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Self Portrait By BERNARD WOLFE Illustrated by MARTIN SCHNEIDER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction November 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] In the credo of this inspiringly selfless cyberneticist, nothing was too good for his colleagues in science. Much too good for them ! October 5, 1959 Well, here I am at Princeton. IFACS is quite a place, quite a place, but the atmosphere's darned informal. My colleagues seem to be mostly youngish fellows dressed in sloppy dungarees, sweatshirts (the kind Einstein made so famous) and moccasins, and when they're not puttering in the labs they're likely to be lolling on the grass, lounging in front of the fire in commons, or slouching around in conference rooms chalking up equations on a blackboard. No way of telling, of course, but a lot of these collegiate-looking chaps must be in the MS end, whatever that is. You'd think fellows in something secret like that would dress and behave with a little more dignity. Guess I was a little previous in packing my soup-and-fish. Soon as I was shown to my room in the bachelor dorms, I dug it out and hung it way back in the closet, out of sight. When in Rome, etc. Later that day I discovered they carry dungarees in the Co-op; luckily, they had the pre-faded kind. October 6, 1959 Met the boss this morning—hardly out of his thirties, crew-cut, wearing a flannel hunting shirt and dirty saddleshoes. I was glad I'd thought to change into my dungarees before the interview. "Parks," he said, "you can count yourself a very fortunate young man. You've come to the most important address in America, not excluding the Pentagon. In the world, probably. To get you oriented, suppose I sketch in some of the background of the place." That would be most helpful, I said. I wondered, though, if he was as naive as he sounded. Did he think I'd been working in cybernetics labs for going on six years without hearing enough rumors about IFACS to make me dizzy? Especially about the MS end of IFACS? "Maybe you know," he went on, "that in the days of Oppenheimer and Einstein, this place was called the Institute for Advanced Studies. It was run pretty loosely then—in addition to the mathematicians and physicists, they had all sorts of queer ducks hanging around—poets, egyptologists, numismatists, medievalists, herbalists, God alone knows what all. By 1955, however, so many cybernetics labs had sprung up around the country that we needed some central coordinating agency, so Washington arranged for us to take over here. Naturally, as soon as we arrived, we eased out the poets and egyptologists, brought in our own people, and changed the name to the Institute for Advanced Cybernetics Studies. We've got some pretty keen projects going now, pret -ty keen." I said I'd bet, and did he have any idea which project I would fit into? "Sure thing," he said. "You're going to take charge of a very important lab. The Pro lab." I guess he saw my puzzled look. "Pro—that's short for prosthetics, artificial limbs. You know, it's really a scandal. With our present level of technology, we should have artificial limbs which in many ways are even better than the originals, but actually we're still making do with modifications of the same primitive, clumsy pegs and hooks they were using a thousand years ago. I'm counting on you to get things hopping in that department. It's a real challenge." I said it sure was a challenge, and of course I'd do my level best to meet it. Still, I couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed. Around cybernetics circles, I hinted, you heard a lot of talk about the hush-hush MS work that was going on at IFACS and it sounded so exciting that, well, a fellow sort of hoped he might get into that end of things. "Look here, Parks," the boss said. He seemed a little peeved. "Cybernetics is teamwork, and the first rule of any team is that not everybody can be quarterback. Each man has a specific job on our team, one thing he's best suited for, and what you're best suited for, obviously, is the Pro lab. We've followed your work closely these last few years, and we were quite impressed by the way you handled those photo-electric-cell insects. You pulled off a brilliant engineering stunt, you know, when you induced nervous breakdown in your robot moths and bedbugs, and proved that the oscillations they developed corresponded to those which the human animal develops in intention tremor and Parkinson's disease. A keen bit of cybernetic thinking, that. Very keen." It was just luck, I told him modestly. "Nonsense," the boss insisted. "You're first and foremost a talented neuro man, and that's exactly what we need in the Pro department. There, you see, the problem is primarily one of duplicating a nervous mechanism in the metal, of bridging the gap between the neuronic and electronic. So buckle down, and if you hear any more gossip about MS, forget it fast—it's not a proper subject of conversation for you. The loyalty oath you signed is very specific about the trouble you can get into with loose talk. Remember that." I said I certainly would, and thanks a whole lot for the advice. Damn! Everybody knows MS is the thing to get into. It gives you real standing in the field if it gets around that you're an MS man. I had my heart set on getting into MS. October 6, 1959 It never rains, etc.: now it turns out that Len Ellsom's here, and he's in MS! Found out about it in a funny way. Two mornings a week, it seems, the staff members get into their skiing and hunting clothes and tramp into the woods to cut logs for their fireplaces. Well, this morning I went with them, and as we were walking along the trail Goldweiser, my assistant, told me the idea behind these expeditions. "You can't get away from it," he said. "E=MC 2 is in a tree trunk as well as in a uranium atom or a solar system. When you're hacking away at a particular tree, though, you don't think much about such intangibles—like any good, untheoretical lumberjack, you're a lot more concerned with superficialities, such as which way the grain runs, how to avoid the knots, and so on. It's very restful. So long as a cyberneticist is sawing and chopping, he's not a sliver of uncontaminated cerebrum contemplating the eternal slippery verities of gravity and electromagnetism; he's just one more guy trying to slice up one more log. Makes him feel he belongs to the human race again. Einstein, you know, used to get the same results with a violin." Now, I've heard talk like that before, and I don't like it. I don't like it at all. It so happens that I feel very strongly on the subject. I think a scientist should like what he's doing and not want to take refuge in Nature from the Laws of Nature (which is downright illogical, anyhow). I, for one, enjoy cutting logs precisely because , when my saw rasps across a knot, I know that the innermost secret of that knot, as of all matter in the Universe, is E=MC 2 . It's my job to know it, and it's very satisfying to know that I know it and that the general run of people don't. I was about to put this thought into words, but before I could open my mouth, somebody behind us spoke up. "Bravo, Goldie," he said. "Let us by all means pretend that we belong to the human race. Make way for the new cyberneticists with their old saws. Cyberneticist, spare that tree!" I turned around to see who could be making jokes in such bad taste and—as I might have guessed—it was Len Ellsom. He was just as surprised as I was. "Well," he said, "if it isn't Ollie Parks! I thought you were out in Cal Tech, building schizophrenic bedbugs." After M. I. T. I had spent some time out in California doing neuro-cyber research, I explained—but what was he doing here? I'd lost track of him after he'd left Boston; the last I'd heard, he'd been working on the giant robot brain Remington-Rand was developing for the Air Force. I remembered seeing his picture in the paper two or three times while he was working on the brain. "I was with Remington a couple of years," he told me. "If I do say so myself, we built the Air Force a real humdinger of a brain—in addition to solving the most complex problems in ballistics, it could whistle Dixie and, in moments of stress, produce a sound not unlike a Bronx cheer. Naturally, for my prowess in the electronic simulation of I.Q., I was tapped for the brain department of these hallowed precincts." "Oh?" I said. "Does that mean you're in MS?" It wasn't an easy idea to accept, but I think I was pretty successful in keeping my tone casual. "Ollie, my boy," he said in an exaggerated stage whisper, putting his finger to his lips, "in the beginning was the word and the word was mum. Leave us avoid the subject of brains in this keen place. We all have a job to do on the team." I suppose that was meant to be a humorous imitation of the boss; Len always did fancy himself quite a clown. We were separated during the sawing, but he caught up with me on the way back and said, "Let's get together soon and have a talk, Ollie. It's been a long time." He wants to talk about Marilyn, I suppose. Naturally. He has a guilty conscience. I'll have to make it quite clear to him that the whole episode is a matter of complete indifference to me. Marilyn is a closed book in my life; he must understand that. But can you beat that? He's right in the middle of MS! That lad certainly gets around. It's the usual Ellsom charm, I suppose. The usual Ellsom technique for irritating people, too. He's still trying to get my goat; he knows how much I've always hated to be called Ollie. Must watch Goldweiser. Thought he laughed pretty heartily at Len's wisecracks. October 18, 1959 Things are shaping up in the Pro lab. Here's how I get the picture. A year ago, the boss laid down a policy for the lab: begin with legs because, while the neuro-motor systems in legs and arms are a lot alike, those in legs are much simpler. If we build satisfactory legs, the boss figures, we can then tackle arms; the main difficulties will have been licked. Well, last summer, in line with this approach, the Army picked out a double amputee from the outpatient department of Walter Reed Hospital—fellow by the name of Kujack, who lost both his legs in a land mine explosion outside Pyongyang—and shipped him up here to be a subject in our experiments. When Kujack arrived, the neuro boys made a major decision. It didn't make sense, they agreed, to keep building experimental legs directly into the muscles and nerves of Kujack's stumps; the surgical procedure in these cine-plastic jobs is complicated as all getout, involves a lot of pain for the subject and, what's more to the point, means long delays each time while the tissues heal. Instead, they hit on the idea of integrating permanent metal and plastic sockets into the stumps, so constructed that each new experimental limb can be snapped into place whenever it's ready for a trial. By the time I took over, two weeks ago, Goldweiser had the sockets worked out and fitted to Kujack's stumps, and the muscular and neural tissues had knitted satisfactorily. There was only one hitch: twenty-three limbs had been designed, and all twenty-three had been dismal flops. That's when the boss called me in. There's no mystery about the failures. Not to me, anyhow. Cybernetics is simply the science of building machines that will duplicate and improve on the organs and functions of the animal, based on what we know about the systems of communication and control in the animal. All right. But in any particular cybernetics project, everything depends on just how many of the functions you want to duplicate, just how much of the total organ you want to replace. That's why the robot-brain boys can get such quick and spectacular results, have their pictures in the papers all the time, and become the real glamor boys of the profession. They're not asked to duplicate the human brain in its entirety —all they have to do is isolate and imitate one particular function of the brain, whether it's a simple operation in mathematics or a certain type of elementary logic. The robot brain called the Eniac, for example, is exactly what its name implies—an Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, and it just has to be able to integrate and compute figures faster and more accurately than the human brain can. It doesn't have to have daydreams and nightmares, make wisecracks, suffer from anxiety, and all that. What's more, it doesn't even have to look like a brain or fit into the tiny space occupied by a real brain. It can be housed in a six-story building and look like an overgrown typewriter or an automobile dashboard or even a pogo stick. All it has to do is tell you that two times two equals four, and tell you fast. When you're told to build an artificial leg that'll take the place of a real one, the headaches begin. Your machine must not only look like its living model, it must also balance and support, walk, run, hop, skip, jump, etc., etc. Also , it must fit into the same space. Also , it must feel everything a real leg feels—touch, heat, cold, pain, moisture, kinesthetic sensations— as well as execute all the brain-directed movements that a real leg can. So you're not duplicating this or that function; you're reconstructing the organ in its totality, or trying to. Your pro must have a full set of sensory-motor communication systems, plus machines to carry out orders, which is impossible enough to begin with. But our job calls for even more. The pro mustn't only equal the real thing, it must be superior ! That means creating a synthetic neuro-muscular system that actually improves on the nerves and muscles Nature created in the original! When our twenty-fourth experimental model turned out to be a dud last week—it just hung from Kujack's stump, quivering like one of my robot bedbugs, as though it had a bad case of intention tremor—Goldweiser said something that made an impression on me. "They don't want much from us," he said sarcastically. "They just want us to be God." I didn't care for his cynical attitude at all, but he had a point. Len Ellsom just has to build a fancy adding machine to get his picture in the papers. I have to be God! October 22, 1959 Don't know what to make of Kujack. His attitude is peculiar. Of course, he's very co-operative, lies back on the fitting table and doesn't even wince when we snap on the pros, and he does his best to carry out instructions. Still, there's something funny about the way he looks at me. There's a kind of malicious expression in his eyes. At times, come to think of it, he reminds me of Len. Take this afternoon, for instance. I've just worked out an entirely different kind of leg based on a whole new arrangement of solenoids to duplicate the muscle systems, and I decided to give it a try. When I was slipping the model into place, I looked up and caught Kujack's eye for a moment. He seemed to be laughing at something, although his face was expressionless. "All right," I said. "Let's make a test. I understand you used to be quite a football player. Well, just think of how you used to kick a football and try to do it now." He really seemed to be trying; the effort made him sweat. All that happened, though, was that the big toe wriggled a little and the knee buckled. Dud Number Twenty-five. I was sore, of course, especially when I noticed that Kujack was more amused than ever. "You seem to think something's pretty funny," I said. "Don't get me wrong, Doc," he said, much too innocently. "It's just that I've been thinking. Maybe you'd have more luck if you thought of me as a bedbug." "Where did you get that idea?" "From Doc Ellsom. I was having some beers with him the other night. He's got a very high opinion of you, says you build the best bedbugs in the business." I find it hard to believe that Len Ellsom would say anything really nice about me. Must be his guilt about Marilyn that makes him talk that way. I don't like his hanging around Kujack. October 25, 1959 The boss came along on our woodcutting expedition this morning and volunteered to work the other end of my two-handled saw. He asked how things were coming in the Pro lab. "As I see it," I said, "there are two sides to the problem, the kinesthetic and the neural. We're making definite progress on the K side—I've worked out a new solenoid system, with some miniature motors tied in, and I think it'll give us a leg that moves damned well. I don't know about the N side, though. It's pretty tough figuring out how to hook the thing up electrically with the central nervous system so that the brain can control it. Some sort of compromise system of operation, along mechanical rather than neural lines, would be a lot simpler." "You mean," the boss said with a smile, "that it's stumping you." I was relieved to see him taking it so well because I know how anxious he is to get results from the Pro lab. Since Pro is one of the few things going on at IFACS that can be talked about, he's impatient for us to come up with something he can release to the press. As the public relations officer explained it to me at dinner the other night, people get worried when they know there's something like IFACS going, but don't get any real information about it, so the boss, naturally, wants to relieve the public's curiosity with a good, reassuring story about our work. I knew I was taking an awful chance spilling the whole K-N thing to him the way I did, but I had to lay the groundwork for a little plan I've just begun to work on. "By the way, sir," I said, "I ran into Len Ellsom the other day. I didn't know he was here." "Do you know him?" the boss said. "Good man. One of the best brains-and-games men you'll find anywhere." I explained that Len had gotten his degree at M.I.T. the year before I did. From what I'd heard, I added, he'd done some important work on the Remington-Rand ballistics computer. "He did indeed," the boss said, "but that's not the half of it. After that he made some major contributions to the robot chess player. As a matter of fact, that's why he's here." I said I hadn't heard about the chess player. "As soon as it began to play a really good game of chess, Washington put the whole thing under wraps for security reasons. Which is why you won't hear any more about it from me." I'm no Eniac, but I can occasionally put two and two together myself. If the boss's remarks mean anything, they mean that an electronic brain capable of playing games has been developed, and that it's led to something important militarily. Of course! I could kick myself for not having guessed it before. Brains-and-games—that's what MS is all about, obviously. It had to happen: out of the mathematical analysis of chess came a robot chess player, and out of the chess player came some kind of mechanical brain that's useful in military strategy. That's what Len Ellsom's in the middle of. "Really brilliant mind," the boss said after we'd sawed for a while. "Keen. But he's a little erratic—quirky, queer sense of humor. Isn't that your impression?" "Definitely," I said. "I'd be the last one in the world to say a word against Len, but he was always a little peculiar. Very gay one moment and very sour the next, and inclined to poke fun at things other people take seriously. He used to write poetry." "I'm very glad to know that," the boss said. "Confirms my own feeling about him." So the boss has some doubts about Len. October 27, 1959 Unpleasant evening with Len. It all started after dinner when he showed up in my room, wagged his finger at me and said, "Ollie, you've been avoiding me. That hurts. Thought we were pals, thick and thin and till debt and death do us part." I saw immediately that he was drunk—he always gets his words mixed up when he's drunk—and I tried to placate him by explaining that it wasn't anything like that; I'd been busy. "If we're pals," he said, "come on and have a beer with me." There was no shaking him off, so I followed him down to his car and we drove to this sleazy little bar in the Negro part of town. As soon as we sat down in a booth, Len borrowed all the nickels I had, put them in the jukebox and pressed the levers for a lot of old Louie Armstrong records. "Sorry, kid," he said. "I know how you hate this real jazzy stuff, but can't have a reunion without music, and there isn't a polka or cowboy ballad or hillbilly stomp in the box. They lack the folksy touch on this side of the tracks." Len has always been very snobbish about my interest in folk music. I asked him what he'd been doing during the day. "Lushing it up," he said. "Getting stinking from drinking." He still likes to use the most flamboyant slang; I consider it an infantile form of protest against what he regards as the "genteel" manner of academic people. "I got sort of restless this morning, so I ducked out and beat it into New York and looked up my friend Steve Lundy in the Village. Spent the afternoon liquidating our joint assets. Liquidating our assets in the joints." What, I wanted to know, was he feeling restless about? "Restless for going on three years now." His face grew solemn, as though he were thinking it over very carefully. "I'll amend that statement. Hell with the Aesopian language. I've been a plain lush for going on three years. Ever since—" If it was something personal—I suggested. "It is not something personal," he said, mimicking me. "Guess I can tell an old cyberneticist pal about it. Been a lush for three years because I've been scared for three years. Been scared for three years because three years ago I saw a machine beat a man at a game of chess." A machine that plays chess? That was interesting, I said. "Didn't tell you the whole truth the other day," Len mumbled. "I did work on the Remington-Rand computer, sure, but I didn't come to IFACS directly from that. In between I spent a couple years at the Bell Telephone Labs. Claude Shannon—or, rather, to begin with there was Norbert Wiener back at M.I.T.—it's complicated...." "Look," I said, "are you sure you want to talk about it?" "Stop wearing your loyalty oath on your sleeve," he said belligerently. "Sure I want to talk about it. Greatest subject I know. Begin at the beginning. Whole thing started back in the Thirties with those two refugee mathematicians who used to be here at the Institute for Advanced Studies when Einstein was around. Von Morgan and Neumanstern, no, Von Neu mann and Mor ganstern. You remember, they did a mathematical analysis of all the possible kinds of games, poker, tossing pennies, chess, bridge, everything, and they wrote up their findings in a volume you certainly know, The Theory of Games . "Well, that got Wiener started. You may remember that when he founded the science of cybernetics, he announced that on the basis of the theory of games, it was feasible to design a robot computing machine that would play a better than average game of chess. Right after that, back in '49 or maybe it was '50, Claude Shannon of the Bell Labs said Wiener wasn't just talking, and to prove it he was going to build the robot chess player. Which he proceeded withforth—forthwith—to do. Sometime in '53, I was taken off the Remington-Rand project and assigned to Bell to work with him." "Maybe we ought to start back," I cut in. "I've got a lot of work to do." "The night is young," he said, "and you're so dutiful. Where was I? Oh yes, Bell. At first our electronic pawn-pusher wasn't so hot—it could beat the pants off a lousy player, but an expert just made it look silly. But we kept improving it, see, building more and more electronic anticipation and gambit-plotting powers into it, and finally, one great day in '55, we thought we had all the kinks ironed out and were ready for the big test. By this time, of course, Washington had stepped in and taken over the whole project. "Well, we got hold of Fortunescu, the world's champion chess player, sat him down and turned the robot loose on him. For four hours straight we followed the match, with a delegation of big brass from Washington, and for four hours straight the machine trounced Fortunescu every game. That was when I began to get scared. I went out that night and got really loaded." What had he been so scared about? It seemed to me he should have felt happy. "Listen, Ollie," he said, "for Christ's sake, stop talking like a Boy Scout for once in your life." If he was going to insult me— "No insult intended. Just listen. I'm a terrible chess player. Any five-year-old could chatemeck—checkmate—me with his brains tied behind his back. But this machine which I built, helped build, is the champion chess player of the world. In other words, my brain has given birth to a brain which can do things my brain could never do. Don't you find that terrifying?" "Not at all," I said. " You made the machine, didn't you? Therefore, no matter what it does, it's only an extension of you. You should feel proud to have devised a powerful new tool." "Some tool," he sneered. He was so drunk by now that I could hardly understand what he was saying. "The General Staff boys in Washington were all hopped up about that little old tool, and for a plenty good reason—they understood that mechanized warfare is only the most complicated game the human race has invented so far, an elaborate form of chess which uses the population of the world for pawns and the globe for a chessboard. They saw, too, that when the game of war gets this complex, the job of controlling and guiding it becomes too damned involved for any number of human brains, no matter how nimble. "In other words, my beamish Boy Scout, modern war needs just this kind of strategy tool; the General Staff has to be mechanized along with everything else. So the Pentagon boys set up IFACS and handed us a top-priority cybernetics project: to build a superduper chess player that could oversee a complicated military maneuver, maybe later a whole campaign, maybe ultimately a whole global war. "We're aiming at a military strategy machine which can digest reports from all the units on all the fronts and from moment to moment, on the basis of that steady stream of information, grind out an elastic overall strategy and dictate concrete tactical directives to all the units. Wiener warned this might happen, and he was right. A very nifty tool. Never mind how far we've gotten with the thing, but I will tell you this: I'm a lot more scared today than I was three years ago." So that was the secret of MS! The most extraordinary machine ever devised by the human mind! It was hard to conceal the thrill of excitement I felt, even as a relative outsider. "Why all the jitters?" I said. "This could be the most wonderful tool ever invented. It might eliminate war altogether." Len was quiet for a while, gulping his beer and looking off into space. Then he turned to me. "Steve Lundy has a cute idea," he said. "He was telling me about it this afternoon. He's a bum, you see, but he's got a damned good mind and he's done a lot of reading. Among other things, he's smart enough to see that once you've got your theory of games worked out, there's at least the logical possibility of converting your Eniac into what he calls a Strategy Integrator and Computer. And he's guessed, simply from the Pentagon's hush-hush policy about it, that that's what we're working on here at IFACS. So he holds forth on the subject of Emsiac, and I listen." "What's his idea?" I asked. "He thinks Emsiac might eliminate war, too, but not in the way a Boy Scout might think. What he says is that all the industrialized nations must be working away like mad on Emsiac, just as they did on the atom bomb, so let's assume that before long all the big countries will have more or less equal MS machines. All right. A cold war gets under way between countries A and B, and pretty soon it reaches the showdown stage. Then both countries plug in their Emsiacs and let them calculate the date on which hostilities should begin. If the machines are equally efficient, they'll hit on the same date. If there's a slight discrepancy, the two countries can work out a compromise date by negotiation. "The day arrives. A's Emsiac is set up in its capital, B's is set up in its capital. In each capital the citizens gather around their strategy machine, the officials turn out in high hats and cut-aways, there are speeches, pageants, choral singing, mass dancing—the ritual can be worked out in advance. Then, at an agreed time, the crowds retreat to a safe distance and a committee of the top cyberneticists appears. They climb into planes, take off and—this is beautiful—drop all their atom bombs and H-bombs on the machines. It happens simultaneously in both countries, you see. That's the neat part of it. The occasion is called International Mushroom Day. "Then the cyberneticists in both countries go back to their vacuum tubes to work on another Emsiac, and the nuclear physicists go back to their piles to build more atom bombs, and when they're ready they have another Mushroom Day. One Mushroom Day every few years, whenever the diplomatic-strategic situation calls for it, and nobody even fires a B-B gun. Scientific war. Isn't it wonderful?"

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51075

A Stone and a Spear BY RAYMOND F. JONES Illustrated by JOHN BUNCH [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.] Given: The future is probabilities merging into one certainty. Proposition: Can the probabilities be made improbables so that the certainty becomes impossible? From Frederick to Baltimore, the rolling Maryland countryside lay under a fresh blanket of green. Wholly unaware of the summer glory, Dr. Curtis Johnson drove swiftly on the undulating highway, stirring clouds of dust and dried grasses. Beside him, his wife, Louise, held her blowing hair away from her face and laughed into the warm air. "Dr. Dell isn't going to run away. Besides, you said we could call this a weekend vacation as well as a business trip." Curt glanced at the speedometer and eased the pressure on the pedal. He grinned. "Wool-gathering again." "What about?" "I was just wondering who said it first—one of the fellows at Detrick, or that lieutenant at Bikini, or—" "Said what ? What are you talking about?" "That crack about the weapons after the next war. He—whoever it was—said there may be some doubt about what the weapons of the next war will be like, but there is absolutely no doubt about the weapons of World War IV. It will be fought with stones and spears. I guess any one of us could have said it." Louise's smile grew tight and thin. "Don't any of you ever think of anything but the next war— any of you?" "How can we? We're fighting it right now." "You make it sound so hopeless." "That's what Dell said in the days just before he quit. He said we didn't have to stay at Detrick producing the toxins and aerosols that will destroy millions of lives. But he never showed us how we could quit—and be sure of staying alive. His own walking out was no more than a futile gesture." "I just can't understand him, Curt. I think he's right in a way, but what brought him to that viewpoint?" "Hard to tell," Curt said, unconsciously speeding up again. "After the war, when the atomic scientists were publicly examining their consciences, Dell told them to examine their own guts first. That was typical of him then, but soon after, he swung just as strongly pacifist and walked out of Detrick." "It still seems strange that he abandoned his whole career. The world's foremost biochemist giving up the laboratory for a truck farm !" Louise glanced down at the lunch basket between them. In it were tomatoes that Dr. Hamon Dell had sent along with his invitation to visit him. For nearly a year Dr. Dell had been sending packages of choice fruit and vegetables to his former colleagues, not only at the biological warfare center at Camp Detrick but at the universities and other research centers throughout the country. "I wish we knew exactly why he asked us to come out," said Louise. "Nobody claims to have figured him out. They laugh a little at him now. They eat his gifts willingly enough, but consider him slightly off his rocker. He still has all his biological talents, though. I've never seen or tasted vegetables like the ones he grows." "And the brass at Detrick doesn't think he's gone soft in the head, either," she added much too innocently. "So they ordered you to take advantage of his invitation and try to persuade him to come back." Curt turned his head so sharply that Louise laughed. "No, I didn't read any secret, hush-hush papers," she said. "But it's pretty obvious, isn't it, the way you rushed right over to General Hansen after you got the invitation?" "It is hush-hush, top-secret stuff," said Curt, his eyes once more on the road. "The Army doesn't want it to leak, but they need Dell, need him badly. Anyone knowing bio-war developments would understand. They wanted to send me before. Dell's invitation was the break we needed. I may be the one with sufficient influence to bring him back. I hope so. But keep it under your permanent and forget your guessing games. There's more to it than you know." The car passed through a cool, wooded section and Louise leaned back and drank in the beauty of it. "Hush-hush, top secret stuff," she said. "Grown men playing children's games." "Pretty deadly games for children, darling." In the late afternoon they by-passed the central part of Baltimore and headed north beyond the suburb of Towson toward Dell's truck farm. His sign was visible for a half mile: YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT Eat the Best EAT DELL'S VEGETABLES "Dr. Hamon Dell, world's foremost biochemist—and truck farmer," Curt muttered as he swung the car off the highway. Louise stepped out when the tires ceased crunching on the gravel lane. She scanned the fields and old woods beyond the ancient but preserved farmhouse. "It's so unearthly." Curt followed. The song of birds, which had been so noticeable before, seemed strangely muted. The land itself was an alien, faintly greenish hue, a color repulsive to more than just the eyes. "It must be something in this particular soil," said Curt, "something that gives it that color and produces such wonderful crops. I'll have to remember to ask Dell about it." "You want Dr. Dell?" They whirled at the sound of an unfamiliar voice. Louise uttered a startled cry. The gaunt figure behind them coughed asthmatically and pointed with an arm that seemed composed only of bones and brownish skin, so thin as to be almost translucent. "Yes," said Curt shakenly. "We're friends of his." "Dell's in back. I'll tell him you're here." The figure shambled away and Louise shook herself as if to rid her mind of the vision. "If our grandchildren ever ask about zombies, I can tell them. Who in the world do you suppose he is?" "Hired man, I suppose. Sounds as if he should be in a lung sanitarium. Funny that Dell would keep him around in that condition." From somewhere behind the house came the sound of a truck engine. Curt took Louise's arm and led her around the trim, graveled path. The old farmhouse had been very carefully renovated. Everywhere was evidence of exquisite care, yet the cumulative atmosphere remained uninviting, almost oppressive. Curt told himself it was the utter silence, made even more tense by the lonely chugging of the engine in back, and the incredible harsh color of the soil beneath their feet. Rounding the corner, they came in sight of a massive tank truck. From it a hose led to an underground storage tank and pulsed slowly under the force of the liquid gushing through it. No one was in sight. "What could that be for?" asked Louise. "You've got me. Could be gasoline, but Dell hasn't any reason for storing that much here." They advanced slowly and amazement crept over Curt as he comprehended the massiveness of the machine. The tank was of elliptical cross section, over ten feet on its major axis. Six double wheels supported the rear; even the front ones were double. In spite of such wide weight distribution, the tires were pressing down the utterly dry ground to a depth of an inch or more. "They must haul liquid lead in that thing," said Curt. "It's getting cool. I wish Dell would show up." Louise glanced out over the twenty-acre expanse of truck farm. Thick rows of robust plants covered the area. Tomatoes, carrots, beets, lettuce, and other vegetables—a hundred or so fruit trees were at the far end. Between them ran the road over which the massive truck had apparently entered the farm from the rear. A heavy step sounded abruptly and Dell's shaggy head appeared from around the end of the truck. His face lighted with pleasure. "Curt, my boy! And Louise! I thought you weren't going to show up at all." Curt's hand was almost lost in Dell's enormous grip, but it wasn't because of that that his grip was passive. It was his shocked reaction to Dell's haggard appearance. The fierce eyes looked merely old and tired now. The ageless, leathery hide of Dell's face seemed to have collapsed before some overpowering decay, its bronze smoothness shattered by deep lines that were like tool marks of pain. Curt spoke in a subdued voice. "It's hard to get away from Detrick. Always one more experiment to try—" "—And the brass riding you as if they expected you to win another war for them tomorrow afternoon," said Dell. "I remember." "We wondered about this truck," Louise commented brightly, trying to change the subject. "We finally gave up on it." "Oh, that. It brings liquid fertilizer to pump into my irrigation water, that's all. No mystery. Let's go on to the house. After you're settled we can catch up on everything and I'll tell you about the things I'm doing here." "Who's the man we saw?" asked Curt. "He looks as if his health is pretty precarious." "That's Brown. He came with the place—farmed it for years for my uncle before I inherited it. He could grow a garden on a granite slab. In spite of appearances, he's well enough physically." "How has your own health been? You have—changed—since you were at Detrick." Dell raised a lock of steel-gray hair in his fingers and dismissed the question with a wan smile. "We all wear out sometime," he said. "My turn had to come." Inside, some of the oppressiveness vanished as the evening passed. It was cool enough for lighting the fireplace, and they settled before it after dinner. While they watched the flickering light that whipped the beamed ceiling, Dell entertained them with stories of his neighbors, whose histories he knew clear back to Revolutionary times. Early, however, Louise excused herself. She knew they would want privacy to thresh out the purposes behind Dell's invitation—and Curt's acceptance. When she was gone, there was a moment's silence. The logs crackled with shocking pistol shots in the fireplace. The scientist moved to stir the coals and then turned abruptly to Curt. "When are you going to leave Detrick?" "When are you coming back?" Curt demanded instead of answering. "So they still want me, even after the things I said when I left." "You're needed badly. When I told Hansen I was coming down, he said it would be worth five years of my own work to bring you back." "They want me to produce even deadlier toxins than those I gave them," Dell said viciously. "They want some that can kill ten million people in four minutes instead of only one million—" "Any man would go insane if he looked at it that way. It would be the same as gun-makers being tormented by the vision of torn men destroyed by their bullets, the sorrowing families—" "And why shouldn't the gun-makers be tormented?" Dell's voice was low with controlled hate. "They are men like you and me who give the war -makers new tools for their trade." "Oh, Dell, it's not as simple as that." Curt raised a hand and let it fall wearily. They had been over this so many times before. "Weapon designers are no more responsible than any other agents of society. It's pure neurosis to absorb the whole guilt of wars yet unfought merely because you happened to have developed a potential weapon." Dell touched the massive dome of his skull. "Here within this brain of mine has been conceived a thing which will probably destroy a billion human lives in the coming years. D. triconus toxin in a suitable aerosol requires only a countable number of molecules in the lungs of a man to kill him. My brain and mine alone is responsible for that vicious, murderous discovery." "Egotism! Any scientist's work is built upon the pyramid of past knowledge." "The weapon I have described exists. If I had not created it, it would not exist. It is as simple as that. No one shares my guilt and my responsibility. And what more do they want of me now? What greater dream of mass slaughter and destruction have they dreamed?" "They want you," said Curt quietly, "because they believe we are not the only ones possessing the toxin. They need you to come back and help find the antitoxin for D. triconus." Dell shook his head. "That's a blind hope. The action of D. triconus is like a match set to a powder train. The instant its molecules contact protoplasm, they start a chain reaction that rips apart the cell structure. It spreads like fire from one cell to the next, and nothing can stop it once it's started operating within a given organism." "But doesn't this sense of guilt—unwarranted as it is—make you want to find an antitoxin?" "Suppose I succeeded? I would have canceled the weapon of an enemy. The military would know he could nullify ours in time. Then they would command me to work out still another toxin. It's a vicious and insane circle, which must be broken somewhere. The purpose of the entire remainder of my life is to break it." "When you are fighting for your life and the enemy already has his hands about your throat," Curt argued, "you reach for the biggest rock you can get your hands on and beat his brains in. You don't try to persuade him that killing is unethical." For an instant it seemed to Curt that a flicker of humor touched the corners of Dell's mouth. Then the lines tightened down again. "Exactly," he said. "You reach for a rock and beat his brains in. You don't wipe human life off the face of the Earth in order to reach that enemy. I asked you to come down here to help me break this circle of which I spoke. There has to be someone here—after I'm gone—" Dell's eyes shifted to the depths of shadows beyond the firelight and remained fixed on unseen images. "Me? Help you?" Curt asked incredulously. "What could I do? Give up science and become a truck gardener, too?" "You might say that we would be in the rock business," replied Dell. "Fighting is no longer on the level of one man with his hands about another's throat, but it should be. Those who want power and domination should have to fight for it personally. But it has been a long time since they had to. "Even in the old days, kings and emperors hired mercenaries to fight their wars. The militarists don't buy swords now. They buy brains. We're the mercenaries of the new day, Curt, you and I. Once there was honor in our profession. We searched for truth for its own sake, and because it was our way of life. Once we were the hope of the world because science was a universal language. "What a horrible joke that turned out to be! Today we are the terror of the world. The war-makers built us fine laboratories, shining palaces, and granted every whim—for a price. They took us up to the hills and showed us the whole world and we sold our souls for it. "Look what happened after the last war. Invading armies carried off prize Nazi brains like so much loot, set the scientists up in big new laboratories, and these new mercenaries keep right on pouring out knowledge for other kings and emperors. "Their loyalty is only to their science. But they can't experiment for knowledge any more, only weapons and counter-weapons. You'll say I'm anti-war, even, perhaps, anti-American or pro-Russian. I am not against just wars, but I am against unjust slaughter. And I love America too much to let her destroy herself along with the enemy." "Then what are we to do?" Curt demanded fiercely. "What are we to do while enemy scientists prepare these same weapons to exterminate us ? Sure, it's one hell of a mess. Science is already dead. The kind you talk about has been dead for twenty years. All our fine ideals are worthless until the politicians find a solution to their quarrels." "Politicians? Since when did men of science have to wait upon politicians for solutions of human problems?" Dell passed a hand over his brow, and suddenly his face contorted in pain. "What is it?" Curt exclaimed, rising. "Nothing—nothing, my boy. Some minor trouble I've had lately. It will pass in a moment." With effort, he went on. "I wanted to say that already you have come to think of science being divided into armed camps by the artificial boundaries of the politicians. Has it been so long ago that it was not even in your lifetime, when scientists regarded themselves as one international brotherhood?" "I can't quarrel with your ideals," said Curt softly. "But national boundary lines do, actually, divide the scientists of the world into armed camps." "Your premises are still incorrect. They do not deliberately war on each other. It is only that they have blindly sold themselves as mercenaries. And they can be called upon to redeem themselves. They can break their unholy contracts." "There would have to be simultaneous agreement among the scientists of all nations. And they are men, influenced by national ideals. They are not merely ivory-tower dabblers and searchers after truth." "Do you remember me five years ago?" Dell's face became more haggard, as if the memory shamed him. "Do you remember when I told the atomic scientists to examine their guts instead of their consciences?" "Yes. You certainly have changed." "And so can other men. There is a way. I need your help desperately, Curt—" The face of the aging biochemist contorted again with unbearable pain. His forehead beaded with sweat as he clenched his skull between his vein-knotted hands. "Dell! What is it?" "It will pass," Dr. Dell breathed through clenched teeth. "I have some medicine—in my bedroom. I'm afraid I'll have to excuse myself tonight. There's so much more I have to say to you, but we'll continue our talk in the morning, Curt. I'm sorry—" He stumbled out, refusing Curt's offer of aid with a grim headshake. The fire crackled loudly within the otherwise silent room. Curt felt cold at the descending chill of the night, his mind bewildered at Dell's barrage, some of it so reasonable, some of it so utterly confused. And there was no clue to the identity of the powerful force that had made so great a change in the once militant scientist. Slowly Curt mounted the staircase of the old house and went to the room Dell had assigned them. Louise was in bed reading a murder mystery. "Secret mission completed?" she asked. Curt sat down on the edge of the bed. "I'm afraid something terrible is wrong with Dell. Besides the neurotic guilt complex because of his war work, he showed signs of a terrific and apparently habitual pain in his head. If that should be brain tumor, it might explain his erratic notions, his abandonment of his career." "Oh, I hope it's not that!" It seemed to Curt that he had slept only minutes before he was roused by sounds in the night. He rolled over and switched on the light. His watch said two o'clock. Louise raised up in sharp alarm. "What is it?" she whispered. "I thought I heard something. There it is again!" "It sounds like someone in pain. It must be Dell!" Curt leaped from the bed and wrestled into his bathrobe. As he hurried toward Dell's room, there was another deep groan that ended in a shuddering sob of unbearable agony. He burst into the scientist's room and switched on the light. Dell looked up, eyes glazed with pain. "Dr. Dell!" "Curt—I thought I had time left, but this is as far as I can go—Just remember all I said tonight. Don't forget a word of it." He sat up rigidly, hardly breathing in the effort of control. "The responsibility for the coming destruction of civilization lies at the doors of the scientist mercenaries. Don't allow it, Curt. Get them to abandon the laboratories of the warriors. Get them to reclaim their honor—" He fell back upon the pillow, his face white with pain and shining with sweat. "Brown—see Brown. He can tell you the—the rest." "I'll go for a doctor," said Curt. "Who have you had? Louise will stay with you." "Don't bring a doctor. There's no escaping this. I've known it for months. Wait here with me, Curt. I'll be gone soon." Curt stared with pity at the great scientist whose mind had so disintegrated. "You need a doctor. I'll call a hospital, Johns Hopkins, if you want." "Wait, maybe you're right. I have no phone here. Get Dr. Wilson—the Judge Building, Towson—find his home address in a phone book." "Fine. I'll only be a little while." He stepped to the door. "Curt! Take the lane down to the new road—behind the farm. Quicker—it cuts off a mile or so—go down through the orchard—" "All right. Take it easy now. I'll be right back." Curt frantically got dressed, ran down the stairs and out to the car. He wondered absently what had become of the cadaverous Brown, who seemed to have vanished from the premises. The wheels spun gravel as he started the car and whipped it out of the driveway. Then he was on the stretch of lane leading through the grove. The moonless night was utterly dark, and the stream of light ahead of the car seemed the only living thing upon the whole landscape. He almost wished he had taken the more familiar road. To get lost now might mean death for Dell. No traffic flowed past him in either direction. There were no buildings showing lights. Overwhelming desolation seemed to possess the countryside and seep into his soul. It seemed impossible that this lay close to the other highway with which he was familiar. He strained his eyes into the darkness for signs of an all-night gas station or store from which he could phone. Finally, he resigned himself to going all the way to Towson. At that moment he glimpsed a spark of light far ahead. Encouraged, Curt stepped on the gas. In less than ten minutes he was at the spot. He braked the car to a stop, and surveyed the building as he got out. It seemed more like a power substation than anything else. But there should be a telephone, at least. He knocked on the door. Almost instantly, footsteps sounded within. The door swung wide. "I wonder if I could use your—" Curt began. He gasped. "Brown! Dell's dying—we've got to get a doctor for him—" As if unable to comprehend, the hired man stared dumbly for a long moment. His hollow-cheeked face was almost skeletal in the light that flooded out from behind him. Then from somewhere within the building came a voice, sharp with tension. "Brown! What the devil are you doing? Shut that door!" That brought the figure to life. He whipped out a gun and motioned Curt inward. "Step inside. We'll have to decide what to do with you when Carlson finds you're here." "What's the matter with you?" Curt asked, stupefied. "Dell's dying. He needs help." "Get in here!" Curt moved slowly forward. Brown closed the door behind him and motioned toward a closed door at the other end of a short hall. They opened it and stepped into a dimly lighted room. Curt's eyes slowly adjusted and he saw what seemed to be a laboratory. It was so packed with equipment that there was scarcely room for the group of twelve or fifteen men jammed closely about some object with their backs to Curt and Brown. Brown shambled forward like an agitated skeleton, breaking the circle. Then Curt saw that the object of the men's attention was a large cathode ray screen occupied by a single green line. There was a pip on it rising sharply near one side of the two-foot tube. The pip moved almost imperceptibly toward a vertical red marker over the face of the screen. The men stared as if hypnotized by it. The newcomers' arrival, however, disturbed their attention. One man turned with an irritable growl. "Brown, for heaven's sake—" He was a bony creature, even more cadaverous than Brown. He caught sight of Curt's almost indecently robust face. He gasped and swore. "Who is this? What's he doing here?" The entire montage of skull faces turned upon Curt. He heard a sharp collective intake of breath, as if his presence were some unforeseen calamity that had shaken the course of their incomprehensible lives. "This is Curtis Johnson," said Brown. "He got lost looking for a doctor for Dell." A mummylike figure rose from a seat before the instrument. "Your coming is tremendously unfortunate, but for the moment we can do nothing about it. Sit here beside me. My name is Tarron Sark." The man indicated a chair. "My friend, Dr. Dell, is dying," Curt snapped out, refusing to sit down. "I've got to get help. I saw your light and hoped you'd allow me to use your phone. I don't know who you are nor what Dell's hired man is doing here with you. But you've got to let me go for help!" "No." The man, Sark, shook his head. "Dell is reconciled. He has to go. We are awaiting precisely the event you would halt—his death." He had known it, Curt thought, from the moment he entered that room. Like vultures sitting on cliffs waiting for the death of their prey, these fantastic men let their glance slip back to the screen. The green line was a third of the way toward the red marker now, and moving more rapidly. It was nightmare—meaningless— "I'm not staying," Curt insisted. "You can't prevent me from helping Dell without assuming responsibility for his death. I demand you let me call." "You're not going to call," said Sark wearily. "And we assumed responsibility for Dell's death long ago. Sit down!" Slowly Curt sank down upon the chair beside the stranger. There was nothing else to do. He was powerless against Brown's gun. But he'd bring them to justice somehow, he swore. He didn't understand the meaning of the slowly moving pattern on the 'scope face, yet, as his eyes followed that pip, he sensed tension in the watching men that seemed sinister, almost murderous. How? What did the inexorably advancing pip signify? No one spoke. The room was stifling hot and the breathing of the circle of men was a dull, rattling sound in Curt's ears. Quickly then, gathering sudden momentum, the pip accelerated. The circle of men grew taut. The pip crossed the red line—and vanished. Only the smooth green trace remained, motionless and without meaning. With hesitant shuffling of feet, the circle expanded. The men glanced uncertainly at one another. One said, "Well, that's the end of Dell. We'll soon know now if we're on the right track, or if we've botched it. Carlson will call when he's computed it." "The end of Dell?" Curt repeated slowly, as if trying to convince himself of what he knew had happened. "The pip on the screen—that showed his life leaving him?" "Yes," said Sark. "He knew he had to go. And there are perhaps hundreds more like him. But Dell couldn't have told you of that—" "What will we do with him?" Brown asked abruptly. "If Dell is dead, you murdered him!" Curt shouted. A rising personal fear grew within him. They could not release him now, even though his story would make no sense to anybody. But they had somehow killed Dell, or thought they had, and they wouldn't hesitate to kill Curt. He thought of Louise in the great house with the corpse of Haman Dell—if, of course, he was actually dead. But that was nonsense.... "Dell must have sent you to us!" Sark said, as if a great mystery had suddenly been lifted from his mind. "He did not have time to tell you everything. Did he tell you to take the road behind the farm?" Curt nodded bitterly. "He told me it was the quickest way to get to a doctor." "He did? Then he knew even better than we did how rapidly he was slipping. Yes, this was the quickest way." "What are you talking about?" Curt demanded. "Did Dell say anything at all about what he wanted of you?" "It was all wild. Something about helping with some crazy plans to retreat from the scientific world. He was going to finish talking in the morning, but I guess it wouldn't have mattered. I realize now that he was sick and irrational." "Too sick to explain everything, but not irrational," Sark said thoughtfully. "He left it to us to tell you, since you are to succeed him." "Succeed Dell? In what?" Sark suddenly flipped a switch on a panel at his right. A screen lighted with some fuzzy image. It cleared with a slight dial adjustment, and Curt seemed to be looking at some oddly familiar moonlit ruin. "An American city," said Sark, hurrying his words now. "Any city. They are all alike. Ruin. Death. This one died thirty years ago." "I don't understand," Curt complained, bewildered. "Thirty years—" "At another point in the Time Continuum," said Sark. "The future. Your future, you understand. Or, rather, our present, the one you created for us." Curt recoiled at the sudden venom in Sark's voice. "The future ?" That was what they had in common with Dell—psychosis, systematic delusions. He had suspected danger before; now it was imminent and terrifying. "Perhaps you are one of those who regard your accomplishments with pride," Sark went on savagely, ignoring or unaware of Curt's fear and horror. "That the hydrogen bombs smashed the cities, and the aerosols destroyed the remnants of humanity seems insignificant to you beside the high technical achievement these things represent." Curt's throat was dry with panic. Irrelevantly, he recalled the pain-fired eyes of Dell and the dying scientist's words: "The responsibility for the coming destruction of civilization lies at the doors of the scientist mercenaries—" "Some of us did manage to survive," said Sark, glaring at the scene of gaunt rubble. Curt could see the veins pounding beneath the thin flesh of his forehead. "We lived for twenty years with the dream of rebuilding a world, the same dream that has followed all wars. But at last we knew that the dream was truly vain this time. We survivors lived in hermetically sealed caverns, trying to exist and recover our lost science and technology. "We could not emerge into the Earth's atmosphere. Its pollution with virulent aerosols would persist for another hundred years. We could not bear a new race out of these famished and rickety bodies of ours. Unless Man was to vanish completely from the face of the Earth, we had only a single hope. That hope was to prevent the destruction from ever occurring!" Sark's eyes were burning now. "Do you understand what that means? We had to go back , not forward. We had to arm to fight a new war, a war to prevent the final war that destroyed Mankind." "Back? How could you go back?" Curt hesitated, grasping now the full insanity of the scene about him. "How have you come back?" He waited tautly for the answer. It would be gibberish, of course, like all the mad conversation before it.

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THE GREEN ODYSSEY by Philip José Farmer Make friends fast. — Handbook For The Shipwrecked Ballantine Books New York Copyright 1957, by Philip José Farmer Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 57-10603 Printed in the United States of America Ballantine Books, Inc. 101 Fifth Avenue, New York 3, N. Y. [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] This is an original novel—not a reprint—published by Ballantine Books, Inc. To Nan Gerding DANGER! THRILLS! ADVENTURE! Alan Green was not exactly a hero. In fact he liked peace just as well as the next man. Not that he was really afraid of that crazy, hot-blooded hound-dog Alzo, or even of the hound's gorgeous owner, the Duchess Zuni—who was also hot-blooded (to say nothing of the Duke). After all, these things were understood on this backward, violent planet, and a man could manage, provided he was alert twenty-four hours a day. And as a matter of fact, Alan was only normally apprehensive of his Junoesque, tempestuous (but altogether lovable) wife Amra. Delightful, demanding Amra—and her five uproarious kids. The trouble was, he was tired. And homesick. So when he heard of two other downed spacemen, he hitched a ride with a piratical merchant-captain on a windroller destined to carry him to the spaceship and thence to the peaceful green hills of Earth. But he had reckoned without the vagaries of the windroller, pirates, the "traveling islands," the rascally Captain, and various flora and fauna peculiar to this planet—all of which, it now seemed, regarded Alan with unnerving malevolence. And worst of all, Amra was determined that he should be a hero. Amra won. 1 For two years Alan Green had lived without hope. From the day the spaceship had crashed on this unknown planet he had resigned himself to the destiny created for him by accident and mathematics. Chances against another ship landing within the next hundred years were a million to one. Therefore it would do no good to sit around waiting for rescue. Much as he loathed the idea, he must live the rest of his life here, and he must squeeze as much blood as he could out of this planet-sized turnip. There wasn't much to squeeze. In fact, it seemed to him that he was the one losing the blood. Shortly after he'd been cast away he'd been made a slave. Now, suddenly, he had hope. Hope came to him a month after he'd been made foreman of the kitchen slaves of the Duke of Tropat. It came to him as he was standing behind the Duchess during a meal and directing those who were waiting upon her. It was the Duchess Zuni who had not so subtly maneuvered him from the labor pens to his coveted, if dangerous, position. Why dangerous? Because she was very jealous and possessive, and the slightest hint of lack of attention from him could mean he'd lose his life or one limb or another. The knowledge of what had happened to his two predecessors kept him extremely sensitive to her every gesture, her every wish. That fateful morning he was standing behind her as she sat at one end of the long breakfast table. In one hand he held his foreman's wand, a little white baton topped by a large red ball. With it he gestured at the slaves who served food, who poured wine and beer, who fanned away the flies, who carried in the household god and sat it on the god chair, who played something like music. Now and then he bent over the Duchess Zuni's long black hair and whispered phrases from this or that love poem, praising her beauty, her supposed unattainability, and his burning, if seemingly hopeless, passion for her. Zuni would smile, or repeat the formula of thanks—the short one—or else giggle at his funny accent. The Duke sat at the other end of the table. He ignored the by-play, just as he ignored the so-called secret passage inside the walls of the castle, which Green used to get to the Duchess's apartments. Custom demanded this, just as custom demanded that he should play the outraged husband if she got tired of Green or angry at him and accused him publicly of amorous advances. This was enough to make Green jittery, but he had more than the Duke to consider. There was Alzo. Alzo was the Duchess's watchdog, a mastiff-like monster with shaggy red-gold hair. The dog hated Green with a vindictiveness that Green could only account for by supposing that the animal knew, perhaps from his body-odor, that he was not a native of this planet. Alzo rumbled a warning deep in his chest every time Green bent over the Duchess or made a too-sudden movement. Occasionally he rose to his four feet and nuzzled the man's leg. When that happened Green could not keep from breaking out into a sweat, for the dog had twice bitten him, playfully, so to speak, and severely lacerated his calf. As if that weren't bad enough, Green had to worry that the natives might notice that his scars healed abnormally fast, almost overnight. He'd been forced to wear bandages on his legs long after the new skin had come in. Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel, or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether the beast. "Dear," said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his conversation with a merchant-captain, "what is this I hear about two men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?" Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's reply. The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned. "Men? Demons, rather! Can men fly in an iron ship through the air? These two claimed to have come from the stars, and you know what that means. Remember Oixrotl's prophecy: A demon will come, claiming to be an angel . No doubt about these two! Just to show you their subtlety, they claim to be neither demon nor angels, but men! Now, there's devilish clever thinking. Confusing to anybody but the most clear-headed. I'm glad the King of Estorya wasn't taken in." Eagerly Zuni leaned forward, her large brown eyes bright, and her red-painted mouth open and wet. "Oh, has he burned them already? What a shame! I should think he'd at least torture them for a while." Miran, the merchant-captain, said, "Your pardon, gracious lady, but the King of Estorya has done no such thing. The Estoryan law demands that all suspected demons should be kept in prison for two years. Everybody knows that a devil can't keep his human disguise more than two years. At the end of that time he reverts to his natural flesh and form, a hideous sight to behold, blasphemous, repulsive, soul-shaking." Miran rolled his one good eye so that only the white showed and made the sign to ward off evil, the index finger held rigidly out from a clenched fist. Jugkaxtr, the household priest, dived under the table, where he crouched praying, secure in the knowledge that demons couldn't touch him while he knelt beneath the thrice-blessed wood. The Duke swallowed a whole glass of wine, apparently to calm his nerves, and belched. Miran wiped his face and said, "Of course, I wasn't able to find out much, because we merchants are regarded with deep suspicion and scarcely dare to move outside the harbor or the marketplace. The Estoryans worship a female deity—ridiculous, isn't it?—and eat fish. They hate us Tropatians because we worship Zaxropatr, Male of Males, and because they must depend on us to bring them fish. But they aren't close-mouthed. They babble on and on to us, especially when one has given them wine for nothing." Green finally released his breath in a sigh of relief. How glad he was that he had never told these people his true origin! So far as they knew he was merely one of the many slaves who came from a distant country in the North. Miran cleared his throat, adjusted his violet turban and yellow robes, pulled gently at the large gold ring that hung from his nose and said, "It took me a month to get back from Estorya, and that is very good time indeed, but then I am noted for my good luck, though I prefer to call it skill plus the favor given by the gods to the truly devout. I do not boast, O gods, but merely give you tribute because you have smiled upon my ventures and have found pleasing the scent of my many sacrifices in your nostrils!" Green lowered his eyelids to conceal the expression of disgust which he felt must be shining from them. At the same time, he saw Zuni's shoe tapping impatiently. Inwardly he groaned, because he knew she would divert the conversation to something more interesting to her, to her clothes and the state of her stomach and/or complexion. And there would be nothing that anybody could do about it, because the custom was that the woman of the house regulated the subject of talk during breakfast. If only this had been lunch or dinner! Then the men would theoretically have had uncontested control. "These two demons were very tall, like your slave Green, here," said Miran, "and they could not speak a word of Estoryan. Or at least they claimed they couldn't. When King Raussmig's soldiers tried to capture them they brought from the folds of their strange clothes two pistols that only had to be pointed to send silent and awesome and sure death. Everywhere men dropped dead. Panic overtook many, but there were brave soldiers who kept on charging, and eventually the magical instruments became exhausted. The demons were overpowered and put into the Tower of Grass Cats from which no man or demon has yet escaped. And there they will be until the Festival of the Sun's Eye. Then they will be burnt...." From beneath the table rose the babble of the priest, Jugkaxtr, as he blessed everyone in the house, down to the latest-born pup, and the fleas living thereoff, and cursed all those who were possessed by even the tiniest demon. The Duke, growing impatient at the noise, kicked under the table. Jugkaxtr yelped and presently crawled out. He sat down and began gnawing the meat from a bone, a well-done-thou-good-and-faithful-servant expression on his fat features. Green also felt like kicking him, just as he often felt like kicking every single human being on this planet. It was hard to remember that he must exercise compassion and understanding for them, and that his own remote ancestors had once been just as nauseatingly superstitious, cruel and bloody. There was a big difference between reading about such people and actually living among them. A history or a romantic novel could describe how unwashed and diseased and formula-bound primitives were, but only the too-too substantial stench and filth could make your gorge rise. Even as he stood there Zuni's powerful perfume rose and clung in heavy festoons about him and slithered down his nostrils. It was a rare and expensive perfume, brought back by Miran from his voyages and given to her as a token of the merchant's esteem. Used in small quantities it would have been quite effective to express feminine daintiness and to hint at delicate passion. But no, Zuni poured it like water over her, hoping to cover up the stale odor left by not taking a bath more than once a month. She looked so beautiful, he thought. And stank so terribly. At least she had at first. Now she looked less beautiful because he knew how stupid she was, and didn't stink quite so badly because his nostrils had become somewhat adjusted. They'd had to. "I intend to be back in Estorya by the time of the festival," said Miran. "I've never seen the Eye of the Sun burn demons before. It's a giant lens, you know. There will be just time enough to make a voyage there and get back before the rainy season. I expect to make even greater profits than the last time, because I've established some highly placed contacts. O gods, I do not boast but merely praise your favor to your humble worshiper, Miran the Merchant of the Clan of Effenycan!" "Please bring me some more of this perfume," said the Duchess, "and I just love the diamond necklace you gave me." "Diamonds, emeralds, rubies!" cried Miran, kissing his hand and rolling his eye ecstatically. "I tell you, the Estoryans are rich beyond our dreams! Jewels flow in their marketplaces like drops of water in a cataract! Ah, if only the Emperor could be induced to organize a great raiding fleet and storm its walls!" "He remembers too well what happened to his father's fleet when he tried it," growled the Duke. "The storm that destroyed his thirty ships was undoubtedly raised by the priests of the Goddess Hooda. I still think that the expedition would have succeeded, however, if the late Emperor had not ignored the vision that came to him the night before they set sail. It was the great god Axoputqui, and he said...." There was a lengthy conversation which did not hold Green's attention. He was too busy trying to think of a plan whereby he could get to Estorya and to the demons' iron vessel, which was obviously a spaceship. This was his only chance. Soon the rainy season would start and there would be no vessels leaving for at least three months. He could, of course, just walk away and hope to get to Estorya on foot. Thousands of miles through countless perils, and he had only a general idea of where the city was ... no, Miran was his only hope. But how...? He didn't think that stowing away would work. There was always a careful search for slaves who might try just that very plan. He looked at Miran, the short, fat, big-stomached, hook-nosed, one-eyed fellow with many chins and a large gold ring in his nose. The fellow was shrewd, shrewd, and he would not want to offend the Duchess by helping her official gigolo escape. Not, that is, unless Green could offer him something that was so valuable that he couldn't afford not to take the risk. Miran boasted that he was a hard-headed businessman, but it was Green's observation that there was always a large soft spot in that supposedly impenetrable cranium: the Fissure of Cupiditas. 2 The Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced because of the loud laughter and from repressed anger at Alzo, who had again repeated his trick of grabbing Green's leg and upsetting him. He wanted to grab a spear from a nearby guard and spit Alzo. But that would be the end of Green. And whereas up to now there had been many times when he would not particularly have cared if he left this planet via the death route, he could not now make a false move. Not when escape was so near! So he grinned sheepishly and again preceded the Duchess, while the others followed her out. When they reached the bottom of the broad stone staircase that led to the upper floors of the castle, Zuni told Green that he was to go to the marketplace and buy tomorrow's food. As for her, she was going back to bed and sleep until noon. Inwardly Green groaned. How long could he keep up this pace? He was expected to stay up half the night with her, then attend to his official duties during the day. She slept enough to be refreshed by the time he visited her, but he never had a chance for any real rest. Even when he had his free hours in the afternoon he had to go to his house in the pens, and there he had to stay awake and attend to all his familial duties. And Amra, his slave-wife, and her six children demanded much from him. They were even more tyrannical than the Duchess, if that were possible. How long, O Lord, how long? The situation was intolerable; even if he'd not heard of the spaceship he would have plotted to escape. Better a quick death while trying to get away than a slow, torturous one by exhaustion. He bowed good-by to the Duke and Duchess, then followed the violet turban and yellow robes of Miran through the courtyard, through the thick stone walls, over the bridge of the broad moat, and into the narrow winding streets of the city of Quotz. Here the merchant-captain got into his silver-and-jewel-decorated rickshaw. The two long-legged men between its shafts, sailors and clansmen from Miran's vessel, the Bird of Fortune , began running through the crowd. The people made way for them, as two other sailors preceded them calling out Miran's name and cracking whips in the air. Green, after looking to make certain that nobody from the castle was around to see him, ran until he was even with the rickshaw. Miran halted it and asked what he wanted. "Your pardon, Your Richness, but may a humble slave speak and not be reprimanded?" "I presume it is no idle thought you have in mind," said Miran, looking Green over his one eye narrow in its fat-folds. "It has to do with money." "Ah, despite your foreign accent you speak with a pleasing voice; you are the golden trumpet of Mennirox, my patron god. Speak!" "First Your Richness must swear by Mennirox that you will under no circumstances divulge my proposal." "There is wealth in this? For me?" "There is." Miran glanced at his clansmen, standing there patiently, apparently oblivious of what was going on. He had power of life and death over them, but he didn't trust them. He said, "Perhaps it would be better if I thought about this before making such a drastic oath. Could you meet me tonight at the Hour of the Wineglass at the House of Equality? And could you perhaps give me a slight hint of what you have in mind?" "The answer to both is yes. My proposal has to do with the dried fish that you carry as cargo to the Estoryans. There is another thing, too, but I may not even hint at it until I have your oath." "Very well then. At the agreed hour. Fish, eh? I must be off. Time is money, you know. Get going boys, full sails." Green hailed a passing rickshaw and seated himself comfortably in it. As assistant majordomo he had plenty of money. Moreover, the Duke and Duchess would have been outraged if he had lowered their prestige by walking through the city's streets. His vehicle made good time, too, because everybody recognized his livery: the scarlet and white tricorn hat and the white sleeveless shirt with the Duke's heraldic arms on its chest—red and green concentric circles pierced by a black arrow. The street led always downward, for the city had been built on the foothills of the mountains. It wandered here and there and gave Green plenty of time to think. The trouble was, he thought, that if the two imprisoned men at Estorya were to die before he got to them he'd still be lost. He had no idea of how to pilot or navigate a spaceship. He'd been a passenger on a freighter when it had unaccountably blown up, and he'd been forced to leave the dying vessel in one of those automatic castaway emergency shells. The capsule had got him down to the surface of this planet and was, as far as he knew, still up in the hills where he'd left it. After wandering for a week and almost starving to death he'd been picked up by some peasants. They had turned him in to the soldiers of a nearby garrison, thinking he must be a runaway slave on whom they'd collect a reward. Taken to the capital city of Quotz, Green had almost been freed because there was no record of his being anybody's property. But his tallness, blondness and inability to speak the local language had convinced his captors that he must have wandered down from some far northern country. Therefore if he wasn't a slave he should be. Presto, changeo! He was. And he'd put in six months in a quarry and a year as a dock worker. Then the Duchess had chanced to see him on the streets as she rode by, and he'd been transferred to the castle. The streets were alive with the short, dark, stocky natives and the taller, lighter-complexioned slaves. The former wore their turbans of various colors, indicating their status and trade. The latter wore their three-cornered hats. Occasionally a priest in his high conical hat, hexagonal spectacles and goatee rode by. Wagons and rickshaws drawn by men or by big, powerful dogs went by. Merchants stood at the fronts of their shops and hawked their wares in loud voices. They sold cloth, grixtr nut, parchment, knives, swords, helmets, drugs, books—on magic, on religion, on travel—spices, perfumes, ink, rugs, highly sugared drinks, wine, beer, tonic, paintings, everything that went to make up their civilization. Butchers stood before open shops where dressed fowl, deer and dogs hung. Dealers in birds pointed out the virtues of their many-colored and multi-songed pets. For the thousandth time Green wondered at this strange planet where the only large animals were men, dogs, grass cats, a small deer and a very small equine. In fact, there was a paucity of any variety of animal life, except for the surprisingly large number of birds. It was this scarcity of horses and oxen, he supposed, that helped perpetuate slavery. Man and dog had to provide most of the labor. No doubt there was an explanation for all this, but it must be buried so deep in this people's forgotten history that one would never know. Green, always curious, wished that he had time and means to explore. But he didn't. He might as well resign himself to keeping a whole skin and to getting out of this mess as fast as he could. There was enough to do merely to make his way through the narrow and crowded streets. He had to display his baton often to clear a path, though when he approached the harbor area he had less trouble because the streets were much wider. Here great wagons drawn by gangs of slaves carried huge loads to or from the ships. The thoroughfares had to be broad, else the people would have been crushed between wagon and house. Here also were the so-called Pens, where the dock-slaves lived. Once the area had actually been an enclosure where men and women were locked up for the night. But the walls had been torn down and new houses built in the old Duke's time. The closest Earthly parallel Green could think of for these edifices was a housing project. Small cottages, all exactly alike, set in military columns. For a moment he considered stopping off to see Amra, then decided against it. She'd get him tied up in an argument or something, and he'd spend too much time trying to soothe her, time that should be spent at the marketplace. He hated scenes, whereas Amra was a born self-dramatist who reveled in them, almost wallowed, one might say. He averted his eyes from the Pens and looked at the other side of the street, where the walls of the great warehouses towered. Workmen swarmed around them, and cranes, operated by gangs pushing wheels like a ship's capstan, raised or lowered big bundles. Here, he thought, was a business opportunity for him. Introduce the steam engine. It'd be the greatest thing that ever hit this planet. Wood-burning automobiles could replace the rickshaws. Cranes could be run by donkey-engines. The ships themselves could have their wheels powered by steam. Or perhaps, he thought, rails could be laid across the Xurdimur, and locomotives would make the ships obsolete. No, that wouldn't work. Iron rails cost too much. And the savages that roved over the grassy plains would tear them up and forge weapons from them. Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its mother's breast or an old man clings to his property. Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it was worth while to become a martyr. He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name. "Alan! Alan!" He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard it. "ALAN, YOU BIG BLOND NO-GOOD HUNK OF MAN, STOP!" Reluctantly Green told his rickshaw boy to turn around. The boy, grinning, did so. Like everybody else along the harbor front he knew Amra and was familiar with her relations with Green. She held their one-year-old daughter in her arms, cradled against her magnificent bosom. Behind her stood her other five children, her two sons by the Duke, her daughter by a visiting prince, her son by the captain of a Northerner ship, her daughter by a temple sculptor. Her rise and fall and slow rise again was told in the children around her; the tableau embodied an outline of the structure of the planet's society. 3 Her mother had been a Northerner slave; her father, a native freeman, a wheelwright. When she was five years old they had died in a plague. She had been transferred to the Pens and raised by her aunt. When she was fifteen her beauty had attracted the Duke and he had installed her in the palace. There she gave birth to his two sons, now ten and eleven, who would soon be taken away from her and raised in the Duke's household as free and petted servants. The Duke had married the present Duchess several years after his liaison with Amra began and her jealousy had forced him to get rid of Amra. Back to the Pens she had gone; perhaps the Duke had not been too sad to see her go, for living with her was like living with a hurricane, and he liked peace and quiet too well. Then, in accordance with the custom, she had been recommended by the Duke to a visiting prince; the prince had overstayed his leave from his native country because he hated to part with her, and the Duke had wanted to give her as a present. But here he'd overstepped his legal authority. Slaves had certain rights. A woman who had borne a citizen a child could not be shipped away or sold unless she gave her permission. Amra didn't choose to go, so the sorrowing prince had gone home, though not without leaving a memento of his visit behind him. The captain of a ship had purchased her, but here again the law came to her rescue. He could not take her out of the country, and she again refused to leave. By now she had purchased several businesses—slaves were allowed to hold property and even have slaves of their own—and she knew that her two boys by the Duke would be valuable later on, when they'd go to live with him. The temple sculptor had used her as his model for his great marble statue of the goddess of Fertility. Well he might, for she was a magnificent creature, a tall woman with long, richly auburn hair, a flawless skin, large russet brown eyes, a mouth as red and ripe as a plum, breasts with which neither child nor lover could find fault, a waist amazingly slender considering the rest of her curved body and her fruitfulness. Her long legs would have looked good on an Earthwoman and were even more outstanding among a population of club-ankled females. There was more to her than beauty. She radiated a something that struck every male at first sight; to Green she sometimes seemed to be a violent physical event, perhaps even a principle of Nature herself. There were times when Green felt proud because she had picked him as her mate, chosen him when he was a newly imported slave who could say only a few words in the highly irregular agglutinative tongue. But there were times when he felt that she was too much for him, and those times had been getting too frequent lately. Besides, he felt a pang whenever he saw their child, because he loved it and dreaded the moment when he would have to leave it. As for deserting Amra, he wasn't sure how that would make him feel. Undeniably, she did affect him, but then so did a blow in the teeth or wine in the blood. He got down out of the rickshaw, told the boy to wait, said, "Hello, honey," and kissed her. He was glad she was a slave, because she didn't wear a nose-ring. When he kissed the Duchess he was always annoyed by hers. She refused to take it off when with him because that would put her on his level, and he mustn't ever forget he was a slave. It was perfectly moral for her to take a bondsman as a lover but not a freeman, and she was nothing if not moral. Amra's return kiss was passionate, part of which was the vigor of asperity. "You're not fooling me," she said. "You meant to ride right by. Kiss the children! What's the matter, are you getting tired of me? You told me you only accepted the Duchess's offer because it meant advancement, and you were afraid that if you turned her down she'd find an excuse to kill you. Well, I believed you—half-believed you, anyway. But I won't if you try sneaking by without seeing me. What's the matter? Are you a man or not? Are you afraid to face a woman? Don't shake your head. You're a liar! Don't forget to kiss Grizquetr; you know he's an affectionate boy and worships you, and it's absurd to say that in your country grown men don't kiss boys that old. You're not in your country—what a strange, frigid, loveless race must live there—and even if you were you might overlook their customs to show some tenderness to the boy. Come on back to our house and I'll bring up some of that wonderful Chalousma wine that came in the other day out of the cellar——" "What was a ship doing in your cellar?" he said, and he whooped with laughter. "By all the gods, Amra, I know it's been two days since I've seen you, but don't try to crowd forty-eight hours' conversation into ten minutes, especially your kind of conversation. And quit scolding me in front of the children. You know it's bad for them. They might pick up your attitude of contempt for the head of the house." "I? Contempt? Why, I worship the ground you walk on! I tell them continually what a fine man you are, though it's rather hard to convince them when you do show up and they see the truth. Still...."

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CONTAGION By KATHERINE MacLEAN [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really. It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows. The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds. A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired. "Got anything?" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest. "Took a shot at something," explained George Barton's cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. "It looked like a duck." "This isn't Central Park," said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. "They won't all look like ducks," he said soberly. "Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon, June," came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. "Not while I still love you." He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet. They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside. But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet. The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion. The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows. They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved. This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder. They lowered their guns. "It needs a shave," Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. "Something we could do for you, Mac?" The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble. Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. "Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria." "English?" gasped June. "We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn't attract its attention." June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years—thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel—to be told that the planet was already settled! "We didn't know there was a colony here," she said. "It is not on the map." "We were afraid of that," the tall bronze man answered soberly. "We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come." Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. "My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D." "Patrick Mead is the name," smiled the man, shaking hands casually. "Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before." The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel. "What—what is the population of Minos?" she asked. He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. "Only one hundred and fifty." He smiled. "Don't worry, this isn't a city planet yet. There's room for a few more people." He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. "That is—you are people, aren't you?" he asked startlingly. "Why not?" said Max with a poise that June admired. "Well, you are all so—so—" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the faces of the group. "So varied." They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled. "I mean," Patrick Mead said into the silence, "all these—interesting different hair colors and face shapes and so forth—" He made a vague wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to insult them. "Joke?" Max asked, bewildered. June laid a hand on his arm. "No harm meant," she said to him over the intercom. "We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us." She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. "What should a person look like, Mr. Mead?" He indicated her with a smile. "Like you." June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles, like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly humorous blue eyes. "In other words," she said, "everyone on the planet looks like you and me?" Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin. "Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside down!" He laughed and sobered. "But then why wear spacesuits? The air is breathable." "For safety," June told him. "We can't take any chances on plague." Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins. Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers. "Plague," Pat Mead said thoughtfully. "We had one here. It came two years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way people can look." Plague. "What was the disease?" Hal Barton asked. "Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to do about it." "You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for some." A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice. Pat Mead explained patiently, "Our ship, with the power plant and all the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion, and never came back. The crew must have died." Long years of hardship were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife and bow. "Any recurrence of melting sickness?" asked Hal Barton. "No." "Any other diseases?" "Not a one." Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching awe. "Do you think all the Meads look like that?" he said to June on the intercom. "I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!" Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions. The polished silver and black column of the Explorer seemed to rise higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up. "Nice!" said Pat. "Beautiful!" The admiration in his voice was warming. "It was a yacht," Max said, still looking up, "second hand, an old-time beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years. Plenty good enough." The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos. "May I go aboard?" Pat asked hopefully. Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet of plants that covered the ground and began to open it. "Tests first," Hal Barton said. "We have to find out if you people still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be no good as a check for what the other Meads might have." Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and hypodermics. "Are you going to jab me with those?" Pat asked with interest. "You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!" Max grinned at Pat Mead, and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being smaller and frailer than Pat Mead. "Lie down," Max told him, "and hold still. We need two spinal fluid samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the arm." Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine nerve surgeon on Earth. High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly, it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from their earphones: "What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?" He banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat. Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew away over the odd-colored forest. "The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got through to us," Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles without exposing them to air. "We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still carry melting sickness," Max added. "You might be immune so it doesn't show on you, but still carry enough germs—if that's what caused it—to wipe out a planet." "If you do carry melting sickness," said Hal Barton, "we won't be able to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease." "Starting with me?" Pat asked. "Starting with you," Max told him ruefully, "as soon as you step on board." "More needles?" "Yes, and a few little extras thrown in." "Rough?" "It isn't easy." A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs. In the Explorer , stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers, was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name. But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient. Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized and injected with various immunizing solutions. Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were dripped into his veins through long thin tubes. All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him. June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall.... "I've got a good figure," she said thoughtfully. Max turned at the door. "Why this sudden interest in your looks?" he asked suspiciously. "Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally get something to eat?" "Wait a minute." She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully, using a combination from the ship's directory. "How're you doing, Pat?" The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled chuckle. "Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go jump in the lake?" "Are you hungry?" "No food since yesterday." "We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out," she told Pat and hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast. They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human blood cells, and fight back against them violently. One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive, so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human cells, and thus succumb more rapidly. "How ya doing, George?" Max asked. "Routine," George Barton grunted absently. On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green where there were fields. Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. "It looks like Winnipeg," she told them as they paused. "When are you doctors going to let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look," she pointed. "See that patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?" Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and began circling lazily. "Sooner than you think," Max told her. "We've discovered a castaway colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it." "People on Minos?" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with excitement. "One of them is down in the medical department," June said. "He'll be out in twenty minutes." "May I go see him?" "Sure," said Max. "Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets out. Tell him we sent you." "Right!" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces, the sound of unfamiliar voices. They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each table where people leisurely ate and talked. They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of conversation. "—new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in. He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman." The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four different desserts, and assorted beverages. Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a table. Brant St. Clair came over. "I beg your pardon, Max, but they are saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages, for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?" Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the shy Canadian. "He's back already. We just saw him come in." "Oh, fine." St. Clair beamed. "I had an appointment with him to go out and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have you seen Bess? Oh—there she is." He turned swiftly and hurried away. A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway, alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward their table. "Look!" said someone. "There's the colonist!" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled woman, followed and caught his arm. "Did you really swim across a river to come here?" Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all directions. "Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with us. Let me help choose your tray." Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting wild animals with a bow and arrow. "He needs to be rescued," Max said. "He won't have a chance to eat." June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be claiming the hero of the hour. Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing. "When we build our town and leave the ship," June explained, "we will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and cocktail bars that used to be inside." "Oh, I'm not complaining," Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to the music, and tried to locate its source. "That's big of you," said Max with gentle irony. They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a day. Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through, and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth seeds with local ground, about mines and strata. There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center of interest. Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish. June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces, eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most chimingly of all. June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's end of the table. "That guy's a menace," Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. "What's eating you?" he added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness. "Nothing," she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily. They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of guilt. Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a question. Now he was saying, "I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!" He glanced at them, looking puzzled. "See if you two can make anything of this. It sounds medical to me." Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy. "Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it." Len turned back to him. "You people live off the country, right? You hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?" "Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry." "Why?" Len was aggrieved. "Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then you'd starve to death on a full stomach." Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays, but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn. "Test-tube evolution?" Max repeated. "What's that? I thought you people had no doctors." "It's a story." Pat leaned back again. "Alexander P. Mead, the head of the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did it all right.'" "Did which?" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear. "Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells—" She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence, hunting, eating and reproducing alone. Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes. He put them through the hard savage school of evolution—a thousand generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it. "Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution in six months," Pat Mead finished. "When they reached to a point where they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he had taken them from." "What was supposed to happen then?" Max asked, leaning forward. "I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his neck at the age of eighty." "A character," Max said. Why was she afraid? "It worked then?" "Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were still eating out of hydroponics tanks." "It worked," said Max to Len. "You're a plant geneticist and a tank culture expert. There's a job for you." "Uh- uh !" Len backed away. "It sounds like a medical problem to me. Human cell control—right up your alley." "It is a one-way street," Pat warned. "Once it is done, you won't be able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it just for the taste." Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. "Three of the twelve test hamsters have died," he reported, and turned to Pat. "Your people carry the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they object?" "We wouldn't want to give you folks germs," Pat smiled. "Anything for safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first." The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on the hour or run the risk of disease. Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a mechanic for the expedition. "This gives me a chance to study their mores." He winked wickedly. "I may not be back for several nights." They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters. Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control; the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the attack. June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again. They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was hairless and pink, like a still-born baby. "We can find no micro-organisms," George Barton said. "None at all. Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia. Fever only for the ones that fought it off." He handed Max some temperature charts and graphs of blood counts. June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall, then abruptly lightened. Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man. It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero out of the pages of a book—Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke. She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back. "Hello, June," said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they passed he lightly touched her arm. "Oh, pioneer!" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile, and knew that he had heard.

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Somewhere on the Time Ellipse Mike Kenscott became Adric; and the only way to return to his own identity was to find the Keep of the Dreamer, and loose the terrible FALCONS of NARABEDLA By Marion Zimmer Bradley [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Contents CHAPTER ONE Voltage—from Nowhere! Somewhere on the crags above us I heard a big bird scream. I turned to Andy, knee-deep in the icy stream beside me. "There's your eagle. Probably smells that cougar I shot yesterday." I started to reel in my line, knowing what my brother's next move would be. "Get the camera, and we'll try for a picture." We crouched together in the underbrush, watching, as the big bird of prey wheeled down in a slow spiral toward the dead cougar. Andy was trembling with excitement, the camera poised against his chest, his eyes glued in the image-finder. "Golly—" he whispered, almost prayerfully, "six foot wing spread—maybe more—" The bird screamed again, warily, head cocked into the wind. We were to leeward; the scent of the carrion masked our enemy smell from him. The eagle failed to scent or to see us, swooping down and dropping on the cougar's head. Andy's camera clicked twice. The eagle thrust in its beak— A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then, in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife, ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of wide wings. A red haze spun around me— Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was hardly recognizable. "Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right? You must be crazy!" I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, "What happened?" My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling wrathfully. "You tell me what happened! Mike, what in the devil were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with your knife! You must be clean crazy!" I let the knife drop out of my hand. "Yeah—" I said heavily, "Yeah, I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—" my voice trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. "That's all right, Mike," he said in a dead voice, "you scared the daylights out of me, that's all." He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my face. "Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare hands—" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run down the slope in the direction of the cabin. I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken pieces of Andy's cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in the living hell had I done a thing like that? I'd warned Andy time and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I didn't wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles, carefully stowed them, cleaned our day's catch. It was dark before I started for the cabin; I could hear the hum of the electric dynamo I'd rigged up and see the electric light across the dusk of the Sierras. A smell of bacon greeted me as I crossed into the glare of the unshielded bulb. Andy was standing at the cookstove, his back stubbornly to me. He did not turn. "Andy—" I said. "It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the fish." "Andy—I'll get you another camera—" "I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat." He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room, restlessly. "Mike—" he said entreatingly, "you came here for a rest! Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?" He looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. "You've turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!" "I can't stop now!" I said violently. "I'm on the track of something—and if I stop I'll never find it!" "Must be real important," Andy said sourly, "if it makes you act like bughouse bait." I shrugged without answering. We'd been over that before. I'd known it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big blowup. I thought, angrily. I'm heading for another one, but I don't care. "Sit down, Andy," I told him. "You don't know what happened down there. Now that the war's over, it's no military secret, and I'll tell you what happened." I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my mouth. "That is—I will if I can." Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I would have liked to think so. It started one day in the lab with a shadow on the sun and an elusive short circuit that gave me shock after shock until I was jittery. By the time I had it fixed, the oscillator had gone out of control. I got a series of low-frequency waves that were like nothing I'd ever seen before. Then there was something like a voice speaking out of a very old, jerry-built amateur radio set. Except that there wasn't a receiver in the lab, and no one else had heard it. I wasn't sure myself, because right then every instrument in the place went haywire and five minutes later, part of the ceiling hit the floor and the floor went up through the roof. They found me, they say, lying half-crushed under a beam, and I woke up eighteen hours later in a hospital with four cracked ribs, and a feeling as if I'd had a lot of voltage poured into me. It went in the report that I'd been struck by lightning. It took me a long time to get well. The ribs healed fast—faster than the doctor liked. I didn't mind the hospital part, except that I couldn't walk without shaking, or light a cigarette without burning myself, for months. The thing I minded was what I remembered before I woke up. Delirium; that was what they told me. But the kind and type of scars on my body didn't ring true. Electricity—even freak lightning—doesn't make that kind of burns. And my corner of the world doesn't make a habit of branding people. But before I could show the scars to anybody outside the hospital, they were gone. Not healed; just gone. I remembered the look on the medic's face when I showed him the place where the scars had been. He didn't think I was crazy; he thought he was. I knew the lab hadn't been struck by lightning. The Major knew it too; I found that out the day I reported back to work. All the time we talked, his big pen moved in stubby circles across the page of his log-book, and he talked without raising his head to look at me. "I know all that, Kenscott. No electrical storms reported in the vicinity; no radio disturbance within a thousand miles. But—" his jaw grew stubborn, "the lab was wrecked and you were hurt. We've got to have something for the record." I could understand all that. What I resented was the way they treated me after I went back to work. They transferred me to another division and another line of work. They turned down my request to follow up those nontypical waves. My private notes were ripped out of my notebook while I was at lunch and I never saw them again. And as soon as they could, they shipped me to Fairbanks, Alaska, and that was the end of that. The Major told me all I needed to know, the day before I took the plane to Alaska. His scowl said more than his words, and they said plenty. "I'd let it alone, Kenscott. No sense stirring up more trouble. We can't bother with side alleys, anyhow. Next time you monkey with it, you might get your head blown off, not just a dose of stray voltage out of the blue. We've done everything but stand on our heads trying to find out where that spare energy came from—and where it went. But we've marked that whole line of research closed , Kenscott. If I were you, I'd keep my mouth shut about it." "It wasn't a message from Mars," I suggested unsmiling, and he didn't think that was funny either. But there was relief on his face as I left the office and went to clean out my drawer. I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same. The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to Andy. "They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned. Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when we came down here—" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. "It started up again the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and blew out five fuses trying to change one." "Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—" My brother's eyes watched me, uneasy. "Mike, you're kidding—" "I wish I were," I said. "That energy just drains into me, and nothing happens. I'm immune." I shrugged, rose and walked across to the radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on. "I'll show you," I told him. The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the speaker, erratic. I took my hand away. "Turn it up—" Andy said uneasily. My hand twiddled the dial. "It's already up." "Try another station;" the kid insisted stubbornly. I pushed all the buttons in succession; the static crackled and buzzed, the panel light flickered on and off in little cryptic flashes. I sighed. "And reception was perfect at noon," I told him, "You were listening to the news." I took my hand away again. "I don't want to blow the thing up." Andy came over and switched the button back on. The little panel light glowed steadily, and the mellow voice of Milton Cross filled the room ... "now conduct the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in the Fifth or 'Fate' symphony of Ludwig von Beethoven ..." the noise of mixed applause, and then the majestic chords of the symphony, thundering through the rooms of the cabin. "Ta-da-da-dumm——Ta-da-da-DUMM!" My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses. There was nothing wrong with the radio. "Mike. What did you do to it?" "I wish I knew," I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button again. Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums. I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the "Fate" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered. "You'd better let it alone!" Andy said shakily. The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice came sleepily from the alcove. "Going to read all night, Mike?" "If I feel like it," I said tersely and began walking up and down again. "Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!" Andy exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. "Sorry, Andy." Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit suicide—but I hadn't. I swore, slamming down the window. I was going to bed. Andy was right. Either I was crazy or there was something wrong; in any case, sitting here wouldn't help. If it didn't let up, I'd take the first train home and see a good electrician—or a psychiatrist. But right now, I was going to hit the sack. My hand went out automatically and switched the light off. "Damn!" I thought incredulously. I'd shorted the dynamo again. The radio stopped as if the whole orchestra had dropped dead; every light in the cabin winked swiftly out, but my hand on the switch crackled with a phosphorescent glow as the entire house current poured into my body. I tingled with weird shock; I heard my own teeth chattering. And something snapped wide open in my brain. I heard, suddenly, an excited voice, shouting. "Rhys! Rhys! That is the man!" CHAPTER TWO Rainbow City " You are mad ," said the man with the tired voice. I was drifting. I was swaying, bodiless, over a huge abyss of caverned space; chasmed, immense, limitless. Vaguely, through a sleeping distance, I heard two voices. This one was old and very tired. "You are mad. They will know. Narayan will know." "Narayan is a fool," said the second voice. "Narayan is the Dreamer," the tired voice said. "He is the Dreamer, and where the Dreamer walks he will know. But have it your way. I am very old and it does not matter. I give you this power, freely—to spare you. But Gamine—" "Gamine—" the second voice stopped. After a long time, "You are old, and a fool, Rhys," it said. "What is Gamine to me?" Bodiless, blind, I drifted and swayed and swung in the sound of the voices. The humming, like a million high-tension wires, sang around me and I felt myself cradled in the pull of a great magnet that held me suspended surely on nothingness and drew me down into the field of some force beneath. Far below me the voices faded. I swung free—fell—plunged downward in sickening motion, head over heels, into the abyss.... My feet struck hard flooring. I wrenched back to consciousness with a jolt. Winds blew coldly in my face; the cabin walls had been flung back to the high-lying stars. I was standing at a barred window at the very pinnacle of a tall tower, in the lap of a weird blueness that arched flickeringly in the night. I caught a glimpse of a startled face, a lean tired old face beneath a peaked hood, in the moment before my knees gave way and I fell, striking my head against the bars of the window. I was lying on a narrow, high bed in a room filled with doors and bars. I could see the edge of a carved mirror set in a frame, and the top of a chest of some kind. On a bench at the edge of my field of vision there were two figures sitting. One was the old grey man, hunched wearily beneath his robe, wearing robes like a Tibetan Lama's, somber black, and a peaked hood of grey. The other was a slimmer younger figure, swathed in silken silvery veiling, with a thin opacity where the face should have been, and a sort of opalescent shine of flesh through the silvery-sapphire silks. The figure was that of a boy or a slim immature girl; it sat erect, motionless, and for a long time I studied it, curious, between half-opened lids. But when I blinked, it rose and passed through one of the multitudinous doors; at once a soft sibilance of draperies announced return. I sat up, getting my feet to the floor, or almost there; the bed was higher than a hospital bed. The blue-robe held a handled mug, like a baby's drinking-cup, at me. I took it in my hand hesitated— "Neither drug nor poison," said the blue-robe mockingly, and the voice was as noncommittal as the veiled body; a sexless voice, soft alto, a woman's or a boy's. "Drink and be glad it is none of Karamy's brewing." I tasted the liquid in the mug; it had an indeterminate greenish look and a faint pungent taste I could not identify, although it reminded me variously of anise and garlic. It seemed to remove the last traces of shock. I handed the cup back empty and looked sharply at the old man in the Lama costume. "You're—Rhys?" I said. "Where in hell have I gotten to?" At least, that's what I meant to say. Imagine my surprise when I found myself asking—in a language I'd never heard, but understood perfectly—"To which of the domains of Zandru have I been consigned now?" At the same moment I became conscious of what I was wearing. It seemed to be an old-fashioned nightshirt, chopped off at the loins, deep crimson in color. "Red flannels yet!" I thought with a gulp of dismay. I checked my impulse to get out of bed. Who could act sane in a red nightshirt? "You might have the decency to explain where I am," I said. "If you know." The tiredness seemed part of Rhys voice. "Adric," he said wearily. "Try to remember." He shrugged his lean shoulders. "You are in your own Tower. And you have been under restraint again. I am sorry." His voice sounded futile. I felt prickling shivers run down my backbone. In spite of the weird surroundings, the phrase "under restraint" had struck home. I was a lunatic in an asylum. The blue-robed one cut in in that smooth, sexless, faint-sarcastic voice. "While Karamy holds the amnesia-ray, Rhys, you will be explaining it to him a dozen times a cycle. He will never be of use to us again. This time Karamy won. Adric; try to remember. You are at home, in Narabedla." I shook my head. Nightshirt or no nightshirt, I'd face this on my feet. I walked to Rhys; put my clenched hands on his shoulders. "Explain this! Who am I supposed to be? You called me Adric. I'm no more Adric than you are!" "Adric, you are not amusing!" The blue-robe's voice was edged with anger. "Use what intelligence you have left! You have had enough sharig antidote to cure a tharl . Now. Who are you?" The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to identity. "Adric—" I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it? Wasn't it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls is the chemming of twilp— stop that! Mike Kenscott. Summer 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head in my hands. "I'm crazy. Or you are. Or we're both sane and this monkey-business is all real." "It is real," said Rhys, compassion in his tired face. "He has been very far on the Time Ellipse, Gamine. Adric, try to understand. This was Karamy's work. She sent you out on a time line, far, very far into the past. Into a time when the Earth was different—she hoped you would come back changed, or mad." His eyes brooded. "I think she succeeded. Gamine, I have long outstayed my leave. I must return to my own tower—or die. Will you explain?" "I will." A hint of emotion flickered in the voice of Gamine. "Go, Master." Rhys left the room, through one of the doors. Gamine turned impatiently to me again. "We waste time this way. Fool, look at yourself!" I strode to a mirror that lined one of the doors. Above the crimson nightshirt I saw a face—not my own. The sight rocked my mind. Out of the mirror a man's face looked anxiously; a face eagle-thin, darkly moustached, with sharp green eyes. The body belonging to the face that was not mine was lean and long and strongly muscled—and not quite human. I squeezed my eyes shut. This couldn't be—I opened my eyes. The man in the red nightshirt I was wearing was still reflected there. I turned my back on the mirror, walking to one of the barred windows to look down on the familiar outline of the Sierra Madre, about a hundred miles away. I couldn't have been mistaken. I knew that ridge of mountains. But between me and the mountains lay a thickly forested expanse of land which looked like no scenery I had ever seen in my life. I was standing near the pinnacle of a high tower; I dimly saw the curve of another, just out of my line of vision. The whole landscape was bathed in a curiously pinkish light; through an overcast sky I could just make out, dimly, the shadowy disk of a watery red sun. Then—no, I wasn't dreaming, I really did see it—beyond it, a second sun; blue-white, shining brilliantly, pallid through the clouds, but brighter than any sunlight I had ever seen. It was proof enough for me. I turned desperately to Gamine behind me. "Where have I gotten, to? Where— when am I? Two suns—those mountains—" The change in Gamine's voice was swift; the veiled face lifted questioningly to mine. What I had thought a veil was not that; it seemed to be more like a shimmering screen wrapped around the features so that Gamine was faceless, an invisible person with substance but no apprehensible characteristics. Yes, it was like that; as if there was an invisible person wearing the curious silken draperies. But the invisible flesh was solid enough. Hands like cold steel gripped my shoulders. "You have been back? Back to the days before the second sun? Adric, tell me; did Earth truly have but one sun?" "Wait—" I begged. "You mean I've travelled in time?" The exultation faded from Gamine's voice imperceptibly. "Never mind. It is improbable in any case. No, Adric; not really travelling. You were only sent out on the Time Ellipse, till you contacted some one in that other Time. Perhaps you stayed in contact with his mind so long that you think you are he?" "I'm not Adric—" I raged. "Adric sent me here—" I saw the blurring around Gamine's invisible features twitch in a headshake. "It's never been proven that two minds can be interchanged like that. Adric's body. Adric's brain. The brain convolutions, the memory centers, the habit patterns—you'd still be Adric. The idea that you are someone else is only an illusion of your conscious mind. It will wear off." I shook my head, puzzled. "I still don't believe it. Where am I?" Gamine moved impatiently. "Oh, very well. You are Adric of Narabedla; and if you are sane again, Lord of the Crimson Tower. I am Gamine." The swathed shoulders moved a little. "You don't remember? I am a spell-singer." I jerked my elbow toward the window. "Those are my own mountains out there," I said roughly. "I'm not Adric, whoever he is. My name's Mike Kenscott, and your hanky-panky doesn't impress me. Take off that veil and let me see your face." "I wish you meant that—" a mournfulness breathed in the soft contralto. A sudden fury blazed up in me from nowhere. "And what right have you to pry for that old fool Rhys? Get back to your own place, then, spell-singer—" I broke off, appalled. What was I saying? Worse, what did I mean by it? Gamine turned. The sexless voice was coldly amused. "Adric spoke then. Whoever sits in the seat of your soul, you are the same—and past redemption!" The robes whispered sibilantly on the floor as Gamine moved to the door. "Karamy is welcome to her slave!" The door slammed. Left alone, I flung myself down on the high bed, stubbornly concentrating on Mike Kenscott, shutting out the vague blurred mystery in my mind that was Adric impinging on consciousness. I was not Adric. I would not be. I dared not go to the window and look out at the terrifying two suns, even to see the reassurance of the familiar Sierra Madre skyline. A homesick terror was hurting in me. But persistently the Adric memories came, a guilty feeling of a shirked duty, and a frightened face—a real face, not a blurred nothingness—beneath Gamine's blue veils. Memories of strange hunts and a big bird on the pommel of a high saddle. A bird hooded like a falcon, in crimson. Consciousness of dress made me remember the—nightshirt—I still wore. Moving swiftly, without conscious thought, I went to a door and slid it open; pulled out some garments and dressed in them. Every garment in the closet was the same color; deep-hued crimson. I glanced in the mirror and a phrase Gamine had used broke the surface of my mind like a leaping fish. "Lord of the Crimson Tower." Well, I looked it. There had been knives and swords in the closet; I took out one to look at it, and before I realized what I was doing I had belted it across my hip. I stared, decided to let it remain. It looked all right with the rest of the costume. It felt right, too. Another door folded back noiselessly and a man stood looking at me. He was young and would have been handsome in an effeminate way if his face had not been so arrogant. Lean, somehow catlike, it was easy to determine that he was akin to Adric, or me, even before the automatic habit of memory fitted name and identity to him. "Evarin," I said, warily. He came forward, moving so softly that for an uneasy moment I wondered if he had pads like a cat's on his feet. He wore deep green from head to foot, similar to the crimson garments that clothed me. His face had a flickering, as if he could at a moment's notice raise a barrier of invisibility like Gamine's about himself. He didn't look as human as I. "I have seen Gamine," he said. "She says you are awake, and as sane as you ever were. We of Narabedla are not so strong that we can afford to waste even a broken tool like you." Wrath—Adric's wrath—boiled up in me; but Evarin moved lithely backward. "I am not Gamine," he warned. "And I will not be served like Gamine has been served. Take care." "Take care yourself," I muttered, knowing little else I could have said. Evarin drew back thin lips. "Why? You have been sent out on the Time Ellipse till you are only a shadow of yourself. But all this is beside the point. Karamy says you are to be freed, so the seals are off all the doors, and the Crimson Tower is no longer a prison to you. Come and go as you please. Karamy—" his lips formed a sneer. "If you call that freedom!" I said slowly, "You think I'm not crazy?" Evarin snorted. "Except where Karamy is concerned, you never were. What is that to me? I have everything I need. The Dreamer gives me good hunting and slaves enough to do my bidding. For the rest, I am the Toymaker. I need little. But you—" his voice leaped with contempt, "you ride time at Karamy's bidding—and your Dreamer walks—waiting the coming of his power that he may destroy us all one day!" I stared somberly at Evarin, standing still near the door. The words seemed to wake an almost personal shame in me. The boy watched and his face lost some of his bitterness. He said more quietly, "The falcon flown cannot be recalled. I came only to tell you that you are free." He turned, shrugging his thin shoulders, and walked to the window. "As I say, if you call that freedom."

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50998

DELAY IN TRANSIT By F. L. WALLACE Illustrated by SIBLEY [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.] An unprovoked, meaningless night attack is terrifying enough on your own home planet, worse on a world across the Galaxy. But the horror is the offer of help that cannot be accepted! "Muscles tense," said Dimanche. "Neural index 1.76, unusually high. Adrenalin squirting through his system. In effect, he's stalking you. Intent: probably assault with a deadly weapon." "Not interested," said Cassal firmly, his subvocalization inaudible to anyone but Dimanche. "I'm not the victim type. He was standing on the walkway near the brink of the thoroughfare. I'm going back to the habitat hotel and sit tight." "First you have to get there," Dimanche pointed out. "I mean, is it safe for a stranger to walk through the city?" "Now that you mention it, no," answered Cassal. He looked around apprehensively. "Where is he?" "Behind you. At the moment he's pretending interest in a merchandise display." A native stamped by, eyes brown and incurious. Apparently he was accustomed to the sight of an Earthman standing alone, Adam's apple bobbing up and down silently. It was a Godolphian axiom that all travelers were crazy. Cassal looked up. Not an air taxi in sight; Godolph shut down at dusk. It would be pure luck if he found a taxi before morning. Of course he could walk back to the hotel, but was that such a good idea? A Godolphian city was peculiar. And, though not intended, it was peculiarly suited to certain kinds of violence. A human pedestrian was at a definite disadvantage. "Correction," said Dimanche. "Not simple assault. He has murder in mind." "It still doesn't appeal to me," said Cassal. Striving to look unconcerned, he strolled toward the building side of the walkway and stared into the interior of a small cafe. Warm, bright and dry. Inside, he might find safety for a time. Damn the man who was following him! It would be easy enough to elude him in a normal city. On Godolph, nothing was normal. In an hour the streets would be brightly lighted—for native eyes. A human would consider it dim. "Why did he choose me?" asked Cassal plaintively. "There must be something he hopes to gain." "I'm working on it," said Dimanche. "But remember, I have limitations. At short distances I can scan nervous systems, collect and interpret physiological data. I can't read minds. The best I can do is report what a person says or subvocalizes. If you're really interested in finding out why he wants to kill you, I suggest you turn the problem over to the godawful police." "Godolph, not godawful," corrected Cassal absently. That was advice he couldn't follow, good as it seemed. He could give the police no evidence save through Dimanche. There were various reasons, many of them involving the law, for leaving the device called Dimanche out of it. The police would act if they found a body. His own, say, floating face-down on some quiet street. That didn't seem the proper approach, either. "Weapons?" "The first thing I searched him for. Nothing very dangerous. A long knife, a hard striking object. Both concealed on his person." Cassal strangled slightly. Dimanche needed a good stiff course in semantics. A knife was still the most silent of weapons. A man could die from it. His hand strayed toward his pocket. He had a measure of protection himself. "Report," said Dimanche. "Not necessarily final. Based, perhaps, on tenuous evidence." "Let's have it anyway." "His motivation is connected somehow with your being marooned here. For some reason you can't get off this planet." That was startling information, though not strictly true. A thousand star systems were waiting for him, and a ship to take him to each one. Of course, the one ship he wanted hadn't come in. Godolph was a transfer point for stars nearer the center of the Galaxy. When he had left Earth, he had known he would have to wait a few days here. He hadn't expected a delay of nearly three weeks. Still, it wasn't unusual. Interstellar schedules over great distances were not as reliable as they might be. Was this man, whoever and whatever he might be, connected with that delay? According to Dimanche, the man thought he was. He was self-deluded or did he have access to information that Cassal didn't? Denton Cassal, sales engineer, paused for a mental survey of himself. He was a good engineer and, because he was exceptionally well matched to his instrument, the best salesman that Neuronics, Inc., had. On the basis of these qualifications, he had been selected to make a long journey, the first part of which already lay behind him. He had to go to Tunney 21 to see a man. That man wasn't important to anyone save the company that employed him, and possibly not even to them. The thug trailing him wouldn't be interested in Cassal himself, his mission, which was a commercial one, nor the man on Tunney. And money wasn't the objective, if Dimanche's analysis was right. What did the thug want? Secrets? Cassal had none, except, in a sense, Dimanche. And that was too well kept on Earth, where the instrument was invented and made, for anyone this far away to have learned about it. And yet the thug wanted to kill him. Wanted to? Regarded him as good as dead. It might pay him to investigate the matter further, if it didn't involve too much risk. "Better start moving." That was Dimanche. "He's getting suspicious." Cassal went slowly along the narrow walkway that bordered each side of that boulevard, the transport tide. It was raining again. It usually was on Godolph, which was a weather-controlled planet where the natives like rain. He adjusted the controls of the weak force field that repelled the rain. He widened the angle of the field until water slanted through it unhindered. He narrowed it around him until it approached visibility and the drops bounced away. He swore at the miserable climate and the near amphibians who created it. A few hundred feet away, a Godolphian girl waded out of the transport tide and climbed to the walkway. It was this sort of thing that made life dangerous for a human—Venice revised, brought up to date in a faster-than-light age. Water. It was a perfect engineering material. Simple, cheap, infinitely flexible. With a minimum of mechanism and at break-neck speed, the ribbon of the transport tide flowed at different levels throughout the city. The Godolphian merely plunged in and was carried swiftly and noiselessly to his destination. Whereas a human—Cassal shivered. If he were found drowned, it would be considered an accident. No investigation would be made. The thug who was trailing him had certainly picked the right place. The Godolphian girl passed. She wore a sleek brown fur, her own. Cassal was almost positive she muttered a polite "Arf?" as she sloshed by. What she meant by that, he didn't know and didn't intend to find out. "Follow her," instructed Dimanche. "We've got to investigate our man at closer range." Obediently, Cassal turned and began walking after the girl. Attractive in an anthropomorphic, seal-like way, even from behind. Not graceful out of her element, though. The would-be assassin was still looking at merchandise as Cassal retraced his steps. A man, or at least man type. A big fellow, physically quite capable of violence, if size had anything to do with it. The face, though, was out of character. Mild, almost meek. A scientist or scholar. It didn't fit with murder. "Nothing," said Dimanche disgustedly. "His mind froze when we got close. I could feel his shoulderblades twitching as we passed. Anticipated guilt, of course. Projecting to you the action he plans. That makes the knife definite." Well beyond the window at which the thug watched and waited, Cassal stopped. Shakily he produced a cigarette and fumbled for a lighter. "Excellent thinking," commended Dimanche. "He won't attempt anything on this street. Too dangerous. Turn aside at the next deserted intersection and let him follow the glow of your cigarette." The lighter flared in his hand. "That's one way of finding out," said Cassal. "But wouldn't I be a lot safer if I just concentrated on getting back to the hotel?" "I'm curious. Turn here." "Go to hell," said Cassal nervously. Nevertheless, when he came to that intersection, he turned there. It was a Godolphian equivalent of an alley, narrow and dark, oily slow-moving water gurgling at one side, high cavernous walls looming on the other. He would have to adjust the curiosity factor of Dimanche. It was all very well to be interested in the man who trailed him, but there was also the problem of coming out of this adventure alive. Dimanche, an electronic instrument, naturally wouldn't consider that. "Easy," warned Dimanche. "He's at the entrance to the alley, walking fast. He's surprised and pleased that you took this route." "I'm surprised, too," remarked Cassal. "But I wouldn't say I'm pleased. Not just now." "Careful. Even subvocalized conversation is distracting." The mechanism concealed within his body was silent for an instant and then continued: "His blood pressure is rising, breathing is faster. At a time like this, he may be ready to verbalize why he wants to murder you. This is critical." "That's no lie," agreed Cassal bitterly. The lighter was in his hand. He clutched it grimly. It was difficult not to look back. The darkness assumed an even more sinister quality. "Quiet," said Dimanche. "He's verbalizing about you." "He's decided I'm a nice fellow after all. He's going to stop and ask me for a light." "I don't think so," answered Dimanche. "He's whispering: 'Poor devil. I hate to do it. But it's really his life or mine'." "He's more right than he knows. Why all this violence, though? Isn't there any clue?" "None at all," admitted Dimanche. "He's very close. You'd better turn around." Cassal turned, pressed the stud on the lighter. It should have made him feel more secure, but it didn't. He could see very little. A dim shadow rushed at him. He jumped away from the water side of the alley, barely in time. He could feel the rush of air as the assailant shot by. "Hey!" shouted Cassal. Echoes answered; nothing else did. He had the uncomfortable feeling that no one was going to come to his assistance. "He wasn't expecting that reaction," explained Dimanche. "That's why he missed. He's turned around and is coming back." "I'm armed!" shouted Cassal. "That won't stop him. He doesn't believe you." Cassal grasped the lighter. That is, it had been a lighter a few seconds before. Now a needle-thin blade had snapped out and projected stiffly. Originally it had been designed as an emergency surgical instrument. A little imagination and a few changes had altered its function, converting it into a compact, efficient stiletto. "Twenty feet away," advised Dimanche. "He knows you can't see him, but he can see your silhouette by the light from the main thoroughfare. What he doesn't know is that I can detect every move he makes and keep you posted below the level of his hearing." "Stay on him," growled Cassal nervously. He flattened himself against the wall. "To the right," whispered Dimanche. "Lunge forward. About five feet. Low." Sickly, he did so. He didn't care to consider the possible effects of a miscalculation. In the darkness, how far was five feet? Fortunately, his estimate was correct. The rapier encountered yielding resistance, the soggy kind: flesh. The tough blade bent, but did not break. His opponent gasped and broke away. "Attack!" howled Dimanche against the bone behind his ear. "You've got him. He can't imagine how you know where he is in the darkness. He's afraid." Attack he did, slicing about wildly. Some of the thrusts landed; some didn't. The percentage was low, the total amount high. His opponent fell to the ground, gasped and was silent. Cassal fumbled in his pockets and flipped on a light. The man lay near the water side of the alley. One leg was crumpled under him. He didn't move. "Heartbeat slow," said Dimanche solemnly. "Breathing barely perceptible." "Then he's not dead," said Cassal in relief. Foam flecked from the still lips and ran down the chin. Blood oozed from cuts on the face. "Respiration none, heartbeat absent," stated Dimanche. Horrified, Cassal gazed at the body. Self-defense, of course, but would the police believe it? Assuming they did, they'd still have to investigate. The rapier was an illegal concealed weapon. And they would question him until they discovered Dimanche. Regrettable, but what could he do about it? Suppose he were detained long enough to miss the ship bound for Tunney 21? Grimly, he laid down the rapier. He might as well get to the bottom of this. Why had the man attacked? What did he want? "I don't know," replied Dimanche irritably. "I can interpret body data—a live body. I can't work on a piece of meat." Cassal searched the body thoroughly. Miscellaneous personal articles of no value in identifying the man. A clip with a startling amount of money in it. A small white card with something scribbled on it. A picture of a woman and a small child posed against a background which resembled no world Cassal had ever seen. That was all. Cassal stood up in bewilderment. Dimanche to the contrary, there seemed to be no connection between this dead man and his own problem of getting to Tunney 21. Right now, though, he had to dispose of the body. He glanced toward the boulevard. So far no one had been attracted by the violence. He bent down to retrieve the lighter-rapier. Dimanche shouted at him. Before he could react, someone landed on him. He fell forward, vainly trying to grasp the weapon. Strong fingers felt for his throat as he was forced to the ground. He threw the attacker off and staggered to his feet. He heard footsteps rushing away. A slight splash followed. Whoever it was, he was escaping by way of water. Whoever it was. The man he had thought he had slain was no longer in sight. "Interpret body data, do you?" muttered Cassal. "Liveliest dead man I've ever been strangled by." "It's just possible there are some breeds of men who can control the basic functions of their body," said Dimanche defensively. "When I checked him, he had no heartbeat." "Remind me not to accept your next evaluation so completely," grunted Cassal. Nevertheless, he was relieved, in a fashion. He hadn't wanted to kill the man. And now there was nothing he'd have to explain to the police. He needed the cigarette he stuck between his lips. For the second time he attempted to pick up the rapier-lighter. This time he was successful. Smoke swirled into his lungs and quieted his nerves. He squeezed the weapon into the shape of a lighter and put it away. Something, however, was missing—his wallet. The thug had relieved him of it in the second round of the scuffle. Persistent fellow. Damned persistent. It really didn't matter. He fingered the clip he had taken from the supposedly dead body. He had intended to turn it over to the police. Now he might as well keep it to reimburse him for his loss. It contained more money than his wallet had. Except for the identification tab he always carried in his wallet, it was more than a fair exchange. The identification, a rectangular piece of plastic, was useful in establishing credit, but with the money he now had, he wouldn't need credit. If he did, he could always send for another tab. A white card fluttered from the clip. He caught it as it fell. Curiously he examined it. Blank except for one crudely printed word, STAB. His unknown assailant certainly had tried. The old man stared at the door, an obsolete visual projector wobbling precariously on his head. He closed his eyes and the lettering on the door disappeared. Cassal was too far away to see what it had been. The technician opened his eyes and concentrated. Slowly a new sign formed on the door. TRAVELERS AID BUREAU Murra Foray, First Counselor It was a drab sign, but, then, it was a dismal, backward planet. The old technician passed on to the next door and closed his eyes again. With a sinking feeling, Cassal walked toward the entrance. He needed help and he had to find it in this dingy rathole. Inside, though, it wasn't dingy and it wasn't a rathole. More like a maze, an approved scientific one. Efficient, though not comfortable. Travelers Aid was busier than he thought it would be. Eventually he managed to squeeze into one of the many small counseling rooms. A woman appeared on the screen, crisp and cool. "Please answer everything the machine asks. When the tape is complete, I'll be available for consultation." Cassal wasn't sure he was going to like her. "Is this necessary?" he asked. "It's merely a matter of information." "We have certain regulations we abide by." The woman smiled frostily. "I can't give you any information until you comply with them." "Sometimes regulations are silly," said Cassal firmly. "Let me speak to the first counselor." "You are speaking to her," she said. Her face disappeared from the screen. Cassal sighed. So far he hadn't made a good impression. Travelers Aid Bureau, in addition to regulations, was abundantly supplied with official curiosity. When the machine finished with him, Cassal had the feeling he could be recreated from the record it had of him. His individuality had been capsuled into a series of questions and answers. One thing he drew the line at—why he wanted to go to Tunney 21 was his own business. The first counselor reappeared. Age, indeterminate. Not, he supposed, that anyone would be curious about it. Slightly taller than average, rather on the slender side. Face was broad at the brow, narrow at the chin and her eyes were enigmatic. A dangerous woman. She glanced down at the data. "Denton Cassal, native of Earth. Destination, Tunney 21." She looked up at him. "Occupation, sales engineer. Isn't that an odd combination?" Her smile was quite superior. "Not at all. Scientific training as an engineer. Special knowledge of customer relations." "Special knowledge of a thousand races? How convenient." Her eyebrows arched. "I think so," he agreed blandly. "Anything else you'd like to know?" "Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you." He could believe that or not as he wished. He didn't. "You refused to answer why you were going to Tunney 21. Perhaps I can guess. They're the best scientists in the Galaxy. You wish to study under them." Close—but wrong on two counts. They were good scientists, though not necessarily the best. For instance, it was doubtful that they could build Dimanche, even if they had ever thought of it, which was even less likely. There was, however, one relatively obscure research worker on Tunney 21 that Neuronics wanted on their staff. If the fragments of his studies that had reached Earth across the vast distance meant anything, he could help Neuronics perfect instantaneous radio. The company that could build a radio to span the reaches of the Galaxy with no time lag could set its own price, which could be control of all communications, transport, trade—a galactic monopoly. Cassal's share would be a cut of all that. His part was simple, on the surface. He was to persuade that researcher to come to Earth, if he could . Literally, he had to guess the Tunnesian's price before the Tunnesian himself knew it. In addition, the reputation of Tunnesian scientists being exceeded only by their arrogance, Cassal had to convince him that he wouldn't be working for ignorant Earth savages. The existence of such an instrument as Dimanche was a key factor. Her voice broke through his thoughts. "Now, then, what's your problem?" "I was told on Earth I might have to wait a few days on Godolph. I've been here three weeks. I want information on the ship bound for Tunney 21." "Just a moment." She glanced at something below the angle of the screen. She looked up and her eyes were grave. " Rickrock C arrived yesterday. Departed for Tunney early this morning." "Departed?" He got up and sat down again, swallowing hard. "When will the next ship arrive?" "Do you know how many stars there are in the Galaxy?" she asked. He didn't answer. "That's right," she said. "Billions. Tunney, according to the notation, is near the center of the Galaxy, inside the third ring. You've covered about a third of the distance to it. Local traffic, anything within a thousand light-years, is relatively easy to manage. At longer distances, you take a chance. You've had yours and missed it. Frankly, Cassal, I don't know when another ship bound for Tunney will show up on or near Godolph. Within the next five years—maybe." He blanched. "How long would it take to get there using local transportation, star-hopping?" "Take my advice: don't try it. Five years, if you're lucky." "I don't need that kind of luck." "I suppose not." She hesitated. "You're determined to go on?" At the emphatic nod, she sighed. "If that's your decision, we'll try to help you. To start things moving, we'll need a print of your identification tab." "There's something funny about her," Dimanche decided. It was the usual speaking voice of the instrument, no louder than the noise the blood made in coursing through arteries and veins. Cassal could hear it plainly, because it was virtually inside his ear. Cassal ignored his private voice. "Identification tab? I don't have it with me. In fact, I may have lost it." She smiled in instant disbelief. "We're not trying to pry into any part of your past you may wish concealed. However, it's much easier for us to help you if you have your identification. Now if you can't remember your real name and where you put your identification—" She arose and left the screen. "Just a moment." He glared uneasily at the spot where the first counselor wasn't. His real name! "Relax," Dimanche suggested. "She didn't mean it as a personal insult." Presently she returned. "I have news for you, whoever you are." "Cassal," he said firmly. "Denton Cassal, sales engineer, Earth. If you don't believe it, send back to—" He stopped. It had taken him four months to get to Godolph, non-stop, plus a six-month wait on Earth for a ship to show up that was bound in the right direction. Over distances such as these, it just wasn't practical to send back to Earth for anything. "I see you understand." She glanced at the card in her hand. "The spaceport records indicate that when Rickrock C took off this morning, there was a Denton Cassal on board, bound for Tunney 21." "It wasn't I," he said dazedly. He knew who it was, though. The man who had tried to kill him last night. The reason for the attack now became clear. The thug had wanted his identification tab. Worse, he had gotten it. "No doubt it wasn't," she said wearily. "Outsiders don't seem to understand what galactic travel entails." Outsiders? Evidently what she called those who lived beyond the second transfer ring. Were those who lived at the edge of the Galaxy, beyond the first ring, called Rimmers? Probably. She was still speaking: "Ten years to cross the Galaxy, without stopping. At present, no ship is capable of that. Real scheduling is impossible. Populations shift and have to be supplied. A ship is taken off a run for repairs and is never put back on. It's more urgently needed elsewhere. The man who depended on it is left waiting; years pass before he learns it's never coming. "If we had instantaneous radio, that would help. Confusion wouldn't vanish overnight, but it would diminish. We wouldn't have to depend on ships for all the news. Reservations could be made ahead of time, credit established, lost identification replaced—" "I've traveled before," he interrupted stiffly. "I've never had any trouble." She seemed to be exaggerating the difficulties. True, the center was more congested. Taking each star as the starting point for a limited number of ships and using statistical probability as a guide—why, no man would arrive at his predetermined destination. But that wasn't the way it worked. Manifestly, you couldn't compare galactic transportation to the erratic paths of air molecules in a giant room. Or could you? For the average man, anyone who didn't have his own inter-stellar ship, was the comparison too apt? It might be. "You've traveled outside, where there are still free planets waiting to be settled. Where a man is welcome, if he's able to work." She paused. "The center is different. Populations are excessive. Inside the third ring, no man is allowed off a ship without an identification tab. They don't encourage immigration." In effect, that meant no ship bound for the center would take a passenger without identification. No ship owner would run the risk of having a permanent guest on board, someone who couldn't be rid of when his money was gone. Cassal held his head in his hands. Tunney 21 was inside the third ring. "Next time," she said, "don't let anyone take your identification." "I won't," he promised grimly. The woman looked directly at him. Her eyes were bright. He revised his estimate of her age drastically downward. She couldn't be as old as he. Nothing outward had happened, but she no longer seemed dowdy. Not that he was interested. Still, it might pay him to be friendly to the first counselor. "We're a philanthropic agency," said Murra Foray. "Your case is special, though—" "I understand," he said gruffly. "You accept contributions." She nodded. "If the donor is able to give. We don't ask so much that you'll have to compromise your standard of living." But she named a sum that would force him to do just that if getting to Tunney 21 took any appreciable time. He stared at her unhappily. "I suppose it's worth it. I can always work, if I have to." "As a salesman?" she asked. "I'm afraid you'll find it difficult to do business with Godolphians." Irony wasn't called for at a time like this, he thought reproachfully. "Not just another salesman," he answered definitely. "I have special knowledge of customer reactions. I can tell exactly—" He stopped abruptly. Was she baiting him? For what reason? The instrument he called Dimanche was not known to the Galaxy at large. From the business angle, it would be poor policy to hand out that information at random. Aside from that, he needed every advantage he could get. Dimanche was his special advantage. "Anyway," he finished lamely, "I'm a first class engineer. I can always find something in that line." "A scientist, maybe," murmured Murra Foray. "But in this part of the Milky Way, an engineer is regarded as merely a technician who hasn't yet gained practical experience." She shook her head. "You'll do better as a salesman." He got up, glowering. "If that's all—" "It is. We'll keep you informed. Drop your contribution in the slot provided for that purpose as you leave." A door, which he hadn't noticed in entering the counselling cubicle, swung open. The agency was efficient. "Remember," the counselor called out as he left, "identification is hard to work with. Don't accept a crude forgery." He didn't answer, but it was an idea worth considering. The agency was also eminently practical. The exit path guided him firmly to an inconspicuous and yet inescapable contribution station. He began to doubt the philanthropic aspect of the bureau. "I've got it," said Dimanche as Cassal gloomily counted out the sum the first counselor had named. "Got what?" asked Cassal. He rolled the currency into a neat bundle, attached his name, and dropped it into the chute. "The woman, Murra Foray, the first counselor. She's a Huntner." "What's a Huntner?" "A sub-race of men on the other side of the Galaxy. She was vocalizing about her home planet when I managed to locate her." "Any other information?" "None. Electronic guards were sliding into place as soon as I reached her. I got out as fast as I could." "I see." The significance of that, if any, escaped him. Nevertheless, it sounded depressing. "What I want to know is," said Dimanche, "why such precautions as electronic guards? What does Travelers Aid have that's so secret?" Cassal grunted and didn't answer. Dimanche could be annoyingly inquisitive at times. Cassal had entered one side of a block-square building. He came out on the other side. The agency was larger than he had thought. The old man was staring at a door as Cassal came out. He had apparently changed every sign in the building. His work finished, the technician was removing the visual projector from his head as Cassal came up to him. He turned and peered. "You stuck here, too?" he asked in the uneven voice of the aged. "Stuck?" repeated Cassal. "I suppose you can call it that. I'm waiting for my ship." He frowned. He was the one who wanted to ask questions. "Why all the redecoration? I thought Travelers Aid was an old agency. Why did you change so many signs? I could understand it if the agency were new." The old man chuckled. "Re-organization. The previous first counselor resigned suddenly, in the middle of the night, they say. The new one didn't like the name of the agency, so she ordered it changed." She would do just that, thought Cassal. "What about this Murra Foray?" The old man winked mysteriously. He opened his mouth and then seemed overcome with senile fright. Hurriedly he shuffled away. Cassal gazed after him, baffled. The old man was afraid for his job, afraid of the first counselor. Why he should be, Cassal didn't know. He shrugged and went on. The agency was now in motion in his behalf, but he didn't intend to depend on that alone.

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50802

A CITY NEAR CENTAURUS By BILL DOEDE 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.] The city was sacred, but not to its gods. Michaelson was a god—but far from sacred! Crouched in the ancient doorway like an animal peering out from his burrow, Mr. Michaelson saw the native. At first he was startled, thinking it might be someone else from the Earth settlement who had discovered the old city before him. Then he saw the glint of sun against the metallic skirt, and relaxed. He chuckled to himself, wondering with amusement what a webfooted man was doing in an old dead city so far from his people. Some facts were known about the people of Alpha Centaurus II. They were not actually natives, he recalled. They were a colony from the fifth planet of the system. They were a curious people. Some were highly intelligent, though uneducated. He decided to ignore the man for the moment. He was far down the ancient street, a mere speck against the sand. There would be plenty of time to wonder about him. He gazed out from his position at the complex variety of buildings before him. Some were small, obviously homes. Others were huge with tall, frail spires standing against the pale blue sky. Square buildings, ellipsoid, spheroid. Beautiful, dream-stuff bridges connected tall, conical towers, bridges that still swung in the wind after half a million years. Late afternoon sunlight shone against ebony surfaces. The sands of many centuries had blown down the wide streets and filled the doorways. Desert plants grew from roofs of smaller buildings. Ignoring the native, Mr. Michaelson poked about among the ruins happily, exclaiming to himself about some particular artifact, marveling at its state of preservation, holding it this way and that to catch the late afternoon sun, smiling, clucking gleefully. He crawled over the rubble through old doorways half filled with the accumulation of ages. He dug experimentally in the sand with his hands, like a dog, under a roof that had weathered half a million years of rain and sun. Then he crawled out again, covered with dust and cobwebs. The native stood in the street less than a hundred feet away, waving his arms madly. "Mr. Earthgod," he cried. "It is sacred ground where you are trespassing!" The archeologist smiled, watching the man hurry closer. He was short, even for a native. Long gray hair hung to his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he walked. He wore no shoes. The toes of his webbed feet dragged in the sand, making a deep trail behind him. He was an old man. "You never told us about this old dead city," Michaelson said, chidingly. "Shame on you. But never mind. I've found it now. Isn't it beautiful?" "Yes, beautiful. You will leave now." "Leave?" Michaelson asked, acting surprised as if the man were a child. "I just got here a few hours ago." "You must go." "Why? Who are you?" "I am keeper of the city." "You?" Michaelson laughed. Then, seeing how serious the native was, said, "What makes you think a dead city needs a keeper?" "The spirits may return." Michaelson crawled out of the doorway and stood up. He brushed his trousers. He pointed. "See that wall? Built of some metal, I'd say, some alloy impervious to rust and wear." "The spirits are angry." "Notice the inscriptions? Wind has blown sand against them for eons, and rain and sleet. But their story is there, once we decipher it." "Leave!" The native's lined, weathered old face was working around the mouth in anger. Michaelson was almost sorry he had mocked him. He was deadly serious. "Look," he said. "No spirits are ever coming back here. Don't you know that? And even if they did, spirits care nothing for old cities half covered with sand and dirt." He walked away from the old man, heading for another building. The sun had already gone below the horizon, coloring the high clouds. He glanced backward. The webfoot was following. "Mr. Earthgod!" the webfoot cried, so sharply that Michaelson stopped. "You must not touch, not walk upon, not handle. Your step may destroy the home of some ancient spirit. Your breath may cause one iota of change and a spirit may lose his way in the darkness. Go quickly now, or be killed." He turned and walked off, not looking back. Michaelson stood in the ancient street, tall, gaunt, feet planted wide, hands in pockets, watching the webfoot until he was out of sight beyond a huge circular building. There was a man to watch. There was one of the intelligent ones. One look into the alert old eyes had told him that. Michaelson shook his head, and went about satisfying his curiosity. He entered buildings without thought of roofs falling in, or decayed floors dropping from under his weight. He began to collect small items, making a pile of them in the street. An ancient bowl, metal untouched by the ages. A statue of a man, one foot high, correct to the minutest detail, showing how identical they had been to Earthmen. He found books still standing on ancient shelves but was afraid to touch them without tools. Darkness came swiftly and he was forced out into the street. He stood there alone feeling the age of the place. Even the smell of age was in the air. Silver moonlight from the two moons filtered through clear air down upon the ruins. The city lay now in darkness, dead and still, waiting for morning so it could lie dead and still in the sun. There was no hurry to be going home, although he was alone, although this was Alpha Centaurus II with many unknowns, many dangers ... although home was a very great distance away. There was no one back there to worry about him. His wife had died many years ago back on Earth. No children. His friends in the settlement would not look for him for another day at least. Anyway, the tiny cylinder, buried in flesh behind his ear, a thing of mystery and immense power, could take him home instantly, without effort save a flicker of thought. "You did not leave, as I asked you." Michaelson whirled around at the sound of the native's voice. Then he relaxed. He said, "You shouldn't sneak up on a man like that." "You must leave, or I will be forced to kill you. I do not want to kill you, but if I must...." He made a clucking sound deep in the throat. "The spirits are angry." "Nonsense. Superstition! But never mind. You have been here longer than I. Tell me, what are those instruments in the rooms? It looks like a clock but I'm certain it had some other function." "What rooms?" "Oh, come now. The small rooms back there. Look like they were bedrooms." "I do not know." The webfoot drew closer. Michaelson decided he was sixty or seventy years old, at least. "You've been here a long time. You are intelligent, and you must be educated, the way you talk. That gadget looks like a time-piece of some sort. What is it? What does it measure?" "I insist that you go." The webfoot held something in his hand. "No." Michaelson looked off down the street, trying to ignore the native, trying to feel the life of the city as it might have been. "You are sensitive," the native said in his ear. "It takes a sensitive god to feel the spirits moving in the houses and walking in these old streets." "Say it any way you want to. This is the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. The Inca's treasure, the ruins of Pompeii, Egyptian tombs—none can hold a candle to this." "Mr. Earthgod...." "Don't call me that. I'm not a god, and you know it." The old man shrugged. "It is not an item worthy of dispute. Those names you mention, are they the names of gods?" He chuckled. "In a way, yes. What is your name?" "Maota." "You must help me, Maota. These things must be preserved. We'll build a museum, right here in the street. No, over there on the hill just outside the city. We'll collect all the old writings and perhaps we may decipher them. Think of it, Maota! To read pages written so long ago and think their thoughts. We'll put everything under glass. Build and evacuate chambers to stop the decay. Catalogue, itemize...." Michaelson was warming up to his subject, but Maota shook his head like a waving palm frond and stamped his feet. "You will leave now." "Can't you see? Look at the decay. These things are priceless. They must be preserved. Future generations will thank us." "Do you mean," the old man asked, aghast, "that you want others to come here? You know the city abhors the sound of alien voices. Those who lived here may return one day! They must not find their city packaged and preserved and laid out on shelves for the curious to breathe their foul breaths upon. You will leave. Now!" "No." Michaelson was adamant. The rock of Gibraltar. Maota hit him, quickly, passionately, and dropped the weapon beside his body. He turned swiftly, making a swirling mark in the sand with his heel, and walked off toward the hills outside the city. The weapon he had used was an ancient book. Its paper-thin pages rustled in the wind as if an unseen hand turned them, reading, while Michaelson's blood trickled out from the head wound upon the ancient street. When he regained consciousness the two moons, bright sentinel orbs in the night sky, had moved to a new position down their sliding path. Old Maota's absence took some of the weirdness and fantasy away. It seemed a more practical place now. The gash in his head was painful, throbbing with quick, short hammer-blows synchronized with his heart beats. But there was a new determination in him. If it was a fight that the old webfooted fool wanted, a fight he would get. The cylinder flicked him, at his command, across five hundred miles of desert and rocks to a small creek he remembered. Here he bathed his head in cool water until all the caked blood was dissolved from his hair. Feeling better, he went back. The wind had turned cool. Michaelson shivered, wishing he had brought a coat. The city was absolutely still except for small gusts of wind sighing through the frail spires. The ancient book still lay in the sand beside the dark spot of blood. He stooped over and picked it up. It was light, much lighter than most Earth books. He ran a hand over the binding. Smooth it was, untouched by time or climate. He squinted at the pages, tilting the book to catch the bright moonlight, but the writing was alien. He touched the page, ran his forefinger over the writing. Suddenly he sprang back. The book fell from his hands. "God in heaven!" he exclaimed. He had heard a voice. He looked around at the old buildings, down the length of the ancient street. Something strange about the voice. Not Maota. Not his tones. Not his words. Satisfied that no one was near, he stooped and picked up the book again. "Good God!" he said aloud. It was the book talking. His fingers had touched the writing again. It was not a voice, exactly, but a stirring in his mind, like a strange language heard for the first time. A talking book. What other surprises were in the city? Tall, fragile buildings laughing at time and weather. A clock measuring God-knows-what. If such wonders remained, what about those already destroyed? One could only guess at the machines, the gadgets, the artistry already decayed and blown away to mix forever with the sand. I must preserve it, he thought, whether Maota likes it or not. They say these people lived half a million years ago. A long time. Let's see, now. A man lives one hundred years on the average. Five thousand lifetimes. And all you do is touch a book, and a voice jumps across all those years! He started off toward the tall building he had examined upon discovery of the city. His left eyelid began to twitch and he laid his forefinger against the eye, pressing until it stopped. Then he stooped and entered the building. He laid the book down and tried to take the "clock" off the wall. It was dark in the building and his fingers felt along the wall, looking for it. Then he touched it. His fingers moved over its smooth surface. Then suddenly he jerked his hand back with an exclamation of amazement. Fear ran up his spine. The clock was warm. He felt like running, like flicking back to the settlement where there were people and familiar voices, for here was a thing that should not be. Half a million years—and here was warmth! He touched it again, curiosity overwhelming his fear. It was warm. No mistake. And there was a faint vibration, a suggestion of power. He stood there in the darkness staring off into the darkness, trembling. Fear built up in him until it was a monstrous thing, drowning reason. He forgot the power of the cylinder behind his ear. He scrambled through the doorway. He got up and ran down the ancient sandy street until he came to the edge of the city. Here he stopped, gasping for air, feeling the pain throb in his head. Common sense said that he should go home, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished at night, that he was tired, that he was weak from loss of blood and fright and running. But when Michaelson was on the trail of important discoveries he had no common sense. He sat down in the darkness, meaning to rest a moment. When he awoke dawn was red against thin clouds in the east. Old Maota stood in the street with webbed feet planted far apart in the sand, a weapon in the crook of his arm. It was a long tube affair, familiar to Michaelson. Michaelson asked, "Did you sleep well?" "No." "I'm sorry to hear that." "How do you feel?" "Fine, but my head aches a little." "Sorry," Maota said. "For what?" "For hitting you. Pain is not for gods like you." Michaelson relaxed somewhat. "What kind of man are you? First you try to break my skull, then you apologize." "I abhor pain. I should have killed you outright." He thought about that for a moment, eyeing the weapon. It looked in good working order. Slim and shiny and innocent, it looked like a glorified African blowgun. But he was not deceived by its appearance. It was a deadly weapon. "Well," he said, "before you kill me, tell me about the book." He held it up for Maota to see. "What about the book?" "What kind of book is it?" "What does Mr. Earthgod mean, what kind of book? You have seen it. It is like any other book, except for the material and the fact that it talks." "No, no. I mean, what's in it?" "Poetry." "Poetry? For God's sake, why poetry? Why not mathematics or history? Why not tell how to make the metal of the book itself? Now there is a subject worthy of a book." Maota shook his head. "One does not study a dead culture to learn how they made things, but how they thought. But we are wasting time. I must kill you now, so I can get some rest." The old man raised the gun. "Wait! You forget that I also have a weapon." He pointed to the spot behind his ear where the cylinder was buried. "I can move faster than you can fire the gun." Maota nodded. "I have heard how you travel. It does not matter. I will kill you anyway." "I suggest we negotiate." "No." "Why not?" Maota looked off toward the hills, old eyes filmed from years of sand and wind, leather skin lined and pitted. The hills stood immobile, brown-gray, already shimmering with heat, impotent. "Why not?" Michaelson repeated. "Why not what?" Maota dragged his eyes back. "Negotiate." "No." Maota's eyes grew hard as steel. They stood there in the sun, not twenty feet apart, hating each other. The two moons, very pale and far away on the western horizon, stared like two bottomless eyes. "All right, then. At least it's a quick death. I hear that thing just disintegrates a man. Pfft! And that's that." Michaelson prepared himself to move if the old man's finger slid closer toward the firing stud. The old man raised the gun. "Wait!" "Now what?" "At least read some of the book to me before I die, then." The gun wavered. "I am not an unreasonable man," the webfoot said. Michaelson stepped forward, extending his arm with the book. "No, stay where you are. Throw it." "This book is priceless. You just don't go throwing such valuable items around." "It won't break. Throw it." Michaelson threw the book. It landed at Maota's feet, spouting sand against his leg. He shifted the weapon, picked up the book and leafed through it, raising his head in a listening attitude, searching for a suitable passage. Michaelson heard the thin, metallic pages rustle softly. He could have jumped and seized the weapon at that moment, but his desire to hear the book was strong. Old Maota read, Michaelson listened. The cadence was different, the syntax confusing. But the thoughts were there. It might have been a professor back on Earth reading to his students. Keats, Shelley, Browning. These people were human, with human thoughts and aspirations. The old man stopped reading. He squatted slowly, keeping Michaelson in sight, and laid the book face up in the sand. Wind moved the pages. "See?" he said. "The spirits read. They must have been great readers, these people. They drink the book, as if it were an elixir. See how gentle! They lap at the pages like a new kitten tasting milk." Michaelson laughed. "You certainly have an imagination." "What difference does it make?" Maota cried, suddenly angry. "You want to close up all these things in boxes for a posterity who may have no slightest feeling or appreciation. I want to leave the city as it is, for spirits whose existence I cannot prove." The old man's eyes were furious now, deadly. The gun came down directly in line with the Earthman's chest. The gnarled finger moved. Michaelson, using the power of the cylinder behind his ear, jumped behind the old webfoot. To Maota it seemed that he had flicked out of existence like a match blown out. The next instant Michaelson spun him around and hit him. It was an inexpert fist, belonging to an archeologist, not a fighter. But Maota was an old man. He dropped in the sand, momentarily stunned. Michaelson bent over to pick up the gun and the old man, feeling it slip from his fingers, hung on and was pulled to his feet. They struggled for possession of the gun, silently, gasping, kicking sand. Faces grew red. Lips drew back over Michaelson's white teeth, over Maota's pink, toothless gums. The dead city's fragile spires threw impersonal shadows down where they fought. Then quite suddenly a finger or hand—neither knew whose finger or hand—touched the firing stud. There was a hollow, whooshing sound. Both stopped still, realizing the total destruction they might have caused. "It only hit the ground," Michaelson said. A black, charred hole, two feet in diameter and—they could not see how deep—stared at them. Maota let go and sprawled in the sand. "The book!" he cried. "The book is gone!" "No! We probably covered it with sand while we fought." Both men began scooping sand in their cupped hands, digging frantically for the book. Saliva dripped from Maota's mouth, but he didn't know or care. Finally they stopped, exhausted. They had covered a substantial area around the hole. They had covered the complete area where they had been. "We killed it," the old man moaned. "It was just a book. Not alive, you know." "How do you know?" The old man's pale eyes were filled with tears. "It talked and it sang. In a way, it had a soul. Sometimes on long nights I used to imagine it loved me, for taking care of it." "There are other books. We'll get another." Maota shook his head. "There are no more." "But I've seen them. Down there in the square building." "Not poetry. Books, yes, but not poetry. That was the only book with songs." "I'm sorry." " You killed it!" Maota suddenly sprang for the weapon, lying forgotten in the sand. Michaelson put his foot on it and Maota was too weak to tear it loose. He could only weep out his rage. When he could talk again, Maota said, "I am sorry, Mr. Earthgod. I've disgraced myself." "Don't be sorry." Michaelson helped him to his feet. "We fight for some reasons, cry for others. A priceless book is a good reason for either." "Not for that. For not winning. I should have killed you last night when I had the chance. The gods give us chances and if we don't take them we lose forever." "I told you before! We are on the same side. Negotiate. Have you never heard of negotiation?" "You are a god," Maota said. "One does not negotiate with gods. One either loves them, or kills them." "That's another thing. I am not a god. Can't you understand?" "Of course you are." Maota looked up, very sure. "Mortals cannot step from star to star like crossing a shallow brook." "No, no. I don't step from one star to another. An invention does that. Just an invention. I carry it with me. It's a tiny thing. No one would ever guess it has such power. So you see, I'm human, just like you. Hit me and I hurt. Cut me and I bleed. I love. I hate. I was born. Some day I'll die. See? I'm human. Just a human with a machine. No more than that." Maota laughed, then sobered quickly. "You lie." "No." "If I had this machine, could I travel as you?" "Yes." "Then I'll kill you and take yours." "It would not work for you." "Why?" "Each machine is tailored for each person." The old man hung his head. He looked down into the black, charred hole. He walked all around the hole. He kicked at the sand, looking half-heartedly again for the book. "Look," Michaelson said. "I'm sure I've convinced you that I'm human. Why not have a try at negotiating our differences?" He looked up. His expressive eyes, deep, resigned, studied Michaelson's face. Finally he shook his head sadly. "When we first met I hoped we could think the ancient thoughts together. But our paths diverge. We have finished, you and I." He turned and started off, shoulders slumped dejectedly. Michaelson caught up to him. "Are you leaving the city?" "No." "Where are you going?" "Away. Far away." Maota looked off toward the hills, eyes distant. "Don't be stupid, old man. How can you go far away and not leave the city?" "There are many directions. You would not understand." "East. West. North. South. Up. Down." "No, no. There is another direction. Come, if you must see." Michaelson followed him far down the street. They came to a section of the city he had not seen before. Buildings were smaller, spires dwarfed against larger structures. Here a path was packed in the sand, leading to a particular building. Michaelson said, "This is where you live?" "Yes." Maota went inside. Michaelson stood in the entrance and looked around. The room was clean, furnished with hand made chairs and a bed. Who is this old man, he thought, far from his people, living alone, choosing a life of solitude among ancient ruins but not touching them? Above the bed a "clock" was fastened to the wall, Michaelson remembered his fright—thinking of the warmth where warmth should not be. Maota pointed to it. "You asked about this machine," he said. "Now I will tell you." He laid his hand against it. "Here is power to follow another direction." Michaelson tested one of the chairs to see if it would hold his weight, then sat down. His curiosity about the instrument was colossal, but he forced a short laugh. "Maota, you are complex. Why not stop all this mystery nonsense and tell me about it? You know more about it than I." "Of course." Maota smiled a toothless, superior smile. "What do you suppose happened to this race?" "You tell me." "They took the unknown direction. The books speak of it. I don't know how the instrument works, but one thing is certain. The race did not die out, as a species becomes extinct." Michaelson was amused, but interested. "Something like a fourth dimension?" "I don't know. I only know that with this instrument there is no death. I have read the books that speak of this race, this wonderful people who conquered all disease, who explored all the mysteries of science, who devised this machine to cheat death. See this button here on the face of the instrument? Press the button, and...." "And what?" "I don't know, exactly. But I have lived many years. I have walked the streets of this city and wondered, and wanted to press the button. Now I will do so." Quickly the old man, still smiling, pressed the button. A high-pitched whine filled the air, just within audio range. Steady for a moment, it then rose in pitch passing beyond hearing quickly. The old man's knees buckled. He sank down, fell over the bed, lay still. Michaelson touched him cautiously, then examined him more carefully. No question about it. The old man was dead. Feeling depressed and alone, Michaelson found a desert knoll outside the city overlooking the tall spires that shone in the sunlight and gleamed in the moonlight. He made a stretcher, rolled the old man's body on to it and dragged it down the long ancient street and up the knoll. Here he buried him. But it seemed a waste of time. Somehow he knew beyond any doubt that the old native and his body were completely disassociated in some sense more complete than death. In the days that followed he gave much thought to the "clock." He came to the city every day. He spent long hours in the huge square building with the books. He learned the language by sheer bulldog determination. Then he searched the books for information about the instrument. Finally after many weeks, long after the winds had obliterated all evidence of Maota's grave on the knoll, Michaelson made a decision. He had to know if the machine would work for him. And so one afternoon when the ancient spires threw long shadows over the sand he walked down the long street and entered the old man's house. He stood before the instrument, trembling, afraid, but determined. He pinched his eyes shut tight like a child and pressed the button. The high-pitched whine started. Complete, utter silence. Void. Darkness. Awareness and memory, yes; nothing else. Then Maota's chuckle came. No sound, an impression only like the voice from the ancient book. Where was he? There was no left or right, up or down. Maota was everywhere, nowhere. "Look!" Maota's thought was directed at him in this place of no direction. "Think of the city and you will see it." Michaelson did, and he saw the city beyond, as if he were looking through a window. And yet he was in the city looking at his own body. Maota's chuckle again. "The city will remain as it is. You did not win after all." "Neither did you." "But this existence has compensations," Maota said. "You can be anywhere, see anywhere on this planet. Even on your Earth." Michaelson felt a great sadness, seeing his body lying across the old, home made bed. He looked closer. He sensed a vibration or life force—he didn't stop to define it—in his body. Why was his dead body different from Old Maota's? Could it be that there was some thread stretching from the reality of his body to his present state? "I don't like your thoughts," Maota said. "No one can go back. I tried. I have discussed it with many who are not presently in communication with you. No one can go back." Michaelson decided he try. "No!" Maota's thought was prickled with fear and anger. Michaelson did not know how to try, but he remembered the cylinder and gathered all the force of his mind in spite of Maota's protests, and gave his most violent command. At first he thought it didn't work. He got up and looked around, then it struck him. He was standing up! The cylinder. He knew it was the cylinder. That was the difference between himself and Maota. When he used the cylinder, that was where he went, the place where Maota was now. It was a door of some kind, leading to a path of some kind where distance was non-existent. But the "clock" was a mechanism to transport only the mind to that place. To be certain of it, he pressed the button again, with the same result as before. He saw his own body fall down. He felt Maota's presence. "You devil!" Maota's thought-scream was a sword of hate and anger, irrational suddenly, like a person who knows his loss is irrevocable. "I said you were a god. I said you were a god. I said you were a god...! "

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51321

PRIME DIFFERENCE By ALAN E. NOURSE Illustrated by SCHOENHEER [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Being two men rolled out of one would solve my problems—but which one would I be? I suppose that every guy reaches a point once in his lifetime when he gets one hundred and forty per cent fed up with his wife. Understand now—I've got nothing against marriage or any thing like that. Marriage is great. It's a good old red-blooded American Institution. Except that it's got one defect in it big enough to throw a cat through, especially when you happen to be married to a woman like Marge— It's so permanent . Oh, I'd have divorced Marge in a minute if we'd been living in the Blissful 'Fifties—but with the Family Solidarity Amendment of 1968, and all the divorce taxes we have these days since the women got their teeth into politics, to say nothing of the Aggrieved Spouse Compensation Act, I'd have been a pauper for the rest of my life if I'd tried it. That's aside from the social repercussions involved. You can't really blame me for looking for another way out. But a man has to be desperate to try to buy himself an Ego Prime. So, all right, I was desperate. I'd spent eight years trying to keep Marge happy, which was exactly seven and a half years too long. Marge was a dream to look at, with her tawny hair and her sulky eyes and a shape that could set your teeth chattering—but that was where the dream stopped. She had a tongue like a #10 wood rasp and a list of grievances long enough to paper the bedroom wall. When she wasn't complaining, she was crying, and when she wasn't crying, she was pointing out in chilling detail exactly where George Faircloth fell short as a model husband, which happened to be everywhere. Half of the time she had a "beastly headache" (for which I was personally responsible) and the other half she was sore about something, so ninety-nine per cent of the time we got along like a couple of tomcats in a packing case. Maybe we just weren't meant for each other. I don't know. I used to envy guys like Harry Folsom at the office. His wife is no joy to live with either, but at least he could take a spin down to Rio once in a while with one of the stenographers and get away with it. I knew better than to try. Marge was already so jealous that I couldn't even smile at the company receptionist without a twinge of guilt. Give Marge something real to howl about, and I'd be ready for the Rehab Center in a week. But I'd underestimated Marge. She didn't need anything real, as I found out when Jeree came along. Business was booming and the secretaries at the office got shuffled around from time to time. Since I had an executive-type job, I got an executive-type secretary. Her name was Jeree and she was gorgeous. As a matter of fact, she was better than gorgeous. She was the sort of secretary every businessman ought to have in his office. Not to do any work—just to sit there. Jeree was tall and dark, and she could convey more without saying anything than I ever dreamed was possible. The first day she was there, she conveyed to me very clearly that if I cared to supply the opportunity, she'd be glad to supply the motive. That night, I could tell that Marge had been thinking something over during the day. She let me get the first bite of dinner halfway to my mouth, and then she said, "I hear you got a new secretary today." I muttered something into my coffee cup and pretended not to hear. Marge turned on her Accusing Look #7. "I also hear that she's five-foot-eight and tapes out at 38-25-36 and thinks you're handsome." Marge had quite a spy system. "She couldn't be much of a secretary," she added. "She's a perfectly good secretary," I blurted, and kicked myself mentally. I should have known Marge's traps by then. Marge exploded. I didn't get any supper, and she was still going strong at midnight. I tried to argue, but when Marge got going, there was no stopping her. I had my ultimatum, as far as Jeree was concerned. Harry Folsom administered the coup de grace at coffee next morning. "What you need is an Ego Prime," he said with a grin. "Solve all your problems. I hear they work like a charm." I set my coffee cup down. Bells were ringing in my ears. "Don't be ridiculous. It's against the law. Anyway, I wouldn't think of such a thing. It's—it's indecent." Harry shrugged. "Just joking, old man, just joking. Still, it's fun to think about, eh? Freedom from wife. Absolutely safe and harmless. Not even too expensive, if you've got the right contacts. And I've got a friend who knows a guy—" Just then, Jeree walked past us and flashed me a big smile. I gripped my cup for dear life and still spilled coffee on my tie. As I said, a guy gets fed up. And maybe opportunity would only knock once. And an Ego Prime would solve all my problems, as Harry had told me. It was completely illegal, of course. The wonder was that Ego Prime, Inc., ever got to put their product on the market at all, once the nation's housewives got wind of just what their product was. From the first, there was rigid Federal control and laws regulating the use of Primes right down to the local level. You could get a license for a Utility model Prime if you were a big business executive, or a high public official, or a movie star, or something like that; but even then his circuits had to be inspected every two months, and he had to have a thousand built-in Paralyzers, and you had to specify in advance exactly what you wanted your Prime to be able to do when, where, how, why, and under what circumstances. The law didn't leave a man much leeway. But everybody knew that if you really wanted a personal Prime with all his circuits open and no questions asked, you could get one. Black market prices were steep and you ran your own risk, but it could be done. Harry Folsom told his friend who knew a guy, and a few greenbacks got lost somewhere, and I found myself looking at a greasy little man with a black mustache and a bald spot, up in a dingy fourth-story warehouse off lower Broadway. "Ah, yes," the little man said. "Mr. Faircloth. We've been expecting you." I didn't like the looks of the guy any more than the looks of the place. "I've been told you can supply me with a—" He coughed. "Yes, yes. I understand. It might be possible." He fingered his mustache and regarded me from pouchy eyes. "Busy executives often come to us to avoid the—ah—unpleasantness of formal arrangements. Naturally, we only act as agents, you might say. We never see the merchandise ourselves—" He wiped his hands on his trousers. "Now were you interested in the ordinary Utility model, Mr. Faircloth?" I assumed he was just being polite. You didn't come to the back door for Utility models. "Or perhaps you'd require one of our Deluxe models. Very careful workmanship. Only a few key Paralyzers in operation and practically complete circuit duplication. Very useful for—ah—close contact work, you know. Social engagements, conferences—" I was shaking my head. "I want a Super Deluxe model," I told him. He grinned and winked. "Ah, indeed! You want perfect duplication. Yes, indeed. Domestic situations can be—awkward, shall we say. Very awkward—" I gave him a cold stare. I couldn't see where my domestic problems were any affairs of his. He got the idea and hurried me back to a storeroom. "We keep a few blanks here for the basic measurement. You'll go to our laboratory on 14th Street to have the minute impressions taken. But I can assure you you'll be delighted, simply delighted." The blanks weren't very impressive—clay and putty and steel, faceless, brainless. He went over me like a tailor, checking measurements of all sorts. He was thorough—embarrassingly thorough, in fact—but finally he was finished. I went on to the laboratory. And that was all there was to it. Practical androids had been a pipe dream until Hunyadi invented the Neuro-pantograph. Hunyadi had no idea in the world what to do with it once he'd invented it, but a couple of enterprising engineers bought him body and soul, sub-contracted the problems of anatomy, design, artistry, audio and visio circuitry, and so forth, and ended up with the modern Ego Primes we have today. I spent a busy two hours under the NP microprobes; the artists worked outside while the NP technicians worked inside. I came out of it pretty woozy, but a shot of Happy-O set that straight. Then I waited in the recovery room for another two hours, dreaming up ways to use my Prime when I got him. Finally the door opened and the head technician walked in, followed by a tall, sandy-haired man with worried blue eyes and a tired look on his face. "Meet George Faircloth Prime," the technician said, grinning at me like a nursing mother. I shook hands with myself. Good firm handshake, I thought admiringly. Nothing flabby about it. I slapped George Prime on the shoulder happily. "Come on, Brother," I said. "You've got a job to do." But, secretly, I was wondering what Jeree was doing that night. George Prime had remote controls, as well as a completely recorded neurological analogue of his boss, who was me. George Prime thought what I thought about the same things I did in the same way I did. The only difference was that what I told George Prime to do, George Prime did. If I told him to go to a business conference in San Francisco and make the smallest possible concessions for the largest possible orders, he would go there and do precisely that. His signature would be my signature. It would hold up in court. And if I told him that my wife Marge was really a sweet, good-hearted girl and that he was to stay home and keep her quiet and happy any time I chose, he'd do that, too. George Prime was a duplicate of me right down to the sandy hairs on the back of my hands. Our fingerprints were the same. We had the same mannerisms and used the same figures of speech. The only physical difference apparent even to an expert was the tiny finger-depression buried in the hair above his ear. A little pressure there would stop George Prime dead in his tracks. He was so lifelike, even I kept forgetting that he was basically just a pile of gears. I'd planned very carefully how I meant to use him, of course. Every man who's been married eight years has a sanctuary. He builds it up and maintains it against assault in the very teeth of his wife's natural instinct to clean, poke, pry and rearrange things. Sometimes it takes him years of diligent work to establish his hideout and be confident that it will stay inviolate, but if he starts early enough, and sticks with it long enough, and is fierce enough and persistent enough and crafty enough, he'll probably win in the end. The girls hate him for it, but he'll win. With some men, it's just a box on their dressers, or a desk, or a corner of an unused back room. But I had set my sights high early in the game. With me, it was the whole workshop in the garage. At first, Marge tried open warfare. She had to clean the place up, she said. I told her I didn't want her to clean it up. She could clean the whole house as often as she chose, but I would clean up the workshop. After a couple of sharp engagements on that field, Marge staged a strategic withdrawal and reorganized her attack. A little pile of wood shavings would be on the workshop floor one night and be gone the next. A wrench would be back on the rack—upside down, of course. An open paint can would have a cover on it. I always knew. I screamed loudly and bitterly. I ranted and raved. I swore I'd rig up a booby-trap with a shotgun. So she quit trying to clean in there and just went in once in a while to take a look around. I fixed that with the old toothpick-in-the-door routine. Every time she so much as set foot in that workshop, she had a battle on her hands for the next week or so. She could count on it. It was that predictable. She never found out how I knew, and after seven years or so, it wore her down. She didn't go into the workshop any more. As I said, you've got to be persistent, but you'll win. Eventually. If you're really persistent. Now all my effort paid off. I got Marge out of the house for an hour or two that day and had George Prime delivered and stored in the big closet in the workshop. They hooked his controls up and left me a manual of instructions for running him. When I got home that night, there he was, just waiting to be put to work. After supper, I went out to the workshop—to get the pipe I'd left there, I said. I pushed George Prime's button, winked at him and switched on the free-behavior circuits. "Go to it, Brother," I said. George Prime put my pipe in his mouth, lit it and walked back into the house. Five minutes later, I heard them fighting. It sounded so familiar that I laughed out loud. Then I caught a cab on the corner and headed uptown. We had quite a night, Jeree and I. I got home just about time to start for work, and sure enough, there was George Prime starting my car, business suit on, briefcase under his arm. I pushed the recall and George Prime got out of the car and walked into the workshop. He stepped into his cradle in the closet. I turned him off and then drove away in the car. Bless his metallic soul, he'd even kissed Marge good-by for me! Needless to say, the affairs of George Faircloth took on a new sparkle with George Prime on hand to cover the home front. For the first week, I was hardly home at all. I must say I felt a little guilty, leaving poor old George Prime to cope with Marge all the time—he looked and acted so human, it was easy to forget that he literally couldn't care less. But I felt apologetic all the same whenever I took him out of his closet. "She's really a sweet girl underneath it all," I'd say. "You'll learn to like her after a bit." "Of course I like her," George Prime said. "You told me to, didn't you? Stop worrying. She's really a sweet girl underneath it all." He sounded convincing enough, but still it bothered me. "You're sure you understand the exchange mechanism?" I asked. I didn't want any foul-ups there, as you can imagine. "Perfectly," said George Prime. "When you buzz the recall, I wait for the first logical opportunity I can find to come out to the workshop, and you take over." "But you might get nervous. You might inadvertently tip her off." George Prime looked pained. "Really, old man! I'm a Super Deluxe model, remember? I don't have fourteen activated Hunyadi tubes up in this cranial vault of mine just for nothing. You're the one that's nervous. I'll take care of everything. Relax." So I did. Jeree made good all her tacit promises and then some. She had a very cozy little apartment on 34th Street where we went to relax after a hard day at the office. When we weren't doing the town, that is. As long as Jeree didn't try too much conversation, everything was wonderful. And then, when Jeree got a little boring, there was Sybil in the accounting department. Or Dorothy in promotion. Or Jane. Or Ingrid. I could go on at some length, but I won't. I was building quite a reputation for myself around the office. Of course, it was like buying your first 3-V set. In a week or so, the novelty wears off a little and you start eating on schedule again. It took a little while, but I finally had things down to a reasonable program. Tuesday and Thursday nights, I was informally "out" while formally "in." Sometimes I took Sunday nights "out" if things got too sticky around the house over the weekend. The rest of the time, George Prime cooled his heels in his closet. Locked up, of course. Can't completely trust a wife to observe a taboo, no matter how well trained she is. There, was an irreconcilable amount of risk. George Prime had to quick-step some questions about my work at the office—there was no way to supply him with current data until the time for his regular two-month refill and pattern-accommodation at the laboratory. In the meantime, George Prime had to make do with what he had. But as he himself pointed out he was a Super Deluxe model. Marge didn't suspect a thing. In fact, George Prime seemed to be having a remarkable effect on her. I didn't notice anything at first—I was hardly ever home. But one night I found my pipe and slippers laid out for me, and the evening paper neatly folded on my chair, and it brought me up short. Marge had been extremely docile lately. We hadn't had a good fight in days. Weeks, come to think of it. I thought it over and shrugged. Old age, I figured. She was bound to mellow sometime. But pretty soon I began to wonder if she wasn't mellowing a little too much. One night when I got home, she kissed me almost as though she really meant it. There wasn't an unpleasant word all through dinner, which happened to be steak with mushrooms, served in the dining room (!) by candlelight (!!) with dinner music that Marge could never bear, chiefly because I liked it. We sat over coffee and cigarettes, and it seemed almost like old times. Very old times, in fact I even caught myself looking at Marge again—really looking at her, watching the light catch in her hair, almost admiring the sparkle in her brown eyes. Sparkle, I said, not glint. As I mentioned before, Marge was always easy to look at. That night, she was practically ravishing. "What are you doing to her?" I asked George Prime later, out in the workshop. "Why, nothing," said George Prime, looking innocent. He couldn't fool me with his look, though, because it was exactly the look I use when I'm guilty and pretending to be innocent. "There must be something ." George Prime shrugged. "Any woman will warm up if you spend enough time telling her all the things she wants to hear and pay all the attention to her that she wants paid to her. That's elemental psychology. I can give you page references." I ought to mention that George Prime had a complete set of basic texts run into his circuits, at a slightly additional charge. Never can tell when an odd bit of information will come in useful. "Well, you must be doing quite a job," I said. I'd never managed to warm Marge up much. "I try," said George Prime. "Oh, I'm not complaining," I hastened to add, forgetting that a Prime's feelings can't be hurt and that he was only acting like me because it was in character. "I was just curious." "Of course, George." "I'm really delighted that you're doing so well." "Thank you, George." But the next night when I was with Dawn, who happens to be a gorgeous redhead who could put Marge to shame on practically any field of battle except maybe brains, I kept thinking about Marge all evening long, and wondering if things weren't getting just a little out of hand. The next evening I almost tripped over George Prime coming out of a liquor store. I ducked quickly into an alley and flagged him. " What are you doing out on the street? " He gave me my martyred look. "Just buying some bourbon. You were out." "But you're not supposed to be off the premises—" "Marge asked me to come. I couldn't tell her I was sorry, but her husband wouldn't let me, could I?" "Well, certainly not—" "You want me to keep her happy, don't you? You don't want her to get suspicious." "No, but suppose somebody saw us together! If she ever got a hint—" "I'm sorry," George Prime said contritely. "It seemed the right thing to do. You would have done it. At least that's what my judgment center maintained. We had quite an argument." "Well, tell your judgment center to use a little sense," I snapped. "I don't want it to happen again." The next night, I stayed home, even though it was Tuesday night. I was beginning to get worried. Of course, I did have complete control—I could snap George Prime off any time I wanted, or even take him in for a complete recircuiting—but it seemed a pity. He was doing such a nice job. Marge was docile as a kitten, even more so than before. She sympathized with my hard day at the office and agreed heartily that the boss, despite all appearances, was in reality a jabbering idiot. After dinner, I suggested a movie, but Marge gave me an odd sort of look and said she thought it would be much nicer to spend the evening at home by the fire. I'd just gotten settled with the paper when she came into the living room and sat down beside me. She was wearing some sort of filmy affair I'd never laid eyes on before, and I caught a whiff of my favorite perfume. "Georgie?" she said. "Uh?" "Do you still love me?" I set the paper down and stared at her. "How's that? Of course I still—" "Well, sometimes you don't act much like it." "Mm. I guess I've—uh—got an awful headache tonight." Damn that perfume! "Oh," said Marge. "In fact, I thought I'd turn in early and get some sleep—" "Sleep," said Marge. There was no mistaking the disappointment in her voice. Now I knew that things were out of hand. The next evening, I activated George Prime and caught the taxi at the corner, but I called Ruby and broke my date with her. I took in an early movie alone and was back by ten o'clock. I left the cab at the corner and walked quietly up the path toward the garage. Then I stopped. I could see Marge and George Prime through the living room windows. George Prime was kissing my wife the way I hadn't kissed her in eight long years. It made my hair stand on end. And Marge wasn't exactly fighting him off, either. She was coming back for more. After a little, the lights went off. George Prime was a Super Deluxe model, all right. I dashed into the workshop and punched the recall button as hard as I could, swearing under my breath. How long had this been going on? I punched the button again, viciously, and waited. George Prime didn't come out. It was plenty cold out in the workshop that night and I didn't sleep a wink. About dawn, out came George Prime, looking like a man with a four-day hangover. Our conversation got down to fundamentals. George Prime kept insisting blandly that, according to my own directions, he was to pick the first logical opportunity to come out when I buzzed, and that was exactly what he'd done. I was furious all the way to work. I'd take care of this nonsense, all right. I'd have George Prime rewired from top to bottom as soon as the laboratory could take him. But I never phoned the laboratory. The bank was calling me when I got to the office. They wanted to know what I planned to do about that check of mine that had just bounced. "What check?" I asked. "The one you wrote to cash yesterday—five hundred dollars—against your regular account, Mr. Faircloth." The last I'd looked, I'd had about three thousand dollars in that account. I told the man so rather bluntly. "Oh, no, sir. That is, you did until last week. But all these checks you've been cashing have emptied the account." He flashed the checks on the desk screen. My signature was on every one of them. "What about my special account?" I'd learned long before that an account Marge didn't know about was sound rear-guard strategy. "That's been closed out for two weeks." I hadn't written a check against that account for over a year! I glared at the ceiling and tried to think things through. I came up with a horrible thought. Marge had always had her heart set on a trip to Bermuda. Just to get away from it all, she'd say. A second honeymoon. I got a list of travel agencies from the business directory and started down them. The third one I tried had a pleasant tenor voice. "No, sir, not Mrs. Faircloth. You bought two tickets. One way. Champagne flight to Bermuda." "When?" I choked out. "Why, today, as a matter of fact. It leaves Idlewild at eleven o'clock—" I let him worry about my amnesia and started home fast. I didn't know what they'd given that Prime for circuits, but there was no question now that he was out of control— way out of control. And poor Marge, all worked up for a second honeymoon— Then it struck me. Poor Marge? Poor sucker George! No Prime in his right circuits would behave this way without some human guidance and that meant only one thing: Marge had spotted him. It had happened before. Couple of nasty court battles I'd read about. And she'd known all about George Prime. For how long? When I got home, the house was empty. George Prime wasn't in his closet. And Marge wasn't in the house. They were gone. I started to call the police, but caught myself just in time. I couldn't very well complain to the cops that my wife had run off with an android. Worse yet, I could get twenty years for having an illegal Prime wandering around. I sat down and poured myself a stiff drink. My own wife deserting me for a pile of bearings. It was indecent. Then I heard the front door open and there was Marge, her arms full of grocery bundles. "Why, darling! You're home early!" I just blinked for a moment. Then I said, "You're still here!" "Of course. Where did you think I'd be?" "But I thought—I mean the ticket office—" She set down the bundles and kissed me and looked up into my eyes, almost smiling, half reproachful. "You didn't really think I'd go running off with something out of a lab, did you?" "Then—you knew?" "Certainly I knew, silly. You didn't do a very good job of instructing him, either. You gave him far too much latitude. Let him have ideas of his own and all that. And next thing I knew, he was trying to get me to run off with him to Hawaii or someplace." "Bermuda," I said. And then Marge was in my arms, kissing me and snuggling her cheek against my chest. "Even though he looked like you, I knew he couldn't be," she said. "He was like you, but he wasn't you , darling. And all I ever want is you. I just never appreciated you before...." I held her close and tried to keep my hands from shaking. George Faircloth, Idiot, I thought. She'd never been more beautiful. "But what did you do with him?" "I sent him back to the factory, naturally. They said they could blot him out and use him over again. But let's not talk about that any more. We've got more interesting things to discuss." Maybe we had, but we didn't waste a lot of time talking. It was the Marge I'd once known and I was beginning to wonder how I could have been so wrong about her. In fact unless my memory was getting awfully porous, the old Marge was never like this— I kissed her tenderly and ran my hands through her hair, and felt the depression with my fore-finger, and then I knew what had really happened. That Marge always had been a sly one. I wondered how she was liking things in Bermuda. Marge probably thought she'd really put me where I belonged, but the laugh was on her, after all. As I said, the old Marge was never like the new one. Marge Prime makes Jeree and Sybil and Dorothy and Dawn and Jane and Ruby all look pretty sad by comparison. She cooks like a dream and she always brings me my pipe and slippers. As they say, there's nothing a man likes more than to be appreciated. A hundred per cent appreciated, with a factory guarantee to correct any slippage, which would only be temporary, anyhow. One of these days, we'll take that second honeymoon. But I think we'll go to Hawaii.

test

49838

Jack of No Trades By EVELYN E. SMITH Illustrated by CAVAT [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd psee otherwise psomeday! I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud. "Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!" my middle brother's voice came muffled through the folds. "If you can't help, at least don't hinder!" I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his mental grip. "I could help," I yelled as soon as I got my head free, "if anybody would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis." Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a kid. Not that he looked his age—he was big and blond, like Danny and Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother. "Boys, boys!" he reproved us. "Danny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself—picking on poor Kev." Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed. Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they lost their tempers could I get—or so I believed—their true attitude toward me. How else could I tell? "Sorry, fella," Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out on the table. "Wrinkles," he grumbled to himself. "Wrinkles. And I had it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious." "If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already," Father reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself. "But I think you'll find she understands." "She knows, all right," Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen, "but I'm not sure she always understands." I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level, because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either. "There are tensions in this room," my sister announced as she slouched in, not quite awake yet, "and hatred. I could feel them all the way upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts, please." She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere primitive, I couldn't help laughing. "Danny, you fumbler!" she screamed. Danny erupted from the kitchen. "How many times have I asked all of you not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of interfering busybodies getting in the way." "I don't see why you have to set the table at all," she retorted. "A robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could." She turned quickly toward me. "Oh, I am sorry, Kevin." I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white. Sylvia's face turned even whiter. "Father, stop him— stop him! He's hating again! I can't stand it!" Father looked at me, then at her. "I don't think he can help it, Sylvia." I grinned. "That's right—I'm just a poor atavism with no control over myself a-tall." Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her the complete details, even though I quickly protested, "It's illegal to probe anyone without permission." "I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed," she said tartly, "and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself, Sylvia—poor Kevin isn't responsible." She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable. Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself. Mother's lips tightened. "Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress. Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?" A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family—that is, not officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more than they could help having thumbnails. "No use," I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. "Who can adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?" "Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy," my father suggested hopefully. "Maybe you should make an appointment for him at the cure-all?" Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. "He's been to it dozens of times and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them." Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic. Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted into it—which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't, like me—psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet. "I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household," my youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair. "You always do, Timothy," my mother said, unfolding her napkin. "And I must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast." He reached for his juice. "Guess this is a doomed household. And what was all that emotional uproar about?" "The usual," Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could answer. She slid warily into her chair. "Hey, Dan, I'm here!" she called. "If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?" "Oh, all right." Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food floating ahead of him. "The usual? Trouble with Kev?" Tim looked at me narrowly. "Somehow my sense of ominousness is connected with him." "Well, that's perfectly natural—" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother caught her eye. "I didn't mean that," Tim said. "I still say Kev's got something we can't figure out." "You've been saying that for years," Danny protested, "and he's been tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or prepossess. He can't—" "Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me," I interrupted, trying to keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my family thought of me, I knew—as an animal, and not a very lovable one, either. "No," Tim said, "he's just got something we haven't developed a test for. It'll come out some day, you'll see." He smiled at me. I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. "It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but—" "He's not saying it just to be kind," my mother put in. "He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin," she added with grim scrupulousness. "Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far." Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding. Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand . Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me. Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared—he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos. Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them—partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing. "We don't need what little money Kev could bring in," my father always said. "I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house." And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home. So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while. I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive—artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power—but I couldn't even do anything like that. About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. "There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective." I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of attracted to me—I could see that—they could hardly go out with me without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them. I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago—before people started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I don't know why I say we —in 1960 or so, I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy. Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more. I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around—not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought—I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power? For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be—a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six? I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland—or, rather, pseudo-woodland—surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility. However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us. On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm. "Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her. "Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?" Tim shot back at her. "He probably doesn't even know what's happened." "Well, what did happen?" I asked, trying not to snap. "One starship got back from Alpha Centauri," Danny said excitedly. "There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!" This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them. "What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?" "Uh-uh." Danny shook his head. "And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going." "But if they're hostile," I said thoughtfully, "it might mean war." "Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case." There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements—if such were its intention—in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament. They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place. Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race. "It isn't so much our defense that worries me," my mother muttered, "as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin," she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. "Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain." I looked at her. "It is an ill wind," she agreed, smiling wryly, "but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?" I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other. My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation—even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours—and the war was on. I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities—normal human abilities, rather. "Gee, Mr. Faraday," one of the other students breathed, "you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything." I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. "My name's not Mr. Faraday," I said. "It's Kevin." "My name's Lucy," she giggled. No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern. "Hey, quit that!" the windee yelled. "You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!" So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive—just a poetess—so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself. However, when the actual bombs—or their alien equivalent—struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene—I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact—and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication. "If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin," she said, " you certainly can." And there was no kindness at all in the you . She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. "Go on—now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world." Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me. The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought. Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all—just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar. "Wha—wha happened?" he asked. "It doesn't hurt any more!" He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too—too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him. "Touch some of the others, quick!" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers. I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors. But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds. "Timothy was right," my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, "and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son—" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it—"the greatest gift of all, that of healing." She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something. I felt ... well, good. "I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power," my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once. "The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it." "Recorded?" I asked, a little jealously. "Of course," she smiled. "Remember the King's Evil?" I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. "Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess." She nodded. "Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers." In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that. When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. "I'm your assistant, Kev," she said shyly. I looked at her. "You are?" "I—I hope you want me," she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension. I gave her shoulder a squeeze. "I do want you, Lucy. More than I can tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to say. But right now—" I clapped her arm—"there's a job to be done." "Yes, Kevin," she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were waiting for me. They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give. I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently disfigured. In a sense, they were—well, my children; I felt a warm glow of affection toward them. They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the hospital soon leaked out—during all those years of peace, the government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets—and people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me. The government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than they wanted to risk me. Plenty of people did come to see me officially—the President, generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I began to love everybody. "Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?" Lucy asked me one day. I gave her an incredulous glance. "You mean I shouldn't help people?" "Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that. Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work." "Why shouldn't I be?" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. "Are you jealous, Lucy?" She lowered her eyes. "Not only that, but the war's bound to come to an end, you know, and—" It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. "Why, do you mean—" And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted.... Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness, were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from the Centaurians again. Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary—only the Vice President this time—had thanked me on behalf of a grateful country. I wasn't needed any more.

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20060

The Unexamined Game Is Not Worth Watching As an achiever, I constantly look for new techniques of achievement and seek to minimize behaviors with low achievement yield. Thus it is only natural that I have begun to worry about the amount of time I spend watching sports on television--an activity that does not measurably advance any of my personal or professional agendas. Most alarmingly, sports have become a steel curtain between me and my family. My wife and three daughters shun me when I turn on a ballgame. Occasionally I try to "relate" to the kids by asking them to fetch Daddy a beer, but I sense that they are drifting away--that I have become, for them, every bit as useless, burdensome, and low-yielding in immediate practical utility as they are for me. I realized that something had to change. I needed to take firm, decisive action. And so I made a solemn vow: I would teach my wife and kids to watch sports with me. Yes, I would! And something more: I would become a better, more sophisticated, more deeply engaged viewer of TV sports. I would become a man for whom sports viewership is not just a bad habit, but a skill. I have sought counsel from experts and engaged in rigorous tests in my own home. What follows are some simple precepts for Next Level sports viewership. The very first thing you must do, before we get into any actual viewing techniques, is ask yourself why sports are an important part of your life. Why do sports matter? Do you like sports because they show that effort, practice, and innovation lead to positive results? Because sports are an outlet for our primitive barbarian hostilities? Because in sports we discover a dramatic metaphor for our desire to move into new terrain and reach goals that can be statistically measured? The answer to all these questions is: Don't be stupid. You watch sports for the simple reason that sports don't matter a jot. You like sports precisely because of their utter insignificance. You find this relaxing. Always remember the pre-eminent rule of the sports junkie: 1. Don't start thinking like George Will. Next, you must configure your viewing area. For help in this regard I called Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films Inc., the company that produces Inside the NFL for HBO. Sabol, I knew, watches a heroic amount of football, from which he gleans the highlights for his films. NFL Films has a signature style: Sweaty, grunting, muddy men move in super slow motion while the baritone narrator describes the events as though the fate of nations hung in the balance. Sabol, a former college football player, says, "That's the way I wanted to show the game, with the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. Before we started it was always filmed from the top, and it looked like a little chess set." His viewing procedures are quite advanced. Every Sunday he watches three games at once. "I have a little cockpit that's built in my den. There's one set, the predominant game, that's on a 30-inch TV, and I have two 19-inch TVs that are slanted inward. So it's like a cockpit. You have to have good peripheral vision and you have to really concentrate." So that's the next tip: 2. Get more, and bigger, televisions. If you have only a single 19-inch television and you can't afford to upgrade, just sit a lot closer. If you get close enough to the set, it's almost as good as going out and buying a multi-thousand-dollar "home theater." Sabol said he has to take the occasional pit stop, but even that is conveniently arranged. "The bathroom's right by the set. If I have to take a piss I can still see the screen." 3. Keep your eye on the screen at all times, even when you are trying to trim a child's toenails. Sabol said he sits in a "Relax-a-back" chair, a kind of recliner, but cautions that this is not for the novice. The worst-case scenario for the sports viewer is the unplanned nap. "Those are dangerous. I only recommend those for the more experienced viewers. You need stamina to do this. You need a good night's sleep. You have to be careful about having too big a breakfast, because that will put you to sleep. The trick is to have a series of small snacks for a 10-hour period." 4. Come to the television rested. Don't eat meals--graze. (Sabol reckons that on a given Sunday he starts watching at 11 a.m. and doesn't stop until 11 p.m., at the end of the cable-TV broadcast. Before his divorce, his wife didn't quite understand that this was work, he says.) Now comes the harder stuff, the actual watching--the seeing, if you will--of the actions on the screen. You must keep in mind that you are not directly watching an event, but rather are watching a produced and directed telecast of an event, manipulated by talented but not infallible professionals. To better understand how a sports program is put together, I called Rudy Martzke, the TV sports columnist for USA Today , who watches between 40 and 60 hours of TV sports a week on the 60-inch Pioneer screen in his family room. Martzke is full of facts and well-educated opinions: The typical Monday Night Football broadcast uses about 13 cameras, compared with only about eight for Fox's primary game Sunday afternoon; Goodyear's Steadycam allows sharp-focus blimp shots even when the blimp is being blown all over the sky; the glowing puck used on Fox hockey games is officially called Fox Trax; Bob Costas at NBC is the best host in the business; and Al Michaels at ABC is the best play-by-play guy. Unseen to viewers, but extremely important, are the producers and directors. "The director is the guy who calls the shots you see on the screen. He's the one who inserts the graphics," says Martzke. "Got a guy sitting next to him who's called the technical director. The director, when he yells out the instructions, 'cut to this picture, that picture, this camera, that camera,' the guy who follows him up, physically, is the technical director. The producer sits to the left of the director. The producer is the one who gets in the replays, the one who's in charge of the format of the show. He makes sure all those commercial breaks get in, so they're paid." Obviously only Rudy Martzke ever thinks twice about these people, but this creates a chance for you to sound authoritative when someone challenges you on your sports-viewership expertise. Let other people talk about who caught what pass or made what tackle; you can say things like, "Sandy Grossman uses down-and-yardage graphics better than any director in the game." The point of all this is: 5. Never let anyone know that you've forgotten the name of the "announcer." The hardest part of all is knowing what to look for when you watch television. In basketball, for example, the referee will often blow the whistle and call "illegal defense," which few viewers ever see in advance. This is because they are only watching the ball. Illegal defense occurs when a defender plays zone rather than man-to-man. Thus you should always look for someone who's just guarding a patch of the court, standing around looking suspicious. When you detect an illegal defense before the referee makes the call, you have completely arrived as a TV sports viewer. In baseball, don't just watch the flight of the ball from the pitcher's hand toward the batter. Look directly at the pitcher's hand and see if you can see what kind of grip he's using--that will tell you whether it's a curve, slider, fastball, splitter, knuckleball, or whatever. In golf, look at the wrists and elbows of the golfer as he or she putts. The great ones have almost no movement in their arms, wrists, and hands other than the gentlest of pendulum swings. In hockey, change channels. You will never see the puck. When Sabol watches a football game, he scrutinizes an area in front of the runner and including the runner. "It's a semicircle with a radius of about 3 yards," he estimates. 6. Expand your zone of attention. In preliminary tests with my own family, I determined that they have a long, long, long way to go before they are major-league sports fans. One Sunday I plunked my two oldest daughters in chairs directly in front of the set and channel-surfed from baseball to basketball to women's golf to figure skating. During the basketball game, my medium-sized daughter, who is not quite 4, said of Joe Dumars: "Is that a girl?" So the first thing we will do, with this particular daughter, is work on gender identification. Both daughters, meanwhile, have decided to become figure skaters when they grow up. You can see that this is drifting into a scary area: I might teach them to watch sports on television, but they might decide that "sports" includes massive doses of Brian Boitano and Oksana Baiul. My natural inclination is to watch figure skating quadrennially. Mary, my wife, is simply a lost cause. She is an extremely discerning person who can detect the most subtle spice in a bowl of soup or a whisper of colored thread in a suit jacket, but for some reason she can stare at a basketball game on television and miss the important details, such as the ball going into the hoop. "What just happened?" I demanded to know after Michael Jordan made a jump shot during a Chicago Bulls game. "I don't know. I was still thinking about the last commercial," she said. 7. Don't pay attention to the commercials, the squeakiness of the basketball court, the spitting in the dugout, the sweating, or fluids of any kind. Once the techniques of viewing are mastered, there remains a major step: analysis. There is no point in watching if one is not really "seeing" anything. Sabol gave me a final tip that I will carry with me the rest of my years: 8. Prepare. "You have to come into the game prepared. You have to come into watching the game with your own game plan," Sabol said. "What are you going to look for? What are the keys to the game?" It's a rule from scouting: Be prepared. Think ahead. Anticipate problems and possible solutions. If you pick up the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , you will see that one of the habits is "be pro-active." Do not wait for the ballgame on television to come to you. You can go to the ballgame, mentally, emotionally, pro-actively. You can be a better sports viewer than anyone on your block, anyone with your ZIP code. Life is a competition. Be a champion.

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20035

The Masked and the Unmasked Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia takes place on a dark night of the soul in the City of Angels. A patriarch is dying. No, hold on, this is a three-hour movie: Two patriarchs are dying. Rich geezer Jason Robards is slipping in and out of a coma on a bed with an oxygen tube up his nose while his minky young wife (Julianne Moore) acts out her despair at losing an old man she thought she'd married for his money. The geezer's nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman) listens to his semi-coherent monologues then decides to get in touch with the dying man's estranged son (Tom Cruise), who gives inspirational lectures in which men are exhorted to "turn women into sperm receptacles" and to leave behind their "unmanly" pasts. The son gets a double dose of his unmanly past this night, since a female TV journalist (April Grace) has uncovered the history he has determinedly concealed and is eating through his mask of machismo on camera. "We may be through with the past," says someone, "but the past isn't through with us." The second dying paterfamilias is Philip Baker Hall as the host of a quiz show for bright kids. He bursts in on his estranged daughter (Melora Walters) with news of his imminent demise, but the addled girl for some reason (three guesses) won't have anything to do with him. His visit sends her into a cocaine-snorting frenzy, which is interrupted by a policeman (John C. Reilly) checking out her deafening stereo: "You've been doing some drugs today?" After 10 minutes, it isn't clear whether this dweebish flatfoot is interrogating her or trying to ask for a date--or whether he even knows. Meanwhile ( Magnolia could have been titled Meanwhile ), an aging ex-quiz-kid celebrity (William H. Macy) gets fired from his job and goes looking for the love he never had, while a contemporary quiz-kid celebrity (Jeremy Blackman) tries to make his father (Michael Bowen) understand that he wants to be loved for himself and not his TV achievements--even if that means peeing in his pants on-camera. What's the connection among these people? Some of the links are familial, others merely circumstantial. But everyone and their dad are having a really lousy day. At the peak of their collective loneliness, the cokehead daughter puts on a plaintive Aimee Mann song, the chorus of which goes: "It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ Till you wise up." She moves her lips and the director cuts to all the characters in all the movie's other strands as they all move their lips to the same universal refrain: "It's not going to stop …" The wife in the car sings. The aging quiz kid on the barstool sings. The cop searching for his lost gun sings. I thought, "Please don't make the guy in the coma sing, or I'm going to be hysterical"--but yup, the guy in the coma sings, too. At that point, I had an interesting reaction to Magnolia : I laughed at it and forgave it almost everything. OK, you could spend three hours snickering at Anderson's "What the World Needs Now Is Aimee Mann" metaphysic. But his vision cuts deeper than a lot of folky bathos. His characters have been screwed up by their families, so when he turns around and makes a case for family as the ultimate salvation, he doesn't seem simple-minded. He's saying the diaspora is understandable--but that it's also killing people. At the point where these people could actually start dying of aloneness, he goes metaphorical. He goes biblical. He goes nuts. He has sort of prepared us with weather reports and the recurrence of numerals suggesting an Old Testament chapter and verse. But nothing could prepare us for the full-scale, surreal, gross-out deluge that's the picture's splattery climax. For the second time, he dynamites his own movie. And for the second time I forgave him almost everything. What clinches Anderson's case for family is how beautifully he works with his surrogate clan. Many of the actors show up from his Hard Eight (1997) and Boogie Nights (1997), and he's so eager to get Luis Guzman into the film, despite the lack of a role, that he makes him a game-show contestant named "Luis Guzman." He's like a parent who can't stop adopting kids. Anderson knows what actors live to do: fall apart. He puts their characters' backs against the wall, then gives them speeches full of free associations and Freudian slips, so that they're suddenly exposed--and terrified by their nakedness. By the end of the first hour of Magnolia , the whole cast is unraveling. By the end of the second, they've unraveled so much that they've burst into song. Anderson must have needed that bonkers third-hour climax because there was nowhere to go short of spontaneous combustion. The actors are great--all of them. It seems unfair to single anyone out, but I loved Reilly's unsettling combination of sweetness and prudery--unsettling because he's just the kind of earnest, by-the-book cop whose wheels move too slowly in a crisis. Between tantrums, Julianne Moore opens and closes her mouth like a fish that's slowly suffocating at the bottom of a boat. And who would have expected a real performance from Tom Cruise? Anderson takes everything fake in Cruise's acting--the face-pulling, the too-quick smile--and turns it into the character's own shtick, so that when the mask is pulled off you get a startling glimpse of the rage and fear under the pose. Elsewhere, Anderson uses Mamet actors and Mamety diction, but he's the Anti-Mamet. He makes his actors feel so safe--so loved--that they seem to be competing to see who can shed the most skin. The title card of The Talented Mr. Ripley is a stroke of genius. Adjectives flash before the words Mr. Ripley , with "talented" an imperfect substitute for about 30 other possibilities, including "confused." Actually, I think confused (or vulnerable or desperate) would have been a more appropriate choice. As played by Matt Damon, this Ripley's chief talent is for licking his lips and looking clammily out of place. Dispatched to the south of Italy by a magnate named Greenleaf seeking the return of his wastrel son Dickie (Jude Law), the working-class Ripley has to pretend he's an old Princeton classmate. But nothing in Damon's demeanor remotely suggests the Ivy League. Beside the smooth, caramel-colored Law, even his pale little muscles seem like poseurs. Anthony Minghella ( The English Patient , 1996) has adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley from a thriller by Patricia Highsmith, and it's a gorgeously creepy piece of movie-making. The Old World luxury--even the Old World rot--is double-edged, subtly mocking its bantamweight New World protagonist. The light that bronzes everyone else burns poor, pasty Ripley. We watch him having the time of his life, but there's no question of his ever fitting in with Dickie, his willowy girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), or even their fat, to-the-manner-born pal Freddie Miles (a hilarious Philip Seymour Hoffman)--he's too tense, too hungry, too incomplete. When Ripley is by himself onscreen, there's nothing going on. Minghella is a thoughtful man and a snazzy craftsman, but by the end of Ripley , I wasn't sure what had attracted him to this material. What does a vaguely masochistic humanist see in Patricia Highsmith? The novel's Ripley (and the Ripley of René Clément's 1960 Purple Noon , Alain Delon) isn't so palpably out of his depth. With a bit of polish he can pass for a playboy, and the bad fun is watching him do anything to keep from accepting the swinish Dickie's view of him as an eternal loser. Damon's Ripley is an eternal loser, an anti-chameleon, and so conscientiously dreary that he lets Jude Law act him off the screen. He isn't allowed to feel a moment's glee at seizing what these rich boobs have denied him. Minghella comes up with a bleakly sincere ending that's the opposite of what this ironic little melodrama needs. He's trying to inflate it into tragedy, where Highsmith's setups are too cold and shallow to be tragic. The old biddy herself would have thought this ending stinks. Along with many Americans, I first caught Andy Kaufman on the Tonight Show in the mid-'70s. He sat next to Johnny Carson and in his helium-pitched "foreign man" voice told jokes without punch lines ("Her cooking ees so bad--ees terrible") and did non-impressionistic impressions; then he got up and launched into the most electrifying Elvis Presley takeoff I've ever seen. Without that final flourish of virtuosity, the shtick would have been just weird. With it, Kaufman signaled that his comedy was about more than untranscendent ineptitude: It was about wondrously fucking with your head. That whole act is reproduced in the funny, frustrating Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon , but not on the Tonight Show . Kaufman (Jim Carrey) does it onstage at a tiny club. We don't know where it came from or what the thinking was behind it. He brings down the house (lots of shots of people smiling and laughing), then goes out for a drink with a potential manager (Danny DeVito), who tells him, "You're insane--but you might also be brilliant." That's about as close to analysis as the picture gets. As in their Ed Wood (1994) and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski take marginal or plain cruddy characters and stick them in the middle of breezily wide-eyed biopics. Their Horatio Alger tone is the joke, but it's not a joke that director Milos Forman seems to be in on. Forman tells one, deadly serious story: A reckless individualist is slowly crushed by society. It meshed with McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) but seemed odd with Mozart ( Amadeus , 1984) and disastrous with Valmont ( Valmont , 1989). With Andy Kaufman, it seems not so much wrong as beside the point. Where did the rage in Kaufman come from, and at what point did it kill the comedy? More important: Did Kaufman himself consider some of his experiments failures, or had his aesthetic finally become so punk/pro-wrestling that he thought driving people crazy was enough? As Jared Hohlt in Slate , the comedian got sick at the point where he needed to reinvent himself to keep from sinking into obscurity. The filmmakers reverse the trajectory (and the actual chronology of Kaufman's career), so that he seems to achieve a magical synthesis of warmth and aggression--and then gets cut down at his prime. That's not just bogus; it's false to the conflicts that ate Kaufman alive. The reason to see Man on the Moon is Jim Carrey. It's not just that he does the Kaufman routines with the kind of hungry gleam that makes you think he's "channeling" the dead comedian. It's that he knows what it's like to walk the high wire and bomb. He knows what it's like to lose control of his aggression: It happened to him in The Cable Guy (1996), maybe his real Andy Kaufman film. I bet that what Carrey saw from inside Kaufman's head would be more illuminating than anything in the movie. He's not just a man in the moon: He generates his own light. Anyone who reads Angela's Ashes is torn down the middle--appalled by the misery and deaths of small children and yet exhilarated, even turned on, by the cadences of Frank McCourt. His alcoholic father starved him of real food but filled his head with the kind of stories that nourished his poet's instincts. I worried that the movie, directed by Alan Parker, would miss McCourt's voice and dwell too much on the tragic details. But what happens is the opposite: McCourt narrates the film, and it turns into a lifeless slide show. There's no flow, no connective tissue between episodes. After the 80 th teensy scene goes by, you realize the movie isn't just botched: It doesn't even exist. Emily Watson suffers prettily, but whatever she's thinking stays in her head, and Robert Carlyle is so mopily present that you don't have a clue why such an earnest fellow would drink so many lives away. (The horror of the father McCourt describes is that he's not at home on planet Earth.) The narrator says his dad was a helluva storyteller, but the man on screen doesn't say so much as "Once upon a time …" Has anyone involved in this disaster ever heard a real story?

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20049

If At First You Don't Secede Forget the Alamo! This sounds crass, but I can't deny it: I desperately wanted the standoff at the Republic of Texas trailer-trash compound to last longer than it did--for selfish reasons. Not weeks longer, mind you. Just a few hours. Just long enough for me to get there . Having missed all the famous government vs. fringe standoffs--Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Montana Freemen--I was determined to go and bear witness this time. I would find out at last if mysterious U.N.-dispatched "black helicopters" really buzz around at these things like giant hell-spawned bumblebees. I would document the local movements of guts-and-glory militia reinforcements. (A militia offensive of some sort was widely rumored on the Net, where one rabid militia man wrote: "WE HAVE HAD A BELLY FULL OF THE FBI, BATF, DEA, ETC. ETC. ... Lock and Load, prepare to Rock and Roll.") It sounds silly now, but militia trouble did seem plausible at Fort Davis. Wednesday, April 30, three days after the siege began, several heavily armed Republic of Texas members were apprehended at a truck stop near Pecos, Texas, about 90 miles from the action. Alas, none of it was to be. I took off from Newark, N.J., at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, May 3. After landing in El Paso, I called a militia contact who had agreed to ask around about possible right-wing bivouacs. (I even brought camping gear!) Things looked "hot" when I left--from inside his "embassy," ROT leader Richard McLaren was busily faxing out apocalyptic maydays--but his hot blood turned to pink Jell-O. "Hey!" said my contact. "Guess you heard. It's over." "What? No! McLaren was talking so tough." "Well, he came out." While I groaned, he described the final hours. McLaren had swallowed the old negotiator's bait of surrender "with honor." The lawmen treated him like the head of a brave conquered nation. He would be allowed to press in court his claim that the Republic of Texas had been illegally annexed by the United States in 1845. Then he would go to jail for many years. Not the best of deals, but he obviously preferred it to Plan B: getting shot. Irented a car and putted around morosely, listening to the radio and mulling over my options. Texas lawmen were boasting, justifiably, about the happy outcome. Yes, there was one tiny glitch--two ROT activists had somehow slipped away--but that was no problem. A drawling official said these fugitives were not experienced in the back country, so they would be easy pickings. For my part, I knew there would be little left to see. The militia would "stand down." Even the trailer compound--which had been tricked out with Swiss Family Robinson-style self-defense gizmos--was still off-limits to the media. There was, however, one notable event left: Sunday, members of the other factions of the Republic of Texas were holding a big rally in Kilgore, to make clear that the movement would live on. (The republic, as you probably know, contains three competing clans.) I unfolded my map. Hmmm. Kilgore was way over by Louisiana. Even at 75 miles per hour, I could count on driving at least 12 hours, making it just in time for the opening gavel at 1 p.m. Was it worth it? No, but what else could I do--go see the Carlsbad Caverns? I buckled up and hit the road. My Countries, Right or Wrong The trip was worth it, at least in terms of understanding what motivates Republic of Texas believers. What motivates them is: They're nuts. All of them. That word is somewhat loaded, so I should be more precise. ROT members are nuts like the Lilliputians in Gulliver's Travels were nuts. They don't drool or wear their shirts backward, but they do expend insane amounts of energy on ridiculous "politics," dissipating most of it through meaningless infighting and petty posturing. Are they evil, hateful nuts? No. I kind of liked most of them. They would be fun people to go fishing with. Unfortunately, they have this other hobby: seceding from the union. And, being Texans, they have enough guns and ammo to potentially make matters not so cute. Most non-McLarian ROT members publicly disavow violence, but the possibility always lurks. Groups like the Republic of Texas exist in a murky gray zone where relatively harmless right-wing bigmouths meet the frightening shriekers of renegade militias, raising the question: At what point does nutty end and scary begin? You can never tell, but Richard Keyes III is a good example of how quickly A can become Z. Keyes is the 21-year-old McLaren follower who actually carried out the kidnapping and shooting that started the whole Fort Davis mess. He's originally from Kansas--so, to find out more about him, I called a county police detective there who tracks the far right. He'd heard of him only once, in a nutty-but-funny context. Keyes filed papers earlier this year demanding that Kansas return portions of the state to the rightful ownership of the Republic of Texas. Tee-hee. Next thing you know, however, he emerged as a serious shoot-'em-up guy. As for the meeting, it was simply funny-nutty, but it became all too clear that the republic's separatist fantasies will live on. A few hundred boisterous Texans--mostly men, middle-aged or above, with a fair number of angry young rednecks and dotty old women--filled the cramped banquet room of a run-down motor lodge in "downtown" Kilgore. Crowding one side of a long dais were frowning representatives of the two non-McLarian Republics of Texas. One is headed by David Johnson of Odessa, Texas. He didn't show up, but some of his "council" members did--they were gray, natty, and grumpy, like Baptist deacons. The other faction is under the sway of Archie Lowe, a long-haired guy who looks like an amiable Harley rider and whose followers are a tiny bit more young and with-it. The Archies' current agenda includes a quest for "international recognition" and the convening of a "Constitutional Convention" this July. The meeting itself was extremely hard to follow. After generic introblab, the floor was opened to "the people," a platoon of Brave New World Epsilons who lined up behind a floor microphone and took turns huffing and ranting. Among the highlights: A very pale young man stood up and said that Judgment Day was coming unless the Republic of Texas succeeded. Then he started crying. A stocky guy in a red shirt and a Republic of Texas cap stood and dramatically announced that he was the driver of one of the two vehicles detained by authorities in Pecos. It was all a gross injustice, of course. Yes, he and four ROT colleagues were traveling with full packs, semiautomatic weapons, pistols, radios, and plenty of ammo, but he said they were merely going to Kermit, Texas, to "hunt wild hogs." But Pecos is not on the way if you're going to Kermit from Garland. I asked him later: Why was he there? "I was curious about what was going on," he said. "On a personal level." A gap-toothed old woman yelped that the federal government is "getting boxcars prepared with some kind of leg irons in 'em to fasten you into place to ship you to concentration camps." OK, perhaps quoting the old woman is a cheap shot. Then again, I heard similar effusions from a high official--Jim Warmke, a wiry, sun-burnished old guy in a mustard-colored Western suit who serves as "secretary of commerce and trade" for the Branch McLarian remnant. I liked Jim, and I just hope his nuttiness stays "funny," but I have to wonder. When we met he extended a huge sandpapery hand and said: "Howdy! Jim Warmke. W-A-R-M-K-E. Hot lock, warm key." We talked about McLaren--"The man is a genius; he has a 160 IQ"--and I raised the question of violence. Given that the federal government and the state are always and forever going to kick ass in U.S. vs. Republic confrontations, when would a patriot like Jim feel justified in picking up a gun and charging? And with such overwhelming odds, why would he do that? "You'll not know how close some came," he said eerily. "I can tell you that the militias have but one methodology in mind. They do not intend to assemble 10-, 20-, 50,000 armed men in one spot and allow napalm to destroy them! There is a tactic called 'targets of availability.' What that means is ... Your interpretation would be terrorism. There is no one that can control that. There is no government could control that." Bomb talk! Did he hear about specific targeted sites? "I have suspicions, but I'll not answer that based on suspicions." After Jim left, two Archie-faction ROT men scurried over and nervously assured me that Jim was a kook. Great. Why didn't I feel reassured? The Joke Stops Here Monday, I finally visited Fort Davis on the way back to El Paso, just to get a feel for the place. Things sounded quite sparky on the radio. Early that morning, reports said that someone fired at the bloodhounds, and that lawmen were closing in. I arrived about 2 p.m. and roosted for a while by the police roadblock at the entrance to the Davis Mountain Resort subdivision. In the distance rose the stark, rocky, mesquite-covered peaks that define this area. A couple of dozen sunburned, siege-weary reporters were hanging around in cars, and one explained that the resort itself was miles and miles away. Whatever was happening, we wouldn't be able to see it or hear it. I took off and stopped for gas in the nearby town of Valentine. Inside I met an old codger named Clifford Beare, who had recently retired from the Jeff Davis County sheriff's department. I asked him if it would be hard for runaways to hide in treeless mountains. "Well, I guess, but you could hide. There's a lot of caves and stuff." Did he think these guys would get caught? "I think they will," he said. "Yes I do." He was half right. About that time one fugitive, believed to be Mike Matson, was getting shot to death in a gun battle. The other, Keyes, appears to have got away, and Tuesday, the authorities scaled back the search for him, making vague noises about the terrain and wild animals finishing him off. "He can ... only have a finite amount of food and water," said Mike Cox, who has been the state's spokesman throughout the siege. What? Of all these people, Keyes is the only survivor who demands to be taken seriously. He started the violence; he never gave up; and he went out ready to blast away and die. They better hope something gets him, because if he does stagger out of those mountains alive, he's going to be biblically, nuttily, and unfunnily pissed.

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20057

Big-Bang Theology Did God cause the big bang? That is what half a dozen new books about science and religion--whose authors range from a Reagan-administration official to an Israeli physicist to an elementary-particle-theorist-turned-Anglican-priest--are saying. The fact that the universe abruptly exploded into existence out of apparent nothingness some 15 billion years ago, they submit, means it must have had a supernatural creator. A couple of months ago the same claim was enthusiastically aired at a Washington conference sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center under the rubric "Beyond the Death of God," with eminent thinkers such as Fred Barnes, Mona Charen, and Elliott Abrams in attendance. And the idea received a sympathetic hearing on William F. Buckley's show Firing Line a few weeks ago . The idea that only God could have caused the big bang is scarcely new. In fact, the big bang is probably the only idea in the history of science that was ever resisted because of its pro-God import. For much of the modern era, scientists followed Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton in believing the cosmos to be eternal and unchanging. But in 1917, when Albert Einstein applied his theory of relativity to space-time as a whole, his equations implied that the universe could not be static; it must be either expanding or contracting. This struck Einstein as grotesque, so he added to his theory a fiddle factor called the "cosmological constant" that eliminated the implication and held the universe still. It was an ordained priest who took relativity to its logical conclusion. In 1927, Georges Lemaître of the University of Louvain in Belgium worked out an expanding model of the universe. Reasoning backward, he proposed that at some definite point in the past it must have originated from a primeval atom of infinitely concentrated energy. Two years later, Lemaître's model was confirmed by the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, who had observed that the galaxies everywhere around us were receding. Both theory and empirical evidence pointed to the same verdict: The universe had an abrupt beginning in time. Churchmen rejoiced. Proof of the biblical account of creation had dropped into their laps. Pope Pius XII, opening a conference at the Vatican in 1951, declared that this scientific theory of cosmic origins bore witness "to that primordial 'Fiat lux ' uttered at the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation. ... Hence, creation took place in time, therefore there is a creator, therefore God exists!" Marxists, meanwhile, gnashed their teeth. Quite aside from its religious aura, the new theory contradicted their belief in the infinity and eternity of matter--one of the axioms of Lenin's dialectical materialism--and was accordingly dismissed as "idealistic." The Marxist physicist David Bohm rebuked the developers of the theory as "scientists who effectively turn traitor to science, and discard scientific facts to reach conclusions that are convenient to the Catholic Church." Atheists of a non-Marxist stripe were also recalcitrant. "Some younger scientists were so upset by these theological trends that they resolved simply to block their cosmological source," commented the German astronomer Otto Heckmann, a prominent investigator of cosmic expansion. The dean of the profession, Sir Arthur Eddington, wrote, "The notion of a beginning is repugnant to me ... I simply do not believe that the present order of things started off with a bang. ... The expanding Universe is preposterous ... incredible ... it leaves me cold ." Even some believing scientists were troubled. The cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle simply felt that an explosion was an undignified way for the world to begin, rather like "a party girl jumping out of a cake." In a BBC interview in the 1950s, Hoyle sardonically referred to the hypothesized origin as "the big bang." The term stuck. Einstein overcame his metaphysical scruples about the big bang not long before his death in 1955, referring to his earlier attempt to dodge it by an ad hoc theoretical device as "the greatest blunder of my career." As for Hoyle and the rest of the skeptics, they were finally won over in 1965, when two scientists at Bell Labs in New Jersey accidentally detected a pervasive microwave hiss that turned out to be the echo of the big bang (at first they thought it was caused by pigeon droppings on their antenna). If you turn on your television and tune it between stations, about 10 percent of that black-and-white-speckled static you see is caused by photons left over from the cosmogonic event. What greater proof of the reality of the big bang--you can watch it on television! Since the '60s, scientists have been busy working out, and feuding over, the details of the big-bang cosmology. But God is not in the details--his existence is deducible from the mere fact that there is a world at all. So goes the cosmological argument , one of the three traditional arguments toward a Supreme Being. (Click to read the ontological argument and the teleological argument .) The reasoning starts off like this: 1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence. 2) The universe began to exist. 3) Therefore the universe has a cause of its existence. (Click to learn more about the surprising Islamic origins of this argument and what Ludwig Wittgenstein had to say about it.) There are many options for attacking the logic of this cosmological argument, and contemporary opponents of theism have tried them all. If everything needs a cause for its existence, then so does God. (More frequently heard in the form "But Mummy, who made God?") This objection fails because it gets Premise 1 wrong. The premise does not say that everything needs a cause but that everything that begins to exist does. God never began to exist--he is eternal. So he does not need a cause for his existence. Maybe the universe had a natural cause. But the big bang could not have been caused by prior physical processes. That is because it began with pointlike singularity , which, according to relativity theory, is not a "thing" but a boundary or an edge in time. Since no causal lines can be extended through it, the cause of the big bang must transcend the physical world. Well, then, perhaps it had no cause at all. It is hard to think of a principle more amply confirmed by our experience than that things do not just pop into existence uncaused. No one can really pull a rabbit out of a hat. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Yet something of the sort does seem to happen in the quantum world, where, owing to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, tiny "virtual particles" spontaneously appear and disappear all the time. An entire universe could do the same, claim some cosmologists. Calling themselves "nothing theorists," they have produced models showing how the cosmos could have burst into being all by itself out of a patch of "false vacuum," or a 3-D geometry of zero volume, or--in the case of Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University--literally nothing at all (this took Vilenkin four pages of math). So the universe is summoned out of the void by the laws of physics. But this can't be right. The laws of physics are just a set of equations, a mathematical pattern. They cannot cause the world to exist. As Stephen Hawking has written, "A scientific theory ... exists only in our minds and does not have any other reality (whatever that might mean)." Just because the universe is temporally finite does not mean it had a beginning. Speaking of Hawking, this is his famous "no boundary" proposal. "So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator," Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time . "But if the universe is completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning or end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?" In Hawking's quantum cosmology, the pointlike singularity of the big bang is replaced by a smooth hemisphere in which space and time are commingled. "Time zero" becomes an arbitrary point, not a true beginning; it is no more a boundary than the North Pole is. Hawking's proposal is extremely popular with laymen who are hostile to the cosmological argument, judging from the mail I get. Apparently they enjoy being baffled by "imaginary time," a theoretical fiction Hawking uses to redescribe the big bang so that there is no beginning. In real time there still is a beginning. Sometimes Hawking says that imaginary time is "earlier" than real time, which is a logical contradiction; sometimes he suggests it might be more real than real time, which is an absurdity. OK, so the universe had a beginning, and hence a First Cause, which is, moreover, transcendent. How does it follow that this cause is God, or even God-like? Now there is an acute question. Philosopher Thomas Nagel has suggested that something humanly inconceivable lies behind the big bang. What, if anything, can really be inferred about the First Cause? Well, suppose that it were something mechanical. An ideal machine produces its effect either always or never; it does not just suddenly start to operate at some moment, unless someone gives it a kick. If a mechanical cause produced the universe at time T, there is no reason it should not have done so at time T minus 1. The argument can be repeated to T minus infinity: A mechanical cause would have either produced the universe from eternity or not at all. But the universe was created at one moment out of an infinity of other indistinguishable moments. This implies that the moment was freely chosen, and hence that the creator had a will, and to that extent a personal nature. And power. Yet the big-bang cosmology has one unwelcome consequence for theists. It seems to suggest that the Creator was a bungler. A singularity is inherently lawless. Anything at all can come out of one. It is exceedingly unlikely that a big-bang singularity should give rise to a universe whose conditions are precisely suitable for life, let alone the best of all possible worlds. As the American philosopher Quentin Smith has pointed out, "If God created the universe with the aim of making it animate, it is illogical that he would have created as its first state something whose natural evolution would lead with high probability only to inanimate states ." The only way God could have ensured the appearance of creatures in his own image was by repeatedly intervening and making adjustments to steer the evolution of the world away from lifeless disaster. But "a competent Creator does not create things he immediately or subsequently needs to set aright," observes Smith. (Remember, we are talking about the universe's physical infrastructure, not sinners with free will.) So did God cause the big bang? Overcome by metaphysical lassitude, I finally reach over to my bookshelf for The Devil's Bible . Turning to Genesis I read: "In the beginning there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was still nothing, but now you could see it."

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20062

Eyes on the Prize These days, studios are inordinately attentive to my viewing habits. As a member of the National Society of Film Critics, which votes a slate of year-end prizes, I'm fielding calls from eager publicists who want to make sure I've seen all those award-worthy movies featuring all those award-worthy performances. I've tried to stay mum, so as to keep my voting options open, but it's hard for a guy brimming with opinions to be circumspect. Beloved ? A worthy effort. Oprah? Worthiness incarnate; I feel unworthy even to sit in judgment. Meryl Streep in Dancing at Lughnasa ? Ian McKellen in Gods and Monsters ? Leonardo DiCaprio in Celebrity ? Damn worthy actors. (I enthused about DiCaprio when the sour Celebrity opened the New York Film Festival in September; since it shows up in theaters this week, you might want to click here so that I don't have to quote myself.) Streep should be awarded a rubber chicken for irradiating us with her yokel devotion in One True Thing (1998), but in Dancing at Lughnasa she goes a long way toward winning back her good (well, pretty good) name. As Kate Mundy, the stick-in-the-mud schoolteacher who presides over four younger, unmarried sisters in 1936 Donegal, Ireland, she holds her facial muscles tense and signals with her eyes her exhaustion from keeping them so fiercely in place. It is a terrible responsibility, upholding her society's values and preventing her siblings and Michael, the illegitimate son of her youngest sister, Christina (Catherine McCormack), from descending into chaos and impoverishment. Not to mention the fact that she's regarded by all as a stupid goose--or, as they call her in town, mocking her sexlessness, "the gander." Streep's performance is layered and compelling, but the film doesn't click. Closely based on Brian Friel's play, it wilts in translation the way Friel's potent but static dramas always do. On stage, every character, every prop, every interjection has a precise symbolic function; on film, those elements no longer stand out in relief. In Dancing at Lughnasa (it's pronounced LOO-nassa), the sisters reside in a sterile and repressive Ireland--but one in which the pagan past continues to bubble up, most visibly in the harvest feast of Lughnasa, when peasants take to the hills to build fires, drink to even greater excess than usual, and dance orgiastically. The rite is liberating but also frightening: Remove a cork from a bottle so pressurized, and the contents are apt to explode. The story, narrated by the now-grown Michael in the shopworn manner of The Glass Menagerie , is set in motion by the return of the boy's Uncle Jack (Michael Gambon) from Africa, where he has toiled as a missionary priest. Delusional, barely remembering his English, Jack becomes a rambling (and, to the local priest, horrific) spokesman for paganism, encouraging all his sisters to emulate Christina and have "children of love." There isn't much else in the way of a plot. Kate's position at the school, which is overseen by the local priest, is imperiled by the subversive presence of her brother. Michael's handsome dad (Rhys Ifans) roars back on a motorcycle to flirt with marriage to Christina: Will he stay or go fight the Fascists in Spain? Each sister chafes in her own way under Kate's oppressive rule--especially Rose (Sophie Thompson), the "simple" one, who might or might not be having an affair with a man whose wife and children have abandoned him for London. A weaving factory is opening nearby and threatens the household income. In venerable Chekhovian fashion, what happens on the surface only hints at the titanic plates that shift beneath, but the actresses--especially Streep, Thompson, Kathy Burke, and Brid Brennan--are supreme at conveying what's at stake. They create an indelibly glowering ensemble. So why isn't Dancing at Lughnasa more involving? It's probably because the director, Pat O'Connor, can't tell the difference between images that express Friel's themes and Hibernian wallpaper, and because his idea of expansive, pictorial beauty proves no substitute for Friel's powerfully compressed stage pictures. In the theater, the radio that crackles on and off signals a world elsewhere; and when it's repaired and the stage is flooded with music and the sisters--beaten down, confronted with only the grimmest of economic and social prospects--begin to dance and then lose themselves in the freedom of the dance, the moment is truly cathartic. On-screen it means the movie's almost over. People think I'm kidding when I say that my favorite film is The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), but I can't imagine how I'd have survived an especially grisly puberty without the comfort of watching Boris Karloff express his anguish to an uncomprehending world through a misshapen body and halting language. Few films have ever offered so inspired a blend of sentimentality, Grand Guignol horror, and sophisticated camp, or such deliriously inventive laboratory bric-a-brac. The film's director, James Whale, has long been venerated for this and other droll '30s entertainments, among them The Old Dark House (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933). Lately, he has also been scrutinized for being openly homosexual in an era when gay directors, such as George Cukor, kept that part of their lives rigidly compartmentalized. But not even David Ehrenstein in his trenchantly gossipy new book on the Hollywood closet, Open Secret , wants to make the case that Whale was penalized for his sexual preferences. If anything, the director seems to have suffered from a surfeit of dignity, proving too proud to overcome the loss of a powerful patron and a couple of ambitious flops. Comfortably rich, he took to painting and traveling before a series of strokes drove him to drown himself in his swimming pool--a suicide, though that fact was concealed from the public for 25 years. Gods and Monsters , based on Father of Frankenstein , a novel by Christopher Bram, explores the last days of the director (Ian McKellen) through the prism of a (fictional) friendship with a handsome, muscular, and heterosexual groundskeeper, Boone (Brendan Fraser). Critics have been unanimous in predicting statuettes in McKellen's future. Why? The movie is psychologically thin, artistically flabby, and symbolically opaque. Whale's Frankenstein films weren't personal testaments, but in Gods and Monsters they're raided for murky fantasy sequences. In one, the groundskeeper is the monster staggering around with Whale in his arms; in another, Whale is laid out on a laboratory slab being operated on by the groundskeeper. What's the metaphor? The script, meanwhile, is the stuff of bad two character plays, with spurious excuses for conflict (Boone storms out when Whale speaks tenderly of the naked, young men who once populated his pool) and a long, climactic monologue about a (fictional) wartime trauma that ostensibly shocked Whale into keeping his past under wraps. In Bram's novel, Boone is vaguely dangerous, a plausible suspect in Whale's death, but Fraser plays him (ingratiatingly) as a lovable lunk, and the conception removes whatever tension the material might have had. As Whale, McKellen wears his elegance lightly. His face is fascinatingly two tiered: lean in long shot, in close-up its features distend to the point of acromegaly, the mouth going slack with lust. But Whale's plangent ruminations are slack as well: "I've spent much of my life outrunning the past, and now it floods all over," he tells Boone, in what is surely the most generic line for a "memory play" ever written. "Something about your face makes me want to tell the truth." All this mawkishness would likely have annoyed the real Whale, who exited the world on his own terms and steered clear, in his art, of banality. W>aking Ned Devine is this year's stab at The Full Monty (1997), which made more than $100 million and even snagged an Oscar nomination. Set in a quaint olde Irish seacoast village, it tells the story of an elderly lottery player, Jackie O'Shea (Ian Bannen), who learns that one of his fifty-odd neighbors holds the winning ticket to a 7 million pound drawing. By a process of elimination, he and his buddy Michael O'Sullivan (David Kelly) end up at the remote stone house of Ned Devine--whom they find dead in his armchair with the ticket between his fingers, the shock of his windfall having felled him. As Devine has no living relations, it makes sense for the impoverished old men to cook up a scheme by which Michael will assume the dead fisherman's identity, and the pair will divide the money between themselves. It was no surprise to read that Kirk Jones, the film's writer and director, doesn't hail from a small town in the Irish Republic or anywhere close. He makes TV commercials in London. Deciding he'd like to make an eccentric regional comedy with universal themes, he journeyed to a village in Ireland, set himself up in the pub, and took notes on what he saw and heard. Then he wrote a script that's one part Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983), one part Preston Sturges' Christmas in July (1940), and about five parts synthetic whimsy. The movie is a passable entertainment--call it The Half Monty . It has standard issue (but funny) farcical sight gags and a score of panpipes to provide the requisite undercurrent of Celtic melancholy. There's a witchy Margaret Hamilton type (Eileen Dromey) who rides some sort of electric wheelchair and attempts to spoil the whole caper. There's also a stock ingénue (Susan Lynch) who loves the town's endearing pig farmer (James Nesbitt) but won't marry him because he smells so bad--and I'm not oversimplifying. Waking Ned Devine might have been a snooze if Jones hadn't stocked it with a slew of old actors with magically lived-in visages. The owlish Bannen can twinkle without looking dear--there's something saturnine in that face. As his Ed Norton-ish sidekick, Kelly walks off--or, rather, rides off--with the picture, his skeletal frame planted buck naked on a motorcycle as he rushes to reach Devine's house before the man from the lottery. I see a future for elderly male actors willing to shed their clothes for laughs, but I don't see myself in the audience. The term "slice of life" has come to mean dreary naturalism, but for the superb Richard LaGravenese, who wrote and directed Living Out Loud , that slice includes fantasy, fairy tale connections, sultry musical interludes, bridges that lead out, and bridges that lead nowhere. The movie, one of the year's most pleasant surprises, is the antithesis of Todd Solondz's Happiness , a humanist's answer to Solondz's evident conviction that life is all dead ends. When her cardiologist husband (Martin Donovan) leaves her, Judith Nelson (Holly Hunter) goes out into the world, her pain making her receptive to everything and everyone--from the elevator man (Danny DeVito) who returns her friendship with uninvited amorousness to the torch singer (Queen Latifah) who takes her to after-hours clubs, where she dances ecstatically with young women. Living Out Loud becomes an ode to openness, to letting in everything that the world throws at you. The movie made me remember why I like Holly Hunter. (I don't always remember.) Her delivery isn't moist--it's prickly and blunt, and she can jabber convincingly, so that the jabbering takes on a life of its own and leaves her (sometimes horrified) in the dust. I might even vote for her.

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20063

Kosovo Con Games For weeks, critics of the war in Yugoslavia have pronounced it unwinnable. The atrocities continue unabated , they say. Air power alone will never get the job done. It's another Vietnam. President Clinton has blown it. Everything we do makes the situation worse. Whether Clinton and his allies can win the war remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: They can't win the debate over the war as long as critics are allowed to rig it with the following hidden premises: A. Selective Scrutiny 1. Policies. Critics observe that many things have gone badly since the air war began: Ethnic Albanians have been killed and expelled from Kosovo and anti-American nationalism has grown in Russia. It's easy to associate bad outcomes with the current policy. But critics seldom apply the same kind of scrutiny to alternative policies. If NATO had forsworn the use of force against the Serbs, what would the Serbs ultimately have done to the Kosovar Albanians? If NATO had launched a ground war, what would Russia be doing now? If, as critics observe, the Serbs have managed to cleanse Kosovo in less than four weeks, what difference could NATO have made by beginning a ground force buildup (which takes considerable time) a month ago? 2. Policy-makers. American reporters think their job is to examine U.S. policy-makers not foreign policy-makers. So they discount Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's behavior as an objective consequence of Clinton's subjective decisions. When Serbian ethnic cleansing follows NATO bombing, reporters treat the Serbian action not as the product of free will but as a reaction determined by NATO's action. So while journalists on the ground report on Serbian atrocities, journalists in the studios and the newsrooms in effect pass the blame to NATO and Clinton. This bias has produced a bizarre blame-America-first spin on the right. "We have ignited the very human rights catastrophe the war was started to avoid," declared Pat Buchanan on Face the Nation . Columnist Arianna Huffington compared Kosovo to Waco, arguing that just as Clinton's actions six years ago "precipitated" the murder-suicides by the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, his intervention in Kosovo "has unwittingly produced one of the great humanitarian catastrophes of the 20 th century." While some conservatives allege that Clinton's unnecessary belligerence provoked the Serbs to ethnic cleansing, others say his timidity about using ground troops "emboldened" the Serbs to the same effect. Clinton even gets the blame for Russian hostility. On Meet the Press , Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., accused Clinton of "pushing Russia into a corner and putting them in a position where they're no longer able to do anything but to react in an aggressive way towards our action." 3. Moral actors. When the Serbs butcher another 50 Kosovar Albanians or drive another 100,000 out of Kosovo, it's a dog-bites-man story. When NATO bombs what it thought was a military convoy and instead hits a caravan of civilian refugees, killing scores, it's a man-bites-dog story. For several days, the media treated the casualties caused by NATO as the lead story from Kosovo, overshadowing far greater casualties caused during that time by the Serbs. "This may have cost NATO the moral high ground," declared John McLaughlin, invoking the moral-equivalence formula usually despised by conservatives. Meanwhile, the Serbs' role in pushing the refugees onto the road in the middle of a war zone was scarcely mentioned. B. Sleight-of-Hand Inferences 4. Unachieved to unachievable. Today's media report news instantaneously and expect it to be made instantaneously as well. In less than two weeks, their verdict on the bombing of Yugoslavia leapt from unfulfilled objectives to failure to impossibility. Since air power hasn't brought the Serbs to their knees in four weeks, the media conclude that it never will. Congressional Republicans have decided it's "doomed to failure," according to Fred Barnes. Never mind that under NATO's plan, the bombing will become more severe each week. 5. Vietnam to Kosovo. Critics constantly compare Kosovo to Vietnam. They infer two lessons from Vietnam: that "gradual escalation" never works and that "bombing" can't break an enemy's will. The trick in invoking such analogies is to ignore the differences: that the war in Kosovo is being waged by 19 countries against one; that no superpower is willing to prop up the targeted country; and that today's air power and surveillance are vastly more precise than the "bombing" technology used in Vietnam. 6. Sinner to sin. Critics on the right argue that because Clinton is untrustworthy, so is the war. As George Will put it last week, the contempt of court citation against Clinton for falsely denying his affair with Monica Lewinsky is "a timely reminder of the mendacity that drenches his presidency, including his Balkan policy." Meanwhile, critics on the left argue that because the United States failed to intervene in Rwanda, its intervention in Kosovo is morally suspect and probably racist. C. Hidden Dichotomies 7. Empirical/moral. Centuries ago, scientific philosophers invented a strict separation between talking about the way the world is and talking about the way it ought to be. Today's media, following this premise, separate "editorial" from "news" judgments. The only standard by which "news" organizations feel comfortable evaluating a policy is success or failure, not right or wrong. So the media's consensus about Kosovo is that NATO's policy is "not working." As Tim Russert put it to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott on Meet the Press , "The atrocities continue. What success can you point to that any of your strategy has worked?" The alternative perspective goes overlooked: that the question is what NATO must do, that atrocities are a challenge rather than a verdict, and that NATO should persevere precisely because they continue. 8. Political/military. Critics say Clinton should have destroyed Serbian TV networks by now and never should have sworn off ground troops. They deride these as "political decisions" and mock NATO for refusing to bomb Milosevic's palace because it contains cultural treasures, including a Rembrandt. "The idea that Italy and Greece object to ground troops and therefore we shouldn't do what is necessary to win this war, is, in my view, ridiculous," protested Bill Kristol on This Week . But what's the definition of winning? Clinton and other NATO leaders say they're not just seeking a one-time victory over Milosevic. They're trying to develop what is essentially an international policing consortium. This is a political as well as military project. It entails compromising with allies who are more cautious about applying force and authorizing targets. Otherwise, the United States would have to police the world alone, which is unsustainable politically (thanks in part to vociferous opposition from many of these same critics), not to mention militarily. 9. Harm/help. Skeptics maintain that the bombing isn't helping the Kosovars. "I don't care about dropping any more bridges into the Danube River," Buchanan fumed on Face the Nation . "I don't know how that helps those people" in Kosovo. The question, he argued, should be "What is the best way to help these people and save these lives? Not how we can bomb another oil plant or oil refinery." Minutes later, host Bob Schieffer ended the show by noting that the Kosovars were still being purged and asking "whether what we are doing is doing any good." This dichotomy rules out the fallback strategy that NATO and U.S. officials have articulated from the outset: to make the cost of Milosevic's "victory" outweigh the rewards. Conservatives used to defend this concept (which they called "deterrence") when it was preached and practiced by President Reagan. If the punishment you administer to the current troublemaker fails to stop him, the theory goes, at least it will make the next troublemaker think twice. D. Self-Fulfilling Doubts 10. Practical futility. The pundits' verdict is in: The war is "doomed" and "already lost." On Late Edition , Wolf Blitzer observed that Milosevic "doesn't give, after a month of this, any impression that he is backing down." Quoting a report that U.S. military leaders see no sign "that Milosevic is changing his strategy or about to break," Russert asked Talbott, "Are we losing this war?" Other talking heads asserted that NATO is "not united" and won't be able to "stand up" as the conflict wears on. "Time is not on our side," warned former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft on Late Edition . "It is going to be very difficult to keep the alliance together." Of course, the best way to assure that Milosevic doesn't break, that NATO comes apart, and that the United States loses the war is to predict that Milosevic won't break, that NATO will come apart, and that the United States will lose the war. These predictions bolster the Serbs' morale while undermining NATO's. As Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., observed on Face the Nation , "Patience and resolve are as important a weapon today as actually the airstrikes are." 11. Moral authority. Rather than call Clinton a liar, many pundits pass this off as a widespread perception by others. They call it a "moral authority" and "public relations" problem, asking how it will "impact" his "ability to lead" Americans and NATO in war. "There is a common drum beat on the airwaves," a reporter asked Clinton on April 15, "that you, personally, lack the moral authority to be commander in chief." New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd warned that Clinton "does not inspire" great "loyalty," adding, "He may have a conflict of interest if he sends in ground troops. It would be hard to save his skin and their skin at the same time." By questioning Clinton's moral authority in this pseudo-objective way, journalists destroy what's left of his moral authority. 12. NATO credibility. Self-styled hawks fret that NATO will lose the war and thereby expose its impotence. This "lumbering and clumsy" alliance, incapable of "managing such brush fires as Kosovo," could "lose the Kosovo war in a month against the ruin of a rump state," warned columnist Charles Krauthammer. "If the perception is that for 26 days tiny little Yugoslavia ... has withstood NATO and the United States," asked Russert, will NATO and the United States be exposed as "a paper tiger"? Russert's guest, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., grimly intoned, "Many are predicting that this will be the funeral of NATO." And all because, in Krauthammer's words, Clinton "staked the survival of the most successful alliance in history on bright new academic ideas cooked up far from the battlefields on which they now flounder." Having defined anything less than the total recapture of Kosovo and the restoration of its refugees as a failure, Clinton's critics are ensuring that such failure will be interpreted as catastrophically as possible. As for their suggestion that NATO's credibility is too precious to be risked in war, you can understand their reluctance. Even tough guys have their Rembrandt.

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20030

You Don't Tug on the Avenger's Cape Greetings, oh frustrated and bone-weary consumer! It is I, the great Shopping Avenger, who has pledged himself to the betterment of all humankind, or at least to that portion of humankind that shops at Circuit City and rents trucks from U-Haul. The Shopping Avenger has much to discuss today: You will hear the tale of a Hasidic rabbi who suffered greatly at the hands of TWA, but who, due to his mystical and gentle nature, sought not the help of lawyers but instead the help of Shopping Avenger, who is a part-time kabalist and runs special discounts for clergy every Tuesday, and you will also learn the winning answer to the recent contest question "How much Turtle Wax constitutes a year's supply of Turtle Wax?" But first, the Shopping Avenger would like to tell his own tale of consumer woe. Many of you might find this a shocking statement, but even the Shopping Avenger sometimes gets smacked upside the head by the evil forces of rampant capitalism. Granted, this seldom happens when the Shopping Avenger is wearing his cape and codpiece and special decals, but the Shopping Avenger seldom ventures outside the Great Hall of Consumer Justice in his cape and codpiece and special decals, on account of the fact that he doesn't want to get arrested. What you should know is that by day the Shopping Avenger is a mild-mannered reporter for a major metropolitan magazine, and it is in this guise that the Shopping Avenger sometimes finds himself holding the short end of the consumer stick. Whatever that means. Take the following incident, which occurred at Heathrow airport, which, I am told, is somewhere in Europe. The Shopping Avenger, who was scheduled to transit home from the Middle East through Heathrow, was feeling ill and generally fed up at the end of his trip and so decided to upgrade himself, using his own money, to business class. The total cost of the ticket: $1,732. Remember that exorbitant sum. The first flight, out of the Middle East, left late and arrived even later at Heathrow, though not too late to make the connection. However, the Shopping Avenger and several other passengers were met at the gate by a British Airways agent, who said that there was no time to make the connection, which was leaving from a different terminal. Technically, he admitted, there was enough time, but since British Airways was committed to "on-time departures," the plane's doors would be closing early. The Shopping Avenger argued in his mild-mannered manner that British Airways did not, in fact, have a commitment to "on-time departures" because the originating flight did not depart on time. The Shopping Avenger received no answer to this statement. Instead, the Shopping Avenger was booked onto a later flight and so asked the agent if he could use a British Airways telephone to call Mrs. Shopping Avenger, who would be waiting for him at the other end. The agent directed the Shopping Avenger to the British Airways business-class lounge, where a telephone would be made available to him. You, of course, know what happened next. The Shopping Avenger was told by a very nasty airline employee that only first-class passengers would be allowed to use the telephone. When the Shopping Avenger argued, in an increasingly less mild-mannered manner, that the call was necessitated by a British Airways screw up and, therefore, British Airways should pay for the call, he was told that pay phones could be found outside the lounge. This was when Shopping Avenger stated very loudly that for $1,732, he should be allowed to make a two-minute phone call. And it was the weekend! Weekend calling rates, for Pete's sake! But British Airways is an insufferably greedy little company, and so the Shopping Avenger was given no recourse but to invoke the power of his high office. The Shopping Avenger asked this nasty lady if she had ever heard of the Shopping Avenger. To the Shopping Avenger's dismay, this was her answer: "No." What about Slate magazine? "No." Well, whatever. The Shopping Avenger, while not identifying himself as the Shopping Avenger--this would have meant changing into his codpiece and cape in the business-class lounge--informed this poorly informed British Airways employee that the Shopping Avenger was America's foremost consumer advocate (this is a lie, but she's English, so what does she know?) and that the Shopping Avenger would hear about this treatment and seek vengeance. Well, did her tune ever change. Not exactly her tune--she remained as mean as a ferret, but she did let Shopping Avenger use her telephone. The moral of this story for the world's airlines: Penny-pinching might make you rich, but it also gets you blasted in Slate magazine. The other moral: Superheroes should never travel without their codpiece under their pants. There is only one airline the Shopping Avenger believes understands the fundamentals of customer service, and that is Southwest Airlines. But more on that in the next episode. First, this month's U-Haul outrage. The following letter contains perhaps the funniest story the Shopping Avenger has heard about U-Haul, and by now the Shopping Avenger has received upward of 6.7 million complaints about U-Haul. The story comes from one Susan Hwang: "A year ago, I, too, reserved a truck at U-Haul and get this--they said someone with my SAME NAME--Susan Hwang is really common--and going to the SAME SUBURB of Chicago, picked up my truck. Amazing!! They had to rent a bigger truck to me, which, of course cost more and at that point, they have you by the balls." At least the anatomically confused Susan Hwang got her truck. Most of the Shopping Avenger's correspondents wind up having to rent from Ryder and Budget, who seem to keep extra trucks on hand in order to benefit from U-Haul's nefarious practice of overbooking. On a semi-positive note, the Shopping Avenger did finally hear from Johna Burke, the U-Haul spokeswoman, who apologized for the inconvenience caused K., the . (For other U-Haul horror stories, click .) K., you'll recall, was left standing in the U-Haul parking lot when a credit-card reservation he'd made was dishonored by U-Haul. "Mr. K.'s two day rental reservation should have been honored so long as he provided us with his credit card number, which we will assume was the case. This is what we at U-Haul call a 'confirmed reservation.' " Burke's letter, though, is filled with what we at Shopping Avenger call "bullshit." "Once we have a confirmed reservation we should have moved heaven and earth to see that Mr. K.'s two day reservation was filled," Burke wrote. Yes, of course they should have--but they never do. This is not Burke's fault. She is simply paid to explain the inexplicable. The Shopping Avenger has received 164--no exaggeration for effect in this instance--letters so far from people who say they had confirmed reservations with U-Haul, only to show up and find no truck waiting for them. The Shopping Avenger would like to hear from more--to show Burke and the bossmen at U-Haul the hollowness of their concept of "confirmed reservations." One more thing before we get to our tale of rabbinical woe: the winning answer to the recent contest question "How much Turtle Wax comprises a year's supply of Turtle Wax?" Fifty-eight of you wrote in, 48 with the correct answer, which is, of course: "Depends upon how many Turtles you wanna wax," in the words of one of our winners, Samir Raiyani. Or, as another of our winners, Karen Bitterman, wrote, it "depends on the size of the turtle--and whether or not you park it in a covered space." Unfortunately, because so many of you wrote in with the more or less correct answer, the Shopping Avenger is unable to award the contest prize, which was to be a year's supply of Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat. Now to our hapless rabbi, Rabbi S., who wrote the Shopping Avenger seeking worldly justice in his case against TWA. The story of Rabbi S. is entirely typical of the airline industry--a minor problem made enormous by the cruelty and ignorance of employees who are, in theory, hired by the greedheads who run the airlines to take care of passengers. Rabbi S., his wife, and kids arrived at Kennedy airport in time for his flight to Detroit, parked curbside, unloaded their luggage, and proceeded to the check-in counter. There the rabbi asked a TWA representative if he could leave his luggage by the counter for his wife to check in while he parked the car, to which he received a positive response and left to go park. No one told him, though, that he must first show his driver's license to the ticket agent. The ticket agent refused to check the rabbi's bags once he left, telling the wife that "security reasons" forbade him from checking the luggage of ticket holders who were not present. But then she told Rabbi S.'s wife: "If you want, you can pay an extra $100 for the extra bags"--i.e., charge his luggage to her ticket. "How could it be a security issue," Rabbi S. wrote the Shopping Avenger, "if they're ready to take money for the bags?" Rabbi S. was running late (Kennedy airport is not a parking-friendly place), and his wife refused to check her bags without his bags. She was then told that she would miss the flight, and then her children began crying, and then she began crying. Rabbi S. finally made it back to Terminal 25 minutes before the flight was scheduled to depart. His wife handed him one baby and took the other to the gate. "The woman at the counter treated me like a piece of dirt," he wrote. "First she said she's not sure whether the flight is still open. Then she took more than five minutes to look around and find someone who said, 'Yeah, I think we just closed it a minute ago.' ... In the meantime, my wife went to the gate and the people at the gate told her there's plenty of time for me--and let her wait outside the gate for me for another 15 minutes. Alas, my wife didn't realize that [I] could not come because of the luggage issue and the haughtiness of the people downstairs." At the ticket counter, Rabbi S. was told that he wouldn't make this flight and that he should book himself on another. His wife and one of his children, meanwhile, got on the flight to Detroit. Rabbi S. had TWA book him on another flight, a Delta flight, and he schlepped--that's the only word for it--to the Delta terminal, only to be told that his was a "voluntary" transfer--he was late for his TWA flight--and so therefore he would have to pay an additional $300. "My fault!?!? I'm thinking to myself, 'If your people would have been competent enough to tell me that I should show my license and courteous enough to put the luggage on for my wife, then I would be on a flight now with my family to Detroit, not roaming an airport with a starving baby being sent on a wild goose chase." Here the story becomes as confusing as the Book of Leviticus, but suffice it to say that TWA continued to torture Rabbi S. for another day--finally forcing him to buy a new $400 ticket. "I have never in my life been treated so horribly," Rabbi S. wrote. The Shopping Avenger contacted Jim Brown, a TWA spokesman, to discuss Rabbi S.'s case. To his surprise--the Shopping Avenger has not had very good experiences on TWA--Brown investigated the complaint and wrote: "TWA has issued a credit for the value of Rabbi S.'s ticket for $244. In addition, a Customer Relations representative has been communicating with the rabbi on this incident and is sending him the difference between that ticket and the cost of a new ticket, $219, plus a letter of apology for the behavior of our representatives at Kennedy Airport. She is also enclosing four travel coupons valued at $75 each." Brown, however, had no explanation for the behavior at the Kennedy ticket counter--entirely typical behavior that often makes the already unpleasant air travel experience completely unbearable. In the next episode, the Shopping Avenger will tell the story of Southwest Airlines, the only airline that seems to actually care about customer service. But the Shopping Avenger needs your help! Keep those airline stories coming--and all those other stories, too--except computer stories. Let me say again, the Shopping Avenger does not fix computers. One final request: The Shopping Avenger would like to hear from anyone who has actually eaten Rice-a-Roni and from anyone who could explain why it is known as "the San Francisco treat." Onward, shoppers!

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20040

Eastern Europe Eight years after the Berlin Wall's collapse, how meaningful are the political and economic differences that once divided Eastern and Western Europe? Herewith, a primer on the transition to democracy and capitalism in the old Soviet bloc and former Soviet Republics. Statistics gauging economic change since communism's collapse are deceptive. All countries initially foundered. Only since 1993, with the onset of widespread privatization of economic activity, have most of them grown. However, even post-1993 averages (compiled by the U.S. Agency for International Development from international lending-agency data) may be misleading in evaluating economic success. Take Albania, which averaged 8.4 percent growth during this period--and attribute much (perhaps all) of its measured growth to a massive Ponzi scheme, which collapsed this winter, bringing down the entire Albanian economy. Central Europe Czech Republic ( 2.7 percent growth--measured for all countries as average annual GDP change since 1993--75 percent private-sector share of GDP in 1996. Democracy strong: free elections; successful transfer of power; free media.) Despite economic growth and the lowest unemployment in Eastern Europe , the Czech economy has suffered a recent setback. In the last six months, several of the nation's biggest banks collapsed because of loose lending and fraud. To reassure foreign investors, last week conservative Prime Minister Václav Klaus announced a 5 percent cut in government spending. Opposition Social Democrats may use Klaus' austerity program to mobilize growing discontent. Chain-smoking President Václav Havel's failing health is another concern. Though Havel's position is largely ceremonial, he helps give credibility to the widely mistrusted bureaucracy and police. Hungary (1.25 percent growth; 73 percent private. Democracy strong: free elections; successful transfer of power; constitutional protection for the media and minorities.) Because it privatized early and aggressively, Hungary has attracted $15 billion in foreign investment since 1989 --more than any other Eastern European nation. To curry favor with NATO and the European Union, for the last two years its centrist government (led by Gyula Horn, also an ex-Communist) has battled popular nationalist parties. It installed Western-style legal protections for minorities and gave up long-standing claims to Transylvania, the Hungarian-populated section of Romania. Poland (5.25 percent growth; 60 percent private. Democracy strong: free elections; successful transfer of power; no state-run media.) It is considered Eastern Europe's greatest economic success . Poland's government privatized more cautiously than Hungary's or the Czech Republic's. Western fears about the 1995 election of ex-party apparatchik Aleksander Kwasniewski as president (displacing Lech Walesa, who calls him the "red spider") have been allayed by Kwasniewski's support for further privatization and his enthusiasm for NATO expansion. (This summer Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic will probably be invited to join the alliance.) Amid much protest from the right wing, Kwasniewski's government restored the legal rights to abortion and divorce removed by the Walesa government. Romania (4.7 percent growth; 50 percent private. Democracy relatively weak: free and fair elections; state-controlled media.) Communist Party boss (ostensibly a social democrat) Ion Iliescu ruled between a mob's execution of longtime strongman Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989 and his own loss of an election last year. His successor, a geology professor named Emil Constantinescu, promised rapid privatization and protection for an independent media. Romania is jockeying to be included in NATO expansion , but nobody takes its candidacy seriously. Slovakia (3.65 percent growth; 70 percent private. Democracy relatively weak: free elections; strong state security force; state-pressured media.) Inheriting the most depressed regions of former Czechoslovakia and a massive, outmoded arms-manufacturing industry, it fared badly after its 1992-1993 split with the Czech Republic. Slovakia has had less success than other Central European countries at ousting corrupt Communist bosses from its bureaucracy. Prime Minister Vladimír Meciar is accused of having orchestrated the kidnapping of the Slovakian president's son, among other charges. The Balkans Albania (8.4 percent growth; 75 percent private. Democracy weak: widespread police killings and beatings; no free elections; state-controlled media.) Between 50 percent and 90 percent of the country invested nearly $3 billion in a Ponzi scheme that collapsed this winter. When the government failed to fulfill promises to compensate investors, rioters pillaged the capital, Tirana, and battled government-organized militias. So far the staunchly anti-Communist government has relied on repression to survive the crisis. Bosnia (No economic data. Democracy weak: elections held last September amid accusations of fraud.) Thoroughly destroyed by war , it is economically devastated and ethnically divided. The Dayton Accord separates the country into two provinces: the Muslim-dominated Bosnian Federation and the Serbian Republika Srpska. Serbian and Croatian minorities complain they will not get a fair shake in the Muslim-majority state. The U.S. military will leave Bosnia at the end of this year. Bulgaria (-2 percent growth; 45 percent private. Democracy weak: no elections until this month.) Bulgaria's economy remains socialist . Price controls are drastic: McDonald's restaurants in Bulgaria sell the cheapest Big Macs in the world, and oil costs the same as in Saudi Arabia. Shortages and slipping wages sparked street protests this winter that forced the ruling socialists to hand power over to a caretaker government. A centrist coalition won elections this month. Emigration to Western Europe has been significant : Five hundred thousand people have left Bulgaria (total population, 9 million) since 1989. Croatia (0.15 percent growth; 50 percent private. Democracy questionable: allegations of electoral fraud; authoritarian but popular government; little repression of media.) Since Yugoslavia's disintegration, Franjo Tudjman, a right-wing dictator, has exploited Croatian nationalist sentiments. Demonstrations this winter against Tudjman quickly dissipated (at the time, he was being treated in the United States for cancer--he may not live much longer). Despite rampant war profiteering and a large state presence in the economy, growth has been steady, and Tudjman remains popular . Macedonia ( -3.2 percent growth; 50 percent private. Democracy relatively strong: free elections, though minority groups claim oppression. ) Though Macedonia avoided the Balkan War, ethnic tensions and instability are a problem. Last year, the country's liberal, pro-West president was seriously injured in a car-bomb attack. A Greek minority demands that Macedonia, with its ethnically Albanian majority, be absorbed into Greece. Serbia (No economic data. Democracy weak: corruption during elections; state-controlled media.) Slobodan Milosevic, an old party boss, has retained power since 1989, appealing to Serbian chauvinism to elude liberal reforms. War, hyperinflation, and unemployment , however, have recently undermined his popularity. Two months of street protests this winter were said to presage his ouster. His concession of the opposition's demands (recognition of local election results and reopening of nonstate-run media), however, ultimately solidified Milosevic's control. Slovenia (3.5 percent growth; 45 percent private. Democracy relatively strong: free elections; constitutional protection for the media and minorities.) The most Western, liberal, and independent of the former Yugoslav republics, Slovenia escaped the Balkan War unscathed . Unlike the other agriculture-dependent Balkan economies, Slovenia has a significant manufacturing sector, much of it high-tech. Its per capita income is already higher than those of Portugal and Greece, members of the EU. However, because of its reluctance to privatize, foreign investment is scant, and growth has been lower than predicted. The Baltics Estonia (-1.25 percent growth; 75 percent private. Democracy relatively strong: safeguards against police abuse and state interference in the media.) Thanks to Finnish and Swedish investment, Estonia is the most prosperous Baltic state , though its recovery did not begin until 1995. Russia still maintains military bases near its border, and Estonia relies on Russian oil and gas. But Estonia has been increasingly defiant: It switched official allegiance from the Russian to the Greek Orthodox Church, criticized Russia's war in Chechnya, and imposed requirements that make it difficult for its Russian-speaking minority to become citizens. Latvia (-3.1 percent growth; 60 percent private. Democracy relatively strong: free elections; successful transfer of power.) Economists predict the country will soon benefit from its tight controls on inflation , which have stymied short-term growth. For the last two years, Latvia has been governed by a six-party "rainbow coalition." Lithuania (-4.2 percent growth; 65 percent private. Democracy strong: free elections; successful transfer of power.) After flirting with a return to communism, party bosses retook power in 1992. The conservative Vytautas Landsbergis--musicologist, former chess champion, and post-Communist Lithuania's first prime minister (between 1991 and 1992)--was re-elected last year. The economy has foundered since the Soviet Union's collapse. Western Soviet Republics Belarus (-7.8 percent growth; 15 percent private. Democracy nonexistent: no independent judiciary; repressive state security apparatus; state-controlled media.) The most Soviet of the former Soviet republics, it is ruled by Alexander Lukashenko , a dictator who recently consolidated his personal control over the country's media and secret police. He has enhanced the country's ties to Russia, vociferously opposes NATO expansion, and alleges that fledgling opposition movements are CIA plants (there is no evidence of this). Moldova (-8.6 percent growth; 40 percent private. Democracy relatively weak: free elections; hostility toward minorities; government interference with press.) Initially touted as a model of reform, Moldova is now in a shambles. A rebellion by Ukrainian and Russian-speaking minorities ended in 1992, with the Romanian-speaking majority government retaining control over only half of the country. It was the center of a recently shut-down Internet porn scam that charged unwitting customers, mainly Americans, the cost of a long-distance call to Moldova when they downloaded dirty pictures. Ukraine (-14.8 percent growth; 40 percent private. Democracy weak: widespread corruption and organized crime.) Fifty percent of the economy is invested in the black market to avoid taxes (as high as 89 percent) and corrupt government officials--largely former Communists who require under-the-table payments. Consequently, foreigners have only reluctantly invested $700 million--the same amount as in Estonia, which is only a fraction of the size of Ukraine. The government disbanded its nuclear arsenal in 1994 after a U.S. payment of $400 million. Despite nationalist hostility toward Russia, Ukraine remains too dependent to do anything more than grumble about the Russian military's continued use of its ports. Transcaucasian Republics Armenia (1.03 percent growth; 50 percent private. Democracy weak: allegations of election fraud; arbitrary arrests; restrictions on freedom of press.) Alienated by its Muslim neighbors--Turkey to the west, Iran to the south, and Azerbaijan to the east--Armenia aligns itself with Georgia and Russia (which keeps 12,000 troops on Armenia's border). An influential Armenian-American diaspora helps the country get more U.S. aid per capita than any country except Israel . Since 1994, it has been ruled by an autocratic intellectual, who has banned opposition parties and controls the media. Azerbaijan (-13.5 percent growth; 25 percent private. Democracy nonexistent: widespread corruption; no free elections; repression of minorities.) A recent cease-fire ended the Muslim government's six-year war with Armenia over control of a Christian enclave in the northeast part of the country. Afterward, oil companies scrambled to tap its prodigious reserves. Before the Soviets took over, Azerbaijan was a boom country that attracted hundreds of European speculators. The government has been unstable--done in by a series of coups and the continued rule of Communist bosses. Georgia (-15.75 percent growth; 50 percent private. Democracy fairly strong: free elections but continued human-rights abuses, including torture and forced confessions.) Western expectations for Georgia--the highly regarded former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze is the president--have been disappointed. The government battles rebels from Abkhazia, a Muslim province in the country's northwest. Russia still maintains thousands of troops in Georgia. Only last year did the country begin to emerge from a severe depression, but it still lacks consistent electricity in Tbilisi, its capital.

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20054

The Other L-Word What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation By Charles Murray Broadway Books; 192 pages; $20 Libertarianism: A Primer By David Boaz The Free Press; 336 pages; $23 Are libertarians on a roll? If you begin with the recent election to Congress of Ron Paul, a former Libertarian presidential candidate; note the emergence of cyberlibertarians as a political constituency; factor in the collapse of communism; and quote Bill Clinton's admission that "the era of big government is over," you have what sounds like a compelling case. There are other signs as well: the rise of the Cato Institute as one of the leading Washington think tanks; and the general accrual of credibility to what, 20 years ago, was a fringe-y movement of Ayn Rand devotees and risqué Republicans. Yet, there is an equally strong argument to be made that the United States is only moving toward libertarian-style minimalist government in the same way that you get closer to Paris when you drive east to the supermarket. Libertarian presidential candidate Harry Browne got less than 500,000 votes in 1996. This was an increase over 1992 but only a slight improvement upon the Libertarian vote in 1988, and a far weaker performance than in 1980. Meanwhile, leaders of the Christian right, whose aims are antithetical to those of libertarians, make the plausible claim that it is they who are winning converts and influence by the day. And if Clinton now knows to eschew "big government," members of the Republican Congress elected in 1994 have also learned their lesson about attempting to make government truly smaller. The appearance of these two books counts as an entry in the plus side of the ledger. Each attempts to make libertarianism more respectable and popular. They are pitched, however, at different audiences. Charles Murray is a conservative trying to persuade other conservatives that the absence of restraint will in fact make people more moral. He rather reluctantly defends the legalization of drugs, prostitution, and pornography, and concedes that government has to play some more-than-minimal role. David Boaz, an official at the Cato Institute, sees libertarianism as neither conservative nor liberal, and aims to convert everyone. But while he is more ecumenical, Boaz is far more extreme. If you insist on keeping national parks or old-age pensions, he has some advice on the least bad way to run these things--but, given his druthers, he wouldn't run them at all. Murray's more laconic account is based upon a classical liberal argument: Force is bad; cooperation is good; government is force; ergo, the only legitimate functions of government are to enforce voluntary agreements, and to prevent force and fraud. Murray accepts, though, that there also exist limited "public goods." The two he names are environmental protection and education. These exceptions to the rule of the minimal state are probably necessary to make libertarianism palatable to mainstream conservatives. The problem is that they require an admission--which Murray never makes directly--that decisions made by a democratic government within the boundaries of a constitution are not merely "force" but also "cooperation," albeit with a certain degree of legitimate coercion. In an attempt to distinguish those public purposes that are tolerable from those that aren't, Murray posits that, to be valid, public goods either have to be "nonexclusive"--interventions from which everyone benefits--or else must arise to counter "externalities," costs passed on to others that, in practical terms, cannot be compensated, as in the case of the chemical incinerator that pollutes the air. What this scheme leaves unclear is why education and the environment are valid public goods while other efforts he opposes--insuring elderly people against poverty, say, or providing national health insurance--are not. Education and the environment are not purely nonexclusive goods. Some people who either don't have children or who don't like to visit national parks--or both--will be taxed to pay for them. And if the standard of nonexclusivity is not absolute, then programs Murray rejects, such as welfare and Medicare, can reasonably qualify. Anyone may fall upon hard times, and most people anticipate being around long enough to benefit from nationalized health care for the elderly. Murray's next strategy is to try a series of more pragmatic arguments against government action. To show how little sense regulations make, he proposes a thought experiment. Why not give consumers a choice, he asks, about whether to use regulated or unregulated products (unregulated products, he stipulates, would have to be labeled as such). This merely demonstrates that Murray has failed to understand his own argument about externalities as a basis for public goods. The point of regulation is not merely to protect consumers, but to protect innocent third parties. Of course consumers would be better off if the government gave them the right to buy appliances built by polluting factories and low-cost child labor. (In fact, consumers already can, so long as the pollution and child labor are foreign and not domestic.) These regulations exist for the benefit of those who live downstream from the factory and the children who would otherwise be working inside it. Or, to take an example of regulation employed by Murray, consider the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit. Murray says there is no reason to keep people from harming themselves. But speed limits don't just prevent people who willingly take the risk of driving faster and more dangerously from hurting themselves. They improve the odds for the children in the back seat, and for the safe driver in the opposite lane, whom the reckless driver might plow into. With this example, Murray undercuts himself in another way. He says regulation only gets more onerous over time. But the national speed limit is an example of precisely the opposite point. In most states you can now drive 65 or 70 on freeways. Like many conservatives, Murray high-dudgeons himself into the Jeane Kirkpatrick position of ascribing historical inevitability to a trend that is actually in the midst of reversal. Murray involves himself in more serious contradictions by drawing in arguments from his earlier books, each of which presents a different case against public action to fight poverty. In Losing Ground (1984), the work that made him famous, he contended that government anti-poverty programs had done much to create the underclass. In The Bell Curve (1994), he said that some people--namely blacks--were genetically inferior, a condition that government could do nothing about. In What It Means to Be a Libertarian , he says government intervention is morally wrong. He means these arguments to be mutually reinforcing: Government social programs don't work; they can't work on account of human nature; and if by chance they do work, they're morally unjustified anyhow. But this triple argument in the triple alternative actually obliterates itself. In The Bell Curve , Murray contends that government can't really help people. In the version of that argument given in What It Means , he asserts that "most government interventions are ineffectual" because "modern society has the inertia of a ponderous freight train." But if government can't reroute the freight train in a better direction, it's hard to see how it can derail it. The metaphor undermines the Losing Ground Murray, the guy who writes that "[u]ntil the government began masking the social costs created by large numbers of fatherless children, civilized communities everywhere stigmatized illegitimacy." The "futility" thesis--government can't help--and the "perversity" thesis--government makes problems worse instead of better--are at odds. If government can't do anything, how can it do so strongly the opposite of what it intends? Dimly aware of this problem, Murray brings in a more sweeping illegitimacy thesis--government is unjustified--to trump all the others. But this exposes his underlying bias, which casts doubt on the critiques of government in both Losing Ground and The Bell Curve . The three Murrays play a kind of fugue throughout this book. In fact, there seems to be a fourth Murray struggling to get out. This is the Charles Murray who says late in the book that he half-supports the idea of a negative income tax--a guaranteed income for everyone. This would seem to violate all the aforementioned principles. It would create a powerful incentive (of the kind attacked in Losing Ground ) for people not to work; it would be an attempt to help people who The Bell Curve says can't be helped anyway; and it would certainly violate What It Means to Be a Libertarian 's admonition against forcing people to pay for dubious public goods. What Murray likes about the idea is that it would finally discharge society's obligation to members of the underclass. They might not be better off, but they would have to quit bellyaching. Combined with a new, heartfelt attack on civil-rights laws (Murray says bad, prejudicial discrimination is inseparable from good, economically sensible discrimination), this passage leaves one with the sense that in declaring himself a libertarian, Murray has not yet removed the final veil. David Boaz has written a more stimulating, more consistent, and more dogmatic book. After a long history of libertarian ideas, he proposes a version of Murray's basic argument, which he calls the "nonagression axiom"--no one can use force against anyone else. That's it. Unlike Murray, Boaz draws no exception for public goods. He does not pander to political reality by accepting large expenditures for national defense, environmental regulation, or publicly funded education. He does not believe in national parks ("private stewards" will exercise "proper stewardship"). Nor does he believe in military conscription in wartime ("[t]he libertarian believes that people will voluntarily defend a country worth defending"). Though this version of libertarianism seems to flirt with anarchism, Boaz isn't worried about disarray. In the absence of malign government intervention, there will emerge what he calls "spontaneous order." Boaz's model for this is the Internet. He neglects, of course, the fact that the Internet began life as a federal defense project. But the real question Boaz begs is why the laws he thinks are necessary for society to function, including fair chunks of the U.S. Constitution, count as "spontaneous" and good while everything else is defined as coercion. Capitalism may arise spontaneously, but the Bill of Rights is as much a man-made construct as the food-stamp program. In the end, it is futile to argue with this view. Boaz has worked out every possible detail of his libertarian heaven in an utterly comprehensive and slightly mad way. He takes pains to say he is not offering a plan for a perfect society, merely a "framework for utopia" (the phrase is Robert Nozick's). But his heart is clearly with the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu, who wrote: "Without law or compulsion, men would dwell in harmony." Murray, too, is afflicted with millenarianism. "That America is not the land of universal plenty it should have become is for many libertarians, including me, the source of our deepest anger about what big government has done to this country," he writes at one point. He offers instead "a society that is prosperous and virtuous, but one that is exciting and fun as well." I was reminded of the famous passage where Marx writes that in the Communist future, every worker will spend part of his day fishing, part writing poetry, and only part working at his lathe. Marx believed that the state would wither away. Libertarians believe men must wither it. But really, their utopias are not so different. They share a wishful vision of human perfectibility dressed up as an idea of justice.

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Martin Scorsese The first reviews of Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead are the latest evidence of the director's status as a critical favorite. This is not because the notices have been uniformly glowing--it's been some time since a Scorsese picture won unanimous praise from reviewers--but because Scorsese remains, almost uniquely among American directors, an embodiment of the beleaguered idea that filmmaking, and therefore film criticism, can be a serious, important, life-and-death matter. Here, for instance, is Roger Ebert, all thumbs: To look at Bringing Out the Dead --to look, indeed, at almost any Scorsese film--is to be reminded that film can touch us urgently and deeply. Scorsese is never on autopilot, never panders, never sells out, always goes for broke; to watch his films is to see a man risking his talent, not simply exercising it. He makes movies as well as they can be made. Never? Always? This is pure ideology--which is not to say that it isn't, to some extent, true. Even Scorsese's weaker films bristle with energy and intelligence. But look closely at what Ebert says: To be reminded of the power of film as a medium is not quite the same as being moved by a particular film, and Bringing Out the Dead is, for all its hectic pacing and breakneck intensity, an oddly unmoving experience. Yes, you think, movies can touch us urgently and deeply. Why doesn't this one? If Scorsese makes movies as well as they can be made, why does one so often feel that his movies--especially over the last decade or so--could have been better? Above all, to look at Bringing Out the Dead is to be reminded of a lot of other Scorsese films. Critics have noted its similarities with Taxi Driver , Scorsese's first collaboration with screenwriter Paul Schrader (who also wrote The Last Temptation of Christ and the later drafts of Raging Bull ). Both movies feature a disturbed outsider cruising the nightmarish, as-yet-ungentrified streets of Manhattan in search of redemption. In place of Sport, Harvey Keitel's suave, vicious pimp in the earlier film, Bringing Out the Dead features Cy, a suave, vicious drug dealer played by Cliff Curtis. The mood here is a good deal softer: The scabrous nihilism of Taxi Driver is no longer as palatable--or, perhaps, as accurate in its response to the flavor of the times or the mood of its creators--as it was in 1976. Nicolas Cage's Frank Pierce saves Cy from a death as gruesome as the one De Niro's Travis Bickle visited on Sport, and when Frank does take a life (in the movie's best, most understated scene), it's an act of mercy. Aside from these parallels and variations, there's plenty in Bringing Out the Dead to remind you that you're watching a Scorsese picture. There's voice-over narration. There's an eclectic, relentless rock 'n' roll score and a directorial cameo--this time Scorsese provides the disembodied voice of an ambulance dispatcher. There are jarring, anti-realist effects embedded in an overall mise en scène of harsh verisimilitude. And, of course, there is the obligatory religious imagery--the final frames present a classic Pietà, with Patricia Arquette (whose character is named Mary) cradling Cage, the man of sorrows, in her arms. To survey Scorsese's oeuvre is to find such echoings and prefigurations in abundance. Look at Boxcar Bertha , a throwaway piece of apprentice-work he made for schlock impresario Roger Corman in the early '70s (if you've never seen it, imagine Bonnie and Clyde remade as an episode of Kung Fu ), and then look at The Last Temptation of Christ , the controversial, deeply personal rendering of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel which infuriated some Christians a decade and a half later. Different as they are, both films prominently feature 1) a crucifixion and 2) Barbara Hershey naked. Well, that may be a coincidence. But it's hard to think of an active director who has produced such an emphatically cross-referenced body of work who seems not so much to repeat himself (though he does some of that) as to make movies by recombining a recognizable and fairly stable set of narrative, thematic, and stylistic elements. In other words, Scorsese is the last living incarnation of la politique des auteurs. That old politique --the auteur theory, in plain English--was first articulated in the 1950s by a group of French critics, many of whom went on to become, as directors, fixtures of the Nouvelle Vague . In a nutshell, the theory--brought to these shores in 1962 by Village Voice film critic Andrew Sarris--held that, like any work of art, a film represents the vision of an individual artist, almost always the director. The artists who populated the auterist canon--Howard Hawks and John Ford, pre-eminently--had labored within the constraints of the studio system. But even their lesser films, according to auterist critics, could be distinguished from mere studio hackwork by the reiteration of a unique cinematic vocabulary and by an implicit but unmistakable sense of solitary genius in conflict with bureaucratic philistinism. The auteur theory was quickly challenged, most notably by Pauline Kael, who shredded Sarris in the pages of Film Quarterly . But the "new Hollywood" of the '70s--with Kael as its champion, scold, and Cassandra--was dominated by young directors who attained, thanks to the collapse of the old studios, an unprecedented degree of creative autonomy, and who thought of themselves as artists. What resulted, as Peter Biskind shows in his New Hollywood dish bible Easy Riders, Raging Bulls , was an epidemic of megalomania, sexual libertinism, money-wasting, and drug abuse--as well as a few dozen classics of American cinema. The avatars of the New Hollywood were mostly "movie brats"--socially maladroit, nerdy young men (and they were, to a man, men) who shared a fervid, almost religious devotion to cinema. Scorsese, a runty, asthmatic altar boy from New York City's Little Italy who traded Catholic seminary for New York University film school, was arguably the purest in his faith. Unlike Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, or Steven Spielberg, "St. Martin" (as Biskind calls him) did not see directing as a route to world domination but as a priestly avocation, a set of spiritual exercises embedded in technical problems. Scorsese's technical proficiency won him some early breaks. While making Who's That Knocking at My Door , his earnest, autobiographical first feature, independently, Scorsese was hired to edit Woodstock into a coherent film. His success (more or less) led to more rock 'n' roll editing assignments--a traveling sub-Woodstock "festival" called Medicine Ball Caravan ; Elvis on Tour --and then to Boxcar Bertha , which allowed him to join the Directors Guild and gave him the chance to make Mean Streets . That movie helped launch the careers of Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro, and taught generations of would-be tough guys the meaning of the word "mook." Kael called Mean Streets "a triumph of personal film-making," and even though it may be the single most imitated movie of the past 30 years--cf The Pope of Greenwich Village, State of Grace, Federal Hill, Boyz N the Hood , etc.--it has lost remarkably little of its freshness and power. Watching it, you feel that you are seeing real life on the screen, but real life heightened and shaped by absolute artistic self-assurance. Or, to quote Kael again, "Mean Streets never loses touch with the ordinary look of things or with common experience. Rather, it puts us in closer touch with the ordinary, the common, by turning a different light on them." This kind of realism marks Scorsese's next two films, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore --his best piece of directing-for-hire, and one of the half-forgotten gems of the period--and Taxi Driver , both of which were critically and commercially successful. But the medium-budget, artisanal, personal filmmaking of the early '70s soon gave way to grander visions. To be a New Hollywood director was to flirt with hubris. Biskind's book, accordingly, concludes with a litany of spectacular flameouts: Coppola's Apocalypse Now and One From the Heart, Spielberg's 1941 , William Friedkin's Sorcerer, and, of course, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate . According to Mardik Martin, Scorsese's erstwhile writing partner (as quoted by Biskind): "The auteur theory killed all these people. One or two films, the magazines told them they were geniuses, that they could do anything. They went completely bananas. They thought they were God." Scorsese's own Götterdämmerung came with New York, New York , a hugely ambitious jazz epic starring De Niro and Liza Minelli (Scorsese's mistress at the time), and the first of a series of flops that continued with Raging Bull and The King of Comedy . Of these three, Raging Bull has been singled out for vindication. It's the highest-ranking of the three Scorsese films on the American Film Institute's Top 100 list, and it's widely considered to be his masterpiece. But it remains exceedingly hard to watch, not so much because of the repulsiveness of De Niro's Jake La Motta as because of its overall sense of aesthetic claustrophobia. It's a movie lacquered by its own self-importance, so bloated with the ambition to achieve greatness that it can barely move. If it convinces you it's a masterpiece, it does so by sheer brute force. Raging Bull is undone by its own perfectionism. New York, New York and The King of Comedy stand up rather better, in my opinion, in spite of their obvious flaws. (So does The Last Waltz , a documentary of the Band's last concert done simultaneously with New York, New York , thanks to the magic of cocaine.) For one thing, New York, New York is virtually the only Scorsese movie (aside from "Life Lessons," his crackerjack contribution to the Coppola-produced anthology film New York Stories ) to have at its center the relationship between a man and a woman. For another, it ends with Liza Minelli parading through a series of phantasmagoric stage sets singing a pointedly ironic song called "Happy Endings"--a sequence every bit as dazzling (and as mystifying) as the ballet from An American in Paris . Just as Mean Streets is an unparalleled demonstration of the power of film to convey reality, "Happy Endings" is a celebration of film's magical ability to create it. A moviegoer's dream, but good luck seeing it on the big screen. For its part, The King of Comedy , a creepy reprise of Taxi Driver --played, this time, for laughs--is a movie made before its time, back when celebrity-stalking was a piquant metaphor for our cultural ills, rather than the focus of our cultural life. De Niro and Sandra Bernhard kidnap Jerry Lewis (playing, brilliantly, a famous late-night talk show host), Bernhard steals the movie, and the ending is guaranteed to provoke long, excruciating arguments about the difference between fantasy and reality. In Biskind's account of the tragedy of the New Hollywood, Spielberg is the villain, Hal Ashby the martyr, and Scorsese the scarred survivor. After the failures of the early '80s, he picked himself up and made some more movies: the quirky, proto-Indie downtown comedy After Hours , The Color of Money (a respectable sequel to The Hustler ), and his long dreamed of The Last Temptation of Christ . His fortunes revived with GoodFellas , which was hailed as a return to form, and floundered again with The Age of Innocence , one of his periodic attempts--like The Last Waltz , Temptation and, most recently, Kundun --to defy expectation. Next came Casino, one of his periodic attempts to defy the expectation that he would defy expectations. Casino blends Raging Bull with GoodFellas and can be interpreted as a wry allegory of Hollywood in the '70s--a time when "guys like us" (i.e., the free-lancing gangsters played by De Niro and Joe Pesci) were allowed to run things without interference. Of course, they got too greedy, screwed everything up, and the big corporations turned their playground into Disneyland. At the end, De Niro's character, the scarred survivor, picks himself up and goes back to work. Scorsese keeps working too--upcoming projects include Gangs of New York , with Leonardo DiCaprio, and a Dean Martin biopic starring Tom Hanks. His extracurricular good works--overseeing the re-release of classics such as El Cid and Belle de Jour , campaigning for film preservation, narrating a BBC documentary on his favorite movies--are testament to his abiding faith. But his movies more often than not feel cold and mechanical. They substitute intensity for emotion and give us bombast when we want passion. Why do we go to the movies? Pauline Kael used to say it was to be caught up, swept away, surfeited by sensation, and confronted by reality. Some of us keep going to Scorsese's movies because we still want to believe in that, and we leave wondering whether he still does.

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BREAKDOWN By HERBERT D. KASTLE Illustrated by COWLES [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine June 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] He didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to admit he was sick that way—in the head! Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his mind. And sometimes—like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching the first hint of light touch the windows—he began sweating with fear. A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was based on nothing. The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to waste.... Davie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing stronger each day from helping out after school. He turned and shook Edna. "What happened to Davie?" She cleared her throat, mumbled, "Huh? What happened to who?" "I said, what...." But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children. He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. "Like hotcakes for breakfast?" "Eggs," he said. "Bacon." And then, seeing her face change, he remembered. "Course," he muttered. "Can't have bacon. Rationed." She was fully awake now. "If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could—" "You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins, who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and...." She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They had no son, never had a son. And Timkins—he'd died and they'd gone to his funeral. Or so Edna said. He himself just couldn't remember it. He went to the bed and sat down beside her. "Sorry. That was just a dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a son." He waited then, hoping she'd say they had had a son, and he'd died or gone away. But of course she didn't. He went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen, Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate. Part way through the meal, he paused. "Got an awful craving for meat," he said. "Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock for his own table!" "We're having meat for lunch," she said placatingly. "Nice cut of multi-pro." "Multi-pro," he scoffed. "God knows what's in it. Like spam put through a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste any meat there." "Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current crisis, you know." The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn. He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. "Why, this ain't the way I had my barn...." He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it was his barn! He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, "Get down to the patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang." He walked outside and took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still, different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe.... He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen—he'd had twelve pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four—behind the house to where the half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime later, Edna called to him. "Delivery last night, Harry. I took some. Pick up rest?" "Yes," he shouted. She disappeared. He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard, moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him. The car. He hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers. No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it was no use to him lying in the tractor shed. He whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor shed had stood just fifty feet from the house! No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it. He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too. He was at the supply bin—like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and they left it—or whatever they allowed you—with a bill. You paid the bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn. It came out just about even. He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A television program guide. Edna hustled over excitedly. "Anything good on this week, Harry?" He looked down the listings, and frowned. "All old movies. Still only one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night." He gave it to her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing last week. And she had said the films were all new to her. She said it now. "Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither." "I'm gonna lie down," he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward, and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the stove. "But the door...." he began. He cut himself short. He turned and saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right) and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was wrong. The windows were wrong. The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong! Edna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right. They had only a dozen or so now. When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock? Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease? He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to regulations—one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water twice a week. She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be showing. He managed a smile. "You remember how much we got for our livestock, Edna?" "Same as everyone else," she said. "Government agents paid flat rates." He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them, and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs. He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. "Found it in the supply bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the book of directions." Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, "How's Penny?" "Fine," Gloria answered. "I'm starting her on the kindergarten book next week." "She's five already?" Harry asked. "Almost six," Walt said. "Emergency Education Regulations state that the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on kindergarten book." "And Frances?" Harry asked. "Your oldest? She must be starting high...." He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because he couldn't remember Frances clearly. "Just a joke," he said, laughing and rising. "Let's eat. I'm starved." They ate in the kitchen. They talked—or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing. Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about Doctor Hamming. He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying. "Harry, please see the doctor." He got up. "I'm going out. I might even sleep out!" "But why, Harry, why?" He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet cheek, spoke more softly. "It'll do me good, like when I was a kid." "If you say so, Harry." He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty. Once there'd been cars, people.... He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone. He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he? He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town. Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine. He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field. His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to leave his headache and confusion behind. He didn't know how long it was, but Plum was moving cautiously now. He raised his head. They were approaching a fence. He noticed a gate off to the right, and pulled the rope so Plum went that way. They reached the gate and he got down to open it, and saw the sign. "Phineas Grotton Farm." He looked up at the sky, found the constellations, turned his head, and nodded. He'd started north, and Plum had continued north. He'd crossed land belonging both to himself and the Franklins. Now he was leaving the Franklin farm. North of the Franklins were the Bessers. Who was this Phineas Grotton? Had he bought out Lon Besser? But anything like that would've gotten around. Was he forgetting again? Well, no matter. Mr. Grotton would have to excuse his trespass. He opened the gate, led Plum through it, closed the gate. He mounted and rode forward, still north, toward the small Pangborn place and after the Pangborns the biggest farm in the county—old Wallace Elverton's place. The fields here, as everywhere in the county, lay fallow. Seemed as if the government had so much grain stored up they'd be able to get along without crops for years more. He looked around. Somehow, the country bothered him. He wasn't sure why, but ... everything was wrong. His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by three feet of barbed-wire—five separate strands. What in the world had Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this? He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way. He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back. Yes, there was a slight inward curve. He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured the best way to get to the other side. The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they used to say back when he was a kid. It took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand. He'd never seen the like of it in this county. He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure he was heading in the right direction. And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring. Flooring! He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a sick laugh, so he stopped it. He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked. More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had before in Cultwait County. His entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat. He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray. He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised damp fingers to his mouth. Salt. He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly, until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him, and shut his eyes and mind to everything. Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing him again. It was getting light. His head was splitting. Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in town.... Town! He should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east, to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find out what was happening. He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs. Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately—a long time lately? The ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons. And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of Crossville. And after that.... He was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to forget things he'd known all his life? He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard. There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his voice. "Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get you!" He rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A moment later, adult voices yelled after him: "You theah! Stop!" "Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!" There was no place called Piney Woods in this county. Was this how a man's mind went? He came to another house, and another. He passed ten all told, and people shouted at him for breaking regulations, and the last three or four sounded like Easterners. And their houses looked like pictures of New England he'd seen in magazines. He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood, and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw it—a car. A car! It was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined, tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. "You broke regulations, Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us." He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned toward Plum. The other officer was walking around the horse. "Rode her hard," he said, and he sounded real worried. "Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr. We have so very few now...." The officer holding Harry's arm said, "Pete." The officer examining Plum said, "It won't make any difference in a while." Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear. "Take the horse back to his farm," the officer holding Harry said. He opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away. Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him, walking him. "He sure must like horses," he said. "Yes." "Am I going to jail?" "No." "Where then?" "The doctor's place." They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm. Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know about it—or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks? He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the path. Harry noticed that the new house was big. When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in at least three places that he could see, and at the far end—a good two hundred yards away—a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital, or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he didn't see or hear people. He did hear something ; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down somewhere. They went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there, putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred years old. "Where's Petey?" he asked. "Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm." The old man sighed. "I didn't know what form it would take. I expected one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence." "No violence, Dad." "Fine, Stan." He looked at Harry. "I'm going to give you a little treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything...." "What happened to Davie?" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain again. Stan helped him up. "Just step this way, Mr. Burr." He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so as to know whether or not he was insane. "What happened to my son Davie?" The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch. "Please," Harry whispered. "Just tell me about my son." The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the switch. "Dead," he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. "Like so many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps the whole world is dead—except for us." Harry stared at him. "I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just three of us—myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should have helped her as I'm helping you." "I don't understand," Harry said. "I remember people, and things, and where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities...." "I haven't the time," the doctor repeated, voice rising. "I have to run a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have known they would." Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines? "You survived," the doctor said. "Your wife. A few hundred others in the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to survive." He laughed, high and thin. His son said, "Please, Dad...." "No! I want to talk to someone sane ! You and Petey and I—we're all insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land, any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know nothing." He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. "Now do you understand? I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway. Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later. I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all, sanity ! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife...." He choked and stopped. Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to check south and east; on all sides if that fence continued to curve inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa. And this wasn't Iowa. The explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife and his two sons.... Suddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, "We're on...." but the switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he got out of the chair and said, "Sure glad I took my wife's advice and came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only one.... What do you call these treatments?" "Diathermy," the little doctor muttered. Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in change. "That's certainly reasonable enough," Harry said. The doctor nodded. "There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations." Harry said, "Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?" "You will, Mr. Burr." Harry walked to the door. "We're on an ark," the doctor said. Harry turned around, smiling. "What?" "A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye." Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations. "Me?" he exclaimed, amazed. "Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill a pig!"

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51194

Made to Measure By WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT Illustrated by L. WOROMAY [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.] Somewhere is an ideal mate for every man and woman, but Joe wasn't willing to bet on it. He was a man who rolled his own! The pressure tube locks clicked behind them, as the train moved on. It was a strange, sighing click and to Joe it sounded like, "She's not right—she's not right—she's not right—" So, finally, he said it. "She's not right." Sam, who was riding with him, looked over wonderingly. "Who isn't?" "Vera. My wife. She's not right." Sam frowned. "Are you serious, Joe? You mean she's—?" He tapped his temple. "Oh, no. I mean she's not what I want." "That's why we have the Center," Sam answered, as if quoting, which he was. "With the current and growing preponderance of women over men, something had to be done. I think we've done it." Sam was the Director of the Domestic Center and a man sold on his job. "You've done as well as you could," Joe agreed in an argumentative way. "You've given some reason and order to the marital competition among women. You've almost eliminated illicit relations. You've established a basic security for the kids. But the big job? You've missed it completely." "Thanks," Sam said. "That's a very small knife you've inserted between my shoulder blades, but I'm thin-skinned." He took a deep breath. "What, in the opinion of the Junior Assistant to the Adjutant Science Director, was the big job?" Joe looked for some scorn in Sam's words, found it, and said, "The big job is too big for a sociologist." Sam seemed to flinch. "I didn't think that axe would fit alongside the knife. I underestimated you." "No offense," Joe said. "It's just that you have to deal with human beings." "Oh," Sam said. "Now it comes. You know, for a minute I forgot who you were. I forgot you were the greatest living authority on robots. I was thinking of you as my boyhood chum, good old Joe. You're beyond that now, aren't you?" "Beyond my adolescence? I hope so, though very few people are." Joe looked at Sam squarely. "Every man wants a perfect wife, doesn't he?" Sam shrugged. "I suppose." "And no human is perfect, so no man gets a perfect wife. Am I right, so far?" "Sounds like it." "Okay." Joe tapped Sam's chest with a hard finger. "I'm going to make a perfect wife." He tapped his own chest. "For me, just for me, the way I want her. No human frailties. Ideal." "A perfect robot," Sam objected. "A wife," Joe corrected. "A person. A human being." "But without a brain." "With a brain. Do you know anything about cybernetics, Sam?" "I know just as much about cybernetics as you know about people. Nothing." "That's not quite fair. I'm not sentimental about people, but it's inaccurate to say I don't know anything about them. I'm a person. I think I'm—discerning and sensitive." "Sure," Sam said. "Let's drop the subject." "Why?" "Because you're talking nonsense. A person without faults is not a person. And if—it or he—she were, I don't think I'd care to know him or her or it." "Naturally. You're a sentimentalist. You've seen so much misery, so much human error, so much stupidity that you've built up your natural tolerance into a sloppy and unscientific sentimentality. It happens to sociologists all the time." "Joe, I'm not going to argue with you. Only one thing I ask. When you—break the news to Vera, break it gently. And get her back to the Center as quickly as you can. She's a choice, rare number." Joe said nothing to that. Sam looked miserable. They sat there, listening to the swishing, burring clicks of the airlocks, two friends—one who dealt with people and had grown soft, the other who dealt with machines and might not have grown at all. As the car rose for the Inglewood station, Sam looked over, but Joe's eyes were straight ahead. Sam got up and out of the seat. There was a whispering sigh of escaping air and the sunlight glare of the Inglewood station, synthetic redwood and chrome and marble. Sam was out of the cylindrical, stainless steel car and hurrying for the Westchester local when Joe came out onto the platform. Sam was annoyed, it was plain. Joe's glance went from his hurrying friend to the parking lot, and his coupe was there with Vera behind the wheel. It was only a three block walk, but she had to be there to meet him, every evening. That was her major fault, her romantic sentimentality. "Darling," she said, as he approached the coupe. "Sweetheart. Have a good day?" He kissed her casually. "Ordinary." She slid over and he climbed in behind the wheel. "Sat with Sam Tullgren on the train." "Sam's nice." He turned on the ignition and said, "Start." The motor obediently started and he swung out of the lot, onto Chestnut. "Sam's all right. Kind of sentimental." "That's what I mean." Joe was silent. The coupe went past a row of solar homes and turned on Fulsom. Three houses from the corner, he turned into their driveway. "You're awfully quiet," Vera said. "I'm thinking." "About what?" Her voice was suddenly strained. "Sam didn't try to sell you—" "A new wife?" He looked at her. "What makes you think that?" "You're thinking about me, about trading me in. Joe, haven't I—darling, is there—?" She broke off, looking even more miserable than Sam had. "I don't intend to trade you in," he said quietly. She took a deep breath. He didn't look at her. "But you're going back to the Center." She stared at him, a film of moisture in her eyes. She didn't cry or ask questions or protest. Joe wished she would. This was worse. "It's not your fault," he said, after a moment. "I'm not going to get another. You're as ideal, almost, as a human wife can ever be." "I've tried so hard," she said. "Maybe I tried too hard." "No," he said, "it isn't your fault. Any reasonable man would be delighted with you, Vera. You won't be at the Center long." "I don't want a reasonable man," she said quietly. "I want you, Joe. I—I loved you." He had started to get out of the car. He paused to look back. "Loved? Did you use the past tense?" "I used the past tense." She started to get out on her side of the car. "I don't want to talk about it." "But I do," he told her. "Is this love something you can turn on and off like a faucet?" "I don't care to explain it to you," she said. "I've got to pack." She left the car, slammed the door, and moved hurriedly toward the house. Joe watched her. Something was troubling him, something he couldn't analyze, but he felt certain that if he could, it would prove to be absurd. He went thoughtfully into the living room and snapped on the telenews. He saw troops moving by on foot, a file of them dispersed along a Brazilian road. He turned the knob to another station and saw the huge stock market board, a rebroadcast. Another twist and he saw a disheveled, shrieking woman being transported down some tenement steps by a pair of policemen. The small crowd on the sidewalk mugged into the camera. He snapped it off impatiently and went into the kitchen. The dinette was a glass-walled alcove off this, and the table was set. There was food on his plate, none on Vera's. He went to the living room and then, with a mutter of impatience, to the door of the back bedroom. She had her grips open on the low bed. "You don't have to leave tonight, you know." "I know." "You're being very unreasonable." "Am I?" "I wasn't trying to be intentionally cruel." "Weren't you?" His voice rose. "Will you stop talking like some damned robot? Are you a human being, or aren't you?" "I'm afraid I am," she said, "and that's why I'm going back to the Center. I've changed my mind. I want to get registered. I want to find a man ." She started to go past him, her grip in her hand. He put a hand on her shoulder. "Vera, you—" Something flashed toward his face. It was her slim, white hand, but it didn't feel slim and white. She said, "I can see now why you weren't made Senior Assistant to the Adjutant Science Director. You're a stupid, emotionless mechanic. A machine." He was still staring after her when the door slammed. He thought of the huge Domestic Center with its classes in Allure, Boudoir Manners, Diet, Poise, Budgeting. That vast, efficient, beautifully decorated Center which was the brain child of Sam Tullgren, but which still had to deal with imperfect humans. People, people, people ... and particularly women. He rose, after a while, and went into the dinette. He sat down and stared moodily at his food. Little boys are made of something and snails and puppydogs' tails. What are little girls made of? Joe didn't want a little girl; he wanted one about a hundred and twenty-two pounds and five feet, four inches high. He wanted her to be flat where she should be and curved where she should be, with blonde hair and gray-green eyes and an exciting smile. He had a medical degree, among his others. The nerves, muscles, flesh, circulatory system could be made—and better than they were ever made naturally. The brain would be cybernetic and fashioned after his own, with his own mental background stored in the memory circuits. So far, of course, he had described nothing more than a robot of flesh and blood. The spark, now—what distinguished the better-grade robots from people? Prenatal heat, that was it. Incubation. A mold, a heated mold. Warmth, the spark, the sun, life. For the skin, he went to Pete Celano, the top syntho-dermatologist in the Department. "Something special?" Pete asked. "Not just a local skin graft? What then?" "A wife. A perfect wife." Pete's grin sagged baffledly. "I don't get it, Joe. Perfect how?" "In all ways." Joe's face was grave. "Someone ideal to live with." "How about Vera? What was wrong with her?" "A sentimentalist, too romantic, kind of—well, maybe not dumb, exactly, but—" "But not perfect. Who is, Joe?" "My new wife is going to be." Pete shrugged and began putting together the ingredients for the kind of skin Joe had specified. They're all the same, Joe thought, Sam and Pete and the rest. They seemed to think his idea childish. He built the instillers and incubator that night. The mold would be done by one of the Department's engravers. Joe had the sketches and dimensions ready. Wednesday afternoon, Burke called him in. Burke was the Senior assistant, a job Joe had expected and been miffed about. Burke was a jerk, in Joe's book. This afternoon, Burke's long nose was twitching and his thin face was gravely bleak. He had a clipped, efficient way of speaking. "Tired, Joe?" "What do you mean?" "Not hitting the ball, not on the beam, no zipperoo." "I'm—yes, I guess you're right. I've been working at home on a private project." "Scientific?" "Naturally." "Anything in particular?" Joe took a breath, looked away, and back at Burke. "Well, a wife." A frown, a doubtful look from the cold, blue eyes. "Robot? Dishwasher and cook and phone answerer and like that?" "More than that." Slightly raised eyebrows. "More?" "Completely human, except she will have no human faults." Cool smile. "Wouldn't be human, then, of course." " Human, but without human faults, I said! " "You raised your voice, Joe." "I did." "I'm the Senior Assistant. Junior Assistants do not raise their voices to Senior Assistants." "I thought you might be deaf, as well as dumb," Joe said. A silence. The granite face of Burke was marble, then steel and finally chromium. His voice matched it. "I'll have to talk to the Chief before I fire you, of course. Department rule. Good afternoon." "Go to hell." Joe went back to his desk and burned. He started with a low flame and fed it with the grievances of the past weeks. When it began to warm his collar, he picked up his hat and left. Click, burr, click went the airlocks. Very few riders, this time of the afternoon. The brain would go in, intact, and then the knowledge instiller would work during the incubation period, feeding the adolescent memories to the retentive circuits. She would really spend her mental childhood in the mold, while the warmth sent the human spark through her body. Robot? Huh! What did they know? A human being, a product of science, a flawless human being. The rise, the big hiss of the final airlock, and Inglewood. Joe stood on the platform a second, looking for his car, and then realized she wasn't there. She hadn't been there for a week, and he'd done that every night. Silly thing, habit. Human trait. Tonight, he'd know. The flesh had been in the mold for two days. The synthetic nerves were plump and white under the derma-ray, the fluxo heart was pumping steadily, the entire muscular structure kept under pneumatic massage for muscle tone. He'd thought of omitting the frowning muscles, but realized it would ruin the facial contours. They weren't, however, under massage and would not be active. And the mind? Well, naturally it would be tuned to his. She'd know everything he knew. What room was there for disagreement if the minds were the same? Smiling, as she agreed, because she couldn't frown. Her tenderness, her romanticism would have an intensity variable, of course. He didn't want one of these grinning simperers. He remembered his own words: "Is this love something you can turn on and off like a faucet?" Were his own words biting him, or only scratching him? Something itched. An intensity variable was not a faucet, though unscientific minds might find a crude, allegorical resemblance. To hell with unscientific minds. He went down to the basement. The mold was 98.6. He watched the knowledge instiller send its minute current to the head end of the mold. The meter read less than a tenth of an amp. The slow, plastic pulse of the muscle tone massage worked off a small pump near the foot of the mold. On the wall, the big master operating clock sent the minute currents to the various bodily sections, building up the cells, maintaining the organic functions. In two hours, the clock would shut off all power, the box would cool, and there would be his—Alice. Well, why not Alice? She had to have a name, didn't she? Warmth, that was the difference between a human and a robot, just warmth, just the spark. Funny he'd never thought of it before. Warmth was—it had unscientific connotations. It wasn't, though. He went upstairs and fried some eggs. Twice a day, for a week, he had fried eggs. Their flavor was overrated. Then he went into the living room and snapped on the ball game. Martin was on third and Pelter was at bat. On the mound, the lank form of Dorffberger cast a long, grotesque shadow in the afternoon sun. Dorffberger chewed and spat and wiped his nose with the back of his glove. He looked over at third and yawned. At the plate, Pelter was digging in. Pelter looked nervous. Joe said, "Bet that Dorffberger fans him. He's got the Indian sign on Pelter." Then he realized he was talking to himself. Damn it. On the telenews screen, Dorffberger looked right into the camera and nodded. He was winding up, and the director put the ball into slow motion. Even in slow motion, it winged. "Ho-ho!" Joe said. "You can't hit what you can't see." Pelter must have seen it. He caught it on the fat part of the bat, twisting into it with all his hundred and ninety pounds. The impact rattled the telenews screen and the telescopic cameras took over. They followed the ball's flight about halfway to Jersey and then the short-range eyes came back to show Pelter crossing the plate, and Martin waiting there to shake his hand. Joe snapped off the machine impatiently. Very unscientific game, baseball. No rhyme or reason to it. He went out onto the porch. The grass was dry and gray; he'd forgotten to set the sprinkler clock, Vera's old job. Across the street, Dan Harvey sat with his wife, each with a drink. Sat with his human wife, the poor fish. They looked happy, though. Some people were satisfied with mediocrities. Unscientific people. Why was he restless? Why was he bored? Was he worried about his job? Only slightly; the Chief thought a lot of him, a hell of a lot. The Chief was a great guy for seniority and Burke had it, or Joe would certainly have been Senior Assistant. The stirring in him he didn't want to analyze and he thought of the days he'd courted Vera, going to dances at the Center, playing bridge at the Center, studying Greek at the Center. A fine but too well-lighted place. You could do everything but smooch there; the smooching came after the declaration of intentions and a man was bound after the declaration to go through with the wedding, to live with his chosen mate for the minimum three months of the adjustment period. Adjustment period ... another necessity for humans, for imperfect people. Across the street, the perfectly adjusted Harveys smiled at each other and sipped their drinks. Hell, that wasn't adjustment, that was surrender. He got up and went into the living room; fighting the stirring in him, the stirring he didn't want to analyze and find absurd. He went into the bathroom and studied his lean, now haggard face. He looked like hell. He went into the back bedroom and smelled her perfume and went quickly from the house and into the backyard. He sat there until seven, listening to the throb from the basement. The molecule agitator should have the flesh firm and finished now, nourished by the select blood, massaged by the pulsating plastic. At seven, she should be ready. At seven, he went down to the basement. His heart should have been hammering and his mind expectant, but he was just another guy going down to the basement. The pumps had stopped, the agitator, the instiller. He felt the mold; it was cool to the touch. He lifted the lid, his mind on Vera for some reason. A beauty. The lid was fully back and his mate sat up, smiled and said, "Hello, Joe." "Hello, Alice. Everything all right?" "Fine." Her hair was a silver blonde, her features a blend of the patrician and the classical. Her figure was neither too slim nor too stout, too flat nor too rounded. Nowhere was there any sag. "Thought we'd drop over to the Harveys' for a drink," Joe said. "Sort of show you off, you know." "Ego gratification, Joe?" "Of course. I've some clothes upstairs for you." "I'm sure they're lovely." "They are lovely." While she dressed, he phoned the Harveys. He explained about Vera first, because Vera was what the Harveys considered a good neighbor. Dan Harvey said sympathetically, "It happens to the best of us. Thinking of getting a new one, Joe?" "I've got one right here. Thought I'd drop over, sort of break the ice." "Great," Dan said. "Fine. Dandy." The event was of minor importance, except for the revelation involved. The Harveys had a gift for putting guests at ease, the gift being a cellar full of thirty-year-old bourbon the elder Harvey had bequeathed them at the end of their adjustment period. The talk moved here and there, over the bourbon, Alice sharing in it rarely, though nodding when Joe was talking. Then, at mention of someone or other, Mrs. Harvey said tolerantly, "Well, none of us are perfect, I guess." Alice smiled and answered, "Some of us are satisfied with mediocrities in marriage." Mrs. Harvey frowned doubtfully. "I don't quite understand, dear. In any marriage, there has to be adjustment. Dan and I, for example, have adjusted very well." "You haven't adjusted," Alice said smilingly. "You've surrendered." Joe coughed up half a glass of bourbon, Dan turned a sort of red-green and Mrs. Harvey stared with her mouth open. Alice smiled. Finally, Mrs. Harvey said, "Well, I never—" "Of all the—" Dan Harvey said. Joe rose and said, "Must get to bed, got to get to bed." "Here?" Alice asked. "No, of course not. Home. Let's go, dear. Have to rush." Alice's smile had nothing sentimental about it. He didn't berate her until morning. He wanted time to cool off, to look at the whole thing objectively. It just wouldn't get objective, though. At breakfast, he said, "That was tactless last night. Very, very tactless." "Yes, Joe. Tact requires deception. Tact is essentially deception." When had he said that? Oh, yes, at the Hydra Club lecture. And it was true and he hated deception and he'd created a wife without one. He said, "I'll have to devise a character distiller that won't require putting you back in the mold." "Of course, dear. Why?" "You need just a touch of deception, just a wee shade of it." "Of course, Joe." So she had tact. He went to the office with very little of the absurdity mood stirring in him. He'd had a full breakfast, naturally. At the office, there was a note on his desk: Mr. Behrens wants to see you immediately. It bore his secretary's initials. Mr. Behrens was the Chief. He was a fairly short man with immense shoulders and what he'd been told was a classical head. So he let his hair grow, and had a habit of thrusting his chin forward when he listened. He listened to Joe's account of the interview with Burke. When Joe had finished, the Chief's smile was tolerant. "Ribbing him, were you? Old Burke hasn't much sense of humor, Joe." Joe said patiently, "I wasn't ribbing him. I took her out of the mold last night. I ate breakfast with her this morning. She's—beautiful, Chief. She's ideal." The Chief looked at him for seconds, his head tilted. Joe said, "Heat, that's what does it. If you'd like to come for dinner with us tonight, Chief, and see for yourself—" The Chief nodded. "I'd like that." They left a little early to avoid the crowd in the tube. Burke saw them leaving, and his long face grew even longer. On the trip, Joe told his boss about the cybernetic brain, about his background and his beliefs stored in the memory circuits, and the boss listened quietly, not committing himself with any comments. But he did say, "I certainly thought a lot of Vera. You wouldn't have to warm her in any incubating mold." "Wait'll you see this one," Joe said. And when she walked into the living room at home, when she acknowledged the introduction to the Chief, Joe knew the old boy was sold. The Chief could only stare. Joe took him down to the basement then to show him the molecule agitator, the memory feeder, the instillers. The old boy looked it over and said, quite simply, "I'll be damned!" They went up to a perfect dinner—and incident number two. The Chief was a sentimentalist and he'd just lost a fine friend. This friend was his terrier, Murph, who'd been hit by a speeding car. The story of Murph from birth to death was a fairly long one, but never dull. The Chief had a way with words. Even Joe, one of the world's top-ranking non-sentimentalists, was touched by the tale. When they came to the end, where Murph had lain in his master's arms, whimpering, as though to comfort him, trying to lick his face, Joe's eyes were wet and the drink wobbled in his hand. The Chief finished in a whisper, and looked up from the carpet he'd been staring at through the account. And there was Alice, sitting erect, a smile of perfect joy on her face. "How touching," she said, and grinned. For one horror-stricken second, the Chief glared at her, and then his questioning eyes went to Joe. "She can't frown," Joe explained. "The muscles are there, but they need massage to bring them to life." He paused. "I wanted a smiling wife." The Chief inhaled heavily. "There are times when a smile is out of order, don't you think, Joe?" "It seems that way." It didn't take long. Massage, orientation, practice, concentration. It didn't take long, and she was so willing to cooperate. Golly, she was agreeable. She was more than that; she voiced his thoughts before he did. Because of the mental affinity, you see. He'd made sure of that. She could frown now and she had enough deception to get by in almost any company. These flaws were necessary, but they were still flaws and brought her closer to being—human. At the office on Saturday morning, Sam Tullgren dropped in. Sam said, "I've been hearing things, Joseph." "From Vera? At the Center?" Sam shook his head. "Vera's been too busy to have much time for the director. She's our most popular number." Sam paused. "About the new one. Hear she's something to see." "You heard right. She's practically flawless, Sam. She's just what a man needs at home." His voice, for some reason, didn't indicate the enthusiasm he should have felt. Sam chewed one corner of his mouth. "Why not bring her over, say, tonight? We'll play some bridge." That would be something. Two minds, perfectly in harmony, synchronized, working in partnership. Joe's smile was smug. "We'll be there. At eight-thirty." Driving over to Westchester that night, Joe told Alice, "Sam's a timid bidder. His wife's inclined to overbid. Plays a sacrificing game when she knows it will gain points. Our job will be to make her oversacrifice." Sam's eyes opened at sight of her; his wife's narrowed. Joe took pride in their reaction, but it was a strange, impersonal pride. They had a drink and some small talk, and settled around the table. It was more like a seance than a game. They bid and made four clubs, a heart. Sam's wife got that determined look. With the opposition holding down one leg of the rubber, she figured to make the next bid a costly one. She won it with six diamonds, and went down nine tricks, doubled. Sam started to say something, after the debacle, but one look at his wife's anguished countenance stopped him short of audibility. Sam said consolingly, "I'm such a lousy bidder, dear. I must have given you the wrong idea of my hand." Next time, Sam made up for his timidity. Sam, with one heart in his hand, tried a psychic. "One heart," he said firmly. Sam knew there was a good chance the hearts were in the oppositions' hands, and this looked like a fine defensive tactic. However, his wife, with a three-suit powerhouse, couldn't conceive of a psychic from Sam. She had need of only a second round stopper in hearts and a small slam in no trump was in the bag. She had no hearts, but timid Sam was undoubtedly holding the ace-king. She bid six no-trump, which was conservative for her. She didn't want to make the mistake of having Sam let the bid die. Joe had the ace, king, queen and jack of hearts and a three to lead to Alice's hand. Alice finished up the hearts for a total of seven tricks, and this time it was Mrs. Tullgren who opened her mouth to speak. But she remembered Sam's kindness in the former hand, and she said, "It was all my fault, darling. To think I couldn't recognize a psychic, just because it came from you. I think we're overmatched, sweet." She paused to smile at Joe. "Up against the man who invented the comptin-reduco-determina." She added, as an afterthought, "And his charming, brilliant new wife." Which brought about incident number three. Alice turned to Mrs. Tullgren sweetly and asked, "Don't you really understand the comptin-reduco-determina?" "Not even faintly," Mrs. Tullgren answered. She smiled at Alice. The smile faded after about ten minutes. For Alice was telling her all about the comptin-reduco-determina. For an hour and nineteen minutes, Alice talked to this woman who had been humiliated twice, telling her all the things about the famous thinking machine that Mrs. Tullgren didn't want to know. It wasn't until Alice was through talking animatedly that the entranced Joe began to suspect that perhaps the Tullgrens weren't as interested in the dingus as a scientific mind would assume. They weren't. There was a strain after that, a decided heaviness to the rest of the evening. Sam seemed to sigh with relief when they said good night. In the car, Joe was thoughtful. Halfway home, he said, "Darling, I think you know too much—for a female, that is. I think you'll have to have a go with the knowledge-instiller. In reverse, of course." "Of course," she agreed. "I don't object to females knowing a lot. The world does." "Of course," she said. She was a first model and, therefore, experimental. These bugs were bound to show up. She was now less knowing, more deceptive, and she could frown. She began to remind him of Vera, which didn't make sense. Alice was sad when he was sad, gay when he was gay, and romantic to the same split-degree in the same split-second. She even told him his old jokes with the same inflection he always used. Their mood affinity was geared as closely as the comptin-reduco-determina. What more could a man want? And, damn it, why should Vera's perfume linger in that back bedroom?

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Triumph of the Middlebrow? This book comes with a triumphant blaring of publishers' trumpets, and one supposes that it is a signal sort of triumph for black studies or Africana studies (take your pick of names). The field has arrived to such an extent that a publisher thinks that it can make money, significant money, publishing such a work. Assignments in black studies have filtered down to the high-school, junior-high, and even elementary-school level (and remember the black liturgical occasions we now have on the calendar that beg for special schoolchild reports of one sort or another: the King holiday, Black History Month, Black Music Month, Kwanzaa, Malcolm X's birthday, Juneteenth), and while not every school does all of this, most schools must do some of this. (And this, of course, has nothing to do with the occasional racial killing or major protest that took place or may be taking place somewhere that require a report and discussion in a current-events or social-studies class.) Moreover, blacks cannot be left out of Women's History Month or Veteran's Day or, for the truly daring, Gay Appreciation Month. So, a book like Africana is bound to get a great deal of use, to be sold to virtually every school, public, and university library in the country, as well as to a number of churches, to say nothing of the private homes that will have a copy right next to the Britannica . (In some more Afrocentric black homes, it may replace the Britannica entirely, that Eurocentric collection of lies, although Britannica has become as multicultural as everyone else these days.) Those of us who have labored in the field of black studies (politically incorrectly such as the present author or very much politically correctly like a good many very good scholars) are heartened by this commercial venture. Indeed, it would be disheartening, as well as entirely untrue, if one were to think that this book was published as an act of philanthropy, as something that ought to be done. (It is so tiresome as a black person to be the recipient of charity all the time, to be the object of the moral imperative.) It is good to know that, partly through the energetic offices of Henry Louis Gates, black studies can, as it were, pay its way these days and not be dependent for its existence on a kind of political and cultural moralism on the part of whites and a kind of fetishlike piety on the part of blacks. It can be, alas, a business of an entirely good sort or needful sort, justifying itself in the marketplace. But I would think that most black-studies scholars are only partly heartened by this; for this rather triumphalist book (and Gates is important in black studies, in part, for the promotion of a triumphalist view of black history and black culture--globally speaking--which is why he is hated by Afrocentrists who take a somewhat different view of the long-term meaning of "the coming of the white man") is nothing less than the middlebrow arrival of black studies in American culture. Encyclopedias, after all, are middlebrow, bourgeois books that tend, in the end, not to promote intellectual inquiry on the part of the people who use them but rather to stifle it. Children tend to copy verbatim from such books without ever reading what they are copying. Adults, with far too much deference for the printed word, tend to consult such a book in much the way they consult the dictionary or the Bible (or in the way baseball fanatics consult the official record books): as the final arbiter, as that which settles all arguments. Why, for goodness' sake, would anyone actually read a book like this? Knowledge, in the instance of the definitive reference book, becomes entombed and sanctified, very much serving the anti-intellectual ends of the middlebrow, who want not to encounter knowledge and to wrestle with it but to store it as an authority on the bookshelf. But I suppose it is something of a triumph, which the publication of this book is meant to acknowledge, that black studies has achieved middlebrow status in the United States, that bourgeois people, both white and black, feel bad if they don't know something about the history and culture of African-descended people, in much the same way they feel bad, inadequate, if they don't know something about opera or a bit about Impressionist painting or if they have never seen a film by D. W. Griffith or Fritz Lang. How terrible at a party to discover that one has never seen The Grand Illusion --one of the all-time great films--or that one has not read, alas, a Toni Morrison novel or one does not own a Wynton Marsalis album. (The truly knowing coves own albums by Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, no less, and do reports for their book clubs on the blues.) What most thinking people in black studies find dangerous about the middlebrow apotheosis of the field is that it usually leads to the enshrinement of what Jacques Barzun calls thought-clichés, half-truths or non-truths that are accepted as the truth because someone said so in some reference book like Africana . Thought-clichés are like narcotics; people love them because they relieve them of the very thing they do not wish to do in any case, that is, think, think hard, and think critically and against the grain of their own beliefs or psychological needs or neurotic fantasy projections. Thought-clichés confirm one's stupidity and one's laziness. With all the goodwill in the world, a book like Africana cannot help but produce thought-clichés; it is, indeed, why most people will consult such a work, to find them and be comforted by them. No intellectual or scholar can, therefore, be fully at ease with a work of this sort, no matter his or her ideological stripe. Such a book as Africana simply washes the practitioners in the field in a sea of ambivalence, with a sense of lost faith, as we all stand before it a bit as Matthew Arnold stood before Dover Beach. Now, Gates and Appiah published a multicultural dictionary about a year ago, and Gates and Nellie McKay published the Norton Anthology of African American Literature shortly before that. With Africana , where Gates and Appiah, rather sentimentally and opportunistically, see themselves as the descendants of Du Bois, whose unfilled dream was to produce such a book, Gates seems to have cornered the market on black reference books that shape the canon of black studies, that define the field and its major players. Building a canon is very important to Gates, and it is, without question, an important pedagogical pursuit. A field must have order and it must have pioneers and heroes. It is also a power pursuit. He who defines the field controls it, in a manner of speaking. Some are jealous that Gates wants this sort of power. Others find it unseemly. I think Gates is wasting his considerable talents in the pursuit of it, but that is another issue for another type of review. It is amazing that Gates has done this volume so successfully and so quickly, that he has flooded the market with first-rate black reference books in such short order. It took him and Appiah only four years to produce Africana . Even with modern technology, that is an astonishing feat, so astonishing that some will dismiss the book (I have heard some comments of this sort even before the book was published) as some half-baked enterprise. That would be a mistake, for this is an incredibly polished work. This is a beautiful book, one of the most striking reference works I have ever seen. Gates and Appiah must be quite the field marshals to have hustled together this army of academics and to have gotten the work from them on time or nearly so. They deserve much credit for this. Most academics would have felt lucky to have finished this enterprise in 10 years. That Du Bois--who exists in the field of black studies these days as rather the black equivalent of Einstein (theorist), Dr. Johnson (wordsmith), Emerson (humanist), and Kant (moral philosopher), separately and together, as it were--is evoked by the editors in their introduction provides this volume with a pedigree that I suppose they thought it needed, making Gates and Appiah our intellectual knights who have given us the Holy Grail. (The editors called the quest for producing a black encyclopedia "a Holy Grail." More triumphalist history!) The introduction offers a good and useful account of Du Bois' attempt to produce an Africana encyclopedia, the professional jealousy he encountered, the racism that sometimes thwarted his efforts. It should be read by all who purchase the book. But the history of the publication of this book is only incompletely told by the editors. After 1970, when black studies was established on the white college campus, a number of reference books about the black experience were published and continue to be published. The editors make no attempt to place their book within that particular context, a more accurate historical context for understanding the appearance of this book, as it was made possible not by Du Bois' dream in any respect but by the rise of multiculturalism and black studies as intellectual industries in the United States after 1970. The increasing professionalization of black studies made this book possible, more scholars in the field, both black and white, being produced since 1970, more scholarship being produced. This book was also made possible by the rise of professionalism among African-Americans since the 1960s and the rise of a black middle class that has demanded more artifacts and objects, more "education" about its experience (more institutionalization of it, in other words, and more orthodoxy about its significance), that are all meant to reinforce its sense of identity, its psychological well-being, its sense of race mission, all important reasons for the existence of black studies, but all clearly anti-intellectual. In other words, the forces that brought this book into existence had little enough to do with Du Bois--although evoking him is of critical importance to the book's audience as a kind of typology about the struggle of black people to gain self-knowledge, a story that black people never tire of reciting, even today with a plethora of black bookshops and publishers grinding out books on black subjects or with a black point of view with ever-increasing regularity--and a great deal to do with the shift that has taken place within the black population of the United States in the last 25 years and the dramatic change in its status. This book is the product of both a strong movement toward the intellectualization of black experience among an elite and the anti-intellectualization of black experience by the public at large (earnest and respectful of black experience as it has now generally become) and those who cater to the public's access to intellectual material by rounding off the rough edges and making it thoroughly anti-intellectual by designing and evoking certain emotional markers about "struggle" and "resistance." I shall begin my next entry with a discussion of a set of entries in Africana , those dealing with aspects of Philadelphia, my hometown, and a response to David Nicholson's impressions of the book.

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TWO WHOLE GLORIOUS WEEKS By WILL WORTHINGTON A new author, and a decidedly unusual idea of the summer camp of the future: hard labor, insults, and hog kidneys! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Bertha and I were like a couple of city kids on their first country outing when we arrived at Morton's place. The weather was perfect—the first chill of autumn had arrived in the form of a fine, needle-shower rain of the type that doesn't look very bad through a window, but when you get out in it, it seeks out every tiny opening between the warp and weft of your clothing and runs through your hair and eyebrows, under your collar and over the surfaces of your body until, as though directed by some knowing, invisible entity, it finds its way to your belly-button. It was beautifully timed: the ancient motor-bus had two blowouts on the way up the last half-mile of corduroy road that led to the place, and of course we were obliged to change the tires ourselves. This was a new experience for both of us, and on the very first day! Everything was as advertised, and we hadn't even arrived at the admission gate yet. We didn't dare talk. On the way from the heliport we had seen some of the other folks at work in the swamp that surrounded the camp proper. They were digging out stumps with mattocks, crowbars and axes, and some of them stood waist-deep in the dark water. Bertha had said "Looky there!" and had made some remark about the baggy gray coveralls they wore—"Just like convicts," she said. The driver, a huge, swinelike creature with very small, close-set eyes, had yanked the emergency brake and wheeled around at us then. "You shnooks might just as well get outa the habit o' talkin' right here an' now. One more peep outa ya, 'n ya git clobbered!" All we could do was look at each other and giggle like a couple of kids in the back pew of Sunday School, after that. Bertha looked ten years younger already. The gate was exactly as the brochure had pictured it: solid and massive, it was let into a board fence about ten feet high which extended as far as you could see in either direction and lost itself on either side in a tangle of briers, elder bushes and dark trees. There were two strands of barbed wire running along the top. A sign over the gate—stark, black lettering on a light gray background—read: Silence!—No admission without authority—No smoking! *** MORTON'S MISERY FARM *** 30 acres of swamp—Our own rock quarry—Jute Mill—Steam laundry Harshest dietary laws in the Catskills A small door opened at one side of the gate and a short, stocky, well-muscled woman in a black visored cap and a shapeless black uniform came out and boarded the bus. She had our releases with her, fastened to a clipboard. She thrust this under my nose. "Read and sign, shnook!" she said in a voice that sounded like rusty boiler plate being torn away from more rusty boiler plate. The releases were in order. Our hands shook a little when we signed the papers; there was something so terribly final and irreversible about it. There would be no release except in cases of severe medical complaint, external legal involvement or national emergency. We were paid up in advance, of course. There was no turning away. Another attendant, who also looked like a matron of police, boarded the bus with a large suitcase and two of the baggy gray garments we had seen the others wearing in the swamp. No shoes, socks or underwear. "Strip and pack your clothes here, shnooks," said the woman with the empty suitcase. We did, though it was pretty awkward ... standing there in the aisle of the bus with those two gorgons staring at us. I started to save out a pack of cigarettes, but was soon disabused of this idea. The older of the two women knocked the pack from my hand, ground it under her heel on the floor and let me have one across the face with what I am almost certain must have been an old sock full of rancid hog kidneys. "What the hell was that?" I protested. "Sock fulla hog kidneys, shnook. Soft but heavy, know what I mean? Just let us do the thinkin' around here. Git outa line just once an' you'll see what we can do with a sock fulla hog kidneys." I didn't press the matter further. All I could think of was how I wanted a smoke just then. When I thought of the fresh, new pack of cigarettes with its unbroken cellophane and its twenty, pure white cylinders of fragrant Turkish and Virginia, I came as close to weeping as I had in forty years. The ground was slimy and cold under our bare feet when we got down from the bus, but the two viragos behind us gave us no time to pick our way delicately over the uneven ground. We were propelled through the small door at the side of the gate, and at last we found ourselves within the ten-foot barriers of the Misery Camp. We just looked at each other and giggled. Inside the yard, about twenty other guests shuffled around and around in a circle. Their gray coveralls were dark and heavy with the rain and clung to their bodies in clammy-looking patches. All moved sluggishly through the mud with their arms hanging slack at their sides, their shoulders hunched forward against the wet chill, and their eyes turned downward, as though they were fascinated with the halting progress of their own feet. I had never seen people look so completely dispirited and tired. Only one man raised his head to look at us as we stood there. I noticed that his forehead had bright purple marks on it. These proved to be " No. 94, Property of MMF ," in inch-high letters which ran from temple to temple just above his eyebrows. Incredibly enough the man grinned at us. "You'll be sah-reeeee," he yelped. I saw him go down into the mud under a blow with a kidney-sock from a burly male guard who had been standing in the center of the cheerless little circle. "Leave the welcoming ceremonies to us, knoedelhead!" barked the guard. The improvident guest rose painfully and resumed his plodding with the rest. I noticed that he made no rejoinder. He cringed. We were led into a small office at one end of a long, wooden, one-story building. A sign on the door said, simply, " Admissions. Knock and Remove Hat. " The lady guard knocked and we entered. We had no hats to remove; indeed, this was emphasized for us by the fact that the rain had by now penetrated our hair and brows and was running down over our faces annoyingly. As soon as I'd blinked the rain from my eyes, I was able to see the form of the person behind the desk with more clarity than I might have wished. He was large, but terribly emaciated, with the kind of gauntness that should be covered by a sheet—tenderly, reverently and finally. Picture the archetype of every chain-gang captain who has been relieved for inhumanity to prisoners; imagine the naked attribute Meanness, stripped of all accidental, incongruous, mitigating integument; picture all kindness, all mercy, all warmth, all humanity excised or cauterized, or turned back upon itself and let ferment into some kind of noxious mash; visualize the creature from which all the gentle qualities had been expunged, thus, and then try to forget the image. The eyes were perhaps the worst feature. They burned like tiny phosphorescent creatures, dimly visible deep inside a cave under dark, overhanging cliffs—the brows. The skin of the face was drawn over the bones so tautly that you felt a sharp rap with a hard object would cause the sharp cheekbones to break through. There was a darkness about the skin that should have been, yet somehow did not seem to be the healthy tan of outdoor living. It was a coloring that came from the inside and radiated outwards; perhaps pellagra—a wasting, darkening malnutritional disease which no man had suffered for three hundred years. I wondered where, where on the living earth, they had discovered such a specimen. "I am in full charge here. You will speak only when spoken to," he said. His voice came as a surprise and, to me at least, as a profound relief. I had expected an inarticulate drawl—something not yet language, not quite human. Instead his voice was clipped, precise, clear as new type on white paper. This gave me hope at a time when hope was at a dangerously low mark on my personal thermometer. My mounting misgivings had come to focus on this grim figure behind the desk, and the most feared quality that I had seen in the face, a hard, sharp, immovable and imponderable stupidity, was strangely mitigated and even contradicted by the flawless, mechanical speech of the man. "What did you do on the Outside, shnook?" he snapped at me. "Central Computing and Control. I punched tapes. Only got four hours of work a month," I said, hoping to cover myself with a protective film of humility. "Hah! Another low-hour man. I don't see how the hell you could afford to come here. Well, anyway—we've got work for climbers like you. Real work, shnook. I know climbers like you hope you'll meet aristocracy in a place like this—ten hour men or even weekly workers, but I can promise you, shnook, that you'll be too damned tired to disport yourself socially, and too damned busy looking at your toes. Don't forget that!" Remembering, I looked down quickly, but not before one of the matrons behind me had fetched me a solid clout on the side of the head with her sap. "Mark 'em and put 'em to work," he barked at the guards. Two uniformed men, who must have sneaked in while I was fascinated by the man behind the desk, seized me and started painting my forehead with an acrid fluid that stung like strong disinfectant in an open wound. I squinted my eyes and tried to look blank. "This is indelible," one of them explained. "We have the chemical to take it off, but it doesn't come off till we say so." When I had been marked, one of the guards took his ink and brush and advanced upon Bertha. The other addressed himself to me. "There is a choice of activities. There is the jute mill, the rock quarry, the stump-removal detail, the manure pile...." "How about the steam laundry?" I asked, prompted now by the cold sound of a sudden gust of rain against the wooden side of the building. Splukk! went the guard's kidney-sock as it landed on the right hinge of my jaw. Soft or not, it nearly dropped me. "I said there is a choice—not you have a choice, shnook. Besides, the steam laundry is for the ladies. Don't forget who's in charge here." "Who is in charge here, then?" I asked, strangely emboldened by the clout on the side of the jaw. Splukk! "That's somethin' you don't need to know, shnook. You ain't gonna sue nobody. You signed a release —remember?" I had nothing to say. My toes, I noted, looked much the same. Then, behind my back, I heard a sharp squeal from Bertha. "Stop that! Oh stop! Stop! The brochure said nothing about—" "Take it easy lady," said the other guard in an oily-nasty voice. "I won't touch you none. Just wanted to see if you was amenable." I would like more than anything else in the world to be able to say honestly that I felt a surge of anger then. I didn't. I can remember with terrible clarity that I felt nothing. "So he wants a nice inside job in the steam laundry?" said the man behind the desk—"the captain," we were instructed to call him. Another gust of wet wind joined his comments. "Put him on 'The Big Rock Candy Mountain.'" He fixed me then with those deep-set, glow-worm eyes, coldly appraising. The two Sisters of Gorgonia, meanwhile, seized Bertha's arms and dragged her from the room. I did not try to follow. I knew the rules: there were to be three husband-and-wife visiting hours per week. Fifteen minutes each. The Captain was still scrutinizing me from under the dark cliff of his brow. A thin smile now took shape on his lipless mouth. One of the guards was beating a slow, measured, somewhat squudgy tattoo on the edge of the desk with his kidney-sock. "You wouldn't be entertaining angry thoughts, would you shnook?" asked the Captain, after what seemed like half an hour of sickly pause. My toes hadn't changed in the slightest respect. It must have been then, or soon after that, that my sense of time went gently haywire. I was conducted to "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," which turned out to be a Brobdingnagian manure heap. Its forbidding bulk overshadowed all other features of the landscape except some of the larger trees. A guard stood in the shadow of a large umbrella, at a respectable and tolerable distance from the nitrogenous colossus, but not so distant that his voice did not command the entire scene. " Hut-ho! hut-ho! Hut-ho HAW! " he roared, and the wretched, gray-clad figures, whose number I joined without ceremony or introduction, moved steadily at their endless work in apparent unawareness of his cadenced chant. I do not remember that anyone spoke to me directly or, at least, coherently enough so that words lodged in my memory, but someone must have explained the general pattern of activity. The object, it seemed, was to move all this soggy fertilizer from its present imposing site to another small but growing pile located about three hundred yards distant. This we were to accomplish by filling paper cement bags with the manure and carrying it, a bag at a time, to the more distant pile. Needless to say, the bags frequently dissolved or burst at the lower seams. This meant scraping up the stuff with the hands and refilling another paper bag. Needless to say, also, pitchforks and shovels were forbidden at the Farm, as was any potentially dangerous object which could be lifted, swung or hurled. It would have been altogether redundant to explain this rule. I have absolutely no way of knowing how long we labored at this Augean enterprise; my watch had been taken from me, of course, and of the strange dislocation of my normal time-sense I have already spoken. I do remember that floodlights had been turned on long before a raucous alarm sounded, indicating that it was time for supper. My weariness from the unaccustomed toil had carried me past the point of hunger, but I do remember my first meal at the Farm. We had dumplings. You usually think fondly of dumplings as being in or with something. We had just dumplings—cold and not quite cooked through. Impressions of this character have a way of entrenching themselves, perhaps at the cost of more meaningful ones. Conversation at the Farm was monosyllabic and infrequent, so it may merely be that I recall most lucidly those incidents with which some sort of communication was associated. A small man sitting opposite me in the mess hall gloomily indicated the dumpling at which I was picking dubiously. "They'll bind ya," he said with the finality of special and personal knowledge. "Ya don't wanta let yaself get bound here. They've got a—" I don't now recall whether I said something or whether I merely held up my hand. I do know that I had no wish to dwell on the subject. If I had hoped for respite after "supper," it was at that time that I learned not to hope. Back to "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" we went, and under the bleak, iridescent glare of the lights we resumed our labor of no reward. One by one I felt my synapses parting, and one by one, slowly and certainly, the fragile membranes separating the minute from the hour, the Now from the Then, and the epoch out of unmeasured time softened and sloughed away. I was, at last, Number 109 at work on a monstrous manure pile, and I labored with the muscles and nerves of an undifferentiated man. I experienced change. I knew now that my identity, my ego, was an infinitesimal thing which rode along embedded in a mountain of more or less integrated organisms, more or less purposeful tissues, fluids and loosely articulated bones, as a tiny child rides in the cab of a locomotive. And the rain came down and the manure bags broke and we scrabbled with our hands to refill new ones. The raucous alarm sounded again, and a voice which might have been that of a hospital nurse or of an outraged parrot announced that it was time for "Beddy-by." And in a continuous, unbroken motion we slogged into another long building, discarded our coveralls, waded through a shallow tank of cloudy disinfectant solution and were finally hosed down by the guards. I remember observing to myself giddily that I now knew how cars must feel in an auto laundry. There were clean towels waiting for us at the far end of the long building, but I must have just blotted the excess water off myself in a perfunctory way, because I still felt wet when I donned the clean coverall that someone handed me. "Beddy-by" was one of a row of thirty-odd slightly padded planks like ironing boards, which were arranged at intervals of less than three feet in another long, low-ceilinged barracks. I knew that I would find no real release in "Beddy-by"—only another dimension of that abiding stupor which now served me for consciousness. I may have groaned, croaked, whimpered, or expressed myself in some other inarticulate way as I measured the length of the board with my carcass; I only remember that the others did so. There was an unshaded light bulb hanging directly over my face. To this day, I cannot be sure that this bleak beacon was ever turned off. I think not. I can only say with certainty that it was burning just as brightly when the raucous signal sounded again, and the unoiled voice from the loudspeaker announced that it was time for the morning Cheer-Up Entertainment. These orgies, it turned out, were held in the building housing the admission office. There was a speech choir made up of elderly women, all of whom wore the black uniform of the Farm matrons. The realization that a speech choir still existed may have startled me into a somewhat higher state of awareness; I had assumed that the speech choir had gone out with hair-receivers and humoristic medicine. The things they recited were in a childishly simple verse form: One and two and three and four; One and two and THREE. These verses had to do with the virtues of endless toil, the importance of thrift, and the hideous dangers lurking in cigarette smoking and needless borrowing. I am happy to report that I do not remember them more specifically than this, but I was probably more impressed by the delivery than the message delivered. I could not imagine where they had discovered these women. During their performance, some sense of duration was restored to me; while I could be certain of nothing pertaining to the passage of time, it is not possible that the Cheer-Up period lasted less than two hours. Then they let us go to the latrine. After a breakfast of boiled cabbage and dry pumpernickel crusts—more savory than you might imagine—we were assigned to our work for the day. I had expected to return to the manure pile, but got instead the rock quarry. I remember observing then, with no surprise at all, that the sun was out and the day promised to be a hot one. The work at the rock quarry was organized according to the same futilitarian pattern that governed the manure-pile operation. Rock had to be hacked, pried and blasted from one end of the quarry, then reduced to coarse gravel with sledge-hammers and carted to the other end of the excavation in wheelbarrows. Most of the men commenced working at some task in the quarry with the automatic unconcern of trained beasts who have paused for rest and water, perhaps, but have never fully stopped. A guard indicated a wheelbarrow to me and uttered a sharp sound ... something like HUP! I picked up the smooth handles of the barrow, and time turned its back upon us again. It was that night—or perhaps the following night—that Bertha and I had our first fifteen-minute visit with each other. She was changed: her face glowed with feverish vitality, her hair was stringy and moist, and her eyes were serenely glassy. She had not been more provocative in twenty-five years. An old dormant excitement stirred within me—microscopically but unmistakably. She told me that she had been put to work in the jute mill, but had passed out and had been transferred to the steam laundry. Her job in the laundry was to sort out the socks and underwear that were too bad to go in with the rest of the wash. We speculated on where the socks and underwear could have come from, as such fripperies were denied to us at the Farm. We also wondered about the manure, considering that no animals were in evidence here. Both, we concluded, must have been shipped in specially from the Outside. We found it in us to giggle, when the end of the visit was announced, over our own choice of conversational material for that precious quarter hour. Thereafter, when we could catch glimpses of each other during the day, we would exchange furtive signals, then go about our work exhilarated by the fiction that we shared some priceless Cabalistic knowledge. The grim Captain made an appearance in the rock quarry one morning just as we were beginning work. He stood on top of a pile of stones, swinging his kidney-sap from his wrist and letting his eyes sweep over us as though selecting one for slaughter. When the silence had soaked in thoroughly, he announced in his cold, incisive tone that "there will be no rest periods, no chow, no 'Beddy-by,' until this entire rock face is reduced to ballast rock." He indicated a towering slab of stone. We raised our heads only long enough to reassure ourselves of the utter hopelessness of the task before us. Not daring to look at each other closely, fearing to see our own despair reflected in the faces of others, we picked up our hammers and crowbars and crawled to the top of the monolithic mass. The film must have cleared from my eyes then, momentarily. "Why—this thing is nothing but a huge writing slate," I said to a small, bald inmate beside me. He made a feeble noise in reply. The Captain left, and the only other guard now relaxed in the shade of a boulder nearly fifty yards away. He was smoking a forbidden cigar. Suddenly and unaccountably, I felt a little taller than the others, and everything looked unnaturally clear. The slab was less than six inches wide at the top! "If we work this thing right, this job will practically do itself. We'll be through here before sundown," I heard myself snap out. The others, accustomed now to obeying any imperative voice, fell to with crowbars and peaveys as I directed them. "Use them as levers," I said. "Don't just flail and hack—pry!" No one questioned me. When all of the tools were in position I gave the count: " One—two—HEAVE! " The huge slab finally leaned out, wavered for a queasy moment, then fell with a splintering crash onto the boulders below. After the dust settled, we could see that much of the work of breaking up the mass was already accomplished. We descended and set to work with an enthusiasm that was new. Long before sundown, of course, we were marched back to the latrine and then to the mess hall. Later I had expected that some further work would be thrust upon us, but it didn't happen. The grim Captain stopped me as I entered the mess hall. I froze. There was a queer smile on his face, and I had grown to fear novelty. "You had a moment," he said, simply and declaratively. "You didn't miss it, did you?" "No," I replied, not fully understanding. "No, I didn't miss it." "You are more fortunate than most," he went on, still standing between me and the mess hall. "Some people come here year after year, or they go to other places like this, or permit themselves to be confined in the hulls of old submarines, and some even apprentice themselves to medical missionaries in Equatorial Africa; they expose themselves to every conceivable combination of external conditions, but nothing really happens to them. They feel nothing except a fleeting sensation of contrast—soon lost in a torrent of other sensations. No 'moment'; only a brief cessation of the continuing pleasure process. You have been one of the fortunate few, Mr. Devoe." Then the film dissolved—finally and completely—from the surface of my brain, and my sense of time returned to me in a flood of ordered recollections. Hours and days began to arrange themselves into meaningful sequence. Was it possible that two whole glorious weeks could have passed so swiftly? "You and Mrs. Devoe may leave tonight or in the morning, just as you prefer," said the Captain. Bertha and I have had little to say to one another as we wait in the office for the car that will take us to the heliport. For the moment—this moment—it suffices that we stand here in our own clothes, that we have tasted coffee again, brought to us on a tray by a matron whose manner towards us bordered on the obsequious, and that the aroma of a cigarette is just as gratifying as ever. We will go back to our ten-room apartment on the ninety-first floor of the New Empire State Hotel; back to our swimming pool, our three-dimensional color television, our anti-gravity sleeping chambers, our impeccably efficient, relentlessly cheerful robot servants, and our library of thrills, entertainment, solace, diversion and escape—all impressed on magnetic tape and awaiting our pleasure. I will go back to my five kinds of cigars and my sixteen kinds of brandy; Bertha will return to her endless fantasy of pastries and desserts—an endless, joyous parade of goodies, never farther away than the nearest dumb-waiter door. And we will both become softer, heavier, a little less responsive. When, as sometimes happens, the sweet lethargy threatens to choke off our breath, we will step into our flying platform and set its automatic controls for Miami, Palm Beach, or the Cote d'Azur. There are conducted tours to the Himalayas now, or to the "lost" cities of the South American jungles, or to the bottom of any one of the seven seas. We will bide our time, much as others do. But we will survive these things: I still have my four hours per month at Central Computing and Control; Bertha has her endless and endlessly varying work on committees (the last one was dedicated to the abolition of gambling at Las Vegas in favor of such wholesome games as Scrabble and checkers). We cannot soften and slough away altogether, for when all else fails, when the last stronghold of the spirit is in peril, there is always the vision of year's end and another glorious vacation.

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The Happy Clown BY ALICE ELEANOR JONES This was a century of peace, plethora and perfection, and little Steven was a misfit, a nonconformist, who hated perfection. He had to learn the hard way.... [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Steven Russell was born a misfit, a nonconformist, and for the first five years of his life he made himself and his parents extremely unhappy. The twenty-first century was perfect, and this inexplicable child did not like perfection. The first trouble arose over his food. His mother did not nurse him, since the doctors had proved that Baby-Lac, and the soft rainbow-colored plastic containers in which it was warmed and offered, were both a vast improvement on nature. Steven drank the Baby-Lac, but though it was hard to credit in so young a child, sometimes his face wore an expression of pure distaste. A little later he rejected the Baby Oatsies and Fruitsies and Meatsies, and his large half-focused eyes wept at the jolly pictures on the jarsies. He disliked his plastic dish made like a curled-up Jolly Kitten, and his spoon with the Happy Clown's head on the handle. He turned his face away determinedly and began to pine, reducing his mother to tears and his father to frightened anger. The doctor said cheerily, "There's nothing the matter with him. He'll eat when he gets hungry enough," and Steven did, to a degree, but not as if he enjoyed it. One day when he was nearly a year old, his mother carried his Kiddie Korner with the Dancing Dogsies on the pad into her bedroom, put him in it, and began to take things out of the bottom bureau drawer. They were old things, and Harriet Russell was ashamed of them. She had said more than once to her husband Richard, only half joking, "I couldn't give them away, and I'd be ashamed for anybody to see them in our trash!" They were old silver, knives and forks and spoons that looked like what they were, unadorned, and a child's plain silver dish and cup, and one small spoon with a useful curly handle. They had belonged to Harriet's great-grandmother. Once a year Harriet took the things out and polished them and furtively put them back. This year Steven cried, "Ma!" stretching out his hands toward the silver and uttering a string of determined sounds which were perfectly clear to his mother. She smiled at him lovingly but shook her head. "No, Stevie. Mumsie's precious baby doesn't want those nasty old things, no he doesn't! Play with your Happy Clown, sweetheart." Steven's face got red, and he squeezed his eyes shut, opened his mouth and howled until his mother passed him the dish and cup and curly spoon to play with. At meal-time he would not be parted from them, and Harriet had to put away the plastic dish and spoon. Thereafter, for the sake of the container, he tolerated the thing contained, and thrived and grew fat. Steven did not like his Rockabye Crib, that joggled him gently and sang him songs about the Happy Clown all night long; and he howled until they turned it off. He was a clean boy, and to his mother's amazement trained himself to be dry day and night by the age of fourteen months, without the aid of the Singing Toidey or the Happy Clown Alarm; so she bought him a Little Folks Youth Bed, with a built-in joggler, and Happy Clowns on the corners, and a television set in the footboard. It was a smaller copy of his parents' bed, even to the Happy Clowns. Steven did not like that either, and if his parents persisted in turning the bed on after he had learned to turn it off, he climbed out and slept on the floor. Harriet said worriedly to her husband, "I don't know what could be the matter with him. Dickie, he's peculiar!" Richard tried to comfort her. "Never mind, Harry, he'll outgrow it." Steven did not outgrow it. When he became too big for the curly spoon and dish and cup he demanded a knife and fork and spoon from the bureau drawer and ate his meals from the plainest dish he could find. He ate them with his back stubbornly turned to the television set, away from the morning cartoons and the noontime Kiddies' Lunch Club and the evening Happy Clown. The Happy Clown had been an American institution for thirty years. He was on television for an hour every night at dinner time, with puppets and movies and live singers and dancers and his own inimitable brand of philosophy and humor. Everybody loved the Happy Clown. He had been several different actors in thirty years, but his makeup never changed: the beaming face drawn in vivid colors, the rotund body that shook when he laughed like a bowlful of Jellsies, and the chuckling infectious laugh. The Happy Clown was always so cheerful and folksy and sincere. He believed passionately in all the products he instructed his viewers to buy, and one was entirely certain that he used them all himself. He gave one much more than advertising, though. Some of his nightly gems of wisdom (he called them nuggets) were really wonderful; they made one think. A favorite nugget, which people were always writing in and asking him to repeat, went like this: "We're all alike inside, folks, and we ought to be all alike outside." The Happy Clown's viewers were not children and adults, they were kiddies and folks. After the Happy Clown went off the air the happy kiddies went to bed, to lie for a while looking at the Jolly Kitten and the Dancing Dogsie, until, lulled by the joggler, they went gently to sleep. After that came the cowboys and spacemen, carryovers for any happy kiddies with insomnia. For really meaty programs one had to stay up past ten. Then the spectaculars began, and the quiz shows, and the boxing and wrestling. Steven did not like the Happy Clown or the Jolly Kitten or the Dancing Dogsie. Sometimes he began to grow interested in the cowboys or spacemen, but when they stopped in the middle of an adventure to talk about how they could not possibly rope the steers or shoot the asteroids without a good breakfast of Cornsies and Choko-Milko, which everybody ate, just everybody, Steven climbed out of bed and slept on the floor. Steven did not like the records or the talking books, and when he went to kiddie-garden he viewed the televised lessons with a cold eye. For some reason which he could not have explained, he wanted to learn to read, but they would not teach him till he was seven, and so he taught himself, from the letters on the jarsies. But then there was nothing to read except the newspapers and the magazines, which he puzzled over patiently, getting most of the words right after a while. The many advertisements were easiest; they used pictures and the simplest of language. His parents thought it was very cunning of him to look at the printing like that, so wisely, as if he could read it! He said once to Harriet, "I can read it," but she said, "Oh, Stevie, you're teasing Mumsie!" and looked so frightened at this fresh peculiarity that the child said gravely, "Yes, teasing." He wished he had a silent book. He knew there were such things, but there were none at home. There were few silent books anywhere. There were none in kiddie-garden. Steven was not happy in kiddie-garden. The enthusiasm the other kiddies showed for the lessons appalled him. The kiddies themselves appalled him. They joined so passionately in the group play, clutching each other with their hot moist hands, panting and grinning into each others' faces. They were always clutching and panting and grinning, in large noisy groups, with large community smiles. They confused him; he could not tell them apart. Steven retired to a corner and turned his back, and when they clutched and panted and grinned at him he hit them. The kiddie-garden monitor had to report of him to his unhappy parents that he was uncooperative and anti-social. He would not merge with the group, he would not acquire the proper attitudes for successful community living, he would not adjust. Most shocking of all, when the lesson about the birdsies and beesies was telecast, he not only refused to participate in the ensuing period of group experimentation, but lost color and disgraced himself by being sick in his corner. It was a painful interview. At the end of it the monitor recommended the clinic. Richard appreciated her delicacy. The clinic would be less expensive than private psychiatry, and after all, the manager of a supermarket was no millionaire. Harriet said to Richard when they were alone, "Dickie, he isn't outgrowing it, he's getting worse! What are we going to do?" It was a special tragedy, since Harriet was unable to have any more kiddies, and if this one turned out wrong ... Richard said firmly, "We'll take him to the clinic. They'll know what to do." The first thing they did to Steven was to talk to him. The psychiatrist made him lie down on a foam rubber couch, kiddies' model, with the Happy Clown motif on the slip-cover, and said with a beaming face, "Now, Stevie, what seems to be the trouble?" The boy turned his head away from the psychiatrist's shining teeth and said, "My name's not Stevie. It's Steven." He was a thin little boy, rather undersized. The baby fat had melted away fast when he began to be exposed to kiddie-garden. He had dark hair and big eyes and an uncommonly precise way of speaking for a child of five. The psychiatrist said, "Oh, but we're going to be friends, Stevie, and friends always use nicknames, don't they? My name's William, but everybody calls me Willie. You can call me Uncle Willie." The boy said politely, "I'd rather not, please." The doctor was undismayed. "I want to help you. You believe that, don't you, Stevie?" The child said, "Steven. Do I have to lie down?" The doctor said agreeably, "It's more usual to lie down, but you may sit up if you want to. Why don't you like kiddie-garden, Steven?" The boy sat up and regarded him warily. The doctor had a kind face, a really kind face in spite of all those shining teeth, and Steven was only five years old, after all, and there was nobody to talk to, and he was desperately unhappy. Perhaps.... He said, "You'll tell them." The doctor shook his head. "Nothing goes farther than this room, Stevie—Steven." The child leaned forward, pressing his knees together, hugging himself with his arms, bowing his head. His position was almost foetal. He said, "I'm never by myself. They never let me be by myself." The psychiatrist said reasonably, "But nobody can live by himself, Stevie." He had apparently forgotten Steven, and the boy did not correct him again. "You have to learn to live with other people, to work and play with them, to know them, and the only way you can learn is by being with them. When you can't be with them personally, there's always television. That's how you learn, Stevie. You can't be by yourself." The boy looked up and said starkly, "Never?" The gleaming teeth showed. "But why should you want to?" Steven said, "I don't know." The doctor said, slowly and with emphasis, "Stevie, long before you were born the world was a very bad place. There were wars all the time. Do you know why?" The boy shook his head. "It was because people were different from each other, and didn't understand each other, and didn't know each other. They had to learn how to be alike, and understand, and know, so that they would be able to live together. They learned in many ways, Stevie. One way was by visiting each other—you've heard about the visitors who come from—" Steven said, "You mean the Happy Tours." "Yes. When you're twelve years old you can go on a Happy Tour. Won't that be fun?" Steven said, "If I could go alone." The doctor looked at him sharply. "But you can't. Try to understand, Stevie, you can't. Now tell me—why don't you like to be with other people?" Steven said, "All the time—not all the time ." The doctor repeated patiently, "Why?" Steven looked at the doctor and said a very strange thing. "They touch me." He seemed to shrink into himself. "Not just with their hands." The doctor shook his head sadly. "Of course they do, that's just—well, maybe you're too young to understand." The interview went on for quite a while, and at the end of it Steven was given a series of tests which took a week. The psychiatrist had not told the truth; what the boy said, during the first interview and all the tests, was fully recorded on concealed machines. The complete transcript made a fat dossier in the office of the Clinic Director. At the end of the tests the Director said seriously to Steven's parents, "I'll be frank with you. You have a brilliant kiddie here—right now he has the intelligence of a twelve-year-old—but brilliance has to be channeled in the right direction. Just now—well, frankly, it's channeled in the wrong direction. We'll give it a year or so, and then if things don't clear up I'm afraid we'll have to correct him." Richard said through dry lips, "You mean a Steyner?" The Director nodded. "The only thing." Harriet shuddered and began to cry. "But there's never been anything like that in our family! The disgrace—oh, Dickie, it would kill me!" The Director said kindly, "There's no disgrace, Mrs. Russell. That's a mistaken idea many people have. These things happen occasionally—nobody knows why—and there's absolutely no disgrace in a Steyner. Nothing is altered but the personality, and afterward you have a happy normal kiddie who hardly remembers that anything was ever wrong with him. Naturally nobody ever mentions it.... But there's no hurry; in the case of a kiddie we can wait a while. Bring Stevie in once a week; we'll try therapy first." Being, as the Director had said, a brilliant kiddie, Steven soon understood much of what was kept from him. It did not take him long to learn what was making his Dadsie look stern and white and what was making his Mumsie cry. He loved his parents and did not want them to be unhappy, and he certainly did not want to have his head cut open, and so he began to act. Even at five, Steven discovered in himself a fine talent for acting. He began to conform, to adjust, to merge. He became social and cooperative and acquired the proper attitudes for successful community living. He gave up the old silver voluntarily, he accepted the Youth Bed, he looked at the Happy Clown, and he did much better in kiddie-garden. He even joined in the group experimentation and was not sick any more, though he could not keep himself from losing color. They were pleased with him at the clinic and after a few months discharged him. By the time Steven was twelve and had made the Happy Tour and joined the Happy Scouts and had a happy affair, involving experimentation, with a neighbor's daughter, Harriet and Richard ceased to worry about him. If sometimes he felt so tightly strung-up that a storm of tears was his only relief, he kept the tears quiet. He was graduated from high school at sixteen and from college at twenty, having read all he could of the silent books in the scant high school library and the more ample university one, and having wisely elected to appear more stupid than he was. Even his I.Q. was now judged to be only slightly above normal. He left college with honors, popularity and a reputation as an actor. He took the lead in all the dramatic club plays, having particular success in the reproduction of a Happy Clown program. Steven, of course, was the Happy Clown. He enrolled at once in the New York School of Television Arts, and his mother cried when he left home to live in the School dormitory. Steven did well at Television Arts, soon taking more leads than was customary in School productions, which were organized on a strictly repertory basis. He did not stay to graduate, being snatched away in his first year by a talent scout for a popular daytime serial, "The Happy Life." "The Happy Life" recounted the trials of a young physician, too beautiful for his own good, who became involved in endless romantic complications. Steven was given the lead, the preceding actor having moved up to a job as understudy for the Jolly Kitten, and was an immediate success. For one thing he looked the part. He was singularly handsome in a lean dark-browed way and did not need flattering makeup or special camera angles. He had a deep vibrant voice and perfect timing. He could say, "Darling, this is tearing me to pieces!" with precisely the right intonation, and let tears come into his magnificent eyes, and make his jaw muscles jump appealingly, and hold the pose easily for the five minutes between the ten-minute pitch for Marquis cigarettes which constituted one episode of "The Happy Life." His fan mail was prodigious. If Steven had moments of bewilderment, of self-loathing, of despair, when the tears were real and the jaw muscles jumped to keep the mouth from screaming, no one in the Happy Young Men's dormitory where he slept ever knew it. He managed his life well enough. He had a few affairs with girls, it was expected of one, and he did not have to work very hard at it since they always threw themselves at him; and he got along well with other young men, who forgave him for being so handsome because he did not work at it except on camera; but he was lonely. Surrounded by people, intruded and trespassed upon, continually touched in ways other than physical, he was yet lonely. During his life he had met a few other nonconformists, shy, like him, wary of revealing themselves, but something always seemed to happen to them. Some were miserable being nonconformists and asked pitifully for the Steyner, some were detected, as Steven had been, and some were unfortunately surprised in hospitals. Under the anesthetic they sometimes talked, and then, if they were adults, they were immediately corrected by means of Steyner's lobotomy. It had been learned that adults did not respond to therapy. There was never any organization, any underground, of misfits. An underground presupposes injustice to be fought, cruelty to be resisted, and there was no injustice and no cruelty. The mass of people were kind, and their leaders, duly and fairly elected, were kind. They all sincerely believed in the gospel of efficiency and conformity and kindness. It had made the world a wonderful place to live in, full of wonderful things to make and buy and consume (all wonderfully advertised), and if one were a misfit and the doctors found it out and gave one a Steyner, it was only to make one happy, so that one could appreciate what a wonderful world it was. Steven met no nonconformists at the School of Television Arts, and none while he was acting in "The Happy Life" until Denise Cottrell joined the cast. Denise—called Denny, of course—was a pleasantly plain young woman with a whimsical face which photographed pretty, and remarkable dark blue eyes. It was her eyes which first made Steven wonder. They mirrored his own hope, and longing, and the desperate loneliness of the exile. For two months they were together as often as they could be, talking intellectual treason in public under cover of conventional faces, and talking intellectual treason in private with excitement and laughter and sometimes tears—falling in love. They planned, after much discussion, to be married and to bring up a dozen clever rebel children. Denise said soberly, "They'd better be clever, because they'll have to learn to hide." They made love in Denise's apartment when her roommate Pauline—Polly—was out, as awkwardly as if there had never been any group experimentation or happy affairs. Denise said wonderingly, "When you really love someone it's all new. Isn't that strange?" and Steven said, kissing her, "No, not strange at all." He took her to meet his family—Denise's family lived three thousand miles away—and she behaved with such perfect decorum and charm that Richard and Harriet were delighted and as eager as Steven for the wedding. Steven had agreed reluctantly to put it off until Denise had a chance to introduce him to her parents; they were coming East at Christmas. She laughed over it and said, "I'm being terribly conventional, darling, but that's one convention I like." While they waited, Steven's agent secured a really unprecedented opportunity for so young and relatively untried an actor. The current Happy Clown was unhappily retiring, by reason of age and infirmity, and Steven's agent arranged a tryout for the part. He said, "Give it all you got, kid; it's the chance of the century." Steven said, "Sure, Joey," and allowed his sensitive face to register all the proper emotions. Actually his emotions were, in the vernacular of a previous century, mixed. He loathed the whole concept of the Happy Clown—but there was money in it, and Steven was not rebel enough to despise money. With money he could retire early, go away somewhere with Denise, to some country place where they could be relatively free of pressure. Over staggering competition he got the part. He called Denise up at once from a booth at the studio to tell her. Polly answered the phone, looking pale and frightened over the viewer, and said rapidly, "Oh, Stevie, I've been trying to get you for an hour. Denny's sick. They took her to the hospital!" Steven sat back against the hard wall of the booth, feeling cold, the receiver slack in his hand. He said, "What's the matter with her? Which hospital?" "Ap-pendicitis. Happy Hour." Polly began to cry. "Oh, Stevie, I feel so—" "I'll go right over." He cut her off abruptly and went. The doctors caught Denise's appendix in time to avoid the necessary but rarely fatal complications ... but under the anesthetic she talked, revealing enough about her opinion of television, and the Happy Clown cult, and the state of society in general, to cause her doctors to raise their eyebrows pityingly and perform the Steyner at once. While Steven sat unknowing in the waiting room, smoking a full pack of Marquis cigarettes, the thing was done. At last the doctor came out to him and said what was always said in such cases. "It was necessary to do something—you understand, no mention—" and for a moment Steven felt so ill that he was grateful for the little ampoule the doctor broke and held under his nose. They always carried those when they had to give news of a Steyner to relatives or sweethearts or friends. The doctor said, "All right now? Good .... You'll be careful, of course. She may be conscious for a minute; there's no harm in it yet, she won't move or touch the—" Steven said, "I'll be careful." He was still feeling ill when they let him in to see Denise. He sat down beside her bed and spoke to her urgently. "Denise, talk to me. Please, Denise!" She opened her eyes, looked at him drowsily and smiled. "Oh, Stevie, I'm so glad you came. I've been wanting you, darling." Steven said, "Denise—" She frowned. "Why do you call me that? Call me Denny. Did you get the part, darling?" He drew back a little. "Yes, I got it." She gave him a radiant smile. "That's wonderful! I'm so proud of you, Stevie." She slept again. That night in the HYM dormitory Steven did not sleep. He lay quiet, tense, hoping for the relief of tears, but it did not come. Steven went to see Denise every day though after the first time she was not awake to know him. The doctors were keeping her under sedation until the head bandage could be removed. So far as Denise was to know, she had gone to the hospital simply for a rather protracted appendectomy. Looking at her, Steven knew that he could never leave her. He had loved her completely; he would love her now with as much of himself as she would need or understand. For a while he waited to be kindly questioned, to be thoroughly examined, to be tenderly given the shot in the arm and to awake like her, but nobody came. Denise had apparently said nothing about him. Some censor or other—perhaps it was the censor of love—had kept her from even saying his name. For a while Steven considered confessing to somebody that he was a—what?—an unacceptable member of society. Then they would make him like Denise. He shuddered. Did he really want to be like Denise? Some stubborn pride in him refused it. When Denise left the hospital for the hotel where she would stay until the wedding, Steven was more gentle with her than ever, kinder and more loving. He made her very happy. He made love to her again, and it was like loving a ghost—no, it was like loving a fine beautiful body without the ghost, without the spirit. He returned to the HYM to lie sleepless amid the breathings and mutterings of the other young men, turning restlessly in his bed, feeling oppressed, tormented, strung on wires. He rehearsed feverishly for the part of the Happy Clown, and because he was a fine craftsman and a conscientious artist he continued to give it all he had. The sponsors were pleased. A week before Christmas the current Happy Clown retired and hobbled off to a nursing home. There was no fanfare—the public was not to realize that the Happy Clown was mortal—and Steven took over with no visible change. For five days he played the part to perfection. On the sixth day he performed as usual, perhaps a little better. His commercials had a special fervor, and the sponsors exchanged happy glances. Denise was sitting in the booth with them; she smiled at Steven lovingly through the glass. Steven was running a little fast tonight. The engineer made stretching motions with his hands to slow him down, but he used up all his material, even the nugget, with three minutes to spare. Then he said, "All right, folks, now I have a special treat for you," and moved quickly to the center mike. Before the sponsors, or the engineers, or the studio audience, or anybody in the whole American nation knew what was happening, he began rapidly to talk. He said, "Are you all happy? You are, aren't you?—everybody's happy, because you're all sheep! All sheep, in a nice safe pasture. All alike—you eat alike and dress alike and think alike. If any of you has an original thought you'd better suppress it, or they'll cut it out of you with a knife." He leaned forward and made a horrible face at the camera. Under the jolly makeup and the artful padding, his mouth was shockingly twisted, and tears were running out of his eyes. "A long sharp knife, folks!" He paused momentarily to recover his voice, which had begun to shake. "Go on being happy, go on being sheep. Wear the clothesies, and eat the foodsies, and don't dare think! Me—I'd rather be dead, and damned, and in hell!" Fortunately nobody heard the last three sentences. The paralyzed engineer had recovered in time to cut him off during the pause, and had signalled the stagehand to draw the curtain and the sound man to play the Happy Clown sign-off record—loud. Steven finished himself thoroughly, however, by repeating the same sentiments, with some others he happened to think of, to Denise and the sponsors, when they all came pouring out of the booth. Then he collapsed. Steven's Steyner was a complete success. He recovered from it a subdued, agreeable and thoroughly conventional young man, who had the impression that he had suffered a nervous breakdown. He was discharged from the Happy Hour at the end of January, innocently leaving behind him the broken hearts of three nurses and one female physician, and went home to his parents. During his convalescence they were patient with him and passionately kind. In spite of the disgrace they felt, a disgrace that would never be mentioned, they loved him even better than before, because now he was irrevocably like them. Denise was lost to him. The outburst in the studio, and the Steyner, and the loss of the Happy Clown part were cumulatively too much for her. She broke the engagement and was heard to say that Stevie Russell had proved himself an absolute fool. He was miserable over it, though he had only a hazy idea of what he had done or why Denny should suddenly be so unkind to him. The Happy Clown incident had passed off well—immediately after it occurred, a powerful battery of comedians, including the Jolly Kitten and the Dancing Dogsie, forgetting rivalries to rally 'round in a crisis, went on the air to insure that it passed off well. They made certain that every viewer should regard the whole thing as a tremendously funny if rather mystifying joke. The viewers fell in with this opinion easily and laughed about the sheep joke a good deal, admiring the Happy Clown's sense of humor—a little sharp, to be sure, not so folksy and down-to-earth as usual, but the Happy Clown could do no wrong. They said to each other, "He laughed till he cried, did you notice? So did I!" For a while teenagers addressed each other as, "Hi, sheep!" (girls were, "Hi, lamb!"), and a novelty company in Des Moines made a quick killing with scatter pins fashioned like sheep and/or lambs. But, around the studios Steven was dead. Steyner or no Steyner—and of course that part of it was never openly discussed—sponsors had long memories, and the consensus seemed to be that it was best to let sleeping sheep lie. Steven did not care. He no longer had any particular desire to be an actor. Steven went to work in his father's supermarket and was happy among the shelves of Oatsies and Cornsies and Jellsies. He got over Denise after a while and met a girl named Frances—Franny—whom he loved and who loved him. They were married in the summer and had a little house with as much furniture in it as they could afford. The first thing they bought was a television set. After all, as Stevie said, he would not want to miss the Happy Clown.

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A wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you. the hoofer by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr. A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man in the full vigor of youth do—if his heart cries out for a home? They all knew he was a spacer because of the white goggle marks on his sun-scorched face, and so they tolerated him and helped him. They even made allowances for him when he staggered and fell in the aisle of the bus while pursuing the harassed little housewife from seat to seat and cajoling her to sit and talk with him. Having fallen, he decided to sleep in the aisle. Two men helped him to the back of the bus, dumped him on the rear seat, and tucked his gin bottle safely out of sight. After all, he had not seen Earth for nine months, and judging by the crusted matter about his eyelids, he couldn't have seen it too well now, even if he had been sober. Glare-blindness, gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were excuses for a lot of things, when a man was just back from Big Bottomless. And who could blame a man for acting strangely? Minutes later, he was back up the aisle and swaying giddily over the little housewife. "How!" he said. "Me Chief Broken Wing. You wanta Indian wrestle?" The girl, who sat nervously staring at him, smiled wanly, and shook her head. "Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?" he burbled affectionately, crashing into the seat beside her. The two men slid out of their seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder. "Come on, Broken Wing, let's go back to bed." "My name's Hogey," he said. "Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding about being a Indian." "Yeah. Come on, let's go have a drink." They got him on his feet, and led him stumbling back down the aisle. "My ma was half Cherokee, see? That's how come I said it. You wanta hear a war whoop? Real stuff." "Never mind." He cupped his hands to his mouth and favored them with a blood-curdling proof of his ancestry, while the female passengers stirred restlessly and hunched in their seats. The driver stopped the bus and went back to warn him against any further display. The driver flashed a deputy's badge and threatened to turn him over to a constable. "I gotta get home," Big Hogey told him. "I got me a son now, that's why. You know? A little baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen him yet." "Will you just sit still and be quiet then, eh?" Big Hogey nodded emphatically. "Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to make any trouble." When the bus started again, he fell on his side and lay still. He made retching sounds for a time, then rested, snoring softly. The bus driver woke him again at Caine's junction, retrieved his gin bottle from behind the seat, and helped him down the aisle and out of the bus. Big Hogey stumbled about for a moment, then sat down hard in the gravel at the shoulder of the road. The driver paused with one foot on the step, looking around. There was not even a store at the road junction, but only a freight building next to the railroad track, a couple of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road, and, just across the way, a deserted filling station with a sagging roof. The land was Great Plains country, treeless, barren, and rolling. Big Hogey got up and staggered around in front of the bus, clutching at it for support, losing his duffle bag. "Hey, watch the traffic!" The driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome compassion he trotted around after his troublesome passenger, taking his arm as he sagged again. "You crossing?" "Yah," Hogey muttered. "Lemme alone, I'm okay." The driver started across the highway with him. The traffic was sparse, but fast and dangerous in the central ninety-mile lane. "I'm okay," Hogey kept protesting. "I'm a tumbler, ya know? Gravity's got me. Damn gravity. I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I used to be a tumbler— huk! —only now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l Hogey?" "Yeah. Your son. Come on." "Say, you gotta son? I bet you gotta son." "Two kids," said the driver, catching Hogey's bag as it slipped from his shoulder. "Both girls." "Say, you oughta be home with them kids. Man oughta stick with his family. You oughta get another job." Hogey eyed him owlishly, waggled a moralistic finger, skidded on the gravel as they stepped onto the opposite shoulder, and sprawled again. The driver blew a weary breath, looked down at him, and shook his head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find a constable after all. This guy could get himself killed, wandering around loose. "Somebody supposed to meet you?" he asked, squinting around at the dusty hills. " Huk! —who, me?" Hogey giggled, belched, and shook his head. "Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming. S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a week ago." He looked up at the driver with a pained expression. "Week late, ya know? Marie's gonna be sore—woo- hoo !—is she gonna be sore!" He waggled his head severely at the ground. "Which way are you going?" the driver grunted impatiently. Hogey pointed down the side-road that led back into the hills. "Marie's pop's place. You know where? 'Bout three miles from here. Gotta walk, I guess." "Don't," the driver warned. "You sit there by the culvert till you get a ride. Okay?" Hogey nodded forlornly. "Now stay out of the road," the driver warned, then hurried back across the highway. Moments later, the atomic battery-driven motors droned mournfully, and the bus pulled away. Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing the back of his neck. "Nice people," he said. "Nice buncha people. All hoofers." With a grunt and a lurch, he got to his feet, but his legs wouldn't work right. With his tumbler's reflexes, he fought to right himself with frantic arm motions, but gravity claimed him, and he went stumbling into the ditch. "Damn legs, damn crazy legs!" he cried. The bottom of the ditch was wet, and he crawled up the embankment with mud-soaked knees, and sat on the shoulder again. The gin bottle was still intact. He had himself a long fiery drink, and it warmed him deep down. He blinked around at the gaunt and treeless land. The sun was almost down, forge-red on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked sky faded into sulphurous yellow toward the zenith, and the very air that hung over the land seemed full of yellow smoke, the omnipresent dust of the plains. A farm truck turned onto the side-road and moaned away, its driver hardly glancing at the dark young man who sat swaying on his duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just kept staring at the crazy sun. He shook his head. It wasn't really the sun. The sun, the real sun, was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in the dead black pit. It painted everything with pure white pain, and you saw things by the reflected pain-light. The fat red sun was strictly a phoney, and it didn't fool him any. He hated it for what he knew it was behind the gory mask, and for what it had done to his eyes. With a grunt, he got to his feet, managed to shoulder the duffle bag, and started off down the middle of the farm road, lurching from side to side, and keeping his eyes on the rolling distances. Another car turned onto the side-road, honking angrily. Hogey tried to turn around to look at it, but he forgot to shift his footing. He staggered and went down on the pavement. The car's tires screeched on the hot asphalt. Hogey lay there for a moment, groaning. That one had hurt his hip. A car door slammed and a big man with a florid face got out and stalked toward him, looking angry. "What the hell's the matter with you, fella?" he drawled. "You soused? Man, you've really got a load." Hogey got up doggedly, shaking his head to clear it. "Space legs," he prevaricated. "Got space legs. Can't stand the gravity." The burly farmer retrieved his gin bottle for him, still miraculously unbroken. "Here's your gravity," he grunted. "Listen, fella, you better get home pronto." "Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest, I'm just space burned. You know?" "Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway? Do you live around here?" It was obvious that the big man had taken him for a hobo or a tramp. Hogey pulled himself together. "Goin' to the Hauptman's place. Marie. You know Marie?" The farmer's eyebrows went up. "Marie Hauptman? Sure I know her. Only she's Marie Parker now. Has been, nigh on six years. Say—" He paused, then gaped. "You ain't her husband by any chance?" "Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey Parker." "Well, I'll be—! Get in the car. I'm going right past John Hauptman's place. Boy, you're in no shape to walk it." He grinned wryly, waggled his head, and helped Hogey and his bag into the back seat. A woman with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly beside the farmer in the front, and she neither greeted the passenger nor looked around. "They don't make cars like this anymore," the farmer called over the growl of the ancient gasoline engine and the grind of gears. "You can have them new atomics with their loads of hot isotopes under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh, Martha?" The woman with the sun-baked neck quivered her head slightly. "A car like this was good enough for Pa, an' I reckon it's good enough for us," she drawled mournfully. Five minutes later the car drew in to the side of the road. "Reckon you can walk it from here," the farmer said. "That's Hauptman's road just up ahead." He helped Hogey out of the car and drove away without looking back to see if Hogey stayed on his feet. The woman with the sun-baked neck was suddenly talking garrulously in his direction. It was twilight. The sun had set, and the yellow sky was turning gray. Hogey was too tired to go on, and his legs would no longer hold him. He blinked around at the land, got his eyes focused, and found what looked like Hauptman's place on a distant hillside. It was a big frame house surrounded by a wheatfield, and a few scrawny trees. Having located it, he stretched out in the tall grass beyond the ditch to take a little rest. Somewhere dogs were barking, and a cricket sang creaking monotony in the grass. Once there was the distant thunder of a rocket blast from the launching station six miles to the west, but it faded quickly. An A-motored convertible whined past on the road, but Hogey went unseen. When he awoke, it was night, and he was shivering. His stomach was screeching, and his nerves dancing with high voltages. He sat up and groped for his watch, then remembered he had pawned it after the poker game. Remembering the game and the results of the game made him wince and bite his lip and grope for the bottle again. He sat breathing heavily for a moment after the stiff drink. Equating time to position had become second nature with him, but he had to think for a moment because his defective vision prevented him from seeing the Earth-crescent. Vega was almost straight above him in the late August sky, so he knew it wasn't much after sundown—probably about eight o'clock. He braced himself with another swallow of gin, picked himself up and got back to the road, feeling a little sobered after the nap. He limped on up the pavement and turned left at the narrow drive that led between barbed-wire fences toward the Hauptman farmhouse, five hundred yards or so from the farm road. The fields on his left belonged to Marie's father, he knew. He was getting close—close to home and woman and child. He dropped the bag suddenly and leaned against a fence post, rolling his head on his forearms and choking in spasms of air. He was shaking all over, and his belly writhed. He wanted to turn and run. He wanted to crawl out in the grass and hide. What were they going to say? And Marie, Marie most of all. How was he going to tell her about the money? Six hitches in space, and every time the promise had been the same: One more tour, baby, and we'll have enough dough, and then I'll quit for good. One more time, and we'll have our stake—enough to open a little business, or buy a house with a mortgage and get a job. And she had waited, but the money had never been quite enough until this time. This time the tour had lasted nine months, and he had signed on for every run from station to moon-base to pick up the bonuses. And this time he'd made it. Two weeks ago, there had been forty-eight hundred in the bank. And now ... " Why? " he groaned, striking his forehead against his forearms. His arm slipped, and his head hit the top of the fencepost, and the pain blinded him for a moment. He staggered back into the road with a low roar, wiped blood from his forehead, and savagely kicked his bag. It rolled a couple of yards up the road. He leaped after it and kicked it again. When he had finished with it, he stood panting and angry, but feeling better. He shouldered the bag and hiked on toward the farmhouse. They're hoofers, that's all—just an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers, even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A born tumbler. Know what that means? It means—God, what does it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless, where Earth's like a fat moon with fuzzy mold growing on it. Mold, that's all you are, just mold. A dog barked, and he wondered if he had been muttering aloud. He came to a fence-gap and paused in the darkness. The road wound around and came up the hill in front of the house. Maybe they were sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd already heard him coming. Maybe ... He was trembling again. He fished the fifth of gin out of his coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over half a pint. He decided to kill it. It wouldn't do to go home with a bottle sticking out of his pocket. He stood there in the night wind, sipping at it, and watching the reddish moon come up in the east. The moon looked as phoney as the setting sun. He straightened in sudden determination. It had to be sometime. Get it over with, get it over with now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped through, and closed it firmly behind him. He retrieved his bag, and waded quietly through the tall grass until he reached the hedge which divided an area of sickly peach trees from the field. He got over the hedge somehow, and started through the trees toward the house. He stumbled over some old boards, and they clattered. " Shhh! " he hissed, and moved on. The dogs were barking angrily, and he heard a screen door slam. He stopped. "Ho there!" a male voice called experimentally from the house. One of Marie's brothers. Hogey stood frozen in the shadow of a peach tree, waiting. "Anybody out there?" the man called again. Hogey waited, then heard the man muttering, "Sic 'im, boy, sic 'im." The hound's bark became eager. The animal came chasing down the slope, and stopped ten feet away to crouch and bark frantically at the shadow in the gloom. He knew the dog. "Hooky!" he whispered. "Hooky boy—here!" The dog stopped barking, sniffed, trotted closer, and went " Rrrooff! " Then he started sniffing suspiciously again. "Easy, Hooky, here boy!" he whispered. The dog came forward silently, sniffed his hand, and whined in recognition. Then he trotted around Hogey, panting doggy affection and dancing an invitation to romp. The man whistled from the porch. The dog froze, then trotted quickly back up the slope. "Nothing, eh, Hooky?" the man on the porch said. "Chasin' armadillos again, eh?" The screen door slammed again, and the porch light went out. Hogey stood there staring, unable to think. Somewhere beyond the window lights were—his woman, his son. What the hell was a tumbler doing with a woman and a son? After perhaps a minute, he stepped forward again. He tripped over a shovel, and his foot plunged into something that went squelch and swallowed the foot past the ankle. He fell forward into a heap of sand, and his foot went deeper into the sloppy wetness. He lay there with his stinging forehead on his arms, cursing softly and crying. Finally he rolled over, pulled his foot out of the mess, and took off his shoes. They were full of mud—sticky sandy mud. The dark world was reeling about him, and the wind was dragging at his breath. He fell back against the sand pile and let his feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled his toes. He was laughing soundlessly, and his face was wet in the wind. He couldn't think. He couldn't remember where he was and why, and he stopped caring, and after a while he felt better. The stars were swimming over him, dancing crazily, and the mud cooled his feet, and the sand was soft behind him. He saw a rocket go up on a tail of flame from the station, and waited for the sound of its blast, but he was already asleep when it came. It was far past midnight when he became conscious of the dog licking wetly at his ear and cheek. He pushed the animal away with a low curse and mopped at the side of his face. He stirred, and groaned. His feet were burning up! He tried to pull them toward him, but they wouldn't budge. There was something wrong with his legs. For an instant he stared wildly around in the night. Then he remembered where he was, closed his eyes and shuddered. When he opened them again, the moon had emerged from behind a cloud, and he could see clearly the cruel trap into which he had accidentally stumbled. A pile of old boards, a careful stack of new lumber, a pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete mixer—well, it added up. He gripped his ankles and pulled, but his feet wouldn't budge. In sudden terror, he tried to stand up, but his ankles were clutched by the concrete too, and he fell back in the sand with a low moan. He lay still for several minutes, considering carefully. He pulled at his left foot. It was locked in a vise. He tugged even more desperately at his right foot. It was equally immovable. He sat up with a whimper and clawed at the rough concrete until his nails tore and his fingertips bled. The surface still felt damp, but it had hardened while he slept. He sat there stunned until Hooky began licking at his scuffed fingers. He shouldered the dog away, and dug his hands into the sand-pile to stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at his face, panting love. "Get away!" he croaked savagely. The dog whined softly, trotted a short distance away, circled, and came back to crouch down in the sand directly before Hogey, inching forward experimentally. Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry sand and cursed between his teeth, while his eyes wandered over the sky. They came to rest on the sliver of light—the space station—rising in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless where the gang was—Nichols and Guerrera and Lavrenti and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced him. Keesey would have a rough time for a while—rough as a cob. The pit was no playground. The first time you went out of the station in a suit, the pit got you. Everything was falling, and you fell, with it. Everything. The skeletons of steel, the tire-shaped station, the spheres and docks and nightmare shapes—all tied together by umbilical cables and flexible tubes. Like some crazy sea-thing they seemed, floating in a black ocean with its tentacles bound together by drifting strands in the dark tide that bore it. Everything was pain-bright or dead black, and it wheeled around you, and you went nuts trying to figure which way was down. In fact, it took you months to teach your body that all ways were down and that the pit was bottomless. He became conscious of a plaintive sound in the wind, and froze to listen. It was a baby crying. It was nearly a minute before he got the significance of it. It hit him where he lived, and he began jerking frantically at his encased feet and sobbing low in his throat. They'd hear him if he kept that up. He stopped and covered his ears to close out the cry of his firstborn. A light went on in the house, and when it went off again, the infant's cry had ceased. Another rocket went up from the station, and he cursed it. Space was a disease, and he had it. "Help!" he cried out suddenly. "I'm stuck! Help me, help me!" He knew he was yelling hysterically at the sky and fighting the relentless concrete that clutched his feet, and after a moment he stopped. The light was on in the house again, and he heard faint sounds. The stirring-about woke the baby again, and once more the infant's wail came on the breeze. Make the kid shut up, make the kid shut up ... But that was no good. It wasn't the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's fault. No fathers allowed in space, they said, but it wasn't their fault either. They were right, and he had only himself to blame. The kid was an accident, but that didn't change anything. Not a thing in the world. It remained a tragedy. A tumbler had no business with a family, but what was a man going to do? Take a skinning knife, boy, and make yourself a eunuch. But that was no good either. They needed bulls out there in the pit, not steers. And when a man came down from a year's hitch, what was he going to do? Live in a lonely shack and read books for kicks? Because you were a man, you sought out a woman. And because she was a woman, she got a kid, and that was the end of it. It was nobody's fault, nobody's at all. He stared at the red eye of Mars low in the southwest. They were running out there now, and next year he would have been on the long long run ... But there was no use thinking about it. Next year and the years after belonged to little Hogey. He sat there with his feet locked in the solid concrete of the footing, staring out into Big Bottomless while his son's cry came from the house and the Hauptman menfolk came wading through the tall grass in search of someone who had cried out. His feet were stuck tight, and he wouldn't ever get them out. He was sobbing softly when they found him. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe September 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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HOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT By ADAM CHASE [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare. How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision? That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero. Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when he reached the village. He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing, parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius' second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body. He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest time as a boy. He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and brought the ladle to his lips. He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish. Poisoned. He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table. The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth—too late for anything. He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard scurried away. "Earthman!" a quavering voice called. Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center, a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin, which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black. Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the canteen and said: "What happened here?" "They're gone. All gone." "Yes, but what happened?" "The Kumaji—" "You're Kumaji." "This is my town," the old man said. "I lived with the Earthmen. Now they're gone." "But you stayed here—" "To die," the old man said, without self-pity. "I'm too old to flee, too old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water." Steve gave him another drink. "You still haven't told me what happened." Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy, Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government, so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions, almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves. "When did it happen?" Steve demanded. "Last night." It was now midafternoon. "Three folks died," the Kumaji said in his almost perfect English, "from the poisoning of the well. The well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go, and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses." "Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?" Oasis City, built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground, was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat.... "They have to," the old man said. "And they have to hurry. Men, women and children. The Kumaji are after them." Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists, trekking across a parched wilderness—to the safety of Oasis City—or death. "Come on," Steve said, making up his mind. "The unicopter can hold two in a pinch." "You're going after them?" "I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long." "Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember." "Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell." "I'm not going anyplace, young fellow." "But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without—" "I'm staying," the old man said, still without self-pity, just matter-of-factly. "The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame 'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good, long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?" "No," Steve said. "Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck." "But you can't—" "Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow." Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet. Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again. The old man's voice called after him: "Tell the people ... hurry ... Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their trail ... but hurry...." The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind. Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people. Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle East—and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them.... "Hullo!" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding clumsily through the sand toward him. "Cantwell's the name," Steve said. "I'm one of you." Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. "Cantwell. Yeah, I remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh, no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?" The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now, Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation. Perhaps that explained his bitterness. "So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell." The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly. They hardly seemed to be moving at all. "Is my aunt all right?" Steve said. She was the only family he remembered. Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. "I hate to be the one to tell you this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died from the poisoned water last night." For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death. Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness. The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl. She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. "Who is he, Dad?" the girl said. "Young Cantwell. Remember?" So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly. She was a woman now.... "Steve Cantwell?" Mary said. "Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I—I'm sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your aunt. If there's anything I can do...." Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was completely genuine. He appreciated it. Tobias Whiting said: "Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know that." He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. "But I never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be poor again. We could have been rich." Steve asked, "What happened to all your profits?" "Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll never see it again." Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming. But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was comforting and reassuring. Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared. The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day. Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their backs. And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji. "But why?" someone asked. "Why?" At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the day before said: "It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the Kumaji." None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying anything, and Steve squeezed her hand. "Now, wait a minute," one of Whiting's friends said. "Wait, nothing." This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the colony. "I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?" "That's what I was told," Steve said. "All right," Gort went on relentlessly. "Then this is what I figure must have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's 'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight." "No?" someone asked. "No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll make the trade." His voice reflected some bitterness. Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even blink. "Well," he asked her gently, "did your pa tell you he was going?" "N-no," Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry. Gort turned to Steve. "Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?" Steve shook his head. "Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel, Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each day. He won't get far." "He'll crash in the desert?" "Crash or crash-land," Steve said. Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent. "We've got to stop him," Gort said. "And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji, they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find us—or are led to us—and attack." Steve said, "I should have taken something out of the 'copter every night, so it couldn't start. I'll go." Mary came forward boldly. "I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying." Gort looked at her. "And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?" "Then—then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise." "That's good enough for me," Steve said. A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find mounted. The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding. Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in order to regain his fortune. On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the Kumaji encampment by now. "It doesn't seem badly damaged," Mary said. The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there. "No," Steve said. "It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it all right." "To go—to them?" "I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm sorry." "Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?" "Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on." "North?" "North." "And if by some miracle we find him?" Steve said nothing. The answer—capture or death—was obvious. But you couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you? As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel aside. "They'd kill us," he said. "We can only surrender." They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular tent. Tobias Whiting was in there. "Mary!" he cried. "My God! Mary...." "We came for you, Dad," she said coldly. "To stop you. To ... to kill you if necessary." "Mary...." "Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?" "We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live the sort of life I planned for you. You...." "Whiting," Steve said, "did you tell them yet?" "No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our...." "Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?" "It doesn't matter now. I—I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now, now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way—we get nothing. I couldn't stand to see them hurt you." "They can do—what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing." "You won't have to," Whiting said. "I'll tell them when we reach the larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me." "Then we've got to get out of here tonight," Steve said. The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon. When darkness came, if the guard were not increased.... They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, "Dad, I don't want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were doing it for me...." "I've made up my mind," Tobias Whiting said. Mary turned to Steve, in despair. "Steve," she said. "Steve. Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand." Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information? Steve could stand up to it perhaps—but he couldn't stand to see them hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that.... Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one guard, the man outside, came.... Darkness in the Kumaji encampment. Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert. "Are you asleep?" Mary asked. "No," Steve said. "Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing—like a baby. As if—as if he wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!" Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's voice surprised him. "I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I—" "I'm going to kill you," Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting. He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat and closed there—not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again. Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside. Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies. The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the thick-muscled neck, clamped there—squeezing. The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard—or death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek another. They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned, but Steve hardly heard him. When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to kill attacked a man.... "Steve!" It was Mary, calling his name and crying. "It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—" Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face. "My stomach," Whiting said, gasping for breath. "The pain...." Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying softly. "You two ..." Whiting gasped. "You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what you want?" "Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!" "You can get her out of here, Cantwell?" "I think so," Steve said. "Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan. You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary." She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: "Isn't there anything we can do for him?" Steve shook his head. "But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to deceive them." "I'll live long enough," Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he would. "Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man...." Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots . The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him, and they glided off across the sand. Pursuit was disorganized—and unsuccessful. It was too dark for effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail. Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said, "Steve, do you have to tell them?" "We can tell them this," Steve said. "Your father died a hero's death, sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction." "And not—not what he'd planned to do at first." "No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can make a mistake, can't he?" "I love you, Steve. I love you." Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all reach Oasis City in safety. With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.

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To escape from Mars, all Clayton had to do was the impossible. Break out of a crack-proof exile camp—get onto a ship that couldn’t be boarded—smash through an impenetrable wall of steel. Perhaps he could do all these things, but he discovered that Mars did evil things to men; that he wasn’t even Clayton any more. He was only— The Man Who Hated Mars By RANDALL GARRETT “I want you to put me in prison!” the big, hairy man said in a trembling voice. He was addressing his request to a thin woman sitting behind a desk that seemed much too big for her. The plaque on the desk said: LT. PHOEBE HARRIS TERRAN REHABILITATION SERVICE Lieutenant Harris glanced at the man before her for only a moment before she returned her eyes to the dossier on the desk; but long enough to verify the impression his voice had given. Ron Clayton was a big, ugly, cowardly, dangerous man. He said: “Well? Dammit, say something!” The lieutenant raised her eyes again. “Just be patient until I’ve read this.” Her voice and eyes were expressionless, but her hand moved beneath the desk. The frightful carnage would go down in the bloody history of space. Clayton froze. She’s yellow! he thought. She’s turned on the trackers! He could see the pale greenish glow of their little eyes watching him all around the room. If he made any fast move, they would cut him down with a stun beam before he could get two feet. She had thought he was going to jump her. Little rat! he thought, somebody ought to slap her down! He watched her check through the heavy dossier in front of her. Finally, she looked up at him again. “Clayton, your last conviction was for strong-arm robbery. You were given a choice between prison on Earth and freedom here on Mars. You picked Mars.” He nodded slowly. He’d been broke and hungry at the time. A sneaky little rat named Johnson had bilked Clayton out of his fair share of the Corey payroll job, and Clayton had been forced to get the money somehow. He hadn’t mussed the guy up much; besides, it was the sucker’s own fault. If he hadn’t tried to yell— Lieutenant Harris went on: “I’m afraid you can’t back down now.” “But it isn’t fair! The most I’d have got on that frame-up would’ve been ten years. I’ve been here fifteen already!” “I’m sorry, Clayton. It can’t be done. You’re here. Period. Forget about trying to get back. Earth doesn’t want you.” Her voice sounded choppy, as though she were trying to keep it calm. Clayton broke into a whining rage. “You can’t do that! It isn’t fair! I never did anything to you! I’ll go talk to the Governor! He’ll listen to reason! You’ll see! I’ll—” “ Shut up! ” the woman snapped harshly. “I’m getting sick of it! I personally think you should have been locked up—permanently. I think this idea of forced colonization is going to breed trouble for Earth someday, but it is about the only way you can get anybody to colonize this frozen hunk of mud. “Just keep it in mind that I don’t like it any better than you do— and I didn’t strong-arm anybody to deserve the assignment! Now get out of here!” She moved a hand threateningly toward the manual controls of the stun beam. Clayton retreated fast. The trackers ignored anyone walking away from the desk; they were set only to spot threatening movements toward it. Outside the Rehabilitation Service Building, Clayton could feel the tears running down the inside of his face mask. He’d asked again and again—God only knew how many times—in the past fifteen years. Always the same answer. No. When he’d heard that this new administrator was a woman, he’d hoped she might be easier to convince. She wasn’t. If anything, she was harder than the others. The heat-sucking frigidity of the thin Martian air whispered around him in a feeble breeze. He shivered a little and began walking toward the recreation center. There was a high, thin piping in the sky above him which quickly became a scream in the thin air. He turned for a moment to watch the ship land, squinting his eyes to see the number on the hull. Fifty-two. Space Transport Ship Fifty-two. Probably bringing another load of poor suckers to freeze to death on Mars. That was the thing he hated about Mars—the cold. The everlasting damned cold! And the oxidation pills; take one every three hours or smother in the poor, thin air. The government could have put up domes; it could have put in building-to-building tunnels, at least. It could have done a hell of a lot of things to make Mars a decent place for human beings. But no—the government had other ideas. A bunch of bigshot scientific characters had come up with the idea nearly twenty-three years before. Clayton could remember the words on the sheet he had been given when he was sentenced. “Mankind is inherently an adaptable animal. If we are to colonize the planets of the Solar System, we must meet the conditions on those planets as best we can. “Financially, it is impracticable to change an entire planet from its original condition to one which will support human life as it exists on Terra. “But man, since he is adaptable, can change himself—modify his structure slightly—so that he can live on these planets with only a minimum of change in the environment.” So they made you live outside and like it. So you froze and you choked and you suffered. Clayton hated Mars. He hated the thin air and the cold. More than anything, he hated the cold. Ron Clayton wanted to go home. The Recreation Building was just ahead; at least it would be warm inside. He pushed in through the outer and inner doors, and he heard the burst of music from the jukebox. His stomach tightened up into a hard cramp. They were playing Heinlein’s Green Hills of Earth . There was almost no other sound in the room, although it was full of people. There were plenty of colonists who claimed to like Mars, but even they were silent when that song was played. Clayton wanted to go over and smash the machine—make it stop reminding him. He clenched his teeth and his fists and his eyes and cursed mentally. God, how I hate Mars! When the hauntingly nostalgic last chorus faded away, he walked over to the machine and fed it full of enough coins to keep it going on something else until he left. At the bar, he ordered a beer and used it to wash down another oxidation tablet. It wasn’t good beer; it didn’t even deserve the name. The atmospheric pressure was so low as to boil all the carbon dioxide out of it, so the brewers never put it back in after fermentation. He was sorry for what he had done—really and truly sorry. If they’d only give him one more chance, he’d make good. Just one more chance. He’d work things out. He’d promised himself that both times they’d put him up before, but things had been different then. He hadn’t really been given another chance, what with parole boards and all. Clayton closed his eyes and finished the beer. He ordered another. He’d worked in the mines for fifteen years. It wasn’t that he minded work really, but the foreman had it in for him. Always giving him a bad time; always picking out the lousy jobs for him. Like the time he’d crawled into a side-boring in Tunnel 12 for a nap during lunch and the foreman had caught him. When he promised never to do it again if the foreman wouldn’t put it on report, the guy said, “Yeah. Sure. Hate to hurt a guy’s record.” Then he’d put Clayton on report anyway. Strictly a rat. Not that Clayton ran any chance of being fired; they never fired anybody. But they’d fined him a day’s pay. A whole day’s pay. He tapped his glass on the bar, and the barman came over with another beer. Clayton looked at it, then up at the barman. “Put a head on it.” The bartender looked at him sourly. “I’ve got some soapsuds here, Clayton, and one of these days I’m gonna put some in your beer if you keep pulling that gag.” That was the trouble with some guys. No sense of humor. Somebody came in the door and then somebody else came in behind him, so that both inner and outer doors were open for an instant. A blast of icy breeze struck Clayton’s back, and he shivered. He started to say something, then changed his mind; the doors were already closed again, and besides, one of the guys was bigger than he was. The iciness didn’t seem to go away immediately. It was like the mine. Little old Mars was cold clear down to her core—or at least down as far as they’d drilled. The walls were frozen and seemed to radiate a chill that pulled the heat right out of your blood. Somebody was playing Green Hills again, damn them. Evidently all of his own selections had run out earlier than he’d thought they would. Hell! There was nothing to do here. He might as well go home. “Gimme another beer, Mac.” He’d go home as soon as he finished this one. He stood there with his eyes closed, listening to the music and hating Mars. A voice next to him said: “I’ll have a whiskey.” The voice sounded as if the man had a bad cold, and Clayton turned slowly to look at him. After all the sterilization they went through before they left Earth, nobody on Mars ever had a cold, so there was only one thing that would make a man’s voice sound like that. Clayton was right. The fellow had an oxygen tube clamped firmly over his nose. He was wearing the uniform of the Space Transport Service. “Just get in on the ship?” Clayton asked conversationally. The man nodded and grinned. “Yeah. Four hours before we take off again.” He poured down the whiskey. “Sure cold out.” Clayton agreed. “It’s always cold.” He watched enviously as the spaceman ordered another whiskey. Clayton couldn’t afford whiskey. He probably could have by this time, if the mines had made him a foreman, like they should have. Maybe he could talk the spaceman out of a couple of drinks. “My name’s Clayton. Ron Clayton.” The spaceman took the offered hand. “Mine’s Parkinson, but everybody calls me Parks.” “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I buy you a beer?” Parks shook his head. “No, thanks. I started on whiskey. Here, let me buy you one.” “Well—thanks. Don’t mind if I do.” They drank them in silence, and Parks ordered two more. “Been here long?” Parks asked. “Fifteen years. Fifteen long, long years.” “Did you—uh—I mean—” Parks looked suddenly confused. Clayton glanced quickly to make sure the bartender was out of earshot. Then he grinned. “You mean am I a convict? Nah. I came here because I wanted to. But—” He lowered his voice. “—we don’t talk about it around here. You know.” He gestured with one hand—a gesture that took in everyone else in the room. Parks glanced around quickly, moving only his eyes. “Yeah. I see,” he said softly. “This your first trip?” asked Clayton. “First one to Mars. Been on the Luna run a long time.” “Low pressure bother you much?” “Not much. We only keep it at six pounds in the ships. Half helium and half oxygen. Only thing that bothers me is the oxy here. Or rather, the oxy that isn’t here.” He took a deep breath through his nose tube to emphasize his point. Clayton clamped his teeth together, making the muscles at the side of his jaw stand out. Parks didn’t notice. “You guys have to take those pills, don’t you?” “Yeah.” “I had to take them once. Got stranded on Luna. The cat I was in broke down eighty some miles from Aristarchus Base and I had to walk back—with my oxy low. Well, I figured—” Clayton listened to Parks’ story with a great show of attention, but he had heard it before. This “lost on the moon” stuff and its variations had been going the rounds for forty years. Every once in a while, it actually did happen to someone; just often enough to keep the story going. This guy did have a couple of new twists, but not enough to make the story worthwhile. “Boy,” Clayton said when Parks had finished, “you were lucky to come out of that alive!” Parks nodded, well pleased with himself, and bought another round of drinks. “Something like that happened to me a couple of years ago,” Clayton began. “I’m supervisor on the third shift in the mines at Xanthe, but at the time, I was only a foreman. One day, a couple of guys went to a branch tunnel to—” It was a very good story. Clayton had made it up himself, so he knew that Parks had never heard it before. It was gory in just the right places, with a nice effect at the end. “—so I had to hold up the rocks with my back while the rescue crew pulled the others out of the tunnel by crawling between my legs. Finally, they got some steel beams down there to take the load off, and I could let go. I was in the hospital for a week,” he finished. Parks was nodding vaguely. Clayton looked up at the clock above the bar and realized that they had been talking for better than an hour. Parks was buying another round. Parks was a hell of a nice fellow. There was, Clayton found, only one trouble with Parks. He got to talking so loud that the bartender refused to serve either one of them any more. The bartender said Clayton was getting loud, too, but it was just because he had to talk loud to make Parks hear him. Clayton helped Parks put his mask and parka on and they walked out into the cold night. Parks began to sing Green Hills . About halfway through, he stopped and turned to Clayton. “I’m from Indiana.” Clayton had already spotted him as an American by his accent. “Indiana? That’s nice. Real nice.” “Yeah. You talk about green hills, we got green hills in Indiana. What time is it?” Clayton told him. “Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship takes off in an hour. Ought to have one more drink first.” Clayton realized he didn’t like Parks. But maybe he’d buy a bottle. Sharkie Johnson worked in Fuels Section, and he made a nice little sideline of stealing alcohol, cutting it, and selling it. He thought it was real funny to call it Martian Gin. Clayton said: “Let’s go over to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell us a bottle.” “Okay,” said Parks. “We’ll get a bottle. That’s what we need: a bottle.” It was quite a walk to the Shark’s place. It was so cold that even Parks was beginning to sober up a little. He was laughing like hell when Clayton started to sing. “We’re going over to the Shark’s To buy a jug of gin for Parks! Hi ho, hi ho, hi ho!” One thing about a few drinks; you didn’t get so cold. You didn’t feel it too much, anyway. The Shark still had his light on when they arrived. Clayton whispered to Parks: “I’ll go in. He knows me. He wouldn’t sell it if you were around. You got eight credits?” “Sure I got eight credits. Just a minute, and I’ll give you eight credits.” He fished around for a minute inside his parka, and pulled out his notecase. His gloved fingers were a little clumsy, but he managed to get out a five and three ones and hand them to Clayton. “You wait out here,” Clayton said. He went in through the outer door and knocked on the inner one. He should have asked for ten credits. Sharkie only charged five, and that would leave him three for himself. But he could have got ten—maybe more. When he came out with the bottle, Parks was sitting on a rock, shivering. “Jeez-krise!” he said. “It’s cold out here. Let’s get to someplace where it’s warm.” “Sure. I got the bottle. Want a drink?” Parks took the bottle, opened it, and took a good belt out of it. “Hooh!” he breathed. “Pretty smooth.” As Clayton drank, Parks said: “Hey! I better get back to the field! I know! We can go to the men’s room and finish the bottle before the ship takes off! Isn’t that a good idea? It’s warm there.” They started back down the street toward the spacefield. “Yep, I’m from Indiana. Southern part, down around Bloomington,” Parks said. “Gimme the jug. Not Bloomington, Illinois—Bloomington, Indiana. We really got green hills down there.” He drank, and handed the bottle back to Clayton. “Pers-nally, I don’t see why anybody’d stay on Mars. Here y’are, practic’ly on the equator in the middle of the summer, and it’s colder than hell. Brrr! “Now if you was smart, you’d go home, where it’s warm. Mars wasn’t built for people to live on, anyhow. I don’t see how you stand it.” That was when Clayton decided he really hated Parks. And when Parks said: “Why be dumb, friend? Whyn’t you go home?” Clayton kicked him in the stomach, hard. “And that, that—” Clayton said as Parks doubled over. He said it again as he kicked him in the head. And in the ribs. Parks was gasping as he writhed on the ground, but he soon lay still. Then Clayton saw why. Parks’ nose tube had come off when Clayton’s foot struck his head. Parks was breathing heavily, but he wasn’t getting any oxygen. That was when the Big Idea hit Ron Clayton. With a nosepiece on like that, you couldn’t tell who a man was. He took another drink from the jug and then began to take Parks’ clothes off. The uniform fit Clayton fine, and so did the nose mask. He dumped his own clothing on top of Parks’ nearly nude body, adjusted the little oxygen tank so that the gas would flow properly through the mask, took the first deep breath of good air he’d had in fifteen years, and walked toward the spacefield. He went into the men’s room at the Port Building, took a drink, and felt in the pockets of the uniform for Parks’ identification. He found it and opened the booklet. It read: PARKINSON, HERBERT J. Steward 2nd Class, STS Above it was a photo, and a set of fingerprints. Clayton grinned. They’d never know it wasn’t Parks getting on the ship. Parks was a steward, too. A cook’s helper. That was good. If he’d been a jetman or something like that, the crew might wonder why he wasn’t on duty at takeoff. But a steward was different. Clayton sat for several minutes, looking through the booklet and drinking from the bottle. He emptied it just before the warning sirens keened through the thin air. Clayton got up and went outside toward the ship. “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake up!” Somebody was slapping his cheeks. Clayton opened his eyes and looked at the blurred face over his own. From a distance, another voice said: “Who is it?” The blurred face said: “I don’t know. He was asleep behind these cases. I think he’s drunk.” Clayton wasn’t drunk—he was sick. His head felt like hell. Where the devil was he? “Get up, bud. Come on, get up!” Clayton pulled himself up by holding to the man’s arm. The effort made him dizzy and nauseated. The other man said: “Take him down to sick bay, Casey. Get some thiamin into him.” Clayton didn’t struggle as they led him down to the sick bay. He was trying to clear his head. Where was he? He must have been pretty drunk last night. He remembered meeting Parks. And getting thrown out by the bartender. Then what? Oh, yeah. He’d gone to the Shark’s for a bottle. From there on, it was mostly gone. He remembered a fight or something, but that was all that registered. The medic in the sick bay fired two shots from a hypo-gun into both arms, but Clayton ignored the slight sting. “Where am I?” “Real original. Here, take these.” He handed Clayton a couple of capsules, and gave him a glass of water to wash them down with. When the water hit his stomach, there was an immediate reaction. “Oh, Christ!” the medic said. “Get a mop, somebody. Here, bud; heave into this.” He put a basin on the table in front of Clayton. It took them the better part of an hour to get Clayton awake enough to realize what was going on and where he was. Even then, he was plenty groggy. It was the First Officer of the STS-52 who finally got the story straight. As soon as Clayton was in condition, the medic and the quartermaster officer who had found him took him up to the First Officer’s compartment. “I was checking through the stores this morning when I found this man. He was asleep, dead drunk, behind the crates.” “He was drunk, all right,” supplied the medic. “I found this in his pocket.” He flipped a booklet to the First Officer. The First was a young man, not older than twenty-eight with tough-looking gray eyes. He looked over the booklet. “Where did you get Parkinson’s ID booklet? And his uniform?” Clayton looked down at his clothes in wonder. “I don’t know.” “You don’t know ? That’s a hell of an answer.” “Well, I was drunk,” Clayton said defensively. “A man doesn’t know what he’s doing when he’s drunk.” He frowned in concentration. He knew he’d have to think up some story. “I kind of remember we made a bet. I bet him I could get on the ship. Sure—I remember, now. That’s what happened; I bet him I could get on the ship and we traded clothes.” “Where is he now?” “At my place, sleeping it off, I guess.” “Without his oxy-mask?” “Oh, I gave him my oxidation pills for the mask.” The First shook his head. “That sounds like the kind of trick Parkinson would pull, all right. I’ll have to write it up and turn you both in to the authorities when we hit Earth.” He eyed Clayton. “What’s your name?” “Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,” Clayton said without batting an eye. “Volunteer or convicted colonist?” “Volunteer.” The First looked at him for a long moment, disbelief in his eyes. It didn’t matter. Volunteer or convict, there was no place Clayton could go. From the officer’s viewpoint, he was as safely imprisoned in the spaceship as he would be on Mars or a prison on Earth. The First wrote in the log book, and then said: “Well, we’re one man short in the kitchen. You wanted to take Parkinson’s place; brother, you’ve got it—without pay.” He paused for a moment. “You know, of course,” he said judiciously, “that you’ll be shipped back to Mars immediately. And you’ll have to work out your passage both ways—it will be deducted from your pay.” Clayton nodded. “I know.” “I don’t know what else will happen. If there’s a conviction, you may lose your volunteer status on Mars. And there may be fines taken out of your pay, too. “Well, that’s all, Cartwright. You can report to Kissman in the kitchen.” The First pressed a button on his desk and spoke into the intercom. “Who was on duty at the airlock when the crew came aboard last night? Send him up. I want to talk to him.” Then the quartermaster officer led Clayton out the door and took him to the kitchen. The ship’s driver tubes were pushing it along at a steady five hundred centimeters per second squared acceleration, pushing her steadily closer to Earth with a little more than half a gravity of drive. There wasn’t much for Clayton to do, really. He helped to select the foods that went into the automatics, and he cleaned them out after each meal was cooked. Once every day, he had to partially dismantle them for a really thorough going-over. And all the time, he was thinking. Parkinson must be dead; he knew that. That meant the Chamber. And even if he wasn’t, they’d send Clayton back to Mars. Luckily, there was no way for either planet to communicate with the ship; it was hard enough to keep a beam trained on a planet without trying to hit such a comparatively small thing as a ship. But they would know about it on Earth by now. They would pick him up the instant the ship landed. And the best he could hope for was a return to Mars. No, by God! He wouldn’t go back to that frozen mud-ball! He’d stay on Earth, where it was warm and comfortable and a man could live where he was meant to live. Where there was plenty of air to breathe and plenty of water to drink. Where the beer tasted like beer and not like slop. Earth. Good green hills, the like of which exists nowhere else. Slowly, over the days, he evolved a plan. He watched and waited and checked each little detail to make sure nothing would go wrong. It couldn’t go wrong. He didn’t want to die, and he didn’t want to go back to Mars. Nobody on the ship liked him; they couldn’t appreciate his position. He hadn’t done anything to them, but they just didn’t like him. He didn’t know why; he’d tried to get along with them. Well, if they didn’t like him, the hell with them. If things worked out the way he figured, they’d be damned sorry. He was very clever about the whole plan. When turn-over came, he pretended to get violently spacesick. That gave him an opportunity to steal a bottle of chloral hydrate from the medic’s locker. And, while he worked in the kitchen, he spent a great deal of time sharpening a big carving knife. Once, during his off time, he managed to disable one of the ship’s two lifeboats. He was saving the other for himself. The ship was eight hours out from Earth and still decelerating when Clayton pulled his getaway. It was surprisingly easy. He was supposed to be asleep when he sneaked down to the drive compartment with the knife. He pushed open the door, looked in, and grinned like an ape. The Engineer and the two jetmen were out cold from the chloral hydrate in the coffee from the kitchen. Moving rapidly, he went to the spares locker and began methodically to smash every replacement part for the drivers. Then he took three of the signal bombs from the emergency kit, set them for five minutes, and placed them around the driver circuits. He looked at the three sleeping men. What if they woke up before the bombs went off? He didn’t want to kill them though. He wanted them to know what had happened and who had done it. He grinned. There was a way. He simply had to drag them outside and jam the door lock. He took the key from the Engineer, inserted it, turned it, and snapped off the head, leaving the body of the key still in the lock. Nobody would unjam it in the next four minutes. Then he began to run up the stairwell toward the good lifeboat. He was panting and out of breath when he arrived, but no one had stopped him. No one had even seen him. He clambered into the lifeboat, made everything ready, and waited. The signal bombs were not heavy charges; their main purposes was to make a flare bright enough to be seen for thousands of miles in space. Fluorine and magnesium made plenty of light—and heat. Quite suddenly, there was no gravity. He had felt nothing, but he knew that the bombs had exploded. He punched the LAUNCH switch on the control board of the lifeboat, and the little ship leaped out from the side of the greater one. Then he turned on the drive, set it at half a gee, and watched the STS-52 drop behind him. It was no longer decelerating, so it would miss Earth and drift on into space. On the other hand, the lifeship would come down very neatly within a few hundred miles of the spaceport in Utah, the destination of the STS-52. Landing the lifeship would be the only difficult part of the maneuver, but they were designed to be handled by beginners. Full instructions were printed on the simplified control board. Clayton studied them for a while, then set the alarm to waken him in seven hours and dozed off to sleep. He dreamed of Indiana. It was full of nice, green hills and leafy woods, and Parkinson was inviting him over to his mother’s house for chicken and whiskey. And all for free. Beneath the dream was the calm assurance that they would never catch him and send him back. When the STS-52 failed to show up, they would think he had been lost with it. They would never look for him. When the alarm rang, Earth was a mottled globe looming hugely beneath the ship. Clayton watched the dials on the board, and began to follow the instructions on the landing sheet. He wasn’t too good at it. The accelerometer climbed higher and higher, and he felt as though he could hardly move his hands to the proper switches. He was less than fifteen feet off the ground when his hand slipped. The ship, out of control, shifted, spun, and toppled over on its side, smashing a great hole in the cabin. Clayton shook his head and tried to stand up in the wreckage. He got to his hands and knees, dizzy but unhurt, and took a deep breath of the fresh air that was blowing in through the hole in the cabin. It felt just like home. Bureau of Criminal Investigation Regional Headquarters Cheyenne, Wyoming 20 January 2102 To: Space Transport Service Subject: Lifeship 2, STS-52 Attention Mr. P. D. Latimer Dear Paul, I have on hand the copies of your reports on the rescue of the men on the disabled STS-52. It is fortunate that the Lunar radar stations could compute their orbit. The detailed official report will follow, but briefly, this is what happened: The lifeship landed—or, rather, crashed—several miles west of Cheyenne, as you know, but it was impossible to find the man who was piloting it until yesterday because of the weather. He has been identified as Ronald Watkins Clayton, exiled to Mars fifteen years ago. Evidently, he didn’t realize that fifteen years of Martian gravity had so weakened his muscles that he could hardly walk under the pull of a full Earth gee. As it was, he could only crawl about a hundred yards from the wrecked lifeship before he collapsed. Well, I hope this clears up everything. I hope you’re not getting the snow storms up there like we’ve been getting them. John B. Remley Captain, CBI THE END Transcriber’s Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories September 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 If Worlds of Science Fiction November 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. THE VERY SECRET AGENT BY MARI WOLF Illustrated by Ed Emsh Poor Riuku!... Not being a member of the human race, how was he supposed to understand what goes on in a woman's mind when the male of the same species didn't even know? In their ship just beyond the orbit of Mars the two aliens sat looking at each other. "No," Riuku said. "I haven't had any luck. And I can tell you right now that I'm not going to have any, and no one else is going to have any either. The Earthmen are too well shielded." "You contacted the factory?" Nagor asked. "Easily. It's the right one. The parking lot attendant knows there's a new weapon being produced in there. The waitress at the Jumbo Burger Grill across the street knows it. Everybody I reached knows it. But not one knows anything about what it is." Nagor looked out through the ports of the spaceship, which didn't in the least resemble an Earth spaceship, any more than what Nagor considered sight resembled the corresponding Earth sense perception. He frowned. "What about the research scientists? We know who some of them are. The supervisors? The technicians?" "No," Riuku said flatly. "They're shielded. Perfectly I can't make contact with a single mind down there that has the faintest inkling of what's going on. We never should have let them develop the shield." "Have you tried contacting everyone? What about the workers?" "Shielded. All ten thousand of them. Of course I haven't checked all of them yet, but—" "Do it," Nagor said grimly. "We've got to find out what that weapon is. Or else get out of this solar system." Riuku sighed. "I'll try," he said. Someone put another dollar in the juke box, and the theremins started in on Mare Indrium Mary for the tenth time since Pete Ganley had come into the bar. "Aw shut up," he said, wishing there was some way to turn them off. Twelve-ten. Alice got off work at Houston's at twelve. She ought to be here by now. She would be, if it weren't Thursday. Shield boosting night for her. Why, he asked himself irritably, couldn't those scientists figure out some way to keep the shields up longer than a week? Or else why didn't they have boosting night the same for all departments? He had to stay late every Friday and Alice every Thursday, and all the time there was Susan at home ready to jump him if he wasn't in at a reasonable time.... "Surprised, Pete?" Alice Hendricks said at his elbow. He swung about, grinned at her. "Am I? You said it. And here I was about to go. I never thought you'd make it before one." His grin faded a little. "How'd you do it? Sweet-talk one of the guards into letting you in at the head of the line?" She shook her bandanaed head, slid onto the stool beside him and crossed her knees—a not very convincing sign of femininity in a woman wearing baggy denim coveralls. "Aren't you going to buy me a drink, honey?" "Oh, sure." He glanced over at the bartender. "Another beer. No, make it two." He pulled the five dollars out of his pocket, shoved it across the bar, and looked back at Alice, more closely this time. The ID badge, pinned to her hip. The badge, with her name, number, department, and picture—and the little meter that measured the strength of her Mind Shield. The dial should have pointed to full charge. It didn't. It registered about seventy per cent loss. Alice followed his gaze. She giggled. "It was easy," she said. "The guards don't do more than glance at us, you know. And everyone who's supposed to go through Shielding on Thursday has the department number stamped on a yellow background. So all I did was make a red background, like yours, and slip it on in the restroom at Clean-up time." "But Alice...." Pete Ganley swallowed his beer and signaled for another. "This is serious. You've got to keep the shields up. The enemy is everywhere. Why, right now, one could be probing you." "So what? The dial isn't down to Danger yet. And tomorrow I'll just put the red tag back on over the yellow one and go through Shielding in the same line with you. They won't notice." She giggled again. "I thought it was smart, Petey. You oughta think so too. You know why I did it, don't you?" Her round, smooth face looked up at him, wide-eyed and full-lipped. She had no worry wrinkles like Susan's, no mouth pulled down at the corners like Susan's, and under that shapeless coverall.... "Sure, baby, I'm glad you did it," Pete Ganley said huskily. Riuku was glad too, the next afternoon when the swing shift started pouring through the gates. It was easy, once he'd found her. He had tested hundreds, all shielded, some almost accessible to him, but none vulnerable enough. Then this one came. The shield was so far down that contact was almost easy. Painful, tiring, but not really difficult. He could feel her momentary sense of alarm, of nausea, and then he was through, integrated with her, his thoughts at home with her thoughts. He rested, inside her mind. "Oh, hi, Joan. No, I'm all right. Just a little dizzy for a moment. A hangover? Of course not. Not on a Friday." Riuku listened to her half of the conversation. Stupid Earthman. If only she'd start thinking about the job. Or if only his contact with her were better. If he could use her sense perceptions, see through her eyes, hear through her ears, feel through her fingers, then everything would be easy. But he couldn't. All he could do was read her thoughts. Earth thoughts at that.... ... The time clock. Where's my card? Oh, here it is. Only 3:57. Why did I have to hurry so? I had lots of time.... "Why, Mary, how nice you look today. That's a new hairdo, isn't it? A permanent? Yeah, what kind?" ... What a microbe! Looks like pink straw, her hair does, and of course she thinks it's beautiful.... "I'd better get down to my station. Old Liverlips will be ranting again. You oughta be glad you have Eddie for a lead man. Eddie's cute. So's Dave, over in 77. But Liverlips, ugh...." She was walking down the aisle to her station now. A procession of names: Maisie, and Edith, and that fat slob Natalie, and if Jean Andrews comes around tonight flashing that diamond in my face again, I'll—I'll kill her.... "Oh hello, Clinton. What do you mean, late? The whistle just blew. Of course I'm ready to go to work." Liverlips, that's what you are. And still in that same blue shirt. What a wife you must have. Probably as sloppy as you are.... Good, Riuku thought. Now she'll be working. Now he'd find out whatever it was she was doing. Not that it would be important, of course, but let him learn what her job was, and what those other girls' jobs were, and in a little while he'd have all the data he needed. Maybe even before the shift ended tonight, before she went through the Shielding boost. He shivered a little, thinking of the boost. He'd survive it, of course. He'd be too well integrated with her by then. But it was nothing to look forward to. Still, he needn't worry about it. He had the whole shift to find out what the weapon was. The whole shift, here inside Alice's mind, inside the most closely guarded factory on or under or above the surface of the Earth. He settled down and waited, expectantly. Alice Hendricks turned her back on the lead man and looked down the work table to her place. The other girls were there already. Lois and Marge and Coralie, the other three members of the Plug table, Line 73. "Hey, how'd you make out?" Marge said. She glanced around to make sure none of the lead men or timekeepers were close enough to overhear her, then went on. "Did you get away with it?" "Sure," Alice said. "And you should of seen Pete's face when I walked in." She took the soldering iron out of her locker, plugged it in, and reached out for the pan of 731 wires. "You know, it's funny. Pete's not so good looking, and he's sort of a careless dresser and all that, but oh, what he does to me." She filled the 731 plug with solder and reached for the white, black, red wire. "You'd better watch out," Lois said. "Or Susan's going to be doing something to you." "Oh, her." Alice touched the tip of the iron to the solder filled pin, worked the wire down into position. "What can she do? Pete doesn't give a damn about her." "He's still living with her, isn't he?" Lois said. Alice shrugged.... What a mealy-mouthed little snip Lois could be, sometimes. You'd think to hear her that she was better than any of them, and luckier too, with her Joe and the kids. What a laugh! Joe was probably the only guy who'd ever looked at her, and she'd hooked him right out of school, and now with three kids in five years and her working nights.... Alice finished soldering the first row of wires in the plug and started in on the second. So old Liverlips thought she wasted time, did he? Well, she'd show him. She'd get out her sixteen plugs tonight. "Junior kept me up all night last night," Lois said. "He's cutting a tooth." "Yeah," Coralie said, "It's pretty rough at that age. I remember right after Mike was born...." Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face, with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth.... "Oh, oh," Alice said suddenly. "I've got solder on the outside of the pin." She looked around for the alcohol. Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires, of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing. They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment. Only they weren't. They were making a weapon, and this bit of electronic equipment was part of that weapon. What part? What did the 731 plug do? Alice Hendricks didn't know. Alice Hendricks didn't care. The first break. Ten minutes away from work. Alice was walking back along the aisle that separated Assembly from the men's Machine Shop. A chance, perhaps. She was looking at the machines, or rather past them, at the men. "Hello, Tommy. How's the love life?" He's not bad at all. Real cute. Though not like Pete, oh no. The machines. Riuku prodded at her thoughts, wishing he could influence them, wishing that just for a moment he could see, hear, feel, think as she would never think. The machines were—machines. That big funny one where Ned works, and Tommy's spot welder, and over in the corner where the superintendent is—he's a snappy dresser, tie and everything. The corner. Restricted area. Can't go over. High voltage or something.... Her thoughts slid away from the restricted area. Should she go out for lunch or eat off the sandwich machine? And Riuku curled inside her mind and cursed her with his rapidly growing Earthwoman's vocabulary. At the end of the shift he had learned nothing. Nothing about the weapon, that is. He had found out a good deal about the sex life of Genus Homo—information that made him even more glad than before that his was a one-sexed race. With work over and tools put away and Alice in the restroom gleefully thinking about the red Friday night tag she was slipping onto her ID badge, he was as far from success as ever. For a moment he considered leaving her, looking for another subject. But he'd probably not be able to find one. No, the only thing to do was stay with her, curl deep in her mind and go through the Shielding boost, and later on.... The line. Alice's nervousness.... Oh, oh, there's that guy with the meter—the one from maintenance. What's he want? "Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?" ... If he checks the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway. The enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them? "No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if.... It's okay, huh? It'll pass...." Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess. Whew. "Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here tonight? Shut up...." And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no consciousness of anything at all. He struggled back. He was confused, and there was blankness around him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration—much more complete integration than he had ever known before. "But Pete, honey," Alice said. "What did you come over to the gate for? You shouldn't of done it." "Why not? I wanted to see you." "What if one of Susan's pals sees us?" "So what? I'm getting tired of checking in every night, like a baby. Besides, one of her pals did see us, last night, at the bar." Fear. What'll she do? Susan's a hellcat. I know she is. But maybe Pete'll get really sick and tired of her. He looks it. He looks mad. I'd sure hate to have him mad at me.... "Let's go for a spin, baby. Out in the suburbs somewhere. How about it?" "Well—why sure, Pete...." Sitting beside him in the copter. All alone up here. Real romantic, like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean thing. Poor Petey.... Riuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost. If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could accomplish the same results. He prodded again. "Pete," Alice said suddenly. "What are we working on, anyway?" "What do you mean, working on?" He frowned at her. "At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one ever tells me what for." "Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—" "Can cost Earth a ship. I know. Quit spouting poster talk at me, Pete Ganley. The enemy isn't even human. And there aren't any around here." Pete looked over at her. She was pouting, the upper lip drawn under the lower. Someone must have told her that was cute. Well, so what—it was cute. "What makes you think I know anything more than you do?" he said. "Well, gee." She looked up at him, so near to her in the moonlight that she wondered why she wanted to talk about the plant anyway. "You're in Final Assembly, aren't you? You check the whatsits before they go out." "Sure," he said. No harm in telling her. No spies now, not in this kind of war. Besides, she was too dumb to know anything. "It's a simple enough gadget," Pete Ganley said. "A new type of force field weapon that the enemy can't spot until it hits them. They don't even know there's an Earth ship within a million miles, until Bingo !..." She drank it in, and in her mind Riuku did too. Wonderful integration, wonderful. Partial thought control. And now, he'd learn the secret.... "You really want to know how it works?" Pete Ganley said. When she nodded he couldn't help grinning. "Well, it's analogous to the field set up by animal neurones, in a way. You've just got to damp that field, and not only damp it but blot it out, so that the frequency shows nothing at all there, and then—well, that's where those Corcoran assemblies you're soldering on come in. You produce the field...." Alice Hendricks listened. For some reason she wanted to listen. She was really curious about the field. But, gee, how did he expect her to understand all that stuff? He sounded like her algebra teacher, or was it chemistry? Lord, how she'd hated school. Maybe she shouldn't have quit. ... Corcoran fields. E and IR and nine-space something or other. She'd never seen Pete like this before. He looked real different. Sort of like a professor, or something. He must be real smart. And so—well, not good-looking especially but, well, appealing. Real SA, he had.... "So that's how it works," Pete Ganley said. "Quite a weapon, against them. It wouldn't work on a human being, of course." She was staring at him dreamy-eyed. He laughed. "Silly, I bet you haven't understood a word I said." "I have too." "Liar." He locked the automatic pilot on the copter and held out his arms. "Come here, you." "Oh, Petey...." Who cared about the weapon? He was right, even if she wouldn't admit it. She hadn't even listened, hardly. She hadn't understood. And neither had Riuku. Riuku waited until she'd fallen soundly asleep that night before he tried contacting Nagor. He'd learned nothing useful. He'd picked up nothing in her mind except more thoughts of Pete, and gee, maybe someday they'd get married, if he only had guts enough to tell Susan where to get off.... But she was asleep at last. Riuku was free enough of her thoughts to break contact, partially of course, since if he broke it completely he wouldn't be able to get back through the Shielding. It was hard enough to reach out through it. He sent a painful probing feeler out into space, to the spot where Nagor and the others waited for his report. "Nagor...." "Riuku? Is that you?" "Yes. I've got a contact. A girl. But I haven't learned anything yet that can help us." "Louder, Riuku. I can hardly hear you...." Alice Hendricks stirred in her sleep. The dream images slipped through her subconscious, almost waking her, beating against Riuku. Pete, baby, you shouldn't be like that.... Riuku cursed the bisexual species in their own language. "Riuku!" Nagor's call was harsh, urgent. "You've got to find out. We haven't much time. We lost three more ships today, and there wasn't a sign of danger. No Earthman nearby, no force fields, nothing. You've got to find out why." Those ships just disappeared. Riuku forced his way up through the erotic dreams of Alice Hendricks. "I know a little," he said. "They damp their thought waves somehow, and keep us from spotting the Corcoran field." "Corcoran field? What's that?" "I don't know." Alice's thoughts washed over him, pulling him back into complete integration, away from Nagor, into a medley of heroic Petes with gleaming eyes and clutching hands and good little Alices pushing them away—for the moment. "But surely you can find out through the girl," Nagor insisted from far away, almost out of phase altogether. "No, Pete!" Alice Hendricks said aloud. "Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact. You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all." "Well," Alice Hendricks thought, "maybe...." Riuku cursed her again, in the lingua franca of a dozen systems. Nagor's voice faded. Riuku switched back to English. Saturday. Into the plant at 3:58. Jean's diamond again.... Wish it would choke her; she's got a horsey enough face for it to. Where's old Liverlips? Don't see him around. Might as well go to the restroom for a while.... That's it, Riuku thought. Get her over past the machine shop, over by that Restricted Area. There must be something there we can go on.... "Hello, Tommy," Alice Hendricks said. "How's the love life?" "It could be better if someone I know would, uh, cooperate...." She looked past him, toward the corner where the big panels were with all the dials and the meters and the chart that was almost like the kind they drew pictures of earthquakes on. What was it for, anyway? And why couldn't anyone go over to it except those longhairs? High voltage her foot.... "What're you looking at, Alice?" Tommy said. "Oh, that." She pointed. "Wonder what it's for? It doesn't look like much of anything, really." "I wouldn't know. I've got something better to look at." "Oh, you !" Compared to Pete, he didn't have anything, not anything at all. ... Pete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway? Riuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found out what the other girls thought about it. Nothing. Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering? She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to call Nagor again. "Have you found out anything, Riuku?" "Not yet." Silence. Then: "We've lost another ship. Maybe you'd better turn her loose and come on back. It looks as if we'll have to run for it, after all." Defeat. The long, interstellar search for another race, a race less technologically advanced than this one, and all because of a stupid Earth female. "Not yet, Nagor," he said. "Her boy friend knows. I'll find out. I'll make her listen to him." "Well," Nagor said doubtfully. "All right. But hurry. We haven't much time at all." "I'll hurry," Riuku promised. "I'll be back with you tonight." That night after work Pete Ganley was waiting outside the gate again. Alice spotted his copter right away, even though he had the lights turned way down. "Gee, Pete, I didn't think...." "Get in. Quick." "What's the matter?" She climbed in beside him. He didn't answer until the copter had lifted itself into the air, away from the factory landing lots and the bright overhead lights and the home-bound workers. "It's Susan, who else," he said grimly. "She was really sounding off today. She kept saying she had a lot of evidence and I'd better be careful. And, well, I sure didn't want you turning up at the bar tonight of all nights." He didn't sound like Pete. "Why?" Alice said. "Are you afraid she'll divorce you?" "Oh, Alice, you're as bad as—look, baby, don't you see? It would be awful for you. All the publicity, the things she'd call you, maybe even in the papers...." He was staring straight ahead, his hands locked about the controls. He was sort of—well, distant. Not her Petey any more. Someone else's Pete. Susan's Pete.... "I think we should be more careful," he said. Riuku twisted his way through her thoughts, tried to push them down.... Does he love me, he's got to love me, sure he does, he just doesn't want me to get hurt.... And far away, almost completely out of phase, Nagor's call. "Riuku, another ship's gone. You'd better come back. Bring what you've learned so far and we can withdraw from the system and maybe piece it together...." "In a little while. Just a little while." Stop thinking about Susan, you biological schizo. Change the subject. You'll never get anything out of that man by having hysterics.... "I suppose," Alice cried bitterly, "you've been leading me on all the time. You don't love me. You'd rather have her !" "That's not so. Hell, baby...." He's angry. He's not even going to kiss me. I'm just cutting my own throat when I act like that.... "Okay, Pete. I'm sorry. I know it's tough on you. Let's have a drink, okay? Still got some in the glove compartment?" "Huh? Oh, sure." She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient gulp. She poured him another. Riuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed, swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe. Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The Restricted Area.... "Pete." "Yeah, baby?" "How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't even go over in the Restricted Area?" "Whatever made you think of that?" He laughed suddenly. He turned to her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. "Voltage loose ... oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?" "No. What?" "That's the control panel for one of the weapons, silly. It's only a duplicate, actually—a monitor station. But it's tuned to the frequencies of all the ships in this sector and—" She listened. She wanted to listen. She had to want to listen, now. "Nagor, I'm getting it," Riuku called. "I'll bring it all back with me. Just a minute and I'll have it." "How does it work, honey?" Alice Hendricks said. "You really want to know? Okay. Now the Corcoran field is generated between the ships and areas like that one, only a lot more powerful, by—" "It's coming through now, Nagor." "—a very simple power source, once you get the basics of it. You—oh, oh!" He grabbed her arm. "Duck, Alice!" A spotlight flashed out of the darkness, turned on them, outlined them. A siren whirred briefly, and then another copter pulled up beside them and a loudspeaker blared tinnily. "Okay, bud, pull down to the landing lane." The police. Police. Fear, all the way through Alice's thoughts, all the way through Riuku. Police. Earth law. That meant—it must mean he'd been discovered, that they had some other means of protection besides the Shielding.... "Nagor! I've been discovered!" "Come away then, you fool!" He twisted, trying to pull free of Alice's fear, away from the integration of their separate terrors. But he couldn't push her thoughts back from his. She was too frightened. He was too frightened. The bond held. "Oh, Pete, Pete, what did you do?" He didn't answer. He landed the copter, stepped out of it, walked back to the other copter that was just dropping down behind him. "But officer, what's the matter?" Alice Hendricks huddled down in the seat, already seeing tomorrow's papers, and her picture, and she wasn't really photogenic, either.... And then, from the other copter, she heard the woman laugh. "Pete Ganley, you fall for anything, don't you?" "Susan!" "You didn't expect me to follow you, did you? Didn't it ever occur to you that detectives could put a bug in your copter? My, what we've been hearing!" "Yeah," the detective who was driving said. "And those pictures we took last night weren't bad either." "Susan, I can explain everything...." "I'm sure you can, Pete. You always try. But as for you—you little—" Alice ducked down away from her. Pictures. Oh God, what it would make her look like. Still, this hag with the pinched up face who couldn't hold a man with all the cosmetics in the drugstore to camouflage her—she had her nerve, yelling like that. "Yeah, and I know a lot about you too!" Alice Hendricks cried. "Why, let me get my hands on you...." "Riuku!" Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool. You're not gaining anything this way. Calm down, so I can get out of here.... Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly. "That's better," Susan said. "Pete, your taste in women gets worse each time. I don't know why I always take you back." "I can explain everything." "Oh, Pete," Alice Hendricks whispered. "Petey, you're not—" "Sure he is," Susan Ganley said. "He's coming with me. The nice detectives will take you home, dear. But I don't think you'd better try anything with them—they're not your type. They're single." "Pete...." But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his arm, he followed her. "How could you do it, Petey...." Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku. Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is.... "Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman—" "Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other systems." Petey, Petey, Petey.... Contact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free, break free.... "What's the matter, Riuku? Why don't you come? Have the police caught you?" The others were fleeing, getting farther away even as he listened to Nagor's call. Contact was hard to maintain now; he could feel communication fading. "Riuku, if you don't come now...." He fought, but Alice's thoughts were still with him; Alice's tears still kept bringing him back into full awareness of her. "Riuku!" "I—I can't!" The Shielding boost, that had integrated him so completely with Alice Hendricks, would never let him go. "Oh, Petey, I've lost you...." And Nagor's sad farewell slipped completely out of phase, leaving him alone, with her. The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth's now unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding machine, at Tommy. "How's the love life?" "You really interested in finding out, Alice?" "Well—maybe—" And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.

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25629

Consider the poor mailman of the future. To "sleet and snow and dead of night"—things that must not keep him from his appointed rounds—will be added, sub-zero void, meteors, and planets that won't stay put. Maybe he'll decide that for six cents an ounce it just ain't worth it. POSTMARK GANYMEDE By ROBERT SILVERBERG "I'm washed up," Preston growled bitterly. "They made a postman out of me. Me—a postman!" He crumpled the assignment memo into a small, hard ball and hurled it at the bristly image of himself in the bar mirror. He hadn't shaved in three days—which was how long it had been since he had been notified of his removal from Space Patrol Service and his transfer to Postal Delivery. Suddenly, Preston felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up and saw a man in the trim gray of a Patrolman's uniform. "What do you want, Dawes?" "Chief's been looking for you, Preston. It's time for you to get going on your run." Preston scowled. "Time to go deliver the mail, eh?" He spat. "Don't they have anything better to do with good spacemen than make letter carriers out of them?" The other man shook his head. "You won't get anywhere grousing about it, Preston. Your papers don't specify which branch you're assigned to, and if they want to make you carry the mail—that's it." His voice became suddenly gentle. "Come on, Pres. One last drink, and then let's go. You don't want to spoil a good record, do you?" "No," Preston said reflectively. He gulped his drink and stood up. "Okay. I'm ready. Neither snow nor rain shall stay me from my appointed rounds, or however the damned thing goes." "That's a smart attitude, Preston. Come on—I'll walk you over to Administration." Savagely, Preston ripped away the hand that the other had put around his shoulders. "I can get there myself. At least give me credit for that!" "Okay," Dawes said, shrugging. "Well—good luck, Preston." "Yeah. Thanks. Thanks real lots." He pushed his way past the man in Space Grays and shouldered past a couple of barflies as he left. He pushed open the door of the bar and stood outside for a moment. It was near midnight, and the sky over Nome Spaceport was bright with stars. Preston's trained eye picked out Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There they were—waiting. But he would spend the rest of his days ferrying letters on the Ganymede run. He sucked in the cold night air of summertime Alaska and squared his shoulders. Two hours later, Preston sat at the controls of a one-man patrol ship just as he had in the old days. Only the control panel was bare where the firing studs for the heavy guns was found in regular patrol ships. And in the cargo hold instead of crates of spare ammo there were three bulging sacks of mail destined for the colony on Ganymede. Slight difference , Preston thought, as he set up his blasting pattern. "Okay, Preston," came the voice from the tower. "You've got clearance." "Cheers," Preston said, and yanked the blast-lever. The ship jolted upward, and for a second he felt a little of the old thrill—until he remembered. He took the ship out in space, saw the blackness in the viewplate. The radio crackled. "Come in, Postal Ship. Come in, Postal Ship." "I'm in. What do you want?" "We're your convoy," a hard voice said. "Patrol Ship 08756, Lieutenant Mellors, above you. Down at three o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732, Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll take you through the Pirate Belt." Preston felt his face go hot with shame. Mellors! Gunderson! They would stick two of his old sidekicks on the job of guarding him. "Please acknowledge," Mellors said. "The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman." Preston paused. Then: "Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant Preston aboard. I acknowledge message." There was a stunned silence. " Preston? Hal Preston?" "The one and only," Preston said. "What are you doing on a Postal ship?" Mellors asked. "Why don't you ask the Chief that? He's the one who yanked me out of the Patrol and put me here." "Can you beat that?" Gunderson asked incredulously. "Hal Preston, on a Postal ship." "Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?" Preston asked bitterly. "You can't believe your ears. Well, you better believe it, because here I am." "Must be some clerical error," Gunderson said. "Let's change the subject," Preston snapped. They were silent for a few moments, as the three ships—two armed, one loaded with mail for Ganymede—streaked outward away from Earth. Manipulating his controls with the ease of long experience, Preston guided the ship smoothly toward the gleaming bulk of far-off Jupiter. Even at this distance, he could see five or six bright pips surrounding the huge planet. There was Callisto, and—ah—there was Ganymede. He made computations, checked his controls, figured orbits. Anything to keep from having to talk to his two ex-Patrolmates or from having to think about the humiliating job he was on. Anything to— " Pirates! Moving up at two o'clock! " Preston came awake. He picked off the location of the pirate ships—there were two of them, coming up out of the asteroid belt. Small, deadly, compact, they orbited toward him. He pounded the instrument panel in impotent rage, looking for the guns that weren't there. "Don't worry, Pres," came Mellors' voice. "We'll take care of them for you." "Thanks," Preston said bitterly. He watched as the pirate ships approached, longing to trade places with the men in the Patrol ships above and below him. Suddenly a bright spear of flame lashed out across space and the hull of Gunderson's ship glowed cherry red. "I'm okay," Gunderson reported immediately. "Screens took the charge." Preston gripped his controls and threw the ship into a plunging dive that dropped it back behind the protection of both Patrol ships. He saw Gunderson and Mellors converge on one of the pirates. Two blue beams licked out, and the pirate ship exploded. But then the second pirate swooped down in an unexpected dive. "Look out!" Preston yelled helplessly—but it was too late. Beams ripped into the hull of Mellors' ship, and a dark fissure line opened down the side of the ship. Preston smashed his hand against the control panel. Better to die in an honest dogfight than to live this way! It was one against one, now—Gunderson against the pirate. Preston dropped back again to take advantage of the Patrol ship's protection. "I'm going to try a diversionary tactic," Gunderson said on untappable tight-beam. "Get ready to cut under and streak for Ganymede with all you got." "Check." Preston watched as the tactic got under way. Gunderson's ship traveled in a long, looping spiral that drew the pirate into the upper quadrant of space. His path free, Preston guided his ship under the other two and toward unobstructed freedom. As he looked back, he saw Gunderson steaming for the pirate on a sure collision orbit. He turned away. The score was two Patrolmen dead, two ships wrecked—but the mails would get through. Shaking his head, Preston leaned forward over his control board and headed on toward Ganymede. The blue-white, frozen moon hung beneath him. Preston snapped on the radio. "Ganymede Colony? Come in, please. This is your Postal Ship." The words tasted sour in his mouth. There was silence for a second. "Come in, Ganymede," Preston repeated impatiently—and then the sound of a distress signal cut across his audio pickup. It was coming on wide beam from the satellite below—and they had cut out all receiving facilities in an attempt to step up their transmitter. Preston reached for the wide-beam stud, pressed it. "Okay, I pick up your signal, Ganymede. Come in, now!" "This is Ganymede," a tense voice said. "We've got trouble down here. Who are you?" "Mail ship," Preston said. "From Earth. What's going on?" There was the sound of voices whispering somewhere near the microphone. Finally: "Hello, Mail Ship?" "Yeah?" "You're going to have to turn back to Earth, fellow. You can't land here. It's rough on us, missing a mail trip, but—" Preston said impatiently, "Why can't I land? What the devil's going on down there?" "We've been invaded," the tired voice said. "The colony's been completely surrounded by iceworms." "Iceworms?" "The local native life," the colonist explained. "They're about thirty feet long, a foot wide, and mostly mouth. There's a ring of them about a hundred yards wide surrounding the Dome. They can't get in and we can't get out—and we can't figure out any possible approach for you." "Pretty," Preston said. "But why didn't the things bother you while you were building your Dome?" "Apparently they have a very long hibernation-cycle. We've only been here two years, you know. The iceworms must all have been asleep when we came. But they came swarming out of the ice by the hundreds last month." "How come Earth doesn't know?" "The antenna for our long-range transmitter was outside the Dome. One of the worms came by and chewed the antenna right off. All we've got left is this short-range thing we're using and it's no good more than ten thousand miles from here. You're the first one who's been this close since it happened." "I get it." Preston closed his eyes for a second, trying to think things out. The Colony was under blockade by hostile alien life, thereby making it impossible for him to deliver the mail. Okay. If he'd been a regular member of the Postal Service, he'd have given it up as a bad job and gone back to Earth to report the difficulty. But I'm not going back. I'll be the best damned mailman they've got. "Give me a landing orbit anyway, Ganymede." "But you can't come down! How will you leave your ship?" "Don't worry about that," Preston said calmly. "We have to worry! We don't dare open the Dome, with those creatures outside. You can't come down, Postal Ship." "You want your mail or don't you?" The colonist paused. "Well—" "Okay, then," Preston said. "Shut up and give me landing coordinates!" There was a pause, and then the figures started coming over. Preston jotted them down on a scratch-pad. "Okay, I've got them. Now sit tight and wait." He glanced contemptuously at the three mail-pouches behind him, grinned, and started setting up the orbit. Mailman, am I? I'll show them! He brought the Postal Ship down with all the skill of his years in the Patrol, spiralling in around the big satellite of Jupiter as cautiously and as precisely as if he were zeroing in on a pirate lair in the asteroid belt. In its own way, this was as dangerous, perhaps even more so. Preston guided the ship into an ever-narrowing orbit, which he stabilized about a hundred miles over the surface of Ganymede. As his ship swung around the moon's poles in its tight orbit, he began to figure some fuel computations. His scratch-pad began to fill with notations. Fuel storage— Escape velocity— Margin of error— Safety factor— Finally he looked up. He had computed exactly how much spare fuel he had, how much he could afford to waste. It was a small figure—too small, perhaps. He turned to the radio. "Ganymede?" "Where are you, Postal Ship?" "I'm in a tight orbit about a hundred miles up," Preston said. "Give me the figures on the circumference of your Dome, Ganymede?" "Seven miles," the colonist said. "What are you planning to do?" Preston didn't answer. He broke contact and scribbled some more figures. Seven miles of iceworms, eh? That was too much to handle. He had planned on dropping flaming fuel on them and burning them out, but he couldn't do it that way. He'd have to try a different tactic. Down below, he could see the blue-white ammonia ice that was the frozen atmosphere of Ganymede. Shimmering gently amid the whiteness was the transparent yellow of the Dome beneath whose curved walls lived the Ganymede Colony. Even forewarned, Preston shuddered. Surrounding the Dome was a living, writhing belt of giant worms. "Lovely," he said. "Just lovely." Getting up, he clambered over the mail sacks and headed toward the rear of the ship, hunting for the auxiliary fuel-tanks. Working rapidly, he lugged one out and strapped it into an empty gun turret, making sure he could get it loose again when he'd need it. He wiped away sweat and checked the angle at which the fuel-tank would face the ground when he came down for a landing. Satisfied, he knocked a hole in the side of the fuel-tank. "Okay, Ganymede," he radioed. "I'm coming down." He blasted loose from the tight orbit and rocked the ship down on manual. The forbidding surface of Ganymede grew closer and closer. Now he could see the iceworms plainly. Hideous, thick creatures, lying coiled in masses around the Dome. Preston checked his spacesuit, making sure it was sealed. The instruments told him he was a bare ten miles above Ganymede now. One more swing around the poles would do it. He peered out as the Dome came below and once again snapped on the radio. "I'm going to come down and burn a path through those worms of yours. Watch me carefully, and jump to it when you see me land. I want that airlock open, or else." "But—" "No buts!" He was right overhead now. Just one ordinary-type gun would solve the whole problem, he thought. But Postal Ships didn't get guns. They weren't supposed to need them. He centered the ship as well as he could on the Dome below and threw it into automatic pilot. Jumping from the control panel, he ran back toward the gun turret and slammed shut the plexilite screen. Its outer wall opened and the fuel-tank went tumbling outward and down. He returned to his control-panel seat and looked at the viewscreen. He smiled. The fuel-tank was lying near the Dome—right in the middle of the nest of iceworms. The fuel was leaking from the puncture. The iceworms writhed in from all sides. "Now!" Preston said grimly. The ship roared down, jets blasting. The fire licked out, heated the ground, melted snow—ignited the fuel-tank! A gigantic flame blazed up, reflected harshly off the snows of Ganymede. And the mindless iceworms came, marching toward the fire, being consumed, as still others devoured the bodies of the dead and dying. Preston looked away and concentrated on the business of finding a place to land the ship. The holocaust still raged as he leaped down from the catwalk of the ship, clutching one of the heavy mail sacks, and struggled through the melting snows to the airlock. He grinned. The airlock was open. Arms grabbed him, pulled him through. Someone opened his helmet. "Great job, Postman!" "There are two more mail sacks," Preston said. "Get men out after them." The man in charge gestured to two young colonists, who donned spacesuits and dashed through the airlock. Preston watched as they raced to the ship, climbed in, and returned a few moments later with the mail sacks. "You've got it all," Preston said. "I'm checking out. I'll get word to the Patrol to get here and clean up that mess for you." "How can we thank you?" the official-looking man asked. "No need to," Preston said casually. "I had to get that mail down here some way, didn't I?" He turned away, smiling to himself. Maybe the Chief had known what he was doing when he took an experienced Patrol man and dumped him into Postal. Delivering the mail to Ganymede had been more hazardous than fighting off half a dozen space pirates. I guess I was wrong , Preston thought. This is no snap job for old men. Preoccupied, he started out through the airlock. The man in charge caught his arm. "Say, we don't even know your name! Here you are a hero, and—" "Hero?" Preston shrugged. "All I did was deliver the mail. It's all in a day's work, you know. The mail's got to get through!" THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories September 1957. 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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ACID BATH By VASELEOS GARSON The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues. Jon Karyl was bolting in a new baffle plate on the stationary rocket engine. It was a tedious job and took all his concentration. So he wasn't paying too much attention to what was going on in other parts of the little asteroid. He didn't see the peculiar blue space ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted to land only a few hundred yards away from his plastic igloo. Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's airlock. It was only as he crawled out of the depths of the rocket power plant that he realized something was wrong. By then it was almost too late. The six blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching him at a lope. Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot bounds. When you're a Lone Watcher, and strangers catch you unawares, you don't stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend upon your life. As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under his breath. The automatic alarm should have shrilled out a warning. Then he saved as much of his breath as he could as some sort of power wave tore up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get out of sight of the strangers. Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut back and head for the underground entrance to the service station. He glanced back finally. Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting after him, and rapidly closing the distance. Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for greater exertion, increased the gravity pull in his space-suit boots as he neared the ravine he'd been racing for. The oxygen was just taking hold when he hit the lip of the ravine and began sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn course. The power ray from behind ripped out great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But running naturally, bent close to the bottom of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare spots. The oxygen made the tremendous exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue stalkers. He'd eluded them, temporarily at least, Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off the dim trail and watched for movement along the route behind him. He stood up, finally, pushed aside the leafy overhang of a bush and looked for landmarks along the edge of the ravine. He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the ravine. The hidden entrance to the service station wasn't far off. His pistol held ready, he moved quietly on down the ravine until the old water course made an abrupt hairpin turn. Instead of following around the sharp bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead through the overhanging bushes until he came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his hands and knees he worked his way under the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out space in the center. There , just ahead of him, was the lock leading into the service station. Slipping a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit, he jabbed it into the center of the lock, opening the lever housing. He pulled strongly on the lever. With a hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open. Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing softly behind. At the end of the long tunnel he stepped to the televisor which was fixed on the area surrounding the station. Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures. But he saw their ship. It squatted like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut tight. He tuned the televisor to its widest range and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues. He was looking into the stationary rocket engine. As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue came crawling out of the ship. The two Steel-Blues moved toward the center of the televisor range. They're coming toward the station, Karyl thought grimly. Karyl examined the two creatures. They were of the steel-blue color from the crown of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of their walking appendages. They were about the height of Karyl—six feet. But where he tapered from broad shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up and down. They had no legs, just appendages, many-jointed that stretched and shrank independent of the other, but keeping the cylindrical body with its four pairs of tentacles on a level balance. Where their eyes would have been was an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the egg-head, with its converging ends curving around the sides of the head. Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But where were their masters? The Steel-Blues moved out of the range of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard a pounding from the station upstairs. He chuckled. They were like the wolf of pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to blow the house down. The outer shell of the station was formed from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the solar system. With the self-sealing lock of the same resistant material, a mere pounding was nothing. Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway. He went up the steel ladder leading to the station's power plant and the televisor that could look into every room within the station. He heaved a slight sigh when he reached the power room, for right at his hand were weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid. Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the lock to the station. His teeth suddenly clamped down on his lower lip. Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes into the stelrylite with round-headed metal clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't break up that easily. Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up the revolving turret which capped the station so that its thin fin pointed at the squat ship of the invaders. Then he went to the atomic cannon's firing buttons. He pressed first the yellow, then the blue button. Finally the red one. The thin fin—the cannon's sight—split in half as the turret opened and the coiled nose of the cannon protruded. There was a soundless flash. Then a sharp crack. Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship of the solar system. There was nothing that could withstand even the slight jolt of power given by the station cannon on any of the Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of the ship had changed. A bubble of metal, like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off the vessel and struck the rocket of the asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets. He pressed the red button again. Then abruptly he was on the floor of the power room, his legs strangely cut out from under him. He tried to move them. They lay flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried to lever himself to an upright position. Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed from the waist down. But it couldn't happen that suddenly. He turned his head. A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked tentacle held a square black box. Jon could read nothing in that metallic face. He said, voice muffled by the confines of the plastic helmet, "Who are you?" "I am"—there was a rising inflection in the answer—"a Steel-Blue." There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's face to move. "That is what I have named you," Jon Karyl said. "But what are you?" "A robot," came the immediate answer. Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue was telepathic. "Yes," the Steel-Blue answered. "We talk in the language of the mind. Come!" he said peremptorily, motioning with the square black box. The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens he'd seen on the creature's face had a counterpart on the back of the egg-head. Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought. That's quite an innovation. "Thank you," Steel-Blue said. There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he had applied for this high-paying but man-killing job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar System's starways. He had little fear now, only curiosity. These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical. They could have snuffed out my life very simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be friends. Steel-Blue chuckled. Jon followed him through the sundered lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a moment to examine the wreckage of the lock. It had been punched full of holes as if it had been some soft cheese instead of a metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a century perfecting. "We appreciate your compliment," Steel-Blue said. "But that metal also is found on our world. It's probably the softest and most malleable we have. We were surprised you—earthmen, is it?—use it as protective metal." "Why are you in this system?" Jon asked, hardly expecting an answer. It came anyway. "For the same reason you Earthmen are reaching out farther into your system. We need living room. You have strategically placed planets for our use. We will use them." Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had been preaching preparedness as Earth flung her ships into the reaches of the solar system, taking the first long step toward the conquest of space. There are other races somewhere, they argued. As strong and smart as man, many of them so transcending man in mental and inventive power that we must be prepared to strike the minute danger shows. Now here was the answer to the scientists' warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials. "What did you say?" asked Steel-Blue. "I couldn't understand." "Just thinking to myself," Jon answered. It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his thoughts had to be directed outward, rather than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to read it. He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping lock of the invaders' space ship wondering how he could warn Earth. The Space Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at his service station in 21 days. But by that time he probably would be mouldering in the rocky dust of the asteroid. It was pitch dark within the ship but the Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all maneuvering through the maze of corridors. Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle. Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular room, bright with light streaming from a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently were near topside of the vessel. A Steel-Blue, more massive than his guide and with four more pair of tentacles, including two short ones that grew from the top of its head, spoke out. "This is the violator?" Jon's Steel-Blue nodded. "You know the penalty? Carry it out." "He also is an inhabitant of this system," Jon's guide added. "Examine him first, then give him the death." Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from the lighted room through more corridors. If it got too bad he still had the stubray pistol. Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service station attendant just to see what it offered. Here was a part of it, and it was certainly something new. "This is the examination room," his Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously. A green effulgence surrounded him. There was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the tiny microphone on the outside of his suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go through his body. Then it seemed as if a half dozen hands were inside him, examining his internal organs. His stomach contracted. He felt a squeeze on his heart. His lungs tickled. There were several more queer motions inside his body. Then another Steel-Blue voice said: "He is a soft-metal creature, made up of metals that melt at a very low temperature. He also contains a liquid whose makeup I cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him back when the torture is done." Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What kind of torture could this be? Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the chronometer on his wrist. Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien ship and halted expectantly just outside the ship's lock. Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he toted up the disadvantages. He either would have to find a hiding place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues wanted him bad enough they could tear the whole place to pieces, or somehow get aboard the little life ship hidden in the service station. In that he would be just a sitting duck. He shrugged off the slight temptation to use the pistol. He was still curious. And he was interested in staying alive as long as possible. There was a remote chance he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously, he glanced toward his belt to see the little power pack which, if under ideal conditions, could finger out fifty thousand miles into space. If he could somehow stay alive the 21 days he might be able to warn the patrol. He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for his life would be snuffed out immediately. The Steel-Blue said quietly: "It might be ironical to let you warn that SP ship you keep thinking about. But we know your weapon now. Already our ship is equipped with a force field designed especially to deflect your atomic guns." Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts quickly. They can delve deeper than the surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a leash on my thoughts? The Steel-Blue chuckled. "You get—absent-minded, is it?—every once in a while." Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared lugging great sheets of plastic and various other equipment. They dumped their loads and began unbundling them. Working swiftly, they built a plastic igloo, smaller than the living room in the larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments inside—one of them Jon Karyl recognized as an air pump from within the station—and they laid out a pallet. When they were done Jon saw a miniature reproduction of the service station, lacking only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the other. His Steel-Blue said: "We have reproduced the atmosphere of your station so that you be watched while you undergo the torture under the normal conditions of your life." "What is this torture?" Jon Karyl asked. The answer was almost caressing: "It is a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes joints to harden if even so much as a drop remains on it long. It eats away the metal, leaving a scaly residue which crumbles eventually into dust. "We will dilute it with a harmless liquid for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die instantly. "Enter your"—the Steel-Blue hesitated—"mausoleum. You die in your own atmosphere. However, we took the liberty of purifying it. There were dangerous elements in it." Jon walked into the little igloo. The Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit deflated. Pressure was building up in the igloo. He took a sample of the air, found that it was good, although quite rich in oxygen compared with what he'd been using in the service station and in his suit. With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet and gulped huge draughts of the air. He sat down on the pallet and waited for the torture to begin. The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo, staring at him through elliptical eyes. Apparently, they too, were waiting for the torture to begin. Jon thought the excess of oxygen was making him light-headed. He stared at a cylinder which was beginning to sprout tentacles from the circle. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a spacescope, was appearing in the center of the cylinder. A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a yellowish liquid. One of the tentacles reached into the opening and clasped the glass. The opening closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor appendages, moved toward Jon. He didn't like the looks of the liquid in the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some sort. He raised to his feet. He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared to blast the cylinder. The cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his eyes jump in his head. He brought the stubray gun up—but he was helpless. The pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement, one of the tentacles had speared it from his hand and was holding it out of his reach. Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The same tentacle, assisted by a new one, pinioned his shoulders. Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler of liquid. Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid. Something about a fellow named Socrates who was given a cup of hemlock to drink. It was the finis for Socrates. But the old hero had been nonchalant and calm about the whole thing. With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious unto death, relaxed and said, "All right, bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll take it like a man." The cylinder apparently understood him, for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered his stubray pistol. Jon brought the glass of liquid under his nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent. It brought tears to his eyes. He looked at the cylinder, then at the Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic igloo. He waved the glass at the audience. "To Earth, ever triumphant," he toasted. Then he drained the glass at a gulp. Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears. He coughed as the stuff went down. But he was still alive, he thought in amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and was still alive. The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't known until then how tense he'd been. Now with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He laid down on the pallet and went to sleep. There was one lone Steel-Blue watching him when he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and sat up. He vanished almost instantly. He, or another like him, returned immediately accompanied by a half-dozen others, including the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1. One said, "You are alive." The thought registered amazement. "When you lost consciousness, we thought you had"—there was a hesitation—"as you say, died." "No," Jon Karyl said. "I didn't die. I was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep." The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand. "Good it is that you live. The torture will continue," spoke No. 1 before loping away. The cylinder business began again. This time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying to figure out what it was. It had a familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't quite put a taste-finger on it. His belly said he was hungry. He glanced at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before the SP ship arrived. Would this torture—he chuckled—last until then? But he was growing more and more conscious that his belly was screaming for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge off his thirst. It was on the fifth day of his torture that Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get something to eat or perish in the attempt. The cylinder sat passively in its niche in the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed his stubray. They merely watched as he pressed the stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol. The plastic splintered. Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and striding toward his own igloo adjacent to the service station when a Steel-Blue accosted him. "Out of my way," grunted Jon, waving the stubray. "I'm hungry." "I'm the first Steel-Blue you met," said the creature who barred his way. "Go back to your torture." "But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of your tentacles and eat it without seasoning." "Eat?" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled. "I want to refuel. I've got to have food to keep my engine going." Steel-Blue chuckled. "So the hemlock, as you call it, is beginning to affect you at last? Back to the torture room." "Like R-dust," Jon growled. He pressed the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to the rocky sward. Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used once before. A tentacle danced over it. Abruptly Jon found himself standing on a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet wide. "Back to the room," Steel-Blue commanded. Jon resheathed the stubray pistol, shrugged non-committally and leaped the trench. He walked slowly back and reentered the torture chamber. The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage he'd done. As he watched them, Jon was still curious, but he was getting mad underneath at the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues. By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by her green fields, and dark forests, he'd stay alive to warn the SP ship. Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could equip themselves with spray guns and squirt citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade away. It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders—it doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be the answer. Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl discovered a week later. The Steel-Blue who had captured him in the power room of the service station came in to examine him. "You're still holding out, I see," he observed after poking Jon in every sensitive part of his body. "I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase the power of the—ah—hemlock. How do you feel?" Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he answered honestly enough: "My guts feel as if they're chewing each other up. My bones ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm so hungry." "That is the hemlock," Steel-Blue said. It was when he quaffed the new and stronger draught that Jon knew that his hope that it was citric acid was squelched. The acid taste was weaker which meant that the citric acid was the diluting liquid. It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive acid. On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak he didn't feel much like moving around. He let the cylinder feed him the hemlock. No. 1 came again to see him, and went away chuckling, "Decrease the dilution. This Earthman at last is beginning to suffer." Staying alive had now become a fetish with Jon. On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized that the Steel-Blues also were waiting for the SP ship. The extra-terrestrials had repaired the blue ship where the service station atomic ray had struck. And they were doing a little target practice with plastic bubbles only a few miles above the asteroid. When his chronometer clocked off the beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received a tumbler of the hemlock from the hands of No. 1 himself. "It is the hemlock," he chuckled, "undiluted. Drink it and your torture is over. You will die before your SP ship is destroyed. "We have played with you long enough. Today we begin to toy with your SP ship. Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement." Weak though he was Jon lunged to his feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran cool along the plastic arm of his space suit. He changed his mind about throwing the contents on No. 1. With a smile he set the glass at his lips and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1. "The SP ship will turn your ship into jelly." No. 1 swept out, chuckling. "Boast if you will, Earthman, it's your last chance." There was an exultation in Jon's heart that deadened the hunger and washed away the nausea. At last he knew what the hemlock was. He sat on the pallet adjusting the little power-pack radio. The SP ship should now be within range of the set. The space patrol was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to schedule. Seconds counted like years. They had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster or death. He sent out the call letters. "AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ..." Three times he sent the call, then began sending his message, hoping that his signal was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if they answered. Though the power pack could get out a message over a vast distance, it could not pick up messages even when backed by an SP ship's power unless the ship was only a few hundred miles away. The power pack was strictly a distress signal. He didn't know how long he'd been sending, nor how many times his weary voice had repeated the short but desperate message. He kept watching the heavens and hoping. Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming, for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was rising silently from the asteroid. Up and up it rose, then flames flickered in a circle about its curious shape. The ship disappeared, suddenly accelerating. Jon Karyl strained his eyes. Finally he looked away from the heavens to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently outside the goldfish bowl. Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol. He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran toward the service station. He didn't know how weak he was until he stumbled and fell only a few feet from his prison. The Steel-Blues just watched him. He crawled on, around the circular pit in the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue had shown him the power of his weapon. He'd been crawling through a nightmare for years when the quiet voice penetrated his dulled mind. "Take it easy, Karyl. You're among friends." He pried open his eyes with his will. He saw the blue and gold of a space guard's uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness. He was still weak days later when Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said, "Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you what they thought was sure death, and it's the only thing that kept you going long enough to warn us." "I was dumb for a long time," Karyl said. "I thought that it was the acid, almost to the very last. But when I drank that last glass, I knew they didn't have a chance. "They were metal monsters. No wonder they feared that liquid. It would rust their joints, short their wiring, and kill them. No wonder they stared when I kept alive after drinking enough to completely annihilate a half-dozen of them. "But what happened when you met the ship?" The space captain grinned. "Not much. Our crew was busy creating a hollow shell filled with water to be shot out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile thrower. "These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put traction beams on us and started tugging us toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of atomic shots but when they just glanced off, we gave up. "They weren't expecting the shell of water. When it hit that blue ship, you could almost see it oxidize before your eyes. "I guess they knew what was wrong right away. They let go the traction beams and tried to get away. They forgot about the force field, so we just poured atomic fire into the weakening ship. It just melted away." Jon Karyl got up from the divan where he'd been lying. "They thought I was a metal creature, too. But where do you suppose they came from?" The captain shrugged. "Who knows?" Jon set two glasses on the table. "Have a drink of the best damn water in the solar system?" He asked Capt. Small. "Don't mind if I do." The water twinkled in the two glasses, winking as if it knew just what it had done. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories July 1952. 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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"Any problem posed by one group of human beings can be resolved by any other group." That's what the Handbook said. But did that include primitive humans? Or the Bees? Or a ... CONTROL GROUP By ROGER DEE The cool green disk of Alphard Six on the screen was infinitely welcome after the arid desolation and stinking swamplands of the inner planets, an airy jewel of a world that might have been designed specifically for the hard-earned month of rest ahead. Navigator Farrell, youngest and certainly most impulsive of the three-man Terran Reclamations crew, would have set the Marco Four down at once but for the greater caution of Stryker, nominally captain of the group, and of Gibson, engineer, and linguist. Xavier, the ship's little mechanical, had—as was usual and proper—no voice in the matter. "Reconnaissance spiral first, Arthur," Stryker said firmly. He chuckled at Farrell's instant scowl, his little eyes twinkling and his naked paunch quaking over the belt of his shipboard shorts. "Chapter One, Subsection Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed world shall be deemed safe without proper— " Farrell, as Stryker had expected, interrupted with characteristic impatience. "Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six isn't an unreclaimed world—it was never colonized before the Hymenop invasion back in 3025, so why should it be inhabited now?" Gibson, who for four hours had not looked up from his interminable chess game with Xavier, paused with a beleaguered knight in one blunt brown hand. "No point in taking chances," Gibson said in his neutral baritone. He shrugged thick bare shoulders, his humorless black-browed face unmoved, when Farrell included him in his scowl. "We're two hundred twenty-six light-years from Sol, at the old limits of Terran expansion, and there's no knowing what we may turn up here. Alphard's was one of the first systems the Bees took over. It must have been one of the last to be abandoned when they pulled back to 70 Ophiuchi." "And I think you live for the day," Farrell said acidly, "when we'll stumble across a functioning dome of live, buzzing Hymenops. Damn it, Gib, the Bees pulled out a hundred years ago, before you and I were born—neither of us ever saw a Hymenop, and never will!" "But I saw them," Stryker said. "I fought them for the better part of the century they were here, and I learned there's no predicting nor understanding them. We never knew why they came nor why they gave up and left. How can we know whether they'd leave a rear-guard or booby trap here?" He put a paternal hand on Farrell's shoulder, understanding the younger man's eagerness and knowing that their close-knit team would have been the more poorly balanced without it. "Gib's right," he said. He nearly added as usual . "We're on rest leave at the moment, yes, but our mission is still to find Terran colonies enslaved and abandoned by the Bees, not to risk our necks and a valuable Reorientations ship by landing blind on an unobserved planet. We're too close already. Cut in your shields and find a reconnaissance spiral, will you?" Grumbling, Farrell punched coordinates on the Ringwave board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored the bluish enveloping haze of her repellors. Stryker's caution was justified on the instant. The speeding streamlined shape that had flashed up unobserved from below swerved sharply and exploded in a cataclysmic blaze of atomic fire that rocked the ship wildly and flung the three men to the floor in a jangling roar of alarms. "So the Handbook tacticians knew what they were about," Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately he adopted the smug tone best calculated to sting Farrell out of his first self-reproach, and grinned when the navigator bristled defensively. "Some of their enjoinders seem a little stuffy and obvious at times, but they're eminently sensible." When Farrell refused to be baited Stryker turned to Gibson, who was busily assessing the damage done to the ship's more fragile equipment, and to Xavier, who searched the planet's surface with the ship's magnoscanner. The Marco Four , Ringwave generators humming gently, hung at the moment just inside the orbit of Alphard Six's single dun-colored moon. Gibson put down a test meter with an air of finality. "Nothing damaged but the Zero Interval Transfer computer. I can realign that in a couple of hours, but it'll have to be done before we hit Transfer again." Stryker looked dubious. "What if the issue is forced before the ZIT unit is repaired? Suppose they come up after us?" "I doubt that they can. Any installation crudely enough equipped to trust in guided missiles is hardly likely to have developed efficient space craft." Stryker was not reassured. "That torpedo of theirs was deadly enough," he said. "And its nature reflects the nature of the people who made it. Any race vicious enough to use atomic charges is too dangerous to trifle with." Worry made comical creases in his fat, good-humored face. "We'll have to find out who they are and why they're here, you know." "They can't be Hymenops," Gibson said promptly. "First, because the Bees pinned their faith on Ringwave energy fields, as we did, rather than on missiles. Second, because there's no dome on Six." "There were three empty domes on Five, which is a desert planet," Farrell pointed out. "Why didn't they settle Six? It's a more habitable world." Gibson shrugged. "I know the Bees always erected domes on every planet they colonized, Arthur, but precedent is a fallible tool. And it's even more firmly established that there's no possibility of our rationalizing the motivations of a culture as alien as the Hymenops'—we've been over that argument a hundred times on other reclaimed worlds." "But this was never an unreclaimed world," Farrell said with the faint malice of one too recently caught in the wrong. "Alphard Six was surveyed and seeded with Terran bacteria around the year 3000, but the Bees invaded before we could colonize. And that means we'll have to rule out any resurgent colonial group down there, because Six never had a colony in the beginning." "The Bees have been gone for over a hundred years," Stryker said. "Colonists might have migrated from another Terran-occupied planet." Gibson disagreed. "We've touched at every inhabited world in this sector, Lee, and not one surviving colony has developed space travel on its own. The Hymenops had a hundred years to condition their human slaves to ignorance of everything beyond their immediate environment—the motives behind that conditioning usually escape us, but that's beside the point—and they did a thorough job of it. The colonists have had no more than a century of freedom since the Bees pulled out, and four generations simply isn't enough time for any subjugated culture to climb from slavery to interstellar flight." Stryker made a padding turn about the control room, tugging unhappily at the scanty fringe of hair the years had left him. "If they're neither Hymenops nor resurgent colonists," he said, "then there's only one choice remaining—they're aliens from a system we haven't reached yet, beyond the old sphere of Terran exploration. We always assumed that we'd find other races out here someday, and that they'd be as different from us in form and motivation as the Hymenops. Why not now?" Gibson said seriously, "Not probable, Lee. The same objection that rules out the Bees applies to any trans-Alphardian culture—they'd have to be beyond the atomic fission stage, else they'd never have attempted interstellar flight. The Ringwave with its Zero Interval Transfer principle and instantaneous communications applications is the only answer to long-range travel, and if they'd had that they wouldn't have bothered with atomics." Stryker turned on him almost angrily. "If they're not Hymenops or humans or aliens, then what in God's name are they?" "Aye, there's the rub," Farrell said, quoting a passage whose aptness had somehow seen it through a dozen reorganizations of insular tongue and a final translation to universal Terran. "If they're none of those three, we've only one conclusion left. There's no one down there at all—we're victims of the first joint hallucination in psychiatric history." Stryker threw up his hands in surrender. "We can't identify them by theorizing, and that brings us down to the business of first-hand investigation. Who's going to bell the cat this time?" "I'd like to go," Gibson said at once. "The ZIT computer can wait." Stryker vetoed his offer as promptly. "No, the ZIT comes first. We may have to run for it, and we can't set up a Transfer jump without the computer. It's got to be me or Arthur." Farrell felt the familiar chill of uneasiness that inevitably preceded this moment of decision. He was not lacking in courage, else the circumstances under which he had worked for the past ten years—the sometimes perilous, sometimes downright charnel conditions left by the fleeing Hymenop conquerors—would have broken him long ago. But that same hard experience had honed rather than blunted the edge of his imagination, and the prospect of a close-quarters stalking of an unknown and patently hostile force was anything but attractive. "You two did the field work on the last location," he said. "It's high time I took my turn—and God knows I'd go mad if I had to stay inship and listen to Lee memorizing his Handbook subsections or to Gib practicing dead languages with Xavier." Stryker laughed for the first time since the explosion that had so nearly wrecked the Marco Four . "Good enough. Though it wouldn't be more diverting to listen for hours to you improvising enharmonic variations on the Lament for Old Terra with your accordion." Gibson, characteristically, had a refinement to offer. "They'll be alerted down there for a reconnaissance sally," he said. "Why not let Xavier take the scouter down for overt diversion, and drop Arthur off in the helihopper for a low-level check?" Stryker looked at Farrell. "All right, Arthur?" "Good enough," Farrell said. And to Xavier, who had not moved from his post at the magnoscanner: "How does it look, Xav? Have you pinned down their base yet?" The mechanical answered him in a voice as smooth and clear—and as inflectionless—as a 'cello note. "The planet seems uninhabited except for a large island some three hundred miles in diameter. There are twenty-seven small agrarian hamlets surrounded by cultivated fields. There is one city of perhaps a thousand buildings with a central square. In the square rests a grounded spaceship of approximately ten times the bulk of the Marco Four ." They crowded about the vision screen, jostling Xavier's jointed gray shape in their interest. The central city lay in minutest detail before them, the battered hulk of the grounded ship glinting rustily in the late afternoon sunlight. Streets radiated away from the square in orderly succession, the whole so clearly depicted that they could see the throngs of people surging up and down, tiny foreshortened faces turned toward the sky. "At least they're human," Farrell said. Relief replaced in some measure his earlier uneasiness. "Which means that they're Terran, and can be dealt with according to Reclamations routine. Is that hulk spaceworthy, Xav?" Xavier's mellow drone assumed the convention vibrato that indicated stark puzzlement. "Its breached hull makes the ship incapable of flight. Apparently it is used only to supply power to the outlying hamlets." The mechanical put a flexible gray finger upon an indicator graph derived from a composite section of detector meters. "The power transmitted seems to be gross electric current conveyed by metallic cables. It is generated through a crudely governed process of continuous atomic fission." Farrell, himself appalled by the information, still found himself able to chuckle at Stryker's bellow of consternation. " Continuous fission? Good God, only madmen would deliberately run a risk like that!" Farrell prodded him with cheerful malice. "Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid aliens who thrive on hard radiation and look on the danger of being blown to hell in the middle of the night as a satisfactory risk." "They're not alien," Gibson said positively. "Their architecture is Terran, and so is their ship. The ship is incredibly primitive, though; those batteries of tubes at either end—" "Are thrust reaction jets," Stryker finished in an awed voice. "Primitive isn't the word, Gib—the thing is prehistoric! Rocket propulsion hasn't been used in spacecraft since—how long, Xav?" Xavier supplied the information with mechanical infallibility. "Since the year 2100 when the Ringwave propulsion-communication principle was discovered. That principle has served men since." Farrell stared in blank disbelief at the anomalous craft on the screen. Primitive, as Stryker had said, was not the word for it: clumsily ovoid, studded with torpedo domes and turrets and bristling at either end with propulsion tubes, it lay at the center of its square like a rusted relic of a past largely destroyed and all but forgotten. What a magnificent disregard its builders must have had, he thought, for their lives and the genetic purity of their posterity! The sullen atomic fires banked in that oxidizing hulk— Stryker said plaintively, "If you're right, Gib, then we're more in the dark than ever. How could a Terran-built ship eleven hundred years old get here ?" Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's contemplation of alternatives, seemed hardly to hear him. "Logic or not-logic," Gibson said. "If it's a Terran artifact, we can discover the reason for its presence. If not—" " Any problem posed by one group of human beings ," Stryker quoted his Handbook, " can be resolved by any other group, regardless of ideology or conditioning, because the basic perceptive abilities of both must be the same through identical heredity ." "If it's an imitation, and this is another Hymenop experiment in condition ecology, then we're stumped to begin with," Gibson finished. "Because we're not equipped to evaluate the psychology of alien motivation. We've got to determine first which case applies here." He waited for Farrell's expected irony, and when the navigator forestalled him by remaining grimly quiet, continued. "The obvious premise is that a Terran ship must have been built by Terrans. Question: Was it flown here, or built here?" "It couldn't have been built here," Stryker said. "Alphard Six was surveyed just before the Bees took over in 3025, and there was nothing of the sort here then. It couldn't have been built during the two and a quarter centuries since; it's obviously much older than that. It was flown here." "We progress," Farrell said dryly. "Now if you'll tell us how , we're ready to move." "I think the ship was built on Terra during the Twenty-second Century," Gibson said calmly. "The atomic wars during that period destroyed practically all historical records along with the technology of the time, but I've read well-authenticated reports of atomic-driven ships leaving Terra before then for the nearer stars. The human race climbed out of its pit again during the Twenty-third Century and developed the technology that gave us the Ringwave. Certainly no atomic-powered ships were built after the wars—our records are complete from that time." Farrell shook his head at the inference. "I've read any number of fanciful romances on the theme, Gib, but it won't stand up in practice. No shipboard society could last through a thousand-year space voyage. It's a physical and psychological impossibility. There's got to be some other explanation." Gibson shrugged. "We can only eliminate the least likely alternatives and accept the simplest one remaining." "Then we can eliminate this one now," Farrell said flatly. "It entails a thousand-year voyage, which is an impossibility for any gross reaction drive; the application of suspended animation or longevity or a successive-generation program, and a final penetration of Hymenop-occupied space to set up a colony under the very antennae of the Bees. Longevity wasn't developed until around the year 3000—Lee here was one of the first to profit by it, if you remember—and suspended animation is still to come. So there's one theory you can forget." "Arthur's right," Stryker said reluctantly. "An atomic-powered ship couldn't have made such a trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant project couldn't have lasted through forty generations, speculative fiction to the contrary—the later generations would have been too far removed in ideology and intent from their ancestors. They'd have adapted to shipboard life as the norm. They'd have atrophied physically, perhaps even have mutated—" "And they'd never have fought past the Bees during the Hymenop invasion and occupation," Farrell finished triumphantly. "The Bees had better detection equipment than we had. They'd have picked this ship up long before it reached Alphard Six." "But the ship wasn't here in 3000," Gibson said, "and it is now. Therefore it must have arrived at some time during the two hundred years of Hymenop occupation and evacuation." Farrell, tangled in contradictions, swore bitterly. "But why should the Bees let them through? The three domes on Five are over two hundred years old, which means that the Bees were here before the ship came. Why didn't they blast it or enslave its crew?" "We haven't touched on all the possibilities," Gibson reminded him. "We haven't even established yet that these people were never under Hymenop control. Precedent won't hold always, and there's no predicting nor evaluating the motives of an alien race. We never understood the Hymenops because there's no common ground of logic between us. Why try to interpret their intentions now?" Farrell threw up his hands in disgust. "Next you'll say this is an ancient Terran expedition that actually succeeded! There's only one way to answer the questions we've raised, and that's to go down and see for ourselves. Ready, Xav?" But uncertainty nagged uneasily at him when Farrell found himself alone in the helihopper with the forest flowing beneath like a leafy river and Xavier's scouter disappearing bulletlike into the dusk ahead. We never found a colony so advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose this is a Hymenop experiment that really paid off? The Bees did some weird and wonderful things with human guinea pigs—what if they've created the ultimate booby trap here, and primed it with conditioned myrmidons in our own form? Suppose, he thought—and derided himself for thinking it—one of those suicidal old interstellar ventures did succeed? Xavier's voice, a mellow drone from the helihopper's Ringwave-powered visicom, cut sharply into his musing. "The ship has discovered the scouter and is training an electronic beam upon it. My instruments record an electromagnetic vibration pattern of low power but rapidly varying frequency. The operation seems pointless." Stryker's voice followed, querulous with worry: "I'd better pull Xav back. It may be something lethal." "Don't," Gibson's baritone advised. Surprisingly, there was excitement in the engineer's voice. "I think they're trying to communicate with us." Farrell was on the point of demanding acidly to know how one went about communicating by means of a fluctuating electric field when the unexpected cessation of forest diverted his attention. The helihopper scudded over a cultivated area of considerable extent, fields stretching below in a vague random checkerboard of lighter and darker earth, an undefined cluster of buildings at their center. There was a central bonfire that burned like a wild red eye against the lower gloom, and in its plunging ruddy glow he made out an urgent scurrying of shadowy figures. "I'm passing over a hamlet," Farrell reported. "The one nearest the city, I think. There's something odd going on down—" Catastrophe struck so suddenly that he was caught completely unprepared. The helihopper's flimsy carriage bucked and crumpled. There was a blinding flare of electric discharge, a pungent stink of ozone and a stunning shock that flung him headlong into darkness. He awoke slowly with a brutal headache and a conviction of nightmare heightened by the outlandish tone of his surroundings. He lay on a narrow bed in a whitely antiseptic infirmary, an oblong metal cell cluttered with a grimly utilitarian array of tables and lockers and chests. The lighting was harsh and overbright and the air hung thick with pungent unfamiliar chemical odors. From somewhere, far off yet at the same time as near as the bulkhead above him, came the unceasing drone of machinery. Farrell sat up, groaning, when full consciousness made his position clear. He had been shot down by God knew what sort of devastating unorthodox weapon and was a prisoner in the grounded ship. At his rising, a white-smocked fat man with anachronistic spectacles and close-cropped gray hair came into the room, moving with the professional assurance of a medic. The man stopped short at Farrell's stare and spoke; his words were utterly unintelligible, but his gesture was unmistakable. Farrell followed him dumbly out of the infirmary and down a bare corridor whose metal floor rang coldly underfoot. An open port near the corridor's end relieved the blankness of wall and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian sunlight; Farrell slowed to look out, wondering how long he had lain unconscious, and felt panic knife at him when he saw Xavier's scouter lying, port open and undefended, on the square outside. The mechanical had been as easily taken as himself, then. Stryker and Gibson, for all their professional caution, would fare no better—they could not have overlooked the capture of Farrell and Xavier, and when they tried as a matter of course to rescue them the Marco would be struck down in turn by the same weapon. The fat medic turned and said something urgent in his unintelligible tongue. Farrell, dazed by the enormity of what had happened, followed without protest into an intersecting way that led through a bewildering succession of storage rooms and hydroponics gardens, through a small gymnasium fitted with physical training equipment in graduated sizes and finally into a soundproofed place that could have been nothing but a nursery. The implication behind its presence stopped Farrell short. "A creche ," he said, stunned. He had a wild vision of endless generations of children growing up in this dim and stuffy room, to be taught from their first toddling steps the functions they must fulfill before the venture of which they were a part could be consummated. One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was awed by the daring of that thousand-year odyssey. The realization left him more alarmed than before—for what technical marvels might not an isolated group of such dogged specialists have developed during a millennium of application? Such a weapon as had brought down the helihopper and scouter was patently beyond reach of his own latter-day technology. Perhaps, he thought, its possession explained the presence of these people here in the first stronghold of the Hymenops; perhaps they had even fought and defeated the Bees on their own invaded ground. He followed his white-smocked guide through a power room where great crude generators whirred ponderously, pouring out gross electric current into arm-thick cables. They were nearing the bow of the ship when they passed by another open port and Farrell, glancing out over the lowered rampway, saw that his fears for Stryker and Gibson had been well grounded. The Marco Four , ports open, lay grounded outside. Farrell could not have said, later, whether his next move was planned or reflexive. The whole desperate issue seemed to hang suspended for a breathless moment upon a hair-fine edge of decision, and in that instant he made his bid. Without pausing in his stride he sprang out and through the port and down the steep plane of the ramp. The rough stone pavement of the square drummed underfoot; sore muscles tore at him, and weakness was like a weight about his neck. He expected momentarily to be blasted out of existence. He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his guide ringing unintelligibly in his ears. The port yawned; he plunged inside and stabbed at controls without waiting to seat himself. The ports swung shut. The ship darted up under his manipulation and arrowed into space with an acceleration that sprung his knees and made his vision swim blackly. He was so weak with strain and with the success of his coup that he all but fainted when Stryker, his scanty hair tousled and his fat face comical with bewilderment, stumbled out of his sleeping cubicle and bellowed at him. "What the hell are you doing, Arthur? Take us down!" Farrell gaped at him, speechless. Stryker lumbered past him and took the controls, spiraling the Marco Four down. Men swarmed outside the ports when the Reclamations craft settled gently to the square again. Gibson and Xavier reached the ship first; Gibson came inside quickly, leaving the mechanical outside making patient explanations to an excited group of Alphardians. Gibson put a reassuring hand on Farrell's arm. "It's all right, Arthur. There's no trouble." Farrell said dumbly, "I don't understand. They didn't shoot you and Xav down too?" It was Gibson's turn to stare. "No one shot you down! These people are primitive enough to use metallic power lines to carry electricity to their hamlets, an anachronism you forgot last night. You piloted the helihopper into one of those lines, and the crash put you out for the rest of the night and most of today. These Alphardians are friendly, so desperately happy to be found again that it's really pathetic." " Friendly? That torpedo—" "It wasn't a torpedo at all," Stryker put in. Understanding of the error under which Farrell had labored erased his earlier irritation, and he chuckled commiseratingly. "They had one small boat left for emergency missions, and sent it up to contact us in the fear that we might overlook their settlement and move on. The boat was atomic powered, and our shield screens set off its engines." Farrell dropped into a chair at the chart table, limp with reaction. He was suddenly exhausted, and his head ached dully. "We cracked the communications problem early last night," Gibson said. "These people use an ancient system of electromagnetic wave propagation called frequency modulation, and once Lee and I rigged up a suitable transceiver the rest was simple. Both Xav and I recognized the old language; the natives reported your accident, and we came down at once." "They really came from Terra? They lived through a thousand years of flight?" "The ship left Terra for Sirius in 2171," Gibson said. "But not with these people aboard, or their ancestors. That expedition perished after less than a light-year when its hydroponics system failed. The Hymenops found the ship derelict when they invaded us, and brought it to Alphard Six in what was probably their first experiment with human subjects. The ship's log shows clearly what happened to the original complement. The rest is deducible from the situation here." Farrell put his hands to his temples and groaned. "The crash must have scrambled my wits. Gib, where did they come from?" "From one of the first peripheral colonies conquered by the Bees," Gibson said patiently. "The Hymenops were long-range planners, remember, and masters of hypnotic conditioning. They stocked the ship with a captive crew of Terrans conditioned to believe themselves descendants of the original crew, and grounded it here in disabled condition. They left for Alphard Five then, to watch developments. "Succeeding generations of colonists grew up accepting the fact that their ship had missed Sirius and made planetfall here—they still don't know where they really are—by luck. They never knew about the Hymenops, and they've struggled along with an inadequate technology in the hope that a later expedition would find them. They found the truth hard to take, but they're eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran assimilation." Stryker, grinning, brought Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled invitingly. "An unusually fortunate ending to a Hymenop experiment," he said. "These people progressed normally because they've been let alone. Reorienting them will be a simple matter; they'll be properly spoiled colonists within another generation." Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively. "But I don't see why the Bees should go to such trouble to deceive these people. Why did they sit back and let them grow as they pleased, Gib? It doesn't make sense!" "But it does, for once," Gibson said. "The Bees set up this colony as a control unit to study the species they were invading, and they had to give their specimens a normal—if obsolete—background in order to determine their capabilities. The fact that their experiment didn't tell them what they wanted to know may have had a direct bearing on their decision to pull out." Farrell shook his head. "It's a reverse application, isn't it of the old saw about Terrans being incapable of understanding an alien culture?" "Of course," said Gibson, surprised. "It's obvious enough, surely—hard as they tried, the Bees never understood us either." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories January 1960. 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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Henry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these evenings. But, if you do, beware—beware of the Knights! dream town by ... HENRY SLESAR The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who was to tell she had some rather startling interests? The woman in the doorway looked like Mom in the homier political cartoons. She was plump, apple-cheeked, white-haired. She wore a fussy, old-fashioned nightgown, and was busily clutching a worn house-robe around her expansive middle. She blinked at Sol Becker's rain-flattened hair and hang-dog expression, and said: "What is it? What do you want?" "I'm sorry—" Sol's voice was pained. "The man in the diner said you might put me up. I had my car stolen: a hitchhiker; going to Salinas ..." He was puffing. "Hitchhiker? I don't understand." She clucked at the sight of the pool of water he was creating in her foyer. "Well, come inside, for heaven's sake. You're soaking!" "Thanks," Sol said gratefully. With the door firmly shut behind him, the warm interior of the little house covered him like a blanket. He shivered, and let the warmth seep over him. "I'm terribly sorry. I know how late it is." He looked at his watch, but the face was too misty to make out the hour. "Must be nearly three," the woman sniffed. "You couldn't have come at a worse time. I was just on my way to court—" The words slid by him. "If I could just stay overnight. Until the morning. I could call some friends in San Fernando. I'm very susceptible to head colds," he added inanely. "Well, take those shoes off, first," the woman grumbled. "You can undress in the parlor, if you'll keep off the rug. You won't mind using the sofa?" "No, of course not. I'd be happy to pay—" "Oh, tush, nobody's asking you to pay. This isn't a hotel. You mind if I go back upstairs? They're gonna miss me at the palace." "No, of course not," Sol said. He followed her into the darkened parlor, and watched as she turned the screw on a hurricane-style lamp, shedding a yellow pool of light over half a flowery sofa and a doily-covered wing chair. "You go on up. I'll be perfectly fine." "Guess you can use a towel, though. I'll get you one, then I'm going up. We wake pretty early in this house. Breakfast's at seven; you'll have to be up if you want any." "I really can't thank you enough—" "Tush," the woman said. She scurried out, and returned a moment later with a thick bath towel. "Sorry I can't give you any bedding. But you'll find it nice and warm in here." She squinted at the dim face of a ship's-wheel clock on the mantle, and made a noise with her tongue. "Three-thirty!" she exclaimed. "I'll miss the whole execution ..." "The what?" "Goodnight, young man," Mom said firmly. She padded off, leaving Sol holding the towel. He patted his face, and then scrubbed the wet tangle of brown hair. Carefully, he stepped off the carpet and onto the stone floor in front of the fireplace. He removed his drenched coat and suit jacket, and squeezed water out over the ashes. He stripped down to his underwear, wondering about next morning's possible embarrassment, and decided to use the damp bath towel as a blanket. The sofa was downy and comfortable. He curled up under the towel, shivered once, and closed his eyes. He was tired and very sleepy, and his customary nightly review was limited to a few detached thoughts about the wedding he was supposed to attend in Salinas that weekend ... the hoodlum who had responded to his good-nature by dumping him out of his own car ... the slogging walk to the village ... the little round woman who was hurrying off, like the White Rabbit, to some mysterious appointment on the upper floor ... Then he went to sleep. A voice awoke him, shrill and questioning. "Are you nakkid ?" His eyes flew open, and he pulled the towel protectively around his body and glared at the little girl with the rust-red pigtails. "Huh, mister?" she said, pushing a finger against her freckled nose. "Are you?" "No," he said angrily. "I'm not naked. Will you please go away?" "Sally!" It was Mom, appearing in the doorway of the parlor. "You leave the gentleman alone." She went off again. "Yes," Sol said. "Please let me get dressed. If you don't mind." The girl didn't move. "What time is it?" "Dunno," Sally shrugged. "I like poached eggs. They're my favorite eggs in the whole world." "That's good," Sol said desperately. "Now why don't you be a good girl and eat your poached eggs. In the kitchen." "Ain't ready yet. You going to stay for breakfast?" "I'm not going to do anything until you get out of here." She put the end of a pigtail in her mouth and sat down on the chair opposite. "I went to the palace last night. They had an exelution." "Please," Sol groaned. "Be a good girl, Sally. If you let me get dressed, I'll show you how to take your thumb off." "Oh, that's an old trick. Did you ever see an exelution?" "No. Did you ever see a little girl with her hide tanned?" "Huh?" " Sally! " Mom again, sterner. "You get out of there, or you-know-what ..." "Okay," the girl said blithely. "I'm goin' to the palace again. If I brush my teeth. Aren't you ever gonna get up?" She skipped out of the room, and Sol hastily sat up and reached for his trousers. When he had dressed, the clothes still damp and unpleasant against his skin, he went out of the parlor and found the kitchen. Mom was busy at the stove. He said: "Good morning." "Breakfast in ten minutes," she said cheerfully. "You like poached eggs?" "Sure. Do you have a telephone?" "In the hallway. Party line, so you may have to wait." He tried for fifteen minutes to get through, but there was a woman on the line who was terribly upset about a cotton dress she had ordered from Sears, and was telling the world about it. Finally, he got his call through to Salinas, and a sleepy-voiced Fred, his old Army buddy, listened somewhat indifferently to his tale of woe. "I might miss the wedding," Sol said unhappily. "I'm awfully sorry." Fred didn't seem to be half as sorry as he was. When Sol hung up, he was feeling more despondent than ever. A man, tall and rangy, with a bobbing Adam's apple and a lined face, came into the hallway. "Hullo?" he said inquiringly. "You the fella had the car stolen?" "Yes." The man scratched his ear. "Take you over to Sheriff Coogan after breakfast. He'll let the Stateys know about it. My name's Dawes." Sol accepted a careful handshake. "Don't get many people comin' into town," Dawes said, looking at him curiously. "Ain't seen a stranger in years. But you look like the rest of us." He chuckled. Mom called out: "Breakfast!" At the table, Dawes asked his destination. "Wedding in Salinas," he explained. "Old Army friend of mine. I picked this hitchhiker up about two miles from here. He seemed okay." "Never can tell," Dawes said placidly, munching egg. "Hey, Ma. That why you were so late comin' to court last night?" "That's right, Pa." She poured the blackest coffee Sol had ever seen. "Didn't miss much, though." "What court is that?" Sol asked politely, his mouth full. "Umagum," Sally said, a piece of toast sticking out from the side of her mouth. "Don't you know nothin' ?" " Arma gon," Dawes corrected. He looked sheepishly at the stranger. "Don't expect Mister—" He cocked an eyebrow. "What's the name?" "Becker." "Don't expect Mr. Becker knows anything about Armagon. It's just a dream, you know." He smiled apologetically. "Dream? You mean this—Armagon is a place you dream about?" "Yep," Dawes said. He lifted cup to lip. "Great coffee, Ma." He leaned back with a contented sigh. "Dream about it every night. Got so used to the place, I get all confused in the daytime." Mom said: "I get muddle-headed too, sometimes." "You mean—" Sol put his napkin in his lap. "You mean you dream about the same place?" "Sure," Sally piped. "We all go there at night. I'm goin' to the palace again, too." "If you brush your teeth," Mom said primly. "If I brush my teeth. Boy, you shoulda seen the exelution!" "Execution," her father said. "Oh, my goodness!" Mom got up hastily. "That reminds me. I gotta call poor Mrs. Brundage. It's the least I could do." "Good idea," Dawes nodded. "And I'll have to round up some folks and get old Brundage out of there." Sol was staring. He opened his mouth, but couldn't think of the right question to ask. Then he blurted out: "What execution?" "None of your business," the man said coldly. "You eat up, young man. If you want me to get Sheriff Coogan lookin' for your car." The rest of the meal went silently, except for Sally's insistence upon singing her school song between mouthfuls. When Dawes was through, he pushed back his plate and ordered Sol to get ready. Sol grabbed his topcoat and followed the man out the door. "Have to stop someplace first," Dawes said. "But we'll be pickin' up the Sheriff on the way. Okay with you?" "Fine," Sol said uneasily. The rain had stopped, but the heavy clouds seemed reluctant to leave the skies over the small town. There was a skittish breeze blowing, and Sol Becker tightened the collar of his coat around his neck as he tried to keep up with the fast-stepping Dawes. They crossed the street diagonally, and entered a two-story wooden building. Dawes took the stairs at a brisk pace, and pushed open the door on the second floor. A fat man looked up from behind a desk. "Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd see if you wanted to help move Brundage." The man batted his eyes. "Oh, Brundage!" he said. "You know, I clean forgot about him?" He laughed. "Imagine me forgetting that?" "Yeah." Dawes wasn't amused. "And you Prince Regent." "Aw, Willie—" "Well, come on. Stir that fat carcass. Gotta pick up Sheriff Coogan, too. This here gentleman has to see him about somethin' else." The man regarded Sol suspiciously. "Never seen you before. Night or day. Stranger?" "Come on !" Dawes said. The fat man grunted and hoisted himself out of the swivel chair. He followed lamely behind the two men as they went out into the street again. A woman, with an empty market basket, nodded casually to them. "Mornin', folks. Enjoyed it last night. Thought you made a right nice speech, Mr. Dawes." "Thanks," Dawes answered gruffly, but obviously flattered. "We were just goin' over to Brundage's to pick up the body. Ma's gonna pay a call on Mrs. Brundage around ten o'clock. You care to visit?" "Why, I think that's very nice," the woman said. "I'll be sure and do that." She smiled at the fat man. "Mornin', Prince." Sol's head was spinning. As they left the woman and continued their determined march down the quiet street, he tried to find answers. "Look, Mr. Dawes." He was panting; the pace was fast. "Does she dream about this—Armagon, too? That woman back there?" "Yep." Charlie chuckled. "He's a stranger, all right." "And you, Mr.—" Sol turned to the fat man. "You also know about this palace and everything?" "I told you," Dawes said testily. "Charlie here's Prince Regent. But don't let the fancy title fool you. He got no more power than any Knight of the Realm. He's just too dern fat to do much more'n sit on a throne and eat grapes. That right, Charlie?" The fat man giggled. "Here's the Sheriff," Dawes said. The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed citizen with a long, sad face, was rocking on a porch as they approached his house, trying to puff a half-lit pipe. He lifted one hand wearily when he saw them. "Hi, Cookie," Dawes grinned. "Thought you, me, and Charlie would get Brundage's body outa the house. This here's Mr. Becker; he got another problem. Mr. Becker, meet Cookie Coogan." The Sheriff joined the procession, pausing only once to inquire into Sol's predicament. He described the hitchhiker incident, but Coogan listened stoically. He murmured something about the Troopers, and shuffled alongside the puffing fat man. Sol soon realized that their destination was a barber shop. Dawes cupped his hands over the plate glass and peered inside. Gold letters on the glass advertised: HAIRCUT SHAVE & MASSAGE PARLOR. He reported: "Nobody in the shop. Must be upstairs." The fat man rang the bell. It was a while before an answer came. It was a reedy woman in a housecoat, her hair in curlers, her eyes red and swollen. "Now, now," Dawes said gently. "Don't you take on like that, Mrs. Brundage. You heard the charges. It hadda be this way." "My poor Vincent," she sobbed. "Better let us up," the Sheriff said kindly. "No use just lettin' him lay there, Mrs. Brundage." "He didn't mean no harm," the woman snuffled. "He was just purely ornery, Vincent was. Just plain mean stubborn." "The law's the law," the fat man sighed. Sol couldn't hold himself in. "What law? Who's dead? How did it happen?" Dawes looked at him disgustedly. "Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?" "I don't know," Sol said miserably. "You better stay out of this," the Sheriff warned. "This is a local matter, young man. You better stay in the shop while we go up." They filed past him and the crying Mrs. Brundage. When they were out of sight, Sol pleaded with her. "What happened? How did your husband die?" "Please ..." "You must tell me! Was it something to do with Armagon? Do you dream about the place, too?" She was shocked at the question. "Of course!" "And your husband? Did he have the same dream?" Fresh tears resulted. "Can't you leave me alone?" She turned her back. "I got things to do. You can make yourself comfortable—" She indicated the barber chairs, and left through the back door. Sol looked after her, and then ambled over to the first chair and slipped into the high seat. His reflection in the mirror, strangely gray in the dim light, made him groan. His clothes were a mess, and he needed a shave. If only Brundage had been alive ... He leaped out of the chair as voices sounded behind the door. Dawes was kicking it open with his foot, his arms laden with two rather large feet, still encased in bedroom slippers. Charlie was at the other end of the burden, which appeared to be a middle-aged man in pajamas. The Sheriff followed the trio up with a sad, undertaker expression. Behind him came Mrs. Brundage, properly weeping. "We'll take him to the funeral parlor," Dawes said, breathing hard. "Weighs a ton, don't he?" "What killed him?" Sol said. "Heart attack." The fat man chuckled. The tableau was grisly. Sol looked away, towards the comfortingly mundane atmosphere of the barber shop. But even the sight of the thick-padded chairs, the shaving mugs on the wall, the neat rows of cutting instruments, seemed grotesque and morbid. "Listen," Sol said, as they went through the doorway. "About my car—" The Sheriff turned and regarded him lugubriously. "Your car ? Young man, ain't you got no respect ?" Sol swallowed hard and fell silent. He went outside with them, the woman slamming the barber-shop door behind him. He waited in front of the building while the men toted away the corpse to some new destination. He took a walk. The town was just coming to life. People were strolling out of their houses, commenting on the weather, chuckling amiably about local affairs. Kids on bicycles were beginning to appear, jangling the little bells and hooting to each other. A woman, hanging wash in the back yard, called out to him, thinking he was somebody else. He found a little park, no more than twenty yards in circumference, centered around a weatherbeaten monument of some unrecognizable military figure. Three old men took their places on the bench that circled the General, and leaned on their canes. Sol was a civil engineer. But he made like a reporter. "Pardon me, sir." The old man, leathery-faced, with a fine yellow moustache, looked at him dumbly. "Have you ever heard of Armagon?" "You a stranger?" "Yes." "Thought so." Sol repeated the question. "Course I did. Been goin' there ever since I was a kid. Night-times, that is." "How—I mean, what kind of place is it?" "Said you're a stranger?" "Yes." "Then 'tain't your business." That was that. He left the park, and wandered into a thriving luncheonette. He tried questioning the man behind the counter, who merely snickered and said: "You stayin' with the Dawes, ain't you? Better ask Willie, then. He knows the place better than anybody." He asked about the execution, and the man stiffened. "Don't think I can talk about that. Fella broke one of the Laws; that's about it. Don't see where you come into it." At eleven o'clock, he returned to the Dawes residence, and found Mom in the kitchen, surrounded by the warm nostalgic odor of home-baked bread. She told him that her husband had left a message for the stranger, informing him that the State Police would be around to get his story. He waited in the house, gloomily turning the pages of the local newspaper, searching for references to Armagon. He found nothing. At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced State Trooper came to call, and Sol told his story. He was promised nothing, and told to stay in town until he was contacted again by the authorities. Mom fixed him a light lunch, the greatest feature of which was some hot biscuits she plucked out of the oven. It made him feel almost normal. He wandered around the town some more after lunch, trying to spark conversation with the residents. He learned little. At five-thirty, he returned to the Dawes house, and was promptly leaped upon by little Sally. "Hi! Hi! Hi!" she said, clutching his right leg and almost toppling him over. "We had a party in school. I had chocolate cake. You goin' to stay with us?" "Just another night," Sol told her, trying to shake the girl off. "If it's okay with your folks. They haven't found my car yet." "Sally!" Mom was peering out of the screen door. "You let Mr. Becker alone and go wash. Your Pa will be home soon." "Oh, pooh," the girl said, her pigtails swinging. "Do you got a girlfriend, mister?" "No." Sol struggled towards the house with her dead weight on his leg. "Would you mind? I can't walk." "Would you be my boyfriend?" "Well, we'll talk about it. If you let go my leg." Inside the house, she said: "We're having pot roast. You stayin'?" "Of course Mr. Becker's stayin'," Mom said. "He's our guest." "That's very kind of you," Sol said. "I really wish you'd let me pay something—" "Don't want to hear another word about pay." Mr. Dawes came home an hour later, looking tired. Mom pecked him lightly on the forehead. He glanced at the evening paper, and then spoke to Sol. "Hear you been asking questions, Mr. Becker." Sol nodded, embarrassed. "Guess I have. I'm awfully curious about this Armagon place. Never heard of anything like it before." Dawes grunted. "You ain't a reporter?" "Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I was just satisfying my own curiosity." "Uh-huh." Dawes looked reflective. "You wouldn't be thinkin' about writing us up or anything. I mean, this is a pretty private affair." "Writing it up?" Sol blinked. "I hadn't thought of it. But you'll have to admit—it's sure interesting." "Yeah," Dawes said narrowly. "I guess it would be." "Supper!" Mom called. After the meal, they spent a quiet evening at home. Sally went to bed, screaming her reluctance, at eight-thirty. Mom, dozing in the big chair near the fireplace, padded upstairs at nine. Then Dawes yawned widely, stood up, and said goodnight at quarter-of-ten. He paused in the doorway before leaving. "I'd think about that," he said. "Writing it up, I mean. A lot of folks would think you were just plum crazy." Sol laughed feebly. "I guess they would at that." "Goodnight," Dawes said. "Goodnight." He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about half an hour. Then he undressed, made himself comfortable on the sofa, snuggled under the soft blanket that Mom had provided, and shut his eyes. He reviewed the events of the day before dropping off to sleep. The troublesome Sally. The strange dream world of Armagon. The visit to the barber shop. The removal of Brundage's body. The conversations with the townspeople. Dawes' suspicious attitude ... Then sleep came. He was flanked by marble pillars, thrusting towards a high-domed ceiling. The room stretched long and wide before him, the walls bedecked in stunning purple draperies. He whirled at the sound of footsteps, echoing stridently on the stone floor. Someone was running towards him. It was Sally, pigtails streaming out behind her, the small body wearing a flowing white toga. She was shrieking, laughing as she skittered past him, clutching a gleaming gold helmet. He called out to her, but she was too busy outdistancing her pursuer. It was Sheriff Coogan, puffing and huffing, the metal-and-gold cloth uniform ludicrous on his lanky frame. "Consarn kid!" he wheezed. "Gimme my hat!" Mom was following him, her stout body regal in scarlet robes. "Sally! You give Sir Coogan his helmet! You hear?" "Mrs. Dawes!" Sol said. "Why, Mr. Becker! How nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!" Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else could explain the magnificence of his attire. "Yes," Dawes said craftily. "So I see. Welcome to Armagon, Mr. Becker." "Armagon?" Sol gaped. "Then this is the place you've been dreaming about?" "Yep," the King said. "And now you're in it, too." "Then I'm only dreaming!" Charlie, the fat man, clumsy as ever in his robes of State, said: "So that's the snooper, eh?" "Yep," Dawes chuckled. "Think you better round up the Knights." Sol said: "The Knights?" "Exelution! Exelution!" Sally shrieked. "Now wait a minute—" Charlie shouted. Running feet, clanking of armor. Sol backed up against a pillar. "Now look here. You've gone far enough—" "Not quite," said the King. The Knights stepped forward. "Wait!" Sol screamed. Familiar faces, under shining helmets, moved towards him; the tips of sharp-pointed spears gleaming wickedly. And Sol Becker wondered—would he ever awake? Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe January 1957. 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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Just like starting over: when Britain (briefly) fell in love with New Towns "Modern girls and modern boys: it's tremendous!" So goes the sunny reflection of the eponymous hero in Bill Forsyth's 1981 film Gregory's Girl, as he surveys the playing fields, comprehensive schools and spaghetti plate of dual carriageways in Cumbernauld, a mid-20th-century Scottish 'New Town'. Gregory and his friends playfully mock the town, but their youthful affection for Cumbernauld shines through; it neatly encapsulates the optimism these places were all about: doing things differently, doing them better. New Towns were sometimes sublime and surely strange; but more of a success than the popular consensus gave them credit for. These weren't just council estates, but whole functioning places with jobs, shops and services. Perhaps now we're truly recognising some of that value because, as archetypal New Towns like Milton Keynes and Harlow celebrate milestone birthdays this year (fiftieth and seventieth respectively), the UK government has floated a new generation of New Towns that could once again change the face of Britain. Most cities we live in haven't been planned at all, they're the product of hundreds or thousands of years of architectural accretions. Most cities are ultimately exercises in speculative pissing in the wind: developers develop, architects design, but none of it is woven together and thought through from scratch. It's planning on the most piecemeal scale. But not all. Mohenjo-daro might have been the first planned city, appearing 4,500 years ago in what is now Pakistan. Alexandria was planned. And Renaissance Italy boasted the star-shaped Palmanova. But these were the enlightened exceptions, and in Britain it was mainly the kind of hotchpotch best illustrated by the Shambles in York: quaint, but a bloody mess. It was towards the end of the 19th century that modern and urban change came to Britain. Tenements and slums were the rule in most large towns of the era. A number of enlightened capitalists planned their own towns, toy communities almost; but such innovative plans were rare. Schoolchildren today are taught about Titus Salt's dry settlement of Saltaire and the model village that started it all, Bournville. But we make a show of these places and the characters who bequeathed them to make us feel better as a country – to play up our successes rather than our failures. Today Bournville feels quaint, especially if you compare it to the later, more radical New Town of Redditch, a mere six stops down the Midlands' Cross-City Line. Bournville was the brainchild of the Cadburys, and its bucolic buildings and tree-lined streets led towards the garden cities movement at the start of the 20th century. With Bournville and the garden cities we see a key touchstone that would also be echoed in the later New Towns project: the idea that the city was broken and escape was the answer. That sentiment endured beyond the end of the "dark satanic mills" era. Arguably it's only really been in the last 20 years that the city, the British city at least – other European nations typically had a milder view towards their cities – has come to be seen as the answer rather the question. However the garden cities like Letchworth were more of a dream than a reality, an exercise in placemaking reverie; and like Bournville as much of a fantasy as Middle Earth. Tolkein saw Bournville as a child. These towns were visions of an idealised Britain, a pre-industrial, anti-industrial one. This line of thinking continues in the oddball planned suburb of Poundbury, which appears as one of those miniature model villages (but one with a Waitrose, of course). Strangeness wasn't far from all these places. Jonathan Meades picked up on the multitude of cults that infected the garden cities: teetotallers, vegetarians, religious dissenters, political radicals. It was only after the second world war ended that a gutsy modernism bloomed. The New Towns of this era sat alongside the radical municipal socialism exemplified by existing cities like Sheffield, London and Newcastle, which built swathes of housing and other civic amenities in the electric post-war period of progress. Around the globe, planners and architects were getting to make their mark, from Chorweiler to Chandigarh to Brasilia, new cities rose. Top of the list in Britain was providing working people with high quality, affordable housing in healthy surroundings. The 1946 New Towns Act was a way to make things happen by creating an all-powerful development corporation in each of the towns, allowing building to get going quickly. "Amazing people were involved in Harlow, Cumbernauld and Peterlee," points out Catherine Croft of the Twentieth Century Society. Architects like John Madin at Telford, Frederick Gibberd at Harlow, Geoffrey Jellicoe at Hemel Hempstead deploying a complete vision. This was about top-down, total design; men smoking pipes in committee rooms and deciding what was best for women and children. There's no better depiction of this than in Catherine O'Flynn's bravura novel The News Where You Are, where the harassed architect (that she's very careful to point out isn't Madin) pores over his beautiful scale model of a Midlands New Town populated with miniature plastic people lacking faces. "I love the high-profile public art," says Croft, "especially the murals, and would like to see more of that today. As well as the main set pieces, some of the low-key housing developments deserve to be more cherished." Surrounded by the highest quality council housing and landscaping, Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, for instance, has every right to be as high up on a visitor's itinerary as Durham Cathedral. In the public consciousness, everything from the edge estate to the expanded town to the full New Town has become conflated: we see council houses surrounded by trees and are not always sure if it's an estate or a New Town. Frequently these associations are negative. The sprawling exurban council estates, like Chelmsley Wood on Birmingham's outskirts, faced challenges with a lack of infrastructure, jobs, amenities and transport. There was also psychological isolation from the geographic and social communities that previously bound together urban working-class life. In her book Estates, Lynsey Hanley paints pictures of estates like this as if they were flawed works of cubism. The expanded towns like King's Lynn, Haverhill and Thetford were never fully comfortable with their double lives as market towns and an overspill zone for Cockneys. But the fully planned New Towns were attempts to make a whole place with all the facilities, factories, shopping and bus links so essential to any functioning city – even if it did sometimes take too long for these to arrive. Milton Keynes didn't get a hospital for 13 years. In John Grindrod's groundbreaking (pardon the pun) book Concretopia, he says New Towns "sit alongside the creation of the welfare state, the NHS and the post-war revolution in education as monuments to a nation's desire to move on, not just from the destruction of the war years, but from the inequalities and squalor inherited from the Industrial Revolution." Mike Althorpe of Karakusevic Carson Architects, agrees: "I think the New Towns project in the UK was much more successful than people give it credit for… It's one of the greatest modern movements of people and the biggest built project in our history; and its legacy is one of architectural bravery, optimism and a sincere belief in the idea and the qualities of 'place'. These were not mere housing estates, they were intentional communities with great thought given over to what makes a town." It could be a challenge. Aside from the sheer effort of planning a whole new town there was occasional dissent from those who feared the concreting over of the countryside. And some councils – notably Glasgow – wanted to keep their population (in this case a Labour-voting population) within city limits. Occasionally residents and businesses needed a little gentle convincing to relocate: witness the bonkers space pop 7" single, Energy in Northampton, which Northampton Development Agency commissioned to sell the town; and the proto-Gregory's Girl social realism of Living at Thamesmead. Milton Keynes had the charming red balloon TV ad and, more bizarrely, Cliff Richard rollerskating through the shopping centre. Yet what's remarkable is that all this got done, all this got built, and often very quickly. The timescales compare with the ridiculously quick builds we see in China and the Arabian Gulf today. Opposition was won over and people did move in – and they often liked New Towns, and the modernist architecture that underpinned them. Mike Althorpe grew up surrounded by Scots in Corby who came south for steel jobs. "The structure that impacted me most was the 1972 town centre and bus station," he says now. "As a kid I loved running up and down the cantilevered stairs onto balconies to wind my mum up! It had the town's only (broken) escalator, which took you deep into a dark underworld where the smell of diesel bus fumes and chip fat was intoxicating; and a big National Express sign announced 'Book here for Scotland'. It had a fantastically urban quality." JG Ballard said he wrote about the future because he believed it would be better than the past. This is the very essence of town planning: that creating something new, something that works better than what went before, can mould superior worlds. But in an infamous section of Robert Hughes's masterful BBC art series The Shock of the New, this fierce Aussie decried Brasilia as "a ceremonial slum" and Paris's Peripherique New Towns as dead ends. He urged urban planners to shut up because we all need a bit of (his words) "shit" around us in the cities artists and the rest of us live in: like Paris, New York and London. Each UK New Town has its own character. Cumbernauld’s infamous town centre megastructure has been called Britain's ugliest building, but it was intended as a radical and revolutionary attempt to get all of the town's services – library, shops, bookies, hotel, car park, bus station and penthouse flats – into one space station-like building. "I tried to take some American friends to Cumbernauld [town centre] and they refused to get out of the car!" says Catherine Croft. "That's unusually urban and intimidating; in general there is a calm softness to our New Town design." Harlow, with its gardens and Moore sculptures, embodies this softness in its 70th year. But Ballard called the low rise suburbs with house, garden and car in the drive – so typical of New Towns – "the death of the soul". And he lived in a suburb. It could all have been more dramatic: Geoffrey Jellicoe's Motopia in Slough envisaged a city with roads on the roof, while unbuilt proposals for Hook in Hampshire look like a jet-propelled version of quasi-New Town Thamesmead. Hubert de Cronin Hastings, longtime honcho of the Architectural Review, dreamt up Civilia in the 1960s. He wanted to stack Moshe Safdie-esque residential superblocks, Tuscan piazzas and boating lakes (all New Town plans had their marina) on top of an old quarry outside Nuneaton and stick a million people in a kind of retro-futurist Arezzo on the Anker. Civilia didn't make it and what did at that exact time was completely antagonistic to it: low-rise, low density Milton Keynes. This "Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire", according to John Grindrod, is filled with Mies van der Rohe-apeing minimalism and houses by a welter of starchitects like Norman Foster and Ralph Erskine. It continues to look forward, with trials of driverless cars on its ample roads. Katy Lock, the Town and Country Planning Association's New Towns expert, talks eloquently about her own upbringing in Milton Keynes. Crucially, she mentions "people being consciously part of the story. People had chosen to move [to New Towns]. Like with Stevenage earlier, where people had bought into the story of an inside bathroom and a new job." Christopher Smith's forthcoming film, New Town Utopia, focuses on Basildon. "New Towns were a grand ambition that could still work," he says. "But for the first wave of new towns, the execution was flawed. These were places created for the working classes, but designed by the middle and upper classes. They also faced a number of negative external forces, including globalisation, Thatcher's Right to Buy policy, and a lack of care and attention." The current UK government recently put its weight behind more New Towns in places like Essex and Cheshire. "We've been campaigning for a new generation of garden cities," says Lock. "It's one of the solutions of the housing crisis – but the renewal of existing cities is too. We need to learn the lessons from garden cities and post-war New Towns." The question will be: can we fully commit to building a concrete future? The 20th-century New Towns embraced innovation in housing, public realm and transport design. The New Towns of today can do that too – look at Vauban, the ecologically-rigorous New Town on the outskirts of Freiburg in Germany with all kinds of green innovations. The danger with Britain's potential new New Towns is that they simply become overblown dormitory suburbs for the middle managers of Cambridge, Manchester and London: commuter towns with cut-price architecture and planning, rather than truly viable and thriving towns. However, with architects and planners at the tiller instead of just property developers, and with technical innovations such as communications connectivity, futuristic transportation and that all-elusive sense of 'place' front and centre, the new New Towns could offer the 21st century something truly unique. And as the 20th-century New Towns around the world hit middle age, they've often settled into being quietly successful: just look at Australia's spirited capital, Canberra, or the way Milton Keynes has matured to nurture a sense of pride in its inhabitants. Architecture is our gift to future generations; building whole cities supersizes this impulse. It's an urge that will, in various forms, forever linger. This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.

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Open Access: Scope As we saw in chapter 1, any kind of content can in principle be OA. Any kind of content can be digitized, and any kind of digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. In that sense, the potential scope of OA is universal. Hence, instead of saying that OA applies to some categories or genres and not to others, it’s better to say that some categories are easier and some harder. OA is not limited to the sciences, where it is known best and moving fastest, but extends to the arts and humanities. It’s not limited to research created in developed countries, where it is most voluminous, but includes research from developing countries. (Nor, conversely, is it limited to research from developing countries, where the need is most pressing.) It’s not limited to publicly funded research, where the argument is almost universally accepted, but includes privately funded and unfunded research. It’s not limited to present and future publications, where most policies focus, but includes past publications. It’s not limited to born-digital work, where the technical barriers are lowest, but includes work digitized from print, microfiche, film, and other media. It’s not limited to text, but includes data, audio, video, multimedia, and executable code. There are serious, practical, successful campaigns to provide OA to the many kinds of content useful to scholars, including: • peer-reviewed research articles • unrefereed preprints destined to be peer-reviewed research articles • theses and dissertations • research data • government data • source code • conference presentations (texts, slides, audio, video) • scholarly monographs • textbooks • novels, stories, plays, and poetry • newspapers • archival records and manuscripts • images (artworks, photographs, diagrams, maps) • teaching and learning materials (“open education resources” and “open courseware”) • digitized print works (some in the public domain, some still under copyright) For some of these categories, such as data and source code, we need OA to facilitate the testing and replication of scientific experiments. For others, such as data, images, and digitized work from other media, we need OA in order to give readers the same chance to analyze the primary materials that the authors had. For others, such as articles, monographs, dissertations, and conference presentations, we need OA simply to share results and analysis with everyone who might benefit from them. A larger book could devote sections to each category. Here I focus on just a few. 5.1 Preprints, Postprints, and Peer Review Throughout most of its history, newcomers to OA assumed that the whole idea was to bypass peer review. That assumption was false and harmful, and we’ve made good progress in correcting it. The purpose of OA is to remove access barriers, not quality filters. Today many peer-reviewed OA journals are recognized for their excellence, many excellent peer-reviewed toll-access journal publishers are experimenting with OA, and green OA for peer-reviewed articles is growing rapidly. Unfortunately many newcomers unaware of these developments still assume that the purpose of OA is to bypass peer review. Some of them deplore the prospect, some rejoice in it, and their passion spreads the misinformation even farther. All the public statements in support of OA stress the importance of peer review. Most of the enthusiasm for OA is enthusiasm for OA to peer-reviewed literature. At the same time, we can acknowledge that many of the people working hard for this goal are simultaneously exploring new forms of scholarly communication that exist outside the peer-review system, such as preprint exchanges, blogs, wikis, databases, discussion forums, and social media. In OA lingo, a “preprint” is any version of an article prior to peer review, such as a draft circulating among colleagues or the version submitted to a journal. A “postprint” is any version approved by peer review. The scope of green OA deliberately extends to both preprints and postprints, just as the function of gold OA deliberately includes peer review. We could say that OA preprint initiatives focus on bypassing peer review. But it would be more accurate to say that they focus on OA for works destined for peer review but not yet peer reviewed. Preprint exchanges didn’t arise because they bypass peer review but because they bypass delay. They make new work known more quickly to people in the field, creating new and earlier opportunities for citation, discussion, verification, and collaboration. How quickly? They make new work public the minute that authors are ready to make it public. OA preprints offer obvious reader-side benefits to those tracking new developments. But this may be a case where the author-side benefits swamp the reader-side benefits. Preprint exchanges give authors the earliest possible time stamp to mark their priority over others working on the same problem. (Historical aside: It’s likely that in the seventeenth century, journals superseded books as the primary literature of science precisely because they were faster than books in giving authors an authoritative public time stamp.) Preprint exchanges existed before the internet, but OA makes them faster, larger, more useful, and more widely read. Despite these advantages, however, preprint exchanges don’t represent the whole OA movement or even the whole green OA movement. On the contrary, most green OA and most OA overall focuses on peer-reviewed articles. As soon as scholars had digital networks to connect peers together, they began using them to tinker with peer review. Can we use networks to find good referees, or to gather, share, and weigh their comments? Can we use networks to implement traditional models of peer review more quickly or effectively? Can we use networks to do better than the traditional models? Many scholars answer “yes” to some or all of these questions, and many of those saying “yes” also support OA. One effect is a creative and long-overdue efflorescence of experiments with new forms of peer review. Another effect, however, is the false perception that OA entails peer-review reform. For example, many people believe that OA requires a certain kind of peer review, favors some kinds of peer review and disfavors others, can’t proceed until we agree on the best form of peer review, or benefits only those who support certain kinds of peer-review reforms. All untrue. OA is compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most traditional and conservative to the most networked and innovative. Some OA journals deliberately adopt traditional models of peer review, in order to tweak just the access variable of scholarly journals. Some deliberately use very new models, in order to push the evolution of peer review. OA is a kind of access, not a kind of editorial policy. It’s not intrinsically tied to any particular model of peer review any more than it’s intrinsically tied to any particular business model or method of digital preservation. With one exception, achieving OA and reforming peer review are independent projects. That is, we can achieve OA without reforming peer review, and we can reform peer review without achieving OA. The exception is that some new forms of peer review presuppose OA. For example, open review makes submissions OA, before or after some prepublication review, and invites community comments. Some open-review journals will use those comments to decide whether to accept the article for formal publication, and others will already have accepted the article and use the community comments to complement or carry forward the quality evaluation started by the journal. Open review requires OA, but OA does not require open review. Peer review does not depend on the price or medium of a journal. Nor does the value, rigor, or integrity of peer review. We know that peer review at OA journals can be as rigorous and honest as peer review at the best toll-access journals because it can use the same procedures, the same standards, and even the same people (editors and referees) as the best toll-access journals. We see this whenever toll-access journals convert to OA without changing their methods or personnel. 5.2 Theses and Dissertations Theses and dissertations are the most useful kinds of invisible scholarship and the most invisible kinds of useful scholarship. Because of their high quality and low visibility, the access problem is worth solving. Fortunately OA for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) is easier than for any other kind of research literature. Authors have not yet transferred rights to a publisher, no publisher permissions are needed, no publisher fears need be answered, and no publisher negotiations slow things down or make the outcome uncertain. Virtually all theses and dissertations are now born digital, and institutions expecting electronic submission generally provide OA, the reverse of the default for journal publishers. The chief obstacle seems to be author fear that making a thesis or dissertation OA will reduce the odds that a journal will publish an article-length version. While these fears are sometimes justified, the evidence suggests that in most cases they are not. Universities expecting OA for ETDs teach the next generation of scholars how easy OA is to provide, how beneficial it is, and how routine it can be. They help cultivate lifelong habits of self-archiving. And they elicit better work. By giving authors a foreseeable, real audience beyond the dissertation committee, an OA policy strengthens existing incentives to do rigorous, original work. If a university requires theses and dissertations to be new and significant works of scholarship, then it ought to expect them to be made public, just as it expects new and significant scholarship by faculty to be made public. Sharing theses and dissertations that meet the school’s high standard reflects well on the institution and benefits other researchers in the field. The university mission to advance research by young scholars has two steps, not one. First, help students produce good work, and then help others find, use, and build on that good work. 5.3 Books The OA movement focuses on journal articles because journals don’t pay authors for their articles. This frees article authors to consent to OA without losing money. By contrast, book authors either earn royalties or hope to earn royalties. Because the line between royalty-free and royalty-producing literature is bright (and life is short), many OA activists focus exclusively on journal articles and leave books aside. I recommend a different tactic: treat journal articles as low-hanging fruit, but treat books as higher-hanging fruit rather than forbidden fruit. There are even reasons to think that OA for some kinds of books is easier to attain than OA for journal articles. The scope of OA should be determined by author consent, not genre. Imagine an author of a journal article who withholds consent to OA. The economic door is open but the author is not walking through it. This helps us see that relinquishing revenue is only relevant when it leads to consent, and consent suffices whether or not it’s based on relinquishing revenue. It follows that if authors of royalty-producing genres, like books, consent to OA, then we’ll have the same basis for OA to books that we have for OA to articles. Even if books are higher-hanging fruit, they’re not out of reach. Two arguments are increasingly successful in persuading book authors to consent to OA. Royalties on most scholarly monographs range between zero and meager. If your royalties are better than that, congratulations. (I’ve earned book royalties; I’m grateful for them, and I wish all royalty-earning authors success.) The case for OA doesn’t ask authors to make a new sacrifice or leave money on the table. It merely asks them to weigh the risk to their royalties against the benefit of OA, primarily the benefit of a larger audience and greater impact. For many book authors, the benefit will outweigh the risk. The benefit is large and the realistic prospect of royalties is low. There is growing evidence that for some kinds of books, full-text OA editions boost the net sales of the priced, printed editions. OA may increase royalties rather than decrease them. The first argument says that even if OA puts royalties at risk, the benefits might outweigh the risks. The second argument says that OA might not reduce royalties at all, and that conventional publication without an OA edition might be the greater risk. Both say, in effect, that authors should be empirical and realistic about this. Don’t presume that your royalties will be high when there’s evidence they will be low, and don’t presume that OA will kill sales when there’s evidence it could boost them. Both arguments apply to authors, but the second applies to publishers as well. When authors have already transferred rights—and the OA decision—to a publisher, then the case rests on the second argument. A growing number of academic book publishers are either persuaded or so intrigued that they’re experimenting. Many book authors want a print edition, badly. But the second argument is not only compatible with print but depends on print. The model is to give away the OA edition and sell a print edition, usually via print-on-demand (POD). Why would anyone buy a print book when the full text is OA? The answer is that many people don’t want to read a whole book on a screen or gadget, and don’t want to print out a whole book on their printer. They use OA editions for searching and sampling. When they discover a book that piques their curiosity or meets their personal standards of relevance and quality, they’ll buy a copy. Or, many of them will buy a copy. Evidence has been growing for about a decade that this phenomenon works for some books, or some kinds of books, even if it doesn’t work for others. For example, it seems to work for books like novels and monographs, which readers want to read from beginning to end, or which they want to have on their shelves. It doesn’t seem to work for books like encyclopedias, from which readers usually want just an occasional snippet. One problem is running a controlled experiment, since we can’t publish the same book with and without an OA edition to compare the sales. (If we publish a book initially without an OA edition and later add an OA edition, the time lag itself could affect sales.) Another variable is that ebook readers are becoming more and more consumer friendly. If the “net boost to sales” phenomenon is real, and if it depends on the ergonomic discomforts of reading digital books, then better gadgets may make the phenomenon disappear. If the net-boost phenomenon didn’t depend on ergonomic hurdles to digital reading, or didn’t depend entirely on them, then it might survive any sort of technological advances. There’s a lot of experimenting still to do, and fortunately or unfortunately it must be done in a fast-changing environment. The U.S. National Academies Press began publishing full-text OA editions of its monographs alongside priced, printed editions in March 1994, which is ancient history in internet time. Over the years Michael Jensen, its director of web communications and director of publishing technologies, has published a series of articles showing that the OA editions increased the sales of the toll-access editions. In February 2007, the American Association of University Presses issued a Statement on Open Access in which it called for experiments with OA monographs and mixed OA/toll-access business models. By May 2011, the AAUP reported that 17 member presses, or 24 percent of its survey respondents, were already publishing full-text OA books. The question isn’t whether some people will read the OA edition without buying the toll-access edition. Some will. The question isn’t even whether more readers of the OA edition will buy the toll-access edition than not buy it. The question is whether more readers of the OA edition will buy the toll-access edition than would have bought the toll-access edition without the OA edition to alert them to its existence and help them evaluate its relevance and quality. If there are enough OA-inspired buyers, then it doesn’t matter that there are also plenty of OA-satisfied nonbuyers. Book authors and publishers who are still nervous could consent to delayed OA and release the OA edition only after six months or a year. During the time when the monograph is toll-access only, they could still provide OA excerpts and metadata to help readers and potential buyers find the book and start to assess it. Even the youngest scholars today grew up in a world in which there were more print books in the average university library than gratis OA books online. But that ratio reversed around 2006, give or take. Today there are many more gratis OA books online than print books in the average academic library, and we’re steaming toward the next crossover point when there will be many more gratis OA books online than print books in the world’s largest libraries, academic or not. A few years ago, those of us who focus on OA to journal literature were sure that journal articles were lower-hanging fruit than any kind of print books, including public-domain books. But we were wrong. There are still good reasons to make journal literature the strategic focus of the OA movement, and we’re still making good progress on that front. But the lesson of the fast-moving book-scanning projects is that misunderstanding, inertia, and permission are more serious problems than digitization. The permission problem is solved for public-domain books. Digitizing them by the millions is a titanic technical undertaking, but it turns out to be a smaller problem than getting millions of copyrighted articles into OA journals or OA repositories, even when they’re written by authors who can consent to OA without losing revenue. OA for new journal articles faces publisher resistance, print-era incentives, and misunderstandings in every category of stakeholders, including authors and publishers. As the late Jim Gray used to say, “May all your problems be technical.” 5.4 Access to What? Not all the literature that researchers want to find, retrieve, and read should be called knowledge. We want access to serious proposals for knowledge even if they turn out to be false or incomplete. We want access to serious hypotheses even if we’re still testing them and debating their merits. We want access to the data and analysis offered in support of the claims we’re evaluating. We want access to all the arguments, evidence, and discussion. We want access to everything that could help us decide what to call knowledge, not just to the results that we agree to call knowledge. If access depended on the outcome of debate and inquiry, then access could not contribute to debate and inquiry. We don’t have a good name for this category larger than knowledge, but here I’ll just call it research. Among other things, research includes knowledge and knowledge claims or proposals, hypotheses and conjectures, arguments and analysis, evidence and data, algorithms and methods, evaluation and interpretation, debate and discussion, criticism and dissent, summary and review. OA to research should be OA to the whole shebang. Inquiry and research suffer when we have access to anything less. Some people call the journal literature the “minutes” of science, as if it were just a summary. But it’s more than that. If the minutes of a meeting summarize a discussion, the journal literature is a large part of the discussion itself. Moreover, in an age of conferences, preprint servers, blogs, wikis, databases, listservs, and email, the journal literature is not the whole discussion. Wikipedia aspires to provide OA to a summary of knowledge, and (wisely) refuses to accept original research. But the larger OA movement wants OA to knowledge and original research themselves, as well as the full discussion about what we know and what we don’t. It wants OA to the primary and secondary sources where knowledge is taking shape through a messy process that is neither consistent (as it works through the clash of conflicting hypotheses) nor stable (as it discards weak claims and considers new ones that appear stronger). The messiness and instability are properties of a discussion, not properties of the minutes of a discussion. The journal literature isn’t just a report on the process but a major channel of the process itself. And not incidentally, OA is valuable not just for making the process public but for facilitating the process and making it more effective, expeditious, transparent, and global. To benefit from someone’s research, we need access to it, and for this purpose it doesn’t matter whether the research is in the sciences or humanities. We need access to medical or physical research before we can use it to tackle a cure for malaria or devise a more efficient solar panel. We need access to an earthquake prediction before we can use it to plan emergency responses. And we need access to literary and philosophical research in order to understand a difficult passage in Homer or the strength of a response to epistemological skepticism. For this kind of utility, the relevant comparison is not between pure and applied research or between the sciences and humanities. The relevant comparison is between any kind of research when OA and the same kind of research when locked behind price and permission barriers. Whether a given line of research serves wellness or wisdom, energy or enlightenment, protein synthesis or public safety, OA helps it serve those purposes faster, better, and more universally. 5.5 Access for Whom? Answer: human beings and machines. 5.5.1 OA for Lay Readers Some have opposed OA on the ground that not everyone needs it, which is a little like opposing the development of a safe and effective new medicine on the ground that not every one needs it. It’s easy to agree that not everyone needs it. But in the case of OA, there’s no easy way to identify those who do and those who don’t. In addition, there’s no easy way, and no reason, to deliver it only to those who need it and deny it to everyone else. OA allows us to provide access to everyone who cares to have access, without patronizing guesswork about who really wants it, who really deserves it, and who would really benefit from it. Access for everyone with an internet connection helps authors, by enlarging their audience and impact, and helps readers who want access and who might have been excluded by central planners trying to decide in advance whom to enfranchise. The idea is to stop thinking of knowledge as a commodity to meter out to deserving customers, and to start thinking of it as a public good, especially when it is given away by its authors, funded with public money, or both. Some lobbyists for toll-access publishers argue, in good faith or bad, that the goal of OA is to bring access to lay readers. This sets up their counter-argument that lay readers don’t care to read cutting-edge research and wouldn’t understand it if they tried. Some publishers go a step further and argue that access to research would harm lay readers. This is a two-step argument, that OA is primarily for lay readers and that lay readers don’t need it. Each step is false. The first step overlooks the unmet demand for access by professional researchers, as if all professionals who wanted access already had it, and the second overlooks the unmet demand for access by lay readers, as if lay readers had no use for access. One reason to think the first step is put forward in bad faith is that it overlooks the very conspicuous fact that the OA movement is driven by researchers who are emphatic about wanting the benefits of OA for themselves. It also overlooks the evidence of wide and widespread access gaps even for professional researchers. (See section 2.1 on problems.) The problem with the second step is presumption. How does anyone know in advance the level of demand for peer-reviewed research among lay readers? When peer-reviewed literature is toll-access and expensive, then lack of access by lay readers and consumers doesn’t show lack of demand, any more than lack of access to Fort Knox shows lack of demand for gold. We have to remove access barriers before we can distinguish lack of access from lack of interest. The experiment has been done, more than once. When the U.S. National Library of Medicine converted to OA in 2004, for example, visitors to its web site increased more than a hundredfold. A common related argument is that lay readers surfing the internet are easily misled by unsupported claims, refuted theories, anecdotal evidence, and quack remedies. Even if true, however, it’s an argument for rather than against expanding online access to peer-reviewed research. If we’re really worried about online dreck, we should dilute it with high-quality research rather than leave the dreck unchallenged and uncorrected. Many of us medical nonprofessionals—who may be professionals in another field—want access to medical research in order to read about our own conditions or the conditions of family members. But even if few fall into that category, most of us still want access for our doctors, nurses, and hospitals. We still want access for the nonprofit advocacy organizations working on our behalf, such as the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, the Cystinosis Research Network, or the Spina Bifida Association of America. And in turn, doctors, nurses, hospitals, and advocacy organizations want access for laboratory researchers. As I argued earlier (section 1.2), OA benefits researchers directly and benefits everyone else indirectly by benefiting researchers. A May 2006 Harris poll showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans wanted OA for publicly funded research. 83 percent wanted it for their doctors and 82 percent wanted it for everyone. 81 percent said it would help medical patients and their families cope with chronic illness and disability. 62 percent said it would speed up the discovery of new cures. For each poll question, a fairly large percentage of respondents checked “neither agree nor disagree” (between 13 and 30 percent), which meant that only tiny minorities disagreed with the OA propositions. Only 3 percent didn’t want OA for their doctors, 4 percent didn’t want it for themselves, and 5 percent didn’t think it would help patients or their families. The ratio of professional to lay readers of peer-reviewed research undoubtedly varies from field to field. But for the purpose of OA policy, it doesn’t matter what the ratio is in any field. What matters is that neither group has sufficient access today, when most research journals are toll-access. Professional researchers don’t have sufficient access through their institutional libraries because subscription prices are rising faster than library budgets, even at the wealthiest libraries in the world. Motivated lay readers don’t have sufficient access because few public libraries subscribe to any peer-reviewed research journals, and none to the full range. The argument against access for lay readers suffers from more than false assumptions about unmet demand. Either it concedes or doesn’t concede that OA is desirable for professional researchers. If it doesn’t, then it should argue first against the strongest opponent and try to make the case against OA for professionals. But if it does concede that OA for professionals is a good idea, then it wants to build a selection system for deciding who deserves access, and an authentication system for sorting the sheep from the goats. Part of the beauty of OA is that providing access to everyone is cheaper and easier than providing access to some and blocking access to others. We should only raise costs and pay for the apparatus of exclusion when there’s a very good reason to do so. 5.5.2 OA for Machines We also want access for machines. I don’t mean the futuristic altruism in which kindly humans want to help curious machines answer their own questions. I mean something more selfish. We’re well into the era in which serious research is mediated by sophisticated software. If our machines don’t have access, then we don’t have access. Moreover, if we can’t get access for our machines, then we lose a momentous opportunity to enhance access with processing. Think about the size of the body of literature to which you have access, online and off. Now think realistically about the subset to which you’d have practical access if you couldn’t use search engines, or if search engines couldn’t index the literature you needed. Information overload didn’t start with the internet. The internet does vastly increase the volume of work to which we have access, but at the same time it vastly increases our ability to find what we need. We zero in on the pieces that deserve our limited time with the aid of powerful software, or more precisely, powerful software with access. Software helps us learn what exists, what’s new, what’s relevant, what others find relevant, and what others are saying about it. Without these tools, we couldn’t cope with information overload. Or we’d have to redefine “coping” as artificially reducing the range of work we are allowed to consider, investigate, read, or retrieve. Some publishers have seriously argued that high toll-access journal prices and limited library budgets help us cope with information overload, as if the literature we can’t afford always coincides with the literature we don’t need. But of course much that is relevant to our projects is unaffordable to our libraries. If any problems are intrinsic to a very large and fast-growing, accessible corpus of literature, they don’t arise from size itself, or size alone, but from limitations on our discovery tools. With OA and sufficiently powerful tools, we could always find and retrieve what we needed. Without sufficiently powerful tools, we could not. Replacing OA with high-priced toll access would only add new obstacles to research, even if it simultaneously made the accessible corpus small enough for weaker discovery tools to master. In Clay Shirky’s concise formulation, the real problem is not information overload but filter failure. OA is itself a spectacular inducement for software developers to create useful tools to filter what we can find. As soon as the tools are finished, they apply to a free, useful, and fast-growing body of online literature. Conversely, useful tools optimized for OA literature create powerful incentives for authors and publishers to open up their work. As soon as their work is OA, a vast array of powerful tools make it more visible and useful. In the early days of OA, shortages on each side created a vicious circle: the small quantity of OA literature provided little incentive to develop new tools optimized for making it more visible and useful, and the dearth of powerful tools provided little extra incentive to make new work OA. But today a critical mass of OA literature invites the development of useful tools, and a critical mass of useful tools gives authors and publishers another set of reasons to make their work OA. All digital literature, OA or toll access, is machine-readable and supports new and useful kinds of processing. But toll-access literature minimizes that opportunity by shrinking the set of inputs with access fees, password barriers, copyright restrictions, and software locks. By removing price and permission barriers, OA maximizes this opportunity and spawns an ecosystem of tools for searching, indexing, mining, summarizing, translating, querying, linking, recommending, alerting, mashing-up, and other kinds of processing, not to mention myriad forms of crunching and connecting that we can’t even imagine today. One bedrock purpose of OA is to give these research-enhancing, utility-amplifying tools the widest possible scope of operation. In this sense, the ultimate promise of OA is not to provide free online texts for human reading, even if that is the highest-value end use. The ultimate promise of OA is to provide free online data for software acting as the antennae, prosthetic eyeballs, research assistants, and personal librarians of all serious researchers. Opening research literature for human users also opens it for software to crunch the literature for the benefit of human users. We can even hope that OA itself will soon be old hat, taken for granted by a new generation of tools and services that depend on it. As those tools and services come along, they will be the hot story and they will deserve to be. Technologists will note that they all depend on OA, and historians will note that OA itself was not easily won.

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Open Access: Motivation 2.1 OA as Solving Problems There are lamentably many problems for which OA is part of the solution. Here are fifteen ways in which the current system of disseminating peer-reviewed research is deeply dysfunctional for researchers and their institutions, even if highly profitable for the largest conventional publishers. I’ve limited the list to those for which OA offers some hope of relief. We are in the midst of a pricing crisis for scholarly journals. For four decades, subscription prices have risen significantly faster than inflation and significantly faster than library budgets. Subscription prices have risen about twice as fast as the price of healthcare, for most people the very index of skyrocketing, unsustainable prices. We’re long past the era of damage control and into the era of damage. When most peer-reviewed research journals are toll access, a pricing crisis entails an access crisis. Before the rise of OA, all peer-reviewed journals were toll access, and even today about three-quarters of peer-reviewed journals are toll access. When subscribers respond to skyrocketing prices by canceling subscriptions, access decreases. Cancellations mitigate one problem and aggravate another. A study by the Research Information Network in late 2009 found that 40 percent of surveyed researchers had trouble accessing journal literature at least once a week, and two-thirds at least once a month. About 60 percent said that access limitations hindered their research, and 18 percent said the hindrance was significant. Even the wealthiest academic libraries in the world suffer serious access gaps. When the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted unanimously for a strong OA policy in February 2008, Professor Stuart Shieber explained that cumulative price increases had forced the Harvard library to undertake “serious cancellation efforts” for budgetary reasons. Access gaps are worse at other affluent institutions, and worse still in the developing world. In 2008, Harvard subscribed to 98,900 serials and Yale to 73,900. The best-funded research library in India, at the Indian Institute of Science, subscribed to 10,600. Several sub-Saharan African university libraries subscribed to zero, offering their patrons access to no conventional journals except those donated by publishers. The largest publishers minimize cancellations by bundling hundreds or thousands of high-demand and low-demand journals into “big deals,” which reduce the bargaining power of libraries and the cost-cutting options available to them. On the plus side, big deals give universities access to more titles than they had before and reduce the average cost per title. But when libraries try to cancel individual titles that are low in quality or low in local usage, publishers raise the price on the remaining titles. Bundling gives libraries little room to save money with carefully targeted cancellations, and after a point forces them to cancel all or none. By design, big deals are too big to cancel without pain, giving publishers leverage to raise prices out of proportion to journal costs, size, usage, impact, and quality. Without bundling, libraries would have responded to the pricing crisis with a devastating number of cancellations. With bundling, publishers protect even second-rate journals from cancellation, protect their own profits, and shift the devastation to library budgets. While the damage grows, the largest journal publishers earn higher profit margins than the largest oil companies. In 2010, Elsevier’s journal division had a profit margin of 35.7 percent while ExxonMobil had only 28.1 percent. By soaking up library budgets, big deals harm journals from small nonprofit publishers excluded from the bundles. This exacerbates the problem for researchers because journals from these smaller publishers tend to be higher in quality and impact than the journals protected by the big deals (more in #11 below). To top it off, most big deals include confidentiality clauses preventing universities from disclosing the prices they pay. The effect is to reduce bargaining and price competition even further. In 2009, three academics launched the Big Deal Contract Project to use state open-record laws to force disclosure of big-deal contracts with public universities. Elsevier went to court to block the release of its contract with Washington State University and lost. During the decades in which journal prices have been rising faster than inflation and faster than library budgets, libraries have cut into their book budgets to pay for journals. According to James McPherson, “In 1986 [academic] libraries spent 44 percent of their budgets on books and 56 percent on journals; by 1997 the imbalance had grown to 28 percent for books and 72 percent for journals.” Because academic libraries now buy fewer books, academic book publishers now accept fewer manuscripts. One result is that the journal crisis, concentrated in the sciences, has precipitated a monograph crisis, concentrated in the humanities. New restrictions on electronic journals add a permissions crisis on top of the pricing crisis. For publishers of online toll-access journals, there are business reasons to limit the freedom of users to copy and redistribute texts, even if that leaves users with fewer rights than they had with print journals. But these business reasons create pernicious consequences for libraries and their patrons. Among the results: When libraries pay for subscriptions to digital journals, they don’t buy or own their own digital copies but merely rent or license them for a period of time. If they cancel a subscription, they could lose access to past issues. They could violate the publishers’ copyrights if they make or hold copies for long-term preservation without special permission or payment, shifting the task of preservation more and more to publishers who are not preservation experts and who tend to make preservation decisions with only future market potential in mind. Libraries can’t migrate older content, such as journal backfiles, to new media and formats to keep them readable as technology changes, at least not without special permission or risk of liability. Some publishers don’t allow libraries to share digital texts by interlibrary loan and instead require them to make printouts, scan the printouts, and lend the scans. Libraries must negotiate for prices and licensing terms, often under nondisclosure agreements, and retain and consult complex licensing agreements that differ from publisher to publisher and year to year. They must police or negotiate access for walk-in patrons, online users off campus, and visiting faculty. They must limit access and usage by password, internet-protocol (IP) address, usage hours, institutional affiliation, physical location, and caps on simultaneous users. They must implement authentication systems and administer proxy servers. They must make fair-use judgment calls, erring on the side of seeking permission or forgoing use. They must explain to patrons that cookies and registration make anonymous inquiry impossible and that some uses allowed by law are not allowed by the technology. I make this list library-centric rather than user-centric because the pricing crisis has nearly killed off individual subscriptions. Most subscribers to toll-access journals are libraries, and most authorized readers of toll-access journals are library patrons. In short, conventional publishers regard easy online sharing as a problem while researchers and libraries regard it as a solution. The internet is widening the gap between the interests of conventional publishers and the interests of researchers and research institutions. Conventional publishers are adapting to the digital age in some respects. They’re migrating most print journals to digital formats and even dropping their print editions. They’re incorporating hyperlinks, search engines, and alert services. A growing number are digitizing their backfiles and integrating texts with data. But the revolutionary power to share content without price or permission barriers, to solve the pricing and permission crises at a stroke and liberate research for the benefit of all, is the one innovation they fear most. Conventional publishers acquire their key assets from academics without charge. Authors donate the texts of new articles and the rights to publish them. Editors and referees donate the peer-review judgments to improve and validate their quality. But then conventional publishers charge for access to the resulting articles, with no exception for authors, editors, referees, or their institutions. Publishers argue that they add value to the submitted manuscripts, which is true. But other players in the game, such as authors, editors, and referees, add far more value than publishers. For funded research, the funding agency is another critical player. It too must pay for access to the resulting articles even when the cost of a research project is hundreds of thousands of times greater than the cost of publication. Among these five value-adders—authors, editors, referees, funders, and publishers—publishers add the least value and generally demand the ownership rights. Conventional publishers use a business model that depends on access barriers and creates artificial scarcity. All publishers (conventional and OA) need revenue to cover their costs, but OA publishers use business models that dispense with access barriers and avoid artificial scarcity. Toll-access publishers contend that the OA business models are inadequate. We can debate that, for example, in light of the evidence that more than 7,500 peer-reviewed OA journals are finding ways to pay their bills, the fact that a growing number of for-profit OA publishers are already showing profits, and the fact that most of the money needed to support OA journals is currently tied up supporting toll-access journals. (See chapter 7 on economics.) But in the end it doesn’t matter whether toll-access publishers are right or wrong to believe that their revenue requires access barriers. The deeper problem is that we donate time, labor, and public money to create new knowledge and then hand control over the results to businesses that believe, correctly or incorrectly, that their revenue and survival depend on limiting access to that knowledge. If toll-access publishers are right that they must erect access barriers to reimburse themselves, then the problem is that we allow them to be the only outlets for most peer-reviewed research. If they’re wrong about the need for access barriers, then the problem is that we tolerate their access barriers, even for publicly funded research and gifts from authors who write for impact and not for money. Conventional publishers often criticize OA initiatives for “interfering with the market,” but scholarly publishing is permeated by state action, public subsidies, gift culture, and anticompetitive practices. All scholarly journals (toll access and OA) benefit from public subsidies. Most scientific research is funded by public agencies using public money, conducted and written up by researchers working at public institutions and paid with public money, and then peer-reviewed by faculty at public institutions and paid with public money. Even when researchers and peer reviewers work at private universities, their institutions are subsidized by publicly funded tax exemptions and tax-deductible donations. Most toll-access journal subscriptions are purchased by public institutions and paid with taxpayer money. Last and not least, publishers exercise their control over research articles through copyright, a temporary government-created monopoly. Every scholarly journal is a natural mini-monopoly in the sense that no other journal publishes the same articles. There’s nothing improper about this natural mini-monopoly. It’s a side-effect of the desirable fact that journals don’t duplicate one another. But it means that toll-access journals compete for authors much more than they compete for subscribers. If you need an article published in a certain journal, then you need access to that journal. This is one reason why free and expensive journals can coexist in the same field, even at the same level of quality. The free journals don’t drive the expensive journals out of business or even drive down their prices. By weakening the competition for buyers, however, this natural monopoly weakens the market feedback that would otherwise punish declining quality, declining usage, and rising prices. Laid on top of this natural monopoly are several layers of artificial monopoly. One kind of evidence is that large commercial publishers charge higher prices and raise their prices faster than small, nonprofit publishers. Yet, the scholarly consensus is that quality, impact, and prestige are generally higher at the nonprofit society journals. Large conventional publishers spend some of the money they extract from libraries on marketing and “content protection” measures that benefit publishers far more than users. Indeed, the content protection measures don’t benefit users at all and make the texts less useful. Conventional for-profit journals can increase their profit margins by decreasing their rejection rates. Reducing the rejection rate reduces the number of articles a journal must peer review for each article it publishes. Most faculty and researchers are aware of access gaps in their libraries but generally unaware of their causes and unaware that the problems are systemic and worsening. (A common response: My research is very specialized, so naturally my library won’t have everything I need.) On the other hand, librarians are acutely aware of library budget crises, high journal prices, hyperinflationary price increases, bundling constraints, publisher profit margins, and the disconnect between prices paid and journal costs, size, usage, impact, and quality. Researcher oblivion to the problems facing libraries adds several new problems to the mix. It means that the players who are most aware of quality are generally unaware of prices, which Jan Velterop once called the “cat food” model of purchasing. It creates a classic moral hazard in which researchers are shielded from the costs of their preferences and have little incentive to adjust their preferences accordingly. It subtracts one more market signal that might otherwise check high prices and declining quality. And while researchers support OA roughly to the extent that they know about it, and have their own reasons to work for it, their general unawareness of the crisis for libraries adds one more difficulty to the job of recruiting busy and preoccupied researchers to the cause of fixing this broken system. The fact that there are enough problems to motivate different stakeholders is a kind of good news. If the system were broken for buyers (librarians) but not for users (researchers), or vice versa, that would delay any fix even longer. Or it would create a pernicious trade-off in which any fix would help one group at the expense of the other. But the system is broken for both buyers and users, which makes them natural allies. Finally, even in the absence of perverse journal pricing practices, the subscription or toll-access business model would not scale with the growth of research or the growth of published knowledge. If prices were low today and guaranteed to remain low forever, the total price for the total literature would still be heading toward exponential explosion. This is easiest to see at the mythical University of Croesus, which can afford 100 percent of the literature today. In that respect, Croesus is far better off than any university in the real world. Let’s suppose that journal prices and the Croesus library budget increase at the same rate forever. For simplicity, let’s assume that rate is zero. They never grow at all, not even at the rate of inflation. Let’s assume that the growth of knowledge means that the journal literature grows by 5 percent a year, a common industry estimate. Croesus can afford full coverage today, but in twenty years it would have to spend 2.7 times more than it spends today for full coverage, in sixty years 18.7 times more, and in a hundred years 131.5 times more. But since Croesus can’t spend more than it has, in twenty years the coverage it could afford would drop from 100 percent to 37.7 percent, in sixty years to 5.4 percent, and in a hundred years to less than 1 percent. We need a system of research dissemination that scales with the growth of research volume. The subscription or toll-access system scales negatively by shrinking the accessible percentage of research as research itself continues to grow. Money would solve the access crisis if we had enough of it, and if the amount at our disposal grew in proportion to the growing volume and growing prices of the literature. But we don’t have nearly enough money, and the money we do have doesn’t grow nearly fast enough to keep pace with the volume or prices of the literature. Toll-access publishers don’t benefit from access gaps and have their own reasons to want to close them. But they prefer the unscalable money solution, even if university budgets and national treasuries must be squeezed by law to find the funds. Crispin Davis, then-CEO of Elsevier, once argued that “the government needs to lay down guidelines on the proportion of university funds that should be set aside for the acquisition of books and journals, or even increase funding to ensure that universities can buy all the material they need.” At some point we should trust the math more than special-interest lobbies. Among the many who have done the math, the University of California concluded that the subscription model for research journals is “incontrovertibly unsustainable.” 2.2 OA as Seizing Opportunities Even if we had no pressing problems to solve, we’d want to take full advantage of the unprecedented power of digital technology to share knowledge and accelerate research. But we have both problems and opportunities, and we should acknowledge that. Too much of the OA discussion is grim, utilitarian, and problem-oriented. We should complement it with discussion that is joyful, curious, and opportunity-oriented. Serious problems don’t rule out beautiful opportunities, and one of the most beautiful opportunities facing OA is that certain strategic actions will solve serious problems and seize beautiful opportunities at the same time. Here’s a brace of those beautiful opportunities. The internet emerged just as journal subscription prices were reaching unbearable levels. The internet widens distribution and reduces costs at the same time. Digital computers connected to a global network let us make perfect copies of arbitrary files and distribute them to a worldwide audience at zero marginal cost. For 350 years, scholars have willingly, even eagerly, published journal articles without payment, freeing them to consent to OA without losing revenue. Unrestricted access to digital files supports forms of discovery and processing impossible for paper texts and for inaccessible or use-restricted digital texts. OA is already lawful and doesn’t require copyright reform. Now that the internet is at our fingertips, OA is within the reach of researchers and research institutions acting alone and needn’t wait for publishers, legislation, or markets. Authors, editors, and referees—the whole team that produces peer-reviewed research articles—can provide OA to peer-reviewed research literature and, if necessary, cut recalcitrant publishers out of the loop. For researchers acting on their own, the goal of complete OA is even easier to attain than the goal of affordable journals. A less obvious but more fundamental opportunity is that knowledge is nonrivalrous (to use a term from the economics of property). We can share it without dividing it and consume it without diminishing it. My possession and use of some knowledge doesn’t exclude your possession and use of the same knowledge. Familiar physical goods like land, food, and machines are all rivalrous . To share them, we must take turns or settle for portions. Thomas Jefferson described this situation beautifully in an 1813 letter to Isaac McPherson: If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea. . . . Its peculiar character . . . is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine. We seldom think about how metaphysically lucky we are that knowledge is nonrivalrous. We can all know the same ideas, stories, tunes, plans, directions, and words without my knowledge blocking yours or yours blocking mine. We’re equally fortunate that speech is nonrivalrous, since it allows us to articulate and share our knowledge without reducing it to a rivalrous commodity. But for all of human history before the digital age, writing has been rivalrous. Written or recorded knowledge became a material object like stone, clay, skin, or paper, which was necessarily rivalrous. Even when we had the printing press and photocopying machine, allowing us to make many copies at comparatively low cost, each copy was a rivalrous material object. Despite its revolutionary impact, writing was hobbled from birth by this tragic limitation. We could only record nonrivalrous knowledge in a rivalrous form. Digital writing is the first kind of writing that does not reduce recorded knowledge to a rivalrous object. If we all have the right equipment, then we can all have copies of the same digital text without excluding one another, without multiplying our costs, and without depleting our resources. I’ve heard physicists refer to the prospect of room-temperature superconductivity as a “gift of nature.” Unfortunately, that is not quite within reach. But the nonrivalrous property of digital information is a gift of nature that we’ve already grasped and put to work. We only have to stand back a moment to appreciate it. To our ancestors, the prospect of recording knowledge in precise language, symbols, sounds, or images without reducing the record to a rivalrous object would have been magical. But we do it every day now, and it’s losing its magic. The danger is not that we already take this property for granted but that we might stop short and fail to take full advantage of it. It can transform knowledge-sharing if we let it. We take advantage of this gift when we post valuable work online and permit free access and unrestricted use for every user with an internet connection. But if we charge for access, enforce exclusion, create artificial scarcity, or prohibit essential uses, then we treat the nonrivalrous digital file like a rivalrous physical object, dismiss the opportunity, and spurn the gift. When publishers argue that there is no access problem and that we shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken, there are two answers. First, they’re wrong. There are deep and serious access problems. Publishers who really don’t know this should talk to the libraries who subscribe to their journals, and even more to the libraries who don’t. But second, leaving that quarrel entirely to one side, there are good reasons to pursue OA anyway.

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Open Access: Varieties There are many ways to deliver OA: personal web sites, blogs, wikis, databases, ebooks, videos, audios, webcasts, discussion forums, RSS feeds, and P2P networks. Unless creative thinking stops now, there will be many more to come. However, two delivery vehicles dominate the current discussion: journals and repositories. OA journals are like non-OA journals except that they’re OA. Making good on that exception requires a new funding model, but nearly everything else about the journal could be held constant, if we wanted to hold it constant. Some OA journals are very traditional except that they’re OA, while others deliberately push the evolution of journals as a category. (Some toll-access journals also push that evolution, if we don’t count stopping short of OA.) Like conventional, toll-access journals, some OA journals are first-rate and some are bottom feeders. Like conventional journals, some OA journals are high in prestige and some are unknown, and some of the unknowns are high in quality and some are low. Some are on solid financial footing and some are struggling. Also like conventional journals, most are honest and some are scams. As early as 2004, Thomson Scientific found that “in each of the broad subject areas studied there was at least one OA title that ranked at or near the top of its field” in citation impact. The number of high-quality, high-impact OA journals has only grown since. Unlike toll-access journals, however, most OA journals are new. It’s hard to generalize about OA journals beyond saying that they have all the advantages of being OA and all the disadvantages of being new. To be more precise: A disappointing number of OA journals don’t have all the advantages of being OA because they retain needless permission barriers. (See section 3.3 on gratis and libre OA.) At the same time, a heartening number of OA journals no longer suffer from the disadvantages of being new. Like conventional journal publishers, some OA journal publishers are for-profit and some are nonprofit. Like conventional publishers, there are a few large OA publishers and a long tail of small ones, although the largest OA publishers are small compared to the largest conventional publishers. Unlike conventional publishers, the profitable for-profit OA publishers have moderate rather than obscene profit margins. OA repositories are online collections or databases of articles. Unlike OA journals, OA repositories have no counterpart in the traditional landscape of scholarly communication. That makes them woefully easy to overlook or misunderstand. By default, new deposits in OA repositories are OA. But most repositories today support dark deposits , which can be switched to OA at a later date. Most OA repositories were launched to host peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints. But often they include other sorts of content as well, such as theses and dissertations, datasets, courseware, and digitized copies of works from the special collections of the hosting institution’s library. For scholars, repositories are better at making work OA than personal web sites because repositories provide persistent URLs, take steps for long-term preservation, and don’t disappear when the author changes jobs or dies. 3.1 Green and Gold OA Gold and green OA differ in at least two fundamental respects. First, OA journals and repositories differ in their relationship to peer review. OA journals perform their own peer review, just like conventional journals. Repositories generally don’t perform peer review, although they host and disseminate articles peer-reviewed elsewhere. As a result, gold and green OA differ in their support costs and in the roles they can play in the scholarly communications universe. Terminology The OA movement uses the term gold OA for OA delivered by journals, regardless of the journal’s business model, and green OA for OA delivered by repositories. Self-archiving is the practice of depositing one’s own work in an OA repository. All three of these terms were coined by Stevan Harnad. Second, OA journals obtain the rights or permissions they need directly from the rightsholders, while repositories ask depositors to obtain the needed rights or permissions on their own. Even when the depositors are the authors themselves, they may already have transferred key rights to publishers. As a result, OA journals can generate permission for reuse at will, and OA repositories generally cannot. Hence, most libre OA is gold OA, even if it’s not yet the case that most gold OA is libre OA. (See more in section 3.3 on gratis and libre OA.) Gold and green OA require different steps from authors. To make new articles gold OA, authors simply submit their manuscripts to OA journals, as they would to conventional journals. To make articles green OA, authors simply deposit their manuscripts in an OA repository. Most importantly, the green/gold distinction matters because if authors can’t make their work OA one way, they can make it OA the other way. One of the most persistent and damaging misunderstandings is that all OA is gold OA. Authors who can’t find a high-quality, high-prestige OA journal in their field, or whose submissions are rejected from first-rate OA journals, often conclude that they must give up on OA or publish in a second-rate journal. But that’s hasty. If they publish in the best toll-access journal that will accept their work, then—more often than not—they may turn around and deposit the peer-reviewed manuscript in an OA repository. Most toll-access publishers and toll-access journals give blanket permission for green OA, many others will give permission on request, and the numbers approach 100 percent when authors are subject to green OA mandates from their funding agencies or universities. (More in chapters 4 on OA policies and 10 on making your own work OA.) One of the early victories of the OA movement was to get a majority of toll-access publishers and journals to give blanket permission for author-initiated green OA. But this victory remains one of the best-kept secrets of scholarly publishing, and widespread ignorance of it is the single most harmful consequence of green OA’s invisibility. Overlooking this victory reduces the volume of OA and creates the false impression that a trade-off between prestige and OA is common when in fact it is rare. Forgetting that green OA is compatible with conventional publishing also feeds the false impression that policies requiring green OA actually require gold OA and thereby limit the freedom of authors to submit work to the journals of their choice. (More in chapter 4 on policies.) Most publishing scholars will choose prestige over OA if they have to choose. The good news is that they rarely have to choose. The bad news is that few of them know that they rarely have to choose. Few realize that most toll-access journals permit author-initiated green OA, despite determined efforts to explain and publicize this early victory for green OA. There are two reasons why OA is compatible with prestigious publication, a gold reason and a green one. The gold reason is that a growing number of OA journals have already earned high levels of prestige, and others are steadily earning it. If there are no prestigious OA journals in your field today, you could wait (things are changing fast), you could help out (by submitting your best work), or you could move on to green. The green reason why OA is compatible with prestige is that most toll-access journals, including the prestigious, already allow OA archiving. As noted, this “most” can become “all” with the aid of an effective OA policy. (See chapter 4 on policies.) The most useful OA repositories comply with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH), which makes separate repositories play well together. In the jargon, OAI compliance makes repositories interoperable , allowing the worldwide network of individual repositories to behave like a single grand virtual repository that can be searched all at once. It means that users can find a work in an OAI-compliant repository without knowing which repositories exist, where they are located, or what they contain. (OA and OAI are separate but overlapping initiatives.) Most of the major academic and nonacademic search engines crawl OA journals and OA repositories. For example, Google, Bing, and Yahoo all do this and do it from self-interest. These search engines now provide another method (beyond OAI-based interoperability) for searching across the whole network of repositories without knowing what exists where. A common misunderstanding sees OA repositories as walled gardens that make work hard to find by requiring readers to make separate visits to separate repositories to run separate searches. The reverse is true in two senses: OA repositories make work easier to find, and toll-access collections are the ones more likely to be walled gardens, either invisible to search engines or requiring separate visits and separate searches. Disciplinary repositories (also called subject repositories) try to capture all the research in a given field, while institutional repositories try to capture all the research from a given institution. Because both kinds tend to be OAI-compliant and interoperable, the differences matter very little for readers. Readers who want to browse a repository for serendipity are more likely to find useful content in a disciplinary repository in the right field than in an institutional repository. But most scholars find repository content by keyword searches, not by browsing, and through cross-archive searches, not through local single-repository searches. However, the differences between disciplinary and institutional repositories matter more for authors. On the one hand, institutions are in a better position than disciplines to offer incentives and assistance for deposit, and to adopt policies to ensure deposit. A growing number of universities do just that. On the other hand, scholars who regularly read research in a large disciplinary repository, such as arXiv for physics or PubMed Central for medicine, readily grasp the rationale for depositing their work in OA repositories and need less nudging to do so themselves. (More in chapter 4 on policies.) Because most publishers and journals already give blanket permission for green OA, the burden is on authors to take advantage of it. In the absence of an institutional policy to encourage or require deposits, the spontaneous rate of deposit is about 15 percent. Institutions requiring deposit can push the rate toward 100 percent over a few years. The reason the spontaneous rate is lower than the nudged, assisted, and mandated rate is rarely opposition to OA itself. Almost always it’s unfamiliarity with green OA (belief that all OA is gold OA), misunderstanding of green OA (belief that it violates copyright, bypasses peer review, or forecloses the possibility of publishing in a venerable journal), and fear that it is time-consuming. In this sense, author unfamiliarity and misunderstanding are greater obstacles to OA than actual opposition, whether from authors or publishers. The remedies are already spreading worldwide: launching more OA journals and repositories, educating researchers about their gold and green OA options, and adopting intelligent policies to encourage gold OA and require green OA. (More in chapter 4 on OA policies.) 3.2 Green and Gold as Complementary Some friends of OA focus their energy on green OA and some focus on gold OA. Some support both kinds about equally and have merely specialized. But some give one a higher strategic priority than the other. I’ll argue that green and gold OA are complementary and synergistic. We should pursue them simultaneously, much as an organism must develop its nervous system and digestive system simultaneously. Fortunately, this synergy is served even by differences of opinion about its existence. The fact that some activists give green OA a higher priority than gold, and some the reverse, creates a natural division of labor ensuring that good people are working hard on each front. Green OA has some advantages over gold OA. It makes faster progress, since it doesn’t require the launch of new peer-reviewed journals or the conversion of old ones. For the same reason, it’s less expensive than gold OA and can scale up quickly and inexpensively to meet demand, while the bulk of the money needed to scale up OA journals is still tied up in subscriptions to toll-access journals. Green OA can be mandated without infringing academic freedom, but gold OA cannot. (More precisely, gold OA can’t be mandated without infringing academic freedom until virtually all peer-reviewed journals are OA, which isn’t on the horizon.) A green OA policy at a university can cover the institution’s entire research output, regardless of where authors choose to publish, while a gold OA policy can only cover the new articles that faculty are willing to submit to OA journals. Green OA is compatible with toll-access publication. Sometimes this is because toll-access publishers hold the needed rights and decide to allow it, and sometimes because authors retain the needed rights. Well-drafted OA policies can ensure that authors always retain the needed rights and spare them the need to negotiate with publishers. (See chapters 4 on policies and 6 on copyright.) When the best journals in a field are toll-access—often the case today even if changing—green OA allows authors to have their cake and eat it too. Authors good enough to publish in the best journals may do so and still make their work OA, without waiting for high-prestige OA journals to emerge in their fields. When promotion and tenure committees create strong incentives to publish in venerable toll-access journals—often the case today even if changing—green OA allows authors to make their work OA without bucking institutional incentives or relinquishing institutional rewards. Green OA works for preprints as well as postprints, while gold OA only works for postprints. For the same reason, green OA works for other kinds of work that peer-reviewed journals generally don’t publish, such as datasets, source code, theses and dissertations, and digitized copies of work previously available only in another medium such as print, microfiche, or film. On the other side, gold OA has some advantages over green OA. Gold OA articles needn’t labor under restrictions imposed by toll-access publishers fearful of OA. Hence, gold OA is always immediate, while green OA is sometimes embargoed or delayed. Similarly, gold OA can always be libre, even if it doesn’t take sufficient advantage of this opportunity, while green OA seldom even has the opportunity. (See chapter 4 on policies.) Gold OA provides OA to the published version, while green OA is often limited to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, without copy editing or final pagination. Making the OA edition the same as the published edition reduces the confusion caused by the circulation of multiple versions. Gold OA performs its own peer review, without depending on toll-access journals to perform it. Hence support for gold OA supports the survival of peer review itself in case toll-access journals can no longer provide it. Finally, green OA may be a manageable expense, but gold OA can be self-sustaining, even profitable. Librarians traditionally distinguish four functions performed by scholarly journals: Registration (time stamp), certification (peer review), awareness (distribution), and archiving (preservation). We know that green and gold OA are complementary as soon as we recognize that green is better than gold for registration (its time stamps are faster) and preservation, and that gold OA is better than green OA for certification (peer review). Some see green OA mainly as a tool to force a transition to gold OA. The idea is that rising levels of green OA will trigger the cancellation of conventional journals and pressure them to convert to gold OA. The growing volume of green OA might have this effect. Some publishers fear that it will, and some OA activists hope that it will. But it might not have this effect at all. One piece of evidence is that green OA hasn’t triggered journal cancellations in physics, where levels of green OA approach 100 percent and have been high and growing for nearly two decades. (More in chapter 8 on casualties.) Even if it did have this effect, however, it wouldn’t follow that it is the best strategy for advancing gold OA. There are good prospects for a peaceful revolution based on publisher consent and self-interest. (More in chapter 7 on economics.) Most importantly, however, we’ll still want green OA in a world where all peer-reviewed journals are OA. For example, we’ll want green OA for preprints and for the earliest possible time-stamp to establish the author’s priority. We’ll want green OA for datasets, theses and dissertations, and other research genres not published in journals. We’ll want green OA for the security of having multiple OA copies in multiple independent locations. (Even today, the best OA journals not only distribute their articles from their own web sites but also deposit copies in independent OA repositories.) At least until the very last conventional journal converts to OA, we’ll need green OA so that research institutions can mandate OA without limiting the freedom of authors to submit to the journals of their choice. We’ll even want OA repositories as the distribution mechanism for many OA journals themselves. A worldwide network of OA repositories would support one desirable evolution of what we now call journals. It would allow us to decouple peer review from distribution. Peer review could be performed by freestanding editorial boards and distribution by the network of repositories. Decoupling would remove the perverse incentive for peer-review providers to raise access barriers or impede distribution. It would also remove their perverse incentive to demand exclusive rights over research they didn’t fund, perform, write up, or buy from the authors. On the other side, we’ll still want gold OA in a world where all new articles are green OA. High-volume green OA may not have caused toll-access journal cancellations yet, even in fields where green OA approaches 100 percent. But we can’t say that it will never do so, and we can’t say that every field will behave like physics in this respect. If peer-reviewed toll-access journals are not sustainable (see section 2.1), then the survival of peer review will depend on a shift to peer-reviewed OA journals. It won’t matter whether toll-access journals are endangered by rising levels of green OA, by their own hyperinflationary price increases, or by their failure to scale with the rapid growth of new research. If any combination of these causes puts peer-reviewed toll-access journals in jeopardy, then peer review will depend on OA journals, which are not endangered by any of those causes. (In chapter 8 on casualties, we’ll see evidence that toll-access journal price increases cause many more cancellations than green OA does.) Finally, if all new articles are green OA, we’ll still want the advantages that are easier for gold OA than for green OA to provide: freedom from permission barriers, freedom from delays or embargoes, and freedom from ever-rising drains on library budgets. Neither green nor gold OA will suffice, long-term or short-term. That’s a reason to pursue both. 3.3 Gratis and Libre OA Sometimes we must speak unambiguously about two subspecies of OA. One removes price barriers alone and the other removes price barriers and at least some permission barriers. The former is gratis OA and the latter libre OA . To sharpen their definitions, we need a quick detour into fair use. In the United States, fair use is an exception to copyright law allowing users to reproduce copyrighted work “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching . . . , scholarship, or research” (to quote the U.S. copyright statute). Fair use has four characteristics that matter to us here. First, the permission for fair use is granted by law and needn’t be sought from the copyright holder. Or equivalently, the statute assures us that no permission is needed because fair use “is not an infringement of copyright.” Second, the permission is limited and doesn’t cover all the uses that scholars might want to make. To exceed fair use, users must obtain permission from the copyright holder. Third, most countries have some equivalent of fair use, though they differ significantly in what they allow and disallow. Finally, fair use is vague. There are clear cases of fair use (quoting a short snippet in a review) and clear cases of exceeding fair use (reprinting a full-text book), but the boundary between the two is fuzzy and contestable. Gratis OA is free of charge but not more free than that. Users must still seek permission to exceed fair use. Gratis OA removes price barriers but not permission barriers. Libre OA is free of charge and also free of some copyright and licensing restrictions. Users have permission to exceed fair use, at least in certain ways. Because there are many ways to exceed fair use, there are many degrees or kinds of libre OA. Libre OA removes price barriers and at least some permission barriers. Fortunately, we don’t always need these terms. Indeed, in most of this book I use “OA” without qualification. The generic term causes no trouble until we need to talk about differences between gratis and libre OA, just as “carbohydrate” causes no trouble until we need to talk about differences between simple and complex carbohydrates. I’m borrowing the gratis/libre language from the world of software, where it expresses the same distinction. If the terms sound odd in English, it’s because English doesn’t have more domesticated terms for this distinction. Their oddity in English may even be an advantage, since the terms don’t carry extra baggage, as “open” and “free” do, which therefore helps us avoid ambiguity. First note that the gratis/libre distinction is not the same as the green/gold distinction. The gratis/libre distinction is about user rights or freedoms, while the green/gold distinction is about venues or vehicles. Gratis/libre answers the question, how open is it? Green/gold answers the question, how is it delivered? Green OA can be gratis or libre but is usually gratis. Gold OA can be gratis or libre, but is also usually gratis. However, it’s easier for gold OA to be libre than for green OA to be libre, which is why the campaign to go beyond gratis OA to libre OA focuses more on journals than repositories. If users encounter a full-text work online without charge, then they know it’s gratis OA. They don’t have to be told, even if they’d like to be told—for example, so that they don’t have to wonder whether they’re reading an illicit copy. But users can’t figure out whether a work is libre OA unless the provider (author or publisher) tells them. This is the purpose of a license , which is simply a statement from the copyright holder explaining what users may and may not do with a given work. Works under “all-rights-reserved” copyrights don’t need licenses, because “all rights reserved” means that without special permission users may do nothing that exceeds fair use. The default around the world today is that new works are copyrighted from birth (no registration required), that the copyright initially belongs to the author (but is transferrable by contract), and that the rights holder reserves all rights. Authors who want to provide libre OA must affirmatively waive some of their rights and use a license to tell users they’ve done so. For convenience, let’s say that an open license is one allowing some degree of libre OA. Although the word “copyright” is singular, it covers a plurality of rights, and authors may waive some and retain others. They may do so in any combination that suits their needs. That’s why there are many nonequivalent open licenses and nonequivalent types of libre OA. What’s important here is that waiving some rights in order to provide libre OA does not require waiving all rights or waiving copyright altogether. On the contrary, open licenses presuppose copyright, since they express permissions from the copyright holder. Moreover, the rights not waived are fully enforceable. In the clear and sensible language of Creative Commons, open licenses create “some-rights-reserved” copyrights rather than “all-rights-reserved” copyrights. The open licenses from Creative Commons (CC) are the best-known and most widely used. But there are other open licenses, and authors and publishers can always write their own. To illustrate the range of libre OA, however, it’s convenient to look at the CC licenses. The maximal degree of libre OA belongs to works in the public domain. Either these works were never under copyright or their copyrights have expired. Works in the public domain may be used in any way whatsoever without violating copyright law. That’s why it’s lawful to translate or reprint Shakespeare without hunting down his heirs for permission. Creative Commons offers CC0 (CC-Zero) for copyright holders who want to assign their work to the public domain. The CC Attribution license (CC-BY) describes the least restrictive sort of libre OA after the public domain. It allows any use, provided the user attributes the work to the original author. This is the license recommended by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) and the SPARC Europe Seal of Approval program for OA journals. I support this recommendation, use CC-BY for my blog and newsletter, and request CC-BY whenever I publish in a journal. CC supports several other open licenses as well, including CC-BY-NC, which requires attribution and blocks commercial use, and CC-BY-ND, which requires attribution and allows commercial use but blocks derivative works. These licenses are not equivalent to one another, but they all permit uses beyond fair use and therefore they all represent different flavors of libre OA. While you can write your own open licenses or use those created by others, the advantage of CC licenses is that they are ready-made, lawyer-drafted, enforceable, understood by a large and growing number of users, and available in a large and growing number of legal jurisdictions. Moreover, each comes in three versions: human-readable for nonlawyers, lawyer-readable for lawyers and judges, and machine-readable for search engines and other visiting software. They’re extremely convenient and their convenience has revolutionized libre OA. The best way to refer to a specific flavor of libre OA is by referring to a specific open license. We’ll never have unambiguous, widely understood technical terms for every useful variation on the theme. But we already have clearly named licenses for all the major variations on the theme, and we can add new ones for more subtle variations any time we want. A work without an open license stands or appears to stand under an all-rights-reserved copyright. If the rights holder privately welcomes uses beyond fair use, or has decided not to sue for certain kinds of infringement, ordinary users have no way to know that and are forced to choose the least of three evils: the delay of asking permission, the risk of proceeding without it, and the harm of erring on the side of nonuse. These are not only obstacles to research; they are obstacles that libre OA was designed to remove. The BBB definition calls for both gratis and libre OA. However, most of the notable OA success stories are gratis and not libre. I mean this in two senses: gratis success stories are more numerous than libre success stories, so far, and most gratis success stories are notable. Even if they stop short of libre OA, they are hard-won victories and major advances. Some observers look at the prominent gratis OA success stories and conclude that the OA movement focuses on gratis OA and neglects libre. Others look at the public definitions and conclude that OA focuses on libre OA and disparages gratis. Both assessments are one-sided and unfair. One hard fact is that gratis OA is often attainable in circumstances when libre OA is not attainable. For example, a major victory of the OA movement has been to persuade the majority of toll-access publishers and toll-access journals to allow green gratis OA. We’re very far from the same position for green libre OA. Similarly, most of the strong OA policies at funding agencies and universities require green gratis OA. A few require green libre OA, and green libre OA is growing for other reasons. But if these funders and universities had waited until they could muster the votes for a green libre policy, most of them would still be waiting. (See section 4.3 on the historical timing of OA policies.) A second hard fact is that even gratis OA policies can face serious political obstacles. They may be easier to adopt than libre policies, but in most cases they’re far from easy. The OA policy at the U.S. National Institutes of Health was first proposed by Congress in 2004, adopted as a mere request or encouragement in 2005, and strengthened into a requirement in 2008. Every step along the way was strenuously opposed by an aggressive and well-funded publishing lobby. Yet even now the policy provides only gratis OA, not libre OA. Similarly, the gratis OA policies at funders and universities were only adopted after years of patiently educating decision-makers and answering their objections and misunderstandings. Reaching the point of adoption, and especially unanimous votes for adoption, is a cause for celebration, even if the policies only provide gratis, not libre OA. The Directory of Open Access Journals is the most authoritative catalog of OA journals and the only one limiting itself to peer-reviewed journals. But only 20 percent of titles in the DOAJ use CC licenses, and fewer than 11 percent use the recommended CC-BY license. Viewed the other way around, about 80 percent of peer-reviewed OA journals don’t use any kind of CC license. Some of these might use non-CC licenses with a similar legal effect, but these exceptions are rare. Simply put, most OA journals are not using open licenses. Most operate under all-rights-reserved copyrights and leave their users with no more freedom than they already had under fair use. Most are not offering libre OA. Even those wanting to block commercial use, for example, tend to use an all-rights-reserved copyright rather than an open license that blocks commercial use, such as CC-BY-NC, but allows libre OA in other respects. I’ve argued that it’s unfair to criticize the OA movement for disparaging gratis OA (merely on the ground that its public statements call for libre) or neglecting libre OA (merely on the ground that most of its success stories are gratis). But two related criticisms would be more just. First, demanding libre or nothing where libre is currently unattainable makes the perfect the enemy of the good. Fortunately, this tactical mistake is rare. Second, settling for gratis where libre is attainable makes the good a substitute for the better. Unfortunately, this tactical mistake is common, as we see from the majority of OA journals that stop at gratis when they could easily offer libre. Let’s be more specific about the desirability of libre OA. Why should we bother, especially when we may already have attained gratis OA? The answer is that we need libre OA to spare users the delay and expense of seeking permission whenever they want to exceed fair use. And there are good scholarly reasons to exceed fair use. For example: to quote long excerpts • to distribute full-text copies to students or colleagues • to burn copies on CDs for bandwidth-poor parts of the world • to distribute semantically-tagged or otherwise enhanced (i.e., modified) versions • to migrate texts to new formats or media to keep them readable as technologies change • to create and archive copies for long-term preservation • to include works in a database or mashup • to make an audio recording of a text • to translate a text into another language • to copy a text for indexing, text-mining, or other kinds of processing In some jurisdictions, some of these uses may actually fall under fair use, even if most do not. Courts have settled some of the boundaries of fair use but by no means all of them, and in any case users can’t be expected to know all the relevant court rulings. Uncertainty about these boundaries, and increasingly severe penalties for copyright infringement, make users fear liability and act cautiously. It makes them decide that they can’t use something they’d like to use, or that they must delay their research in order to seek permission. Libre OA under open licenses solves all these problems. Even when a desirable use is already allowed by fair use, a clear open license removes all doubt. When a desirable use does exceed fair use, a clear open license removes the restriction and offers libre OA. When you can offer libre OA, don’t leave users with no more freedom than fair use. Don’t leave them uncertain about what they may and may not do. Don’t make conscientious users choose between the delay of seeking permission and the risk of proceeding without it. Don’t increase the pressure to make users less conscientious. Don’t make them pay for permission. Don’t make them err on the side of nonuse. Make your work as usable and useful as it can possibly be.

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Strength in numbers The year is 2027. Dorothy visits her GP about panic attacks she's been getting at work. Before prescribing any treatment, the doctor looks at her genetic history for markers that could affect her response to certain drugs. The GP is looking in particular for CYP2C19 polymorphism, which would mean Dorothy can't metabolise a group of medicines (SSRIs); and at the same time, she examines her patient's sequenced DNA to see if she carries the genetic mutation responsible for panic disorder. Dorothy is a heavy drinker and her doctor sees that she carries a risk gene for alcohol dependence. She considers a drug that could modulate the gene. Dorothy leaves with a smartwatch to log her daily life for the next week: her quality of sleep, diet, exercise, stress, mood and activity. In the room next door, Fred is talking to a specialist about his Parkinson's symptoms. He was prescribed a drug recently for the subtype of Parkinson's he has and, for the first time, there were no side effects. In the past, Fred and the specialist used trial and error to find the right medication. But ever since computers have been able to process exabytes of data, scientists have found patterns and trends that allow them to treat Parkinson's with greater efficiency. Better still, through using an app on his phone, Fred has realised that taking his medicine at night affected his sleep; so he's started taking it at lunchtime instead. Valerie has a migraine again. Like many young people these days, she had her DNA sequenced for her 18th birthday and discovered that she's one of the 7 per cent of Europeans who can't convert codeine into morphine. She inherited her response to the drug from her mother. Valerie knows to mention this to her doctor who prescribes her a non codeine-based painkiller. The doctor also considers what impact Valerie's gut flora and microbiome might have on medication. At its simplest, precision medicine is ultra-tailored healthcare. When President Obama announced the Precision Medicine Initiative in 2015, he put it this way: "delivering the right treatments, at the right time, every time, to the right person." Precision medicine, also known as personalised medicine, is being heralded as the next major breakthrough in healthcare. In Britain, the NHS is "on a journey towards embedding a personalised medicine approach into mainstream healthcare." While medical care has always been tailored to the individual to an extent, the degree to which it can be personalised today is unprecedented because of new technology. Equipment that would have been the stuff of science fiction 20 years ago is now available in many universities. Three key advancements combine to make medicine more precise: patient-generated data through smartphones and wearable tech, genomic medicine and computer science. First, patients can quickly and easily log their daily symptoms with apps on their phones or wearable technology to understand their illnesses better. Detailed records also aid doctors in the way they treat patients and provide data for research. Second, technology is allowing us to sequence DNA at a faster rate and a cheaper cost than ever before; and scientists are understanding the genetic markers of disease at a significant rate. Estimates suggest the cost of sequencing the very first genome could have been as high as $1bn. By 2016, the cost had dropped below $1,500. The process now takes hours rather than weeks. Third, in the age of big data, computers are allowing scientists to analyse vast amounts of data with greater precision than ever before. Machine-learning algorithms accelerate analysis of data sets which result in rapid discoveries. Precision medicine is charged by a need to address the sheer variety of people's reactions to things going wrong in their bodies. From neurological disorders to strokes, cancer to depression, infections to alcoholism, each patient is unique; so ultimately the treatment should be unique, too. Parkinson's is one of the first diseases precision medicine is being applied to. It's a heterogeneous disease, which means there is a lot of variability in how patients progress. In its early stages, the disease can manifest itself with symptoms very different from the tremors most associated with it. Patients may have motion-related issues with walking, posture or movement of the fingers; but they may also experience cognitive and memory problems, depression or lose their sense of smell. Because the early signs are so varied, it is difficult to predict the progression in individual patients. Dr Duygu Tosun-Turgut of the University of California won the 2016 data challenge set by the Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson's research. Her aim was to discover whether the progression rate of Parkinson's disease could be predicted. If doctors could predict the speed of a patient's decline, it could affect both treatment and prognosis. It would also assist with clinical trials, as it is better to recruit patients in swift rather than slow decline. In these patients, changes and improvements – and therefore efficacy of treatment – are demonstrated more dramatically. To define the progression rate, Dr Tosun and her team looked at all the clinical data available, captured from multiple patient visits to clinics. This included, for example, the results of memory tests, the total number of times patients could sit down and stand up over a 30-second period or changes in sleeping habits and sense of smell. Dr Tosun then looked for a pattern using data-driven machine-learning algorithms. Two groups were identified. One was slow progressing and the other was fast progressing. The next step was to find out if there were any baseline assessments that could be used to predict the rate of progression. At this point they looked at genetic makeup, fluid biomarkers, imaging MRI data and other factors. "The body is a whole, everything is so connected. There might be something dominant but it affects other systems in the body. It's the same in the brain," says Dr Tosun. She discovered that if patients arrived with more motor-related symptoms on their first visit, they would decline faster. She also identified a brain region with degenerated white matter fibres. She found that the more degenerated the structures were in these regions, the faster the patient declined. Data was collected from people with a family history of Parkinson's or those who exhibited early signs to see if the same measure could be used to detect the disease before the symptoms started appearing. The goal would be to intervene before the disease started to progress. "It's very difficult to reverse neurodegeneration," says Dr Tosun. "If [a patient is] progressing fast, or if they have the markers telling us they're going to progress fast, you need to progress faster." Now Dr Tosun has turned her focus on the earliest mechanisms that trigger neurodegeneration. If it is known what triggers the disease, there may be precautions people can take to avoid developing Parkinson's. "It can be diet, supplements, physical activity or cognitive activity," she says. "It's very important to understand everything about that patient," says Dr Tosun. "Not just their symptoms: their environment, their background, the state of their brain and body. The more we learn about the patient, the more the we can model the disease and treatment better." With advancements in computer science, algorithms and hardware, scientists like Dr Tosun are at the point where they can look at all the data at one time to better understand disease, health, prognosis and treatment. Finding patterns will help answer different questions. The vast capacity of big data is crucial. Dr Beckie Port, senior research communications officer at Parkinson's UK, says, "The more people you put in your experiments, the more you can iron out some of the complexities and start to see trends, It's going to be a mammoth mission to start teasing out individual factors that could be used for personalised medicine, but it's not impossible." Personal technology – wearable tech such as fitbits and smartphone apps – is another important element in precision medicine. It is already being used in the field of Parkinson's. uMotif is a 'patient data capture platform' that allows patients with long-term conditions to track their symptoms using an app. A patient inputs information about symptoms every day, including non-motor symptoms. How did you sleep? What's your mood like today? How about stress levels? What did you eat? How's your pain? Do you have nausea? With this information, researchers and clinical teams can understand the disease better; and patients can have more useful conversations with their clinicians. The patient becomes an active participant rather than a spectator. "How you feel your Parkinson's is a very important thing in quality of life and good treatments," says uMotif's co-founder and chief executive Bruce Hellman. The data capture for a major study into Parkinson's is just finishing. Over 4,221 people tracked their health for 100 days and donated the data to academic research. Already, the feedback suggests the technology is having a positive effect on individual lives. Since using the app, Mick, a Parkinson's patient, reports feeling more assured in talking about his condition with a neurologist because he has a record of what's been happening and how he's felt. "It teaches you, 'Don't beat yourself up because you can't do what you used to do, look at what you are doing'," he says. Through plotting her feelings each day, Sam now realises that she was managing her life with Parkinson's better that she thought. She'd been getting anxiety attacks in the morning and it suddenly dawned on her that changing taking her medication from the evening to the morning might help ease the attacks. It worked. "I'm in control of my health," she says. "One of the problems people have," says Dr Port, "is that when they go to the doctor's they may be having a very good or bad day but it might not reflect what they're like on an everyday basis, That snapshot the specialist sees could influence [the patient's] drugs for the next six months." "People with Parkinson's often only visit a doctor twice a year," says Hellman, "so knowing more about their health will help them to bridge the gap between health visits and better understand their symptoms. Health is done to you at the moment but in the future it should be done with you." The 100,000 Genomes Project is planning to sequence 100,000 genomes from around 70,000 people. The largest national sequencing project of its kind in the world, it aims to create a new genomic medicine service here in the UK. At the time of writing, the 20,429 genomes that have so far been sequenced are split 50/50 between cancer and rare diseases. It covers a large geographical area: England already has 13 genomic medicine centres covering 85 NHS trusts. "Genomic medicine is right at the vanguard of personalised medicine," says Tom Fowler, deputy chief scientist and director of public health at Genomics England. He points out the role it can play in treating rare diseases, where unmet diagnostic needs are of paramount importance. "For people with a lifetime of wondering why they or their child is affected, the benefit [of genomic medicine] is being able to answer that question. It also can improve existing or potential treatment and help with making reproduction choices." Thanks to genomoic medicine, numerous diagnoses have been possible. The gene mutation causing four-year-old Jessica's rare disease was identified by researchers after her parents spent years not knowing what was wrong. Jessica's treatment is simply a special diet that enhances glucose production in the brain. After a month on the regime, Jessica's parents "noticed a big improvement in her speech, energy levels and general steadiness," according to consultant Maria Bitner-Glindzicz of Great Ormond Street hospital. "Overall, she is better and brighter in herself and her parents don't worry about her having fits on a daily basis as they used to." The project anticipates a 25 per cent diagnostic rate in rare diseases but Fowler says the remaining 75 per cent don't just get put aside, the data goes into research environments where it will be worked on: "It's the start, not the end, of the journey." A small group of Parkinson's patients is included in the 100,000 Genomes project because early onset Parkinson's is considered rare and it's more likely to contain a genetic factor. It is estimated that around 5 per cent of Parkinson's cases have a genetic link; but Dr Port thinks the role of genetics in the disease is probably a lot larger. The challenge now is how to move this kind of healthcare into the mainstream as part of routine healthcare. Fowler hopes that will happen in the next five years. In 2015, in partnership with Health Education England, nine universities introduced master's degrees in Genomic Medicine. "A legacy of upskilling staff so they understand information will make the long-lasting difference," says Fowler. "If we build an infrastructure and workforce that can cope with genomic medicine, as new discoveries happen we've got the ability to adapt and take them on board." Genetic testing can already reveal the potential for future illness and allow for proactive and preventative decisions. When Angelina Jolie, for example, discovered she carried BRCA1, the genetic marker for breast cancer that her late mother carried, she had a double mastectomy. People with a BRCA1 mutation have a 65 per cent chance of developing breast cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute. At the moment the number of people who've had their genes sequenced is fractional but it could become more commonplace. Will everyone have genetic testing eventually? "At the current time it's difficult to see how that would step out into the mainstream," says Fowler. "There may well be a time where that is the case and we move towards it." The NHS wouldn't be expected to pay for that, he adds. People are already paying to have their genes tested. Companies like 23andMe of gene testing home-kit services, which offer the possibility of finding out if you have a genetic variant that could put you at risk for certain traits or conditions. They range from serious conditions (cancer, Alzheimer's) to traits (caffeine metabolism, alcohol flush reaction, coriander aversion and sensitivity to the sound of chewing). Critics of precision medicine say that the word 'precision' is an unrealistic, inflated, hyperbolic term. They caution that there are many things happening in the human body, as well as genetics. In the journal Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, Canadian doctor Dan Roden wrote, "Patients are more than collections of genomes and gene-environment interactions; they are individuals influenced by experience, culture, education, upbringing, and innumerable other factors." Still, there have already been some major success stories in genomic medicine. Most recently, DNA sequencing has led to a 'miracle' drug that treats spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), the most common genetic cause of death in childhood. The drug has recently been approved by the FDA. Combined with patient-generated data and computer-powered analysis of big data, precision medicine seems like an obvious next step. It will take time and cost money but once the task of digitising healthcare is finished, it promises a slicker, more efficient system with better diagnosis and treatment. "You can't assume everyone has average Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or depression. They have their own properties," says Dr Tosun. "Precision Medicine is the solution, it's something we need to do." This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.

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Hold your nerves Stress wrecks too many days before they've even begun. It creeps up as soon as the alarm jerks you awake. Fingers reflexively unlock your phone. Emails bound in with a jolly ping: things you should have done last week; pointless meeting requests; bills to pay. Over a gobbled breakfast you scan the headlines: wall-to-wall misery and pointlessness. On the train you turn to social media for relief. Gillian is funnier than you. Alex got promoted again. Laura's sunning herself in Thailand. You're here, packed in, surrounded but alone, rattling your way towards another overstretched day in an unfulfilling role. There's talk of redundancies and an appointment with the boss looms. Thoughts turn to your dream job. Your heart rate steps up again. Even if you had the energy to fill in the form, you wouldn't get the job. Besides, your sneezing neighbour's probably just infected you with the Zika virus. Stress. We know what it feels like, we can smell it on others, we complain about it most days. But what is it? Now that's a slippery question. Apparently, we're living through an epidemic of it. Latest figures from the UK government's Health and Safety Executive state that stress cost the economy nearly 10m working days last year. Forty-three per cent of all sick days were chalked up to stress. Across the Atlantic, a major 2014 survey conducted by radio network NPR showed that 49 per cent of Americans reported a major stress event in the last year. In 2013 US doctors wrote 76m unique prescriptions for anti-anxiety drugs Xanax and Ativan. With the media pushing images of stress-induced heart disease, strokes, obesity, depression, ulcers and cancer, it's hard not to conclude that stress kills. But consider this: just a century ago nobody got stressed. They suffered with their nerves; got a touch of the vapours; they worried; but they were never stressed. Stress happened to metals subjected to powerful forces and to syllables in elocution classes. In fact, our current view of stress – what it is, what it feels like, and when it is harmful – evolved surprisingly recently. This matters. Recent research shows that the way we think about stress has a profound influence on how it affects us. There is no doubt that prolonged, uncontrollable stress – particularly if suffered in childhood – can be profoundly corrosive and debilitating. But what of the familiar stresses of day-to-day life? Are they actually damaging you? Might the belief that stress is harmful be self-fulfilling? And what would a stress-free life really look like? Instead of turning in on ourselves and doing battle with our personal stress demons, might we be able to put their diabolic energy to good use? Pull back for a moment from your daily hustle and you'll see that many of us are incurably hooked on stress. We thrive on it. We get a kick out of surviving the high-stakes presentation, meeting the deadline and overcoming our fears and prejudices. Watching a thriller, we're on the edge of our seats, pulses racing. Sports, on the field or on television, can propel us into "fight or flight" mode. Humanity's fascination with gambling hinges on stress. If the most skilled physiologists in the world could peer beneath the skin of a thrill-seeker on a rollercoaster and an out-of-their-depth job interview candidate, they'd struggle to tell them apart. Deep in the brain, they'd see a structure called the hypothalamus fired up. With each lurch of the ride or disarming question asked, the hypothalamus signals to the adrenal glands, which sit atop each kidney. The adrenals then squirt a shot of adrenaline into the bloodstream. In the background, the hypothalamus prods the pituitary gland, which passes a different message on to the adrenal gland. This ups the production of cortisol, the textbook 'stress hormone'. Flipping these key biological switches triggers the familiar bodily symptoms of stress: a pounding heart, raised blood pressure, dilated pupils, arrested digestion and a damped-down immune system. In both cases, the biological stress response would look very similar. Even if we could eliminate stress entirely, or smother it with pharmaceuticals, we wouldn't want to. To muzzle the stress response is to silence the good as well as the bad. At best, stress can motivate us to achieve more and fix the sources of our stress. Boredom is stressful in its own way: ask a caged lion, or an understimulated teenager. In fact, as animal psychologist Francoise Wemelsfelder told New Scientist recently, boredom may exist to spur us back into activity. This half-forgotten idea, that some degree of stress can inspire and elevate, is common sense. It also has deep roots in the earliest scientific study of stress and stress responses. Back at the beginning of the 20th century, two American psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dodson, wanted to know how stressing out lab mice affected their learning. They set the rodents navigational challenges and punished wrong turns with small electric shocks to the feet. In their terminology, larger electric currents caused greater 'arousal'. They spotted some consistent trends. When they gave mice an easy task (choosing between a black or a white tunnel, achieved by different lighting) the relationship between the strength of the shock and the speed of learning was simple. The greater the stressor, the quicker the mice learned to pick the right tunnel. When the challenge was subtler (differentiating between grey tunnels), the response was less straightforward. Weak shocks provided little impetus to learn, but as the zaps got stronger, the mice gradually upped their game. They focused on the task and remembered the consequences of wrong choices. Yet, at a certain point, the high stress levels that helped with the easy task became counterproductive. Overwhelmed, the mice skittered around at random, vainly trying to escape. On a graph, the relationship between stress and performance on onerous tasks traces an inverted U-shape. Some degree of stress helps, but there is a clear tipping point, beyond which stress becomes paralysing. These findings became the Yerkes-Dodson law. This was all very well for mice, but could it be applied to the vagaries of human existence? According to Canadian-Austrian endocrinogist Hans Selye, the 'father of stress', it could. It was 10-times Nobel prize nominee Selye who first described the key glands, hormones and nerves of the biological stress response during the 1930s and 40s. Selye was also one of the first to apply the word 'stress' to human biology (he once quipped that he might have chosen a different word had his grasp of English been better). For Selye, 'stress' described an all-purpose response the body had to any demand placed upon it. When stress is on the upswing of Yerkes and Dodsons' inverted-U performance curve, Selye calls it 'eustress'. This is where good teachers and managers should push their charges: to the sweet spot that separates predictable tedium from chaotic overload. When stress gets more persistent, unmanageable and damaging, Selye called it 'distress'. Eustress and distress have identical biological bases, they are simply found at different points on the same curve. We know this, but today stress has a terrible public image, often synonymous with distress. While some wear their stress as a badge of honour ("I'm important enough to be stressed," they think), deep down even the most gung-ho City workers probably stress about their stress. And in painting stress as a beast, we grant it more destructive power. When did we come to view stress as the universal enemy? Mark Petticrew, Professor of Public Health Evaluation at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, has sifted through a huge archive of historical tobacco industry documents. He revealed that a large proportion of stress research during the second half of the 20th century was funded, steered and manipulated by this most unexpected of benefactors. From the late 1950s, Hans Selye himself received hundreds of thousands of tobacco-stained dollars. He also allowed industry lawyers to vet his research and appeared in several pro-tobacco propaganda films. "They put a massive, massive amount of money into it," Petticrew told me. "This isn't a side story in the history of stress." Why were tobacco manufacturers so interested in stress? First of all cigarettes were marketed as a stress reliever. "To anxiety… I bring relief," reads a 1930s advertisement for Lucky Strike. So if research could help them pin poor mental and physical health to stress, this sort of message would carry more weight. (Incidentally, the still widespread belief that smoking reduces anxiety appears to be wrong). Later, as evidence that smoking caused cancer and heart disease piled up, the tobacco industry became hell-bent on proving that stress was an equally significant risk factor. They used the authority of Selye and several other leading stress researchers as a smokescreen (pardon the pun). "Doubt is our product," read a leading tobacco industry executive's 1969 memo. And so doubt they sowed. Time and again they argued that stress was a major cause of disease. Those seeking to control tobacco were barking up the wrong tree, they claimed. It worked: they convinced the general public of the evils of stress and diverted public health research for at least a decade. With tobacco regulation and compensation payouts postponed, the profits kept rolling in. So should we doubt the veracity and neutrality of all the foundational research into stress as disease? "I wouldn't want to argue that stress doesn't exist, or that it isn't bad for your health and certainly your mental health," says Petticrew. "But you can't ignore this story." He goes on to describe concrete 'findings' that industry-funded researchers got wrong. Prominent among these was a link between coronary disease and people displaying so-called 'Type A' personality traits: competitiveness, ambition and anxiety. Such temperamentally 'stressed' people were especially likely to suffer heart attacks and, not coincidentally, to smoke. Then the association simply faded away. "Aside from the scientific weaknesses, which are many, Type A is a cultural artefact to some extent constructed by the tobacco lobby," says Petticrew. Despite its fragile foundations, the Type A myth persists today. Pettigrew calls such research, which continues to be published despite repeatedly negative findings, 'zombie science'. The long shadow cast by decades of one-sided, propaganda-laced stress research has led many of us to believe that stress is a direct cause of heart attacks. But the British Heart Foundation's website clearly states, "There is no evidence to suggest that stress causes coronary heart disease or heart attacks." Nor does it cause stomach ulcers: a bacterium called H. pylori does that. Yet the tobacco-funded researchers didn't get it all wrong. Stress does have clear causal links to some diseases, particularly mental illnesses including depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia and addictive behaviour. High stress levels do appear to be a general risk factor for early death, particularly for middle-aged men. Moreover, we all know how unpleasant stress can be. From insomnia to binge eating and boozing, we respond to stress with all sorts of counterproductive and antisocial behaviours. And that's partly why the tone of messages we hear about stress matters so much. Humans are inherently suggestible and particularly vulnerable to warning messages about our health, especially when those messages seem to be backed by science. With mice in a cage, you can measure the tipping point – the precise current of the electric shock – where good stress becomes bad. You can see how many weeks of stress cause adrenal glands to enlarge and immune systems to wither. But when it comes to humankind, we don't need the lurking menace of a lion in the long grass to activate our stress response. We can do it perfectly well for ourselves. All it takes is a negative thought, the memory of an insult, or a vague feeling of unease. So, we can think our way into stress. And, as recent evidence shows, if we believe stress is going to hurt us, it is more likely to hurt us. This is one message emerging from the Whitehall II project, a long-term study of 10,000 UK government civil servants, set up in 1985 to study the social, economic and personal determinants of health and disease. A 2013 analysis of Whitehall II data concluded that people who believe stress adversely affects their health are more than twice as likely to suffer a heart attack, regardless of the amount of stress they appear to be under. There is a flipside to this gloomy news, though. If our thoughts and beliefs can switch on a damaging stress response, mightn't they also switch it off? Could the power of suggestion be a partial vaccination in the battle against the stress epidemic? This is the contention of Alia Crum, an ambitious young psychology professor at Stanford University. Crum is a flagbearer for the on-trend science of mindset manipulations. In 2007 she showed that if hotel chambermaids come to think of their work as exercise, they lose weight and their blood pressure falls, apparently without working any harder. And in 2011 Crum showed that if we consume a healthy snack dressed as a calorie-laden indulgence, the power of belief dupes our hormonal appetite system into feeling sated. More recently she turned her attention to our core beliefs about stress. Crum's unlikely collaborators were 388 employees of UBS bank, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. This was a time of turmoil, layoffs and uncertainty at the firm. Stress was rife. Crum wanted to know how these overworked bankers thought about stress and whether she could change their convictions. She split the bank workers into three groups. A small control group got no training. Over the course of a week, the other two groups were shown three different short training videos. Superficially the videos were similar: they talked about stress and its effects on mind and body. One group's films dealt with disease risk, anxiety, depression and distraction. They showed basketball ace LeBron James missing a decisive shot under pressure, implying stress is debilitating. In the other videos LeBron sinks his basket, the message being that stress sharpens attention, boosts cognition, enhances relationships and forces fresh perspectives: it is life-enhancing. The UBS staff subtly changed their views. The ‘stress is enhancing’ group took on a more positive stance and reported being more productive, focused and collaborative. They also reported less depression and anxiety, and even a reduction in symptoms like back pain and insomnia. Curiously, The ‘stress is debilitating’ group didn't get any worse, perhaps because they already shared the widespread pessimistic view of stress. Although the results aren't exactly transformative, it seems that by changing how we think about stress, we can temper the stress response. Over a lifetime of minor and major stresses, even relatively subtle drops in anxiety levels and a little less strain on the cardiovascular system could translate into significant boons for physical and psychological health. The inescapable conclusion is this: the human mind is a powerful gatekeeper to the stress response. But we have to tread carefully here. UBS employees may have the freedom to choose a less stressful life, and find opportunity to reshape their stress mindsets. But what about those whose stress is delivered early and compounded by a lifetime of disadvantage and adversity? In his book The Health Gap, UCL Professor Sir Michael Marmot describes a prototypical young man growing up in a rundown part of Glasgow: "Life expectancy 54 years, subject to physical and sexual abuse from a succession of male partners of his mother; moving house about once every 18 months; entering school with behavioural problems, which then led on to delinquency, gang violence, and spells in prison. At various times, psychiatrists labelled him as having personality disorder, anxiety, depression, and antisocial tendencies." To blame him for succumbing to his stressful circumstances and having the wrong mindset would be absurd. Marmot continues: "It is true that tobacco, alcohol, drugs, and an appalling diet, along with liberal indulgence in violence, are major contributors to his ill health, but the causes of the causes are his tragic life history." Marmot describes why the conventional fixes to socioeconomic disadvantage – healthcare provision, lifestyle education, housing schemes, youth centres and the like – may be off beam. He argues instead that we need to look at the mind: "The mind is the major gateway through which social circumstances lead to health inequalities. It is not what you have that is important for health, but what you can do with what you have." Perhaps this is where the story of familiar workaday stress and the grinding strain of social injustice come together. Stress only gets under our skin when we can't see the end or spot the fix. It is only truly distressing when it feels out of control. So what, other than using Crum's mindset interventions, can we do to restore the critical feeling of empowerment? Most reports of the 'stress epidemic' paint stress as a private enemy: something to battle with, resist or evade. The industries that have emerged to combat stress – self-help, stress management, therapy and the like – doubtless help many to cope. But even their emphasis on 'coping' and 'resilience' inadvertently bolsters the 'stress is debilitating' mindset. These approaches also tend to promote personal introspection. Certainly, faced with personal challenges, family turmoil and professional adversity, many of us turn in on ourselves, insulating ourselves from the social world, which seems to be the source of so much stress. Yet according to Yale psychologist Emily Ansell, looking up from your navel and reaching out a kindly hand to your fellow human beings can be surprisingly helpful. In a study published last year, Ansell and colleagues gave a group of 77 people a diary-like smartphone app. They asked them to record all the stressful incidents they encountered, and any minor acts of kindness they performed, during a 14-day period. These data show that gestures like holding doors for strangers and helping the elderly across the road buffer the effects of stress and make you feel measurably more positive. "It's not just whether you're more altruistic than the next person," Ansell told NPR. "It's that being more altruistic than usual can change your experience from day to day. It's all about doing more than your average." Mobile technology now helps us reach out directly to those buckling under stress. Koko is a slick app developed by a team at the MIT media lab, which puts the hive mind to work on counselling and therapy. Wired described it as, "What you'd get if you were to combine the swiping gesture of Tinder, the anonymity of Whisper, the upvoting of Reddit, and the earnestness of old-fashioned forums." Koko users write on the app's digital noticeboard, giving short summaries of their stress and anxiety, ranging from workplace insecurities to more entrenched depression, anxiety and inner turmoil. Other, anonymous users then offer constructive ideas to rethink and reframe the problem. Launched last June, Koko is now used in 155 countries. The early signs are that it works. Amid the ocean of unproven and gimmicky 'stress-busting' apps out there, here is one that has some hard evidence behind it. In a 2015 clinical trial, Koko's web-based predecessor showed promise as a tool for managing depression. Koko has recently been repackaged, to help people tackle everyday stress, as well as depression. Koko co-creator Rob Morris thinks that giving advice may be even more beneficial than getting it. "Helping others can help build feelings of self-efficacy. Many of our users describe feeling more empowered to help themselves after observing their successes when helping others," he tells me. While the acts of kindness recommended by psychologist Ansell and Koko's forum for constructive stress 'reframing' may only be behavioural tweaks, they could hint at where more fundamental solutions might lie. By emphasising the power of reaching out to others, they also remind us that loneliness is a uniquely toxic source of stress. It appears to be on the rise, especially in the developed world, where its cuts across age and social class. As UCLA Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry Steven Cole told Pacific Standard magazine, "Social isolation is the best-established, most robust social or psychological risk factor for disease out there. Nothing can compete." Thrill-seekers, work-junkies and young lovers remind us that stress can be a source of great energy. But left unchecked it's often a frustrating and self-defeating power. What if we could learn to divert some of that potency away from our private battles and into forging connections with those around us? Positive interactions deliver a reward at the neurological level. They restore a sense of control and show that meaningful relationships are possible. Give it a try as you struggle to work next Monday. See how it feels to lift some pushchairs, offer directions and return a few smiles. If you can make the time it also pays to aim higher: try volunteering or helping more vulnerable members of your community or family. Ansell's and other studies have shown that helping others cushions stress. Moreover, helpers often get more psychological and health benefits than those on the receiving end of that help. Michael Poulin, a professor of psychology at the University of Buffalo, is so convinced of this counterintuitive finding that he ended a recent academic paper with this proposition: "At-risk populations are frequently advised to seek support from their social networks. A less common message, but one that perhaps deserves more prominence, is for them to support others as well." Poulin's hunch is that helping others works as the ultimate distractor: "In disengaging from one's self-focused concerns to help others, the sources of stress on one's own life decrease in perceived importance and thus impact on one's own well-being." And it's no good just going through the motions; you've got to believe in what you are doing. "Only if you genuinely commit to the goal of caring for another's welfare do you have cause to disengage [from your own stress]." So how do we encourage prosocial behaviour throughout society, particularly at the underprivileged margins? According to Paul Piff, a social psychologist at UC Irvine, lower-class individuals in America tend to "have less and give more". They are more generous, charitable, trusting and helpful than their upper-class counterparts. It's possible that this tendency to reach out and muck in is a direct response to a life of chronic stress. In response to Piff's theory, Poulin suggests, "We should perhaps really focus on encouraging prosocial behaviour among the well-off, potentially leading both to benefits for them – in terms of stress – and for the disadvantaged, who would presumably benefit from their generosity." From this outward-facing perspective, it's easy to see the value of social prescriptions. Although they are sometimes perceived as box-ticking exercises to complement the real work of providing homes, healthcare and jobs, the more delicate job of building a sense of community may actually be at the centre of the game. Development that is imposed from on high can increase a feeling of disempowerment. At times of pressure it is this more fragile sense of control that has the potential to convert stress into a constructive force rather than a destructive one. This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.

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How Scotland is tackling the democratic deficit, from the ground up On a chilly February morning in Glasgow, Stephanie Anthony and her three-year-old son Ilan are perching on a log in front of a small bonfire. They are making popcorn with kernels, using two sieves tied together with string, and are surrounded by a warm circle of toddlers, mums, dads, aunties, grannies and childminders from the local area. A few yards away, Monroe, two, is also 'cooking', sloshing earth and grass carefully in a saucepan in the mud kitchen. Preschoolers Reuben and Benjamin are making a woodchip path, wheeling little barrows back and forth from a large pile. On the adjoining meadow, dogs and their owners enjoy a stroll and a chat. A colourful signpost arrow points straight ahead for 'Wonderland'. It is an urban idyll of sorts. This piece of vacant land on the edge of Glasgow's residential west end – known as the Children's Wood and North Kelvin Meadow – would probably be a building site now if left up to Glasgow City Council. But in December, after a five-year campaign to keep it in use for the community as wild space, the Scottish Government overruled the local authority, which had granted permission for luxury flats to be built on the site. The sale of land to developer New City Vision was stopped in its tracks. Campaigners are now looking at the possibility of community buy-out to ensure it continues to be used by local nurseries, primary and secondary schools – as well as the group's own forest schools, outdoor play, gardening groups and others. "I don't think the council realised how much it meant to us," says Anthony. "We've fought so hard. But if local democracy had been working we wouldn't have had to fight against the lobbying of private companies." There is a growing sense – from activities, academics and political commentators alike – that we are experiencing a clear democracy deficit. Questions are being raised about that the legitimacy of the politicians supposed to serve us. Does voting alone constitute democracy? At the last general election, around two-thirds of those able to vote did so, while in local elections only about 26 per cent turn up to polling stations. And it is particularly the poor – and the young – who don't participate and for whom policies are not created. The issue is brought into sharpest focus at a local level. Two years ago research by Scotland's first Commission on Strengthening Local Democracy claimed radical democracy reform was needed in response to "unacceptable levels of inequality". And it is in Scotland, where many became politically emboldened and active – sometimes for the first time – during the 2014 independence referendum, there is a growing movement to realise that reform. November saw the launch of Our Democracy: Act as if we own the place, a year-long coalition campaign that will see events held across Scotland to encourage citizens to imagine what their community would look like if they made the decisions, even for a day. Groups will then be encouraged to take steps to make those changes happen. Willie Sullivan, director of the Electoral Reform Society Scotland, and author of The Missing Scotland, about the million-plus Scots who don't vote, claims the grassroots approach is key. "Real democracy needs people to come together to debate and come up with ideas," he says. "Yet simply voting doesn't allow for discussion or debate. "The promise of democracy is that you all have an equal voice. Yet the greatest inequality is the inequality of power. That's part of the breakdown of trust. People know that there are some who can pull those levers of power while others cannot access them." Reports will be written up following each planned meeting – from Dundee to Inverness to Kirriemuir in Angus – and submitted to the Scottish government's consultation on the decentralisation of government. The scope for its plans is currently being finalised. "In Scotland we are always told to manage people's expectations," Sullivan says. "But in this case we want to raise them, to give them confidence that we don't need to wait for permission. There is a bubbling feeling that maybe we can do it ourselves." Emily Cutts, who initiated the Children's Wood just after the birth of her second child, can relate to that. The power of positive thinking was crucial, she claims, in turning a waste ground into a nurturing place for the whole community. "Everything that we did was guerrilla," she says. "My intention was to signal that we'd won from the beginning." Yet it was an uphill struggle. Councillors told them the planned development was a done deal, others said the Children's Wood was a nice idea that would never work. So they set about making it official, registering the playgroup, getting nurseries and schools using the land and organising community events from storytelling to fireside songs. One of the most important things, according to Coutts, was to be optimistic. "And even when it felt like we'd had a setback we also found solutions." Look around Glasgow – a city known for its fighting talk – and there is plenty to inspire. Kinning Park Complex, in the city's southside, is a former primary school turned community centre, which the council decided to close 21 years ago this May. The locals had other ideas, squatting the building for 55 days and saving it for the deprived areas surrounding it. A few miles further south, Govanhill Baths started running its first swimming lessons 16 years ago last month. Here too it was a local community occupation, and a hard won campaign, that brought it back to life after council closure. Robin McAlpine, director of the Common Weal, a "think and do tank" set up ahead of the Independence Referendum, has huge admiration for these campaigns and others like them. But the fact that they are needed at all makes him downright angry. "If you had a functioning local democracy you wouldn't need to fight like this," he says, fresh from the frustrations of trying to help a group in Aberdeen stop land being sold off to developers. They can't get legal advice and the odds are stacked against them. Examples of similar power imbalances litter the country. In Edinburgh campaigners in the Old Town are fighting on a range of fronts to stop what they see as the overdevelopment of the World Heritage site. And across Scotland – from Stirlingshire to Aberdeenshire and beyond – communities are fighting off development plans. "If there's one thing that is truly exhausting it is taking on a bureaucracy when you don't have one of your own," says McAlpine. "I've seen people burn out so many times. When you are campaigning for something like this you are always fighting against a better-resourced opponent." "When you ask local politicians about it they say all people care about is getting their bins emptied. In fact they care deeply about other values, about their local area, families and communities. To say otherwise is just wrong." For him there is another way – participatory democracy that would see communities take on the issues that mattered – by establishing a Citizen's Assembly to act as a second chamber to the Scottish Parliament. In coming weeks Common Weal will launch a paper on the proposal in which they suggest selecting a random, representative sample of 73 members of the public to fulfil this role for at least one year. It is proposing a two-year trial that he says could help revolutionise democracy. Interest in sortition, which sees citizens selected at random in response to the belief that power corrupts, is growing worldwide. But for its critics it's difficult to imagine what it would mean in practice. At one charity in Govan, Glasgow's former shipbuilding area, a version of sorts already exists. Galgael, which aims to rebuild both individuals and the community through purposeful activity, from boat-building to carving and selling surplus timber, holds a monthly assembly for volunteers and staff, as part of its commitment to a democratic model. Though there is also a board, the important decisions are taken here. Galgael was founded in 1997 by Gehan Macleod and her visionary husband Colin, who died in 2005 aged just 39. It was born out of Pollok Free State, an early 90s treetop occupation Colin instigated to protest against the building of the M77 through the public woodlands in the city's Pollok Park. They failed to stop the road but succeeded in creating a community with new skills and purpose; and brought that back to Govan. Today Macleod is facilitating the assembly with warmth and honesty, helping identify issues and open up discussion with compassion and a lack of blame. Respectful disagreement is encouraged and solutions are jointly found. "Our health is affected by decisions made on personal, professional and state levels," says Macleod, who also believes that the process of how decisions are made, not just their outcome, really matters. For many in this room the experience of being heard has been life-changing. Michael O'Neill, who now lives in Clydebank but is originally from Govan, started volunteering here after being made redundant and suffering a breakdown of sorts. "I ended up just sitting in my house looking at the four walls and leaving my wife and two kids to get on with it," he says. Three years later he's working in the workshop, welding, cutting wood, delivery driving and whatever else needs doing. "When you come here nobody judges you and you can speak your mind. If you make a mistake it's no big deal; it's how you learn. For me it's been like therapy. I think if places like this were widespread people would see life differently." Up on the tiny Isle of Eigg, just south of Skye, Maggie Fyffe, secretary of the Eigg Heritage Trust, knows only too well the difference that community ownership makes. In June 2017, islanders will also celebrate the 20th anniversary of the community buy-out, which saw them go on to run their own affairs and develop the world's first completely renewable energy grid. "When the island was in private ownership we couldn't do anything," she says. "In the nineties the island was pretty depressed. All that changed after the community buy-out. "There's now a culture of self-sufficiency which has grown; there are endless small businesses up and running as well as large infrastructure projects." Young people are returning, building homes and having families. The future feels bright. "We are not perfect," she admits. "Often it's a case of muddling through. But we are an example of how a bunch of ordinary people can run their own community. You don't know what you can do until you try, do you?" Back at the Children’s Wood, the playgroup is coming to a close. Toddlers clamber off rope swings, reluctantly part with wheelbarrows and wave goodbye to friends before winding their way through the trees on their way home for lunch. Some stop to splash in muddy puddles on the meadow; parents chat as they wait. The community is now in talks with the council about a 25-year lease and is hopeful that it can start on plans to develop a meeting space, complete with solar panels and compost toilet, a treehouse village and wildflower planting to encourage biodiversity in the meadow. Their eyes are also on the future; on a time when these pre-schools will watch their own children jump in puddles, hang out with their neighbours and be able to make sure it's the needs of the community that matter, first and foremost. That, campaigners claim, is what local democracy reform is really all about. This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.

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Moonshots for the Earth At the end of August, as the northern hemisphere's hottest summer on record drew to a close, a group of inventors, designers and engineers assembled in a grand stone castle an hour's drive west of Paris. Château de Millemont was hosting a five-week 'innovation camp' for the pioneers behind 12 new projects, chosen for their contribution to achieving a world without fossil fuels. POC21 (Proof of Concept) was set up as an active, grassroots foil to cop 21, the 21st UN Climate Change conference in Paris, which begins at the end of November. "Global emissions have doubled since the first UN climate summit in 1995," says the POC21 video, amid images of environmental catastrophe, so "Let's move from talking to building a better tomorrow." The objective was to create workable open-source technology in the fields of energy, food and waste – life, basically. Products that made it to the final 12 included a pedal tractor, a smartphone-controlled greenhouse and an antibacterial water filter. Daniel Connell, one of the chosen inventors, travelled to Paris from the UK for the event. He was picked because he'd created an impressive cost- and resource-efficient wind turbine design. You can make it for about £20 out of aluminium sheets, a bike wheel, rivets, washers and nuts and bolts. "It's entirely built from recycled or upcycled materials, and can be assembled by anybody with basic hand or power tools," says Dominik Wind, core organiser of POC21. "While this makes his design a perfect fit for the people that need it most (the poor, the marginalised around the globe), it's also the perfect design to build upon: it's the basis to start from with more customised, possibly also more complex and more expensive iterations." Connell has been creating prototype technologies and tutorials for solar and wind designs while moving around the world over the last 10 years, traversing Canada, France, India and Spain. A 3D animator by trade, he is self-taught – he describes the Solar Flower, a DIY solar energy collector he created, as "my degree" – and set out to make an existing design for a wind turbine cheap and easy for people to use. "Technically, it could be $5 if you just pay for the rivets and get plates and a bike wheel for free," he said. A seasoned squatter, Connell made his project possible by sifting through scrap heaps, fixing up bikes and living on a few pounds a day so he wouldn't have to work and could devote his time to the wind turbine. Connell's ethos is inspired by the self-sufficient communities he grew up in as a child in New Zealand, and that country's culture of ingenuity and making stuff. Since POC21, his product has improved and he's showing it to students, retirees and other people who want to get off grid via workshops. Connell is one of a number of green inventors working to ease the world's transition to climate change. As wildfires spread, countries sink, species go extinct, floods and drought increase, seas rise, storms devastate, glaciers melt, crops fail, pollution decreases life expectancy and the potential for conflict grows, eyes look to the inventors, geniuses and entrepreneurs who surely can figure out a way of saving the planet. When Pope Francis, in an unprecedented speech earlier this year, rejected market solutions for climate change, attacked "unfettered capitalism" and made a forceful moral plea, it raised the question: if individual behavioural changes aren't realistic or enough, can't technology provide a route out of the problem? Where is that technology? And is 'techno-utopianism' realistic in the context of the climate crisis? Major companies are already divesting from fossil fuels – most recently the Rockefeller Foundation, the Church of England and Norway's £900bn sovereign wealth fund – as burnable reserves run out and the climate change threat becomes more apparent; but local attention is also turning to how to transition to a greener world. In the bowels of an east London theatre on a foggy Sunday afternoon a month or so after POC21, a panel discusses whether Hackney Council should divest its pensions away from fossil fuels. "There is an energy transition happening," says Carbon Tracker's Luke Sussams. Dr David McCoy, an expert in global public health, says, "We face an existential threat in terms of eco collapse… My 14-year-old daughter's future does not look good." He explains how global warming will affect disease patterns and prompt conflict over scarce resources. Yet there is some optimism about green developments in electric cars, renewable energies and Tesla's new battery technology. Bill McKibben, the campaigner and author who brought global warming to public consciousness with his 1989 book The End of Nature, and more recently the founder of international pressure group 350.org, is positive and excited about innovation in the green world. "The price of a solar panel dropped 75 per cent in the last six years," he said, speaking from his home in Vermont. "The world's engineers are doing their job; and doing it extraordinarily well." The move to renewable energy is under way. An Apollo-style research programme to make renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels recently won the backing of Sir David Attenborough and high-profile businesspeople, politicians and economists. Even Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, has warned that the "vast majority of reserves are unburnable" if global temperature rises are to be limited to below 2C. But others think that it's not enough, and consider geoengineering to be the grand techno-fix. First presented as a big-idea solution to climate change in the 1960s, geoengineering proposals range from the seemingly fantastical – brightening the clouds; stirring the seas to change their temperature and cool the Earth; turning the ocean into a gigantic bubble bath to reflect the sun; covering the deserts in mirrors and sending parasols into space; mimicking the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions like Mount Pinatubo – to the more mundane: removing carbon from atmosphere and storing it somewhere else. Although a number of scientists and researchers – including the Royal Society, which held a geoengineering 'retreat' in Buckinghamshire in 2011 – think geoengineering is an option worth considering, no one is actually doing it yet. Well, apart from Russ George, the businessman, entrepreneur and "DIY rogue geo-vigilante" who dumped 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific ocean, triggering a 10,000-sq-km plankton bloom (plankton blooms suck carbon out of the atmosphere). Though the efficacy of his actions is still unclear, George was criticised for eco-terrorism, and was said to have contravened UN conventions. The big problem with DIY geoengineering, and any geoengineering for that matter, is its potential for danger: we don't know what would happen. David Keith, a professor of engineering at Harvard who developed a giant air-sucking wall to capture carbon, told the New Yorker's Michael Specter, "It is hyperbolic to say this, but no less true: when you start to reflect light away from the planet, you can easily imagine a chain of events that would extinguish life on Earth." On the other hand, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) doesn't seem, on the face of it, like playing god with our weather systems or trying, fruitlessly, to find a dimmer switch for the sun. A company called Skyonics claims its Skymine process can capture harmful pollutants and turn them into marketable products such as baking soda and bleach. But to what extent can sucking carbon out of the air work? Sabine Mathesius, a climate modeller at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, wanted to see what CDR could achieve if five gigatons (an enormous, hypothetical amount) of carbon dioxide was removed from the atmosphere each year. Simulations found that the impact of this level of removal would not be significant at all, especially in terms of protecting the ocean, which is acidified by human-produced CO2. "In the beginning I was surprised," she said. "Like many people I also hoped that geoengineering could be a way to undo the harm we did with our CO2 emissions. But if you see how much CO2 we can get out of the atmosphere with the current technologies and what we are expected to emit in a business-as-usual scenario, you can already see that the impact of CO2 removal cannot be that big." CDR could be used as a supporting measure to avoid the worst scenario if emissions are reduced at the same time, Mathesius concluded. "What is not possible is just emitting the CO2 as usual and further expanding our industries and then using CDR to get the CO2 out of the atmosphere. Reducing emissions is the cheapest way to keep the CO2 levels low; and also the easiest way." More promising technologies, such as bioenergy with carbon capture or artificial trees, would also require fertile land or would cost astronomic amounts, Mathesius says. So where then would she place her hope in terms of a techno-fix to solve climate change? "Clean energy to make it easier for people to emit less CO2." Carbon capture and storage gets short shrift from McKibben. "If you step back and think about it for a minute, it's silly," he says. "You can do it, obviously, but can you do it at a cost that makes any kind of sense? You can't. No one's been able to yet. You're way better off just building the windmills in the first place. All it is is a solution designed to try and appease the power of the coal industry and offer them some kind of future." Those looking into this techno-fix are quite clear that solar radiation management or carbon capture is no substitute for reducing carbon emissions anyway. Bodies such as the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative (SRMGI) and the Royal Society contain wary caveats, that geoengineering is not an alternative to reducing carbon consumption. McKibben calls them an "absurd set of ideas where people throw up their hands and say, 'There's no way we can solve this problem, so instead let's fill the atmosphere with sulphur'." On the last day of April, Elon Musk entered the stage at his Tesla Design Centre in Hawthorne, California to thumping dubstep, whoops and ripples of applause. The billionaire business magnate nodded to the crowd of adoring fans and set out his vision for a complete transformation of how the world works. His 20-minute speech explained how a new invention – the Powerwall battery – would advance a complete overhaul of the world's energy infrastructure. "This is how it is today… it sucks," Musk began, gesturing to slides depicting factories belching out smoke. The solution to getting from fossil fuel hell to a renewable-powered future, he explained, was his new product. Because "existing batteries suck," he had developed the Tesla Powerwall: a wall-mounted, household battery on sale for $3,500 (£2,300). His statements were punctuated by cheers and screams from the crowd, especially when he revealed that the whole event had been powered by solar and Powerwall. Musk believes that transitioning to electric cars and solar energy will contain the worst effects of climate change. His electric cars are improving all the time; the mass-market model is expected to be ready before 2020. Tesla open-sourced all its patents and technology in 2014 to encourage other people to advance the electric vehicle industry; and lots of major names in the automobile world have followed with designs for electric cars. "We need the entire automotive industry to remake, and quickly," said McKibben. Musk has also proposed the Hyperloop, a new transport system he describes as "a cross between Concorde, a railgun and a hockey table". Advances in batteries radically change the picture of renewable energy, electric cars and transport systems; and important improvements are happening. At the end of October 2015, a group of Cambridge scientists made a major breakthrough with a rechargeable super-battery that can hold five times more energy as those we're used to and can power a car from London to Edinburgh on a single charge. Improved battery storage will change everything for green energy enthusiasts like Daniel Connell in the next few years. "This is why, apart from [a lack of] political will, we don't have renewable energy: because storage levels don't reach grid level. But before the end of the decade they will," he explains. One of the projects chosen for POC21, the French eco-castle retreat, was a design by a team from Berlin. Sunzilla, a diesel generator without diesel, fuelled by the sun, can be assembled by anyone. Germany is leading the way in the energy revolution with its energiewende , driven by Green politicians and the support of local citizens. In 2014, just over a quarter of German energy came from renewable sources; in 2050, the goal is 80 per cent. The German Green Party politician Ralf Fücks, author of a new book called Green Growth, Smart Growth, is a techno-optimist with faith in society's ability to find a way out of the ecological crisis, although he cautions against the hubris of large-scale techno-fixes. Investment in green technologies and renewable energies are more realistic, he writes, than carbon capture and storage. Fücks speak slowly, carefully and with an obvious delight in the natural world. "Spider silk is a wonderful substance," he says at one point. "It's more flexible than rubber and more solid than steel and we now have the skills to discover [its] molecular composition." He cites the smooth skin of the shark and the self-cleaning surface of the lotus blossom as examples of biological productivity we can learn from and use for our own purposes, while decreasing CO2 emissions. But biomimicry is in its early stages, and renewables have already crossed to the point of no return, as Fücks puts it. On the plus side, though, costs for solar and wind power have decreased considerably over the last five years. Fücks sees opportunities for young entrepreneurs and startups in a world without global celebrities such as Bill Gates or Richard Branson. The environmental reform of industrial society, in his view, demands a combination of big and small. There is room for more Elon Musks. The world of food is fertile ground for big ideas and green tech innovation. Last summer saw the publication of new technology proposals to turn the waste shells of prawn, crab and lobster into nitrogen-rich chemicals for use, say, in pharmaceuticals, carbon sequestration and animal feed, which would avoid industrial production using fossil fuels. Farmers, too, are innovating worldwide. In Devon, Rebecca Hosking is using new land management techniques to make a contribution to fighting climate change. She uses a grazing method that purposely locks atmospheric carbon back into the soil. Instead of ploughing, her long-grass grazing technique keeps carbon in the roots, ploughing release-carbon from soil into the atmosphere. The more organic matter there is in the ground, the more it can trap in the carbon. "Once you lock it in, and as long as you don't plough or let your grassland dry out, then the carbon stays in the soil," she says. "You know that climate change is happening, we do our bit and suck out as much carbon as we can." This method, which French farmers are also keen to implement, is similar in the way it works to a new, low-methane, genetically modified rice. SUSIBA2, the new rice, uses smaller roots, and produces less methane, one of the chief greenhouse gases. Scientists have also developed a feed supplement for dairy cows that could reduce methane emissions by 30 per cent. Global warming is posing serious challenges to water supply; and we all know that the melting of glaciers is one detrimental effect of climate change. Cue another climate hero: Chewang Norphel, an 80-year-old retired civil engineer, has made 12 artificial glaciers in the last 30 years to provide water for the people of Ladakh, India. The Ice Man, as he is called, realised he could divert water through canals into frozen ice sheets, which would melt in spring and provide water for irrigation, agriculture and general local use. "Getting water during the sowing period is the most crucial concern of the farmers because the natural glaciers start melting in the month of June and sowing starts in April and May," he told online news portal the Better India. Ocean farmers are also growing kelp again to encourage a move away from environmentally costly meat-based diets. Indeed, 3D ocean farming proponents GreenWave quote a study that found a network of seaweed farms the size of Washington state could provide all the dietary protein for the entire world population. Pope Francis's recent address sounded a note of caution around technology as a solution to climate change. "Our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience," he said. Bill McKibben believes the key is solving the "structural systemic problem rooted in the balance of political power on our planet." To make a difference, he says, an individual must "join with other people to build the kind of movement that can change those balances of power." In Naomi Klein's book This Changes Everything, she writes about the Hollywood action movie narrative that tells us that, at the very last minute, some of us are going to be saved: "Since our secular religion is technology, it won't be god that saves us but Bill Gates and his gang of super-geniuses at Intellectual Ventures." But, while some techno-fixes recall the Greek hubris myth of Icarus, there is work to be done and hope to be found. Around the world, people are working to improve 3D printing technology and the usability of tutorials to explain how to make Connell's DIY wind turbine or the German Sunzilla. Demand Logic, a company based in London, is using data to sweep big, commercial buildings in the city and work out where energy savings can be made. Of the UN Climate Conference in Paris, McKibben says it will be most interesting to see whether countries will come up with the money to help poor countries leapfrog technologically. But he maintains that engineers and innovators are focusing their efforts in the right place, speeding up the transition from fossil fuels. Despite the Pope's cautionary note, the industry of technology is crucial in the shift to a newly balanced planet. McKibben praised the good, cheap solar panels we already have, but said they could be much more efficient and easier to adopt. "There's no shortage of crucial and interesting work for architects, engineers and financiers, and none of it requires telling yourself science fiction stories, the way that you have to if all you can think of is, 'Let's put a giant piece of film in space to block the sun'." Photographs courtesy of POC21: first photograph published via Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0, second and third images via CC BY-SA 2.0 This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.

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Futures not of our making After listening to Travis Kalanick, CEO and co-founder of Uber, explain why his world-conquering ride-hailing service is ultimately better for drivers than the taxi industry, Stephen Colbert, host of The Late Show, queried his grand plans: "I know you talk about how good this is for drivers, but you said you want, like, self-driving Uber cars… that's not for the driver, [you're] employing robots at that point. How is that helping livery drivers?" Kalanick responded by shifting the conversation: Google is doing the driverless thing. Tesla is doing the driverless thing. Apple is doing the driverless thing. This is going to be the world. So a question for a tech company is, do you want to be part of the future or do you want to resist the future? Driverless cars are the future. If that doesn't appeal to you, blame automation; blame Silicon Valley. Don't blame Uber. Now, Travis Kalanick's vision of the future may indeed come to fruition, and taxi drivers, long-haul truckers and (eventually) train conductors may in fact need to begin looking for new jobs. But what struck me about his oft-repeated response was the way that it so subtly but effectively controlled the narrative around automation and the future. By maintaining that the future is predetermined, Kalanick manoeuvred us, the public, into a position where we, too, are seemingly left with just two choices: resist that future, or embrace it. Of course, this is not the case: every technological advance involves human agency, and so there are choices available to us, but Kalanick's response circumvents this. We shouldn't get in the way of technological determinism. In the context of politics, Patricia Dunmire has written that such language works to "supplant the notion of the future as the site of the possible with a conception of the future as inevitable". This then limits the ability of people to "imagine, articulate and realise futures" different to ones handed down by those in power. My concern is that if we allow tech companies to similarly cast the future as determined, they can avoid engaging in a meaningful discussion about the consequences and implications of new technologies like self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI), or machine learning. Unsurprisingly, Kalanick is far from the first industry boss to frame the future of automation in this way. Industrialists, engineers and scientists in mid-20th-century America deployed many of these same narratives in similar attempts to control the discourse around technology and 'the future'. Examining how these narratives were deployed in the past can offer insight into how they are currently being used today – and what to do about it. The planners of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, for instance, took quite a deterministic view of the relationship between society and technological advance, which the guidebook for the fair encapsulated, in one of the great chapter headings of the 20th century: 'Science Finds – Industry Applies – Man Conforms'. The guidebook went on to explain: "Science discovers, genius invents, industry applies, and man adapts himself to, or is moulded by, new things… Individuals, groups, entire races of men fall into step with the slow or swift movement of the march of science and industry." As well as conjuring images of a certain goose-stepping hyena scene from The Lion King, this description casts technological progress as the prime mover within society. Technological advancement is imagined as a train travelling briskly down the tracks toward a singular destination – a destination that will not only be revolutionary but unquestionably beneficial for all. The public just needs to climb aboard. The National Association of Manufacturers put its own unique spin on this well-worn metaphor in 1954 when it said: "[G]eared to the smooth, effortless workings of automation, the magic carpet of our free economy heads for distant and undreamed of horizons. Just going along for the ride will be the biggest thrill on earth." Yet, for as much as technological advances are often framed as revolutionary, they are also often framed as simply evolutionary . While new automative technologies like electric limit switches, photoelectric controls, or microprocessors were described as revolutionary advances that would greatly benefit industrialists and consumers alike, these same advances were also described as merely the next step in the slow and gradual evolution of industrial technique. Adopting this approach, a 1955 General Electric film/advertisement entitled This is Automation described recent advances in automation as the latest in long line of "natural evolution in industry" that had "worked to the advantage of everyone". This not only served to naturalise automatic processes at a time when the US Congress was meeting to discuss concerns about automation, it also served to rewrite the history of automation extending backward to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. "Before the word automation was coined", the film explained, advances in manufacturing "seemed funny or fearful, depending on the viewpoint… The trouble was, some people thought of automation as a sudden thing – a revolutionary idea. But it isn't! It began nearly two hundred years ago". The message, then, was that automation was not new, and therefore need not be foreboding; what had benefited society in the past would benefit society in the future. After all, did not labourers in the 1950s enjoy better working conditions, shorter hours, and greater purchasing power compared to their equals a century before? The 'natural evolution' of automation would ensure that labourers in 2050 would be similarly better off. Such an account, however, makes no mention of the decades of work done by unions to secure those benefits or the legislation passed to ingrain certain rights as law. Two hundred years of automation are made to seem almost automatically beneficial. As a result, we're led to believe that the future of automation will require equally little in the way of regulation or action by labour unions. In a very real, very Orwellian sense, industry bosses who took such an approach were able to control the story of how automation unfolded in the past, and how it would unfold in the future. In the words of the Party: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past". According to many mid-20th-century industry bosses, the only thing that could derail this better future were the pessimists and critics – the people who wanted to saddle America's economy with unnecessary and burdensome regulation. It was Henry Ford himself who, in a 1939 New York Times article celebrating the opening of the New York World's Fair, lambasted those who would resist the onward march of science. "Despite every restriction that can be placed on it by so-called 'reformers'," Ford wrote, "the quest will continue – invention will go forward." In one of the most unintentionally delightful films from the 20th century the industrial manufacturing firm, Westinghouse, set out to confront these 'so-called reformers' with a feature-length film, The Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair, released in 1939. Part drama and part corporate advertisement, the film sets up a struggle for the soul of the Middleton's cherubic young son, Bud. On one side is Nikolas Makaroff, an intellectual, European, artist type who is partial to quoting Karl Marx and refers to automation as "Frankenstein's monster". On the other is Jim Treadway, a good ol' American boy who passed up a chance to play pro (American) football in order to work for Westinghouse and who believes in the power of science, industry, progress and the American way. For good measure, the screenwriters also include a love triangle between Makaroff, the Middletons' daughter, Babs, and Treadway (her former flame). The film opens with a gloomy radio announcement about the lack of jobs in Depression-era America, after which Bud laments his luck at being born into joblessness. "Maybe it is difficult", Mr Middleton interjects, "but it's worse to be a quitter… You've heard all the talkers , now I'm going to show you the doers !" And with that, the Middletons are off to the fair. The two Middleton men soon meet up with Jim Treadway, whom Mr Middleton drafts to convince Bud of the great prospects for the future thanks to automation and technological advancement. The scenes that follow are notable for the way in which Treadway not only casts aside concerns about the future, but paints those with concerns as domineering, fact-averse, pessimists: Mr. Middleton: "Tell me Jim, do you honestly believe industry can make enough jobs in the future to take care of the young people that are coming along?" Jim Treadway: "I think the problem's going to be the other way around. Industry will make so many jobs there won't be enough people to fill them." Bud: *Scoff* Jim Treadway: "So you don't believe me do you?" Bud: "From all I've heard…" Jim Treadway: [Crossing arms] "You're liable to hear anything these days. Are you willing to sit back and let a lot of self-appointed leaders do your thinking for you?" Bud: "Well they believe we're on the skids…" Jim Treadway: "Yes, and the men who built this fair believe the opposite. And what's more they back up their belief… with two hundred million dollars' worth of facts." Bud: "Well maybe the other side would, too, if they weren't busted." Jim Treadway: "And they'll stay that way. Until they learn that prosperity and pessimism don't travel together. But they're like you, Bud: they don't like facts." Bud: "Oh, I don't mind them, Jim." Jim Treadway: "Good, then I'll introduce you to a few. Come along." [Taking him warmly by the shoulder, Jim leads Bud off stage left]. After an entire day of learning about the economic benefits of photoelectric cells, triodes, and oscilloscopes, Bud has had enough of pessimism. And after Nikolas Makaroff is exposed as a hypocrite, liar and coward, Babs returns to Treadway. The film and the fair for which it was produced are noteworthy for the way that the industrial, scientific, engineering, and business communities came together to directly combat the negative press surrounding technological advancement. In her analysis of the fair, the historian Sue Bix writes: "In defining the future as a period characterised by wonderful revolutions in production, exhibitors effectively excluded discussion of any accompanying cost to workers." By doing so, they were able to avoid taking any substantive steps to address the concerns of labour unions and government bodies. The fact that industry bosses from Henry Ford to Travis Kalanick have been deploying similar rhetoric for more than a century speaks to the success of these narratives, and to the extent to which these same industry bosses have largely been able to avoid engaging in meaningful discussions about the impact of automative technologies. Indeed, their success makes it difficult to even imagine any alternatives. Such framing, according to the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, "annihilates any future uncontained in the past and present". Thankfully, however, a small number of writers and activists from this period offered up a few alternatives. Take the example of the United Auto Workers' (UAW) union. A few years after Congress met to discuss concerns about automation and General Electric released its supporting film This is Automation , the UAW put out its own film on the topic of automation, Push Buttons and People. The film challenges determinist framings of technological advancement by asking, "Will whatever happens, happen automatically? Can we do anything?" After showing footage of Walter Reuther, head of the UAW, testifying before Congress about the effects of automation, the film draws to a close and the narrator moves to sum up: Well, here we are back again with our original word: automation… You and I and a Senate Committee, and Walter Reuther, have had a discussion. Why? Because it's our common problem. The question is: what shall we do to succeed, to tame automation? We, you… the companies, the United States Senate… Given that their jobs were on the line, it is understandable that the UAW described automation not as a train headed toward better shores, but as "a word to strike terror in any human heart" and as something to be confronted and 'tamed'. More importantly, however, the UAW also framed technological advancement as something that was contestable and open to discussion rather than predetermined. The film made a point of attempting to draw viewers into a conversation about how to proceed. Or take the ecologically-minded writer Peter van Dresser who, in a 1939 article in Harper's, rejected Aladdin-esque framings of technological advancement. The American people, according to Dresser, were all too ready to "talk and think as if Scientific Technology [sic] were a kind of wilful genie whose gifts we must gratefully accept while we accommodate ourselves as best we can to his bad habits." Seeing to the social health of the nation would be impossible, Van Dresser argued, so long as people continued to accept "utterly without criticism the blueprints for America's technological future formulated by the industrial empire-builders." Yet despite these calls to action, America exited the 20th century having never settled these debates about the impact of automation. According to Sue Bix, what was missing was both the willpower to challenge dominant discourses about progress and a clearly articulated vision of how the public might be given a say in the development and adoption of automative technologies. As we continue to grapple with more questions about technological advancement today, now is the time to challenge dominant discourses and articulate our alternative visions of the future. This will require taking steps to encourage an informed dialogue between tech companies, governments, non-profits, and the public. Along these lines, the Government Data Science Partnership recently developed a Data Science Ethical Framework which aims to help policymakers and data scientists "think through some of the ethical issues which sit outside the law." Through public workshops and online surveys members of the public were encouraged to participate in the development of this framework. The partnership even commissioned the Data Dilemmas app in an attempt to provide members of the public with "a way of learning about data science and the ethical trade-offs that government has to make in designing data science projects." It is far from perfect, but it is a start. On the industrial side, Google, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Facebook joined forces this September to create the (absurdly-named) Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society. The partnership was formed with the expressed purpose of serving as "an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society". The coming years will tell whether this is a genuine attempt to engage in meaningful dialogue or simply an effort to mollify public fears. Challenging these dominating narratives could also involve setting up dedicated commissions to examine the impact and implications of technological innovations. In a promising move, the House of Commons recently recommended that a commission on Artificial Intelligence be established at the Alan Turing Institute. With a remit to examine the "social, ethical and legal implications of recent potential developments in AI" and ensure that new AI systems are developed responsibly and transparently, the new commission would seem to be a step in the right direction. We need more efforts such as these, and we need them to become the rule rather than the exception. Otherwise, as Grosz warns, we may find ourselves implicated in futures not of our making. And finally, in closing, here's one last clip from the Middletons: This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.

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Who can you trust in a post-truth world? Trust has always been a dangerous business. Every instance of it brings the risk of let-down, disloyalty and betrayal. Still, in recent times, the vulnerability inherent in trust seems more pronounced. Technological advancements enabling increased access to information mean that awareness of corporate scandals, fake news and political lies has increased exponentially: Volkswagen; the Panama Papers; giving £350m a week to the NHS; Hillary's emails; the Pope's supposed support of Trump. The list goes on. Of course, our access to information also makes it easier to learn about the good being done in the world. But somehow scandal always lodges in the memory better than integrity. As a result, it is hard to resist being conditioned to expect that just about everything we read in the news or hear an 'expert' say will turn out to be a lie, politically motivated, or simply wrong. This scepticism lies at the heart of our 'post-truth' and 'post-trust' times. And yet, just when truth is said to be irrelevant, and trust all but gone, those concepts feature heavily in contemporary social discourse. This is no coincidence. As the late philosopher Annette Baier said: "We inhabit a climate of trust as we inhabit an atmosphere and notice it as we notice air, only when it becomes scarce or polluted." In this era of post-truth, scandals, falsity and deception have created a vacuum, leaving many of us all the more aware of just how scarce truth and trust seem to be. That trust is more scarce is not just a perceived reality, but a measurable one. The PR firm Edelman has been assessing global levels of trust for the past 17 years. Their most recent Trust Barometer reports that: Two-thirds of the countries surveyed are now 'distrusters' Less than 50 per cent trust in the mainstream institutions of business, government, media and NGOs to do what is right Over two-thirds of the general population do not have confidence that current leaders can address their country's challenges The media is distrusted in more than 80 per cent of countries surveyed For Edelman, these findings amount to a "crisis of trust" because they find a correlation between trust and societal functioning: We have moved beyond the point of trust being simply a key factor in product purchase or selection of employment opportunity; it is now the deciding factor in whether a society can function. As trust in institutions erodes, the basic assumptions of fairness, shared values and equal opportunity traditionally upheld by 'the system' are no longer taken for granted. Because of its relationship to social functioning, low levels of trust are, indeed, concerning. But if a reduction in trust means that fairness, shared values and justice are no longer taken for granted, the distrust that characterises so much of the world today could in fact be positive. For, while fairness, shared values and justice are necessary for societal well-being, they ought not to be taken for granted. Each historical stand against tyranny shows that the sustainability of values like justice and fairness requires them to be actively defended. The world may be experiencing a crisis of trust. But the crisis cannot be that trust is merely low. For trust is not always best, and more trust is not always better. If the projects that trust enables collaborators to complete are corrupt, busting trust can be appropriate. Whistleblowers are good examples of this: in leaking secrets, they violate a trust, but for a good reason. Too much trust is also undesirable insofar as it enables the abuse of power. The checks and balances built into the American political system exist for this very reason: the relationship between citizens and such powerful leaders is not one that should be characterised solely by trust. Just as trust is not always best, distrust, often thought to be a sign of interpersonal or societal dysfunction, can be appropriate. The key is to cultivate trust that tracks trustworthiness. If a boss, partner or government lacks the competence, motivation or good character needed to uphold the trust placed in them, distrust, rather than trust, is reasonable and appropriate. It is for this reason that the current low levels of trust are understandable. A rebuilding of trust may help society function more smoothly, but the current threat of ambiguous news and politicians who 'construct' their own truth make distrust, rather than trust, appropriate. While trust ought to track trustworthiness, there is at least one instance where trust may be well-placed despite the absence of trustworthiness: when one chooses to trust another for the sake of helping them cultivate trustworthiness, or because one loves them. For example, just as a parent gives a pet to a child, not because they believe the child to be responsible, but to help teach them responsibility, trust can be given to others to help them develop trustworthiness. Also, in relationships characterised by a high degree of intimacy (such as marriages, partnerships and close friendships) to withhold trust because of another's faults goes against the very nature of the relationship. Part of what sets intimate relationships apart is the expectation that the trust in a friendship, partnership or marriage is strong enough, and generous enough, to withstand the imperfections and moments of untrustworthiness that occur in the relationship from time to time. It should be noted, however, that these opportunities to place trust well despite a lack of trustworthiness are more suited to interpersonal relationships than to the much less intimate engagement between the public and social institutions. It may be right to trust a partner because you love her, but it is less clear that one should trust a president or journalist with such generosity. If the institutions that no longer enjoy healthy amounts of public trust are undeserving of it – that is, if they actually are untrustworthy – then the distrust reported by Edelman is well-placed. And if that is the case, then the responsibility for taking trust forward lies, at least in part, with the businesses, media groups, NGOs and governments that need to cultivate better trustworthiness and do the slow, challenging work of communicating that trustworthiness to the public. But, importantly, responsibility for cultivating well-placed trust in the post-truth era does not lie solely with those would-be trusted parties. Even if they cultivate integrity, and root out all deception in their ranks, levels of public trust may continue to ebb away. This is because distrust is quasi-perceptual; like spectacles, it frames what we see. And if left unchecked, a lingering distrust can cause one to withhold trust, even from those who really are deserving of it. Not often discussed, this risk of misplaced distrust is the quiet threat of our post-truth era. For example, it is understandable to distrust the media production company WTO5 after they published the fabricated story that the Pope had endorsed Trump. Likewise, in the wake of its emissions scandal, it is reasonable to become sceptical of Volkswagen. But if that distrust is allowed to run amok, disposing one to be closed to new information suggesting WTO5 or Volkswagen have changed their ways and can now be trusted, it ceases to be reasonable. Distrust also becomes degraded when, as often happens, it mutates from local scepticism of a scandalised entity to a blanket concern about all related individuals or organisations. For example, one might move from distrusting Volkswagen to believing that all automobile manufacturers are bent on side-stepping emissions testing. For trust to be well-placed, distrust must be valued as highly as trust. But in personal, professional and social life we must also take care to ensure that it is possible for untrusted parties to become appropriately trusted. Due to distrust's quasi-perceptual nature, this can be incredibly difficult. Instead, from the perspective of scepticism, all evidence about another individual or organisation can seem to support distrust. Remaining open to those we distrust is further complicated by the reality of hard feelings. When one is the direct victim of a betrayal, strong anger and resentment is normal. And when we hear about an act of betrayal committed against someone else, or when we read about an alleged scandal, indignation can also rush in. Such feelings can stop us from being willing to even consider evidence suggestive of reform on the part of the guilty party. Caught in bitterness, it is tempting to sacrifice the truth because it feels, at least in the moment, more satisfying to have our distrust confirmed. In the wake of violated trust, anger, resentment and indignation are appropriate. And bitterness is understandable. But they can fuel the spread of distrust, inhibiting the pursuit of truth and blocking what could be well-placed trust. To take trust forward in this era of post-truth, then, social institutions must work to be worthy of public trust, but they should not be held solely responsible for the quality of public distrust. Each individual member of the public also has a role to play in ensuring their distrust does not run amok, which is difficult. But it can be done. An important first step to cultivating well-placed distrust is developing greater self-awareness. By understanding what is going on at the emotional level inside ourselves, we are better able to identify when distrust is fuelled by anger. Simply being aware that distrust can be misplaced can help with this. But we can also cultivate self-awareness in this area by pausing to consider the source of our distrust. Is it based on a well-established belief that the object of our distrust is in fact untrustworthy? Do we have good reason to think they actually lack competence or are unlikely to come through for us? Or is the distrust we are experiencing more strongly characterised by anger, a sense of injustice, or the desire to withhold something from the distrusted party? It can be uncomfortable engaging with such questions because they make us look deep into what may be upsetting. Also, answering such questions truthfully requires humility, which can be difficult in the heat of anger. And so we may need to give ourselves ample time to critically assess our distrust. But taking the time to do so is vital for cultivating well-placed trust. If, after reflecting, we find that our distrust is based on hard feelings, that doesn't necessarily mean it is misplaced and should be abandoned. But because hard feelings can cloud our perception of others, and so potentially be misplaced, something like forgiveness may be needed to allow a more objective distrust or trust to take its place. It is something like forgiveness that is needed here. Not all attempts to manage distrust will involve giving up hard feelings towards those who directly offended us and have sought restoration (both conditions usually thought to be necessary for forgiveness). But the step that is needed is like forgiveness because it involves letting go of hard feelings. It is important to note that just because hard feelings are relinquished, it doesn't mean one will necessarily come to a place of trust; nor is that necessarily the goal. Rather, in identifying and giving up hard feelings, the aim is to position oneself so that any trust or distrust is held for good reason rather than being a knee-jerk emotional response. The reality of the post-truth era is that it is hard to know what to believe. And so even if institutions take steps to ensure their own trustworthiness, and members of the public also take responsibility for their own distrust, it may still be hard for trust to get started. For example, one may have rid themselves of all hard feelings toward social institutions, but still be unsure which facts about those institutions to believe, and so remain unsure if it is reasonable to trust them. However, a principle from the philosophy of trust can be helpful to take trust forward when facts are dubious: trust is a type of reliance, but it is not merely reliance. Understanding this distinction sheds light on how mere reliance can be used to scaffold trust in uncertain times. In all instances of trust, we rely on something or someone. But it is possible to rely without trusting. For example, in a rural part of the country, one might have to rely on a sole, local doctor for medical care despite suspecting him of lacking competence. Likewise, it is possible to rely on an individual or organisation while checking up on them, perhaps by fact-checking or making use of transparency initiatives. But trust cannot survive such checking. Once we begin such micromanaging, it becomes clear we do not really trust others to do what we are counting on them for. Because it is possible to rely on others despite distrusting them, it is logically possible for the public to rely on social institutions despite being uncertain of how trustworthy those institutions really are. Such reliance in turn creates an opportunity for institutions to reveal their trustworthiness, or lack thereof, thus giving the public greater reason to trust or distrust. Patient engagement with the National Health Service in the UK provides an example of how mere reliance can lead to trust. A 2006 Ipsos MORI study assessing patient and public satisfaction with the NHS found that while the public satisfaction with GP, inpatient, outpatient and accident and emergency services was below 60 per cent, patient satisfaction rose to 80 per cent and above. These findings suggest that something positive occurs as people actually engage with the NHS. It is not clear whether all those patients who reported satisfaction with the health service would have also said they found the NHS to be trustworthy; but by using the service, all of them did rely on it. And as they did so, they were given the opportunity to come to know more about the NHS and make a more educated decision about whether or not trust of that institution is warranted. To rely is not the same as to trust. But because it is possible to rely while harbouring a good deal of distrust, engaging mere reliance in this time of post-truth provides one practical road to well-placed trust and distrust. Because trust is dangerous – because it always brings with it the risk of let-down and betrayal – it can be tempting to withhold trust until certainty about how governments and brands will behave is known, or until the complete veracity of a published fact has been checked. But it has never been possible to have complete certainty about what others will do. And the nature of scientific discovery means that facts are always changing. This does not mean that the fake news, corporate mismanagement and political deception that makes trust and truth so timely should be allowed to flourish. But the pursuit of well-placed trust should be tempered with the understanding that the human ability to gain certainty and control over life is limited. It is because of this very truth that trust matters at all. This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.

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TWO WHOLE GLORIOUS WEEKS By WILL WORTHINGTON A new author, and a decidedly unusual idea of the summer camp of the future: hard labor, insults, and hog kidneys! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Bertha and I were like a couple of city kids on their first country outing when we arrived at Morton's place. The weather was perfect—the first chill of autumn had arrived in the form of a fine, needle-shower rain of the type that doesn't look very bad through a window, but when you get out in it, it seeks out every tiny opening between the warp and weft of your clothing and runs through your hair and eyebrows, under your collar and over the surfaces of your body until, as though directed by some knowing, invisible entity, it finds its way to your belly-button. It was beautifully timed: the ancient motor-bus had two blowouts on the way up the last half-mile of corduroy road that led to the place, and of course we were obliged to change the tires ourselves. This was a new experience for both of us, and on the very first day! Everything was as advertised, and we hadn't even arrived at the admission gate yet. We didn't dare talk. On the way from the heliport we had seen some of the other folks at work in the swamp that surrounded the camp proper. They were digging out stumps with mattocks, crowbars and axes, and some of them stood waist-deep in the dark water. Bertha had said "Looky there!" and had made some remark about the baggy gray coveralls they wore—"Just like convicts," she said. The driver, a huge, swinelike creature with very small, close-set eyes, had yanked the emergency brake and wheeled around at us then. "You shnooks might just as well get outa the habit o' talkin' right here an' now. One more peep outa ya, 'n ya git clobbered!" All we could do was look at each other and giggle like a couple of kids in the back pew of Sunday School, after that. Bertha looked ten years younger already. The gate was exactly as the brochure had pictured it: solid and massive, it was let into a board fence about ten feet high which extended as far as you could see in either direction and lost itself on either side in a tangle of briers, elder bushes and dark trees. There were two strands of barbed wire running along the top. A sign over the gate—stark, black lettering on a light gray background—read: Silence!—No admission without authority—No smoking! *** MORTON'S MISERY FARM *** 30 acres of swamp—Our own rock quarry—Jute Mill—Steam laundry Harshest dietary laws in the Catskills A small door opened at one side of the gate and a short, stocky, well-muscled woman in a black visored cap and a shapeless black uniform came out and boarded the bus. She had our releases with her, fastened to a clipboard. She thrust this under my nose. "Read and sign, shnook!" she said in a voice that sounded like rusty boiler plate being torn away from more rusty boiler plate. The releases were in order. Our hands shook a little when we signed the papers; there was something so terribly final and irreversible about it. There would be no release except in cases of severe medical complaint, external legal involvement or national emergency. We were paid up in advance, of course. There was no turning away. Another attendant, who also looked like a matron of police, boarded the bus with a large suitcase and two of the baggy gray garments we had seen the others wearing in the swamp. No shoes, socks or underwear. "Strip and pack your clothes here, shnooks," said the woman with the empty suitcase. We did, though it was pretty awkward ... standing there in the aisle of the bus with those two gorgons staring at us. I started to save out a pack of cigarettes, but was soon disabused of this idea. The older of the two women knocked the pack from my hand, ground it under her heel on the floor and let me have one across the face with what I am almost certain must have been an old sock full of rancid hog kidneys. "What the hell was that?" I protested. "Sock fulla hog kidneys, shnook. Soft but heavy, know what I mean? Just let us do the thinkin' around here. Git outa line just once an' you'll see what we can do with a sock fulla hog kidneys." I didn't press the matter further. All I could think of was how I wanted a smoke just then. When I thought of the fresh, new pack of cigarettes with its unbroken cellophane and its twenty, pure white cylinders of fragrant Turkish and Virginia, I came as close to weeping as I had in forty years. The ground was slimy and cold under our bare feet when we got down from the bus, but the two viragos behind us gave us no time to pick our way delicately over the uneven ground. We were propelled through the small door at the side of the gate, and at last we found ourselves within the ten-foot barriers of the Misery Camp. We just looked at each other and giggled. Inside the yard, about twenty other guests shuffled around and around in a circle. Their gray coveralls were dark and heavy with the rain and clung to their bodies in clammy-looking patches. All moved sluggishly through the mud with their arms hanging slack at their sides, their shoulders hunched forward against the wet chill, and their eyes turned downward, as though they were fascinated with the halting progress of their own feet. I had never seen people look so completely dispirited and tired. Only one man raised his head to look at us as we stood there. I noticed that his forehead had bright purple marks on it. These proved to be " No. 94, Property of MMF ," in inch-high letters which ran from temple to temple just above his eyebrows. Incredibly enough the man grinned at us. "You'll be sah-reeeee," he yelped. I saw him go down into the mud under a blow with a kidney-sock from a burly male guard who had been standing in the center of the cheerless little circle. "Leave the welcoming ceremonies to us, knoedelhead!" barked the guard. The improvident guest rose painfully and resumed his plodding with the rest. I noticed that he made no rejoinder. He cringed. We were led into a small office at one end of a long, wooden, one-story building. A sign on the door said, simply, " Admissions. Knock and Remove Hat. " The lady guard knocked and we entered. We had no hats to remove; indeed, this was emphasized for us by the fact that the rain had by now penetrated our hair and brows and was running down over our faces annoyingly. As soon as I'd blinked the rain from my eyes, I was able to see the form of the person behind the desk with more clarity than I might have wished. He was large, but terribly emaciated, with the kind of gauntness that should be covered by a sheet—tenderly, reverently and finally. Picture the archetype of every chain-gang captain who has been relieved for inhumanity to prisoners; imagine the naked attribute Meanness, stripped of all accidental, incongruous, mitigating integument; picture all kindness, all mercy, all warmth, all humanity excised or cauterized, or turned back upon itself and let ferment into some kind of noxious mash; visualize the creature from which all the gentle qualities had been expunged, thus, and then try to forget the image. The eyes were perhaps the worst feature. They burned like tiny phosphorescent creatures, dimly visible deep inside a cave under dark, overhanging cliffs—the brows. The skin of the face was drawn over the bones so tautly that you felt a sharp rap with a hard object would cause the sharp cheekbones to break through. There was a darkness about the skin that should have been, yet somehow did not seem to be the healthy tan of outdoor living. It was a coloring that came from the inside and radiated outwards; perhaps pellagra—a wasting, darkening malnutritional disease which no man had suffered for three hundred years. I wondered where, where on the living earth, they had discovered such a specimen. "I am in full charge here. You will speak only when spoken to," he said. His voice came as a surprise and, to me at least, as a profound relief. I had expected an inarticulate drawl—something not yet language, not quite human. Instead his voice was clipped, precise, clear as new type on white paper. This gave me hope at a time when hope was at a dangerously low mark on my personal thermometer. My mounting misgivings had come to focus on this grim figure behind the desk, and the most feared quality that I had seen in the face, a hard, sharp, immovable and imponderable stupidity, was strangely mitigated and even contradicted by the flawless, mechanical speech of the man. "What did you do on the Outside, shnook?" he snapped at me. "Central Computing and Control. I punched tapes. Only got four hours of work a month," I said, hoping to cover myself with a protective film of humility. "Hah! Another low-hour man. I don't see how the hell you could afford to come here. Well, anyway—we've got work for climbers like you. Real work, shnook. I know climbers like you hope you'll meet aristocracy in a place like this—ten hour men or even weekly workers, but I can promise you, shnook, that you'll be too damned tired to disport yourself socially, and too damned busy looking at your toes. Don't forget that!" Remembering, I looked down quickly, but not before one of the matrons behind me had fetched me a solid clout on the side of the head with her sap. "Mark 'em and put 'em to work," he barked at the guards. Two uniformed men, who must have sneaked in while I was fascinated by the man behind the desk, seized me and started painting my forehead with an acrid fluid that stung like strong disinfectant in an open wound. I squinted my eyes and tried to look blank. "This is indelible," one of them explained. "We have the chemical to take it off, but it doesn't come off till we say so." When I had been marked, one of the guards took his ink and brush and advanced upon Bertha. The other addressed himself to me. "There is a choice of activities. There is the jute mill, the rock quarry, the stump-removal detail, the manure pile...." "How about the steam laundry?" I asked, prompted now by the cold sound of a sudden gust of rain against the wooden side of the building. Splukk! went the guard's kidney-sock as it landed on the right hinge of my jaw. Soft or not, it nearly dropped me. "I said there is a choice—not you have a choice, shnook. Besides, the steam laundry is for the ladies. Don't forget who's in charge here." "Who is in charge here, then?" I asked, strangely emboldened by the clout on the side of the jaw. Splukk! "That's somethin' you don't need to know, shnook. You ain't gonna sue nobody. You signed a release —remember?" I had nothing to say. My toes, I noted, looked much the same. Then, behind my back, I heard a sharp squeal from Bertha. "Stop that! Oh stop! Stop! The brochure said nothing about—" "Take it easy lady," said the other guard in an oily-nasty voice. "I won't touch you none. Just wanted to see if you was amenable." I would like more than anything else in the world to be able to say honestly that I felt a surge of anger then. I didn't. I can remember with terrible clarity that I felt nothing. "So he wants a nice inside job in the steam laundry?" said the man behind the desk—"the captain," we were instructed to call him. Another gust of wet wind joined his comments. "Put him on 'The Big Rock Candy Mountain.'" He fixed me then with those deep-set, glow-worm eyes, coldly appraising. The two Sisters of Gorgonia, meanwhile, seized Bertha's arms and dragged her from the room. I did not try to follow. I knew the rules: there were to be three husband-and-wife visiting hours per week. Fifteen minutes each. The Captain was still scrutinizing me from under the dark cliff of his brow. A thin smile now took shape on his lipless mouth. One of the guards was beating a slow, measured, somewhat squudgy tattoo on the edge of the desk with his kidney-sock. "You wouldn't be entertaining angry thoughts, would you shnook?" asked the Captain, after what seemed like half an hour of sickly pause. My toes hadn't changed in the slightest respect. It must have been then, or soon after that, that my sense of time went gently haywire. I was conducted to "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," which turned out to be a Brobdingnagian manure heap. Its forbidding bulk overshadowed all other features of the landscape except some of the larger trees. A guard stood in the shadow of a large umbrella, at a respectable and tolerable distance from the nitrogenous colossus, but not so distant that his voice did not command the entire scene. " Hut-ho! hut-ho! Hut-ho HAW! " he roared, and the wretched, gray-clad figures, whose number I joined without ceremony or introduction, moved steadily at their endless work in apparent unawareness of his cadenced chant. I do not remember that anyone spoke to me directly or, at least, coherently enough so that words lodged in my memory, but someone must have explained the general pattern of activity. The object, it seemed, was to move all this soggy fertilizer from its present imposing site to another small but growing pile located about three hundred yards distant. This we were to accomplish by filling paper cement bags with the manure and carrying it, a bag at a time, to the more distant pile. Needless to say, the bags frequently dissolved or burst at the lower seams. This meant scraping up the stuff with the hands and refilling another paper bag. Needless to say, also, pitchforks and shovels were forbidden at the Farm, as was any potentially dangerous object which could be lifted, swung or hurled. It would have been altogether redundant to explain this rule. I have absolutely no way of knowing how long we labored at this Augean enterprise; my watch had been taken from me, of course, and of the strange dislocation of my normal time-sense I have already spoken. I do remember that floodlights had been turned on long before a raucous alarm sounded, indicating that it was time for supper. My weariness from the unaccustomed toil had carried me past the point of hunger, but I do remember my first meal at the Farm. We had dumplings. You usually think fondly of dumplings as being in or with something. We had just dumplings—cold and not quite cooked through. Impressions of this character have a way of entrenching themselves, perhaps at the cost of more meaningful ones. Conversation at the Farm was monosyllabic and infrequent, so it may merely be that I recall most lucidly those incidents with which some sort of communication was associated. A small man sitting opposite me in the mess hall gloomily indicated the dumpling at which I was picking dubiously. "They'll bind ya," he said with the finality of special and personal knowledge. "Ya don't wanta let yaself get bound here. They've got a—" I don't now recall whether I said something or whether I merely held up my hand. I do know that I had no wish to dwell on the subject. If I had hoped for respite after "supper," it was at that time that I learned not to hope. Back to "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" we went, and under the bleak, iridescent glare of the lights we resumed our labor of no reward. One by one I felt my synapses parting, and one by one, slowly and certainly, the fragile membranes separating the minute from the hour, the Now from the Then, and the epoch out of unmeasured time softened and sloughed away. I was, at last, Number 109 at work on a monstrous manure pile, and I labored with the muscles and nerves of an undifferentiated man. I experienced change. I knew now that my identity, my ego, was an infinitesimal thing which rode along embedded in a mountain of more or less integrated organisms, more or less purposeful tissues, fluids and loosely articulated bones, as a tiny child rides in the cab of a locomotive. And the rain came down and the manure bags broke and we scrabbled with our hands to refill new ones. The raucous alarm sounded again, and a voice which might have been that of a hospital nurse or of an outraged parrot announced that it was time for "Beddy-by." And in a continuous, unbroken motion we slogged into another long building, discarded our coveralls, waded through a shallow tank of cloudy disinfectant solution and were finally hosed down by the guards. I remember observing to myself giddily that I now knew how cars must feel in an auto laundry. There were clean towels waiting for us at the far end of the long building, but I must have just blotted the excess water off myself in a perfunctory way, because I still felt wet when I donned the clean coverall that someone handed me. "Beddy-by" was one of a row of thirty-odd slightly padded planks like ironing boards, which were arranged at intervals of less than three feet in another long, low-ceilinged barracks. I knew that I would find no real release in "Beddy-by"—only another dimension of that abiding stupor which now served me for consciousness. I may have groaned, croaked, whimpered, or expressed myself in some other inarticulate way as I measured the length of the board with my carcass; I only remember that the others did so. There was an unshaded light bulb hanging directly over my face. To this day, I cannot be sure that this bleak beacon was ever turned off. I think not. I can only say with certainty that it was burning just as brightly when the raucous signal sounded again, and the unoiled voice from the loudspeaker announced that it was time for the morning Cheer-Up Entertainment. These orgies, it turned out, were held in the building housing the admission office. There was a speech choir made up of elderly women, all of whom wore the black uniform of the Farm matrons. The realization that a speech choir still existed may have startled me into a somewhat higher state of awareness; I had assumed that the speech choir had gone out with hair-receivers and humoristic medicine. The things they recited were in a childishly simple verse form: One and two and three and four; One and two and THREE. These verses had to do with the virtues of endless toil, the importance of thrift, and the hideous dangers lurking in cigarette smoking and needless borrowing. I am happy to report that I do not remember them more specifically than this, but I was probably more impressed by the delivery than the message delivered. I could not imagine where they had discovered these women. During their performance, some sense of duration was restored to me; while I could be certain of nothing pertaining to the passage of time, it is not possible that the Cheer-Up period lasted less than two hours. Then they let us go to the latrine. After a breakfast of boiled cabbage and dry pumpernickel crusts—more savory than you might imagine—we were assigned to our work for the day. I had expected to return to the manure pile, but got instead the rock quarry. I remember observing then, with no surprise at all, that the sun was out and the day promised to be a hot one. The work at the rock quarry was organized according to the same futilitarian pattern that governed the manure-pile operation. Rock had to be hacked, pried and blasted from one end of the quarry, then reduced to coarse gravel with sledge-hammers and carted to the other end of the excavation in wheelbarrows. Most of the men commenced working at some task in the quarry with the automatic unconcern of trained beasts who have paused for rest and water, perhaps, but have never fully stopped. A guard indicated a wheelbarrow to me and uttered a sharp sound ... something like HUP! I picked up the smooth handles of the barrow, and time turned its back upon us again. It was that night—or perhaps the following night—that Bertha and I had our first fifteen-minute visit with each other. She was changed: her face glowed with feverish vitality, her hair was stringy and moist, and her eyes were serenely glassy. She had not been more provocative in twenty-five years. An old dormant excitement stirred within me—microscopically but unmistakably. She told me that she had been put to work in the jute mill, but had passed out and had been transferred to the steam laundry. Her job in the laundry was to sort out the socks and underwear that were too bad to go in with the rest of the wash. We speculated on where the socks and underwear could have come from, as such fripperies were denied to us at the Farm. We also wondered about the manure, considering that no animals were in evidence here. Both, we concluded, must have been shipped in specially from the Outside. We found it in us to giggle, when the end of the visit was announced, over our own choice of conversational material for that precious quarter hour. Thereafter, when we could catch glimpses of each other during the day, we would exchange furtive signals, then go about our work exhilarated by the fiction that we shared some priceless Cabalistic knowledge. The grim Captain made an appearance in the rock quarry one morning just as we were beginning work. He stood on top of a pile of stones, swinging his kidney-sap from his wrist and letting his eyes sweep over us as though selecting one for slaughter. When the silence had soaked in thoroughly, he announced in his cold, incisive tone that "there will be no rest periods, no chow, no 'Beddy-by,' until this entire rock face is reduced to ballast rock." He indicated a towering slab of stone. We raised our heads only long enough to reassure ourselves of the utter hopelessness of the task before us. Not daring to look at each other closely, fearing to see our own despair reflected in the faces of others, we picked up our hammers and crowbars and crawled to the top of the monolithic mass. The film must have cleared from my eyes then, momentarily. "Why—this thing is nothing but a huge writing slate," I said to a small, bald inmate beside me. He made a feeble noise in reply. The Captain left, and the only other guard now relaxed in the shade of a boulder nearly fifty yards away. He was smoking a forbidden cigar. Suddenly and unaccountably, I felt a little taller than the others, and everything looked unnaturally clear. The slab was less than six inches wide at the top! "If we work this thing right, this job will practically do itself. We'll be through here before sundown," I heard myself snap out. The others, accustomed now to obeying any imperative voice, fell to with crowbars and peaveys as I directed them. "Use them as levers," I said. "Don't just flail and hack—pry!" No one questioned me. When all of the tools were in position I gave the count: " One—two—HEAVE! " The huge slab finally leaned out, wavered for a queasy moment, then fell with a splintering crash onto the boulders below. After the dust settled, we could see that much of the work of breaking up the mass was already accomplished. We descended and set to work with an enthusiasm that was new. Long before sundown, of course, we were marched back to the latrine and then to the mess hall. Later I had expected that some further work would be thrust upon us, but it didn't happen. The grim Captain stopped me as I entered the mess hall. I froze. There was a queer smile on his face, and I had grown to fear novelty. "You had a moment," he said, simply and declaratively. "You didn't miss it, did you?" "No," I replied, not fully understanding. "No, I didn't miss it." "You are more fortunate than most," he went on, still standing between me and the mess hall. "Some people come here year after year, or they go to other places like this, or permit themselves to be confined in the hulls of old submarines, and some even apprentice themselves to medical missionaries in Equatorial Africa; they expose themselves to every conceivable combination of external conditions, but nothing really happens to them. They feel nothing except a fleeting sensation of contrast—soon lost in a torrent of other sensations. No 'moment'; only a brief cessation of the continuing pleasure process. You have been one of the fortunate few, Mr. Devoe." Then the film dissolved—finally and completely—from the surface of my brain, and my sense of time returned to me in a flood of ordered recollections. Hours and days began to arrange themselves into meaningful sequence. Was it possible that two whole glorious weeks could have passed so swiftly? "You and Mrs. Devoe may leave tonight or in the morning, just as you prefer," said the Captain. Bertha and I have had little to say to one another as we wait in the office for the car that will take us to the heliport. For the moment—this moment—it suffices that we stand here in our own clothes, that we have tasted coffee again, brought to us on a tray by a matron whose manner towards us bordered on the obsequious, and that the aroma of a cigarette is just as gratifying as ever. We will go back to our ten-room apartment on the ninety-first floor of the New Empire State Hotel; back to our swimming pool, our three-dimensional color television, our anti-gravity sleeping chambers, our impeccably efficient, relentlessly cheerful robot servants, and our library of thrills, entertainment, solace, diversion and escape—all impressed on magnetic tape and awaiting our pleasure. I will go back to my five kinds of cigars and my sixteen kinds of brandy; Bertha will return to her endless fantasy of pastries and desserts—an endless, joyous parade of goodies, never farther away than the nearest dumb-waiter door. And we will both become softer, heavier, a little less responsive. When, as sometimes happens, the sweet lethargy threatens to choke off our breath, we will step into our flying platform and set its automatic controls for Miami, Palm Beach, or the Cote d'Azur. There are conducted tours to the Himalayas now, or to the "lost" cities of the South American jungles, or to the bottom of any one of the seven seas. We will bide our time, much as others do. But we will survive these things: I still have my four hours per month at Central Computing and Control; Bertha has her endless and endlessly varying work on committees (the last one was dedicated to the abolition of gambling at Las Vegas in favor of such wholesome games as Scrabble and checkers). We cannot soften and slough away altogether, for when all else fails, when the last stronghold of the spirit is in peril, there is always the vision of year's end and another glorious vacation.

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The Happy Clown BY ALICE ELEANOR JONES This was a century of peace, plethora and perfection, and little Steven was a misfit, a nonconformist, who hated perfection. He had to learn the hard way.... [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Steven Russell was born a misfit, a nonconformist, and for the first five years of his life he made himself and his parents extremely unhappy. The twenty-first century was perfect, and this inexplicable child did not like perfection. The first trouble arose over his food. His mother did not nurse him, since the doctors had proved that Baby-Lac, and the soft rainbow-colored plastic containers in which it was warmed and offered, were both a vast improvement on nature. Steven drank the Baby-Lac, but though it was hard to credit in so young a child, sometimes his face wore an expression of pure distaste. A little later he rejected the Baby Oatsies and Fruitsies and Meatsies, and his large half-focused eyes wept at the jolly pictures on the jarsies. He disliked his plastic dish made like a curled-up Jolly Kitten, and his spoon with the Happy Clown's head on the handle. He turned his face away determinedly and began to pine, reducing his mother to tears and his father to frightened anger. The doctor said cheerily, "There's nothing the matter with him. He'll eat when he gets hungry enough," and Steven did, to a degree, but not as if he enjoyed it. One day when he was nearly a year old, his mother carried his Kiddie Korner with the Dancing Dogsies on the pad into her bedroom, put him in it, and began to take things out of the bottom bureau drawer. They were old things, and Harriet Russell was ashamed of them. She had said more than once to her husband Richard, only half joking, "I couldn't give them away, and I'd be ashamed for anybody to see them in our trash!" They were old silver, knives and forks and spoons that looked like what they were, unadorned, and a child's plain silver dish and cup, and one small spoon with a useful curly handle. They had belonged to Harriet's great-grandmother. Once a year Harriet took the things out and polished them and furtively put them back. This year Steven cried, "Ma!" stretching out his hands toward the silver and uttering a string of determined sounds which were perfectly clear to his mother. She smiled at him lovingly but shook her head. "No, Stevie. Mumsie's precious baby doesn't want those nasty old things, no he doesn't! Play with your Happy Clown, sweetheart." Steven's face got red, and he squeezed his eyes shut, opened his mouth and howled until his mother passed him the dish and cup and curly spoon to play with. At meal-time he would not be parted from them, and Harriet had to put away the plastic dish and spoon. Thereafter, for the sake of the container, he tolerated the thing contained, and thrived and grew fat. Steven did not like his Rockabye Crib, that joggled him gently and sang him songs about the Happy Clown all night long; and he howled until they turned it off. He was a clean boy, and to his mother's amazement trained himself to be dry day and night by the age of fourteen months, without the aid of the Singing Toidey or the Happy Clown Alarm; so she bought him a Little Folks Youth Bed, with a built-in joggler, and Happy Clowns on the corners, and a television set in the footboard. It was a smaller copy of his parents' bed, even to the Happy Clowns. Steven did not like that either, and if his parents persisted in turning the bed on after he had learned to turn it off, he climbed out and slept on the floor. Harriet said worriedly to her husband, "I don't know what could be the matter with him. Dickie, he's peculiar!" Richard tried to comfort her. "Never mind, Harry, he'll outgrow it." Steven did not outgrow it. When he became too big for the curly spoon and dish and cup he demanded a knife and fork and spoon from the bureau drawer and ate his meals from the plainest dish he could find. He ate them with his back stubbornly turned to the television set, away from the morning cartoons and the noontime Kiddies' Lunch Club and the evening Happy Clown. The Happy Clown had been an American institution for thirty years. He was on television for an hour every night at dinner time, with puppets and movies and live singers and dancers and his own inimitable brand of philosophy and humor. Everybody loved the Happy Clown. He had been several different actors in thirty years, but his makeup never changed: the beaming face drawn in vivid colors, the rotund body that shook when he laughed like a bowlful of Jellsies, and the chuckling infectious laugh. The Happy Clown was always so cheerful and folksy and sincere. He believed passionately in all the products he instructed his viewers to buy, and one was entirely certain that he used them all himself. He gave one much more than advertising, though. Some of his nightly gems of wisdom (he called them nuggets) were really wonderful; they made one think. A favorite nugget, which people were always writing in and asking him to repeat, went like this: "We're all alike inside, folks, and we ought to be all alike outside." The Happy Clown's viewers were not children and adults, they were kiddies and folks. After the Happy Clown went off the air the happy kiddies went to bed, to lie for a while looking at the Jolly Kitten and the Dancing Dogsie, until, lulled by the joggler, they went gently to sleep. After that came the cowboys and spacemen, carryovers for any happy kiddies with insomnia. For really meaty programs one had to stay up past ten. Then the spectaculars began, and the quiz shows, and the boxing and wrestling. Steven did not like the Happy Clown or the Jolly Kitten or the Dancing Dogsie. Sometimes he began to grow interested in the cowboys or spacemen, but when they stopped in the middle of an adventure to talk about how they could not possibly rope the steers or shoot the asteroids without a good breakfast of Cornsies and Choko-Milko, which everybody ate, just everybody, Steven climbed out of bed and slept on the floor. Steven did not like the records or the talking books, and when he went to kiddie-garden he viewed the televised lessons with a cold eye. For some reason which he could not have explained, he wanted to learn to read, but they would not teach him till he was seven, and so he taught himself, from the letters on the jarsies. But then there was nothing to read except the newspapers and the magazines, which he puzzled over patiently, getting most of the words right after a while. The many advertisements were easiest; they used pictures and the simplest of language. His parents thought it was very cunning of him to look at the printing like that, so wisely, as if he could read it! He said once to Harriet, "I can read it," but she said, "Oh, Stevie, you're teasing Mumsie!" and looked so frightened at this fresh peculiarity that the child said gravely, "Yes, teasing." He wished he had a silent book. He knew there were such things, but there were none at home. There were few silent books anywhere. There were none in kiddie-garden. Steven was not happy in kiddie-garden. The enthusiasm the other kiddies showed for the lessons appalled him. The kiddies themselves appalled him. They joined so passionately in the group play, clutching each other with their hot moist hands, panting and grinning into each others' faces. They were always clutching and panting and grinning, in large noisy groups, with large community smiles. They confused him; he could not tell them apart. Steven retired to a corner and turned his back, and when they clutched and panted and grinned at him he hit them. The kiddie-garden monitor had to report of him to his unhappy parents that he was uncooperative and anti-social. He would not merge with the group, he would not acquire the proper attitudes for successful community living, he would not adjust. Most shocking of all, when the lesson about the birdsies and beesies was telecast, he not only refused to participate in the ensuing period of group experimentation, but lost color and disgraced himself by being sick in his corner. It was a painful interview. At the end of it the monitor recommended the clinic. Richard appreciated her delicacy. The clinic would be less expensive than private psychiatry, and after all, the manager of a supermarket was no millionaire. Harriet said to Richard when they were alone, "Dickie, he isn't outgrowing it, he's getting worse! What are we going to do?" It was a special tragedy, since Harriet was unable to have any more kiddies, and if this one turned out wrong ... Richard said firmly, "We'll take him to the clinic. They'll know what to do." The first thing they did to Steven was to talk to him. The psychiatrist made him lie down on a foam rubber couch, kiddies' model, with the Happy Clown motif on the slip-cover, and said with a beaming face, "Now, Stevie, what seems to be the trouble?" The boy turned his head away from the psychiatrist's shining teeth and said, "My name's not Stevie. It's Steven." He was a thin little boy, rather undersized. The baby fat had melted away fast when he began to be exposed to kiddie-garden. He had dark hair and big eyes and an uncommonly precise way of speaking for a child of five. The psychiatrist said, "Oh, but we're going to be friends, Stevie, and friends always use nicknames, don't they? My name's William, but everybody calls me Willie. You can call me Uncle Willie." The boy said politely, "I'd rather not, please." The doctor was undismayed. "I want to help you. You believe that, don't you, Stevie?" The child said, "Steven. Do I have to lie down?" The doctor said agreeably, "It's more usual to lie down, but you may sit up if you want to. Why don't you like kiddie-garden, Steven?" The boy sat up and regarded him warily. The doctor had a kind face, a really kind face in spite of all those shining teeth, and Steven was only five years old, after all, and there was nobody to talk to, and he was desperately unhappy. Perhaps.... He said, "You'll tell them." The doctor shook his head. "Nothing goes farther than this room, Stevie—Steven." The child leaned forward, pressing his knees together, hugging himself with his arms, bowing his head. His position was almost foetal. He said, "I'm never by myself. They never let me be by myself." The psychiatrist said reasonably, "But nobody can live by himself, Stevie." He had apparently forgotten Steven, and the boy did not correct him again. "You have to learn to live with other people, to work and play with them, to know them, and the only way you can learn is by being with them. When you can't be with them personally, there's always television. That's how you learn, Stevie. You can't be by yourself." The boy looked up and said starkly, "Never?" The gleaming teeth showed. "But why should you want to?" Steven said, "I don't know." The doctor said, slowly and with emphasis, "Stevie, long before you were born the world was a very bad place. There were wars all the time. Do you know why?" The boy shook his head. "It was because people were different from each other, and didn't understand each other, and didn't know each other. They had to learn how to be alike, and understand, and know, so that they would be able to live together. They learned in many ways, Stevie. One way was by visiting each other—you've heard about the visitors who come from—" Steven said, "You mean the Happy Tours." "Yes. When you're twelve years old you can go on a Happy Tour. Won't that be fun?" Steven said, "If I could go alone." The doctor looked at him sharply. "But you can't. Try to understand, Stevie, you can't. Now tell me—why don't you like to be with other people?" Steven said, "All the time—not all the time ." The doctor repeated patiently, "Why?" Steven looked at the doctor and said a very strange thing. "They touch me." He seemed to shrink into himself. "Not just with their hands." The doctor shook his head sadly. "Of course they do, that's just—well, maybe you're too young to understand." The interview went on for quite a while, and at the end of it Steven was given a series of tests which took a week. The psychiatrist had not told the truth; what the boy said, during the first interview and all the tests, was fully recorded on concealed machines. The complete transcript made a fat dossier in the office of the Clinic Director. At the end of the tests the Director said seriously to Steven's parents, "I'll be frank with you. You have a brilliant kiddie here—right now he has the intelligence of a twelve-year-old—but brilliance has to be channeled in the right direction. Just now—well, frankly, it's channeled in the wrong direction. We'll give it a year or so, and then if things don't clear up I'm afraid we'll have to correct him." Richard said through dry lips, "You mean a Steyner?" The Director nodded. "The only thing." Harriet shuddered and began to cry. "But there's never been anything like that in our family! The disgrace—oh, Dickie, it would kill me!" The Director said kindly, "There's no disgrace, Mrs. Russell. That's a mistaken idea many people have. These things happen occasionally—nobody knows why—and there's absolutely no disgrace in a Steyner. Nothing is altered but the personality, and afterward you have a happy normal kiddie who hardly remembers that anything was ever wrong with him. Naturally nobody ever mentions it.... But there's no hurry; in the case of a kiddie we can wait a while. Bring Stevie in once a week; we'll try therapy first." Being, as the Director had said, a brilliant kiddie, Steven soon understood much of what was kept from him. It did not take him long to learn what was making his Dadsie look stern and white and what was making his Mumsie cry. He loved his parents and did not want them to be unhappy, and he certainly did not want to have his head cut open, and so he began to act. Even at five, Steven discovered in himself a fine talent for acting. He began to conform, to adjust, to merge. He became social and cooperative and acquired the proper attitudes for successful community living. He gave up the old silver voluntarily, he accepted the Youth Bed, he looked at the Happy Clown, and he did much better in kiddie-garden. He even joined in the group experimentation and was not sick any more, though he could not keep himself from losing color. They were pleased with him at the clinic and after a few months discharged him. By the time Steven was twelve and had made the Happy Tour and joined the Happy Scouts and had a happy affair, involving experimentation, with a neighbor's daughter, Harriet and Richard ceased to worry about him. If sometimes he felt so tightly strung-up that a storm of tears was his only relief, he kept the tears quiet. He was graduated from high school at sixteen and from college at twenty, having read all he could of the silent books in the scant high school library and the more ample university one, and having wisely elected to appear more stupid than he was. Even his I.Q. was now judged to be only slightly above normal. He left college with honors, popularity and a reputation as an actor. He took the lead in all the dramatic club plays, having particular success in the reproduction of a Happy Clown program. Steven, of course, was the Happy Clown. He enrolled at once in the New York School of Television Arts, and his mother cried when he left home to live in the School dormitory. Steven did well at Television Arts, soon taking more leads than was customary in School productions, which were organized on a strictly repertory basis. He did not stay to graduate, being snatched away in his first year by a talent scout for a popular daytime serial, "The Happy Life." "The Happy Life" recounted the trials of a young physician, too beautiful for his own good, who became involved in endless romantic complications. Steven was given the lead, the preceding actor having moved up to a job as understudy for the Jolly Kitten, and was an immediate success. For one thing he looked the part. He was singularly handsome in a lean dark-browed way and did not need flattering makeup or special camera angles. He had a deep vibrant voice and perfect timing. He could say, "Darling, this is tearing me to pieces!" with precisely the right intonation, and let tears come into his magnificent eyes, and make his jaw muscles jump appealingly, and hold the pose easily for the five minutes between the ten-minute pitch for Marquis cigarettes which constituted one episode of "The Happy Life." His fan mail was prodigious. If Steven had moments of bewilderment, of self-loathing, of despair, when the tears were real and the jaw muscles jumped to keep the mouth from screaming, no one in the Happy Young Men's dormitory where he slept ever knew it. He managed his life well enough. He had a few affairs with girls, it was expected of one, and he did not have to work very hard at it since they always threw themselves at him; and he got along well with other young men, who forgave him for being so handsome because he did not work at it except on camera; but he was lonely. Surrounded by people, intruded and trespassed upon, continually touched in ways other than physical, he was yet lonely. During his life he had met a few other nonconformists, shy, like him, wary of revealing themselves, but something always seemed to happen to them. Some were miserable being nonconformists and asked pitifully for the Steyner, some were detected, as Steven had been, and some were unfortunately surprised in hospitals. Under the anesthetic they sometimes talked, and then, if they were adults, they were immediately corrected by means of Steyner's lobotomy. It had been learned that adults did not respond to therapy. There was never any organization, any underground, of misfits. An underground presupposes injustice to be fought, cruelty to be resisted, and there was no injustice and no cruelty. The mass of people were kind, and their leaders, duly and fairly elected, were kind. They all sincerely believed in the gospel of efficiency and conformity and kindness. It had made the world a wonderful place to live in, full of wonderful things to make and buy and consume (all wonderfully advertised), and if one were a misfit and the doctors found it out and gave one a Steyner, it was only to make one happy, so that one could appreciate what a wonderful world it was. Steven met no nonconformists at the School of Television Arts, and none while he was acting in "The Happy Life" until Denise Cottrell joined the cast. Denise—called Denny, of course—was a pleasantly plain young woman with a whimsical face which photographed pretty, and remarkable dark blue eyes. It was her eyes which first made Steven wonder. They mirrored his own hope, and longing, and the desperate loneliness of the exile. For two months they were together as often as they could be, talking intellectual treason in public under cover of conventional faces, and talking intellectual treason in private with excitement and laughter and sometimes tears—falling in love. They planned, after much discussion, to be married and to bring up a dozen clever rebel children. Denise said soberly, "They'd better be clever, because they'll have to learn to hide." They made love in Denise's apartment when her roommate Pauline—Polly—was out, as awkwardly as if there had never been any group experimentation or happy affairs. Denise said wonderingly, "When you really love someone it's all new. Isn't that strange?" and Steven said, kissing her, "No, not strange at all." He took her to meet his family—Denise's family lived three thousand miles away—and she behaved with such perfect decorum and charm that Richard and Harriet were delighted and as eager as Steven for the wedding. Steven had agreed reluctantly to put it off until Denise had a chance to introduce him to her parents; they were coming East at Christmas. She laughed over it and said, "I'm being terribly conventional, darling, but that's one convention I like." While they waited, Steven's agent secured a really unprecedented opportunity for so young and relatively untried an actor. The current Happy Clown was unhappily retiring, by reason of age and infirmity, and Steven's agent arranged a tryout for the part. He said, "Give it all you got, kid; it's the chance of the century." Steven said, "Sure, Joey," and allowed his sensitive face to register all the proper emotions. Actually his emotions were, in the vernacular of a previous century, mixed. He loathed the whole concept of the Happy Clown—but there was money in it, and Steven was not rebel enough to despise money. With money he could retire early, go away somewhere with Denise, to some country place where they could be relatively free of pressure. Over staggering competition he got the part. He called Denise up at once from a booth at the studio to tell her. Polly answered the phone, looking pale and frightened over the viewer, and said rapidly, "Oh, Stevie, I've been trying to get you for an hour. Denny's sick. They took her to the hospital!" Steven sat back against the hard wall of the booth, feeling cold, the receiver slack in his hand. He said, "What's the matter with her? Which hospital?" "Ap-pendicitis. Happy Hour." Polly began to cry. "Oh, Stevie, I feel so—" "I'll go right over." He cut her off abruptly and went. The doctors caught Denise's appendix in time to avoid the necessary but rarely fatal complications ... but under the anesthetic she talked, revealing enough about her opinion of television, and the Happy Clown cult, and the state of society in general, to cause her doctors to raise their eyebrows pityingly and perform the Steyner at once. While Steven sat unknowing in the waiting room, smoking a full pack of Marquis cigarettes, the thing was done. At last the doctor came out to him and said what was always said in such cases. "It was necessary to do something—you understand, no mention—" and for a moment Steven felt so ill that he was grateful for the little ampoule the doctor broke and held under his nose. They always carried those when they had to give news of a Steyner to relatives or sweethearts or friends. The doctor said, "All right now? Good .... You'll be careful, of course. She may be conscious for a minute; there's no harm in it yet, she won't move or touch the—" Steven said, "I'll be careful." He was still feeling ill when they let him in to see Denise. He sat down beside her bed and spoke to her urgently. "Denise, talk to me. Please, Denise!" She opened her eyes, looked at him drowsily and smiled. "Oh, Stevie, I'm so glad you came. I've been wanting you, darling." Steven said, "Denise—" She frowned. "Why do you call me that? Call me Denny. Did you get the part, darling?" He drew back a little. "Yes, I got it." She gave him a radiant smile. "That's wonderful! I'm so proud of you, Stevie." She slept again. That night in the HYM dormitory Steven did not sleep. He lay quiet, tense, hoping for the relief of tears, but it did not come. Steven went to see Denise every day though after the first time she was not awake to know him. The doctors were keeping her under sedation until the head bandage could be removed. So far as Denise was to know, she had gone to the hospital simply for a rather protracted appendectomy. Looking at her, Steven knew that he could never leave her. He had loved her completely; he would love her now with as much of himself as she would need or understand. For a while he waited to be kindly questioned, to be thoroughly examined, to be tenderly given the shot in the arm and to awake like her, but nobody came. Denise had apparently said nothing about him. Some censor or other—perhaps it was the censor of love—had kept her from even saying his name. For a while Steven considered confessing to somebody that he was a—what?—an unacceptable member of society. Then they would make him like Denise. He shuddered. Did he really want to be like Denise? Some stubborn pride in him refused it. When Denise left the hospital for the hotel where she would stay until the wedding, Steven was more gentle with her than ever, kinder and more loving. He made her very happy. He made love to her again, and it was like loving a ghost—no, it was like loving a fine beautiful body without the ghost, without the spirit. He returned to the HYM to lie sleepless amid the breathings and mutterings of the other young men, turning restlessly in his bed, feeling oppressed, tormented, strung on wires. He rehearsed feverishly for the part of the Happy Clown, and because he was a fine craftsman and a conscientious artist he continued to give it all he had. The sponsors were pleased. A week before Christmas the current Happy Clown retired and hobbled off to a nursing home. There was no fanfare—the public was not to realize that the Happy Clown was mortal—and Steven took over with no visible change. For five days he played the part to perfection. On the sixth day he performed as usual, perhaps a little better. His commercials had a special fervor, and the sponsors exchanged happy glances. Denise was sitting in the booth with them; she smiled at Steven lovingly through the glass. Steven was running a little fast tonight. The engineer made stretching motions with his hands to slow him down, but he used up all his material, even the nugget, with three minutes to spare. Then he said, "All right, folks, now I have a special treat for you," and moved quickly to the center mike. Before the sponsors, or the engineers, or the studio audience, or anybody in the whole American nation knew what was happening, he began rapidly to talk. He said, "Are you all happy? You are, aren't you?—everybody's happy, because you're all sheep! All sheep, in a nice safe pasture. All alike—you eat alike and dress alike and think alike. If any of you has an original thought you'd better suppress it, or they'll cut it out of you with a knife." He leaned forward and made a horrible face at the camera. Under the jolly makeup and the artful padding, his mouth was shockingly twisted, and tears were running out of his eyes. "A long sharp knife, folks!" He paused momentarily to recover his voice, which had begun to shake. "Go on being happy, go on being sheep. Wear the clothesies, and eat the foodsies, and don't dare think! Me—I'd rather be dead, and damned, and in hell!" Fortunately nobody heard the last three sentences. The paralyzed engineer had recovered in time to cut him off during the pause, and had signalled the stagehand to draw the curtain and the sound man to play the Happy Clown sign-off record—loud. Steven finished himself thoroughly, however, by repeating the same sentiments, with some others he happened to think of, to Denise and the sponsors, when they all came pouring out of the booth. Then he collapsed. Steven's Steyner was a complete success. He recovered from it a subdued, agreeable and thoroughly conventional young man, who had the impression that he had suffered a nervous breakdown. He was discharged from the Happy Hour at the end of January, innocently leaving behind him the broken hearts of three nurses and one female physician, and went home to his parents. During his convalescence they were patient with him and passionately kind. In spite of the disgrace they felt, a disgrace that would never be mentioned, they loved him even better than before, because now he was irrevocably like them. Denise was lost to him. The outburst in the studio, and the Steyner, and the loss of the Happy Clown part were cumulatively too much for her. She broke the engagement and was heard to say that Stevie Russell had proved himself an absolute fool. He was miserable over it, though he had only a hazy idea of what he had done or why Denny should suddenly be so unkind to him. The Happy Clown incident had passed off well—immediately after it occurred, a powerful battery of comedians, including the Jolly Kitten and the Dancing Dogsie, forgetting rivalries to rally 'round in a crisis, went on the air to insure that it passed off well. They made certain that every viewer should regard the whole thing as a tremendously funny if rather mystifying joke. The viewers fell in with this opinion easily and laughed about the sheep joke a good deal, admiring the Happy Clown's sense of humor—a little sharp, to be sure, not so folksy and down-to-earth as usual, but the Happy Clown could do no wrong. They said to each other, "He laughed till he cried, did you notice? So did I!" For a while teenagers addressed each other as, "Hi, sheep!" (girls were, "Hi, lamb!"), and a novelty company in Des Moines made a quick killing with scatter pins fashioned like sheep and/or lambs. But, around the studios Steven was dead. Steyner or no Steyner—and of course that part of it was never openly discussed—sponsors had long memories, and the consensus seemed to be that it was best to let sleeping sheep lie. Steven did not care. He no longer had any particular desire to be an actor. Steven went to work in his father's supermarket and was happy among the shelves of Oatsies and Cornsies and Jellsies. He got over Denise after a while and met a girl named Frances—Franny—whom he loved and who loved him. They were married in the summer and had a little house with as much furniture in it as they could afford. The first thing they bought was a television set. After all, as Stevie said, he would not want to miss the Happy Clown.

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A wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you. the hoofer by ... Walter M. Miller, Jr. A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man in the full vigor of youth do—if his heart cries out for a home? They all knew he was a spacer because of the white goggle marks on his sun-scorched face, and so they tolerated him and helped him. They even made allowances for him when he staggered and fell in the aisle of the bus while pursuing the harassed little housewife from seat to seat and cajoling her to sit and talk with him. Having fallen, he decided to sleep in the aisle. Two men helped him to the back of the bus, dumped him on the rear seat, and tucked his gin bottle safely out of sight. After all, he had not seen Earth for nine months, and judging by the crusted matter about his eyelids, he couldn't have seen it too well now, even if he had been sober. Glare-blindness, gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were excuses for a lot of things, when a man was just back from Big Bottomless. And who could blame a man for acting strangely? Minutes later, he was back up the aisle and swaying giddily over the little housewife. "How!" he said. "Me Chief Broken Wing. You wanta Indian wrestle?" The girl, who sat nervously staring at him, smiled wanly, and shook her head. "Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?" he burbled affectionately, crashing into the seat beside her. The two men slid out of their seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder. "Come on, Broken Wing, let's go back to bed." "My name's Hogey," he said. "Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding about being a Indian." "Yeah. Come on, let's go have a drink." They got him on his feet, and led him stumbling back down the aisle. "My ma was half Cherokee, see? That's how come I said it. You wanta hear a war whoop? Real stuff." "Never mind." He cupped his hands to his mouth and favored them with a blood-curdling proof of his ancestry, while the female passengers stirred restlessly and hunched in their seats. The driver stopped the bus and went back to warn him against any further display. The driver flashed a deputy's badge and threatened to turn him over to a constable. "I gotta get home," Big Hogey told him. "I got me a son now, that's why. You know? A little baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen him yet." "Will you just sit still and be quiet then, eh?" Big Hogey nodded emphatically. "Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to make any trouble." When the bus started again, he fell on his side and lay still. He made retching sounds for a time, then rested, snoring softly. The bus driver woke him again at Caine's junction, retrieved his gin bottle from behind the seat, and helped him down the aisle and out of the bus. Big Hogey stumbled about for a moment, then sat down hard in the gravel at the shoulder of the road. The driver paused with one foot on the step, looking around. There was not even a store at the road junction, but only a freight building next to the railroad track, a couple of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road, and, just across the way, a deserted filling station with a sagging roof. The land was Great Plains country, treeless, barren, and rolling. Big Hogey got up and staggered around in front of the bus, clutching at it for support, losing his duffle bag. "Hey, watch the traffic!" The driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome compassion he trotted around after his troublesome passenger, taking his arm as he sagged again. "You crossing?" "Yah," Hogey muttered. "Lemme alone, I'm okay." The driver started across the highway with him. The traffic was sparse, but fast and dangerous in the central ninety-mile lane. "I'm okay," Hogey kept protesting. "I'm a tumbler, ya know? Gravity's got me. Damn gravity. I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I used to be a tumbler— huk! —only now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l Hogey?" "Yeah. Your son. Come on." "Say, you gotta son? I bet you gotta son." "Two kids," said the driver, catching Hogey's bag as it slipped from his shoulder. "Both girls." "Say, you oughta be home with them kids. Man oughta stick with his family. You oughta get another job." Hogey eyed him owlishly, waggled a moralistic finger, skidded on the gravel as they stepped onto the opposite shoulder, and sprawled again. The driver blew a weary breath, looked down at him, and shook his head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find a constable after all. This guy could get himself killed, wandering around loose. "Somebody supposed to meet you?" he asked, squinting around at the dusty hills. " Huk! —who, me?" Hogey giggled, belched, and shook his head. "Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming. S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a week ago." He looked up at the driver with a pained expression. "Week late, ya know? Marie's gonna be sore—woo- hoo !—is she gonna be sore!" He waggled his head severely at the ground. "Which way are you going?" the driver grunted impatiently. Hogey pointed down the side-road that led back into the hills. "Marie's pop's place. You know where? 'Bout three miles from here. Gotta walk, I guess." "Don't," the driver warned. "You sit there by the culvert till you get a ride. Okay?" Hogey nodded forlornly. "Now stay out of the road," the driver warned, then hurried back across the highway. Moments later, the atomic battery-driven motors droned mournfully, and the bus pulled away. Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing the back of his neck. "Nice people," he said. "Nice buncha people. All hoofers." With a grunt and a lurch, he got to his feet, but his legs wouldn't work right. With his tumbler's reflexes, he fought to right himself with frantic arm motions, but gravity claimed him, and he went stumbling into the ditch. "Damn legs, damn crazy legs!" he cried. The bottom of the ditch was wet, and he crawled up the embankment with mud-soaked knees, and sat on the shoulder again. The gin bottle was still intact. He had himself a long fiery drink, and it warmed him deep down. He blinked around at the gaunt and treeless land. The sun was almost down, forge-red on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked sky faded into sulphurous yellow toward the zenith, and the very air that hung over the land seemed full of yellow smoke, the omnipresent dust of the plains. A farm truck turned onto the side-road and moaned away, its driver hardly glancing at the dark young man who sat swaying on his duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just kept staring at the crazy sun. He shook his head. It wasn't really the sun. The sun, the real sun, was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in the dead black pit. It painted everything with pure white pain, and you saw things by the reflected pain-light. The fat red sun was strictly a phoney, and it didn't fool him any. He hated it for what he knew it was behind the gory mask, and for what it had done to his eyes. With a grunt, he got to his feet, managed to shoulder the duffle bag, and started off down the middle of the farm road, lurching from side to side, and keeping his eyes on the rolling distances. Another car turned onto the side-road, honking angrily. Hogey tried to turn around to look at it, but he forgot to shift his footing. He staggered and went down on the pavement. The car's tires screeched on the hot asphalt. Hogey lay there for a moment, groaning. That one had hurt his hip. A car door slammed and a big man with a florid face got out and stalked toward him, looking angry. "What the hell's the matter with you, fella?" he drawled. "You soused? Man, you've really got a load." Hogey got up doggedly, shaking his head to clear it. "Space legs," he prevaricated. "Got space legs. Can't stand the gravity." The burly farmer retrieved his gin bottle for him, still miraculously unbroken. "Here's your gravity," he grunted. "Listen, fella, you better get home pronto." "Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest, I'm just space burned. You know?" "Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway? Do you live around here?" It was obvious that the big man had taken him for a hobo or a tramp. Hogey pulled himself together. "Goin' to the Hauptman's place. Marie. You know Marie?" The farmer's eyebrows went up. "Marie Hauptman? Sure I know her. Only she's Marie Parker now. Has been, nigh on six years. Say—" He paused, then gaped. "You ain't her husband by any chance?" "Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey Parker." "Well, I'll be—! Get in the car. I'm going right past John Hauptman's place. Boy, you're in no shape to walk it." He grinned wryly, waggled his head, and helped Hogey and his bag into the back seat. A woman with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly beside the farmer in the front, and she neither greeted the passenger nor looked around. "They don't make cars like this anymore," the farmer called over the growl of the ancient gasoline engine and the grind of gears. "You can have them new atomics with their loads of hot isotopes under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh, Martha?" The woman with the sun-baked neck quivered her head slightly. "A car like this was good enough for Pa, an' I reckon it's good enough for us," she drawled mournfully. Five minutes later the car drew in to the side of the road. "Reckon you can walk it from here," the farmer said. "That's Hauptman's road just up ahead." He helped Hogey out of the car and drove away without looking back to see if Hogey stayed on his feet. The woman with the sun-baked neck was suddenly talking garrulously in his direction. It was twilight. The sun had set, and the yellow sky was turning gray. Hogey was too tired to go on, and his legs would no longer hold him. He blinked around at the land, got his eyes focused, and found what looked like Hauptman's place on a distant hillside. It was a big frame house surrounded by a wheatfield, and a few scrawny trees. Having located it, he stretched out in the tall grass beyond the ditch to take a little rest. Somewhere dogs were barking, and a cricket sang creaking monotony in the grass. Once there was the distant thunder of a rocket blast from the launching station six miles to the west, but it faded quickly. An A-motored convertible whined past on the road, but Hogey went unseen. When he awoke, it was night, and he was shivering. His stomach was screeching, and his nerves dancing with high voltages. He sat up and groped for his watch, then remembered he had pawned it after the poker game. Remembering the game and the results of the game made him wince and bite his lip and grope for the bottle again. He sat breathing heavily for a moment after the stiff drink. Equating time to position had become second nature with him, but he had to think for a moment because his defective vision prevented him from seeing the Earth-crescent. Vega was almost straight above him in the late August sky, so he knew it wasn't much after sundown—probably about eight o'clock. He braced himself with another swallow of gin, picked himself up and got back to the road, feeling a little sobered after the nap. He limped on up the pavement and turned left at the narrow drive that led between barbed-wire fences toward the Hauptman farmhouse, five hundred yards or so from the farm road. The fields on his left belonged to Marie's father, he knew. He was getting close—close to home and woman and child. He dropped the bag suddenly and leaned against a fence post, rolling his head on his forearms and choking in spasms of air. He was shaking all over, and his belly writhed. He wanted to turn and run. He wanted to crawl out in the grass and hide. What were they going to say? And Marie, Marie most of all. How was he going to tell her about the money? Six hitches in space, and every time the promise had been the same: One more tour, baby, and we'll have enough dough, and then I'll quit for good. One more time, and we'll have our stake—enough to open a little business, or buy a house with a mortgage and get a job. And she had waited, but the money had never been quite enough until this time. This time the tour had lasted nine months, and he had signed on for every run from station to moon-base to pick up the bonuses. And this time he'd made it. Two weeks ago, there had been forty-eight hundred in the bank. And now ... " Why? " he groaned, striking his forehead against his forearms. His arm slipped, and his head hit the top of the fencepost, and the pain blinded him for a moment. He staggered back into the road with a low roar, wiped blood from his forehead, and savagely kicked his bag. It rolled a couple of yards up the road. He leaped after it and kicked it again. When he had finished with it, he stood panting and angry, but feeling better. He shouldered the bag and hiked on toward the farmhouse. They're hoofers, that's all—just an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers, even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A born tumbler. Know what that means? It means—God, what does it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless, where Earth's like a fat moon with fuzzy mold growing on it. Mold, that's all you are, just mold. A dog barked, and he wondered if he had been muttering aloud. He came to a fence-gap and paused in the darkness. The road wound around and came up the hill in front of the house. Maybe they were sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd already heard him coming. Maybe ... He was trembling again. He fished the fifth of gin out of his coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over half a pint. He decided to kill it. It wouldn't do to go home with a bottle sticking out of his pocket. He stood there in the night wind, sipping at it, and watching the reddish moon come up in the east. The moon looked as phoney as the setting sun. He straightened in sudden determination. It had to be sometime. Get it over with, get it over with now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped through, and closed it firmly behind him. He retrieved his bag, and waded quietly through the tall grass until he reached the hedge which divided an area of sickly peach trees from the field. He got over the hedge somehow, and started through the trees toward the house. He stumbled over some old boards, and they clattered. " Shhh! " he hissed, and moved on. The dogs were barking angrily, and he heard a screen door slam. He stopped. "Ho there!" a male voice called experimentally from the house. One of Marie's brothers. Hogey stood frozen in the shadow of a peach tree, waiting. "Anybody out there?" the man called again. Hogey waited, then heard the man muttering, "Sic 'im, boy, sic 'im." The hound's bark became eager. The animal came chasing down the slope, and stopped ten feet away to crouch and bark frantically at the shadow in the gloom. He knew the dog. "Hooky!" he whispered. "Hooky boy—here!" The dog stopped barking, sniffed, trotted closer, and went " Rrrooff! " Then he started sniffing suspiciously again. "Easy, Hooky, here boy!" he whispered. The dog came forward silently, sniffed his hand, and whined in recognition. Then he trotted around Hogey, panting doggy affection and dancing an invitation to romp. The man whistled from the porch. The dog froze, then trotted quickly back up the slope. "Nothing, eh, Hooky?" the man on the porch said. "Chasin' armadillos again, eh?" The screen door slammed again, and the porch light went out. Hogey stood there staring, unable to think. Somewhere beyond the window lights were—his woman, his son. What the hell was a tumbler doing with a woman and a son? After perhaps a minute, he stepped forward again. He tripped over a shovel, and his foot plunged into something that went squelch and swallowed the foot past the ankle. He fell forward into a heap of sand, and his foot went deeper into the sloppy wetness. He lay there with his stinging forehead on his arms, cursing softly and crying. Finally he rolled over, pulled his foot out of the mess, and took off his shoes. They were full of mud—sticky sandy mud. The dark world was reeling about him, and the wind was dragging at his breath. He fell back against the sand pile and let his feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled his toes. He was laughing soundlessly, and his face was wet in the wind. He couldn't think. He couldn't remember where he was and why, and he stopped caring, and after a while he felt better. The stars were swimming over him, dancing crazily, and the mud cooled his feet, and the sand was soft behind him. He saw a rocket go up on a tail of flame from the station, and waited for the sound of its blast, but he was already asleep when it came. It was far past midnight when he became conscious of the dog licking wetly at his ear and cheek. He pushed the animal away with a low curse and mopped at the side of his face. He stirred, and groaned. His feet were burning up! He tried to pull them toward him, but they wouldn't budge. There was something wrong with his legs. For an instant he stared wildly around in the night. Then he remembered where he was, closed his eyes and shuddered. When he opened them again, the moon had emerged from behind a cloud, and he could see clearly the cruel trap into which he had accidentally stumbled. A pile of old boards, a careful stack of new lumber, a pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete mixer—well, it added up. He gripped his ankles and pulled, but his feet wouldn't budge. In sudden terror, he tried to stand up, but his ankles were clutched by the concrete too, and he fell back in the sand with a low moan. He lay still for several minutes, considering carefully. He pulled at his left foot. It was locked in a vise. He tugged even more desperately at his right foot. It was equally immovable. He sat up with a whimper and clawed at the rough concrete until his nails tore and his fingertips bled. The surface still felt damp, but it had hardened while he slept. He sat there stunned until Hooky began licking at his scuffed fingers. He shouldered the dog away, and dug his hands into the sand-pile to stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at his face, panting love. "Get away!" he croaked savagely. The dog whined softly, trotted a short distance away, circled, and came back to crouch down in the sand directly before Hogey, inching forward experimentally. Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry sand and cursed between his teeth, while his eyes wandered over the sky. They came to rest on the sliver of light—the space station—rising in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless where the gang was—Nichols and Guerrera and Lavrenti and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced him. Keesey would have a rough time for a while—rough as a cob. The pit was no playground. The first time you went out of the station in a suit, the pit got you. Everything was falling, and you fell, with it. Everything. The skeletons of steel, the tire-shaped station, the spheres and docks and nightmare shapes—all tied together by umbilical cables and flexible tubes. Like some crazy sea-thing they seemed, floating in a black ocean with its tentacles bound together by drifting strands in the dark tide that bore it. Everything was pain-bright or dead black, and it wheeled around you, and you went nuts trying to figure which way was down. In fact, it took you months to teach your body that all ways were down and that the pit was bottomless. He became conscious of a plaintive sound in the wind, and froze to listen. It was a baby crying. It was nearly a minute before he got the significance of it. It hit him where he lived, and he began jerking frantically at his encased feet and sobbing low in his throat. They'd hear him if he kept that up. He stopped and covered his ears to close out the cry of his firstborn. A light went on in the house, and when it went off again, the infant's cry had ceased. Another rocket went up from the station, and he cursed it. Space was a disease, and he had it. "Help!" he cried out suddenly. "I'm stuck! Help me, help me!" He knew he was yelling hysterically at the sky and fighting the relentless concrete that clutched his feet, and after a moment he stopped. The light was on in the house again, and he heard faint sounds. The stirring-about woke the baby again, and once more the infant's wail came on the breeze. Make the kid shut up, make the kid shut up ... But that was no good. It wasn't the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's fault. No fathers allowed in space, they said, but it wasn't their fault either. They were right, and he had only himself to blame. The kid was an accident, but that didn't change anything. Not a thing in the world. It remained a tragedy. A tumbler had no business with a family, but what was a man going to do? Take a skinning knife, boy, and make yourself a eunuch. But that was no good either. They needed bulls out there in the pit, not steers. And when a man came down from a year's hitch, what was he going to do? Live in a lonely shack and read books for kicks? Because you were a man, you sought out a woman. And because she was a woman, she got a kid, and that was the end of it. It was nobody's fault, nobody's at all. He stared at the red eye of Mars low in the southwest. They were running out there now, and next year he would have been on the long long run ... But there was no use thinking about it. Next year and the years after belonged to little Hogey. He sat there with his feet locked in the solid concrete of the footing, staring out into Big Bottomless while his son's cry came from the house and the Hauptman menfolk came wading through the tall grass in search of someone who had cried out. His feet were stuck tight, and he wouldn't ever get them out. He was sobbing softly when they found him. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe September 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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HOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT By ADAM CHASE [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare. How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision? That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero. Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when he reached the village. He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing, parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius' second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body. He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed in a Kumaji raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest time as a boy. He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and brought the ladle to his lips. He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish. Poisoned. He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table. The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth—too late for anything. He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard scurried away. "Earthman!" a quavering voice called. Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center, a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin, which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black. Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the canteen and said: "What happened here?" "They're gone. All gone." "Yes, but what happened?" "The Kumaji—" "You're Kumaji." "This is my town," the old man said. "I lived with the Earthmen. Now they're gone." "But you stayed here—" "To die," the old man said, without self-pity. "I'm too old to flee, too old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water." Steve gave him another drink. "You still haven't told me what happened." Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy, Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government, so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions, almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves. "When did it happen?" Steve demanded. "Last night." It was now midafternoon. "Three folks died," the Kumaji said in his almost perfect English, "from the poisoning of the well. The well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go, and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses." "Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?" Oasis City, built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground, was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat.... "They have to," the old man said. "And they have to hurry. Men, women and children. The Kumaji are after them." Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists, trekking across a parched wilderness—to the safety of Oasis City—or death. "Come on," Steve said, making up his mind. "The unicopter can hold two in a pinch." "You're going after them?" "I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long." "Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember." "Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell." "I'm not going anyplace, young fellow." "But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without—" "I'm staying," the old man said, still without self-pity, just matter-of-factly. "The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame 'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good, long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?" "No," Steve said. "Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck." "But you can't—" "Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow." Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet. Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again. The old man's voice called after him: "Tell the people ... hurry ... Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their trail ... but hurry...." The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind. Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people. Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle East—and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them.... "Hullo!" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding clumsily through the sand toward him. "Cantwell's the name," Steve said. "I'm one of you." Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. "Cantwell. Yeah, I remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh, no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?" The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now, Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation. Perhaps that explained his bitterness. "So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell." The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly. They hardly seemed to be moving at all. "Is my aunt all right?" Steve said. She was the only family he remembered. Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. "I hate to be the one to tell you this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died from the poisoned water last night." For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death. Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness. The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl. She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. "Who is he, Dad?" the girl said. "Young Cantwell. Remember?" So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly. She was a woman now.... "Steve Cantwell?" Mary said. "Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I—I'm sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your aunt. If there's anything I can do...." Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was completely genuine. He appreciated it. Tobias Whiting said: "Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know that." He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. "But I never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be poor again. We could have been rich." Steve asked, "What happened to all your profits?" "Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll never see it again." Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming. But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was comforting and reassuring. Three days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared. The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day. Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their backs. And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji. "But why?" someone asked. "Why?" At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the day before said: "It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the Kumaji." None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying anything, and Steve squeezed her hand. "Now, wait a minute," one of Whiting's friends said. "Wait, nothing." This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the colony. "I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?" "That's what I was told," Steve said. "All right," Gort went on relentlessly. "Then this is what I figure must have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's 'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight." "No?" someone asked. "No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll make the trade." His voice reflected some bitterness. Mary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even blink. "Well," he asked her gently, "did your pa tell you he was going?" "N-no," Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry. Gort turned to Steve. "Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?" Steve shook his head. "Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel, Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each day. He won't get far." "He'll crash in the desert?" "Crash or crash-land," Steve said. Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent. "We've got to stop him," Gort said. "And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji, they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find us—or are led to us—and attack." Steve said, "I should have taken something out of the 'copter every night, so it couldn't start. I'll go." Mary came forward boldly. "I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying." Gort looked at her. "And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?" "Then—then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise." "That's good enough for me," Steve said. A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find mounted. The first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or thlotback , the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding. Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in order to regain his fortune. On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the Kumaji encampment by now. "It doesn't seem badly damaged," Mary said. The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there. "No," Steve said. "It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it all right." "To go—to them?" "I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm sorry." "Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What can we do?" "Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on." "North?" "North." "And if by some miracle we find him?" Steve said nothing. The answer—capture or death—was obvious. But you couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you? As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on their thlots . Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel aside. "They'd kill us," he said. "We can only surrender." They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular tent. Tobias Whiting was in there. "Mary!" he cried. "My God! Mary...." "We came for you, Dad," she said coldly. "To stop you. To ... to kill you if necessary." "Mary...." "Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?" "We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live the sort of life I planned for you. You...." "Whiting," Steve said, "did you tell them yet?" "No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our...." "Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?" "It doesn't matter now. I—I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now, now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way—we get nothing. I couldn't stand to see them hurt you." "They can do—what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing." "You won't have to," Whiting said. "I'll tell them when we reach the larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me." "Then we've got to get out of here tonight," Steve said. The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the thlot skin wall of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon. When darkness came, if the guard were not increased.... They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, "Dad, I don't want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were doing it for me...." "I've made up my mind," Tobias Whiting said. Mary turned to Steve, in despair. "Steve," she said. "Steve. Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand." Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information? Steve could stand up to it perhaps—but he couldn't stand to see them hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that.... Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one guard, the man outside, came.... Darkness in the Kumaji encampment. Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert. "Are you asleep?" Mary asked. "No," Steve said. "Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing—like a baby. As if—as if he wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!" Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's voice surprised him. "I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I—" "I'm going to kill you," Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting. He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat and closed there—not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again. Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside. Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies. The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the thick-muscled neck, clamped there—squeezing. The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard—or death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek another. They fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned, but Steve hardly heard him. When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to kill attacked a man.... "Steve!" It was Mary, calling his name and crying. "It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—" Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face. "My stomach," Whiting said, gasping for breath. "The pain...." Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying softly. "You two ..." Whiting gasped. "You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what you want?" "Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!" "You can get her out of here, Cantwell?" "I think so," Steve said. "Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan. You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary." She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: "Isn't there anything we can do for him?" Steve shook his head. "But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to deceive them." "I'll live long enough," Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he would. "Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man...." Steve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the sand to where the thlots were hobbled for the night. He hardly remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the thlots . The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In the darkness he flung Mary on the thlot's bare back in front of him, and they glided off across the sand. Pursuit was disorganized—and unsuccessful. It was too dark for effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail. Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said, "Steve, do you have to tell them?" "We can tell them this," Steve said. "Your father died a hero's death, sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction." "And not—not what he'd planned to do at first." "No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can make a mistake, can't he?" "I love you, Steve. I love you." Then they rode down on the caravan. Somehow Steve knew they would all reach Oasis City in safety. With Mary he would find a new world out in the vastness of space.

test

25644

To escape from Mars, all Clayton had to do was the impossible. Break out of a crack-proof exile camp—get onto a ship that couldn’t be boarded—smash through an impenetrable wall of steel. Perhaps he could do all these things, but he discovered that Mars did evil things to men; that he wasn’t even Clayton any more. He was only— The Man Who Hated Mars By RANDALL GARRETT “I want you to put me in prison!” the big, hairy man said in a trembling voice. He was addressing his request to a thin woman sitting behind a desk that seemed much too big for her. The plaque on the desk said: LT. PHOEBE HARRIS TERRAN REHABILITATION SERVICE Lieutenant Harris glanced at the man before her for only a moment before she returned her eyes to the dossier on the desk; but long enough to verify the impression his voice had given. Ron Clayton was a big, ugly, cowardly, dangerous man. He said: “Well? Dammit, say something!” The lieutenant raised her eyes again. “Just be patient until I’ve read this.” Her voice and eyes were expressionless, but her hand moved beneath the desk. The frightful carnage would go down in the bloody history of space. Clayton froze. She’s yellow! he thought. She’s turned on the trackers! He could see the pale greenish glow of their little eyes watching him all around the room. If he made any fast move, they would cut him down with a stun beam before he could get two feet. She had thought he was going to jump her. Little rat! he thought, somebody ought to slap her down! He watched her check through the heavy dossier in front of her. Finally, she looked up at him again. “Clayton, your last conviction was for strong-arm robbery. You were given a choice between prison on Earth and freedom here on Mars. You picked Mars.” He nodded slowly. He’d been broke and hungry at the time. A sneaky little rat named Johnson had bilked Clayton out of his fair share of the Corey payroll job, and Clayton had been forced to get the money somehow. He hadn’t mussed the guy up much; besides, it was the sucker’s own fault. If he hadn’t tried to yell— Lieutenant Harris went on: “I’m afraid you can’t back down now.” “But it isn’t fair! The most I’d have got on that frame-up would’ve been ten years. I’ve been here fifteen already!” “I’m sorry, Clayton. It can’t be done. You’re here. Period. Forget about trying to get back. Earth doesn’t want you.” Her voice sounded choppy, as though she were trying to keep it calm. Clayton broke into a whining rage. “You can’t do that! It isn’t fair! I never did anything to you! I’ll go talk to the Governor! He’ll listen to reason! You’ll see! I’ll—” “ Shut up! ” the woman snapped harshly. “I’m getting sick of it! I personally think you should have been locked up—permanently. I think this idea of forced colonization is going to breed trouble for Earth someday, but it is about the only way you can get anybody to colonize this frozen hunk of mud. “Just keep it in mind that I don’t like it any better than you do— and I didn’t strong-arm anybody to deserve the assignment! Now get out of here!” She moved a hand threateningly toward the manual controls of the stun beam. Clayton retreated fast. The trackers ignored anyone walking away from the desk; they were set only to spot threatening movements toward it. Outside the Rehabilitation Service Building, Clayton could feel the tears running down the inside of his face mask. He’d asked again and again—God only knew how many times—in the past fifteen years. Always the same answer. No. When he’d heard that this new administrator was a woman, he’d hoped she might be easier to convince. She wasn’t. If anything, she was harder than the others. The heat-sucking frigidity of the thin Martian air whispered around him in a feeble breeze. He shivered a little and began walking toward the recreation center. There was a high, thin piping in the sky above him which quickly became a scream in the thin air. He turned for a moment to watch the ship land, squinting his eyes to see the number on the hull. Fifty-two. Space Transport Ship Fifty-two. Probably bringing another load of poor suckers to freeze to death on Mars. That was the thing he hated about Mars—the cold. The everlasting damned cold! And the oxidation pills; take one every three hours or smother in the poor, thin air. The government could have put up domes; it could have put in building-to-building tunnels, at least. It could have done a hell of a lot of things to make Mars a decent place for human beings. But no—the government had other ideas. A bunch of bigshot scientific characters had come up with the idea nearly twenty-three years before. Clayton could remember the words on the sheet he had been given when he was sentenced. “Mankind is inherently an adaptable animal. If we are to colonize the planets of the Solar System, we must meet the conditions on those planets as best we can. “Financially, it is impracticable to change an entire planet from its original condition to one which will support human life as it exists on Terra. “But man, since he is adaptable, can change himself—modify his structure slightly—so that he can live on these planets with only a minimum of change in the environment.” So they made you live outside and like it. So you froze and you choked and you suffered. Clayton hated Mars. He hated the thin air and the cold. More than anything, he hated the cold. Ron Clayton wanted to go home. The Recreation Building was just ahead; at least it would be warm inside. He pushed in through the outer and inner doors, and he heard the burst of music from the jukebox. His stomach tightened up into a hard cramp. They were playing Heinlein’s Green Hills of Earth . There was almost no other sound in the room, although it was full of people. There were plenty of colonists who claimed to like Mars, but even they were silent when that song was played. Clayton wanted to go over and smash the machine—make it stop reminding him. He clenched his teeth and his fists and his eyes and cursed mentally. God, how I hate Mars! When the hauntingly nostalgic last chorus faded away, he walked over to the machine and fed it full of enough coins to keep it going on something else until he left. At the bar, he ordered a beer and used it to wash down another oxidation tablet. It wasn’t good beer; it didn’t even deserve the name. The atmospheric pressure was so low as to boil all the carbon dioxide out of it, so the brewers never put it back in after fermentation. He was sorry for what he had done—really and truly sorry. If they’d only give him one more chance, he’d make good. Just one more chance. He’d work things out. He’d promised himself that both times they’d put him up before, but things had been different then. He hadn’t really been given another chance, what with parole boards and all. Clayton closed his eyes and finished the beer. He ordered another. He’d worked in the mines for fifteen years. It wasn’t that he minded work really, but the foreman had it in for him. Always giving him a bad time; always picking out the lousy jobs for him. Like the time he’d crawled into a side-boring in Tunnel 12 for a nap during lunch and the foreman had caught him. When he promised never to do it again if the foreman wouldn’t put it on report, the guy said, “Yeah. Sure. Hate to hurt a guy’s record.” Then he’d put Clayton on report anyway. Strictly a rat. Not that Clayton ran any chance of being fired; they never fired anybody. But they’d fined him a day’s pay. A whole day’s pay. He tapped his glass on the bar, and the barman came over with another beer. Clayton looked at it, then up at the barman. “Put a head on it.” The bartender looked at him sourly. “I’ve got some soapsuds here, Clayton, and one of these days I’m gonna put some in your beer if you keep pulling that gag.” That was the trouble with some guys. No sense of humor. Somebody came in the door and then somebody else came in behind him, so that both inner and outer doors were open for an instant. A blast of icy breeze struck Clayton’s back, and he shivered. He started to say something, then changed his mind; the doors were already closed again, and besides, one of the guys was bigger than he was. The iciness didn’t seem to go away immediately. It was like the mine. Little old Mars was cold clear down to her core—or at least down as far as they’d drilled. The walls were frozen and seemed to radiate a chill that pulled the heat right out of your blood. Somebody was playing Green Hills again, damn them. Evidently all of his own selections had run out earlier than he’d thought they would. Hell! There was nothing to do here. He might as well go home. “Gimme another beer, Mac.” He’d go home as soon as he finished this one. He stood there with his eyes closed, listening to the music and hating Mars. A voice next to him said: “I’ll have a whiskey.” The voice sounded as if the man had a bad cold, and Clayton turned slowly to look at him. After all the sterilization they went through before they left Earth, nobody on Mars ever had a cold, so there was only one thing that would make a man’s voice sound like that. Clayton was right. The fellow had an oxygen tube clamped firmly over his nose. He was wearing the uniform of the Space Transport Service. “Just get in on the ship?” Clayton asked conversationally. The man nodded and grinned. “Yeah. Four hours before we take off again.” He poured down the whiskey. “Sure cold out.” Clayton agreed. “It’s always cold.” He watched enviously as the spaceman ordered another whiskey. Clayton couldn’t afford whiskey. He probably could have by this time, if the mines had made him a foreman, like they should have. Maybe he could talk the spaceman out of a couple of drinks. “My name’s Clayton. Ron Clayton.” The spaceman took the offered hand. “Mine’s Parkinson, but everybody calls me Parks.” “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I buy you a beer?” Parks shook his head. “No, thanks. I started on whiskey. Here, let me buy you one.” “Well—thanks. Don’t mind if I do.” They drank them in silence, and Parks ordered two more. “Been here long?” Parks asked. “Fifteen years. Fifteen long, long years.” “Did you—uh—I mean—” Parks looked suddenly confused. Clayton glanced quickly to make sure the bartender was out of earshot. Then he grinned. “You mean am I a convict? Nah. I came here because I wanted to. But—” He lowered his voice. “—we don’t talk about it around here. You know.” He gestured with one hand—a gesture that took in everyone else in the room. Parks glanced around quickly, moving only his eyes. “Yeah. I see,” he said softly. “This your first trip?” asked Clayton. “First one to Mars. Been on the Luna run a long time.” “Low pressure bother you much?” “Not much. We only keep it at six pounds in the ships. Half helium and half oxygen. Only thing that bothers me is the oxy here. Or rather, the oxy that isn’t here.” He took a deep breath through his nose tube to emphasize his point. Clayton clamped his teeth together, making the muscles at the side of his jaw stand out. Parks didn’t notice. “You guys have to take those pills, don’t you?” “Yeah.” “I had to take them once. Got stranded on Luna. The cat I was in broke down eighty some miles from Aristarchus Base and I had to walk back—with my oxy low. Well, I figured—” Clayton listened to Parks’ story with a great show of attention, but he had heard it before. This “lost on the moon” stuff and its variations had been going the rounds for forty years. Every once in a while, it actually did happen to someone; just often enough to keep the story going. This guy did have a couple of new twists, but not enough to make the story worthwhile. “Boy,” Clayton said when Parks had finished, “you were lucky to come out of that alive!” Parks nodded, well pleased with himself, and bought another round of drinks. “Something like that happened to me a couple of years ago,” Clayton began. “I’m supervisor on the third shift in the mines at Xanthe, but at the time, I was only a foreman. One day, a couple of guys went to a branch tunnel to—” It was a very good story. Clayton had made it up himself, so he knew that Parks had never heard it before. It was gory in just the right places, with a nice effect at the end. “—so I had to hold up the rocks with my back while the rescue crew pulled the others out of the tunnel by crawling between my legs. Finally, they got some steel beams down there to take the load off, and I could let go. I was in the hospital for a week,” he finished. Parks was nodding vaguely. Clayton looked up at the clock above the bar and realized that they had been talking for better than an hour. Parks was buying another round. Parks was a hell of a nice fellow. There was, Clayton found, only one trouble with Parks. He got to talking so loud that the bartender refused to serve either one of them any more. The bartender said Clayton was getting loud, too, but it was just because he had to talk loud to make Parks hear him. Clayton helped Parks put his mask and parka on and they walked out into the cold night. Parks began to sing Green Hills . About halfway through, he stopped and turned to Clayton. “I’m from Indiana.” Clayton had already spotted him as an American by his accent. “Indiana? That’s nice. Real nice.” “Yeah. You talk about green hills, we got green hills in Indiana. What time is it?” Clayton told him. “Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship takes off in an hour. Ought to have one more drink first.” Clayton realized he didn’t like Parks. But maybe he’d buy a bottle. Sharkie Johnson worked in Fuels Section, and he made a nice little sideline of stealing alcohol, cutting it, and selling it. He thought it was real funny to call it Martian Gin. Clayton said: “Let’s go over to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell us a bottle.” “Okay,” said Parks. “We’ll get a bottle. That’s what we need: a bottle.” It was quite a walk to the Shark’s place. It was so cold that even Parks was beginning to sober up a little. He was laughing like hell when Clayton started to sing. “We’re going over to the Shark’s To buy a jug of gin for Parks! Hi ho, hi ho, hi ho!” One thing about a few drinks; you didn’t get so cold. You didn’t feel it too much, anyway. The Shark still had his light on when they arrived. Clayton whispered to Parks: “I’ll go in. He knows me. He wouldn’t sell it if you were around. You got eight credits?” “Sure I got eight credits. Just a minute, and I’ll give you eight credits.” He fished around for a minute inside his parka, and pulled out his notecase. His gloved fingers were a little clumsy, but he managed to get out a five and three ones and hand them to Clayton. “You wait out here,” Clayton said. He went in through the outer door and knocked on the inner one. He should have asked for ten credits. Sharkie only charged five, and that would leave him three for himself. But he could have got ten—maybe more. When he came out with the bottle, Parks was sitting on a rock, shivering. “Jeez-krise!” he said. “It’s cold out here. Let’s get to someplace where it’s warm.” “Sure. I got the bottle. Want a drink?” Parks took the bottle, opened it, and took a good belt out of it. “Hooh!” he breathed. “Pretty smooth.” As Clayton drank, Parks said: “Hey! I better get back to the field! I know! We can go to the men’s room and finish the bottle before the ship takes off! Isn’t that a good idea? It’s warm there.” They started back down the street toward the spacefield. “Yep, I’m from Indiana. Southern part, down around Bloomington,” Parks said. “Gimme the jug. Not Bloomington, Illinois—Bloomington, Indiana. We really got green hills down there.” He drank, and handed the bottle back to Clayton. “Pers-nally, I don’t see why anybody’d stay on Mars. Here y’are, practic’ly on the equator in the middle of the summer, and it’s colder than hell. Brrr! “Now if you was smart, you’d go home, where it’s warm. Mars wasn’t built for people to live on, anyhow. I don’t see how you stand it.” That was when Clayton decided he really hated Parks. And when Parks said: “Why be dumb, friend? Whyn’t you go home?” Clayton kicked him in the stomach, hard. “And that, that—” Clayton said as Parks doubled over. He said it again as he kicked him in the head. And in the ribs. Parks was gasping as he writhed on the ground, but he soon lay still. Then Clayton saw why. Parks’ nose tube had come off when Clayton’s foot struck his head. Parks was breathing heavily, but he wasn’t getting any oxygen. That was when the Big Idea hit Ron Clayton. With a nosepiece on like that, you couldn’t tell who a man was. He took another drink from the jug and then began to take Parks’ clothes off. The uniform fit Clayton fine, and so did the nose mask. He dumped his own clothing on top of Parks’ nearly nude body, adjusted the little oxygen tank so that the gas would flow properly through the mask, took the first deep breath of good air he’d had in fifteen years, and walked toward the spacefield. He went into the men’s room at the Port Building, took a drink, and felt in the pockets of the uniform for Parks’ identification. He found it and opened the booklet. It read: PARKINSON, HERBERT J. Steward 2nd Class, STS Above it was a photo, and a set of fingerprints. Clayton grinned. They’d never know it wasn’t Parks getting on the ship. Parks was a steward, too. A cook’s helper. That was good. If he’d been a jetman or something like that, the crew might wonder why he wasn’t on duty at takeoff. But a steward was different. Clayton sat for several minutes, looking through the booklet and drinking from the bottle. He emptied it just before the warning sirens keened through the thin air. Clayton got up and went outside toward the ship. “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake up!” Somebody was slapping his cheeks. Clayton opened his eyes and looked at the blurred face over his own. From a distance, another voice said: “Who is it?” The blurred face said: “I don’t know. He was asleep behind these cases. I think he’s drunk.” Clayton wasn’t drunk—he was sick. His head felt like hell. Where the devil was he? “Get up, bud. Come on, get up!” Clayton pulled himself up by holding to the man’s arm. The effort made him dizzy and nauseated. The other man said: “Take him down to sick bay, Casey. Get some thiamin into him.” Clayton didn’t struggle as they led him down to the sick bay. He was trying to clear his head. Where was he? He must have been pretty drunk last night. He remembered meeting Parks. And getting thrown out by the bartender. Then what? Oh, yeah. He’d gone to the Shark’s for a bottle. From there on, it was mostly gone. He remembered a fight or something, but that was all that registered. The medic in the sick bay fired two shots from a hypo-gun into both arms, but Clayton ignored the slight sting. “Where am I?” “Real original. Here, take these.” He handed Clayton a couple of capsules, and gave him a glass of water to wash them down with. When the water hit his stomach, there was an immediate reaction. “Oh, Christ!” the medic said. “Get a mop, somebody. Here, bud; heave into this.” He put a basin on the table in front of Clayton. It took them the better part of an hour to get Clayton awake enough to realize what was going on and where he was. Even then, he was plenty groggy. It was the First Officer of the STS-52 who finally got the story straight. As soon as Clayton was in condition, the medic and the quartermaster officer who had found him took him up to the First Officer’s compartment. “I was checking through the stores this morning when I found this man. He was asleep, dead drunk, behind the crates.” “He was drunk, all right,” supplied the medic. “I found this in his pocket.” He flipped a booklet to the First Officer. The First was a young man, not older than twenty-eight with tough-looking gray eyes. He looked over the booklet. “Where did you get Parkinson’s ID booklet? And his uniform?” Clayton looked down at his clothes in wonder. “I don’t know.” “You don’t know ? That’s a hell of an answer.” “Well, I was drunk,” Clayton said defensively. “A man doesn’t know what he’s doing when he’s drunk.” He frowned in concentration. He knew he’d have to think up some story. “I kind of remember we made a bet. I bet him I could get on the ship. Sure—I remember, now. That’s what happened; I bet him I could get on the ship and we traded clothes.” “Where is he now?” “At my place, sleeping it off, I guess.” “Without his oxy-mask?” “Oh, I gave him my oxidation pills for the mask.” The First shook his head. “That sounds like the kind of trick Parkinson would pull, all right. I’ll have to write it up and turn you both in to the authorities when we hit Earth.” He eyed Clayton. “What’s your name?” “Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,” Clayton said without batting an eye. “Volunteer or convicted colonist?” “Volunteer.” The First looked at him for a long moment, disbelief in his eyes. It didn’t matter. Volunteer or convict, there was no place Clayton could go. From the officer’s viewpoint, he was as safely imprisoned in the spaceship as he would be on Mars or a prison on Earth. The First wrote in the log book, and then said: “Well, we’re one man short in the kitchen. You wanted to take Parkinson’s place; brother, you’ve got it—without pay.” He paused for a moment. “You know, of course,” he said judiciously, “that you’ll be shipped back to Mars immediately. And you’ll have to work out your passage both ways—it will be deducted from your pay.” Clayton nodded. “I know.” “I don’t know what else will happen. If there’s a conviction, you may lose your volunteer status on Mars. And there may be fines taken out of your pay, too. “Well, that’s all, Cartwright. You can report to Kissman in the kitchen.” The First pressed a button on his desk and spoke into the intercom. “Who was on duty at the airlock when the crew came aboard last night? Send him up. I want to talk to him.” Then the quartermaster officer led Clayton out the door and took him to the kitchen. The ship’s driver tubes were pushing it along at a steady five hundred centimeters per second squared acceleration, pushing her steadily closer to Earth with a little more than half a gravity of drive. There wasn’t much for Clayton to do, really. He helped to select the foods that went into the automatics, and he cleaned them out after each meal was cooked. Once every day, he had to partially dismantle them for a really thorough going-over. And all the time, he was thinking. Parkinson must be dead; he knew that. That meant the Chamber. And even if he wasn’t, they’d send Clayton back to Mars. Luckily, there was no way for either planet to communicate with the ship; it was hard enough to keep a beam trained on a planet without trying to hit such a comparatively small thing as a ship. But they would know about it on Earth by now. They would pick him up the instant the ship landed. And the best he could hope for was a return to Mars. No, by God! He wouldn’t go back to that frozen mud-ball! He’d stay on Earth, where it was warm and comfortable and a man could live where he was meant to live. Where there was plenty of air to breathe and plenty of water to drink. Where the beer tasted like beer and not like slop. Earth. Good green hills, the like of which exists nowhere else. Slowly, over the days, he evolved a plan. He watched and waited and checked each little detail to make sure nothing would go wrong. It couldn’t go wrong. He didn’t want to die, and he didn’t want to go back to Mars. Nobody on the ship liked him; they couldn’t appreciate his position. He hadn’t done anything to them, but they just didn’t like him. He didn’t know why; he’d tried to get along with them. Well, if they didn’t like him, the hell with them. If things worked out the way he figured, they’d be damned sorry. He was very clever about the whole plan. When turn-over came, he pretended to get violently spacesick. That gave him an opportunity to steal a bottle of chloral hydrate from the medic’s locker. And, while he worked in the kitchen, he spent a great deal of time sharpening a big carving knife. Once, during his off time, he managed to disable one of the ship’s two lifeboats. He was saving the other for himself. The ship was eight hours out from Earth and still decelerating when Clayton pulled his getaway. It was surprisingly easy. He was supposed to be asleep when he sneaked down to the drive compartment with the knife. He pushed open the door, looked in, and grinned like an ape. The Engineer and the two jetmen were out cold from the chloral hydrate in the coffee from the kitchen. Moving rapidly, he went to the spares locker and began methodically to smash every replacement part for the drivers. Then he took three of the signal bombs from the emergency kit, set them for five minutes, and placed them around the driver circuits. He looked at the three sleeping men. What if they woke up before the bombs went off? He didn’t want to kill them though. He wanted them to know what had happened and who had done it. He grinned. There was a way. He simply had to drag them outside and jam the door lock. He took the key from the Engineer, inserted it, turned it, and snapped off the head, leaving the body of the key still in the lock. Nobody would unjam it in the next four minutes. Then he began to run up the stairwell toward the good lifeboat. He was panting and out of breath when he arrived, but no one had stopped him. No one had even seen him. He clambered into the lifeboat, made everything ready, and waited. The signal bombs were not heavy charges; their main purposes was to make a flare bright enough to be seen for thousands of miles in space. Fluorine and magnesium made plenty of light—and heat. Quite suddenly, there was no gravity. He had felt nothing, but he knew that the bombs had exploded. He punched the LAUNCH switch on the control board of the lifeboat, and the little ship leaped out from the side of the greater one. Then he turned on the drive, set it at half a gee, and watched the STS-52 drop behind him. It was no longer decelerating, so it would miss Earth and drift on into space. On the other hand, the lifeship would come down very neatly within a few hundred miles of the spaceport in Utah, the destination of the STS-52. Landing the lifeship would be the only difficult part of the maneuver, but they were designed to be handled by beginners. Full instructions were printed on the simplified control board. Clayton studied them for a while, then set the alarm to waken him in seven hours and dozed off to sleep. He dreamed of Indiana. It was full of nice, green hills and leafy woods, and Parkinson was inviting him over to his mother’s house for chicken and whiskey. And all for free. Beneath the dream was the calm assurance that they would never catch him and send him back. When the STS-52 failed to show up, they would think he had been lost with it. They would never look for him. When the alarm rang, Earth was a mottled globe looming hugely beneath the ship. Clayton watched the dials on the board, and began to follow the instructions on the landing sheet. He wasn’t too good at it. The accelerometer climbed higher and higher, and he felt as though he could hardly move his hands to the proper switches. He was less than fifteen feet off the ground when his hand slipped. The ship, out of control, shifted, spun, and toppled over on its side, smashing a great hole in the cabin. Clayton shook his head and tried to stand up in the wreckage. He got to his hands and knees, dizzy but unhurt, and took a deep breath of the fresh air that was blowing in through the hole in the cabin. It felt just like home. Bureau of Criminal Investigation Regional Headquarters Cheyenne, Wyoming 20 January 2102 To: Space Transport Service Subject: Lifeship 2, STS-52 Attention Mr. P. D. Latimer Dear Paul, I have on hand the copies of your reports on the rescue of the men on the disabled STS-52. It is fortunate that the Lunar radar stations could compute their orbit. The detailed official report will follow, but briefly, this is what happened: The lifeship landed—or, rather, crashed—several miles west of Cheyenne, as you know, but it was impossible to find the man who was piloting it until yesterday because of the weather. He has been identified as Ronald Watkins Clayton, exiled to Mars fifteen years ago. Evidently, he didn’t realize that fifteen years of Martian gravity had so weakened his muscles that he could hardly walk under the pull of a full Earth gee. As it was, he could only crawl about a hundred yards from the wrecked lifeship before he collapsed. Well, I hope this clears up everything. I hope you’re not getting the snow storms up there like we’ve been getting them. John B. Remley Captain, CBI THE END Transcriber’s Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories September 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 If Worlds of Science Fiction November 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. THE VERY SECRET AGENT BY MARI WOLF Illustrated by Ed Emsh Poor Riuku!... Not being a member of the human race, how was he supposed to understand what goes on in a woman's mind when the male of the same species didn't even know? In their ship just beyond the orbit of Mars the two aliens sat looking at each other. "No," Riuku said. "I haven't had any luck. And I can tell you right now that I'm not going to have any, and no one else is going to have any either. The Earthmen are too well shielded." "You contacted the factory?" Nagor asked. "Easily. It's the right one. The parking lot attendant knows there's a new weapon being produced in there. The waitress at the Jumbo Burger Grill across the street knows it. Everybody I reached knows it. But not one knows anything about what it is." Nagor looked out through the ports of the spaceship, which didn't in the least resemble an Earth spaceship, any more than what Nagor considered sight resembled the corresponding Earth sense perception. He frowned. "What about the research scientists? We know who some of them are. The supervisors? The technicians?" "No," Riuku said flatly. "They're shielded. Perfectly I can't make contact with a single mind down there that has the faintest inkling of what's going on. We never should have let them develop the shield." "Have you tried contacting everyone? What about the workers?" "Shielded. All ten thousand of them. Of course I haven't checked all of them yet, but—" "Do it," Nagor said grimly. "We've got to find out what that weapon is. Or else get out of this solar system." Riuku sighed. "I'll try," he said. Someone put another dollar in the juke box, and the theremins started in on Mare Indrium Mary for the tenth time since Pete Ganley had come into the bar. "Aw shut up," he said, wishing there was some way to turn them off. Twelve-ten. Alice got off work at Houston's at twelve. She ought to be here by now. She would be, if it weren't Thursday. Shield boosting night for her. Why, he asked himself irritably, couldn't those scientists figure out some way to keep the shields up longer than a week? Or else why didn't they have boosting night the same for all departments? He had to stay late every Friday and Alice every Thursday, and all the time there was Susan at home ready to jump him if he wasn't in at a reasonable time.... "Surprised, Pete?" Alice Hendricks said at his elbow. He swung about, grinned at her. "Am I? You said it. And here I was about to go. I never thought you'd make it before one." His grin faded a little. "How'd you do it? Sweet-talk one of the guards into letting you in at the head of the line?" She shook her bandanaed head, slid onto the stool beside him and crossed her knees—a not very convincing sign of femininity in a woman wearing baggy denim coveralls. "Aren't you going to buy me a drink, honey?" "Oh, sure." He glanced over at the bartender. "Another beer. No, make it two." He pulled the five dollars out of his pocket, shoved it across the bar, and looked back at Alice, more closely this time. The ID badge, pinned to her hip. The badge, with her name, number, department, and picture—and the little meter that measured the strength of her Mind Shield. The dial should have pointed to full charge. It didn't. It registered about seventy per cent loss. Alice followed his gaze. She giggled. "It was easy," she said. "The guards don't do more than glance at us, you know. And everyone who's supposed to go through Shielding on Thursday has the department number stamped on a yellow background. So all I did was make a red background, like yours, and slip it on in the restroom at Clean-up time." "But Alice...." Pete Ganley swallowed his beer and signaled for another. "This is serious. You've got to keep the shields up. The enemy is everywhere. Why, right now, one could be probing you." "So what? The dial isn't down to Danger yet. And tomorrow I'll just put the red tag back on over the yellow one and go through Shielding in the same line with you. They won't notice." She giggled again. "I thought it was smart, Petey. You oughta think so too. You know why I did it, don't you?" Her round, smooth face looked up at him, wide-eyed and full-lipped. She had no worry wrinkles like Susan's, no mouth pulled down at the corners like Susan's, and under that shapeless coverall.... "Sure, baby, I'm glad you did it," Pete Ganley said huskily. Riuku was glad too, the next afternoon when the swing shift started pouring through the gates. It was easy, once he'd found her. He had tested hundreds, all shielded, some almost accessible to him, but none vulnerable enough. Then this one came. The shield was so far down that contact was almost easy. Painful, tiring, but not really difficult. He could feel her momentary sense of alarm, of nausea, and then he was through, integrated with her, his thoughts at home with her thoughts. He rested, inside her mind. "Oh, hi, Joan. No, I'm all right. Just a little dizzy for a moment. A hangover? Of course not. Not on a Friday." Riuku listened to her half of the conversation. Stupid Earthman. If only she'd start thinking about the job. Or if only his contact with her were better. If he could use her sense perceptions, see through her eyes, hear through her ears, feel through her fingers, then everything would be easy. But he couldn't. All he could do was read her thoughts. Earth thoughts at that.... ... The time clock. Where's my card? Oh, here it is. Only 3:57. Why did I have to hurry so? I had lots of time.... "Why, Mary, how nice you look today. That's a new hairdo, isn't it? A permanent? Yeah, what kind?" ... What a microbe! Looks like pink straw, her hair does, and of course she thinks it's beautiful.... "I'd better get down to my station. Old Liverlips will be ranting again. You oughta be glad you have Eddie for a lead man. Eddie's cute. So's Dave, over in 77. But Liverlips, ugh...." She was walking down the aisle to her station now. A procession of names: Maisie, and Edith, and that fat slob Natalie, and if Jean Andrews comes around tonight flashing that diamond in my face again, I'll—I'll kill her.... "Oh hello, Clinton. What do you mean, late? The whistle just blew. Of course I'm ready to go to work." Liverlips, that's what you are. And still in that same blue shirt. What a wife you must have. Probably as sloppy as you are.... Good, Riuku thought. Now she'll be working. Now he'd find out whatever it was she was doing. Not that it would be important, of course, but let him learn what her job was, and what those other girls' jobs were, and in a little while he'd have all the data he needed. Maybe even before the shift ended tonight, before she went through the Shielding boost. He shivered a little, thinking of the boost. He'd survive it, of course. He'd be too well integrated with her by then. But it was nothing to look forward to. Still, he needn't worry about it. He had the whole shift to find out what the weapon was. The whole shift, here inside Alice's mind, inside the most closely guarded factory on or under or above the surface of the Earth. He settled down and waited, expectantly. Alice Hendricks turned her back on the lead man and looked down the work table to her place. The other girls were there already. Lois and Marge and Coralie, the other three members of the Plug table, Line 73. "Hey, how'd you make out?" Marge said. She glanced around to make sure none of the lead men or timekeepers were close enough to overhear her, then went on. "Did you get away with it?" "Sure," Alice said. "And you should of seen Pete's face when I walked in." She took the soldering iron out of her locker, plugged it in, and reached out for the pan of 731 wires. "You know, it's funny. Pete's not so good looking, and he's sort of a careless dresser and all that, but oh, what he does to me." She filled the 731 plug with solder and reached for the white, black, red wire. "You'd better watch out," Lois said. "Or Susan's going to be doing something to you." "Oh, her." Alice touched the tip of the iron to the solder filled pin, worked the wire down into position. "What can she do? Pete doesn't give a damn about her." "He's still living with her, isn't he?" Lois said. Alice shrugged.... What a mealy-mouthed little snip Lois could be, sometimes. You'd think to hear her that she was better than any of them, and luckier too, with her Joe and the kids. What a laugh! Joe was probably the only guy who'd ever looked at her, and she'd hooked him right out of school, and now with three kids in five years and her working nights.... Alice finished soldering the first row of wires in the plug and started in on the second. So old Liverlips thought she wasted time, did he? Well, she'd show him. She'd get out her sixteen plugs tonight. "Junior kept me up all night last night," Lois said. "He's cutting a tooth." "Yeah," Coralie said, "It's pretty rough at that age. I remember right after Mike was born...." Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face, with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth.... "Oh, oh," Alice said suddenly. "I've got solder on the outside of the pin." She looked around for the alcohol. Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires, of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing. They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment. Only they weren't. They were making a weapon, and this bit of electronic equipment was part of that weapon. What part? What did the 731 plug do? Alice Hendricks didn't know. Alice Hendricks didn't care. The first break. Ten minutes away from work. Alice was walking back along the aisle that separated Assembly from the men's Machine Shop. A chance, perhaps. She was looking at the machines, or rather past them, at the men. "Hello, Tommy. How's the love life?" He's not bad at all. Real cute. Though not like Pete, oh no. The machines. Riuku prodded at her thoughts, wishing he could influence them, wishing that just for a moment he could see, hear, feel, think as she would never think. The machines were—machines. That big funny one where Ned works, and Tommy's spot welder, and over in the corner where the superintendent is—he's a snappy dresser, tie and everything. The corner. Restricted area. Can't go over. High voltage or something.... Her thoughts slid away from the restricted area. Should she go out for lunch or eat off the sandwich machine? And Riuku curled inside her mind and cursed her with his rapidly growing Earthwoman's vocabulary. At the end of the shift he had learned nothing. Nothing about the weapon, that is. He had found out a good deal about the sex life of Genus Homo—information that made him even more glad than before that his was a one-sexed race. With work over and tools put away and Alice in the restroom gleefully thinking about the red Friday night tag she was slipping onto her ID badge, he was as far from success as ever. For a moment he considered leaving her, looking for another subject. But he'd probably not be able to find one. No, the only thing to do was stay with her, curl deep in her mind and go through the Shielding boost, and later on.... The line. Alice's nervousness.... Oh, oh, there's that guy with the meter—the one from maintenance. What's he want? "Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?" ... If he checks the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway. The enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them? "No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if.... It's okay, huh? It'll pass...." Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess. Whew. "Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here tonight? Shut up...." And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no consciousness of anything at all. He struggled back. He was confused, and there was blankness around him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration—much more complete integration than he had ever known before. "But Pete, honey," Alice said. "What did you come over to the gate for? You shouldn't of done it." "Why not? I wanted to see you." "What if one of Susan's pals sees us?" "So what? I'm getting tired of checking in every night, like a baby. Besides, one of her pals did see us, last night, at the bar." Fear. What'll she do? Susan's a hellcat. I know she is. But maybe Pete'll get really sick and tired of her. He looks it. He looks mad. I'd sure hate to have him mad at me.... "Let's go for a spin, baby. Out in the suburbs somewhere. How about it?" "Well—why sure, Pete...." Sitting beside him in the copter. All alone up here. Real romantic, like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean thing. Poor Petey.... Riuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost. If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could accomplish the same results. He prodded again. "Pete," Alice said suddenly. "What are we working on, anyway?" "What do you mean, working on?" He frowned at her. "At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one ever tells me what for." "Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—" "Can cost Earth a ship. I know. Quit spouting poster talk at me, Pete Ganley. The enemy isn't even human. And there aren't any around here." Pete looked over at her. She was pouting, the upper lip drawn under the lower. Someone must have told her that was cute. Well, so what—it was cute. "What makes you think I know anything more than you do?" he said. "Well, gee." She looked up at him, so near to her in the moonlight that she wondered why she wanted to talk about the plant anyway. "You're in Final Assembly, aren't you? You check the whatsits before they go out." "Sure," he said. No harm in telling her. No spies now, not in this kind of war. Besides, she was too dumb to know anything. "It's a simple enough gadget," Pete Ganley said. "A new type of force field weapon that the enemy can't spot until it hits them. They don't even know there's an Earth ship within a million miles, until Bingo !..." She drank it in, and in her mind Riuku did too. Wonderful integration, wonderful. Partial thought control. And now, he'd learn the secret.... "You really want to know how it works?" Pete Ganley said. When she nodded he couldn't help grinning. "Well, it's analogous to the field set up by animal neurones, in a way. You've just got to damp that field, and not only damp it but blot it out, so that the frequency shows nothing at all there, and then—well, that's where those Corcoran assemblies you're soldering on come in. You produce the field...." Alice Hendricks listened. For some reason she wanted to listen. She was really curious about the field. But, gee, how did he expect her to understand all that stuff? He sounded like her algebra teacher, or was it chemistry? Lord, how she'd hated school. Maybe she shouldn't have quit. ... Corcoran fields. E and IR and nine-space something or other. She'd never seen Pete like this before. He looked real different. Sort of like a professor, or something. He must be real smart. And so—well, not good-looking especially but, well, appealing. Real SA, he had.... "So that's how it works," Pete Ganley said. "Quite a weapon, against them. It wouldn't work on a human being, of course." She was staring at him dreamy-eyed. He laughed. "Silly, I bet you haven't understood a word I said." "I have too." "Liar." He locked the automatic pilot on the copter and held out his arms. "Come here, you." "Oh, Petey...." Who cared about the weapon? He was right, even if she wouldn't admit it. She hadn't even listened, hardly. She hadn't understood. And neither had Riuku. Riuku waited until she'd fallen soundly asleep that night before he tried contacting Nagor. He'd learned nothing useful. He'd picked up nothing in her mind except more thoughts of Pete, and gee, maybe someday they'd get married, if he only had guts enough to tell Susan where to get off.... But she was asleep at last. Riuku was free enough of her thoughts to break contact, partially of course, since if he broke it completely he wouldn't be able to get back through the Shielding. It was hard enough to reach out through it. He sent a painful probing feeler out into space, to the spot where Nagor and the others waited for his report. "Nagor...." "Riuku? Is that you?" "Yes. I've got a contact. A girl. But I haven't learned anything yet that can help us." "Louder, Riuku. I can hardly hear you...." Alice Hendricks stirred in her sleep. The dream images slipped through her subconscious, almost waking her, beating against Riuku. Pete, baby, you shouldn't be like that.... Riuku cursed the bisexual species in their own language. "Riuku!" Nagor's call was harsh, urgent. "You've got to find out. We haven't much time. We lost three more ships today, and there wasn't a sign of danger. No Earthman nearby, no force fields, nothing. You've got to find out why." Those ships just disappeared. Riuku forced his way up through the erotic dreams of Alice Hendricks. "I know a little," he said. "They damp their thought waves somehow, and keep us from spotting the Corcoran field." "Corcoran field? What's that?" "I don't know." Alice's thoughts washed over him, pulling him back into complete integration, away from Nagor, into a medley of heroic Petes with gleaming eyes and clutching hands and good little Alices pushing them away—for the moment. "But surely you can find out through the girl," Nagor insisted from far away, almost out of phase altogether. "No, Pete!" Alice Hendricks said aloud. "Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact. You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all." "Well," Alice Hendricks thought, "maybe...." Riuku cursed her again, in the lingua franca of a dozen systems. Nagor's voice faded. Riuku switched back to English. Saturday. Into the plant at 3:58. Jean's diamond again.... Wish it would choke her; she's got a horsey enough face for it to. Where's old Liverlips? Don't see him around. Might as well go to the restroom for a while.... That's it, Riuku thought. Get her over past the machine shop, over by that Restricted Area. There must be something there we can go on.... "Hello, Tommy," Alice Hendricks said. "How's the love life?" "It could be better if someone I know would, uh, cooperate...." She looked past him, toward the corner where the big panels were with all the dials and the meters and the chart that was almost like the kind they drew pictures of earthquakes on. What was it for, anyway? And why couldn't anyone go over to it except those longhairs? High voltage her foot.... "What're you looking at, Alice?" Tommy said. "Oh, that." She pointed. "Wonder what it's for? It doesn't look like much of anything, really." "I wouldn't know. I've got something better to look at." "Oh, you !" Compared to Pete, he didn't have anything, not anything at all. ... Pete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway? Riuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found out what the other girls thought about it. Nothing. Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering? She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to call Nagor again. "Have you found out anything, Riuku?" "Not yet." Silence. Then: "We've lost another ship. Maybe you'd better turn her loose and come on back. It looks as if we'll have to run for it, after all." Defeat. The long, interstellar search for another race, a race less technologically advanced than this one, and all because of a stupid Earth female. "Not yet, Nagor," he said. "Her boy friend knows. I'll find out. I'll make her listen to him." "Well," Nagor said doubtfully. "All right. But hurry. We haven't much time at all." "I'll hurry," Riuku promised. "I'll be back with you tonight." That night after work Pete Ganley was waiting outside the gate again. Alice spotted his copter right away, even though he had the lights turned way down. "Gee, Pete, I didn't think...." "Get in. Quick." "What's the matter?" She climbed in beside him. He didn't answer until the copter had lifted itself into the air, away from the factory landing lots and the bright overhead lights and the home-bound workers. "It's Susan, who else," he said grimly. "She was really sounding off today. She kept saying she had a lot of evidence and I'd better be careful. And, well, I sure didn't want you turning up at the bar tonight of all nights." He didn't sound like Pete. "Why?" Alice said. "Are you afraid she'll divorce you?" "Oh, Alice, you're as bad as—look, baby, don't you see? It would be awful for you. All the publicity, the things she'd call you, maybe even in the papers...." He was staring straight ahead, his hands locked about the controls. He was sort of—well, distant. Not her Petey any more. Someone else's Pete. Susan's Pete.... "I think we should be more careful," he said. Riuku twisted his way through her thoughts, tried to push them down.... Does he love me, he's got to love me, sure he does, he just doesn't want me to get hurt.... And far away, almost completely out of phase, Nagor's call. "Riuku, another ship's gone. You'd better come back. Bring what you've learned so far and we can withdraw from the system and maybe piece it together...." "In a little while. Just a little while." Stop thinking about Susan, you biological schizo. Change the subject. You'll never get anything out of that man by having hysterics.... "I suppose," Alice cried bitterly, "you've been leading me on all the time. You don't love me. You'd rather have her !" "That's not so. Hell, baby...." He's angry. He's not even going to kiss me. I'm just cutting my own throat when I act like that.... "Okay, Pete. I'm sorry. I know it's tough on you. Let's have a drink, okay? Still got some in the glove compartment?" "Huh? Oh, sure." She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient gulp. She poured him another. Riuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed, swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe. Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The Restricted Area.... "Pete." "Yeah, baby?" "How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't even go over in the Restricted Area?" "Whatever made you think of that?" He laughed suddenly. He turned to her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. "Voltage loose ... oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?" "No. What?" "That's the control panel for one of the weapons, silly. It's only a duplicate, actually—a monitor station. But it's tuned to the frequencies of all the ships in this sector and—" She listened. She wanted to listen. She had to want to listen, now. "Nagor, I'm getting it," Riuku called. "I'll bring it all back with me. Just a minute and I'll have it." "How does it work, honey?" Alice Hendricks said. "You really want to know? Okay. Now the Corcoran field is generated between the ships and areas like that one, only a lot more powerful, by—" "It's coming through now, Nagor." "—a very simple power source, once you get the basics of it. You—oh, oh!" He grabbed her arm. "Duck, Alice!" A spotlight flashed out of the darkness, turned on them, outlined them. A siren whirred briefly, and then another copter pulled up beside them and a loudspeaker blared tinnily. "Okay, bud, pull down to the landing lane." The police. Police. Fear, all the way through Alice's thoughts, all the way through Riuku. Police. Earth law. That meant—it must mean he'd been discovered, that they had some other means of protection besides the Shielding.... "Nagor! I've been discovered!" "Come away then, you fool!" He twisted, trying to pull free of Alice's fear, away from the integration of their separate terrors. But he couldn't push her thoughts back from his. She was too frightened. He was too frightened. The bond held. "Oh, Pete, Pete, what did you do?" He didn't answer. He landed the copter, stepped out of it, walked back to the other copter that was just dropping down behind him. "But officer, what's the matter?" Alice Hendricks huddled down in the seat, already seeing tomorrow's papers, and her picture, and she wasn't really photogenic, either.... And then, from the other copter, she heard the woman laugh. "Pete Ganley, you fall for anything, don't you?" "Susan!" "You didn't expect me to follow you, did you? Didn't it ever occur to you that detectives could put a bug in your copter? My, what we've been hearing!" "Yeah," the detective who was driving said. "And those pictures we took last night weren't bad either." "Susan, I can explain everything...." "I'm sure you can, Pete. You always try. But as for you—you little—" Alice ducked down away from her. Pictures. Oh God, what it would make her look like. Still, this hag with the pinched up face who couldn't hold a man with all the cosmetics in the drugstore to camouflage her—she had her nerve, yelling like that. "Yeah, and I know a lot about you too!" Alice Hendricks cried. "Why, let me get my hands on you...." "Riuku!" Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool. You're not gaining anything this way. Calm down, so I can get out of here.... Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly. "That's better," Susan said. "Pete, your taste in women gets worse each time. I don't know why I always take you back." "I can explain everything." "Oh, Pete," Alice Hendricks whispered. "Petey, you're not—" "Sure he is," Susan Ganley said. "He's coming with me. The nice detectives will take you home, dear. But I don't think you'd better try anything with them—they're not your type. They're single." "Pete...." But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his arm, he followed her. "How could you do it, Petey...." Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku. Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is.... "Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman—" "Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other systems." Petey, Petey, Petey.... Contact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free, break free.... "What's the matter, Riuku? Why don't you come? Have the police caught you?" The others were fleeing, getting farther away even as he listened to Nagor's call. Contact was hard to maintain now; he could feel communication fading. "Riuku, if you don't come now...." He fought, but Alice's thoughts were still with him; Alice's tears still kept bringing him back into full awareness of her. "Riuku!" "I—I can't!" The Shielding boost, that had integrated him so completely with Alice Hendricks, would never let him go. "Oh, Petey, I've lost you...." And Nagor's sad farewell slipped completely out of phase, leaving him alone, with her. The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth's now unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding machine, at Tommy. "How's the love life?" "You really interested in finding out, Alice?" "Well—maybe—" And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.

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Consider the poor mailman of the future. To "sleet and snow and dead of night"—things that must not keep him from his appointed rounds—will be added, sub-zero void, meteors, and planets that won't stay put. Maybe he'll decide that for six cents an ounce it just ain't worth it. POSTMARK GANYMEDE By ROBERT SILVERBERG "I'm washed up," Preston growled bitterly. "They made a postman out of me. Me—a postman!" He crumpled the assignment memo into a small, hard ball and hurled it at the bristly image of himself in the bar mirror. He hadn't shaved in three days—which was how long it had been since he had been notified of his removal from Space Patrol Service and his transfer to Postal Delivery. Suddenly, Preston felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up and saw a man in the trim gray of a Patrolman's uniform. "What do you want, Dawes?" "Chief's been looking for you, Preston. It's time for you to get going on your run." Preston scowled. "Time to go deliver the mail, eh?" He spat. "Don't they have anything better to do with good spacemen than make letter carriers out of them?" The other man shook his head. "You won't get anywhere grousing about it, Preston. Your papers don't specify which branch you're assigned to, and if they want to make you carry the mail—that's it." His voice became suddenly gentle. "Come on, Pres. One last drink, and then let's go. You don't want to spoil a good record, do you?" "No," Preston said reflectively. He gulped his drink and stood up. "Okay. I'm ready. Neither snow nor rain shall stay me from my appointed rounds, or however the damned thing goes." "That's a smart attitude, Preston. Come on—I'll walk you over to Administration." Savagely, Preston ripped away the hand that the other had put around his shoulders. "I can get there myself. At least give me credit for that!" "Okay," Dawes said, shrugging. "Well—good luck, Preston." "Yeah. Thanks. Thanks real lots." He pushed his way past the man in Space Grays and shouldered past a couple of barflies as he left. He pushed open the door of the bar and stood outside for a moment. It was near midnight, and the sky over Nome Spaceport was bright with stars. Preston's trained eye picked out Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There they were—waiting. But he would spend the rest of his days ferrying letters on the Ganymede run. He sucked in the cold night air of summertime Alaska and squared his shoulders. Two hours later, Preston sat at the controls of a one-man patrol ship just as he had in the old days. Only the control panel was bare where the firing studs for the heavy guns was found in regular patrol ships. And in the cargo hold instead of crates of spare ammo there were three bulging sacks of mail destined for the colony on Ganymede. Slight difference , Preston thought, as he set up his blasting pattern. "Okay, Preston," came the voice from the tower. "You've got clearance." "Cheers," Preston said, and yanked the blast-lever. The ship jolted upward, and for a second he felt a little of the old thrill—until he remembered. He took the ship out in space, saw the blackness in the viewplate. The radio crackled. "Come in, Postal Ship. Come in, Postal Ship." "I'm in. What do you want?" "We're your convoy," a hard voice said. "Patrol Ship 08756, Lieutenant Mellors, above you. Down at three o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732, Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll take you through the Pirate Belt." Preston felt his face go hot with shame. Mellors! Gunderson! They would stick two of his old sidekicks on the job of guarding him. "Please acknowledge," Mellors said. "The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman." Preston paused. Then: "Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant Preston aboard. I acknowledge message." There was a stunned silence. " Preston? Hal Preston?" "The one and only," Preston said. "What are you doing on a Postal ship?" Mellors asked. "Why don't you ask the Chief that? He's the one who yanked me out of the Patrol and put me here." "Can you beat that?" Gunderson asked incredulously. "Hal Preston, on a Postal ship." "Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?" Preston asked bitterly. "You can't believe your ears. Well, you better believe it, because here I am." "Must be some clerical error," Gunderson said. "Let's change the subject," Preston snapped. They were silent for a few moments, as the three ships—two armed, one loaded with mail for Ganymede—streaked outward away from Earth. Manipulating his controls with the ease of long experience, Preston guided the ship smoothly toward the gleaming bulk of far-off Jupiter. Even at this distance, he could see five or six bright pips surrounding the huge planet. There was Callisto, and—ah—there was Ganymede. He made computations, checked his controls, figured orbits. Anything to keep from having to talk to his two ex-Patrolmates or from having to think about the humiliating job he was on. Anything to— " Pirates! Moving up at two o'clock! " Preston came awake. He picked off the location of the pirate ships—there were two of them, coming up out of the asteroid belt. Small, deadly, compact, they orbited toward him. He pounded the instrument panel in impotent rage, looking for the guns that weren't there. "Don't worry, Pres," came Mellors' voice. "We'll take care of them for you." "Thanks," Preston said bitterly. He watched as the pirate ships approached, longing to trade places with the men in the Patrol ships above and below him. Suddenly a bright spear of flame lashed out across space and the hull of Gunderson's ship glowed cherry red. "I'm okay," Gunderson reported immediately. "Screens took the charge." Preston gripped his controls and threw the ship into a plunging dive that dropped it back behind the protection of both Patrol ships. He saw Gunderson and Mellors converge on one of the pirates. Two blue beams licked out, and the pirate ship exploded. But then the second pirate swooped down in an unexpected dive. "Look out!" Preston yelled helplessly—but it was too late. Beams ripped into the hull of Mellors' ship, and a dark fissure line opened down the side of the ship. Preston smashed his hand against the control panel. Better to die in an honest dogfight than to live this way! It was one against one, now—Gunderson against the pirate. Preston dropped back again to take advantage of the Patrol ship's protection. "I'm going to try a diversionary tactic," Gunderson said on untappable tight-beam. "Get ready to cut under and streak for Ganymede with all you got." "Check." Preston watched as the tactic got under way. Gunderson's ship traveled in a long, looping spiral that drew the pirate into the upper quadrant of space. His path free, Preston guided his ship under the other two and toward unobstructed freedom. As he looked back, he saw Gunderson steaming for the pirate on a sure collision orbit. He turned away. The score was two Patrolmen dead, two ships wrecked—but the mails would get through. Shaking his head, Preston leaned forward over his control board and headed on toward Ganymede. The blue-white, frozen moon hung beneath him. Preston snapped on the radio. "Ganymede Colony? Come in, please. This is your Postal Ship." The words tasted sour in his mouth. There was silence for a second. "Come in, Ganymede," Preston repeated impatiently—and then the sound of a distress signal cut across his audio pickup. It was coming on wide beam from the satellite below—and they had cut out all receiving facilities in an attempt to step up their transmitter. Preston reached for the wide-beam stud, pressed it. "Okay, I pick up your signal, Ganymede. Come in, now!" "This is Ganymede," a tense voice said. "We've got trouble down here. Who are you?" "Mail ship," Preston said. "From Earth. What's going on?" There was the sound of voices whispering somewhere near the microphone. Finally: "Hello, Mail Ship?" "Yeah?" "You're going to have to turn back to Earth, fellow. You can't land here. It's rough on us, missing a mail trip, but—" Preston said impatiently, "Why can't I land? What the devil's going on down there?" "We've been invaded," the tired voice said. "The colony's been completely surrounded by iceworms." "Iceworms?" "The local native life," the colonist explained. "They're about thirty feet long, a foot wide, and mostly mouth. There's a ring of them about a hundred yards wide surrounding the Dome. They can't get in and we can't get out—and we can't figure out any possible approach for you." "Pretty," Preston said. "But why didn't the things bother you while you were building your Dome?" "Apparently they have a very long hibernation-cycle. We've only been here two years, you know. The iceworms must all have been asleep when we came. But they came swarming out of the ice by the hundreds last month." "How come Earth doesn't know?" "The antenna for our long-range transmitter was outside the Dome. One of the worms came by and chewed the antenna right off. All we've got left is this short-range thing we're using and it's no good more than ten thousand miles from here. You're the first one who's been this close since it happened." "I get it." Preston closed his eyes for a second, trying to think things out. The Colony was under blockade by hostile alien life, thereby making it impossible for him to deliver the mail. Okay. If he'd been a regular member of the Postal Service, he'd have given it up as a bad job and gone back to Earth to report the difficulty. But I'm not going back. I'll be the best damned mailman they've got. "Give me a landing orbit anyway, Ganymede." "But you can't come down! How will you leave your ship?" "Don't worry about that," Preston said calmly. "We have to worry! We don't dare open the Dome, with those creatures outside. You can't come down, Postal Ship." "You want your mail or don't you?" The colonist paused. "Well—" "Okay, then," Preston said. "Shut up and give me landing coordinates!" There was a pause, and then the figures started coming over. Preston jotted them down on a scratch-pad. "Okay, I've got them. Now sit tight and wait." He glanced contemptuously at the three mail-pouches behind him, grinned, and started setting up the orbit. Mailman, am I? I'll show them! He brought the Postal Ship down with all the skill of his years in the Patrol, spiralling in around the big satellite of Jupiter as cautiously and as precisely as if he were zeroing in on a pirate lair in the asteroid belt. In its own way, this was as dangerous, perhaps even more so. Preston guided the ship into an ever-narrowing orbit, which he stabilized about a hundred miles over the surface of Ganymede. As his ship swung around the moon's poles in its tight orbit, he began to figure some fuel computations. His scratch-pad began to fill with notations. Fuel storage— Escape velocity— Margin of error— Safety factor— Finally he looked up. He had computed exactly how much spare fuel he had, how much he could afford to waste. It was a small figure—too small, perhaps. He turned to the radio. "Ganymede?" "Where are you, Postal Ship?" "I'm in a tight orbit about a hundred miles up," Preston said. "Give me the figures on the circumference of your Dome, Ganymede?" "Seven miles," the colonist said. "What are you planning to do?" Preston didn't answer. He broke contact and scribbled some more figures. Seven miles of iceworms, eh? That was too much to handle. He had planned on dropping flaming fuel on them and burning them out, but he couldn't do it that way. He'd have to try a different tactic. Down below, he could see the blue-white ammonia ice that was the frozen atmosphere of Ganymede. Shimmering gently amid the whiteness was the transparent yellow of the Dome beneath whose curved walls lived the Ganymede Colony. Even forewarned, Preston shuddered. Surrounding the Dome was a living, writhing belt of giant worms. "Lovely," he said. "Just lovely." Getting up, he clambered over the mail sacks and headed toward the rear of the ship, hunting for the auxiliary fuel-tanks. Working rapidly, he lugged one out and strapped it into an empty gun turret, making sure he could get it loose again when he'd need it. He wiped away sweat and checked the angle at which the fuel-tank would face the ground when he came down for a landing. Satisfied, he knocked a hole in the side of the fuel-tank. "Okay, Ganymede," he radioed. "I'm coming down." He blasted loose from the tight orbit and rocked the ship down on manual. The forbidding surface of Ganymede grew closer and closer. Now he could see the iceworms plainly. Hideous, thick creatures, lying coiled in masses around the Dome. Preston checked his spacesuit, making sure it was sealed. The instruments told him he was a bare ten miles above Ganymede now. One more swing around the poles would do it. He peered out as the Dome came below and once again snapped on the radio. "I'm going to come down and burn a path through those worms of yours. Watch me carefully, and jump to it when you see me land. I want that airlock open, or else." "But—" "No buts!" He was right overhead now. Just one ordinary-type gun would solve the whole problem, he thought. But Postal Ships didn't get guns. They weren't supposed to need them. He centered the ship as well as he could on the Dome below and threw it into automatic pilot. Jumping from the control panel, he ran back toward the gun turret and slammed shut the plexilite screen. Its outer wall opened and the fuel-tank went tumbling outward and down. He returned to his control-panel seat and looked at the viewscreen. He smiled. The fuel-tank was lying near the Dome—right in the middle of the nest of iceworms. The fuel was leaking from the puncture. The iceworms writhed in from all sides. "Now!" Preston said grimly. The ship roared down, jets blasting. The fire licked out, heated the ground, melted snow—ignited the fuel-tank! A gigantic flame blazed up, reflected harshly off the snows of Ganymede. And the mindless iceworms came, marching toward the fire, being consumed, as still others devoured the bodies of the dead and dying. Preston looked away and concentrated on the business of finding a place to land the ship. The holocaust still raged as he leaped down from the catwalk of the ship, clutching one of the heavy mail sacks, and struggled through the melting snows to the airlock. He grinned. The airlock was open. Arms grabbed him, pulled him through. Someone opened his helmet. "Great job, Postman!" "There are two more mail sacks," Preston said. "Get men out after them." The man in charge gestured to two young colonists, who donned spacesuits and dashed through the airlock. Preston watched as they raced to the ship, climbed in, and returned a few moments later with the mail sacks. "You've got it all," Preston said. "I'm checking out. I'll get word to the Patrol to get here and clean up that mess for you." "How can we thank you?" the official-looking man asked. "No need to," Preston said casually. "I had to get that mail down here some way, didn't I?" He turned away, smiling to himself. Maybe the Chief had known what he was doing when he took an experienced Patrol man and dumped him into Postal. Delivering the mail to Ganymede had been more hazardous than fighting off half a dozen space pirates. I guess I was wrong , Preston thought. This is no snap job for old men. Preoccupied, he started out through the airlock. The man in charge caught his arm. "Say, we don't even know your name! Here you are a hero, and—" "Hero?" Preston shrugged. "All I did was deliver the mail. It's all in a day's work, you know. The mail's got to get through!" THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories September 1957. 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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ACID BATH By VASELEOS GARSON The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues. Jon Karyl was bolting in a new baffle plate on the stationary rocket engine. It was a tedious job and took all his concentration. So he wasn't paying too much attention to what was going on in other parts of the little asteroid. He didn't see the peculiar blue space ship, its rockets throttled down, as it drifted to land only a few hundred yards away from his plastic igloo. Nor did he see the half-dozen steel-blue creatures slide out of the peculiar vessel's airlock. It was only as he crawled out of the depths of the rocket power plant that he realized something was wrong. By then it was almost too late. The six blue figures were only fifty feet away, approaching him at a lope. Jon Karyl took one look and went bounding over the asteroid's rocky slopes in fifty-foot bounds. When you're a Lone Watcher, and strangers catch you unawares, you don't stand still. You move fast. It's the Watcher's first rule. Stay alive. An Earthship may depend upon your life. As he fled, Jon Karyl cursed softly under his breath. The automatic alarm should have shrilled out a warning. Then he saved as much of his breath as he could as some sort of power wave tore up the rocky sward to his left. He twisted and zig-zagged in his flight, trying to get out of sight of the strangers. Once hidden from their eyes, he could cut back and head for the underground entrance to the service station. He glanced back finally. Two of the steel-blue creatures were jack-rabbiting after him, and rapidly closing the distance. Jon Karyl unsheathed the stubray pistol at his side, turned the oxygen dial up for greater exertion, increased the gravity pull in his space-suit boots as he neared the ravine he'd been racing for. The oxygen was just taking hold when he hit the lip of the ravine and began sprinting through its man-high bush-strewn course. The power ray from behind ripped out great gobs of the sheltering bushes. But running naturally, bent close to the bottom of the ravine, Jon Karyl dodged the bare spots. The oxygen made the tremendous exertion easy for his lungs as he sped down the dim trail, hidden from the two steel-blue stalkers. He'd eluded them, temporarily at least, Jon Karyl decided when he finally edged off the dim trail and watched for movement along the route behind him. He stood up, finally, pushed aside the leafy overhang of a bush and looked for landmarks along the edge of the ravine. He found one, a stubby bush, shaped like a Maltese cross, clinging to the lip of the ravine. The hidden entrance to the service station wasn't far off. His pistol held ready, he moved quietly on down the ravine until the old water course made an abrupt hairpin turn. Instead of following around the sharp bend, Jon Karyl moved straight ahead through the overhanging bushes until he came to a dense thicket. Dropping to his hands and knees he worked his way under the edge of the thicket into a hollowed-out space in the center. There , just ahead of him, was the lock leading into the service station. Slipping a key out of a leg pouch on the space suit, he jabbed it into the center of the lock, opening the lever housing. He pulled strongly on the lever. With a hiss of escaping air, the lock swung open. Jon Karyl darted inside, the door closing softly behind. At the end of the long tunnel he stepped to the televisor which was fixed on the area surrounding the station. Jon Karyl saw none of the steel-blue creatures. But he saw their ship. It squatted like a smashed-down kid's top, its lock shut tight. He tuned the televisor to its widest range and finally spotted one of the Steel-Blues. He was looking into the stationary rocket engine. As Karyl watched, a second Steel-Blue came crawling out of the ship. The two Steel-Blues moved toward the center of the televisor range. They're coming toward the station, Karyl thought grimly. Karyl examined the two creatures. They were of the steel-blue color from the crown of their egg-shaped heads to the tips of their walking appendages. They were about the height of Karyl—six feet. But where he tapered from broad shoulders to flat hips, they were straight up and down. They had no legs, just appendages, many-jointed that stretched and shrank independent of the other, but keeping the cylindrical body with its four pairs of tentacles on a level balance. Where their eyes would have been was an elliptical-shaped lens, covering half the egg-head, with its converging ends curving around the sides of the head. Robots! Jon gauged immediately. But where were their masters? The Steel-Blues moved out of the range of the televisor. A minute later Jon heard a pounding from the station upstairs. He chuckled. They were like the wolf of pre-atomic days who huffed and puffed to blow the house down. The outer shell of the station was formed from stelrylite, the toughest metal in the solar system. With the self-sealing lock of the same resistant material, a mere pounding was nothing. Jon thought he'd have a look-see anyway. He went up the steel ladder leading to the station's power plant and the televisor that could look into every room within the station. He heaved a slight sigh when he reached the power room, for right at his hand were weapons to blast the ship from the asteroid. Jon adjusted one televisor to take in the lock to the station. His teeth suddenly clamped down on his lower lip. Those Steel-Blues were pounding holes into the stelrylite with round-headed metal clubs. But it was impossible. Stelrylite didn't break up that easily. Jon leaped to a row of studs, lining up the revolving turret which capped the station so that its thin fin pointed at the squat ship of the invaders. Then he went to the atomic cannon's firing buttons. He pressed first the yellow, then the blue button. Finally the red one. The thin fin—the cannon's sight—split in half as the turret opened and the coiled nose of the cannon protruded. There was a soundless flash. Then a sharp crack. Jon was dumbfounded when he saw the bolt ricochet off the ship. This was no ship of the solar system. There was nothing that could withstand even the slight jolt of power given by the station cannon on any of the Sun's worlds. But what was this? A piece of the ship had changed. A bubble of metal, like a huge drop of blue wax, dripped off the vessel and struck the rocket of the asteroid. It steamed and ran in rivulets. He pressed the red button again. Then abruptly he was on the floor of the power room, his legs strangely cut out from under him. He tried to move them. They lay flaccid. His arms seemed all right and tried to lever himself to an upright position. Damn it, he seemed as if he were paralyzed from the waist down. But it couldn't happen that suddenly. He turned his head. A Steel-Blue stood facing him. A forked tentacle held a square black box. Jon could read nothing in that metallic face. He said, voice muffled by the confines of the plastic helmet, "Who are you?" "I am"—there was a rising inflection in the answer—"a Steel-Blue." There were no lips on the Steel-Blue's face to move. "That is what I have named you," Jon Karyl said. "But what are you?" "A robot," came the immediate answer. Jon was quite sure then that the Steel-Blue was telepathic. "Yes," the Steel-Blue answered. "We talk in the language of the mind. Come!" he said peremptorily, motioning with the square black box. The paralysis left Karyl's legs. He followed the Steel-Blue, aware that the lens he'd seen on the creature's face had a counterpart on the back of the egg-head. Eyes in the back of his head, Jon thought. That's quite an innovation. "Thank you," Steel-Blue said. There wasn't much fear in Jon Karyl's mind. Psychiatrists had proved that when he had applied for this high-paying but man-killing job as a Lone Watcher on the Solar System's starways. He had little fear now, only curiosity. These Steel-Blues didn't seem inimical. They could have snuffed out my life very simply. Perhaps they and Solarians can be friends. Steel-Blue chuckled. Jon followed him through the sundered lock of the station. Karyl stopped for a moment to examine the wreckage of the lock. It had been punched full of holes as if it had been some soft cheese instead of a metal which Earthmen had spent nearly a century perfecting. "We appreciate your compliment," Steel-Blue said. "But that metal also is found on our world. It's probably the softest and most malleable we have. We were surprised you—earthmen, is it?—use it as protective metal." "Why are you in this system?" Jon asked, hardly expecting an answer. It came anyway. "For the same reason you Earthmen are reaching out farther into your system. We need living room. You have strategically placed planets for our use. We will use them." Jon sighed. For 400 years scientists had been preaching preparedness as Earth flung her ships into the reaches of the solar system, taking the first long step toward the conquest of space. There are other races somewhere, they argued. As strong and smart as man, many of them so transcending man in mental and inventive power that we must be prepared to strike the minute danger shows. Now here was the answer to the scientists' warning. Invasion by extra-terrestrials. "What did you say?" asked Steel-Blue. "I couldn't understand." "Just thinking to myself," Jon answered. It was a welcome surprise. Apparently his thoughts had to be directed outward, rather than inward, in order for the Steel-Blues to read it. He followed the Steel-Blue into the gaping lock of the invaders' space ship wondering how he could warn Earth. The Space Patrol cruiser was due in for refueling at his service station in 21 days. But by that time he probably would be mouldering in the rocky dust of the asteroid. It was pitch dark within the ship but the Steel-Blue seemed to have no trouble at all maneuvering through the maze of corridors. Jon followed him, attached to one tentacle. Finally Jon and his guide entered a circular room, bright with light streaming from a glass-like, bulging skylight. They apparently were near topside of the vessel. A Steel-Blue, more massive than his guide and with four more pair of tentacles, including two short ones that grew from the top of its head, spoke out. "This is the violator?" Jon's Steel-Blue nodded. "You know the penalty? Carry it out." "He also is an inhabitant of this system," Jon's guide added. "Examine him first, then give him the death." Jon Karyl shrugged as he was led from the lighted room through more corridors. If it got too bad he still had the stubray pistol. Anyway, he was curious. He'd taken on the lonely, nerve-wracking job of service station attendant just to see what it offered. Here was a part of it, and it was certainly something new. "This is the examination room," his Steel-Blue said, almost contemptuously. A green effulgence surrounded him. There was a hiss. Simultaneously, as the tiny microphone on the outside of his suit picked up the hiss, he felt a chill go through his body. Then it seemed as if a half dozen hands were inside him, examining his internal organs. His stomach contracted. He felt a squeeze on his heart. His lungs tickled. There were several more queer motions inside his body. Then another Steel-Blue voice said: "He is a soft-metal creature, made up of metals that melt at a very low temperature. He also contains a liquid whose makeup I cannot ascertain by ray-probe. Bring him back when the torture is done." Jon Karyl grinned a trifle wryly. What kind of torture could this be? Would it last 21 days? He glanced at the chronometer on his wrist. Jon's Steel-Blue led him out of the alien ship and halted expectantly just outside the ship's lock. Jon Karyl waited, too. He thought of the stubray pistol holstered at his hip. Shoot my way out? It'd be fun while it lasted. But he toted up the disadvantages. He either would have to find a hiding place on the asteroid, and if the Steel-Blues wanted him bad enough they could tear the whole place to pieces, or somehow get aboard the little life ship hidden in the service station. In that he would be just a sitting duck. He shrugged off the slight temptation to use the pistol. He was still curious. And he was interested in staying alive as long as possible. There was a remote chance he might warn the SP ship. Unconsciously, he glanced toward his belt to see the little power pack which, if under ideal conditions, could finger out fifty thousand miles into space. If he could somehow stay alive the 21 days he might be able to warn the patrol. He couldn't do it by attempting to flee, for his life would be snuffed out immediately. The Steel-Blue said quietly: "It might be ironical to let you warn that SP ship you keep thinking about. But we know your weapon now. Already our ship is equipped with a force field designed especially to deflect your atomic guns." Jon Karyl covered up his thoughts quickly. They can delve deeper than the surface of the mind. Or wasn't I keeping a leash on my thoughts? The Steel-Blue chuckled. "You get—absent-minded, is it?—every once in a while." Just then four other Steel-Blues appeared lugging great sheets of plastic and various other equipment. They dumped their loads and began unbundling them. Working swiftly, they built a plastic igloo, smaller than the living room in the larger service station igloo. They ranged instruments inside—one of them Jon Karyl recognized as an air pump from within the station—and they laid out a pallet. When they were done Jon saw a miniature reproduction of the service station, lacking only the cannon cap and fin, and with clear plastic walls instead of the opaqueness of the other. His Steel-Blue said: "We have reproduced the atmosphere of your station so that you be watched while you undergo the torture under the normal conditions of your life." "What is this torture?" Jon Karyl asked. The answer was almost caressing: "It is a liquid we use to dissolve metals. It causes joints to harden if even so much as a drop remains on it long. It eats away the metal, leaving a scaly residue which crumbles eventually into dust. "We will dilute it with a harmless liquid for you since No. 1 does not wish you to die instantly. "Enter your"—the Steel-Blue hesitated—"mausoleum. You die in your own atmosphere. However, we took the liberty of purifying it. There were dangerous elements in it." Jon walked into the little igloo. The Steel-Blues sealed the lock, fingered dials and switches on the outside. Jon's space suit deflated. Pressure was building up in the igloo. He took a sample of the air, found that it was good, although quite rich in oxygen compared with what he'd been using in the service station and in his suit. With a sigh of relief he took off his helmet and gulped huge draughts of the air. He sat down on the pallet and waited for the torture to begin. The Steel Blues crowded about the igloo, staring at him through elliptical eyes. Apparently, they too, were waiting for the torture to begin. Jon thought the excess of oxygen was making him light-headed. He stared at a cylinder which was beginning to sprout tentacles from the circle. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. An opening, like the adjustable eye-piece of a spacescope, was appearing in the center of the cylinder. A square, glass-like tumbler sat in the opening disclosed in the four-foot cylinder that had sprouted tentacles. It contained a yellowish liquid. One of the tentacles reached into the opening and clasped the glass. The opening closed and the cylinder, propelled by locomotor appendages, moved toward Jon. He didn't like the looks of the liquid in the tumbler. It looked like an acid of some sort. He raised to his feet. He unsheathed the stubray gun and prepared to blast the cylinder. The cylinder moved so fast Jon felt his eyes jump in his head. He brought the stubray gun up—but he was helpless. The pistol kept on going up. With a deft movement, one of the tentacles had speared it from his hand and was holding it out of his reach. Jon kicked at the glass in the cylinder's hand. But he was too slow. Two tentacles gripped the kicking leg. Another struck him in the chest, knocking him to the pallet. The same tentacle, assisted by a new one, pinioned his shoulders. Four tentacles held him supine. The cylinder lifted a glass-like cap from the tumbler of liquid. Lying there helplessly, Jon was remembering an old fairy tale he'd read as a kid. Something about a fellow named Socrates who was given a cup of hemlock to drink. It was the finis for Socrates. But the old hero had been nonchalant and calm about the whole thing. With a sigh, Jon Karyl, who was curious unto death, relaxed and said, "All right, bub, you don't have to force-feed me. I'll take it like a man." The cylinder apparently understood him, for it handed him the tumbler. It even reholstered his stubray pistol. Jon brought the glass of liquid under his nose. The fumes of the liquid were pungent. It brought tears to his eyes. He looked at the cylinder, then at the Steel-Blues crowding around the plastic igloo. He waved the glass at the audience. "To Earth, ever triumphant," he toasted. Then he drained the glass at a gulp. Its taste was bitter, and he felt hot prickles jab at his scalp. It was like eating very hot peppers. His eyes filled with tears. He coughed as the stuff went down. But he was still alive, he thought in amazement. He'd drunk the hemlock and was still alive. The reaction set in quickly. He hadn't known until then how tense he'd been. Now with the torture ordeal over, he relaxed. He laid down on the pallet and went to sleep. There was one lone Steel-Blue watching him when he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and sat up. He vanished almost instantly. He, or another like him, returned immediately accompanied by a half-dozen others, including the multi-tentacled creature known as No. 1. One said, "You are alive." The thought registered amazement. "When you lost consciousness, we thought you had"—there was a hesitation—"as you say, died." "No," Jon Karyl said. "I didn't die. I was just plain dead-beat so I went to sleep." The Steel-Blues apparently didn't understand. "Good it is that you live. The torture will continue," spoke No. 1 before loping away. The cylinder business began again. This time, Jon drank the bitter liquid slowly, trying to figure out what it was. It had a familiar, tantalizing taste but he couldn't quite put a taste-finger on it. His belly said he was hungry. He glanced at his chronometer. Only 20 days left before the SP ship arrived. Would this torture—he chuckled—last until then? But he was growing more and more conscious that his belly was screaming for hunger. The liquid had taken the edge off his thirst. It was on the fifth day of his torture that Jon Karyl decided that he was going to get something to eat or perish in the attempt. The cylinder sat passively in its niche in the circle. A dozen Steel-Blues were watching as Jon put on his helmet and unsheathed his stubray. They merely watched as he pressed the stubray's firing stud. Invisible rays licked out of the bulbous muzzle of the pistol. The plastic splintered. Jon was out of his goldfish bowl and striding toward his own igloo adjacent to the service station when a Steel-Blue accosted him. "Out of my way," grunted Jon, waving the stubray. "I'm hungry." "I'm the first Steel-Blue you met," said the creature who barred his way. "Go back to your torture." "But I'm so hungry I'll chew off one of your tentacles and eat it without seasoning." "Eat?" The Steel-Blue sounded puzzled. "I want to refuel. I've got to have food to keep my engine going." Steel-Blue chuckled. "So the hemlock, as you call it, is beginning to affect you at last? Back to the torture room." "Like R-dust," Jon growled. He pressed the firing stud on the stubray gun. One of Steel-Blue's tentacles broke off and fell to the rocky sward. Steel-Blue jerked out the box he'd used once before. A tentacle danced over it. Abruptly Jon found himself standing on a pinnacle of rock. Steel-Blue had cut a swath around him 15 feet deep and five feet wide. "Back to the room," Steel-Blue commanded. Jon resheathed the stubray pistol, shrugged non-committally and leaped the trench. He walked slowly back and reentered the torture chamber. The Steel-Blues rapidly repaired the damage he'd done. As he watched them, Jon was still curious, but he was getting mad underneath at the cold egoism of the Steel-Blues. By the shimmering clouds of Earth, by her green fields, and dark forests, he'd stay alive to warn the SP ship. Yes, he'd stay alive till then. And send the story of the Steel-Blues' corrosive acid to it. Then hundreds of Earth's ships could equip themselves with spray guns and squirt citric acid and watch the Steel-Blues fade away. It sounded almost silly to Jon Karyl. The fruit acid of Earth to repel these invaders—it doesn't sound possible. That couldn't be the answer. Citric acid wasn't the answer, Jon Karyl discovered a week later. The Steel-Blue who had captured him in the power room of the service station came in to examine him. "You're still holding out, I see," he observed after poking Jon in every sensitive part of his body. "I'll suggest to No. 1 that we increase the power of the—ah—hemlock. How do you feel?" Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he answered honestly enough: "My guts feel as if they're chewing each other up. My bones ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm so hungry." "That is the hemlock," Steel-Blue said. It was when he quaffed the new and stronger draught that Jon knew that his hope that it was citric acid was squelched. The acid taste was weaker which meant that the citric acid was the diluting liquid. It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive acid. On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak he didn't feel much like moving around. He let the cylinder feed him the hemlock. No. 1 came again to see him, and went away chuckling, "Decrease the dilution. This Earthman at last is beginning to suffer." Staying alive had now become a fetish with Jon. On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized that the Steel-Blues also were waiting for the SP ship. The extra-terrestrials had repaired the blue ship where the service station atomic ray had struck. And they were doing a little target practice with plastic bubbles only a few miles above the asteroid. When his chronometer clocked off the beginning of the twenty-first day, Jon received a tumbler of the hemlock from the hands of No. 1 himself. "It is the hemlock," he chuckled, "undiluted. Drink it and your torture is over. You will die before your SP ship is destroyed. "We have played with you long enough. Today we begin to toy with your SP ship. Drink up, Earthman, drink to enslavement." Weak though he was Jon lunged to his feet, spilling the tumbler of liquid. It ran cool along the plastic arm of his space suit. He changed his mind about throwing the contents on No. 1. With a smile he set the glass at his lips and drank. Then he laughed at No. 1. "The SP ship will turn your ship into jelly." No. 1 swept out, chuckling. "Boast if you will, Earthman, it's your last chance." There was an exultation in Jon's heart that deadened the hunger and washed away the nausea. At last he knew what the hemlock was. He sat on the pallet adjusting the little power-pack radio. The SP ship should now be within range of the set. The space patrol was notorious for its accuracy in keeping to schedule. Seconds counted like years. They had to be on the nose, or it meant disaster or death. He sent out the call letters. "AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ... AX to SP-101 ..." Three times he sent the call, then began sending his message, hoping that his signal was reaching the ship. He couldn't know if they answered. Though the power pack could get out a message over a vast distance, it could not pick up messages even when backed by an SP ship's power unless the ship was only a few hundred miles away. The power pack was strictly a distress signal. He didn't know how long he'd been sending, nor how many times his weary voice had repeated the short but desperate message. He kept watching the heavens and hoping. Abruptly he knew the SP ship was coming, for the blue ship of the Steel-Blues was rising silently from the asteroid. Up and up it rose, then flames flickered in a circle about its curious shape. The ship disappeared, suddenly accelerating. Jon Karyl strained his eyes. Finally he looked away from the heavens to the two Steel-Blues who stood negligently outside the goldfish bowl. Once more, Jon used the stubray pistol. He marched out of the plastic igloo and ran toward the service station. He didn't know how weak he was until he stumbled and fell only a few feet from his prison. The Steel-Blues just watched him. He crawled on, around the circular pit in the sward of the asteroid where one Steel-Blue had shown him the power of his weapon. He'd been crawling through a nightmare for years when the quiet voice penetrated his dulled mind. "Take it easy, Karyl. You're among friends." He pried open his eyes with his will. He saw the blue and gold of a space guard's uniform. He sighed and drifted into unconsciousness. He was still weak days later when Capt. Ron Small of SP-101 said, "Yes, Karyl, it's ironical. They fed you what they thought was sure death, and it's the only thing that kept you going long enough to warn us." "I was dumb for a long time," Karyl said. "I thought that it was the acid, almost to the very last. But when I drank that last glass, I knew they didn't have a chance. "They were metal monsters. No wonder they feared that liquid. It would rust their joints, short their wiring, and kill them. No wonder they stared when I kept alive after drinking enough to completely annihilate a half-dozen of them. "But what happened when you met the ship?" The space captain grinned. "Not much. Our crew was busy creating a hollow shell filled with water to be shot out of a rocket tube converted into a projectile thrower. "These Steel-Blues, as you call them, put traction beams on us and started tugging us toward the asteroid. We tried a couple of atomic shots but when they just glanced off, we gave up. "They weren't expecting the shell of water. When it hit that blue ship, you could almost see it oxidize before your eyes. "I guess they knew what was wrong right away. They let go the traction beams and tried to get away. They forgot about the force field, so we just poured atomic fire into the weakening ship. It just melted away." Jon Karyl got up from the divan where he'd been lying. "They thought I was a metal creature, too. But where do you suppose they came from?" The captain shrugged. "Who knows?" Jon set two glasses on the table. "Have a drink of the best damn water in the solar system?" He asked Capt. Small. "Don't mind if I do." The water twinkled in the two glasses, winking as if it knew just what it had done. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories July 1952. 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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24949

"Any problem posed by one group of human beings can be resolved by any other group." That's what the Handbook said. But did that include primitive humans? Or the Bees? Or a ... CONTROL GROUP By ROGER DEE The cool green disk of Alphard Six on the screen was infinitely welcome after the arid desolation and stinking swamplands of the inner planets, an airy jewel of a world that might have been designed specifically for the hard-earned month of rest ahead. Navigator Farrell, youngest and certainly most impulsive of the three-man Terran Reclamations crew, would have set the Marco Four down at once but for the greater caution of Stryker, nominally captain of the group, and of Gibson, engineer, and linguist. Xavier, the ship's little mechanical, had—as was usual and proper—no voice in the matter. "Reconnaissance spiral first, Arthur," Stryker said firmly. He chuckled at Farrell's instant scowl, his little eyes twinkling and his naked paunch quaking over the belt of his shipboard shorts. "Chapter One, Subsection Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: No planetfall on an unreclaimed world shall be deemed safe without proper— " Farrell, as Stryker had expected, interrupted with characteristic impatience. "Do you sleep with that damned Reclamations Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six isn't an unreclaimed world—it was never colonized before the Hymenop invasion back in 3025, so why should it be inhabited now?" Gibson, who for four hours had not looked up from his interminable chess game with Xavier, paused with a beleaguered knight in one blunt brown hand. "No point in taking chances," Gibson said in his neutral baritone. He shrugged thick bare shoulders, his humorless black-browed face unmoved, when Farrell included him in his scowl. "We're two hundred twenty-six light-years from Sol, at the old limits of Terran expansion, and there's no knowing what we may turn up here. Alphard's was one of the first systems the Bees took over. It must have been one of the last to be abandoned when they pulled back to 70 Ophiuchi." "And I think you live for the day," Farrell said acidly, "when we'll stumble across a functioning dome of live, buzzing Hymenops. Damn it, Gib, the Bees pulled out a hundred years ago, before you and I were born—neither of us ever saw a Hymenop, and never will!" "But I saw them," Stryker said. "I fought them for the better part of the century they were here, and I learned there's no predicting nor understanding them. We never knew why they came nor why they gave up and left. How can we know whether they'd leave a rear-guard or booby trap here?" He put a paternal hand on Farrell's shoulder, understanding the younger man's eagerness and knowing that their close-knit team would have been the more poorly balanced without it. "Gib's right," he said. He nearly added as usual . "We're on rest leave at the moment, yes, but our mission is still to find Terran colonies enslaved and abandoned by the Bees, not to risk our necks and a valuable Reorientations ship by landing blind on an unobserved planet. We're too close already. Cut in your shields and find a reconnaissance spiral, will you?" Grumbling, Farrell punched coordinates on the Ringwave board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored the bluish enveloping haze of her repellors. Stryker's caution was justified on the instant. The speeding streamlined shape that had flashed up unobserved from below swerved sharply and exploded in a cataclysmic blaze of atomic fire that rocked the ship wildly and flung the three men to the floor in a jangling roar of alarms. "So the Handbook tacticians knew what they were about," Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately he adopted the smug tone best calculated to sting Farrell out of his first self-reproach, and grinned when the navigator bristled defensively. "Some of their enjoinders seem a little stuffy and obvious at times, but they're eminently sensible." When Farrell refused to be baited Stryker turned to Gibson, who was busily assessing the damage done to the ship's more fragile equipment, and to Xavier, who searched the planet's surface with the ship's magnoscanner. The Marco Four , Ringwave generators humming gently, hung at the moment just inside the orbit of Alphard Six's single dun-colored moon. Gibson put down a test meter with an air of finality. "Nothing damaged but the Zero Interval Transfer computer. I can realign that in a couple of hours, but it'll have to be done before we hit Transfer again." Stryker looked dubious. "What if the issue is forced before the ZIT unit is repaired? Suppose they come up after us?" "I doubt that they can. Any installation crudely enough equipped to trust in guided missiles is hardly likely to have developed efficient space craft." Stryker was not reassured. "That torpedo of theirs was deadly enough," he said. "And its nature reflects the nature of the people who made it. Any race vicious enough to use atomic charges is too dangerous to trifle with." Worry made comical creases in his fat, good-humored face. "We'll have to find out who they are and why they're here, you know." "They can't be Hymenops," Gibson said promptly. "First, because the Bees pinned their faith on Ringwave energy fields, as we did, rather than on missiles. Second, because there's no dome on Six." "There were three empty domes on Five, which is a desert planet," Farrell pointed out. "Why didn't they settle Six? It's a more habitable world." Gibson shrugged. "I know the Bees always erected domes on every planet they colonized, Arthur, but precedent is a fallible tool. And it's even more firmly established that there's no possibility of our rationalizing the motivations of a culture as alien as the Hymenops'—we've been over that argument a hundred times on other reclaimed worlds." "But this was never an unreclaimed world," Farrell said with the faint malice of one too recently caught in the wrong. "Alphard Six was surveyed and seeded with Terran bacteria around the year 3000, but the Bees invaded before we could colonize. And that means we'll have to rule out any resurgent colonial group down there, because Six never had a colony in the beginning." "The Bees have been gone for over a hundred years," Stryker said. "Colonists might have migrated from another Terran-occupied planet." Gibson disagreed. "We've touched at every inhabited world in this sector, Lee, and not one surviving colony has developed space travel on its own. The Hymenops had a hundred years to condition their human slaves to ignorance of everything beyond their immediate environment—the motives behind that conditioning usually escape us, but that's beside the point—and they did a thorough job of it. The colonists have had no more than a century of freedom since the Bees pulled out, and four generations simply isn't enough time for any subjugated culture to climb from slavery to interstellar flight." Stryker made a padding turn about the control room, tugging unhappily at the scanty fringe of hair the years had left him. "If they're neither Hymenops nor resurgent colonists," he said, "then there's only one choice remaining—they're aliens from a system we haven't reached yet, beyond the old sphere of Terran exploration. We always assumed that we'd find other races out here someday, and that they'd be as different from us in form and motivation as the Hymenops. Why not now?" Gibson said seriously, "Not probable, Lee. The same objection that rules out the Bees applies to any trans-Alphardian culture—they'd have to be beyond the atomic fission stage, else they'd never have attempted interstellar flight. The Ringwave with its Zero Interval Transfer principle and instantaneous communications applications is the only answer to long-range travel, and if they'd had that they wouldn't have bothered with atomics." Stryker turned on him almost angrily. "If they're not Hymenops or humans or aliens, then what in God's name are they?" "Aye, there's the rub," Farrell said, quoting a passage whose aptness had somehow seen it through a dozen reorganizations of insular tongue and a final translation to universal Terran. "If they're none of those three, we've only one conclusion left. There's no one down there at all—we're victims of the first joint hallucination in psychiatric history." Stryker threw up his hands in surrender. "We can't identify them by theorizing, and that brings us down to the business of first-hand investigation. Who's going to bell the cat this time?" "I'd like to go," Gibson said at once. "The ZIT computer can wait." Stryker vetoed his offer as promptly. "No, the ZIT comes first. We may have to run for it, and we can't set up a Transfer jump without the computer. It's got to be me or Arthur." Farrell felt the familiar chill of uneasiness that inevitably preceded this moment of decision. He was not lacking in courage, else the circumstances under which he had worked for the past ten years—the sometimes perilous, sometimes downright charnel conditions left by the fleeing Hymenop conquerors—would have broken him long ago. But that same hard experience had honed rather than blunted the edge of his imagination, and the prospect of a close-quarters stalking of an unknown and patently hostile force was anything but attractive. "You two did the field work on the last location," he said. "It's high time I took my turn—and God knows I'd go mad if I had to stay inship and listen to Lee memorizing his Handbook subsections or to Gib practicing dead languages with Xavier." Stryker laughed for the first time since the explosion that had so nearly wrecked the Marco Four . "Good enough. Though it wouldn't be more diverting to listen for hours to you improvising enharmonic variations on the Lament for Old Terra with your accordion." Gibson, characteristically, had a refinement to offer. "They'll be alerted down there for a reconnaissance sally," he said. "Why not let Xavier take the scouter down for overt diversion, and drop Arthur off in the helihopper for a low-level check?" Stryker looked at Farrell. "All right, Arthur?" "Good enough," Farrell said. And to Xavier, who had not moved from his post at the magnoscanner: "How does it look, Xav? Have you pinned down their base yet?" The mechanical answered him in a voice as smooth and clear—and as inflectionless—as a 'cello note. "The planet seems uninhabited except for a large island some three hundred miles in diameter. There are twenty-seven small agrarian hamlets surrounded by cultivated fields. There is one city of perhaps a thousand buildings with a central square. In the square rests a grounded spaceship of approximately ten times the bulk of the Marco Four ." They crowded about the vision screen, jostling Xavier's jointed gray shape in their interest. The central city lay in minutest detail before them, the battered hulk of the grounded ship glinting rustily in the late afternoon sunlight. Streets radiated away from the square in orderly succession, the whole so clearly depicted that they could see the throngs of people surging up and down, tiny foreshortened faces turned toward the sky. "At least they're human," Farrell said. Relief replaced in some measure his earlier uneasiness. "Which means that they're Terran, and can be dealt with according to Reclamations routine. Is that hulk spaceworthy, Xav?" Xavier's mellow drone assumed the convention vibrato that indicated stark puzzlement. "Its breached hull makes the ship incapable of flight. Apparently it is used only to supply power to the outlying hamlets." The mechanical put a flexible gray finger upon an indicator graph derived from a composite section of detector meters. "The power transmitted seems to be gross electric current conveyed by metallic cables. It is generated through a crudely governed process of continuous atomic fission." Farrell, himself appalled by the information, still found himself able to chuckle at Stryker's bellow of consternation. " Continuous fission? Good God, only madmen would deliberately run a risk like that!" Farrell prodded him with cheerful malice. "Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid aliens who thrive on hard radiation and look on the danger of being blown to hell in the middle of the night as a satisfactory risk." "They're not alien," Gibson said positively. "Their architecture is Terran, and so is their ship. The ship is incredibly primitive, though; those batteries of tubes at either end—" "Are thrust reaction jets," Stryker finished in an awed voice. "Primitive isn't the word, Gib—the thing is prehistoric! Rocket propulsion hasn't been used in spacecraft since—how long, Xav?" Xavier supplied the information with mechanical infallibility. "Since the year 2100 when the Ringwave propulsion-communication principle was discovered. That principle has served men since." Farrell stared in blank disbelief at the anomalous craft on the screen. Primitive, as Stryker had said, was not the word for it: clumsily ovoid, studded with torpedo domes and turrets and bristling at either end with propulsion tubes, it lay at the center of its square like a rusted relic of a past largely destroyed and all but forgotten. What a magnificent disregard its builders must have had, he thought, for their lives and the genetic purity of their posterity! The sullen atomic fires banked in that oxidizing hulk— Stryker said plaintively, "If you're right, Gib, then we're more in the dark than ever. How could a Terran-built ship eleven hundred years old get here ?" Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's contemplation of alternatives, seemed hardly to hear him. "Logic or not-logic," Gibson said. "If it's a Terran artifact, we can discover the reason for its presence. If not—" " Any problem posed by one group of human beings ," Stryker quoted his Handbook, " can be resolved by any other group, regardless of ideology or conditioning, because the basic perceptive abilities of both must be the same through identical heredity ." "If it's an imitation, and this is another Hymenop experiment in condition ecology, then we're stumped to begin with," Gibson finished. "Because we're not equipped to evaluate the psychology of alien motivation. We've got to determine first which case applies here." He waited for Farrell's expected irony, and when the navigator forestalled him by remaining grimly quiet, continued. "The obvious premise is that a Terran ship must have been built by Terrans. Question: Was it flown here, or built here?" "It couldn't have been built here," Stryker said. "Alphard Six was surveyed just before the Bees took over in 3025, and there was nothing of the sort here then. It couldn't have been built during the two and a quarter centuries since; it's obviously much older than that. It was flown here." "We progress," Farrell said dryly. "Now if you'll tell us how , we're ready to move." "I think the ship was built on Terra during the Twenty-second Century," Gibson said calmly. "The atomic wars during that period destroyed practically all historical records along with the technology of the time, but I've read well-authenticated reports of atomic-driven ships leaving Terra before then for the nearer stars. The human race climbed out of its pit again during the Twenty-third Century and developed the technology that gave us the Ringwave. Certainly no atomic-powered ships were built after the wars—our records are complete from that time." Farrell shook his head at the inference. "I've read any number of fanciful romances on the theme, Gib, but it won't stand up in practice. No shipboard society could last through a thousand-year space voyage. It's a physical and psychological impossibility. There's got to be some other explanation." Gibson shrugged. "We can only eliminate the least likely alternatives and accept the simplest one remaining." "Then we can eliminate this one now," Farrell said flatly. "It entails a thousand-year voyage, which is an impossibility for any gross reaction drive; the application of suspended animation or longevity or a successive-generation program, and a final penetration of Hymenop-occupied space to set up a colony under the very antennae of the Bees. Longevity wasn't developed until around the year 3000—Lee here was one of the first to profit by it, if you remember—and suspended animation is still to come. So there's one theory you can forget." "Arthur's right," Stryker said reluctantly. "An atomic-powered ship couldn't have made such a trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant project couldn't have lasted through forty generations, speculative fiction to the contrary—the later generations would have been too far removed in ideology and intent from their ancestors. They'd have adapted to shipboard life as the norm. They'd have atrophied physically, perhaps even have mutated—" "And they'd never have fought past the Bees during the Hymenop invasion and occupation," Farrell finished triumphantly. "The Bees had better detection equipment than we had. They'd have picked this ship up long before it reached Alphard Six." "But the ship wasn't here in 3000," Gibson said, "and it is now. Therefore it must have arrived at some time during the two hundred years of Hymenop occupation and evacuation." Farrell, tangled in contradictions, swore bitterly. "But why should the Bees let them through? The three domes on Five are over two hundred years old, which means that the Bees were here before the ship came. Why didn't they blast it or enslave its crew?" "We haven't touched on all the possibilities," Gibson reminded him. "We haven't even established yet that these people were never under Hymenop control. Precedent won't hold always, and there's no predicting nor evaluating the motives of an alien race. We never understood the Hymenops because there's no common ground of logic between us. Why try to interpret their intentions now?" Farrell threw up his hands in disgust. "Next you'll say this is an ancient Terran expedition that actually succeeded! There's only one way to answer the questions we've raised, and that's to go down and see for ourselves. Ready, Xav?" But uncertainty nagged uneasily at him when Farrell found himself alone in the helihopper with the forest flowing beneath like a leafy river and Xavier's scouter disappearing bulletlike into the dusk ahead. We never found a colony so advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose this is a Hymenop experiment that really paid off? The Bees did some weird and wonderful things with human guinea pigs—what if they've created the ultimate booby trap here, and primed it with conditioned myrmidons in our own form? Suppose, he thought—and derided himself for thinking it—one of those suicidal old interstellar ventures did succeed? Xavier's voice, a mellow drone from the helihopper's Ringwave-powered visicom, cut sharply into his musing. "The ship has discovered the scouter and is training an electronic beam upon it. My instruments record an electromagnetic vibration pattern of low power but rapidly varying frequency. The operation seems pointless." Stryker's voice followed, querulous with worry: "I'd better pull Xav back. It may be something lethal." "Don't," Gibson's baritone advised. Surprisingly, there was excitement in the engineer's voice. "I think they're trying to communicate with us." Farrell was on the point of demanding acidly to know how one went about communicating by means of a fluctuating electric field when the unexpected cessation of forest diverted his attention. The helihopper scudded over a cultivated area of considerable extent, fields stretching below in a vague random checkerboard of lighter and darker earth, an undefined cluster of buildings at their center. There was a central bonfire that burned like a wild red eye against the lower gloom, and in its plunging ruddy glow he made out an urgent scurrying of shadowy figures. "I'm passing over a hamlet," Farrell reported. "The one nearest the city, I think. There's something odd going on down—" Catastrophe struck so suddenly that he was caught completely unprepared. The helihopper's flimsy carriage bucked and crumpled. There was a blinding flare of electric discharge, a pungent stink of ozone and a stunning shock that flung him headlong into darkness. He awoke slowly with a brutal headache and a conviction of nightmare heightened by the outlandish tone of his surroundings. He lay on a narrow bed in a whitely antiseptic infirmary, an oblong metal cell cluttered with a grimly utilitarian array of tables and lockers and chests. The lighting was harsh and overbright and the air hung thick with pungent unfamiliar chemical odors. From somewhere, far off yet at the same time as near as the bulkhead above him, came the unceasing drone of machinery. Farrell sat up, groaning, when full consciousness made his position clear. He had been shot down by God knew what sort of devastating unorthodox weapon and was a prisoner in the grounded ship. At his rising, a white-smocked fat man with anachronistic spectacles and close-cropped gray hair came into the room, moving with the professional assurance of a medic. The man stopped short at Farrell's stare and spoke; his words were utterly unintelligible, but his gesture was unmistakable. Farrell followed him dumbly out of the infirmary and down a bare corridor whose metal floor rang coldly underfoot. An open port near the corridor's end relieved the blankness of wall and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian sunlight; Farrell slowed to look out, wondering how long he had lain unconscious, and felt panic knife at him when he saw Xavier's scouter lying, port open and undefended, on the square outside. The mechanical had been as easily taken as himself, then. Stryker and Gibson, for all their professional caution, would fare no better—they could not have overlooked the capture of Farrell and Xavier, and when they tried as a matter of course to rescue them the Marco would be struck down in turn by the same weapon. The fat medic turned and said something urgent in his unintelligible tongue. Farrell, dazed by the enormity of what had happened, followed without protest into an intersecting way that led through a bewildering succession of storage rooms and hydroponics gardens, through a small gymnasium fitted with physical training equipment in graduated sizes and finally into a soundproofed place that could have been nothing but a nursery. The implication behind its presence stopped Farrell short. "A creche ," he said, stunned. He had a wild vision of endless generations of children growing up in this dim and stuffy room, to be taught from their first toddling steps the functions they must fulfill before the venture of which they were a part could be consummated. One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was awed by the daring of that thousand-year odyssey. The realization left him more alarmed than before—for what technical marvels might not an isolated group of such dogged specialists have developed during a millennium of application? Such a weapon as had brought down the helihopper and scouter was patently beyond reach of his own latter-day technology. Perhaps, he thought, its possession explained the presence of these people here in the first stronghold of the Hymenops; perhaps they had even fought and defeated the Bees on their own invaded ground. He followed his white-smocked guide through a power room where great crude generators whirred ponderously, pouring out gross electric current into arm-thick cables. They were nearing the bow of the ship when they passed by another open port and Farrell, glancing out over the lowered rampway, saw that his fears for Stryker and Gibson had been well grounded. The Marco Four , ports open, lay grounded outside. Farrell could not have said, later, whether his next move was planned or reflexive. The whole desperate issue seemed to hang suspended for a breathless moment upon a hair-fine edge of decision, and in that instant he made his bid. Without pausing in his stride he sprang out and through the port and down the steep plane of the ramp. The rough stone pavement of the square drummed underfoot; sore muscles tore at him, and weakness was like a weight about his neck. He expected momentarily to be blasted out of existence. He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his guide ringing unintelligibly in his ears. The port yawned; he plunged inside and stabbed at controls without waiting to seat himself. The ports swung shut. The ship darted up under his manipulation and arrowed into space with an acceleration that sprung his knees and made his vision swim blackly. He was so weak with strain and with the success of his coup that he all but fainted when Stryker, his scanty hair tousled and his fat face comical with bewilderment, stumbled out of his sleeping cubicle and bellowed at him. "What the hell are you doing, Arthur? Take us down!" Farrell gaped at him, speechless. Stryker lumbered past him and took the controls, spiraling the Marco Four down. Men swarmed outside the ports when the Reclamations craft settled gently to the square again. Gibson and Xavier reached the ship first; Gibson came inside quickly, leaving the mechanical outside making patient explanations to an excited group of Alphardians. Gibson put a reassuring hand on Farrell's arm. "It's all right, Arthur. There's no trouble." Farrell said dumbly, "I don't understand. They didn't shoot you and Xav down too?" It was Gibson's turn to stare. "No one shot you down! These people are primitive enough to use metallic power lines to carry electricity to their hamlets, an anachronism you forgot last night. You piloted the helihopper into one of those lines, and the crash put you out for the rest of the night and most of today. These Alphardians are friendly, so desperately happy to be found again that it's really pathetic." " Friendly? That torpedo—" "It wasn't a torpedo at all," Stryker put in. Understanding of the error under which Farrell had labored erased his earlier irritation, and he chuckled commiseratingly. "They had one small boat left for emergency missions, and sent it up to contact us in the fear that we might overlook their settlement and move on. The boat was atomic powered, and our shield screens set off its engines." Farrell dropped into a chair at the chart table, limp with reaction. He was suddenly exhausted, and his head ached dully. "We cracked the communications problem early last night," Gibson said. "These people use an ancient system of electromagnetic wave propagation called frequency modulation, and once Lee and I rigged up a suitable transceiver the rest was simple. Both Xav and I recognized the old language; the natives reported your accident, and we came down at once." "They really came from Terra? They lived through a thousand years of flight?" "The ship left Terra for Sirius in 2171," Gibson said. "But not with these people aboard, or their ancestors. That expedition perished after less than a light-year when its hydroponics system failed. The Hymenops found the ship derelict when they invaded us, and brought it to Alphard Six in what was probably their first experiment with human subjects. The ship's log shows clearly what happened to the original complement. The rest is deducible from the situation here." Farrell put his hands to his temples and groaned. "The crash must have scrambled my wits. Gib, where did they come from?" "From one of the first peripheral colonies conquered by the Bees," Gibson said patiently. "The Hymenops were long-range planners, remember, and masters of hypnotic conditioning. They stocked the ship with a captive crew of Terrans conditioned to believe themselves descendants of the original crew, and grounded it here in disabled condition. They left for Alphard Five then, to watch developments. "Succeeding generations of colonists grew up accepting the fact that their ship had missed Sirius and made planetfall here—they still don't know where they really are—by luck. They never knew about the Hymenops, and they've struggled along with an inadequate technology in the hope that a later expedition would find them. They found the truth hard to take, but they're eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran assimilation." Stryker, grinning, brought Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled invitingly. "An unusually fortunate ending to a Hymenop experiment," he said. "These people progressed normally because they've been let alone. Reorienting them will be a simple matter; they'll be properly spoiled colonists within another generation." Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively. "But I don't see why the Bees should go to such trouble to deceive these people. Why did they sit back and let them grow as they pleased, Gib? It doesn't make sense!" "But it does, for once," Gibson said. "The Bees set up this colony as a control unit to study the species they were invading, and they had to give their specimens a normal—if obsolete—background in order to determine their capabilities. The fact that their experiment didn't tell them what they wanted to know may have had a direct bearing on their decision to pull out." Farrell shook his head. "It's a reverse application, isn't it of the old saw about Terrans being incapable of understanding an alien culture?" "Of course," said Gibson, surprised. "It's obvious enough, surely—hard as they tried, the Bees never understood us either." THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Science Fiction Stories January 1960. 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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Henry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these evenings. But, if you do, beware—beware of the Knights! dream town by ... HENRY SLESAR The woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who was to tell she had some rather startling interests? The woman in the doorway looked like Mom in the homier political cartoons. She was plump, apple-cheeked, white-haired. She wore a fussy, old-fashioned nightgown, and was busily clutching a worn house-robe around her expansive middle. She blinked at Sol Becker's rain-flattened hair and hang-dog expression, and said: "What is it? What do you want?" "I'm sorry—" Sol's voice was pained. "The man in the diner said you might put me up. I had my car stolen: a hitchhiker; going to Salinas ..." He was puffing. "Hitchhiker? I don't understand." She clucked at the sight of the pool of water he was creating in her foyer. "Well, come inside, for heaven's sake. You're soaking!" "Thanks," Sol said gratefully. With the door firmly shut behind him, the warm interior of the little house covered him like a blanket. He shivered, and let the warmth seep over him. "I'm terribly sorry. I know how late it is." He looked at his watch, but the face was too misty to make out the hour. "Must be nearly three," the woman sniffed. "You couldn't have come at a worse time. I was just on my way to court—" The words slid by him. "If I could just stay overnight. Until the morning. I could call some friends in San Fernando. I'm very susceptible to head colds," he added inanely. "Well, take those shoes off, first," the woman grumbled. "You can undress in the parlor, if you'll keep off the rug. You won't mind using the sofa?" "No, of course not. I'd be happy to pay—" "Oh, tush, nobody's asking you to pay. This isn't a hotel. You mind if I go back upstairs? They're gonna miss me at the palace." "No, of course not," Sol said. He followed her into the darkened parlor, and watched as she turned the screw on a hurricane-style lamp, shedding a yellow pool of light over half a flowery sofa and a doily-covered wing chair. "You go on up. I'll be perfectly fine." "Guess you can use a towel, though. I'll get you one, then I'm going up. We wake pretty early in this house. Breakfast's at seven; you'll have to be up if you want any." "I really can't thank you enough—" "Tush," the woman said. She scurried out, and returned a moment later with a thick bath towel. "Sorry I can't give you any bedding. But you'll find it nice and warm in here." She squinted at the dim face of a ship's-wheel clock on the mantle, and made a noise with her tongue. "Three-thirty!" she exclaimed. "I'll miss the whole execution ..." "The what?" "Goodnight, young man," Mom said firmly. She padded off, leaving Sol holding the towel. He patted his face, and then scrubbed the wet tangle of brown hair. Carefully, he stepped off the carpet and onto the stone floor in front of the fireplace. He removed his drenched coat and suit jacket, and squeezed water out over the ashes. He stripped down to his underwear, wondering about next morning's possible embarrassment, and decided to use the damp bath towel as a blanket. The sofa was downy and comfortable. He curled up under the towel, shivered once, and closed his eyes. He was tired and very sleepy, and his customary nightly review was limited to a few detached thoughts about the wedding he was supposed to attend in Salinas that weekend ... the hoodlum who had responded to his good-nature by dumping him out of his own car ... the slogging walk to the village ... the little round woman who was hurrying off, like the White Rabbit, to some mysterious appointment on the upper floor ... Then he went to sleep. A voice awoke him, shrill and questioning. "Are you nakkid ?" His eyes flew open, and he pulled the towel protectively around his body and glared at the little girl with the rust-red pigtails. "Huh, mister?" she said, pushing a finger against her freckled nose. "Are you?" "No," he said angrily. "I'm not naked. Will you please go away?" "Sally!" It was Mom, appearing in the doorway of the parlor. "You leave the gentleman alone." She went off again. "Yes," Sol said. "Please let me get dressed. If you don't mind." The girl didn't move. "What time is it?" "Dunno," Sally shrugged. "I like poached eggs. They're my favorite eggs in the whole world." "That's good," Sol said desperately. "Now why don't you be a good girl and eat your poached eggs. In the kitchen." "Ain't ready yet. You going to stay for breakfast?" "I'm not going to do anything until you get out of here." She put the end of a pigtail in her mouth and sat down on the chair opposite. "I went to the palace last night. They had an exelution." "Please," Sol groaned. "Be a good girl, Sally. If you let me get dressed, I'll show you how to take your thumb off." "Oh, that's an old trick. Did you ever see an exelution?" "No. Did you ever see a little girl with her hide tanned?" "Huh?" " Sally! " Mom again, sterner. "You get out of there, or you-know-what ..." "Okay," the girl said blithely. "I'm goin' to the palace again. If I brush my teeth. Aren't you ever gonna get up?" She skipped out of the room, and Sol hastily sat up and reached for his trousers. When he had dressed, the clothes still damp and unpleasant against his skin, he went out of the parlor and found the kitchen. Mom was busy at the stove. He said: "Good morning." "Breakfast in ten minutes," she said cheerfully. "You like poached eggs?" "Sure. Do you have a telephone?" "In the hallway. Party line, so you may have to wait." He tried for fifteen minutes to get through, but there was a woman on the line who was terribly upset about a cotton dress she had ordered from Sears, and was telling the world about it. Finally, he got his call through to Salinas, and a sleepy-voiced Fred, his old Army buddy, listened somewhat indifferently to his tale of woe. "I might miss the wedding," Sol said unhappily. "I'm awfully sorry." Fred didn't seem to be half as sorry as he was. When Sol hung up, he was feeling more despondent than ever. A man, tall and rangy, with a bobbing Adam's apple and a lined face, came into the hallway. "Hullo?" he said inquiringly. "You the fella had the car stolen?" "Yes." The man scratched his ear. "Take you over to Sheriff Coogan after breakfast. He'll let the Stateys know about it. My name's Dawes." Sol accepted a careful handshake. "Don't get many people comin' into town," Dawes said, looking at him curiously. "Ain't seen a stranger in years. But you look like the rest of us." He chuckled. Mom called out: "Breakfast!" At the table, Dawes asked his destination. "Wedding in Salinas," he explained. "Old Army friend of mine. I picked this hitchhiker up about two miles from here. He seemed okay." "Never can tell," Dawes said placidly, munching egg. "Hey, Ma. That why you were so late comin' to court last night?" "That's right, Pa." She poured the blackest coffee Sol had ever seen. "Didn't miss much, though." "What court is that?" Sol asked politely, his mouth full. "Umagum," Sally said, a piece of toast sticking out from the side of her mouth. "Don't you know nothin' ?" " Arma gon," Dawes corrected. He looked sheepishly at the stranger. "Don't expect Mister—" He cocked an eyebrow. "What's the name?" "Becker." "Don't expect Mr. Becker knows anything about Armagon. It's just a dream, you know." He smiled apologetically. "Dream? You mean this—Armagon is a place you dream about?" "Yep," Dawes said. He lifted cup to lip. "Great coffee, Ma." He leaned back with a contented sigh. "Dream about it every night. Got so used to the place, I get all confused in the daytime." Mom said: "I get muddle-headed too, sometimes." "You mean—" Sol put his napkin in his lap. "You mean you dream about the same place?" "Sure," Sally piped. "We all go there at night. I'm goin' to the palace again, too." "If you brush your teeth," Mom said primly. "If I brush my teeth. Boy, you shoulda seen the exelution!" "Execution," her father said. "Oh, my goodness!" Mom got up hastily. "That reminds me. I gotta call poor Mrs. Brundage. It's the least I could do." "Good idea," Dawes nodded. "And I'll have to round up some folks and get old Brundage out of there." Sol was staring. He opened his mouth, but couldn't think of the right question to ask. Then he blurted out: "What execution?" "None of your business," the man said coldly. "You eat up, young man. If you want me to get Sheriff Coogan lookin' for your car." The rest of the meal went silently, except for Sally's insistence upon singing her school song between mouthfuls. When Dawes was through, he pushed back his plate and ordered Sol to get ready. Sol grabbed his topcoat and followed the man out the door. "Have to stop someplace first," Dawes said. "But we'll be pickin' up the Sheriff on the way. Okay with you?" "Fine," Sol said uneasily. The rain had stopped, but the heavy clouds seemed reluctant to leave the skies over the small town. There was a skittish breeze blowing, and Sol Becker tightened the collar of his coat around his neck as he tried to keep up with the fast-stepping Dawes. They crossed the street diagonally, and entered a two-story wooden building. Dawes took the stairs at a brisk pace, and pushed open the door on the second floor. A fat man looked up from behind a desk. "Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd see if you wanted to help move Brundage." The man batted his eyes. "Oh, Brundage!" he said. "You know, I clean forgot about him?" He laughed. "Imagine me forgetting that?" "Yeah." Dawes wasn't amused. "And you Prince Regent." "Aw, Willie—" "Well, come on. Stir that fat carcass. Gotta pick up Sheriff Coogan, too. This here gentleman has to see him about somethin' else." The man regarded Sol suspiciously. "Never seen you before. Night or day. Stranger?" "Come on !" Dawes said. The fat man grunted and hoisted himself out of the swivel chair. He followed lamely behind the two men as they went out into the street again. A woman, with an empty market basket, nodded casually to them. "Mornin', folks. Enjoyed it last night. Thought you made a right nice speech, Mr. Dawes." "Thanks," Dawes answered gruffly, but obviously flattered. "We were just goin' over to Brundage's to pick up the body. Ma's gonna pay a call on Mrs. Brundage around ten o'clock. You care to visit?" "Why, I think that's very nice," the woman said. "I'll be sure and do that." She smiled at the fat man. "Mornin', Prince." Sol's head was spinning. As they left the woman and continued their determined march down the quiet street, he tried to find answers. "Look, Mr. Dawes." He was panting; the pace was fast. "Does she dream about this—Armagon, too? That woman back there?" "Yep." Charlie chuckled. "He's a stranger, all right." "And you, Mr.—" Sol turned to the fat man. "You also know about this palace and everything?" "I told you," Dawes said testily. "Charlie here's Prince Regent. But don't let the fancy title fool you. He got no more power than any Knight of the Realm. He's just too dern fat to do much more'n sit on a throne and eat grapes. That right, Charlie?" The fat man giggled. "Here's the Sheriff," Dawes said. The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed citizen with a long, sad face, was rocking on a porch as they approached his house, trying to puff a half-lit pipe. He lifted one hand wearily when he saw them. "Hi, Cookie," Dawes grinned. "Thought you, me, and Charlie would get Brundage's body outa the house. This here's Mr. Becker; he got another problem. Mr. Becker, meet Cookie Coogan." The Sheriff joined the procession, pausing only once to inquire into Sol's predicament. He described the hitchhiker incident, but Coogan listened stoically. He murmured something about the Troopers, and shuffled alongside the puffing fat man. Sol soon realized that their destination was a barber shop. Dawes cupped his hands over the plate glass and peered inside. Gold letters on the glass advertised: HAIRCUT SHAVE & MASSAGE PARLOR. He reported: "Nobody in the shop. Must be upstairs." The fat man rang the bell. It was a while before an answer came. It was a reedy woman in a housecoat, her hair in curlers, her eyes red and swollen. "Now, now," Dawes said gently. "Don't you take on like that, Mrs. Brundage. You heard the charges. It hadda be this way." "My poor Vincent," she sobbed. "Better let us up," the Sheriff said kindly. "No use just lettin' him lay there, Mrs. Brundage." "He didn't mean no harm," the woman snuffled. "He was just purely ornery, Vincent was. Just plain mean stubborn." "The law's the law," the fat man sighed. Sol couldn't hold himself in. "What law? Who's dead? How did it happen?" Dawes looked at him disgustedly. "Now is it any of your business? I mean, is it?" "I don't know," Sol said miserably. "You better stay out of this," the Sheriff warned. "This is a local matter, young man. You better stay in the shop while we go up." They filed past him and the crying Mrs. Brundage. When they were out of sight, Sol pleaded with her. "What happened? How did your husband die?" "Please ..." "You must tell me! Was it something to do with Armagon? Do you dream about the place, too?" She was shocked at the question. "Of course!" "And your husband? Did he have the same dream?" Fresh tears resulted. "Can't you leave me alone?" She turned her back. "I got things to do. You can make yourself comfortable—" She indicated the barber chairs, and left through the back door. Sol looked after her, and then ambled over to the first chair and slipped into the high seat. His reflection in the mirror, strangely gray in the dim light, made him groan. His clothes were a mess, and he needed a shave. If only Brundage had been alive ... He leaped out of the chair as voices sounded behind the door. Dawes was kicking it open with his foot, his arms laden with two rather large feet, still encased in bedroom slippers. Charlie was at the other end of the burden, which appeared to be a middle-aged man in pajamas. The Sheriff followed the trio up with a sad, undertaker expression. Behind him came Mrs. Brundage, properly weeping. "We'll take him to the funeral parlor," Dawes said, breathing hard. "Weighs a ton, don't he?" "What killed him?" Sol said. "Heart attack." The fat man chuckled. The tableau was grisly. Sol looked away, towards the comfortingly mundane atmosphere of the barber shop. But even the sight of the thick-padded chairs, the shaving mugs on the wall, the neat rows of cutting instruments, seemed grotesque and morbid. "Listen," Sol said, as they went through the doorway. "About my car—" The Sheriff turned and regarded him lugubriously. "Your car ? Young man, ain't you got no respect ?" Sol swallowed hard and fell silent. He went outside with them, the woman slamming the barber-shop door behind him. He waited in front of the building while the men toted away the corpse to some new destination. He took a walk. The town was just coming to life. People were strolling out of their houses, commenting on the weather, chuckling amiably about local affairs. Kids on bicycles were beginning to appear, jangling the little bells and hooting to each other. A woman, hanging wash in the back yard, called out to him, thinking he was somebody else. He found a little park, no more than twenty yards in circumference, centered around a weatherbeaten monument of some unrecognizable military figure. Three old men took their places on the bench that circled the General, and leaned on their canes. Sol was a civil engineer. But he made like a reporter. "Pardon me, sir." The old man, leathery-faced, with a fine yellow moustache, looked at him dumbly. "Have you ever heard of Armagon?" "You a stranger?" "Yes." "Thought so." Sol repeated the question. "Course I did. Been goin' there ever since I was a kid. Night-times, that is." "How—I mean, what kind of place is it?" "Said you're a stranger?" "Yes." "Then 'tain't your business." That was that. He left the park, and wandered into a thriving luncheonette. He tried questioning the man behind the counter, who merely snickered and said: "You stayin' with the Dawes, ain't you? Better ask Willie, then. He knows the place better than anybody." He asked about the execution, and the man stiffened. "Don't think I can talk about that. Fella broke one of the Laws; that's about it. Don't see where you come into it." At eleven o'clock, he returned to the Dawes residence, and found Mom in the kitchen, surrounded by the warm nostalgic odor of home-baked bread. She told him that her husband had left a message for the stranger, informing him that the State Police would be around to get his story. He waited in the house, gloomily turning the pages of the local newspaper, searching for references to Armagon. He found nothing. At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced State Trooper came to call, and Sol told his story. He was promised nothing, and told to stay in town until he was contacted again by the authorities. Mom fixed him a light lunch, the greatest feature of which was some hot biscuits she plucked out of the oven. It made him feel almost normal. He wandered around the town some more after lunch, trying to spark conversation with the residents. He learned little. At five-thirty, he returned to the Dawes house, and was promptly leaped upon by little Sally. "Hi! Hi! Hi!" she said, clutching his right leg and almost toppling him over. "We had a party in school. I had chocolate cake. You goin' to stay with us?" "Just another night," Sol told her, trying to shake the girl off. "If it's okay with your folks. They haven't found my car yet." "Sally!" Mom was peering out of the screen door. "You let Mr. Becker alone and go wash. Your Pa will be home soon." "Oh, pooh," the girl said, her pigtails swinging. "Do you got a girlfriend, mister?" "No." Sol struggled towards the house with her dead weight on his leg. "Would you mind? I can't walk." "Would you be my boyfriend?" "Well, we'll talk about it. If you let go my leg." Inside the house, she said: "We're having pot roast. You stayin'?" "Of course Mr. Becker's stayin'," Mom said. "He's our guest." "That's very kind of you," Sol said. "I really wish you'd let me pay something—" "Don't want to hear another word about pay." Mr. Dawes came home an hour later, looking tired. Mom pecked him lightly on the forehead. He glanced at the evening paper, and then spoke to Sol. "Hear you been asking questions, Mr. Becker." Sol nodded, embarrassed. "Guess I have. I'm awfully curious about this Armagon place. Never heard of anything like it before." Dawes grunted. "You ain't a reporter?" "Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I was just satisfying my own curiosity." "Uh-huh." Dawes looked reflective. "You wouldn't be thinkin' about writing us up or anything. I mean, this is a pretty private affair." "Writing it up?" Sol blinked. "I hadn't thought of it. But you'll have to admit—it's sure interesting." "Yeah," Dawes said narrowly. "I guess it would be." "Supper!" Mom called. After the meal, they spent a quiet evening at home. Sally went to bed, screaming her reluctance, at eight-thirty. Mom, dozing in the big chair near the fireplace, padded upstairs at nine. Then Dawes yawned widely, stood up, and said goodnight at quarter-of-ten. He paused in the doorway before leaving. "I'd think about that," he said. "Writing it up, I mean. A lot of folks would think you were just plum crazy." Sol laughed feebly. "I guess they would at that." "Goodnight," Dawes said. "Goodnight." He read Sally's copy of Treasure Island for about half an hour. Then he undressed, made himself comfortable on the sofa, snuggled under the soft blanket that Mom had provided, and shut his eyes. He reviewed the events of the day before dropping off to sleep. The troublesome Sally. The strange dream world of Armagon. The visit to the barber shop. The removal of Brundage's body. The conversations with the townspeople. Dawes' suspicious attitude ... Then sleep came. He was flanked by marble pillars, thrusting towards a high-domed ceiling. The room stretched long and wide before him, the walls bedecked in stunning purple draperies. He whirled at the sound of footsteps, echoing stridently on the stone floor. Someone was running towards him. It was Sally, pigtails streaming out behind her, the small body wearing a flowing white toga. She was shrieking, laughing as she skittered past him, clutching a gleaming gold helmet. He called out to her, but she was too busy outdistancing her pursuer. It was Sheriff Coogan, puffing and huffing, the metal-and-gold cloth uniform ludicrous on his lanky frame. "Consarn kid!" he wheezed. "Gimme my hat!" Mom was following him, her stout body regal in scarlet robes. "Sally! You give Sir Coogan his helmet! You hear?" "Mrs. Dawes!" Sol said. "Why, Mr. Becker! How nice to see you again! Pa! Pa! Look who's here!" Willie Dawes appeared. No! Sol thought. This was King Dawes; nothing else could explain the magnificence of his attire. "Yes," Dawes said craftily. "So I see. Welcome to Armagon, Mr. Becker." "Armagon?" Sol gaped. "Then this is the place you've been dreaming about?" "Yep," the King said. "And now you're in it, too." "Then I'm only dreaming!" Charlie, the fat man, clumsy as ever in his robes of State, said: "So that's the snooper, eh?" "Yep," Dawes chuckled. "Think you better round up the Knights." Sol said: "The Knights?" "Exelution! Exelution!" Sally shrieked. "Now wait a minute—" Charlie shouted. Running feet, clanking of armor. Sol backed up against a pillar. "Now look here. You've gone far enough—" "Not quite," said the King. The Knights stepped forward. "Wait!" Sol screamed. Familiar faces, under shining helmets, moved towards him; the tips of sharp-pointed spears gleaming wickedly. And Sol Becker wondered—would he ever awake? Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe January 1957. 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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Just like starting over: when Britain (briefly) fell in love with New Towns "Modern girls and modern boys: it's tremendous!" So goes the sunny reflection of the eponymous hero in Bill Forsyth's 1981 film Gregory's Girl, as he surveys the playing fields, comprehensive schools and spaghetti plate of dual carriageways in Cumbernauld, a mid-20th-century Scottish 'New Town'. Gregory and his friends playfully mock the town, but their youthful affection for Cumbernauld shines through; it neatly encapsulates the optimism these places were all about: doing things differently, doing them better. New Towns were sometimes sublime and surely strange; but more of a success than the popular consensus gave them credit for. These weren't just council estates, but whole functioning places with jobs, shops and services. Perhaps now we're truly recognising some of that value because, as archetypal New Towns like Milton Keynes and Harlow celebrate milestone birthdays this year (fiftieth and seventieth respectively), the UK government has floated a new generation of New Towns that could once again change the face of Britain. Most cities we live in haven't been planned at all, they're the product of hundreds or thousands of years of architectural accretions. Most cities are ultimately exercises in speculative pissing in the wind: developers develop, architects design, but none of it is woven together and thought through from scratch. It's planning on the most piecemeal scale. But not all. Mohenjo-daro might have been the first planned city, appearing 4,500 years ago in what is now Pakistan. Alexandria was planned. And Renaissance Italy boasted the star-shaped Palmanova. But these were the enlightened exceptions, and in Britain it was mainly the kind of hotchpotch best illustrated by the Shambles in York: quaint, but a bloody mess. It was towards the end of the 19th century that modern and urban change came to Britain. Tenements and slums were the rule in most large towns of the era. A number of enlightened capitalists planned their own towns, toy communities almost; but such innovative plans were rare. Schoolchildren today are taught about Titus Salt's dry settlement of Saltaire and the model village that started it all, Bournville. But we make a show of these places and the characters who bequeathed them to make us feel better as a country – to play up our successes rather than our failures. Today Bournville feels quaint, especially if you compare it to the later, more radical New Town of Redditch, a mere six stops down the Midlands' Cross-City Line. Bournville was the brainchild of the Cadburys, and its bucolic buildings and tree-lined streets led towards the garden cities movement at the start of the 20th century. With Bournville and the garden cities we see a key touchstone that would also be echoed in the later New Towns project: the idea that the city was broken and escape was the answer. That sentiment endured beyond the end of the "dark satanic mills" era. Arguably it's only really been in the last 20 years that the city, the British city at least – other European nations typically had a milder view towards their cities – has come to be seen as the answer rather the question. However the garden cities like Letchworth were more of a dream than a reality, an exercise in placemaking reverie; and like Bournville as much of a fantasy as Middle Earth. Tolkein saw Bournville as a child. These towns were visions of an idealised Britain, a pre-industrial, anti-industrial one. This line of thinking continues in the oddball planned suburb of Poundbury, which appears as one of those miniature model villages (but one with a Waitrose, of course). Strangeness wasn't far from all these places. Jonathan Meades picked up on the multitude of cults that infected the garden cities: teetotallers, vegetarians, religious dissenters, political radicals. It was only after the second world war ended that a gutsy modernism bloomed. The New Towns of this era sat alongside the radical municipal socialism exemplified by existing cities like Sheffield, London and Newcastle, which built swathes of housing and other civic amenities in the electric post-war period of progress. Around the globe, planners and architects were getting to make their mark, from Chorweiler to Chandigarh to Brasilia, new cities rose. Top of the list in Britain was providing working people with high quality, affordable housing in healthy surroundings. The 1946 New Towns Act was a way to make things happen by creating an all-powerful development corporation in each of the towns, allowing building to get going quickly. "Amazing people were involved in Harlow, Cumbernauld and Peterlee," points out Catherine Croft of the Twentieth Century Society. Architects like John Madin at Telford, Frederick Gibberd at Harlow, Geoffrey Jellicoe at Hemel Hempstead deploying a complete vision. This was about top-down, total design; men smoking pipes in committee rooms and deciding what was best for women and children. There's no better depiction of this than in Catherine O'Flynn's bravura novel The News Where You Are, where the harassed architect (that she's very careful to point out isn't Madin) pores over his beautiful scale model of a Midlands New Town populated with miniature plastic people lacking faces. "I love the high-profile public art," says Croft, "especially the murals, and would like to see more of that today. As well as the main set pieces, some of the low-key housing developments deserve to be more cherished." Surrounded by the highest quality council housing and landscaping, Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, for instance, has every right to be as high up on a visitor's itinerary as Durham Cathedral. In the public consciousness, everything from the edge estate to the expanded town to the full New Town has become conflated: we see council houses surrounded by trees and are not always sure if it's an estate or a New Town. Frequently these associations are negative. The sprawling exurban council estates, like Chelmsley Wood on Birmingham's outskirts, faced challenges with a lack of infrastructure, jobs, amenities and transport. There was also psychological isolation from the geographic and social communities that previously bound together urban working-class life. In her book Estates, Lynsey Hanley paints pictures of estates like this as if they were flawed works of cubism. The expanded towns like King's Lynn, Haverhill and Thetford were never fully comfortable with their double lives as market towns and an overspill zone for Cockneys. But the fully planned New Towns were attempts to make a whole place with all the facilities, factories, shopping and bus links so essential to any functioning city – even if it did sometimes take too long for these to arrive. Milton Keynes didn't get a hospital for 13 years. In John Grindrod's groundbreaking (pardon the pun) book Concretopia, he says New Towns "sit alongside the creation of the welfare state, the NHS and the post-war revolution in education as monuments to a nation's desire to move on, not just from the destruction of the war years, but from the inequalities and squalor inherited from the Industrial Revolution." Mike Althorpe of Karakusevic Carson Architects, agrees: "I think the New Towns project in the UK was much more successful than people give it credit for… It's one of the greatest modern movements of people and the biggest built project in our history; and its legacy is one of architectural bravery, optimism and a sincere belief in the idea and the qualities of 'place'. These were not mere housing estates, they were intentional communities with great thought given over to what makes a town." It could be a challenge. Aside from the sheer effort of planning a whole new town there was occasional dissent from those who feared the concreting over of the countryside. And some councils – notably Glasgow – wanted to keep their population (in this case a Labour-voting population) within city limits. Occasionally residents and businesses needed a little gentle convincing to relocate: witness the bonkers space pop 7" single, Energy in Northampton, which Northampton Development Agency commissioned to sell the town; and the proto-Gregory's Girl social realism of Living at Thamesmead. Milton Keynes had the charming red balloon TV ad and, more bizarrely, Cliff Richard rollerskating through the shopping centre. Yet what's remarkable is that all this got done, all this got built, and often very quickly. The timescales compare with the ridiculously quick builds we see in China and the Arabian Gulf today. Opposition was won over and people did move in – and they often liked New Towns, and the modernist architecture that underpinned them. Mike Althorpe grew up surrounded by Scots in Corby who came south for steel jobs. "The structure that impacted me most was the 1972 town centre and bus station," he says now. "As a kid I loved running up and down the cantilevered stairs onto balconies to wind my mum up! It had the town's only (broken) escalator, which took you deep into a dark underworld where the smell of diesel bus fumes and chip fat was intoxicating; and a big National Express sign announced 'Book here for Scotland'. It had a fantastically urban quality." JG Ballard said he wrote about the future because he believed it would be better than the past. This is the very essence of town planning: that creating something new, something that works better than what went before, can mould superior worlds. But in an infamous section of Robert Hughes's masterful BBC art series The Shock of the New, this fierce Aussie decried Brasilia as "a ceremonial slum" and Paris's Peripherique New Towns as dead ends. He urged urban planners to shut up because we all need a bit of (his words) "shit" around us in the cities artists and the rest of us live in: like Paris, New York and London. Each UK New Town has its own character. Cumbernauld’s infamous town centre megastructure has been called Britain's ugliest building, but it was intended as a radical and revolutionary attempt to get all of the town's services – library, shops, bookies, hotel, car park, bus station and penthouse flats – into one space station-like building. "I tried to take some American friends to Cumbernauld [town centre] and they refused to get out of the car!" says Catherine Croft. "That's unusually urban and intimidating; in general there is a calm softness to our New Town design." Harlow, with its gardens and Moore sculptures, embodies this softness in its 70th year. But Ballard called the low rise suburbs with house, garden and car in the drive – so typical of New Towns – "the death of the soul". And he lived in a suburb. It could all have been more dramatic: Geoffrey Jellicoe's Motopia in Slough envisaged a city with roads on the roof, while unbuilt proposals for Hook in Hampshire look like a jet-propelled version of quasi-New Town Thamesmead. Hubert de Cronin Hastings, longtime honcho of the Architectural Review, dreamt up Civilia in the 1960s. He wanted to stack Moshe Safdie-esque residential superblocks, Tuscan piazzas and boating lakes (all New Town plans had their marina) on top of an old quarry outside Nuneaton and stick a million people in a kind of retro-futurist Arezzo on the Anker. Civilia didn't make it and what did at that exact time was completely antagonistic to it: low-rise, low density Milton Keynes. This "Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire", according to John Grindrod, is filled with Mies van der Rohe-apeing minimalism and houses by a welter of starchitects like Norman Foster and Ralph Erskine. It continues to look forward, with trials of driverless cars on its ample roads. Katy Lock, the Town and Country Planning Association's New Towns expert, talks eloquently about her own upbringing in Milton Keynes. Crucially, she mentions "people being consciously part of the story. People had chosen to move [to New Towns]. Like with Stevenage earlier, where people had bought into the story of an inside bathroom and a new job." Christopher Smith's forthcoming film, New Town Utopia, focuses on Basildon. "New Towns were a grand ambition that could still work," he says. "But for the first wave of new towns, the execution was flawed. These were places created for the working classes, but designed by the middle and upper classes. They also faced a number of negative external forces, including globalisation, Thatcher's Right to Buy policy, and a lack of care and attention." The current UK government recently put its weight behind more New Towns in places like Essex and Cheshire. "We've been campaigning for a new generation of garden cities," says Lock. "It's one of the solutions of the housing crisis – but the renewal of existing cities is too. We need to learn the lessons from garden cities and post-war New Towns." The question will be: can we fully commit to building a concrete future? The 20th-century New Towns embraced innovation in housing, public realm and transport design. The New Towns of today can do that too – look at Vauban, the ecologically-rigorous New Town on the outskirts of Freiburg in Germany with all kinds of green innovations. The danger with Britain's potential new New Towns is that they simply become overblown dormitory suburbs for the middle managers of Cambridge, Manchester and London: commuter towns with cut-price architecture and planning, rather than truly viable and thriving towns. However, with architects and planners at the tiller instead of just property developers, and with technical innovations such as communications connectivity, futuristic transportation and that all-elusive sense of 'place' front and centre, the new New Towns could offer the 21st century something truly unique. And as the 20th-century New Towns around the world hit middle age, they've often settled into being quietly successful: just look at Australia's spirited capital, Canberra, or the way Milton Keynes has matured to nurture a sense of pride in its inhabitants. Architecture is our gift to future generations; building whole cities supersizes this impulse. It's an urge that will, in various forms, forever linger. This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.

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Open Access: Scope As we saw in chapter 1, any kind of content can in principle be OA. Any kind of content can be digitized, and any kind of digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. In that sense, the potential scope of OA is universal. Hence, instead of saying that OA applies to some categories or genres and not to others, it’s better to say that some categories are easier and some harder. OA is not limited to the sciences, where it is known best and moving fastest, but extends to the arts and humanities. It’s not limited to research created in developed countries, where it is most voluminous, but includes research from developing countries. (Nor, conversely, is it limited to research from developing countries, where the need is most pressing.) It’s not limited to publicly funded research, where the argument is almost universally accepted, but includes privately funded and unfunded research. It’s not limited to present and future publications, where most policies focus, but includes past publications. It’s not limited to born-digital work, where the technical barriers are lowest, but includes work digitized from print, microfiche, film, and other media. It’s not limited to text, but includes data, audio, video, multimedia, and executable code. There are serious, practical, successful campaigns to provide OA to the many kinds of content useful to scholars, including: • peer-reviewed research articles • unrefereed preprints destined to be peer-reviewed research articles • theses and dissertations • research data • government data • source code • conference presentations (texts, slides, audio, video) • scholarly monographs • textbooks • novels, stories, plays, and poetry • newspapers • archival records and manuscripts • images (artworks, photographs, diagrams, maps) • teaching and learning materials (“open education resources” and “open courseware”) • digitized print works (some in the public domain, some still under copyright) For some of these categories, such as data and source code, we need OA to facilitate the testing and replication of scientific experiments. For others, such as data, images, and digitized work from other media, we need OA in order to give readers the same chance to analyze the primary materials that the authors had. For others, such as articles, monographs, dissertations, and conference presentations, we need OA simply to share results and analysis with everyone who might benefit from them. A larger book could devote sections to each category. Here I focus on just a few. 5.1 Preprints, Postprints, and Peer Review Throughout most of its history, newcomers to OA assumed that the whole idea was to bypass peer review. That assumption was false and harmful, and we’ve made good progress in correcting it. The purpose of OA is to remove access barriers, not quality filters. Today many peer-reviewed OA journals are recognized for their excellence, many excellent peer-reviewed toll-access journal publishers are experimenting with OA, and green OA for peer-reviewed articles is growing rapidly. Unfortunately many newcomers unaware of these developments still assume that the purpose of OA is to bypass peer review. Some of them deplore the prospect, some rejoice in it, and their passion spreads the misinformation even farther. All the public statements in support of OA stress the importance of peer review. Most of the enthusiasm for OA is enthusiasm for OA to peer-reviewed literature. At the same time, we can acknowledge that many of the people working hard for this goal are simultaneously exploring new forms of scholarly communication that exist outside the peer-review system, such as preprint exchanges, blogs, wikis, databases, discussion forums, and social media. In OA lingo, a “preprint” is any version of an article prior to peer review, such as a draft circulating among colleagues or the version submitted to a journal. A “postprint” is any version approved by peer review. The scope of green OA deliberately extends to both preprints and postprints, just as the function of gold OA deliberately includes peer review. We could say that OA preprint initiatives focus on bypassing peer review. But it would be more accurate to say that they focus on OA for works destined for peer review but not yet peer reviewed. Preprint exchanges didn’t arise because they bypass peer review but because they bypass delay. They make new work known more quickly to people in the field, creating new and earlier opportunities for citation, discussion, verification, and collaboration. How quickly? They make new work public the minute that authors are ready to make it public. OA preprints offer obvious reader-side benefits to those tracking new developments. But this may be a case where the author-side benefits swamp the reader-side benefits. Preprint exchanges give authors the earliest possible time stamp to mark their priority over others working on the same problem. (Historical aside: It’s likely that in the seventeenth century, journals superseded books as the primary literature of science precisely because they were faster than books in giving authors an authoritative public time stamp.) Preprint exchanges existed before the internet, but OA makes them faster, larger, more useful, and more widely read. Despite these advantages, however, preprint exchanges don’t represent the whole OA movement or even the whole green OA movement. On the contrary, most green OA and most OA overall focuses on peer-reviewed articles. As soon as scholars had digital networks to connect peers together, they began using them to tinker with peer review. Can we use networks to find good referees, or to gather, share, and weigh their comments? Can we use networks to implement traditional models of peer review more quickly or effectively? Can we use networks to do better than the traditional models? Many scholars answer “yes” to some or all of these questions, and many of those saying “yes” also support OA. One effect is a creative and long-overdue efflorescence of experiments with new forms of peer review. Another effect, however, is the false perception that OA entails peer-review reform. For example, many people believe that OA requires a certain kind of peer review, favors some kinds of peer review and disfavors others, can’t proceed until we agree on the best form of peer review, or benefits only those who support certain kinds of peer-review reforms. All untrue. OA is compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most traditional and conservative to the most networked and innovative. Some OA journals deliberately adopt traditional models of peer review, in order to tweak just the access variable of scholarly journals. Some deliberately use very new models, in order to push the evolution of peer review. OA is a kind of access, not a kind of editorial policy. It’s not intrinsically tied to any particular model of peer review any more than it’s intrinsically tied to any particular business model or method of digital preservation. With one exception, achieving OA and reforming peer review are independent projects. That is, we can achieve OA without reforming peer review, and we can reform peer review without achieving OA. The exception is that some new forms of peer review presuppose OA. For example, open review makes submissions OA, before or after some prepublication review, and invites community comments. Some open-review journals will use those comments to decide whether to accept the article for formal publication, and others will already have accepted the article and use the community comments to complement or carry forward the quality evaluation started by the journal. Open review requires OA, but OA does not require open review. Peer review does not depend on the price or medium of a journal. Nor does the value, rigor, or integrity of peer review. We know that peer review at OA journals can be as rigorous and honest as peer review at the best toll-access journals because it can use the same procedures, the same standards, and even the same people (editors and referees) as the best toll-access journals. We see this whenever toll-access journals convert to OA without changing their methods or personnel. 5.2 Theses and Dissertations Theses and dissertations are the most useful kinds of invisible scholarship and the most invisible kinds of useful scholarship. Because of their high quality and low visibility, the access problem is worth solving. Fortunately OA for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) is easier than for any other kind of research literature. Authors have not yet transferred rights to a publisher, no publisher permissions are needed, no publisher fears need be answered, and no publisher negotiations slow things down or make the outcome uncertain. Virtually all theses and dissertations are now born digital, and institutions expecting electronic submission generally provide OA, the reverse of the default for journal publishers. The chief obstacle seems to be author fear that making a thesis or dissertation OA will reduce the odds that a journal will publish an article-length version. While these fears are sometimes justified, the evidence suggests that in most cases they are not. Universities expecting OA for ETDs teach the next generation of scholars how easy OA is to provide, how beneficial it is, and how routine it can be. They help cultivate lifelong habits of self-archiving. And they elicit better work. By giving authors a foreseeable, real audience beyond the dissertation committee, an OA policy strengthens existing incentives to do rigorous, original work. If a university requires theses and dissertations to be new and significant works of scholarship, then it ought to expect them to be made public, just as it expects new and significant scholarship by faculty to be made public. Sharing theses and dissertations that meet the school’s high standard reflects well on the institution and benefits other researchers in the field. The university mission to advance research by young scholars has two steps, not one. First, help students produce good work, and then help others find, use, and build on that good work. 5.3 Books The OA movement focuses on journal articles because journals don’t pay authors for their articles. This frees article authors to consent to OA without losing money. By contrast, book authors either earn royalties or hope to earn royalties. Because the line between royalty-free and royalty-producing literature is bright (and life is short), many OA activists focus exclusively on journal articles and leave books aside. I recommend a different tactic: treat journal articles as low-hanging fruit, but treat books as higher-hanging fruit rather than forbidden fruit. There are even reasons to think that OA for some kinds of books is easier to attain than OA for journal articles. The scope of OA should be determined by author consent, not genre. Imagine an author of a journal article who withholds consent to OA. The economic door is open but the author is not walking through it. This helps us see that relinquishing revenue is only relevant when it leads to consent, and consent suffices whether or not it’s based on relinquishing revenue. It follows that if authors of royalty-producing genres, like books, consent to OA, then we’ll have the same basis for OA to books that we have for OA to articles. Even if books are higher-hanging fruit, they’re not out of reach. Two arguments are increasingly successful in persuading book authors to consent to OA. Royalties on most scholarly monographs range between zero and meager. If your royalties are better than that, congratulations. (I’ve earned book royalties; I’m grateful for them, and I wish all royalty-earning authors success.) The case for OA doesn’t ask authors to make a new sacrifice or leave money on the table. It merely asks them to weigh the risk to their royalties against the benefit of OA, primarily the benefit of a larger audience and greater impact. For many book authors, the benefit will outweigh the risk. The benefit is large and the realistic prospect of royalties is low. There is growing evidence that for some kinds of books, full-text OA editions boost the net sales of the priced, printed editions. OA may increase royalties rather than decrease them. The first argument says that even if OA puts royalties at risk, the benefits might outweigh the risks. The second argument says that OA might not reduce royalties at all, and that conventional publication without an OA edition might be the greater risk. Both say, in effect, that authors should be empirical and realistic about this. Don’t presume that your royalties will be high when there’s evidence they will be low, and don’t presume that OA will kill sales when there’s evidence it could boost them. Both arguments apply to authors, but the second applies to publishers as well. When authors have already transferred rights—and the OA decision—to a publisher, then the case rests on the second argument. A growing number of academic book publishers are either persuaded or so intrigued that they’re experimenting. Many book authors want a print edition, badly. But the second argument is not only compatible with print but depends on print. The model is to give away the OA edition and sell a print edition, usually via print-on-demand (POD). Why would anyone buy a print book when the full text is OA? The answer is that many people don’t want to read a whole book on a screen or gadget, and don’t want to print out a whole book on their printer. They use OA editions for searching and sampling. When they discover a book that piques their curiosity or meets their personal standards of relevance and quality, they’ll buy a copy. Or, many of them will buy a copy. Evidence has been growing for about a decade that this phenomenon works for some books, or some kinds of books, even if it doesn’t work for others. For example, it seems to work for books like novels and monographs, which readers want to read from beginning to end, or which they want to have on their shelves. It doesn’t seem to work for books like encyclopedias, from which readers usually want just an occasional snippet. One problem is running a controlled experiment, since we can’t publish the same book with and without an OA edition to compare the sales. (If we publish a book initially without an OA edition and later add an OA edition, the time lag itself could affect sales.) Another variable is that ebook readers are becoming more and more consumer friendly. If the “net boost to sales” phenomenon is real, and if it depends on the ergonomic discomforts of reading digital books, then better gadgets may make the phenomenon disappear. If the net-boost phenomenon didn’t depend on ergonomic hurdles to digital reading, or didn’t depend entirely on them, then it might survive any sort of technological advances. There’s a lot of experimenting still to do, and fortunately or unfortunately it must be done in a fast-changing environment. The U.S. National Academies Press began publishing full-text OA editions of its monographs alongside priced, printed editions in March 1994, which is ancient history in internet time. Over the years Michael Jensen, its director of web communications and director of publishing technologies, has published a series of articles showing that the OA editions increased the sales of the toll-access editions. In February 2007, the American Association of University Presses issued a Statement on Open Access in which it called for experiments with OA monographs and mixed OA/toll-access business models. By May 2011, the AAUP reported that 17 member presses, or 24 percent of its survey respondents, were already publishing full-text OA books. The question isn’t whether some people will read the OA edition without buying the toll-access edition. Some will. The question isn’t even whether more readers of the OA edition will buy the toll-access edition than not buy it. The question is whether more readers of the OA edition will buy the toll-access edition than would have bought the toll-access edition without the OA edition to alert them to its existence and help them evaluate its relevance and quality. If there are enough OA-inspired buyers, then it doesn’t matter that there are also plenty of OA-satisfied nonbuyers. Book authors and publishers who are still nervous could consent to delayed OA and release the OA edition only after six months or a year. During the time when the monograph is toll-access only, they could still provide OA excerpts and metadata to help readers and potential buyers find the book and start to assess it. Even the youngest scholars today grew up in a world in which there were more print books in the average university library than gratis OA books online. But that ratio reversed around 2006, give or take. Today there are many more gratis OA books online than print books in the average academic library, and we’re steaming toward the next crossover point when there will be many more gratis OA books online than print books in the world’s largest libraries, academic or not. A few years ago, those of us who focus on OA to journal literature were sure that journal articles were lower-hanging fruit than any kind of print books, including public-domain books. But we were wrong. There are still good reasons to make journal literature the strategic focus of the OA movement, and we’re still making good progress on that front. But the lesson of the fast-moving book-scanning projects is that misunderstanding, inertia, and permission are more serious problems than digitization. The permission problem is solved for public-domain books. Digitizing them by the millions is a titanic technical undertaking, but it turns out to be a smaller problem than getting millions of copyrighted articles into OA journals or OA repositories, even when they’re written by authors who can consent to OA without losing revenue. OA for new journal articles faces publisher resistance, print-era incentives, and misunderstandings in every category of stakeholders, including authors and publishers. As the late Jim Gray used to say, “May all your problems be technical.” 5.4 Access to What? Not all the literature that researchers want to find, retrieve, and read should be called knowledge. We want access to serious proposals for knowledge even if they turn out to be false or incomplete. We want access to serious hypotheses even if we’re still testing them and debating their merits. We want access to the data and analysis offered in support of the claims we’re evaluating. We want access to all the arguments, evidence, and discussion. We want access to everything that could help us decide what to call knowledge, not just to the results that we agree to call knowledge. If access depended on the outcome of debate and inquiry, then access could not contribute to debate and inquiry. We don’t have a good name for this category larger than knowledge, but here I’ll just call it research. Among other things, research includes knowledge and knowledge claims or proposals, hypotheses and conjectures, arguments and analysis, evidence and data, algorithms and methods, evaluation and interpretation, debate and discussion, criticism and dissent, summary and review. OA to research should be OA to the whole shebang. Inquiry and research suffer when we have access to anything less. Some people call the journal literature the “minutes” of science, as if it were just a summary. But it’s more than that. If the minutes of a meeting summarize a discussion, the journal literature is a large part of the discussion itself. Moreover, in an age of conferences, preprint servers, blogs, wikis, databases, listservs, and email, the journal literature is not the whole discussion. Wikipedia aspires to provide OA to a summary of knowledge, and (wisely) refuses to accept original research. But the larger OA movement wants OA to knowledge and original research themselves, as well as the full discussion about what we know and what we don’t. It wants OA to the primary and secondary sources where knowledge is taking shape through a messy process that is neither consistent (as it works through the clash of conflicting hypotheses) nor stable (as it discards weak claims and considers new ones that appear stronger). The messiness and instability are properties of a discussion, not properties of the minutes of a discussion. The journal literature isn’t just a report on the process but a major channel of the process itself. And not incidentally, OA is valuable not just for making the process public but for facilitating the process and making it more effective, expeditious, transparent, and global. To benefit from someone’s research, we need access to it, and for this purpose it doesn’t matter whether the research is in the sciences or humanities. We need access to medical or physical research before we can use it to tackle a cure for malaria or devise a more efficient solar panel. We need access to an earthquake prediction before we can use it to plan emergency responses. And we need access to literary and philosophical research in order to understand a difficult passage in Homer or the strength of a response to epistemological skepticism. For this kind of utility, the relevant comparison is not between pure and applied research or between the sciences and humanities. The relevant comparison is between any kind of research when OA and the same kind of research when locked behind price and permission barriers. Whether a given line of research serves wellness or wisdom, energy or enlightenment, protein synthesis or public safety, OA helps it serve those purposes faster, better, and more universally. 5.5 Access for Whom? Answer: human beings and machines. 5.5.1 OA for Lay Readers Some have opposed OA on the ground that not everyone needs it, which is a little like opposing the development of a safe and effective new medicine on the ground that not every one needs it. It’s easy to agree that not everyone needs it. But in the case of OA, there’s no easy way to identify those who do and those who don’t. In addition, there’s no easy way, and no reason, to deliver it only to those who need it and deny it to everyone else. OA allows us to provide access to everyone who cares to have access, without patronizing guesswork about who really wants it, who really deserves it, and who would really benefit from it. Access for everyone with an internet connection helps authors, by enlarging their audience and impact, and helps readers who want access and who might have been excluded by central planners trying to decide in advance whom to enfranchise. The idea is to stop thinking of knowledge as a commodity to meter out to deserving customers, and to start thinking of it as a public good, especially when it is given away by its authors, funded with public money, or both. Some lobbyists for toll-access publishers argue, in good faith or bad, that the goal of OA is to bring access to lay readers. This sets up their counter-argument that lay readers don’t care to read cutting-edge research and wouldn’t understand it if they tried. Some publishers go a step further and argue that access to research would harm lay readers. This is a two-step argument, that OA is primarily for lay readers and that lay readers don’t need it. Each step is false. The first step overlooks the unmet demand for access by professional researchers, as if all professionals who wanted access already had it, and the second overlooks the unmet demand for access by lay readers, as if lay readers had no use for access. One reason to think the first step is put forward in bad faith is that it overlooks the very conspicuous fact that the OA movement is driven by researchers who are emphatic about wanting the benefits of OA for themselves. It also overlooks the evidence of wide and widespread access gaps even for professional researchers. (See section 2.1 on problems.) The problem with the second step is presumption. How does anyone know in advance the level of demand for peer-reviewed research among lay readers? When peer-reviewed literature is toll-access and expensive, then lack of access by lay readers and consumers doesn’t show lack of demand, any more than lack of access to Fort Knox shows lack of demand for gold. We have to remove access barriers before we can distinguish lack of access from lack of interest. The experiment has been done, more than once. When the U.S. National Library of Medicine converted to OA in 2004, for example, visitors to its web site increased more than a hundredfold. A common related argument is that lay readers surfing the internet are easily misled by unsupported claims, refuted theories, anecdotal evidence, and quack remedies. Even if true, however, it’s an argument for rather than against expanding online access to peer-reviewed research. If we’re really worried about online dreck, we should dilute it with high-quality research rather than leave the dreck unchallenged and uncorrected. Many of us medical nonprofessionals—who may be professionals in another field—want access to medical research in order to read about our own conditions or the conditions of family members. But even if few fall into that category, most of us still want access for our doctors, nurses, and hospitals. We still want access for the nonprofit advocacy organizations working on our behalf, such as the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, the Cystinosis Research Network, or the Spina Bifida Association of America. And in turn, doctors, nurses, hospitals, and advocacy organizations want access for laboratory researchers. As I argued earlier (section 1.2), OA benefits researchers directly and benefits everyone else indirectly by benefiting researchers. A May 2006 Harris poll showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans wanted OA for publicly funded research. 83 percent wanted it for their doctors and 82 percent wanted it for everyone. 81 percent said it would help medical patients and their families cope with chronic illness and disability. 62 percent said it would speed up the discovery of new cures. For each poll question, a fairly large percentage of respondents checked “neither agree nor disagree” (between 13 and 30 percent), which meant that only tiny minorities disagreed with the OA propositions. Only 3 percent didn’t want OA for their doctors, 4 percent didn’t want it for themselves, and 5 percent didn’t think it would help patients or their families. The ratio of professional to lay readers of peer-reviewed research undoubtedly varies from field to field. But for the purpose of OA policy, it doesn’t matter what the ratio is in any field. What matters is that neither group has sufficient access today, when most research journals are toll-access. Professional researchers don’t have sufficient access through their institutional libraries because subscription prices are rising faster than library budgets, even at the wealthiest libraries in the world. Motivated lay readers don’t have sufficient access because few public libraries subscribe to any peer-reviewed research journals, and none to the full range. The argument against access for lay readers suffers from more than false assumptions about unmet demand. Either it concedes or doesn’t concede that OA is desirable for professional researchers. If it doesn’t, then it should argue first against the strongest opponent and try to make the case against OA for professionals. But if it does concede that OA for professionals is a good idea, then it wants to build a selection system for deciding who deserves access, and an authentication system for sorting the sheep from the goats. Part of the beauty of OA is that providing access to everyone is cheaper and easier than providing access to some and blocking access to others. We should only raise costs and pay for the apparatus of exclusion when there’s a very good reason to do so. 5.5.2 OA for Machines We also want access for machines. I don’t mean the futuristic altruism in which kindly humans want to help curious machines answer their own questions. I mean something more selfish. We’re well into the era in which serious research is mediated by sophisticated software. If our machines don’t have access, then we don’t have access. Moreover, if we can’t get access for our machines, then we lose a momentous opportunity to enhance access with processing. Think about the size of the body of literature to which you have access, online and off. Now think realistically about the subset to which you’d have practical access if you couldn’t use search engines, or if search engines couldn’t index the literature you needed. Information overload didn’t start with the internet. The internet does vastly increase the volume of work to which we have access, but at the same time it vastly increases our ability to find what we need. We zero in on the pieces that deserve our limited time with the aid of powerful software, or more precisely, powerful software with access. Software helps us learn what exists, what’s new, what’s relevant, what others find relevant, and what others are saying about it. Without these tools, we couldn’t cope with information overload. Or we’d have to redefine “coping” as artificially reducing the range of work we are allowed to consider, investigate, read, or retrieve. Some publishers have seriously argued that high toll-access journal prices and limited library budgets help us cope with information overload, as if the literature we can’t afford always coincides with the literature we don’t need. But of course much that is relevant to our projects is unaffordable to our libraries. If any problems are intrinsic to a very large and fast-growing, accessible corpus of literature, they don’t arise from size itself, or size alone, but from limitations on our discovery tools. With OA and sufficiently powerful tools, we could always find and retrieve what we needed. Without sufficiently powerful tools, we could not. Replacing OA with high-priced toll access would only add new obstacles to research, even if it simultaneously made the accessible corpus small enough for weaker discovery tools to master. In Clay Shirky’s concise formulation, the real problem is not information overload but filter failure. OA is itself a spectacular inducement for software developers to create useful tools to filter what we can find. As soon as the tools are finished, they apply to a free, useful, and fast-growing body of online literature. Conversely, useful tools optimized for OA literature create powerful incentives for authors and publishers to open up their work. As soon as their work is OA, a vast array of powerful tools make it more visible and useful. In the early days of OA, shortages on each side created a vicious circle: the small quantity of OA literature provided little incentive to develop new tools optimized for making it more visible and useful, and the dearth of powerful tools provided little extra incentive to make new work OA. But today a critical mass of OA literature invites the development of useful tools, and a critical mass of useful tools gives authors and publishers another set of reasons to make their work OA. All digital literature, OA or toll access, is machine-readable and supports new and useful kinds of processing. But toll-access literature minimizes that opportunity by shrinking the set of inputs with access fees, password barriers, copyright restrictions, and software locks. By removing price and permission barriers, OA maximizes this opportunity and spawns an ecosystem of tools for searching, indexing, mining, summarizing, translating, querying, linking, recommending, alerting, mashing-up, and other kinds of processing, not to mention myriad forms of crunching and connecting that we can’t even imagine today. One bedrock purpose of OA is to give these research-enhancing, utility-amplifying tools the widest possible scope of operation. In this sense, the ultimate promise of OA is not to provide free online texts for human reading, even if that is the highest-value end use. The ultimate promise of OA is to provide free online data for software acting as the antennae, prosthetic eyeballs, research assistants, and personal librarians of all serious researchers. Opening research literature for human users also opens it for software to crunch the literature for the benefit of human users. We can even hope that OA itself will soon be old hat, taken for granted by a new generation of tools and services that depend on it. As those tools and services come along, they will be the hot story and they will deserve to be. Technologists will note that they all depend on OA, and historians will note that OA itself was not easily won.

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Open Access: Motivation 2.1 OA as Solving Problems There are lamentably many problems for which OA is part of the solution. Here are fifteen ways in which the current system of disseminating peer-reviewed research is deeply dysfunctional for researchers and their institutions, even if highly profitable for the largest conventional publishers. I’ve limited the list to those for which OA offers some hope of relief. We are in the midst of a pricing crisis for scholarly journals. For four decades, subscription prices have risen significantly faster than inflation and significantly faster than library budgets. Subscription prices have risen about twice as fast as the price of healthcare, for most people the very index of skyrocketing, unsustainable prices. We’re long past the era of damage control and into the era of damage. When most peer-reviewed research journals are toll access, a pricing crisis entails an access crisis. Before the rise of OA, all peer-reviewed journals were toll access, and even today about three-quarters of peer-reviewed journals are toll access. When subscribers respond to skyrocketing prices by canceling subscriptions, access decreases. Cancellations mitigate one problem and aggravate another. A study by the Research Information Network in late 2009 found that 40 percent of surveyed researchers had trouble accessing journal literature at least once a week, and two-thirds at least once a month. About 60 percent said that access limitations hindered their research, and 18 percent said the hindrance was significant. Even the wealthiest academic libraries in the world suffer serious access gaps. When the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted unanimously for a strong OA policy in February 2008, Professor Stuart Shieber explained that cumulative price increases had forced the Harvard library to undertake “serious cancellation efforts” for budgetary reasons. Access gaps are worse at other affluent institutions, and worse still in the developing world. In 2008, Harvard subscribed to 98,900 serials and Yale to 73,900. The best-funded research library in India, at the Indian Institute of Science, subscribed to 10,600. Several sub-Saharan African university libraries subscribed to zero, offering their patrons access to no conventional journals except those donated by publishers. The largest publishers minimize cancellations by bundling hundreds or thousands of high-demand and low-demand journals into “big deals,” which reduce the bargaining power of libraries and the cost-cutting options available to them. On the plus side, big deals give universities access to more titles than they had before and reduce the average cost per title. But when libraries try to cancel individual titles that are low in quality or low in local usage, publishers raise the price on the remaining titles. Bundling gives libraries little room to save money with carefully targeted cancellations, and after a point forces them to cancel all or none. By design, big deals are too big to cancel without pain, giving publishers leverage to raise prices out of proportion to journal costs, size, usage, impact, and quality. Without bundling, libraries would have responded to the pricing crisis with a devastating number of cancellations. With bundling, publishers protect even second-rate journals from cancellation, protect their own profits, and shift the devastation to library budgets. While the damage grows, the largest journal publishers earn higher profit margins than the largest oil companies. In 2010, Elsevier’s journal division had a profit margin of 35.7 percent while ExxonMobil had only 28.1 percent. By soaking up library budgets, big deals harm journals from small nonprofit publishers excluded from the bundles. This exacerbates the problem for researchers because journals from these smaller publishers tend to be higher in quality and impact than the journals protected by the big deals (more in #11 below). To top it off, most big deals include confidentiality clauses preventing universities from disclosing the prices they pay. The effect is to reduce bargaining and price competition even further. In 2009, three academics launched the Big Deal Contract Project to use state open-record laws to force disclosure of big-deal contracts with public universities. Elsevier went to court to block the release of its contract with Washington State University and lost. During the decades in which journal prices have been rising faster than inflation and faster than library budgets, libraries have cut into their book budgets to pay for journals. According to James McPherson, “In 1986 [academic] libraries spent 44 percent of their budgets on books and 56 percent on journals; by 1997 the imbalance had grown to 28 percent for books and 72 percent for journals.” Because academic libraries now buy fewer books, academic book publishers now accept fewer manuscripts. One result is that the journal crisis, concentrated in the sciences, has precipitated a monograph crisis, concentrated in the humanities. New restrictions on electronic journals add a permissions crisis on top of the pricing crisis. For publishers of online toll-access journals, there are business reasons to limit the freedom of users to copy and redistribute texts, even if that leaves users with fewer rights than they had with print journals. But these business reasons create pernicious consequences for libraries and their patrons. Among the results: When libraries pay for subscriptions to digital journals, they don’t buy or own their own digital copies but merely rent or license them for a period of time. If they cancel a subscription, they could lose access to past issues. They could violate the publishers’ copyrights if they make or hold copies for long-term preservation without special permission or payment, shifting the task of preservation more and more to publishers who are not preservation experts and who tend to make preservation decisions with only future market potential in mind. Libraries can’t migrate older content, such as journal backfiles, to new media and formats to keep them readable as technology changes, at least not without special permission or risk of liability. Some publishers don’t allow libraries to share digital texts by interlibrary loan and instead require them to make printouts, scan the printouts, and lend the scans. Libraries must negotiate for prices and licensing terms, often under nondisclosure agreements, and retain and consult complex licensing agreements that differ from publisher to publisher and year to year. They must police or negotiate access for walk-in patrons, online users off campus, and visiting faculty. They must limit access and usage by password, internet-protocol (IP) address, usage hours, institutional affiliation, physical location, and caps on simultaneous users. They must implement authentication systems and administer proxy servers. They must make fair-use judgment calls, erring on the side of seeking permission or forgoing use. They must explain to patrons that cookies and registration make anonymous inquiry impossible and that some uses allowed by law are not allowed by the technology. I make this list library-centric rather than user-centric because the pricing crisis has nearly killed off individual subscriptions. Most subscribers to toll-access journals are libraries, and most authorized readers of toll-access journals are library patrons. In short, conventional publishers regard easy online sharing as a problem while researchers and libraries regard it as a solution. The internet is widening the gap between the interests of conventional publishers and the interests of researchers and research institutions. Conventional publishers are adapting to the digital age in some respects. They’re migrating most print journals to digital formats and even dropping their print editions. They’re incorporating hyperlinks, search engines, and alert services. A growing number are digitizing their backfiles and integrating texts with data. But the revolutionary power to share content without price or permission barriers, to solve the pricing and permission crises at a stroke and liberate research for the benefit of all, is the one innovation they fear most. Conventional publishers acquire their key assets from academics without charge. Authors donate the texts of new articles and the rights to publish them. Editors and referees donate the peer-review judgments to improve and validate their quality. But then conventional publishers charge for access to the resulting articles, with no exception for authors, editors, referees, or their institutions. Publishers argue that they add value to the submitted manuscripts, which is true. But other players in the game, such as authors, editors, and referees, add far more value than publishers. For funded research, the funding agency is another critical player. It too must pay for access to the resulting articles even when the cost of a research project is hundreds of thousands of times greater than the cost of publication. Among these five value-adders—authors, editors, referees, funders, and publishers—publishers add the least value and generally demand the ownership rights. Conventional publishers use a business model that depends on access barriers and creates artificial scarcity. All publishers (conventional and OA) need revenue to cover their costs, but OA publishers use business models that dispense with access barriers and avoid artificial scarcity. Toll-access publishers contend that the OA business models are inadequate. We can debate that, for example, in light of the evidence that more than 7,500 peer-reviewed OA journals are finding ways to pay their bills, the fact that a growing number of for-profit OA publishers are already showing profits, and the fact that most of the money needed to support OA journals is currently tied up supporting toll-access journals. (See chapter 7 on economics.) But in the end it doesn’t matter whether toll-access publishers are right or wrong to believe that their revenue requires access barriers. The deeper problem is that we donate time, labor, and public money to create new knowledge and then hand control over the results to businesses that believe, correctly or incorrectly, that their revenue and survival depend on limiting access to that knowledge. If toll-access publishers are right that they must erect access barriers to reimburse themselves, then the problem is that we allow them to be the only outlets for most peer-reviewed research. If they’re wrong about the need for access barriers, then the problem is that we tolerate their access barriers, even for publicly funded research and gifts from authors who write for impact and not for money. Conventional publishers often criticize OA initiatives for “interfering with the market,” but scholarly publishing is permeated by state action, public subsidies, gift culture, and anticompetitive practices. All scholarly journals (toll access and OA) benefit from public subsidies. Most scientific research is funded by public agencies using public money, conducted and written up by researchers working at public institutions and paid with public money, and then peer-reviewed by faculty at public institutions and paid with public money. Even when researchers and peer reviewers work at private universities, their institutions are subsidized by publicly funded tax exemptions and tax-deductible donations. Most toll-access journal subscriptions are purchased by public institutions and paid with taxpayer money. Last and not least, publishers exercise their control over research articles through copyright, a temporary government-created monopoly. Every scholarly journal is a natural mini-monopoly in the sense that no other journal publishes the same articles. There’s nothing improper about this natural mini-monopoly. It’s a side-effect of the desirable fact that journals don’t duplicate one another. But it means that toll-access journals compete for authors much more than they compete for subscribers. If you need an article published in a certain journal, then you need access to that journal. This is one reason why free and expensive journals can coexist in the same field, even at the same level of quality. The free journals don’t drive the expensive journals out of business or even drive down their prices. By weakening the competition for buyers, however, this natural monopoly weakens the market feedback that would otherwise punish declining quality, declining usage, and rising prices. Laid on top of this natural monopoly are several layers of artificial monopoly. One kind of evidence is that large commercial publishers charge higher prices and raise their prices faster than small, nonprofit publishers. Yet, the scholarly consensus is that quality, impact, and prestige are generally higher at the nonprofit society journals. Large conventional publishers spend some of the money they extract from libraries on marketing and “content protection” measures that benefit publishers far more than users. Indeed, the content protection measures don’t benefit users at all and make the texts less useful. Conventional for-profit journals can increase their profit margins by decreasing their rejection rates. Reducing the rejection rate reduces the number of articles a journal must peer review for each article it publishes. Most faculty and researchers are aware of access gaps in their libraries but generally unaware of their causes and unaware that the problems are systemic and worsening. (A common response: My research is very specialized, so naturally my library won’t have everything I need.) On the other hand, librarians are acutely aware of library budget crises, high journal prices, hyperinflationary price increases, bundling constraints, publisher profit margins, and the disconnect between prices paid and journal costs, size, usage, impact, and quality. Researcher oblivion to the problems facing libraries adds several new problems to the mix. It means that the players who are most aware of quality are generally unaware of prices, which Jan Velterop once called the “cat food” model of purchasing. It creates a classic moral hazard in which researchers are shielded from the costs of their preferences and have little incentive to adjust their preferences accordingly. It subtracts one more market signal that might otherwise check high prices and declining quality. And while researchers support OA roughly to the extent that they know about it, and have their own reasons to work for it, their general unawareness of the crisis for libraries adds one more difficulty to the job of recruiting busy and preoccupied researchers to the cause of fixing this broken system. The fact that there are enough problems to motivate different stakeholders is a kind of good news. If the system were broken for buyers (librarians) but not for users (researchers), or vice versa, that would delay any fix even longer. Or it would create a pernicious trade-off in which any fix would help one group at the expense of the other. But the system is broken for both buyers and users, which makes them natural allies. Finally, even in the absence of perverse journal pricing practices, the subscription or toll-access business model would not scale with the growth of research or the growth of published knowledge. If prices were low today and guaranteed to remain low forever, the total price for the total literature would still be heading toward exponential explosion. This is easiest to see at the mythical University of Croesus, which can afford 100 percent of the literature today. In that respect, Croesus is far better off than any university in the real world. Let’s suppose that journal prices and the Croesus library budget increase at the same rate forever. For simplicity, let’s assume that rate is zero. They never grow at all, not even at the rate of inflation. Let’s assume that the growth of knowledge means that the journal literature grows by 5 percent a year, a common industry estimate. Croesus can afford full coverage today, but in twenty years it would have to spend 2.7 times more than it spends today for full coverage, in sixty years 18.7 times more, and in a hundred years 131.5 times more. But since Croesus can’t spend more than it has, in twenty years the coverage it could afford would drop from 100 percent to 37.7 percent, in sixty years to 5.4 percent, and in a hundred years to less than 1 percent. We need a system of research dissemination that scales with the growth of research volume. The subscription or toll-access system scales negatively by shrinking the accessible percentage of research as research itself continues to grow. Money would solve the access crisis if we had enough of it, and if the amount at our disposal grew in proportion to the growing volume and growing prices of the literature. But we don’t have nearly enough money, and the money we do have doesn’t grow nearly fast enough to keep pace with the volume or prices of the literature. Toll-access publishers don’t benefit from access gaps and have their own reasons to want to close them. But they prefer the unscalable money solution, even if university budgets and national treasuries must be squeezed by law to find the funds. Crispin Davis, then-CEO of Elsevier, once argued that “the government needs to lay down guidelines on the proportion of university funds that should be set aside for the acquisition of books and journals, or even increase funding to ensure that universities can buy all the material they need.” At some point we should trust the math more than special-interest lobbies. Among the many who have done the math, the University of California concluded that the subscription model for research journals is “incontrovertibly unsustainable.” 2.2 OA as Seizing Opportunities Even if we had no pressing problems to solve, we’d want to take full advantage of the unprecedented power of digital technology to share knowledge and accelerate research. But we have both problems and opportunities, and we should acknowledge that. Too much of the OA discussion is grim, utilitarian, and problem-oriented. We should complement it with discussion that is joyful, curious, and opportunity-oriented. Serious problems don’t rule out beautiful opportunities, and one of the most beautiful opportunities facing OA is that certain strategic actions will solve serious problems and seize beautiful opportunities at the same time. Here’s a brace of those beautiful opportunities. The internet emerged just as journal subscription prices were reaching unbearable levels. The internet widens distribution and reduces costs at the same time. Digital computers connected to a global network let us make perfect copies of arbitrary files and distribute them to a worldwide audience at zero marginal cost. For 350 years, scholars have willingly, even eagerly, published journal articles without payment, freeing them to consent to OA without losing revenue. Unrestricted access to digital files supports forms of discovery and processing impossible for paper texts and for inaccessible or use-restricted digital texts. OA is already lawful and doesn’t require copyright reform. Now that the internet is at our fingertips, OA is within the reach of researchers and research institutions acting alone and needn’t wait for publishers, legislation, or markets. Authors, editors, and referees—the whole team that produces peer-reviewed research articles—can provide OA to peer-reviewed research literature and, if necessary, cut recalcitrant publishers out of the loop. For researchers acting on their own, the goal of complete OA is even easier to attain than the goal of affordable journals. A less obvious but more fundamental opportunity is that knowledge is nonrivalrous (to use a term from the economics of property). We can share it without dividing it and consume it without diminishing it. My possession and use of some knowledge doesn’t exclude your possession and use of the same knowledge. Familiar physical goods like land, food, and machines are all rivalrous . To share them, we must take turns or settle for portions. Thomas Jefferson described this situation beautifully in an 1813 letter to Isaac McPherson: If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea. . . . Its peculiar character . . . is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine. We seldom think about how metaphysically lucky we are that knowledge is nonrivalrous. We can all know the same ideas, stories, tunes, plans, directions, and words without my knowledge blocking yours or yours blocking mine. We’re equally fortunate that speech is nonrivalrous, since it allows us to articulate and share our knowledge without reducing it to a rivalrous commodity. But for all of human history before the digital age, writing has been rivalrous. Written or recorded knowledge became a material object like stone, clay, skin, or paper, which was necessarily rivalrous. Even when we had the printing press and photocopying machine, allowing us to make many copies at comparatively low cost, each copy was a rivalrous material object. Despite its revolutionary impact, writing was hobbled from birth by this tragic limitation. We could only record nonrivalrous knowledge in a rivalrous form. Digital writing is the first kind of writing that does not reduce recorded knowledge to a rivalrous object. If we all have the right equipment, then we can all have copies of the same digital text without excluding one another, without multiplying our costs, and without depleting our resources. I’ve heard physicists refer to the prospect of room-temperature superconductivity as a “gift of nature.” Unfortunately, that is not quite within reach. But the nonrivalrous property of digital information is a gift of nature that we’ve already grasped and put to work. We only have to stand back a moment to appreciate it. To our ancestors, the prospect of recording knowledge in precise language, symbols, sounds, or images without reducing the record to a rivalrous object would have been magical. But we do it every day now, and it’s losing its magic. The danger is not that we already take this property for granted but that we might stop short and fail to take full advantage of it. It can transform knowledge-sharing if we let it. We take advantage of this gift when we post valuable work online and permit free access and unrestricted use for every user with an internet connection. But if we charge for access, enforce exclusion, create artificial scarcity, or prohibit essential uses, then we treat the nonrivalrous digital file like a rivalrous physical object, dismiss the opportunity, and spurn the gift. When publishers argue that there is no access problem and that we shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken, there are two answers. First, they’re wrong. There are deep and serious access problems. Publishers who really don’t know this should talk to the libraries who subscribe to their journals, and even more to the libraries who don’t. But second, leaving that quarrel entirely to one side, there are good reasons to pursue OA anyway.

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Open Access: Varieties There are many ways to deliver OA: personal web sites, blogs, wikis, databases, ebooks, videos, audios, webcasts, discussion forums, RSS feeds, and P2P networks. Unless creative thinking stops now, there will be many more to come. However, two delivery vehicles dominate the current discussion: journals and repositories. OA journals are like non-OA journals except that they’re OA. Making good on that exception requires a new funding model, but nearly everything else about the journal could be held constant, if we wanted to hold it constant. Some OA journals are very traditional except that they’re OA, while others deliberately push the evolution of journals as a category. (Some toll-access journals also push that evolution, if we don’t count stopping short of OA.) Like conventional, toll-access journals, some OA journals are first-rate and some are bottom feeders. Like conventional journals, some OA journals are high in prestige and some are unknown, and some of the unknowns are high in quality and some are low. Some are on solid financial footing and some are struggling. Also like conventional journals, most are honest and some are scams. As early as 2004, Thomson Scientific found that “in each of the broad subject areas studied there was at least one OA title that ranked at or near the top of its field” in citation impact. The number of high-quality, high-impact OA journals has only grown since. Unlike toll-access journals, however, most OA journals are new. It’s hard to generalize about OA journals beyond saying that they have all the advantages of being OA and all the disadvantages of being new. To be more precise: A disappointing number of OA journals don’t have all the advantages of being OA because they retain needless permission barriers. (See section 3.3 on gratis and libre OA.) At the same time, a heartening number of OA journals no longer suffer from the disadvantages of being new. Like conventional journal publishers, some OA journal publishers are for-profit and some are nonprofit. Like conventional publishers, there are a few large OA publishers and a long tail of small ones, although the largest OA publishers are small compared to the largest conventional publishers. Unlike conventional publishers, the profitable for-profit OA publishers have moderate rather than obscene profit margins. OA repositories are online collections or databases of articles. Unlike OA journals, OA repositories have no counterpart in the traditional landscape of scholarly communication. That makes them woefully easy to overlook or misunderstand. By default, new deposits in OA repositories are OA. But most repositories today support dark deposits , which can be switched to OA at a later date. Most OA repositories were launched to host peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints. But often they include other sorts of content as well, such as theses and dissertations, datasets, courseware, and digitized copies of works from the special collections of the hosting institution’s library. For scholars, repositories are better at making work OA than personal web sites because repositories provide persistent URLs, take steps for long-term preservation, and don’t disappear when the author changes jobs or dies. 3.1 Green and Gold OA Gold and green OA differ in at least two fundamental respects. First, OA journals and repositories differ in their relationship to peer review. OA journals perform their own peer review, just like conventional journals. Repositories generally don’t perform peer review, although they host and disseminate articles peer-reviewed elsewhere. As a result, gold and green OA differ in their support costs and in the roles they can play in the scholarly communications universe. Terminology The OA movement uses the term gold OA for OA delivered by journals, regardless of the journal’s business model, and green OA for OA delivered by repositories. Self-archiving is the practice of depositing one’s own work in an OA repository. All three of these terms were coined by Stevan Harnad. Second, OA journals obtain the rights or permissions they need directly from the rightsholders, while repositories ask depositors to obtain the needed rights or permissions on their own. Even when the depositors are the authors themselves, they may already have transferred key rights to publishers. As a result, OA journals can generate permission for reuse at will, and OA repositories generally cannot. Hence, most libre OA is gold OA, even if it’s not yet the case that most gold OA is libre OA. (See more in section 3.3 on gratis and libre OA.) Gold and green OA require different steps from authors. To make new articles gold OA, authors simply submit their manuscripts to OA journals, as they would to conventional journals. To make articles green OA, authors simply deposit their manuscripts in an OA repository. Most importantly, the green/gold distinction matters because if authors can’t make their work OA one way, they can make it OA the other way. One of the most persistent and damaging misunderstandings is that all OA is gold OA. Authors who can’t find a high-quality, high-prestige OA journal in their field, or whose submissions are rejected from first-rate OA journals, often conclude that they must give up on OA or publish in a second-rate journal. But that’s hasty. If they publish in the best toll-access journal that will accept their work, then—more often than not—they may turn around and deposit the peer-reviewed manuscript in an OA repository. Most toll-access publishers and toll-access journals give blanket permission for green OA, many others will give permission on request, and the numbers approach 100 percent when authors are subject to green OA mandates from their funding agencies or universities. (More in chapters 4 on OA policies and 10 on making your own work OA.) One of the early victories of the OA movement was to get a majority of toll-access publishers and journals to give blanket permission for author-initiated green OA. But this victory remains one of the best-kept secrets of scholarly publishing, and widespread ignorance of it is the single most harmful consequence of green OA’s invisibility. Overlooking this victory reduces the volume of OA and creates the false impression that a trade-off between prestige and OA is common when in fact it is rare. Forgetting that green OA is compatible with conventional publishing also feeds the false impression that policies requiring green OA actually require gold OA and thereby limit the freedom of authors to submit work to the journals of their choice. (More in chapter 4 on policies.) Most publishing scholars will choose prestige over OA if they have to choose. The good news is that they rarely have to choose. The bad news is that few of them know that they rarely have to choose. Few realize that most toll-access journals permit author-initiated green OA, despite determined efforts to explain and publicize this early victory for green OA. There are two reasons why OA is compatible with prestigious publication, a gold reason and a green one. The gold reason is that a growing number of OA journals have already earned high levels of prestige, and others are steadily earning it. If there are no prestigious OA journals in your field today, you could wait (things are changing fast), you could help out (by submitting your best work), or you could move on to green. The green reason why OA is compatible with prestige is that most toll-access journals, including the prestigious, already allow OA archiving. As noted, this “most” can become “all” with the aid of an effective OA policy. (See chapter 4 on policies.) The most useful OA repositories comply with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH), which makes separate repositories play well together. In the jargon, OAI compliance makes repositories interoperable , allowing the worldwide network of individual repositories to behave like a single grand virtual repository that can be searched all at once. It means that users can find a work in an OAI-compliant repository without knowing which repositories exist, where they are located, or what they contain. (OA and OAI are separate but overlapping initiatives.) Most of the major academic and nonacademic search engines crawl OA journals and OA repositories. For example, Google, Bing, and Yahoo all do this and do it from self-interest. These search engines now provide another method (beyond OAI-based interoperability) for searching across the whole network of repositories without knowing what exists where. A common misunderstanding sees OA repositories as walled gardens that make work hard to find by requiring readers to make separate visits to separate repositories to run separate searches. The reverse is true in two senses: OA repositories make work easier to find, and toll-access collections are the ones more likely to be walled gardens, either invisible to search engines or requiring separate visits and separate searches. Disciplinary repositories (also called subject repositories) try to capture all the research in a given field, while institutional repositories try to capture all the research from a given institution. Because both kinds tend to be OAI-compliant and interoperable, the differences matter very little for readers. Readers who want to browse a repository for serendipity are more likely to find useful content in a disciplinary repository in the right field than in an institutional repository. But most scholars find repository content by keyword searches, not by browsing, and through cross-archive searches, not through local single-repository searches. However, the differences between disciplinary and institutional repositories matter more for authors. On the one hand, institutions are in a better position than disciplines to offer incentives and assistance for deposit, and to adopt policies to ensure deposit. A growing number of universities do just that. On the other hand, scholars who regularly read research in a large disciplinary repository, such as arXiv for physics or PubMed Central for medicine, readily grasp the rationale for depositing their work in OA repositories and need less nudging to do so themselves. (More in chapter 4 on policies.) Because most publishers and journals already give blanket permission for green OA, the burden is on authors to take advantage of it. In the absence of an institutional policy to encourage or require deposits, the spontaneous rate of deposit is about 15 percent. Institutions requiring deposit can push the rate toward 100 percent over a few years. The reason the spontaneous rate is lower than the nudged, assisted, and mandated rate is rarely opposition to OA itself. Almost always it’s unfamiliarity with green OA (belief that all OA is gold OA), misunderstanding of green OA (belief that it violates copyright, bypasses peer review, or forecloses the possibility of publishing in a venerable journal), and fear that it is time-consuming. In this sense, author unfamiliarity and misunderstanding are greater obstacles to OA than actual opposition, whether from authors or publishers. The remedies are already spreading worldwide: launching more OA journals and repositories, educating researchers about their gold and green OA options, and adopting intelligent policies to encourage gold OA and require green OA. (More in chapter 4 on OA policies.) 3.2 Green and Gold as Complementary Some friends of OA focus their energy on green OA and some focus on gold OA. Some support both kinds about equally and have merely specialized. But some give one a higher strategic priority than the other. I’ll argue that green and gold OA are complementary and synergistic. We should pursue them simultaneously, much as an organism must develop its nervous system and digestive system simultaneously. Fortunately, this synergy is served even by differences of opinion about its existence. The fact that some activists give green OA a higher priority than gold, and some the reverse, creates a natural division of labor ensuring that good people are working hard on each front. Green OA has some advantages over gold OA. It makes faster progress, since it doesn’t require the launch of new peer-reviewed journals or the conversion of old ones. For the same reason, it’s less expensive than gold OA and can scale up quickly and inexpensively to meet demand, while the bulk of the money needed to scale up OA journals is still tied up in subscriptions to toll-access journals. Green OA can be mandated without infringing academic freedom, but gold OA cannot. (More precisely, gold OA can’t be mandated without infringing academic freedom until virtually all peer-reviewed journals are OA, which isn’t on the horizon.) A green OA policy at a university can cover the institution’s entire research output, regardless of where authors choose to publish, while a gold OA policy can only cover the new articles that faculty are willing to submit to OA journals. Green OA is compatible with toll-access publication. Sometimes this is because toll-access publishers hold the needed rights and decide to allow it, and sometimes because authors retain the needed rights. Well-drafted OA policies can ensure that authors always retain the needed rights and spare them the need to negotiate with publishers. (See chapters 4 on policies and 6 on copyright.) When the best journals in a field are toll-access—often the case today even if changing—green OA allows authors to have their cake and eat it too. Authors good enough to publish in the best journals may do so and still make their work OA, without waiting for high-prestige OA journals to emerge in their fields. When promotion and tenure committees create strong incentives to publish in venerable toll-access journals—often the case today even if changing—green OA allows authors to make their work OA without bucking institutional incentives or relinquishing institutional rewards. Green OA works for preprints as well as postprints, while gold OA only works for postprints. For the same reason, green OA works for other kinds of work that peer-reviewed journals generally don’t publish, such as datasets, source code, theses and dissertations, and digitized copies of work previously available only in another medium such as print, microfiche, or film. On the other side, gold OA has some advantages over green OA. Gold OA articles needn’t labor under restrictions imposed by toll-access publishers fearful of OA. Hence, gold OA is always immediate, while green OA is sometimes embargoed or delayed. Similarly, gold OA can always be libre, even if it doesn’t take sufficient advantage of this opportunity, while green OA seldom even has the opportunity. (See chapter 4 on policies.) Gold OA provides OA to the published version, while green OA is often limited to the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript, without copy editing or final pagination. Making the OA edition the same as the published edition reduces the confusion caused by the circulation of multiple versions. Gold OA performs its own peer review, without depending on toll-access journals to perform it. Hence support for gold OA supports the survival of peer review itself in case toll-access journals can no longer provide it. Finally, green OA may be a manageable expense, but gold OA can be self-sustaining, even profitable. Librarians traditionally distinguish four functions performed by scholarly journals: Registration (time stamp), certification (peer review), awareness (distribution), and archiving (preservation). We know that green and gold OA are complementary as soon as we recognize that green is better than gold for registration (its time stamps are faster) and preservation, and that gold OA is better than green OA for certification (peer review). Some see green OA mainly as a tool to force a transition to gold OA. The idea is that rising levels of green OA will trigger the cancellation of conventional journals and pressure them to convert to gold OA. The growing volume of green OA might have this effect. Some publishers fear that it will, and some OA activists hope that it will. But it might not have this effect at all. One piece of evidence is that green OA hasn’t triggered journal cancellations in physics, where levels of green OA approach 100 percent and have been high and growing for nearly two decades. (More in chapter 8 on casualties.) Even if it did have this effect, however, it wouldn’t follow that it is the best strategy for advancing gold OA. There are good prospects for a peaceful revolution based on publisher consent and self-interest. (More in chapter 7 on economics.) Most importantly, however, we’ll still want green OA in a world where all peer-reviewed journals are OA. For example, we’ll want green OA for preprints and for the earliest possible time-stamp to establish the author’s priority. We’ll want green OA for datasets, theses and dissertations, and other research genres not published in journals. We’ll want green OA for the security of having multiple OA copies in multiple independent locations. (Even today, the best OA journals not only distribute their articles from their own web sites but also deposit copies in independent OA repositories.) At least until the very last conventional journal converts to OA, we’ll need green OA so that research institutions can mandate OA without limiting the freedom of authors to submit to the journals of their choice. We’ll even want OA repositories as the distribution mechanism for many OA journals themselves. A worldwide network of OA repositories would support one desirable evolution of what we now call journals. It would allow us to decouple peer review from distribution. Peer review could be performed by freestanding editorial boards and distribution by the network of repositories. Decoupling would remove the perverse incentive for peer-review providers to raise access barriers or impede distribution. It would also remove their perverse incentive to demand exclusive rights over research they didn’t fund, perform, write up, or buy from the authors. On the other side, we’ll still want gold OA in a world where all new articles are green OA. High-volume green OA may not have caused toll-access journal cancellations yet, even in fields where green OA approaches 100 percent. But we can’t say that it will never do so, and we can’t say that every field will behave like physics in this respect. If peer-reviewed toll-access journals are not sustainable (see section 2.1), then the survival of peer review will depend on a shift to peer-reviewed OA journals. It won’t matter whether toll-access journals are endangered by rising levels of green OA, by their own hyperinflationary price increases, or by their failure to scale with the rapid growth of new research. If any combination of these causes puts peer-reviewed toll-access journals in jeopardy, then peer review will depend on OA journals, which are not endangered by any of those causes. (In chapter 8 on casualties, we’ll see evidence that toll-access journal price increases cause many more cancellations than green OA does.) Finally, if all new articles are green OA, we’ll still want the advantages that are easier for gold OA than for green OA to provide: freedom from permission barriers, freedom from delays or embargoes, and freedom from ever-rising drains on library budgets. Neither green nor gold OA will suffice, long-term or short-term. That’s a reason to pursue both. 3.3 Gratis and Libre OA Sometimes we must speak unambiguously about two subspecies of OA. One removes price barriers alone and the other removes price barriers and at least some permission barriers. The former is gratis OA and the latter libre OA . To sharpen their definitions, we need a quick detour into fair use. In the United States, fair use is an exception to copyright law allowing users to reproduce copyrighted work “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching . . . , scholarship, or research” (to quote the U.S. copyright statute). Fair use has four characteristics that matter to us here. First, the permission for fair use is granted by law and needn’t be sought from the copyright holder. Or equivalently, the statute assures us that no permission is needed because fair use “is not an infringement of copyright.” Second, the permission is limited and doesn’t cover all the uses that scholars might want to make. To exceed fair use, users must obtain permission from the copyright holder. Third, most countries have some equivalent of fair use, though they differ significantly in what they allow and disallow. Finally, fair use is vague. There are clear cases of fair use (quoting a short snippet in a review) and clear cases of exceeding fair use (reprinting a full-text book), but the boundary between the two is fuzzy and contestable. Gratis OA is free of charge but not more free than that. Users must still seek permission to exceed fair use. Gratis OA removes price barriers but not permission barriers. Libre OA is free of charge and also free of some copyright and licensing restrictions. Users have permission to exceed fair use, at least in certain ways. Because there are many ways to exceed fair use, there are many degrees or kinds of libre OA. Libre OA removes price barriers and at least some permission barriers. Fortunately, we don’t always need these terms. Indeed, in most of this book I use “OA” without qualification. The generic term causes no trouble until we need to talk about differences between gratis and libre OA, just as “carbohydrate” causes no trouble until we need to talk about differences between simple and complex carbohydrates. I’m borrowing the gratis/libre language from the world of software, where it expresses the same distinction. If the terms sound odd in English, it’s because English doesn’t have more domesticated terms for this distinction. Their oddity in English may even be an advantage, since the terms don’t carry extra baggage, as “open” and “free” do, which therefore helps us avoid ambiguity. First note that the gratis/libre distinction is not the same as the green/gold distinction. The gratis/libre distinction is about user rights or freedoms, while the green/gold distinction is about venues or vehicles. Gratis/libre answers the question, how open is it? Green/gold answers the question, how is it delivered? Green OA can be gratis or libre but is usually gratis. Gold OA can be gratis or libre, but is also usually gratis. However, it’s easier for gold OA to be libre than for green OA to be libre, which is why the campaign to go beyond gratis OA to libre OA focuses more on journals than repositories. If users encounter a full-text work online without charge, then they know it’s gratis OA. They don’t have to be told, even if they’d like to be told—for example, so that they don’t have to wonder whether they’re reading an illicit copy. But users can’t figure out whether a work is libre OA unless the provider (author or publisher) tells them. This is the purpose of a license , which is simply a statement from the copyright holder explaining what users may and may not do with a given work. Works under “all-rights-reserved” copyrights don’t need licenses, because “all rights reserved” means that without special permission users may do nothing that exceeds fair use. The default around the world today is that new works are copyrighted from birth (no registration required), that the copyright initially belongs to the author (but is transferrable by contract), and that the rights holder reserves all rights. Authors who want to provide libre OA must affirmatively waive some of their rights and use a license to tell users they’ve done so. For convenience, let’s say that an open license is one allowing some degree of libre OA. Although the word “copyright” is singular, it covers a plurality of rights, and authors may waive some and retain others. They may do so in any combination that suits their needs. That’s why there are many nonequivalent open licenses and nonequivalent types of libre OA. What’s important here is that waiving some rights in order to provide libre OA does not require waiving all rights or waiving copyright altogether. On the contrary, open licenses presuppose copyright, since they express permissions from the copyright holder. Moreover, the rights not waived are fully enforceable. In the clear and sensible language of Creative Commons, open licenses create “some-rights-reserved” copyrights rather than “all-rights-reserved” copyrights. The open licenses from Creative Commons (CC) are the best-known and most widely used. But there are other open licenses, and authors and publishers can always write their own. To illustrate the range of libre OA, however, it’s convenient to look at the CC licenses. The maximal degree of libre OA belongs to works in the public domain. Either these works were never under copyright or their copyrights have expired. Works in the public domain may be used in any way whatsoever without violating copyright law. That’s why it’s lawful to translate or reprint Shakespeare without hunting down his heirs for permission. Creative Commons offers CC0 (CC-Zero) for copyright holders who want to assign their work to the public domain. The CC Attribution license (CC-BY) describes the least restrictive sort of libre OA after the public domain. It allows any use, provided the user attributes the work to the original author. This is the license recommended by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) and the SPARC Europe Seal of Approval program for OA journals. I support this recommendation, use CC-BY for my blog and newsletter, and request CC-BY whenever I publish in a journal. CC supports several other open licenses as well, including CC-BY-NC, which requires attribution and blocks commercial use, and CC-BY-ND, which requires attribution and allows commercial use but blocks derivative works. These licenses are not equivalent to one another, but they all permit uses beyond fair use and therefore they all represent different flavors of libre OA. While you can write your own open licenses or use those created by others, the advantage of CC licenses is that they are ready-made, lawyer-drafted, enforceable, understood by a large and growing number of users, and available in a large and growing number of legal jurisdictions. Moreover, each comes in three versions: human-readable for nonlawyers, lawyer-readable for lawyers and judges, and machine-readable for search engines and other visiting software. They’re extremely convenient and their convenience has revolutionized libre OA. The best way to refer to a specific flavor of libre OA is by referring to a specific open license. We’ll never have unambiguous, widely understood technical terms for every useful variation on the theme. But we already have clearly named licenses for all the major variations on the theme, and we can add new ones for more subtle variations any time we want. A work without an open license stands or appears to stand under an all-rights-reserved copyright. If the rights holder privately welcomes uses beyond fair use, or has decided not to sue for certain kinds of infringement, ordinary users have no way to know that and are forced to choose the least of three evils: the delay of asking permission, the risk of proceeding without it, and the harm of erring on the side of nonuse. These are not only obstacles to research; they are obstacles that libre OA was designed to remove. The BBB definition calls for both gratis and libre OA. However, most of the notable OA success stories are gratis and not libre. I mean this in two senses: gratis success stories are more numerous than libre success stories, so far, and most gratis success stories are notable. Even if they stop short of libre OA, they are hard-won victories and major advances. Some observers look at the prominent gratis OA success stories and conclude that the OA movement focuses on gratis OA and neglects libre. Others look at the public definitions and conclude that OA focuses on libre OA and disparages gratis. Both assessments are one-sided and unfair. One hard fact is that gratis OA is often attainable in circumstances when libre OA is not attainable. For example, a major victory of the OA movement has been to persuade the majority of toll-access publishers and toll-access journals to allow green gratis OA. We’re very far from the same position for green libre OA. Similarly, most of the strong OA policies at funding agencies and universities require green gratis OA. A few require green libre OA, and green libre OA is growing for other reasons. But if these funders and universities had waited until they could muster the votes for a green libre policy, most of them would still be waiting. (See section 4.3 on the historical timing of OA policies.) A second hard fact is that even gratis OA policies can face serious political obstacles. They may be easier to adopt than libre policies, but in most cases they’re far from easy. The OA policy at the U.S. National Institutes of Health was first proposed by Congress in 2004, adopted as a mere request or encouragement in 2005, and strengthened into a requirement in 2008. Every step along the way was strenuously opposed by an aggressive and well-funded publishing lobby. Yet even now the policy provides only gratis OA, not libre OA. Similarly, the gratis OA policies at funders and universities were only adopted after years of patiently educating decision-makers and answering their objections and misunderstandings. Reaching the point of adoption, and especially unanimous votes for adoption, is a cause for celebration, even if the policies only provide gratis, not libre OA. The Directory of Open Access Journals is the most authoritative catalog of OA journals and the only one limiting itself to peer-reviewed journals. But only 20 percent of titles in the DOAJ use CC licenses, and fewer than 11 percent use the recommended CC-BY license. Viewed the other way around, about 80 percent of peer-reviewed OA journals don’t use any kind of CC license. Some of these might use non-CC licenses with a similar legal effect, but these exceptions are rare. Simply put, most OA journals are not using open licenses. Most operate under all-rights-reserved copyrights and leave their users with no more freedom than they already had under fair use. Most are not offering libre OA. Even those wanting to block commercial use, for example, tend to use an all-rights-reserved copyright rather than an open license that blocks commercial use, such as CC-BY-NC, but allows libre OA in other respects. I’ve argued that it’s unfair to criticize the OA movement for disparaging gratis OA (merely on the ground that its public statements call for libre) or neglecting libre OA (merely on the ground that most of its success stories are gratis). But two related criticisms would be more just. First, demanding libre or nothing where libre is currently unattainable makes the perfect the enemy of the good. Fortunately, this tactical mistake is rare. Second, settling for gratis where libre is attainable makes the good a substitute for the better. Unfortunately, this tactical mistake is common, as we see from the majority of OA journals that stop at gratis when they could easily offer libre. Let’s be more specific about the desirability of libre OA. Why should we bother, especially when we may already have attained gratis OA? The answer is that we need libre OA to spare users the delay and expense of seeking permission whenever they want to exceed fair use. And there are good scholarly reasons to exceed fair use. For example: to quote long excerpts • to distribute full-text copies to students or colleagues • to burn copies on CDs for bandwidth-poor parts of the world • to distribute semantically-tagged or otherwise enhanced (i.e., modified) versions • to migrate texts to new formats or media to keep them readable as technologies change • to create and archive copies for long-term preservation • to include works in a database or mashup • to make an audio recording of a text • to translate a text into another language • to copy a text for indexing, text-mining, or other kinds of processing In some jurisdictions, some of these uses may actually fall under fair use, even if most do not. Courts have settled some of the boundaries of fair use but by no means all of them, and in any case users can’t be expected to know all the relevant court rulings. Uncertainty about these boundaries, and increasingly severe penalties for copyright infringement, make users fear liability and act cautiously. It makes them decide that they can’t use something they’d like to use, or that they must delay their research in order to seek permission. Libre OA under open licenses solves all these problems. Even when a desirable use is already allowed by fair use, a clear open license removes all doubt. When a desirable use does exceed fair use, a clear open license removes the restriction and offers libre OA. When you can offer libre OA, don’t leave users with no more freedom than fair use. Don’t leave them uncertain about what they may and may not do. Don’t make conscientious users choose between the delay of seeking permission and the risk of proceeding without it. Don’t increase the pressure to make users less conscientious. Don’t make them pay for permission. Don’t make them err on the side of nonuse. Make your work as usable and useful as it can possibly be.

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Strength in numbers The year is 2027. Dorothy visits her GP about panic attacks she's been getting at work. Before prescribing any treatment, the doctor looks at her genetic history for markers that could affect her response to certain drugs. The GP is looking in particular for CYP2C19 polymorphism, which would mean Dorothy can't metabolise a group of medicines (SSRIs); and at the same time, she examines her patient's sequenced DNA to see if she carries the genetic mutation responsible for panic disorder. Dorothy is a heavy drinker and her doctor sees that she carries a risk gene for alcohol dependence. She considers a drug that could modulate the gene. Dorothy leaves with a smartwatch to log her daily life for the next week: her quality of sleep, diet, exercise, stress, mood and activity. In the room next door, Fred is talking to a specialist about his Parkinson's symptoms. He was prescribed a drug recently for the subtype of Parkinson's he has and, for the first time, there were no side effects. In the past, Fred and the specialist used trial and error to find the right medication. But ever since computers have been able to process exabytes of data, scientists have found patterns and trends that allow them to treat Parkinson's with greater efficiency. Better still, through using an app on his phone, Fred has realised that taking his medicine at night affected his sleep; so he's started taking it at lunchtime instead. Valerie has a migraine again. Like many young people these days, she had her DNA sequenced for her 18th birthday and discovered that she's one of the 7 per cent of Europeans who can't convert codeine into morphine. She inherited her response to the drug from her mother. Valerie knows to mention this to her doctor who prescribes her a non codeine-based painkiller. The doctor also considers what impact Valerie's gut flora and microbiome might have on medication. At its simplest, precision medicine is ultra-tailored healthcare. When President Obama announced the Precision Medicine Initiative in 2015, he put it this way: "delivering the right treatments, at the right time, every time, to the right person." Precision medicine, also known as personalised medicine, is being heralded as the next major breakthrough in healthcare. In Britain, the NHS is "on a journey towards embedding a personalised medicine approach into mainstream healthcare." While medical care has always been tailored to the individual to an extent, the degree to which it can be personalised today is unprecedented because of new technology. Equipment that would have been the stuff of science fiction 20 years ago is now available in many universities. Three key advancements combine to make medicine more precise: patient-generated data through smartphones and wearable tech, genomic medicine and computer science. First, patients can quickly and easily log their daily symptoms with apps on their phones or wearable technology to understand their illnesses better. Detailed records also aid doctors in the way they treat patients and provide data for research. Second, technology is allowing us to sequence DNA at a faster rate and a cheaper cost than ever before; and scientists are understanding the genetic markers of disease at a significant rate. Estimates suggest the cost of sequencing the very first genome could have been as high as $1bn. By 2016, the cost had dropped below $1,500. The process now takes hours rather than weeks. Third, in the age of big data, computers are allowing scientists to analyse vast amounts of data with greater precision than ever before. Machine-learning algorithms accelerate analysis of data sets which result in rapid discoveries. Precision medicine is charged by a need to address the sheer variety of people's reactions to things going wrong in their bodies. From neurological disorders to strokes, cancer to depression, infections to alcoholism, each patient is unique; so ultimately the treatment should be unique, too. Parkinson's is one of the first diseases precision medicine is being applied to. It's a heterogeneous disease, which means there is a lot of variability in how patients progress. In its early stages, the disease can manifest itself with symptoms very different from the tremors most associated with it. Patients may have motion-related issues with walking, posture or movement of the fingers; but they may also experience cognitive and memory problems, depression or lose their sense of smell. Because the early signs are so varied, it is difficult to predict the progression in individual patients. Dr Duygu Tosun-Turgut of the University of California won the 2016 data challenge set by the Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson's research. Her aim was to discover whether the progression rate of Parkinson's disease could be predicted. If doctors could predict the speed of a patient's decline, it could affect both treatment and prognosis. It would also assist with clinical trials, as it is better to recruit patients in swift rather than slow decline. In these patients, changes and improvements – and therefore efficacy of treatment – are demonstrated more dramatically. To define the progression rate, Dr Tosun and her team looked at all the clinical data available, captured from multiple patient visits to clinics. This included, for example, the results of memory tests, the total number of times patients could sit down and stand up over a 30-second period or changes in sleeping habits and sense of smell. Dr Tosun then looked for a pattern using data-driven machine-learning algorithms. Two groups were identified. One was slow progressing and the other was fast progressing. The next step was to find out if there were any baseline assessments that could be used to predict the rate of progression. At this point they looked at genetic makeup, fluid biomarkers, imaging MRI data and other factors. "The body is a whole, everything is so connected. There might be something dominant but it affects other systems in the body. It's the same in the brain," says Dr Tosun. She discovered that if patients arrived with more motor-related symptoms on their first visit, they would decline faster. She also identified a brain region with degenerated white matter fibres. She found that the more degenerated the structures were in these regions, the faster the patient declined. Data was collected from people with a family history of Parkinson's or those who exhibited early signs to see if the same measure could be used to detect the disease before the symptoms started appearing. The goal would be to intervene before the disease started to progress. "It's very difficult to reverse neurodegeneration," says Dr Tosun. "If [a patient is] progressing fast, or if they have the markers telling us they're going to progress fast, you need to progress faster." Now Dr Tosun has turned her focus on the earliest mechanisms that trigger neurodegeneration. If it is known what triggers the disease, there may be precautions people can take to avoid developing Parkinson's. "It can be diet, supplements, physical activity or cognitive activity," she says. "It's very important to understand everything about that patient," says Dr Tosun. "Not just their symptoms: their environment, their background, the state of their brain and body. The more we learn about the patient, the more the we can model the disease and treatment better." With advancements in computer science, algorithms and hardware, scientists like Dr Tosun are at the point where they can look at all the data at one time to better understand disease, health, prognosis and treatment. Finding patterns will help answer different questions. The vast capacity of big data is crucial. Dr Beckie Port, senior research communications officer at Parkinson's UK, says, "The more people you put in your experiments, the more you can iron out some of the complexities and start to see trends, It's going to be a mammoth mission to start teasing out individual factors that could be used for personalised medicine, but it's not impossible." Personal technology – wearable tech such as fitbits and smartphone apps – is another important element in precision medicine. It is already being used in the field of Parkinson's. uMotif is a 'patient data capture platform' that allows patients with long-term conditions to track their symptoms using an app. A patient inputs information about symptoms every day, including non-motor symptoms. How did you sleep? What's your mood like today? How about stress levels? What did you eat? How's your pain? Do you have nausea? With this information, researchers and clinical teams can understand the disease better; and patients can have more useful conversations with their clinicians. The patient becomes an active participant rather than a spectator. "How you feel your Parkinson's is a very important thing in quality of life and good treatments," says uMotif's co-founder and chief executive Bruce Hellman. The data capture for a major study into Parkinson's is just finishing. Over 4,221 people tracked their health for 100 days and donated the data to academic research. Already, the feedback suggests the technology is having a positive effect on individual lives. Since using the app, Mick, a Parkinson's patient, reports feeling more assured in talking about his condition with a neurologist because he has a record of what's been happening and how he's felt. "It teaches you, 'Don't beat yourself up because you can't do what you used to do, look at what you are doing'," he says. Through plotting her feelings each day, Sam now realises that she was managing her life with Parkinson's better that she thought. She'd been getting anxiety attacks in the morning and it suddenly dawned on her that changing taking her medication from the evening to the morning might help ease the attacks. It worked. "I'm in control of my health," she says. "One of the problems people have," says Dr Port, "is that when they go to the doctor's they may be having a very good or bad day but it might not reflect what they're like on an everyday basis, That snapshot the specialist sees could influence [the patient's] drugs for the next six months." "People with Parkinson's often only visit a doctor twice a year," says Hellman, "so knowing more about their health will help them to bridge the gap between health visits and better understand their symptoms. Health is done to you at the moment but in the future it should be done with you." The 100,000 Genomes Project is planning to sequence 100,000 genomes from around 70,000 people. The largest national sequencing project of its kind in the world, it aims to create a new genomic medicine service here in the UK. At the time of writing, the 20,429 genomes that have so far been sequenced are split 50/50 between cancer and rare diseases. It covers a large geographical area: England already has 13 genomic medicine centres covering 85 NHS trusts. "Genomic medicine is right at the vanguard of personalised medicine," says Tom Fowler, deputy chief scientist and director of public health at Genomics England. He points out the role it can play in treating rare diseases, where unmet diagnostic needs are of paramount importance. "For people with a lifetime of wondering why they or their child is affected, the benefit [of genomic medicine] is being able to answer that question. It also can improve existing or potential treatment and help with making reproduction choices." Thanks to genomoic medicine, numerous diagnoses have been possible. The gene mutation causing four-year-old Jessica's rare disease was identified by researchers after her parents spent years not knowing what was wrong. Jessica's treatment is simply a special diet that enhances glucose production in the brain. After a month on the regime, Jessica's parents "noticed a big improvement in her speech, energy levels and general steadiness," according to consultant Maria Bitner-Glindzicz of Great Ormond Street hospital. "Overall, she is better and brighter in herself and her parents don't worry about her having fits on a daily basis as they used to." The project anticipates a 25 per cent diagnostic rate in rare diseases but Fowler says the remaining 75 per cent don't just get put aside, the data goes into research environments where it will be worked on: "It's the start, not the end, of the journey." A small group of Parkinson's patients is included in the 100,000 Genomes project because early onset Parkinson's is considered rare and it's more likely to contain a genetic factor. It is estimated that around 5 per cent of Parkinson's cases have a genetic link; but Dr Port thinks the role of genetics in the disease is probably a lot larger. The challenge now is how to move this kind of healthcare into the mainstream as part of routine healthcare. Fowler hopes that will happen in the next five years. In 2015, in partnership with Health Education England, nine universities introduced master's degrees in Genomic Medicine. "A legacy of upskilling staff so they understand information will make the long-lasting difference," says Fowler. "If we build an infrastructure and workforce that can cope with genomic medicine, as new discoveries happen we've got the ability to adapt and take them on board." Genetic testing can already reveal the potential for future illness and allow for proactive and preventative decisions. When Angelina Jolie, for example, discovered she carried BRCA1, the genetic marker for breast cancer that her late mother carried, she had a double mastectomy. People with a BRCA1 mutation have a 65 per cent chance of developing breast cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute. At the moment the number of people who've had their genes sequenced is fractional but it could become more commonplace. Will everyone have genetic testing eventually? "At the current time it's difficult to see how that would step out into the mainstream," says Fowler. "There may well be a time where that is the case and we move towards it." The NHS wouldn't be expected to pay for that, he adds. People are already paying to have their genes tested. Companies like 23andMe of gene testing home-kit services, which offer the possibility of finding out if you have a genetic variant that could put you at risk for certain traits or conditions. They range from serious conditions (cancer, Alzheimer's) to traits (caffeine metabolism, alcohol flush reaction, coriander aversion and sensitivity to the sound of chewing). Critics of precision medicine say that the word 'precision' is an unrealistic, inflated, hyperbolic term. They caution that there are many things happening in the human body, as well as genetics. In the journal Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, Canadian doctor Dan Roden wrote, "Patients are more than collections of genomes and gene-environment interactions; they are individuals influenced by experience, culture, education, upbringing, and innumerable other factors." Still, there have already been some major success stories in genomic medicine. Most recently, DNA sequencing has led to a 'miracle' drug that treats spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), the most common genetic cause of death in childhood. The drug has recently been approved by the FDA. Combined with patient-generated data and computer-powered analysis of big data, precision medicine seems like an obvious next step. It will take time and cost money but once the task of digitising healthcare is finished, it promises a slicker, more efficient system with better diagnosis and treatment. "You can't assume everyone has average Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or depression. They have their own properties," says Dr Tosun. "Precision Medicine is the solution, it's something we need to do." This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.

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Hold your nerves Stress wrecks too many days before they've even begun. It creeps up as soon as the alarm jerks you awake. Fingers reflexively unlock your phone. Emails bound in with a jolly ping: things you should have done last week; pointless meeting requests; bills to pay. Over a gobbled breakfast you scan the headlines: wall-to-wall misery and pointlessness. On the train you turn to social media for relief. Gillian is funnier than you. Alex got promoted again. Laura's sunning herself in Thailand. You're here, packed in, surrounded but alone, rattling your way towards another overstretched day in an unfulfilling role. There's talk of redundancies and an appointment with the boss looms. Thoughts turn to your dream job. Your heart rate steps up again. Even if you had the energy to fill in the form, you wouldn't get the job. Besides, your sneezing neighbour's probably just infected you with the Zika virus. Stress. We know what it feels like, we can smell it on others, we complain about it most days. But what is it? Now that's a slippery question. Apparently, we're living through an epidemic of it. Latest figures from the UK government's Health and Safety Executive state that stress cost the economy nearly 10m working days last year. Forty-three per cent of all sick days were chalked up to stress. Across the Atlantic, a major 2014 survey conducted by radio network NPR showed that 49 per cent of Americans reported a major stress event in the last year. In 2013 US doctors wrote 76m unique prescriptions for anti-anxiety drugs Xanax and Ativan. With the media pushing images of stress-induced heart disease, strokes, obesity, depression, ulcers and cancer, it's hard not to conclude that stress kills. But consider this: just a century ago nobody got stressed. They suffered with their nerves; got a touch of the vapours; they worried; but they were never stressed. Stress happened to metals subjected to powerful forces and to syllables in elocution classes. In fact, our current view of stress – what it is, what it feels like, and when it is harmful – evolved surprisingly recently. This matters. Recent research shows that the way we think about stress has a profound influence on how it affects us. There is no doubt that prolonged, uncontrollable stress – particularly if suffered in childhood – can be profoundly corrosive and debilitating. But what of the familiar stresses of day-to-day life? Are they actually damaging you? Might the belief that stress is harmful be self-fulfilling? And what would a stress-free life really look like? Instead of turning in on ourselves and doing battle with our personal stress demons, might we be able to put their diabolic energy to good use? Pull back for a moment from your daily hustle and you'll see that many of us are incurably hooked on stress. We thrive on it. We get a kick out of surviving the high-stakes presentation, meeting the deadline and overcoming our fears and prejudices. Watching a thriller, we're on the edge of our seats, pulses racing. Sports, on the field or on television, can propel us into "fight or flight" mode. Humanity's fascination with gambling hinges on stress. If the most skilled physiologists in the world could peer beneath the skin of a thrill-seeker on a rollercoaster and an out-of-their-depth job interview candidate, they'd struggle to tell them apart. Deep in the brain, they'd see a structure called the hypothalamus fired up. With each lurch of the ride or disarming question asked, the hypothalamus signals to the adrenal glands, which sit atop each kidney. The adrenals then squirt a shot of adrenaline into the bloodstream. In the background, the hypothalamus prods the pituitary gland, which passes a different message on to the adrenal gland. This ups the production of cortisol, the textbook 'stress hormone'. Flipping these key biological switches triggers the familiar bodily symptoms of stress: a pounding heart, raised blood pressure, dilated pupils, arrested digestion and a damped-down immune system. In both cases, the biological stress response would look very similar. Even if we could eliminate stress entirely, or smother it with pharmaceuticals, we wouldn't want to. To muzzle the stress response is to silence the good as well as the bad. At best, stress can motivate us to achieve more and fix the sources of our stress. Boredom is stressful in its own way: ask a caged lion, or an understimulated teenager. In fact, as animal psychologist Francoise Wemelsfelder told New Scientist recently, boredom may exist to spur us back into activity. This half-forgotten idea, that some degree of stress can inspire and elevate, is common sense. It also has deep roots in the earliest scientific study of stress and stress responses. Back at the beginning of the 20th century, two American psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dodson, wanted to know how stressing out lab mice affected their learning. They set the rodents navigational challenges and punished wrong turns with small electric shocks to the feet. In their terminology, larger electric currents caused greater 'arousal'. They spotted some consistent trends. When they gave mice an easy task (choosing between a black or a white tunnel, achieved by different lighting) the relationship between the strength of the shock and the speed of learning was simple. The greater the stressor, the quicker the mice learned to pick the right tunnel. When the challenge was subtler (differentiating between grey tunnels), the response was less straightforward. Weak shocks provided little impetus to learn, but as the zaps got stronger, the mice gradually upped their game. They focused on the task and remembered the consequences of wrong choices. Yet, at a certain point, the high stress levels that helped with the easy task became counterproductive. Overwhelmed, the mice skittered around at random, vainly trying to escape. On a graph, the relationship between stress and performance on onerous tasks traces an inverted U-shape. Some degree of stress helps, but there is a clear tipping point, beyond which stress becomes paralysing. These findings became the Yerkes-Dodson law. This was all very well for mice, but could it be applied to the vagaries of human existence? According to Canadian-Austrian endocrinogist Hans Selye, the 'father of stress', it could. It was 10-times Nobel prize nominee Selye who first described the key glands, hormones and nerves of the biological stress response during the 1930s and 40s. Selye was also one of the first to apply the word 'stress' to human biology (he once quipped that he might have chosen a different word had his grasp of English been better). For Selye, 'stress' described an all-purpose response the body had to any demand placed upon it. When stress is on the upswing of Yerkes and Dodsons' inverted-U performance curve, Selye calls it 'eustress'. This is where good teachers and managers should push their charges: to the sweet spot that separates predictable tedium from chaotic overload. When stress gets more persistent, unmanageable and damaging, Selye called it 'distress'. Eustress and distress have identical biological bases, they are simply found at different points on the same curve. We know this, but today stress has a terrible public image, often synonymous with distress. While some wear their stress as a badge of honour ("I'm important enough to be stressed," they think), deep down even the most gung-ho City workers probably stress about their stress. And in painting stress as a beast, we grant it more destructive power. When did we come to view stress as the universal enemy? Mark Petticrew, Professor of Public Health Evaluation at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, has sifted through a huge archive of historical tobacco industry documents. He revealed that a large proportion of stress research during the second half of the 20th century was funded, steered and manipulated by this most unexpected of benefactors. From the late 1950s, Hans Selye himself received hundreds of thousands of tobacco-stained dollars. He also allowed industry lawyers to vet his research and appeared in several pro-tobacco propaganda films. "They put a massive, massive amount of money into it," Petticrew told me. "This isn't a side story in the history of stress." Why were tobacco manufacturers so interested in stress? First of all cigarettes were marketed as a stress reliever. "To anxiety… I bring relief," reads a 1930s advertisement for Lucky Strike. So if research could help them pin poor mental and physical health to stress, this sort of message would carry more weight. (Incidentally, the still widespread belief that smoking reduces anxiety appears to be wrong). Later, as evidence that smoking caused cancer and heart disease piled up, the tobacco industry became hell-bent on proving that stress was an equally significant risk factor. They used the authority of Selye and several other leading stress researchers as a smokescreen (pardon the pun). "Doubt is our product," read a leading tobacco industry executive's 1969 memo. And so doubt they sowed. Time and again they argued that stress was a major cause of disease. Those seeking to control tobacco were barking up the wrong tree, they claimed. It worked: they convinced the general public of the evils of stress and diverted public health research for at least a decade. With tobacco regulation and compensation payouts postponed, the profits kept rolling in. So should we doubt the veracity and neutrality of all the foundational research into stress as disease? "I wouldn't want to argue that stress doesn't exist, or that it isn't bad for your health and certainly your mental health," says Petticrew. "But you can't ignore this story." He goes on to describe concrete 'findings' that industry-funded researchers got wrong. Prominent among these was a link between coronary disease and people displaying so-called 'Type A' personality traits: competitiveness, ambition and anxiety. Such temperamentally 'stressed' people were especially likely to suffer heart attacks and, not coincidentally, to smoke. Then the association simply faded away. "Aside from the scientific weaknesses, which are many, Type A is a cultural artefact to some extent constructed by the tobacco lobby," says Petticrew. Despite its fragile foundations, the Type A myth persists today. Pettigrew calls such research, which continues to be published despite repeatedly negative findings, 'zombie science'. The long shadow cast by decades of one-sided, propaganda-laced stress research has led many of us to believe that stress is a direct cause of heart attacks. But the British Heart Foundation's website clearly states, "There is no evidence to suggest that stress causes coronary heart disease or heart attacks." Nor does it cause stomach ulcers: a bacterium called H. pylori does that. Yet the tobacco-funded researchers didn't get it all wrong. Stress does have clear causal links to some diseases, particularly mental illnesses including depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia and addictive behaviour. High stress levels do appear to be a general risk factor for early death, particularly for middle-aged men. Moreover, we all know how unpleasant stress can be. From insomnia to binge eating and boozing, we respond to stress with all sorts of counterproductive and antisocial behaviours. And that's partly why the tone of messages we hear about stress matters so much. Humans are inherently suggestible and particularly vulnerable to warning messages about our health, especially when those messages seem to be backed by science. With mice in a cage, you can measure the tipping point – the precise current of the electric shock – where good stress becomes bad. You can see how many weeks of stress cause adrenal glands to enlarge and immune systems to wither. But when it comes to humankind, we don't need the lurking menace of a lion in the long grass to activate our stress response. We can do it perfectly well for ourselves. All it takes is a negative thought, the memory of an insult, or a vague feeling of unease. So, we can think our way into stress. And, as recent evidence shows, if we believe stress is going to hurt us, it is more likely to hurt us. This is one message emerging from the Whitehall II project, a long-term study of 10,000 UK government civil servants, set up in 1985 to study the social, economic and personal determinants of health and disease. A 2013 analysis of Whitehall II data concluded that people who believe stress adversely affects their health are more than twice as likely to suffer a heart attack, regardless of the amount of stress they appear to be under. There is a flipside to this gloomy news, though. If our thoughts and beliefs can switch on a damaging stress response, mightn't they also switch it off? Could the power of suggestion be a partial vaccination in the battle against the stress epidemic? This is the contention of Alia Crum, an ambitious young psychology professor at Stanford University. Crum is a flagbearer for the on-trend science of mindset manipulations. In 2007 she showed that if hotel chambermaids come to think of their work as exercise, they lose weight and their blood pressure falls, apparently without working any harder. And in 2011 Crum showed that if we consume a healthy snack dressed as a calorie-laden indulgence, the power of belief dupes our hormonal appetite system into feeling sated. More recently she turned her attention to our core beliefs about stress. Crum's unlikely collaborators were 388 employees of UBS bank, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. This was a time of turmoil, layoffs and uncertainty at the firm. Stress was rife. Crum wanted to know how these overworked bankers thought about stress and whether she could change their convictions. She split the bank workers into three groups. A small control group got no training. Over the course of a week, the other two groups were shown three different short training videos. Superficially the videos were similar: they talked about stress and its effects on mind and body. One group's films dealt with disease risk, anxiety, depression and distraction. They showed basketball ace LeBron James missing a decisive shot under pressure, implying stress is debilitating. In the other videos LeBron sinks his basket, the message being that stress sharpens attention, boosts cognition, enhances relationships and forces fresh perspectives: it is life-enhancing. The UBS staff subtly changed their views. The ‘stress is enhancing’ group took on a more positive stance and reported being more productive, focused and collaborative. They also reported less depression and anxiety, and even a reduction in symptoms like back pain and insomnia. Curiously, The ‘stress is debilitating’ group didn't get any worse, perhaps because they already shared the widespread pessimistic view of stress. Although the results aren't exactly transformative, it seems that by changing how we think about stress, we can temper the stress response. Over a lifetime of minor and major stresses, even relatively subtle drops in anxiety levels and a little less strain on the cardiovascular system could translate into significant boons for physical and psychological health. The inescapable conclusion is this: the human mind is a powerful gatekeeper to the stress response. But we have to tread carefully here. UBS employees may have the freedom to choose a less stressful life, and find opportunity to reshape their stress mindsets. But what about those whose stress is delivered early and compounded by a lifetime of disadvantage and adversity? In his book The Health Gap, UCL Professor Sir Michael Marmot describes a prototypical young man growing up in a rundown part of Glasgow: "Life expectancy 54 years, subject to physical and sexual abuse from a succession of male partners of his mother; moving house about once every 18 months; entering school with behavioural problems, which then led on to delinquency, gang violence, and spells in prison. At various times, psychiatrists labelled him as having personality disorder, anxiety, depression, and antisocial tendencies." To blame him for succumbing to his stressful circumstances and having the wrong mindset would be absurd. Marmot continues: "It is true that tobacco, alcohol, drugs, and an appalling diet, along with liberal indulgence in violence, are major contributors to his ill health, but the causes of the causes are his tragic life history." Marmot describes why the conventional fixes to socioeconomic disadvantage – healthcare provision, lifestyle education, housing schemes, youth centres and the like – may be off beam. He argues instead that we need to look at the mind: "The mind is the major gateway through which social circumstances lead to health inequalities. It is not what you have that is important for health, but what you can do with what you have." Perhaps this is where the story of familiar workaday stress and the grinding strain of social injustice come together. Stress only gets under our skin when we can't see the end or spot the fix. It is only truly distressing when it feels out of control. So what, other than using Crum's mindset interventions, can we do to restore the critical feeling of empowerment? Most reports of the 'stress epidemic' paint stress as a private enemy: something to battle with, resist or evade. The industries that have emerged to combat stress – self-help, stress management, therapy and the like – doubtless help many to cope. But even their emphasis on 'coping' and 'resilience' inadvertently bolsters the 'stress is debilitating' mindset. These approaches also tend to promote personal introspection. Certainly, faced with personal challenges, family turmoil and professional adversity, many of us turn in on ourselves, insulating ourselves from the social world, which seems to be the source of so much stress. Yet according to Yale psychologist Emily Ansell, looking up from your navel and reaching out a kindly hand to your fellow human beings can be surprisingly helpful. In a study published last year, Ansell and colleagues gave a group of 77 people a diary-like smartphone app. They asked them to record all the stressful incidents they encountered, and any minor acts of kindness they performed, during a 14-day period. These data show that gestures like holding doors for strangers and helping the elderly across the road buffer the effects of stress and make you feel measurably more positive. "It's not just whether you're more altruistic than the next person," Ansell told NPR. "It's that being more altruistic than usual can change your experience from day to day. It's all about doing more than your average." Mobile technology now helps us reach out directly to those buckling under stress. Koko is a slick app developed by a team at the MIT media lab, which puts the hive mind to work on counselling and therapy. Wired described it as, "What you'd get if you were to combine the swiping gesture of Tinder, the anonymity of Whisper, the upvoting of Reddit, and the earnestness of old-fashioned forums." Koko users write on the app's digital noticeboard, giving short summaries of their stress and anxiety, ranging from workplace insecurities to more entrenched depression, anxiety and inner turmoil. Other, anonymous users then offer constructive ideas to rethink and reframe the problem. Launched last June, Koko is now used in 155 countries. The early signs are that it works. Amid the ocean of unproven and gimmicky 'stress-busting' apps out there, here is one that has some hard evidence behind it. In a 2015 clinical trial, Koko's web-based predecessor showed promise as a tool for managing depression. Koko has recently been repackaged, to help people tackle everyday stress, as well as depression. Koko co-creator Rob Morris thinks that giving advice may be even more beneficial than getting it. "Helping others can help build feelings of self-efficacy. Many of our users describe feeling more empowered to help themselves after observing their successes when helping others," he tells me. While the acts of kindness recommended by psychologist Ansell and Koko's forum for constructive stress 'reframing' may only be behavioural tweaks, they could hint at where more fundamental solutions might lie. By emphasising the power of reaching out to others, they also remind us that loneliness is a uniquely toxic source of stress. It appears to be on the rise, especially in the developed world, where its cuts across age and social class. As UCLA Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry Steven Cole told Pacific Standard magazine, "Social isolation is the best-established, most robust social or psychological risk factor for disease out there. Nothing can compete." Thrill-seekers, work-junkies and young lovers remind us that stress can be a source of great energy. But left unchecked it's often a frustrating and self-defeating power. What if we could learn to divert some of that potency away from our private battles and into forging connections with those around us? Positive interactions deliver a reward at the neurological level. They restore a sense of control and show that meaningful relationships are possible. Give it a try as you struggle to work next Monday. See how it feels to lift some pushchairs, offer directions and return a few smiles. If you can make the time it also pays to aim higher: try volunteering or helping more vulnerable members of your community or family. Ansell's and other studies have shown that helping others cushions stress. Moreover, helpers often get more psychological and health benefits than those on the receiving end of that help. Michael Poulin, a professor of psychology at the University of Buffalo, is so convinced of this counterintuitive finding that he ended a recent academic paper with this proposition: "At-risk populations are frequently advised to seek support from their social networks. A less common message, but one that perhaps deserves more prominence, is for them to support others as well." Poulin's hunch is that helping others works as the ultimate distractor: "In disengaging from one's self-focused concerns to help others, the sources of stress on one's own life decrease in perceived importance and thus impact on one's own well-being." And it's no good just going through the motions; you've got to believe in what you are doing. "Only if you genuinely commit to the goal of caring for another's welfare do you have cause to disengage [from your own stress]." So how do we encourage prosocial behaviour throughout society, particularly at the underprivileged margins? According to Paul Piff, a social psychologist at UC Irvine, lower-class individuals in America tend to "have less and give more". They are more generous, charitable, trusting and helpful than their upper-class counterparts. It's possible that this tendency to reach out and muck in is a direct response to a life of chronic stress. In response to Piff's theory, Poulin suggests, "We should perhaps really focus on encouraging prosocial behaviour among the well-off, potentially leading both to benefits for them – in terms of stress – and for the disadvantaged, who would presumably benefit from their generosity." From this outward-facing perspective, it's easy to see the value of social prescriptions. Although they are sometimes perceived as box-ticking exercises to complement the real work of providing homes, healthcare and jobs, the more delicate job of building a sense of community may actually be at the centre of the game. Development that is imposed from on high can increase a feeling of disempowerment. At times of pressure it is this more fragile sense of control that has the potential to convert stress into a constructive force rather than a destructive one. This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.

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How Scotland is tackling the democratic deficit, from the ground up On a chilly February morning in Glasgow, Stephanie Anthony and her three-year-old son Ilan are perching on a log in front of a small bonfire. They are making popcorn with kernels, using two sieves tied together with string, and are surrounded by a warm circle of toddlers, mums, dads, aunties, grannies and childminders from the local area. A few yards away, Monroe, two, is also 'cooking', sloshing earth and grass carefully in a saucepan in the mud kitchen. Preschoolers Reuben and Benjamin are making a woodchip path, wheeling little barrows back and forth from a large pile. On the adjoining meadow, dogs and their owners enjoy a stroll and a chat. A colourful signpost arrow points straight ahead for 'Wonderland'. It is an urban idyll of sorts. This piece of vacant land on the edge of Glasgow's residential west end – known as the Children's Wood and North Kelvin Meadow – would probably be a building site now if left up to Glasgow City Council. But in December, after a five-year campaign to keep it in use for the community as wild space, the Scottish Government overruled the local authority, which had granted permission for luxury flats to be built on the site. The sale of land to developer New City Vision was stopped in its tracks. Campaigners are now looking at the possibility of community buy-out to ensure it continues to be used by local nurseries, primary and secondary schools – as well as the group's own forest schools, outdoor play, gardening groups and others. "I don't think the council realised how much it meant to us," says Anthony. "We've fought so hard. But if local democracy had been working we wouldn't have had to fight against the lobbying of private companies." There is a growing sense – from activities, academics and political commentators alike – that we are experiencing a clear democracy deficit. Questions are being raised about that the legitimacy of the politicians supposed to serve us. Does voting alone constitute democracy? At the last general election, around two-thirds of those able to vote did so, while in local elections only about 26 per cent turn up to polling stations. And it is particularly the poor – and the young – who don't participate and for whom policies are not created. The issue is brought into sharpest focus at a local level. Two years ago research by Scotland's first Commission on Strengthening Local Democracy claimed radical democracy reform was needed in response to "unacceptable levels of inequality". And it is in Scotland, where many became politically emboldened and active – sometimes for the first time – during the 2014 independence referendum, there is a growing movement to realise that reform. November saw the launch of Our Democracy: Act as if we own the place, a year-long coalition campaign that will see events held across Scotland to encourage citizens to imagine what their community would look like if they made the decisions, even for a day. Groups will then be encouraged to take steps to make those changes happen. Willie Sullivan, director of the Electoral Reform Society Scotland, and author of The Missing Scotland, about the million-plus Scots who don't vote, claims the grassroots approach is key. "Real democracy needs people to come together to debate and come up with ideas," he says. "Yet simply voting doesn't allow for discussion or debate. "The promise of democracy is that you all have an equal voice. Yet the greatest inequality is the inequality of power. That's part of the breakdown of trust. People know that there are some who can pull those levers of power while others cannot access them." Reports will be written up following each planned meeting – from Dundee to Inverness to Kirriemuir in Angus – and submitted to the Scottish government's consultation on the decentralisation of government. The scope for its plans is currently being finalised. "In Scotland we are always told to manage people's expectations," Sullivan says. "But in this case we want to raise them, to give them confidence that we don't need to wait for permission. There is a bubbling feeling that maybe we can do it ourselves." Emily Cutts, who initiated the Children's Wood just after the birth of her second child, can relate to that. The power of positive thinking was crucial, she claims, in turning a waste ground into a nurturing place for the whole community. "Everything that we did was guerrilla," she says. "My intention was to signal that we'd won from the beginning." Yet it was an uphill struggle. Councillors told them the planned development was a done deal, others said the Children's Wood was a nice idea that would never work. So they set about making it official, registering the playgroup, getting nurseries and schools using the land and organising community events from storytelling to fireside songs. One of the most important things, according to Coutts, was to be optimistic. "And even when it felt like we'd had a setback we also found solutions." Look around Glasgow – a city known for its fighting talk – and there is plenty to inspire. Kinning Park Complex, in the city's southside, is a former primary school turned community centre, which the council decided to close 21 years ago this May. The locals had other ideas, squatting the building for 55 days and saving it for the deprived areas surrounding it. A few miles further south, Govanhill Baths started running its first swimming lessons 16 years ago last month. Here too it was a local community occupation, and a hard won campaign, that brought it back to life after council closure. Robin McAlpine, director of the Common Weal, a "think and do tank" set up ahead of the Independence Referendum, has huge admiration for these campaigns and others like them. But the fact that they are needed at all makes him downright angry. "If you had a functioning local democracy you wouldn't need to fight like this," he says, fresh from the frustrations of trying to help a group in Aberdeen stop land being sold off to developers. They can't get legal advice and the odds are stacked against them. Examples of similar power imbalances litter the country. In Edinburgh campaigners in the Old Town are fighting on a range of fronts to stop what they see as the overdevelopment of the World Heritage site. And across Scotland – from Stirlingshire to Aberdeenshire and beyond – communities are fighting off development plans. "If there's one thing that is truly exhausting it is taking on a bureaucracy when you don't have one of your own," says McAlpine. "I've seen people burn out so many times. When you are campaigning for something like this you are always fighting against a better-resourced opponent." "When you ask local politicians about it they say all people care about is getting their bins emptied. In fact they care deeply about other values, about their local area, families and communities. To say otherwise is just wrong." For him there is another way – participatory democracy that would see communities take on the issues that mattered – by establishing a Citizen's Assembly to act as a second chamber to the Scottish Parliament. In coming weeks Common Weal will launch a paper on the proposal in which they suggest selecting a random, representative sample of 73 members of the public to fulfil this role for at least one year. It is proposing a two-year trial that he says could help revolutionise democracy. Interest in sortition, which sees citizens selected at random in response to the belief that power corrupts, is growing worldwide. But for its critics it's difficult to imagine what it would mean in practice. At one charity in Govan, Glasgow's former shipbuilding area, a version of sorts already exists. Galgael, which aims to rebuild both individuals and the community through purposeful activity, from boat-building to carving and selling surplus timber, holds a monthly assembly for volunteers and staff, as part of its commitment to a democratic model. Though there is also a board, the important decisions are taken here. Galgael was founded in 1997 by Gehan Macleod and her visionary husband Colin, who died in 2005 aged just 39. It was born out of Pollok Free State, an early 90s treetop occupation Colin instigated to protest against the building of the M77 through the public woodlands in the city's Pollok Park. They failed to stop the road but succeeded in creating a community with new skills and purpose; and brought that back to Govan. Today Macleod is facilitating the assembly with warmth and honesty, helping identify issues and open up discussion with compassion and a lack of blame. Respectful disagreement is encouraged and solutions are jointly found. "Our health is affected by decisions made on personal, professional and state levels," says Macleod, who also believes that the process of how decisions are made, not just their outcome, really matters. For many in this room the experience of being heard has been life-changing. Michael O'Neill, who now lives in Clydebank but is originally from Govan, started volunteering here after being made redundant and suffering a breakdown of sorts. "I ended up just sitting in my house looking at the four walls and leaving my wife and two kids to get on with it," he says. Three years later he's working in the workshop, welding, cutting wood, delivery driving and whatever else needs doing. "When you come here nobody judges you and you can speak your mind. If you make a mistake it's no big deal; it's how you learn. For me it's been like therapy. I think if places like this were widespread people would see life differently." Up on the tiny Isle of Eigg, just south of Skye, Maggie Fyffe, secretary of the Eigg Heritage Trust, knows only too well the difference that community ownership makes. In June 2017, islanders will also celebrate the 20th anniversary of the community buy-out, which saw them go on to run their own affairs and develop the world's first completely renewable energy grid. "When the island was in private ownership we couldn't do anything," she says. "In the nineties the island was pretty depressed. All that changed after the community buy-out. "There's now a culture of self-sufficiency which has grown; there are endless small businesses up and running as well as large infrastructure projects." Young people are returning, building homes and having families. The future feels bright. "We are not perfect," she admits. "Often it's a case of muddling through. But we are an example of how a bunch of ordinary people can run their own community. You don't know what you can do until you try, do you?" Back at the Children’s Wood, the playgroup is coming to a close. Toddlers clamber off rope swings, reluctantly part with wheelbarrows and wave goodbye to friends before winding their way through the trees on their way home for lunch. Some stop to splash in muddy puddles on the meadow; parents chat as they wait. The community is now in talks with the council about a 25-year lease and is hopeful that it can start on plans to develop a meeting space, complete with solar panels and compost toilet, a treehouse village and wildflower planting to encourage biodiversity in the meadow. Their eyes are also on the future; on a time when these pre-schools will watch their own children jump in puddles, hang out with their neighbours and be able to make sure it's the needs of the community that matter, first and foremost. That, campaigners claim, is what local democracy reform is really all about. This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.

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Moonshots for the Earth At the end of August, as the northern hemisphere's hottest summer on record drew to a close, a group of inventors, designers and engineers assembled in a grand stone castle an hour's drive west of Paris. Château de Millemont was hosting a five-week 'innovation camp' for the pioneers behind 12 new projects, chosen for their contribution to achieving a world without fossil fuels. POC21 (Proof of Concept) was set up as an active, grassroots foil to cop 21, the 21st UN Climate Change conference in Paris, which begins at the end of November. "Global emissions have doubled since the first UN climate summit in 1995," says the POC21 video, amid images of environmental catastrophe, so "Let's move from talking to building a better tomorrow." The objective was to create workable open-source technology in the fields of energy, food and waste – life, basically. Products that made it to the final 12 included a pedal tractor, a smartphone-controlled greenhouse and an antibacterial water filter. Daniel Connell, one of the chosen inventors, travelled to Paris from the UK for the event. He was picked because he'd created an impressive cost- and resource-efficient wind turbine design. You can make it for about £20 out of aluminium sheets, a bike wheel, rivets, washers and nuts and bolts. "It's entirely built from recycled or upcycled materials, and can be assembled by anybody with basic hand or power tools," says Dominik Wind, core organiser of POC21. "While this makes his design a perfect fit for the people that need it most (the poor, the marginalised around the globe), it's also the perfect design to build upon: it's the basis to start from with more customised, possibly also more complex and more expensive iterations." Connell has been creating prototype technologies and tutorials for solar and wind designs while moving around the world over the last 10 years, traversing Canada, France, India and Spain. A 3D animator by trade, he is self-taught – he describes the Solar Flower, a DIY solar energy collector he created, as "my degree" – and set out to make an existing design for a wind turbine cheap and easy for people to use. "Technically, it could be $5 if you just pay for the rivets and get plates and a bike wheel for free," he said. A seasoned squatter, Connell made his project possible by sifting through scrap heaps, fixing up bikes and living on a few pounds a day so he wouldn't have to work and could devote his time to the wind turbine. Connell's ethos is inspired by the self-sufficient communities he grew up in as a child in New Zealand, and that country's culture of ingenuity and making stuff. Since POC21, his product has improved and he's showing it to students, retirees and other people who want to get off grid via workshops. Connell is one of a number of green inventors working to ease the world's transition to climate change. As wildfires spread, countries sink, species go extinct, floods and drought increase, seas rise, storms devastate, glaciers melt, crops fail, pollution decreases life expectancy and the potential for conflict grows, eyes look to the inventors, geniuses and entrepreneurs who surely can figure out a way of saving the planet. When Pope Francis, in an unprecedented speech earlier this year, rejected market solutions for climate change, attacked "unfettered capitalism" and made a forceful moral plea, it raised the question: if individual behavioural changes aren't realistic or enough, can't technology provide a route out of the problem? Where is that technology? And is 'techno-utopianism' realistic in the context of the climate crisis? Major companies are already divesting from fossil fuels – most recently the Rockefeller Foundation, the Church of England and Norway's £900bn sovereign wealth fund – as burnable reserves run out and the climate change threat becomes more apparent; but local attention is also turning to how to transition to a greener world. In the bowels of an east London theatre on a foggy Sunday afternoon a month or so after POC21, a panel discusses whether Hackney Council should divest its pensions away from fossil fuels. "There is an energy transition happening," says Carbon Tracker's Luke Sussams. Dr David McCoy, an expert in global public health, says, "We face an existential threat in terms of eco collapse… My 14-year-old daughter's future does not look good." He explains how global warming will affect disease patterns and prompt conflict over scarce resources. Yet there is some optimism about green developments in electric cars, renewable energies and Tesla's new battery technology. Bill McKibben, the campaigner and author who brought global warming to public consciousness with his 1989 book The End of Nature, and more recently the founder of international pressure group 350.org, is positive and excited about innovation in the green world. "The price of a solar panel dropped 75 per cent in the last six years," he said, speaking from his home in Vermont. "The world's engineers are doing their job; and doing it extraordinarily well." The move to renewable energy is under way. An Apollo-style research programme to make renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels recently won the backing of Sir David Attenborough and high-profile businesspeople, politicians and economists. Even Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, has warned that the "vast majority of reserves are unburnable" if global temperature rises are to be limited to below 2C. But others think that it's not enough, and consider geoengineering to be the grand techno-fix. First presented as a big-idea solution to climate change in the 1960s, geoengineering proposals range from the seemingly fantastical – brightening the clouds; stirring the seas to change their temperature and cool the Earth; turning the ocean into a gigantic bubble bath to reflect the sun; covering the deserts in mirrors and sending parasols into space; mimicking the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions like Mount Pinatubo – to the more mundane: removing carbon from atmosphere and storing it somewhere else. Although a number of scientists and researchers – including the Royal Society, which held a geoengineering 'retreat' in Buckinghamshire in 2011 – think geoengineering is an option worth considering, no one is actually doing it yet. Well, apart from Russ George, the businessman, entrepreneur and "DIY rogue geo-vigilante" who dumped 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific ocean, triggering a 10,000-sq-km plankton bloom (plankton blooms suck carbon out of the atmosphere). Though the efficacy of his actions is still unclear, George was criticised for eco-terrorism, and was said to have contravened UN conventions. The big problem with DIY geoengineering, and any geoengineering for that matter, is its potential for danger: we don't know what would happen. David Keith, a professor of engineering at Harvard who developed a giant air-sucking wall to capture carbon, told the New Yorker's Michael Specter, "It is hyperbolic to say this, but no less true: when you start to reflect light away from the planet, you can easily imagine a chain of events that would extinguish life on Earth." On the other hand, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) doesn't seem, on the face of it, like playing god with our weather systems or trying, fruitlessly, to find a dimmer switch for the sun. A company called Skyonics claims its Skymine process can capture harmful pollutants and turn them into marketable products such as baking soda and bleach. But to what extent can sucking carbon out of the air work? Sabine Mathesius, a climate modeller at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, wanted to see what CDR could achieve if five gigatons (an enormous, hypothetical amount) of carbon dioxide was removed from the atmosphere each year. Simulations found that the impact of this level of removal would not be significant at all, especially in terms of protecting the ocean, which is acidified by human-produced CO2. "In the beginning I was surprised," she said. "Like many people I also hoped that geoengineering could be a way to undo the harm we did with our CO2 emissions. But if you see how much CO2 we can get out of the atmosphere with the current technologies and what we are expected to emit in a business-as-usual scenario, you can already see that the impact of CO2 removal cannot be that big." CDR could be used as a supporting measure to avoid the worst scenario if emissions are reduced at the same time, Mathesius concluded. "What is not possible is just emitting the CO2 as usual and further expanding our industries and then using CDR to get the CO2 out of the atmosphere. Reducing emissions is the cheapest way to keep the CO2 levels low; and also the easiest way." More promising technologies, such as bioenergy with carbon capture or artificial trees, would also require fertile land or would cost astronomic amounts, Mathesius says. So where then would she place her hope in terms of a techno-fix to solve climate change? "Clean energy to make it easier for people to emit less CO2." Carbon capture and storage gets short shrift from McKibben. "If you step back and think about it for a minute, it's silly," he says. "You can do it, obviously, but can you do it at a cost that makes any kind of sense? You can't. No one's been able to yet. You're way better off just building the windmills in the first place. All it is is a solution designed to try and appease the power of the coal industry and offer them some kind of future." Those looking into this techno-fix are quite clear that solar radiation management or carbon capture is no substitute for reducing carbon emissions anyway. Bodies such as the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative (SRMGI) and the Royal Society contain wary caveats, that geoengineering is not an alternative to reducing carbon consumption. McKibben calls them an "absurd set of ideas where people throw up their hands and say, 'There's no way we can solve this problem, so instead let's fill the atmosphere with sulphur'." On the last day of April, Elon Musk entered the stage at his Tesla Design Centre in Hawthorne, California to thumping dubstep, whoops and ripples of applause. The billionaire business magnate nodded to the crowd of adoring fans and set out his vision for a complete transformation of how the world works. His 20-minute speech explained how a new invention – the Powerwall battery – would advance a complete overhaul of the world's energy infrastructure. "This is how it is today… it sucks," Musk began, gesturing to slides depicting factories belching out smoke. The solution to getting from fossil fuel hell to a renewable-powered future, he explained, was his new product. Because "existing batteries suck," he had developed the Tesla Powerwall: a wall-mounted, household battery on sale for $3,500 (£2,300). His statements were punctuated by cheers and screams from the crowd, especially when he revealed that the whole event had been powered by solar and Powerwall. Musk believes that transitioning to electric cars and solar energy will contain the worst effects of climate change. His electric cars are improving all the time; the mass-market model is expected to be ready before 2020. Tesla open-sourced all its patents and technology in 2014 to encourage other people to advance the electric vehicle industry; and lots of major names in the automobile world have followed with designs for electric cars. "We need the entire automotive industry to remake, and quickly," said McKibben. Musk has also proposed the Hyperloop, a new transport system he describes as "a cross between Concorde, a railgun and a hockey table". Advances in batteries radically change the picture of renewable energy, electric cars and transport systems; and important improvements are happening. At the end of October 2015, a group of Cambridge scientists made a major breakthrough with a rechargeable super-battery that can hold five times more energy as those we're used to and can power a car from London to Edinburgh on a single charge. Improved battery storage will change everything for green energy enthusiasts like Daniel Connell in the next few years. "This is why, apart from [a lack of] political will, we don't have renewable energy: because storage levels don't reach grid level. But before the end of the decade they will," he explains. One of the projects chosen for POC21, the French eco-castle retreat, was a design by a team from Berlin. Sunzilla, a diesel generator without diesel, fuelled by the sun, can be assembled by anyone. Germany is leading the way in the energy revolution with its energiewende , driven by Green politicians and the support of local citizens. In 2014, just over a quarter of German energy came from renewable sources; in 2050, the goal is 80 per cent. The German Green Party politician Ralf Fücks, author of a new book called Green Growth, Smart Growth, is a techno-optimist with faith in society's ability to find a way out of the ecological crisis, although he cautions against the hubris of large-scale techno-fixes. Investment in green technologies and renewable energies are more realistic, he writes, than carbon capture and storage. Fücks speak slowly, carefully and with an obvious delight in the natural world. "Spider silk is a wonderful substance," he says at one point. "It's more flexible than rubber and more solid than steel and we now have the skills to discover [its] molecular composition." He cites the smooth skin of the shark and the self-cleaning surface of the lotus blossom as examples of biological productivity we can learn from and use for our own purposes, while decreasing CO2 emissions. But biomimicry is in its early stages, and renewables have already crossed to the point of no return, as Fücks puts it. On the plus side, though, costs for solar and wind power have decreased considerably over the last five years. Fücks sees opportunities for young entrepreneurs and startups in a world without global celebrities such as Bill Gates or Richard Branson. The environmental reform of industrial society, in his view, demands a combination of big and small. There is room for more Elon Musks. The world of food is fertile ground for big ideas and green tech innovation. Last summer saw the publication of new technology proposals to turn the waste shells of prawn, crab and lobster into nitrogen-rich chemicals for use, say, in pharmaceuticals, carbon sequestration and animal feed, which would avoid industrial production using fossil fuels. Farmers, too, are innovating worldwide. In Devon, Rebecca Hosking is using new land management techniques to make a contribution to fighting climate change. She uses a grazing method that purposely locks atmospheric carbon back into the soil. Instead of ploughing, her long-grass grazing technique keeps carbon in the roots, ploughing release-carbon from soil into the atmosphere. The more organic matter there is in the ground, the more it can trap in the carbon. "Once you lock it in, and as long as you don't plough or let your grassland dry out, then the carbon stays in the soil," she says. "You know that climate change is happening, we do our bit and suck out as much carbon as we can." This method, which French farmers are also keen to implement, is similar in the way it works to a new, low-methane, genetically modified rice. SUSIBA2, the new rice, uses smaller roots, and produces less methane, one of the chief greenhouse gases. Scientists have also developed a feed supplement for dairy cows that could reduce methane emissions by 30 per cent. Global warming is posing serious challenges to water supply; and we all know that the melting of glaciers is one detrimental effect of climate change. Cue another climate hero: Chewang Norphel, an 80-year-old retired civil engineer, has made 12 artificial glaciers in the last 30 years to provide water for the people of Ladakh, India. The Ice Man, as he is called, realised he could divert water through canals into frozen ice sheets, which would melt in spring and provide water for irrigation, agriculture and general local use. "Getting water during the sowing period is the most crucial concern of the farmers because the natural glaciers start melting in the month of June and sowing starts in April and May," he told online news portal the Better India. Ocean farmers are also growing kelp again to encourage a move away from environmentally costly meat-based diets. Indeed, 3D ocean farming proponents GreenWave quote a study that found a network of seaweed farms the size of Washington state could provide all the dietary protein for the entire world population. Pope Francis's recent address sounded a note of caution around technology as a solution to climate change. "Our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience," he said. Bill McKibben believes the key is solving the "structural systemic problem rooted in the balance of political power on our planet." To make a difference, he says, an individual must "join with other people to build the kind of movement that can change those balances of power." In Naomi Klein's book This Changes Everything, she writes about the Hollywood action movie narrative that tells us that, at the very last minute, some of us are going to be saved: "Since our secular religion is technology, it won't be god that saves us but Bill Gates and his gang of super-geniuses at Intellectual Ventures." But, while some techno-fixes recall the Greek hubris myth of Icarus, there is work to be done and hope to be found. Around the world, people are working to improve 3D printing technology and the usability of tutorials to explain how to make Connell's DIY wind turbine or the German Sunzilla. Demand Logic, a company based in London, is using data to sweep big, commercial buildings in the city and work out where energy savings can be made. Of the UN Climate Conference in Paris, McKibben says it will be most interesting to see whether countries will come up with the money to help poor countries leapfrog technologically. But he maintains that engineers and innovators are focusing their efforts in the right place, speeding up the transition from fossil fuels. Despite the Pope's cautionary note, the industry of technology is crucial in the shift to a newly balanced planet. McKibben praised the good, cheap solar panels we already have, but said they could be much more efficient and easier to adopt. "There's no shortage of crucial and interesting work for architects, engineers and financiers, and none of it requires telling yourself science fiction stories, the way that you have to if all you can think of is, 'Let's put a giant piece of film in space to block the sun'." Photographs courtesy of POC21: first photograph published via Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0, second and third images via CC BY-SA 2.0 This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.

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Futures not of our making After listening to Travis Kalanick, CEO and co-founder of Uber, explain why his world-conquering ride-hailing service is ultimately better for drivers than the taxi industry, Stephen Colbert, host of The Late Show, queried his grand plans: "I know you talk about how good this is for drivers, but you said you want, like, self-driving Uber cars… that's not for the driver, [you're] employing robots at that point. How is that helping livery drivers?" Kalanick responded by shifting the conversation: Google is doing the driverless thing. Tesla is doing the driverless thing. Apple is doing the driverless thing. This is going to be the world. So a question for a tech company is, do you want to be part of the future or do you want to resist the future? Driverless cars are the future. If that doesn't appeal to you, blame automation; blame Silicon Valley. Don't blame Uber. Now, Travis Kalanick's vision of the future may indeed come to fruition, and taxi drivers, long-haul truckers and (eventually) train conductors may in fact need to begin looking for new jobs. But what struck me about his oft-repeated response was the way that it so subtly but effectively controlled the narrative around automation and the future. By maintaining that the future is predetermined, Kalanick manoeuvred us, the public, into a position where we, too, are seemingly left with just two choices: resist that future, or embrace it. Of course, this is not the case: every technological advance involves human agency, and so there are choices available to us, but Kalanick's response circumvents this. We shouldn't get in the way of technological determinism. In the context of politics, Patricia Dunmire has written that such language works to "supplant the notion of the future as the site of the possible with a conception of the future as inevitable". This then limits the ability of people to "imagine, articulate and realise futures" different to ones handed down by those in power. My concern is that if we allow tech companies to similarly cast the future as determined, they can avoid engaging in a meaningful discussion about the consequences and implications of new technologies like self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI), or machine learning. Unsurprisingly, Kalanick is far from the first industry boss to frame the future of automation in this way. Industrialists, engineers and scientists in mid-20th-century America deployed many of these same narratives in similar attempts to control the discourse around technology and 'the future'. Examining how these narratives were deployed in the past can offer insight into how they are currently being used today – and what to do about it. The planners of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, for instance, took quite a deterministic view of the relationship between society and technological advance, which the guidebook for the fair encapsulated, in one of the great chapter headings of the 20th century: 'Science Finds – Industry Applies – Man Conforms'. The guidebook went on to explain: "Science discovers, genius invents, industry applies, and man adapts himself to, or is moulded by, new things… Individuals, groups, entire races of men fall into step with the slow or swift movement of the march of science and industry." As well as conjuring images of a certain goose-stepping hyena scene from The Lion King, this description casts technological progress as the prime mover within society. Technological advancement is imagined as a train travelling briskly down the tracks toward a singular destination – a destination that will not only be revolutionary but unquestionably beneficial for all. The public just needs to climb aboard. The National Association of Manufacturers put its own unique spin on this well-worn metaphor in 1954 when it said: "[G]eared to the smooth, effortless workings of automation, the magic carpet of our free economy heads for distant and undreamed of horizons. Just going along for the ride will be the biggest thrill on earth." Yet, for as much as technological advances are often framed as revolutionary, they are also often framed as simply evolutionary . While new automative technologies like electric limit switches, photoelectric controls, or microprocessors were described as revolutionary advances that would greatly benefit industrialists and consumers alike, these same advances were also described as merely the next step in the slow and gradual evolution of industrial technique. Adopting this approach, a 1955 General Electric film/advertisement entitled This is Automation described recent advances in automation as the latest in long line of "natural evolution in industry" that had "worked to the advantage of everyone". This not only served to naturalise automatic processes at a time when the US Congress was meeting to discuss concerns about automation, it also served to rewrite the history of automation extending backward to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. "Before the word automation was coined", the film explained, advances in manufacturing "seemed funny or fearful, depending on the viewpoint… The trouble was, some people thought of automation as a sudden thing – a revolutionary idea. But it isn't! It began nearly two hundred years ago". The message, then, was that automation was not new, and therefore need not be foreboding; what had benefited society in the past would benefit society in the future. After all, did not labourers in the 1950s enjoy better working conditions, shorter hours, and greater purchasing power compared to their equals a century before? The 'natural evolution' of automation would ensure that labourers in 2050 would be similarly better off. Such an account, however, makes no mention of the decades of work done by unions to secure those benefits or the legislation passed to ingrain certain rights as law. Two hundred years of automation are made to seem almost automatically beneficial. As a result, we're led to believe that the future of automation will require equally little in the way of regulation or action by labour unions. In a very real, very Orwellian sense, industry bosses who took such an approach were able to control the story of how automation unfolded in the past, and how it would unfold in the future. In the words of the Party: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past". According to many mid-20th-century industry bosses, the only thing that could derail this better future were the pessimists and critics – the people who wanted to saddle America's economy with unnecessary and burdensome regulation. It was Henry Ford himself who, in a 1939 New York Times article celebrating the opening of the New York World's Fair, lambasted those who would resist the onward march of science. "Despite every restriction that can be placed on it by so-called 'reformers'," Ford wrote, "the quest will continue – invention will go forward." In one of the most unintentionally delightful films from the 20th century the industrial manufacturing firm, Westinghouse, set out to confront these 'so-called reformers' with a feature-length film, The Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair, released in 1939. Part drama and part corporate advertisement, the film sets up a struggle for the soul of the Middleton's cherubic young son, Bud. On one side is Nikolas Makaroff, an intellectual, European, artist type who is partial to quoting Karl Marx and refers to automation as "Frankenstein's monster". On the other is Jim Treadway, a good ol' American boy who passed up a chance to play pro (American) football in order to work for Westinghouse and who believes in the power of science, industry, progress and the American way. For good measure, the screenwriters also include a love triangle between Makaroff, the Middletons' daughter, Babs, and Treadway (her former flame). The film opens with a gloomy radio announcement about the lack of jobs in Depression-era America, after which Bud laments his luck at being born into joblessness. "Maybe it is difficult", Mr Middleton interjects, "but it's worse to be a quitter… You've heard all the talkers , now I'm going to show you the doers !" And with that, the Middletons are off to the fair. The two Middleton men soon meet up with Jim Treadway, whom Mr Middleton drafts to convince Bud of the great prospects for the future thanks to automation and technological advancement. The scenes that follow are notable for the way in which Treadway not only casts aside concerns about the future, but paints those with concerns as domineering, fact-averse, pessimists: Mr. Middleton: "Tell me Jim, do you honestly believe industry can make enough jobs in the future to take care of the young people that are coming along?" Jim Treadway: "I think the problem's going to be the other way around. Industry will make so many jobs there won't be enough people to fill them." Bud: *Scoff* Jim Treadway: "So you don't believe me do you?" Bud: "From all I've heard…" Jim Treadway: [Crossing arms] "You're liable to hear anything these days. Are you willing to sit back and let a lot of self-appointed leaders do your thinking for you?" Bud: "Well they believe we're on the skids…" Jim Treadway: "Yes, and the men who built this fair believe the opposite. And what's more they back up their belief… with two hundred million dollars' worth of facts." Bud: "Well maybe the other side would, too, if they weren't busted." Jim Treadway: "And they'll stay that way. Until they learn that prosperity and pessimism don't travel together. But they're like you, Bud: they don't like facts." Bud: "Oh, I don't mind them, Jim." Jim Treadway: "Good, then I'll introduce you to a few. Come along." [Taking him warmly by the shoulder, Jim leads Bud off stage left]. After an entire day of learning about the economic benefits of photoelectric cells, triodes, and oscilloscopes, Bud has had enough of pessimism. And after Nikolas Makaroff is exposed as a hypocrite, liar and coward, Babs returns to Treadway. The film and the fair for which it was produced are noteworthy for the way that the industrial, scientific, engineering, and business communities came together to directly combat the negative press surrounding technological advancement. In her analysis of the fair, the historian Sue Bix writes: "In defining the future as a period characterised by wonderful revolutions in production, exhibitors effectively excluded discussion of any accompanying cost to workers." By doing so, they were able to avoid taking any substantive steps to address the concerns of labour unions and government bodies. The fact that industry bosses from Henry Ford to Travis Kalanick have been deploying similar rhetoric for more than a century speaks to the success of these narratives, and to the extent to which these same industry bosses have largely been able to avoid engaging in meaningful discussions about the impact of automative technologies. Indeed, their success makes it difficult to even imagine any alternatives. Such framing, according to the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, "annihilates any future uncontained in the past and present". Thankfully, however, a small number of writers and activists from this period offered up a few alternatives. Take the example of the United Auto Workers' (UAW) union. A few years after Congress met to discuss concerns about automation and General Electric released its supporting film This is Automation , the UAW put out its own film on the topic of automation, Push Buttons and People. The film challenges determinist framings of technological advancement by asking, "Will whatever happens, happen automatically? Can we do anything?" After showing footage of Walter Reuther, head of the UAW, testifying before Congress about the effects of automation, the film draws to a close and the narrator moves to sum up: Well, here we are back again with our original word: automation… You and I and a Senate Committee, and Walter Reuther, have had a discussion. Why? Because it's our common problem. The question is: what shall we do to succeed, to tame automation? We, you… the companies, the United States Senate… Given that their jobs were on the line, it is understandable that the UAW described automation not as a train headed toward better shores, but as "a word to strike terror in any human heart" and as something to be confronted and 'tamed'. More importantly, however, the UAW also framed technological advancement as something that was contestable and open to discussion rather than predetermined. The film made a point of attempting to draw viewers into a conversation about how to proceed. Or take the ecologically-minded writer Peter van Dresser who, in a 1939 article in Harper's, rejected Aladdin-esque framings of technological advancement. The American people, according to Dresser, were all too ready to "talk and think as if Scientific Technology [sic] were a kind of wilful genie whose gifts we must gratefully accept while we accommodate ourselves as best we can to his bad habits." Seeing to the social health of the nation would be impossible, Van Dresser argued, so long as people continued to accept "utterly without criticism the blueprints for America's technological future formulated by the industrial empire-builders." Yet despite these calls to action, America exited the 20th century having never settled these debates about the impact of automation. According to Sue Bix, what was missing was both the willpower to challenge dominant discourses about progress and a clearly articulated vision of how the public might be given a say in the development and adoption of automative technologies. As we continue to grapple with more questions about technological advancement today, now is the time to challenge dominant discourses and articulate our alternative visions of the future. This will require taking steps to encourage an informed dialogue between tech companies, governments, non-profits, and the public. Along these lines, the Government Data Science Partnership recently developed a Data Science Ethical Framework which aims to help policymakers and data scientists "think through some of the ethical issues which sit outside the law." Through public workshops and online surveys members of the public were encouraged to participate in the development of this framework. The partnership even commissioned the Data Dilemmas app in an attempt to provide members of the public with "a way of learning about data science and the ethical trade-offs that government has to make in designing data science projects." It is far from perfect, but it is a start. On the industrial side, Google, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Facebook joined forces this September to create the (absurdly-named) Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society. The partnership was formed with the expressed purpose of serving as "an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society". The coming years will tell whether this is a genuine attempt to engage in meaningful dialogue or simply an effort to mollify public fears. Challenging these dominating narratives could also involve setting up dedicated commissions to examine the impact and implications of technological innovations. In a promising move, the House of Commons recently recommended that a commission on Artificial Intelligence be established at the Alan Turing Institute. With a remit to examine the "social, ethical and legal implications of recent potential developments in AI" and ensure that new AI systems are developed responsibly and transparently, the new commission would seem to be a step in the right direction. We need more efforts such as these, and we need them to become the rule rather than the exception. Otherwise, as Grosz warns, we may find ourselves implicated in futures not of our making. And finally, in closing, here's one last clip from the Middletons: This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.

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Who can you trust in a post-truth world? Trust has always been a dangerous business. Every instance of it brings the risk of let-down, disloyalty and betrayal. Still, in recent times, the vulnerability inherent in trust seems more pronounced. Technological advancements enabling increased access to information mean that awareness of corporate scandals, fake news and political lies has increased exponentially: Volkswagen; the Panama Papers; giving £350m a week to the NHS; Hillary's emails; the Pope's supposed support of Trump. The list goes on. Of course, our access to information also makes it easier to learn about the good being done in the world. But somehow scandal always lodges in the memory better than integrity. As a result, it is hard to resist being conditioned to expect that just about everything we read in the news or hear an 'expert' say will turn out to be a lie, politically motivated, or simply wrong. This scepticism lies at the heart of our 'post-truth' and 'post-trust' times. And yet, just when truth is said to be irrelevant, and trust all but gone, those concepts feature heavily in contemporary social discourse. This is no coincidence. As the late philosopher Annette Baier said: "We inhabit a climate of trust as we inhabit an atmosphere and notice it as we notice air, only when it becomes scarce or polluted." In this era of post-truth, scandals, falsity and deception have created a vacuum, leaving many of us all the more aware of just how scarce truth and trust seem to be. That trust is more scarce is not just a perceived reality, but a measurable one. The PR firm Edelman has been assessing global levels of trust for the past 17 years. Their most recent Trust Barometer reports that: Two-thirds of the countries surveyed are now 'distrusters' Less than 50 per cent trust in the mainstream institutions of business, government, media and NGOs to do what is right Over two-thirds of the general population do not have confidence that current leaders can address their country's challenges The media is distrusted in more than 80 per cent of countries surveyed For Edelman, these findings amount to a "crisis of trust" because they find a correlation between trust and societal functioning: We have moved beyond the point of trust being simply a key factor in product purchase or selection of employment opportunity; it is now the deciding factor in whether a society can function. As trust in institutions erodes, the basic assumptions of fairness, shared values and equal opportunity traditionally upheld by 'the system' are no longer taken for granted. Because of its relationship to social functioning, low levels of trust are, indeed, concerning. But if a reduction in trust means that fairness, shared values and justice are no longer taken for granted, the distrust that characterises so much of the world today could in fact be positive. For, while fairness, shared values and justice are necessary for societal well-being, they ought not to be taken for granted. Each historical stand against tyranny shows that the sustainability of values like justice and fairness requires them to be actively defended. The world may be experiencing a crisis of trust. But the crisis cannot be that trust is merely low. For trust is not always best, and more trust is not always better. If the projects that trust enables collaborators to complete are corrupt, busting trust can be appropriate. Whistleblowers are good examples of this: in leaking secrets, they violate a trust, but for a good reason. Too much trust is also undesirable insofar as it enables the abuse of power. The checks and balances built into the American political system exist for this very reason: the relationship between citizens and such powerful leaders is not one that should be characterised solely by trust. Just as trust is not always best, distrust, often thought to be a sign of interpersonal or societal dysfunction, can be appropriate. The key is to cultivate trust that tracks trustworthiness. If a boss, partner or government lacks the competence, motivation or good character needed to uphold the trust placed in them, distrust, rather than trust, is reasonable and appropriate. It is for this reason that the current low levels of trust are understandable. A rebuilding of trust may help society function more smoothly, but the current threat of ambiguous news and politicians who 'construct' their own truth make distrust, rather than trust, appropriate. While trust ought to track trustworthiness, there is at least one instance where trust may be well-placed despite the absence of trustworthiness: when one chooses to trust another for the sake of helping them cultivate trustworthiness, or because one loves them. For example, just as a parent gives a pet to a child, not because they believe the child to be responsible, but to help teach them responsibility, trust can be given to others to help them develop trustworthiness. Also, in relationships characterised by a high degree of intimacy (such as marriages, partnerships and close friendships) to withhold trust because of another's faults goes against the very nature of the relationship. Part of what sets intimate relationships apart is the expectation that the trust in a friendship, partnership or marriage is strong enough, and generous enough, to withstand the imperfections and moments of untrustworthiness that occur in the relationship from time to time. It should be noted, however, that these opportunities to place trust well despite a lack of trustworthiness are more suited to interpersonal relationships than to the much less intimate engagement between the public and social institutions. It may be right to trust a partner because you love her, but it is less clear that one should trust a president or journalist with such generosity. If the institutions that no longer enjoy healthy amounts of public trust are undeserving of it – that is, if they actually are untrustworthy – then the distrust reported by Edelman is well-placed. And if that is the case, then the responsibility for taking trust forward lies, at least in part, with the businesses, media groups, NGOs and governments that need to cultivate better trustworthiness and do the slow, challenging work of communicating that trustworthiness to the public. But, importantly, responsibility for cultivating well-placed trust in the post-truth era does not lie solely with those would-be trusted parties. Even if they cultivate integrity, and root out all deception in their ranks, levels of public trust may continue to ebb away. This is because distrust is quasi-perceptual; like spectacles, it frames what we see. And if left unchecked, a lingering distrust can cause one to withhold trust, even from those who really are deserving of it. Not often discussed, this risk of misplaced distrust is the quiet threat of our post-truth era. For example, it is understandable to distrust the media production company WTO5 after they published the fabricated story that the Pope had endorsed Trump. Likewise, in the wake of its emissions scandal, it is reasonable to become sceptical of Volkswagen. But if that distrust is allowed to run amok, disposing one to be closed to new information suggesting WTO5 or Volkswagen have changed their ways and can now be trusted, it ceases to be reasonable. Distrust also becomes degraded when, as often happens, it mutates from local scepticism of a scandalised entity to a blanket concern about all related individuals or organisations. For example, one might move from distrusting Volkswagen to believing that all automobile manufacturers are bent on side-stepping emissions testing. For trust to be well-placed, distrust must be valued as highly as trust. But in personal, professional and social life we must also take care to ensure that it is possible for untrusted parties to become appropriately trusted. Due to distrust's quasi-perceptual nature, this can be incredibly difficult. Instead, from the perspective of scepticism, all evidence about another individual or organisation can seem to support distrust. Remaining open to those we distrust is further complicated by the reality of hard feelings. When one is the direct victim of a betrayal, strong anger and resentment is normal. And when we hear about an act of betrayal committed against someone else, or when we read about an alleged scandal, indignation can also rush in. Such feelings can stop us from being willing to even consider evidence suggestive of reform on the part of the guilty party. Caught in bitterness, it is tempting to sacrifice the truth because it feels, at least in the moment, more satisfying to have our distrust confirmed. In the wake of violated trust, anger, resentment and indignation are appropriate. And bitterness is understandable. But they can fuel the spread of distrust, inhibiting the pursuit of truth and blocking what could be well-placed trust. To take trust forward in this era of post-truth, then, social institutions must work to be worthy of public trust, but they should not be held solely responsible for the quality of public distrust. Each individual member of the public also has a role to play in ensuring their distrust does not run amok, which is difficult. But it can be done. An important first step to cultivating well-placed distrust is developing greater self-awareness. By understanding what is going on at the emotional level inside ourselves, we are better able to identify when distrust is fuelled by anger. Simply being aware that distrust can be misplaced can help with this. But we can also cultivate self-awareness in this area by pausing to consider the source of our distrust. Is it based on a well-established belief that the object of our distrust is in fact untrustworthy? Do we have good reason to think they actually lack competence or are unlikely to come through for us? Or is the distrust we are experiencing more strongly characterised by anger, a sense of injustice, or the desire to withhold something from the distrusted party? It can be uncomfortable engaging with such questions because they make us look deep into what may be upsetting. Also, answering such questions truthfully requires humility, which can be difficult in the heat of anger. And so we may need to give ourselves ample time to critically assess our distrust. But taking the time to do so is vital for cultivating well-placed trust. If, after reflecting, we find that our distrust is based on hard feelings, that doesn't necessarily mean it is misplaced and should be abandoned. But because hard feelings can cloud our perception of others, and so potentially be misplaced, something like forgiveness may be needed to allow a more objective distrust or trust to take its place. It is something like forgiveness that is needed here. Not all attempts to manage distrust will involve giving up hard feelings towards those who directly offended us and have sought restoration (both conditions usually thought to be necessary for forgiveness). But the step that is needed is like forgiveness because it involves letting go of hard feelings. It is important to note that just because hard feelings are relinquished, it doesn't mean one will necessarily come to a place of trust; nor is that necessarily the goal. Rather, in identifying and giving up hard feelings, the aim is to position oneself so that any trust or distrust is held for good reason rather than being a knee-jerk emotional response. The reality of the post-truth era is that it is hard to know what to believe. And so even if institutions take steps to ensure their own trustworthiness, and members of the public also take responsibility for their own distrust, it may still be hard for trust to get started. For example, one may have rid themselves of all hard feelings toward social institutions, but still be unsure which facts about those institutions to believe, and so remain unsure if it is reasonable to trust them. However, a principle from the philosophy of trust can be helpful to take trust forward when facts are dubious: trust is a type of reliance, but it is not merely reliance. Understanding this distinction sheds light on how mere reliance can be used to scaffold trust in uncertain times. In all instances of trust, we rely on something or someone. But it is possible to rely without trusting. For example, in a rural part of the country, one might have to rely on a sole, local doctor for medical care despite suspecting him of lacking competence. Likewise, it is possible to rely on an individual or organisation while checking up on them, perhaps by fact-checking or making use of transparency initiatives. But trust cannot survive such checking. Once we begin such micromanaging, it becomes clear we do not really trust others to do what we are counting on them for. Because it is possible to rely on others despite distrusting them, it is logically possible for the public to rely on social institutions despite being uncertain of how trustworthy those institutions really are. Such reliance in turn creates an opportunity for institutions to reveal their trustworthiness, or lack thereof, thus giving the public greater reason to trust or distrust. Patient engagement with the National Health Service in the UK provides an example of how mere reliance can lead to trust. A 2006 Ipsos MORI study assessing patient and public satisfaction with the NHS found that while the public satisfaction with GP, inpatient, outpatient and accident and emergency services was below 60 per cent, patient satisfaction rose to 80 per cent and above. These findings suggest that something positive occurs as people actually engage with the NHS. It is not clear whether all those patients who reported satisfaction with the health service would have also said they found the NHS to be trustworthy; but by using the service, all of them did rely on it. And as they did so, they were given the opportunity to come to know more about the NHS and make a more educated decision about whether or not trust of that institution is warranted. To rely is not the same as to trust. But because it is possible to rely while harbouring a good deal of distrust, engaging mere reliance in this time of post-truth provides one practical road to well-placed trust and distrust. Because trust is dangerous – because it always brings with it the risk of let-down and betrayal – it can be tempting to withhold trust until certainty about how governments and brands will behave is known, or until the complete veracity of a published fact has been checked. But it has never been possible to have complete certainty about what others will do. And the nature of scientific discovery means that facts are always changing. This does not mean that the fake news, corporate mismanagement and political deception that makes trust and truth so timely should be allowed to flourish. But the pursuit of well-placed trust should be tempered with the understanding that the human ability to gain certainty and control over life is limited. It is because of this very truth that trust matters at all. This article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.