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THE GIRL IN HIS MIND By ROBERT F. YOUNG [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of Tomorrow April 1963 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Every man's mind is a universe with countless places in which he can hide—even from himself! The dance that the chocoletto girl was performing was an expurgated version of the kylee sex ritual which the Louave maidens of Dubhe 7 practiced on the eve of their betrothal. Expurgated or not, however, it was still on the lascivious side. The G-string that constituted the chocoletto girl's entire costume put her but one degree above the nakedness which the original dance demanded. Nathan Blake's voice was slightly thick when he summoned the waiter who was hovering in the shadows at the back of the room. "Is she free?" he asked. "I do not know, mensakin. Perhaps." Blake resumed watching. The girl's movements were a delicate blend of love and lust. Her face accompanied her body, eyes half-lidded one moment to match the languid motion of her limbs, wide and feral the next to match the furious bump and grind of her hips. For a chocoletto she was light-skinned—more bronze, really, than brown. But then, the word "chocoletto", coined by the early beche-la-mer traders, was misleading, and few of the natives of Dubhe 4's southern-most continent lived up to it completely. She was beautiful too. Her high-cheekboned face was striking—the eyes dark-brown and wide-apart, the mouth sensuous, the teeth showing in a vivid white line between the half-parted purple lips. And her body was splendid. Blake had never seen anyone quite like her. He beckoned to her when the dance was over and, after slipping into a white thigh-length tunic, she joined him at his table. She ordered Martian wine in a liquid voice, and sipped it with a finesse that belied her cannibalistic forebears. "You wish a night?" she asked. Blake nodded. "If you are free." "Three thousand quandoes." He did not haggle, but counted out the amount and handed it to her. She slipped the bills into a thigh sheath-purse, told him her hut number and stood up to leave. "I will meet you there in an hour," she said. Her hut was as good a place to wait for her as any. After buying a bottle of native whiskey at the bar, Blake went out into the Dubhe 4 night and made his way through the labyrinthine alleys of the native sector. In common with all chocoletto huts, Eldoria's was uncared for on the outside, and gave a false impression of poverty. He expected to find the usual hanger-on waiting in the anteroom, and looked forward to booting him out into the alley. Instead he found a young girl— A human girl. He paused in the doorway. The girl was sitting cross-legged on a small mat, a book open on her lap. Xenophon's Anabasis . Her hair made him think of the copper-colored sunrises of Norma 9 and her eyes reminded him of the blue tarns of Fornax 6. "Come in," she said. After closing the door, he sat down opposite her on the guest mat. Behind her, a gaudy arras hid the hut's other room. "You are here to wait for Eldoria?" she asked. Blake nodded. "And you?" She laughed. "I am here because I live here," she said. He tried to assimilate the information, but could not. Perceiving his difficulty, the girl went on, "My parents indentured themselves to the Great Starway Cartel and were assigned to the rubber plantations of Dubhe 4. They died of yellow-water dysentery before their indenture ran out, and in accordance with Interstellar Law I was auctioned off along with the rest of their possessions. Eldoria bought me." Five years as a roving psycheye had hardened Blake to commercial colonization practices; nevertheless, he found the present example of man's inhumanity to man sickening. "How old are you?" Blake asked. "Fourteen." "And what are you going to be when you grow up?" "Probably I shall be a psychiatrist. Eldoria is sending me to the mission school now, and afterward she is going to put me through an institute of higher learning. And when I come of age, she is going to give me my freedom." "I see," Blake said. He indicated the book on her lap. "Homework?" She shook her head. "In addition to my courses at the mission school, I am studying the humanities." "Xenophon," Blake said. "And I suppose Plato too." "And Homer and Virgil and Aeschylus and Euripides and all the rest of them. When I grow up I shall be a most well-educated person." "I'm sure you will be," Blake said, looking at the arras. "My name is Deirdre." "Nathan," Blake said. "Nathan Blake." "Eldoria will be arriving soon. I must go and prepare her dais." She got up, parted the arras, and slipped into the next room. Shame flamed in Blake's cheeks, and for a moment he considered leaving; then he remembered Eldoria's dance, and he went right on sitting where he was. Presently the girl returned, and not long afterward the cloying scent of native incense crept beneath the arras and permeated the anteroom. She sat sideways on the mat this time, and he caught her face in profile. There was a suggestion of saintliness in the line of the nose and chin, a suggestion made all the more poignant by the slender column of the neck. He shifted uncomfortably on the guest mat. She had taken up the Anabasis again, and silence was pounding silent fists upon the walls. He was relieved when Eldoria finally arrived. She ushered him into the next room immediately. It was slightly larger than the anteroom, and much more richly appointed. A thick carpet the color of Martian waterways lay upon the floor, contrasting pleasantly with the golden tapestries that adorned all four walls. The sleeping dais was oval and took up nearly half the floor space. It was strewn with scarlet cushions. Blake sat down upon it. Nervously he watched Eldoria slip out of her white street robe, his eyes moving back and forth from her smooth dark skin to the arras. The incense thickened around him. She noticed the back-and-forth movement of his eyes. "You need not fear the little one," she said, laying her hand upon his knee. "She will not enter." "It's not that so much," Blake said. "What?" The warm bronze shoulder was touching his.... He rose up once in the night, thinking to find his hotel bed. His next awakening was in the grayness of dawn, and he got up and dressed and moved silently to the doorway. The girl slept just without the arras on a thin sleeping-mat, and he had to step over her to gain the anteroom. In sleep, a strand of her copper-colored hair had tumbled down across her forehead and lay like a lovely flower upon the virginal whiteness of her skin. There was something saintly about her quiet face. When he reached the alley he began to run, and he did not stop running till the chocoletto sector was far behind him. The hill was a memory-image and Aldebaran 12 rain-country hills were notoriously steep. Blake was breathing hard when he reached the crest. Before him lay a memory-image of a section of Deneb 1 wasteland. The image extended for no more than half a mile, but Blake was annoyed that he should have remembered even that much of the wretched terrain. Ideally, a man's mind-country should have been comprised only of the places and times he wanted to remember. Practically, however, that was far from being the case. He glanced back down into the rain-pocked valley that he had just crossed. The rain and the mist made for poor visibility. He could only faintly distinguish the three figures of his pursuers. The trio seemed a little closer now. Ever since he had first set foot into his mind, some ten hours ago, they had been on his trail, but for some reason he had been unable to bring himself to go back and find out who they were and what they wanted. Hence he was as vexed with himself as he was with them. After resting for a few minutes, he descended the hill and started across the Deneb 1 wasteland. It was a remarkably detailed materialization, and his quarry's footprints stood out clearly in the duplicated sand. Sabrina York did not even know the rudiments of the art of throwing off a mind-tracker. It would have done her but little good if she had, for twelve years as a psycheye had taught Blake all the tricks. Probably she had taken it for granted that the mere act of hiding out in her tracker's mind was in itself a sufficient guarantee of her safety. After all, she had no way of knowing that he had discovered her presence. Mind-country was as temporally inconsecutive as it was topographically incongruous, so Blake was not surprised when the Deneb 1 wasteland gave way to an expanse of boyhood meadow. Near the meadow was the house where Blake had lived at a much later date. In reality, the places were as far apart in miles as they were in years, but here in the country of his mind they existed side by side, surrounded by heterogeneous landscapes from all over the civilized sector of the galaxy and by the sharply demarcated spectra of a hundred different suns. A few of the suns were in the patchwork sky—Sirius, for example, and its twinkling dwarf companion. Most of them, however, were present only in their remembered radiance. To add to the confusion, scattered night memories interrupted the hodge-podge horizon with columns of darkness, and here and there the gray column of a dawn or dusk memory showed. The house was flanked on one side by a section of a New Earth spaceport and on the other by an excerpt of an Ex-earth city-block. Behind it flowed a brief blue stretch of Martian waterway. Sabrina's footsteps led up to the front door, and the door itself was ajar. Perhaps she was still inside. Perhaps she was watching him even now through one of the remembered windows. He scanned them with a professional eye, but saw no sign of her. Warily he stepped inside, adjusting the temperature of his all-weather jacket to the remembered air-conditioning. His father was sitting in the living room, smoking, and watching 3V. He had no awareness of Blake. At Blake's entry he went right on smoking and watching as though the door had neither opened nor closed. He would go right on smoking and watching till Blake died and the conglomeration of place-times that constituted Blake's mind-world ceased to be. Ironically, he was watching nothing. The 3V program that had been in progress at the time of the unconscious materialization had failed to come through. The memory was a treasured one—the old man had perished in a 'copter crash several years ago—and for a long while Blake did not move. He had never been in his own mind before. Consequently he was more affected than he might otherwise have been. Finally, stirring himself, he walked out into the kitchen. On a shelf above the sink stood a gaily colored box of his mother's favorite detergent with a full-length drawing of Vera Velvetskin, the company's blond and chic visual symbol, on the front. His mother was standing before the huge automatic range, preparing a meal she had served twenty-three years ago. He regarded her with moist eyes. She had died a dozen years before his father, but the wound that her death had caused had never healed. He wanted to go up behind her and touch her shoulder and say, "What's for supper, mom?" but he knew it would do no good. For her he had no reality, not only because he was far in her future, but because in his mind-world she was a mortal and he, a god—a picayune god, perhaps, but a real one. As he was about to turn away, the name-plate on the range caught his eye, and thinking that he had read the two words wrong, he stepped closer so that he could see them more clearly. No, he had made no mistake: the first word was "Sabrina", and the second was "York". He stepped back. Odd that a kitchen range should have the same name as his quarry. But perhaps not unduly so. Giving appliances human names had been common practice for centuries. Even a name like "Sabrina York", while certainly not run-of-the-mill, was bound to be duplicated in real life. Nevertheless a feeling of uneasiness accompanied him when he left the kitchen and climbed the stairs to the second floor. He went through each room systematically, but saw no sign of Sabrina York. He lingered for some time in his own room, wistfully watching his fifteen-year-old self lolling on the bed with a dog-eared copy of The Galaxy Boys and the Secret of the Crab Nebula , then he stepped back out into the hall and started to descend the stairs. At the head of the stairs a narrow window looked out over the front yard and thence out over the meadow. He glanced absently through the panes, and came to an abrupt halt. His three pursuers were wading through the long meadow grass less than a quarter of a mile away—not close enough as yet for him to be able to make out their faces, but close enough for him to be able to see that two of them were wearing dresses and that the third had on a blue skirt and blouse, and a kepi to match. He gasped. It simply hadn't occurred to him that his pursuers might be women. To his consternation he discovered that he was even more loath to go back and accost them than he had been before. He actually had an impulse to flee. He controlled it and descended the stairs with exaggerated slowness, leaving the house by way of the back door. He picked up Sabrina's trail in the back yard and followed it down to the Martian waterway and thence along the bank to where the waterway ended and a campus began. Not the campus of the university which he had visited two days ago to attend his protegee's graduation. It was not a place-time that he cared to revisit, nor a moment that he cared to relive, but Sabrina's trail led straight across the artificially stunted grass toward the little bench where he and Deirdre Eldoria had come to talk after the ceremony was over. He had no choice. The bench stood beneath a towering American elm whose feathery branches traced green arabesques against the blue June sky. A set of footprints slightly deeper than its predecessors indicated that Sabrina had paused by the trunk. Despite himself Blake paused there too. Pain tightened his throat when he looked at Deirdre's delicate profile and copper-colored hair, intensified when he lowered his eyes to the remembered blueness of her graduation dress. The diamond brooch that he had given her as a graduation present, and which she had proudly pinned upon her bodice for the whole wide world to see, made him want to cry. His self-image of two weeks ago shocked him. There were lines on the face that did not as yet exist, and the brown hair was shot with streaks of gray that had yet to come into being. Lord, he must have been feeling old to have pictured himself like that! Deirdre was speaking. "Yes," she was saying, "at nine o'clock. And I should very much like for you to come." Blake Past shook his head. "Proms aren't for parents. You know that as well as I do. That young man you were talking with a few minutes ago—he's the one who should take you. He'd give his right arm for the chance." "I'll thank you not to imply that you're my father. One would think from the way you talk that you are centuries old!" "I'm thirty-eight," Blake Past said, "and while I may not be your father, I'm certainly old enough to be. That young man—" A pink flush of anger climbed into Deirdre Eldoria's girlish cheeks. "What right has he got to take me! Did he scrimp and go without in order to put me through high school and college? Has he booked passage for me to New Earth and paid my tuition to Trevor University?" "Please," Blake Past said, desperation deepening his voice. "You're only making everything worse. After majoring in Trevorism, you certainly ought to realize by now that there was nothing noble about my buying you after Eldoria died. I only did it to ease my conscience—" "What do you know about conscience?" Deirdre demanded. "Conscience is a much more complex mechanism than most laymen realize. Guilt feelings aren't reliable criteria. They can stem from false causes—from ridiculous things like a person's inability to accept himself for what he is." Abruptly she dropped the subject. "Don't you realize, Nate," she went on a little desperately, "that I'm leaving tomorrow and that we won't see each other again for years and years?" "I'll come to New Earth to visit you," Blake said. "Venus is only a few days distant on the new ships." She stood up. "You won't come—I know you won't." She stamped her foot. "And you won't come to the prom either. I know that too. I knew it all along. Sometimes I'm tempted to—" Abruptly she broke off. "Very well then," she went on, "I'll say good-by now then." Blake Past stood up too. "No, not yet. I'll walk back to the sorority house with you." She tossed her head, but the sadness in her tarn-blue eyes belied her hauteur. "If you wish," she said. Blake Present watched them set out side by side toward the remembered halls of learning that showed in the distance. There had been other people present on the campus that afternoon, but as they had failed to register on Blake Past's mind, they did not exist for Blake Present. All that existed for Blake Present were the diminishing figures of the girl and the man, and the pain that was constricting his throat. Wretchedly he turned away. As he did so he saw the three shadows lying at his feet and knew that his pursuers had at last caught up to him. His first reaction when he faced them was amazement. His next reaction was shock. His third was fear. His amazement resulted from recognition. One of the three women arrayed before him was Miss Stoddart, his boyhood Sunday-school teacher. Standing next to her in a familiar blue uniform was Officer Finch, the police woman who had maintained law and order in the collective elementary school he had attended. Standing next to Officer Finch was blond and chic Vera Velvetskin, whose picture he had seen on box after countless box of his mother's favorite detergent. His shock resulted from the expressions on the three faces. Neither Miss Stoddart nor Officer Finch ever particularly liked him, but they had never particularly disliked him either. This Miss Stoddart and this Officer Finch disliked him, though. They hated him. They hated him so much that their hatred had thinned out their faces and darkened their eyes. More shocking yet, Vera Velvetskin, who had never existed save in some copywriter's mind, hated him too. In fact, judging from the greater thinness of her face and the more pronounced darkness of her eyes, she hated him even more than Miss Stoddart and Officer Finch did. His fear resulted from the realization that his mind-world contained phenomena it had no right to contain—not if he was nearly as well-adjusted as he considered himself to be. The three women standing before him definitely were not memory-images. They were too vivid, for one thing. For another, they were aware of him. What were they, then? And what were they doing in his mind? He asked the two questions aloud. Three arms were raised and three forefingers were pointed accusingly at his chest. Three pairs of eyes burned darkly. "You ask us that?" Miss Stoddart said. "Callous creature who did a maiden's innocence affront!" said Officer Finch. "And sought sanctuary in ill-fitting robes of righteousness!" said Vera Velvetskin. The three faces moved together, blurred and seemed to blend into one. The three voices were raised in unison: "You know who we are, Nathan Blake. You know who we are!" Blake stared at them open-mouthed. Then he turned and fled. It had taken man a long time to discover that he was a god in his own right and that he too was capable of creating universes. Trivial universes, to be sure, when compared with the grandeur and scope of the objective one, and peopled with ghosts instead of human beings; but universes nonetheless. The discovery came about quite by accident. After projecting himself into a patient's memory one day, a psychologist named Trevor suddenly found himself clinging to the slope of a traumatically distorted mountain. His patient was beside him. The mountain proved to be an unconscious memory-image out of the patient's boyhood, and its country proved to be the country of the patient's mind. After many trials and errors, Trevor managed to get both himself and his patient back to the objective world, and not long afterward he was able to duplicate the feat on another case. The next logical step was to enter his own mind, and this he also succeeded in doing. It was inevitable that Trevor should write a book about his discovery and set about founding a new school of psychology. It was equally inevitable that he should acquire enemies as well as disciples. However, as the years passed and the new therapy which he devised cured more and more psychoses, the ranks of his disciples swelled and those of his enemies shrank. When, shortly before his death, he published a paper explaining how anyone could enter his or her own mind-world at will, his niche in the Freudian hall of fame was assured. The method employed an ability that had been evolving in the human mind for millennia—the ability to project oneself into a past moment—or, to use Trevor's term, a past "place-time." Considerable practice was required before the first transition could be achieved, but once it was achieved, successive transitions became progressively easier. Entering another person's mind-world was of course a more difficult undertaking, and could be achieved only after an intensive study of a certain moment in that person's past. In order to return to the objective world, it was necessary in both cases to locate the most recently materialized place-time and take one step beyond it. By their very nature, mind-countries were confusing. They existed on a plane of reality that bore no apparent relationship to the plane of the so-called objective universe. In fact, so far as was known, this secondary—or subjective—reality was connected to so-called true reality only through the awareness of the various creators. In addition, these countries had no outward shape in the ordinary sense of the word, and while most countries contained certain parallel images, these images were subject to the interpretation of the individual creator. As a result they were seldom identical. It was inevitable that sooner or later some criminal would hit upon the idea of hiding out in his own mind-world till the statute of limitations that applied to his particular crime ran out, and it was equally inevitable that others should follow suit. Society's answer was the psyche-police, and the psyche-police hadn't been in action very long before the first private psycheye appeared. Blake was one of a long line of such operators. So far as he knew, the present case represented the first time a criminal had ever hidden out in the pursuer's mind. It would have been a superb stratagem indeed if, shortly after her entry, Sabrina York had not betrayed her presence. For her point of entry she had used the place-time materialization of the little office Blake had opened on Ex-earth at the beginning of his career. Unaccountably she had ransacked it before moving into a co-terminous memory-image. Even this action wouldn't have given her away, however, if the office hadn't constituted a sentimental memory. Whenever Blake accepted a case he invariably thought of the bleak and lonely little room with its thin-gauge steel desk and battered filing cabinets, and when he had done so after accepting his case—or was it before? He couldn't quite remember—the mental picture that had come into his mind had revealed open drawers, scattered papers and a general air of disarray. He had suspected the truth immediately, and when he had seen the woman's handkerchief with the initials "SB" embroidered on it lying by one of the filing cabinets he had known definitely that his quarry was hiding out in his mind. Retiring to his bachelor quarters, he had entered at the same place-time and set off in pursuit. Her only advantage lost, Sabrina York was now at his mercy. Unless she discovered his presence and was able to locate his most recently materialized place-time before he over-took her, her capture was assured. Only two things bothered Blake. The little office was far in his past, and it was unlikely that anyone save the few intimate acquaintances whom he had told about it were aware that it had ever existed. How, then, had a total stranger such as Sabrina York learned enough about it to enable her to use it as a point of entry? The other thing that bothered him was of a much more urgent nature. He had been in enough minds and he had read enough on the subject of Trevorism to know that people were sometimes capable of creating beings considerably higher on the scale of mind-country evolution than ordinary memory-ghosts. One woman whom he had apprehended in her own mind had created a walking-talking Virgin Mary who watched over her wherever she went. And once, after tracking down an ex-enlisted man, he had found his quarry holed up in the memory-image of an army barracks with a ten-star general waiting on him hand and foot. But these, and other, similar, cases, had to do with mal-adjusted people, and moreover, the super-image in each instance had been an image that the person involved had wanted to create. Therefore, even assuming that Blake was less well-adjusted than he considered himself to be, why had he created three such malevolent super-images as Miss Stoddart, Officer Finch, and Vera Velvetskin? They followed him off the campus into a vicarious memory-image of Walden Pond, Thoreau's shack, and the encompassing woods. Judging from the ecstatic "oh's" and "ah's" they kept giving voice to, the place delighted them. Once, glancing back over his shoulder, he saw them standing in front of Thoreau's shack, looking at it as though it were a doll's house. Not far away, Thoreau was sitting in under a tall pine, gazing up into the branches at a bird that had come through only as a vague blur of beak and feathers. Blake went on. Presently the Walden Pond memory-image gave way to a memory-image of an English park which the ex-Earth government had set aside as a memorial to the English poets and which had impressed Blake sufficiently when he had visited it in his youth to have found a place for itself in the country of his mind. It consisted of reconstructions of famous dwellings out of the lives of the poets, among them, a dwelling out of the life of a poet who was not in the strictest sense of the word English at all—the birthplace of Robert Burns. Oddly enough, it was Burns's birthplace that had impressed Blake most. Now the little cottage stood out in much more vivid detail than any of the other famous dwellings. Sabrina York must have been attracted to the place, for her footprints showed that she had turned in at the gate, walked up the little path and let herself in the door. They also showed that she had left by the same route, so there was no reason for Blake to linger. As a matter of fact, the fascination that had brought the place into being had been replaced by an illogical repugnance. But repugnance can sometimes be as compelling a force as fascination, and Blake not only lingered but went inside as well. He remembered the living room distinctly—the flagstone floor, the huge grill-fronted hearth, the deeply recessed window, the rack of cups and platters on the wall; the empty straight-backed chair standing sternly in a corner, the bare wooden table— He paused just within the doorway. The chair was no longer empty, the table no longer bare. A man sat on the former and a bottle of wine stood on the latter. Moreover, the room showed signs of having been lived in for a long time. The floor was covered with tracked-in dirt and the walls were blackened from smoke. The grill-work of the hearth was begrimed with grease.

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LOST IN TRANSLATION By LARRY M. HARRIS In language translation, you may get a literally accurate word-for-word translation ... but miss the meaning entirely. And in space-type translation ... the effect may be the same! Illustrated by Schoenherr The cell had been put together more efficiently than any Korvin had ever been in. But that was only natural, he told himself sadly; the Tr'en were an efficient people. All the preliminary reports had agreed on that; their efficiency, as a matter of fact, was what had made Korvin's arrival a necessity. They were well into the atomic era, and were on the verge of developing space travel. Before long they'd be settling the other planets of their system, and then the nearer stars. Faster-than-light travel couldn't be far away, for the magnificently efficient physical scientists of the Tr'en—and that would mean, in the ordinary course of events, an invitation to join the Comity of Planets. An invitation, the Comity was sure, which the Tr'en would not accept. Korvin stretched out on the cell's single bunk, a rigid affair which was hardly meant for comfort, and sighed. He'd had three days of isolation, with nothing to do but explore the resources of his own mind. He'd tried some of the ancient Rhine experiments, but that was no good; he still didn't show any particular psi talents. He couldn't unlock the cell door with his unaided mind; he couldn't even alter the probability of a single dust-mote's Brownian path through the somewhat smelly air. Nor could he disappear from his cell and appear, as if by magic, several miles away near the slightly-damaged hulk of his ship, to the wonder and amazement of his Tr'en captors. He could do, as a matter of fact, precisely nothing. He wished quietly that the Tr'en had seen fit to give him a pack of cards, or a book, or even a folder of tourist pictures. The Wonders of Tr'en, according to all the advance reports, were likely to be pretty boring, but they'd have been better than nothing. In any decently-run jail, he told himself with indignation, there would at least have been other prisoners to talk to. But on Tr'en Korvin was all alone. True, every night the guards came in and gave him a concentrated lesson in the local language, but Korvin failed to get much pleasure out of that, being unconscious at the time. But now he was equipped to discuss almost anything from philosophy to plumbing, but there was nobody to discuss it with. He changed position on the bunk and stared at the walls. The Tr'en were efficient; there weren't even any imperfections in the smooth surface to distract him. He wasn't tired and he wasn't hungry; his captors had left him with a full stock of food concentrates. But he was almightily bored, and about ready to tell anything to anyone, just for the chance at a little conversation. As he reached this dismal conclusion, the cell door opened. Korvin got up off the bunk in a hurry and spun around to face his visitor. The Tr'en was tall, and slightly green. He looked, as all the Tr'en did, vaguely humanoid—that is, if you don't bother to examine him closely. Life in the universe appeared to be rigidly limited to humanoid types on oxygen planets; Korvin didn't know why, and neither did anybody else. There were a lot of theories, but none that accounted for all the facts satisfactorily. Korvin really didn't care about it; it was none of his business. The Tr'en regarded him narrowly through catlike pupils. "You are Korvin," he said. It was a ritual, Korvin had learned. "You are of the Tr'en," he replied. The green being nodded. "I am Didyak of the Tr'en," he said. Amenities over with, he relaxed slightly—but no more than slightly—and came into the cell, closing the door behind him. Korvin thought of jumping the Tr'en, but decided quickly against it. He was a captive, and it was unwise to assume that his captors had no more resources than the ones he saw: a small translucent pistollike affair in a holster at the Tr'en's side, and a small knife in a sheath at the belt. Those Korvin could deal with; but there might be almost anything else hidden and ready to fire on him. "What do you want with me?" Korvin said. The Tr'en speech—apparently there was only one language on the planet—was stiff and slightly awkward, but easily enough learned under drug hypnosis; it was the most rigorously logical construction of its kind Korvin had ever come across. It reminded him of some of the mathematical metalanguages he'd dealt with back on Earth, in training; but it was more closely and carefully constructed than even those marvels. "I want nothing with you," Didyak said, leaning against the door-frame. "You have other questions?" Korvin sighed. "What are you doing here, then?" he asked. As conversation, it wasn't very choice; but it was, he admitted, better than solitude. "I am leaning against the door," Didyak said. The Tr'en literalist approach to the smallest problems of everyday living was a little hard to get the hang of, Korvin told himself bitterly. He thought for a second. "Why did you come to me?" he said at last. Didyak beamed at him. The sight was remarkably unpleasant, involving as it did the disclosure of the Tr'en fifty-eight teeth, mostly pointed. Korvin stared back impassively. "I have been ordered to come to you," Didyak said, "by the Ruler. The Ruler wishes to talk with you." It wasn't quite "talk"; that was a general word in the Tr'en language, and Didyak had used a specific meaning, roughly: "gain information from, by peaceful and vocal means." Korvin filed it away for future reference. "Why did the Ruler not come to me?" Korvin asked. "The Ruler is the Ruler," Didyak said, slightly discomfited. "You are to go to him. Such is his command." Korvin shrugged, sighed and smoothed back his hair. "I obey the command of the Ruler," he said—another ritual. Everybody obeyed the command of the Ruler. If you didn't, you never had a second chance to try. But Korvin meant exactly what he'd said. He was going to obey the commands of the Ruler of the Tr'en—and remove the Tr'en threat from the rest of the galaxy forever. That, after all, was his job. The Room of the Ruler was large, square and excessively brown. The walls were dark-brown, the furnishings—a single great chair, several kneeling-benches and a small table near the chair—were light-brown, of some metallic substance, and even the drapes were tan. It was, Korvin decided, much too much of a bad idea, even when the color contrast of the Tr'en themselves were figured in. The Ruler himself, a Tr'en over seven feet tall and correspondingly broad, sat in the great chair, his four fingers tapping gently on the table near him, staring at Korvin and his guards. The guards stood on either side of their captive, looking as impassive as jade statues, six and a half feet high. Korvin wasn't attempting to escape. He wasn't pleading with the Ruler. He wasn't defying the Ruler, either. He was just answering questions. The Tr'en liked to have everything clear. They were a logical race. The Ruler had started with Korvin's race, his name, his sex—if any—and whether or not his appearance were normal for humanity. Korvin was answering the last question. "Some men are larger than I am," he said, "and some are smaller." "Within what limits?" Korvin shrugged. "Some are over eight feet tall," he said, "and others under four feet." He used the Tr'en measurement scale, of course; it didn't seem necessary, though, to mention that both extremes of height were at the circus-freak level. "Then there is a group of humans," he went on, "who are never more than a foot and a half in height, and usually less than that—approximately nine or ten inches. We call these children ," he volunteered helpfully. "Approximately?" the Ruler growled. "We ask for precision here," he said. "We are scientific men. We are exact." Korvin nodded hurriedly. "Our race is more ... more approximate," he said apologetically. "Slipshod," the Ruler muttered. "Undoubtedly," Korvin agreed politely. "I'll try to do the best I can for you." "You will answer my questions," the Ruler said, "with exactitude." He paused, frowning slightly. "You landed your ship on this planet," he went on. "Why?" "My job required it," Korvin said. "A clumsy lie," the Ruler said. "The ship crashed; our examinations prove that beyond any doubt." "True," Korvin said. "And it is your job to crash your ship?" the Ruler said. "Wasteful." Korvin shrugged again. "What I say is true," he announced. "Do you have tests for such matters?" "We do," the Ruler told him. "We are an exact and a scientific race. A machine for the testing of truth has been adjusted to your physiology. It will be attached to you." Korvin looked around and saw it coming through the door, pushed by two technicians. It was large and squat and metallic, and it had wheels, dials, blinking lights, tubes and wires, and a seat with armrests and straps. It was obviously a form of lie-detector—and Korvin felt himself marveling again at this race. Earth science had nothing to match their enormous command of the physical universe; adapting a hypnopædic language-course to an alien being so quickly had been wonder enough, but adapting the perilously delicate mechanisms that necessarily made up any lie-detector machinery was almost a miracle. The Tr'en, under other circumstances, would have been a valuable addition to the Comity of Nations. Being what they were, though, they could only be a menace. And Korvin's appreciation of the size of that menace was growing hourly. He hoped the lie-detector had been adjusted correctly. If it showed him telling an untruth, he wasn't likely to live long, and his job—not to mention the strongest personal inclinations—demanded most strongly that he stay alive. He swallowed hard. But when the technicians forced him down into the seat, buckled straps around him, attached wires and electrodes and elastic bands to him at appropriate places and tightened some final screws, he made no resistance. "We shall test the machine," the Ruler said. "In what room are you?" "In the Room of the Ruler," Korvin said equably. "Are you standing or sitting?" "I am sitting," Korvin said. "Are you a chulad ?" the Ruler asked. A chulad was a small native pet, Korvin knew, something like a greatly magnified deathwatch beetle. "I am not," he said. The Ruler looked to his technicians for a signal, and nodded on receiving it. "You will tell an untruth now," he said. "Are you standing or sitting?" "I am standing," Korvin said. The technicians gave another signal. The Ruler looked, in his frowning manner, reasonably satisfied. "The machine," he announced, "has been adjusted satisfactorily to your physiology. The questioning will now continue." Korvin swallowed again. The test hadn't really seemed extensive enough to him. But, after all, the Tr'en knew their business, better than anyone else could know it. They had the technique and the logic and the training. He hoped they were right. The Ruler was frowning at him. Korvin did his best to look receptive. "Why did you land your ship on this planet?" the Ruler said. "My job required it," Korvin said. The Ruler nodded. "Your job is to crash your ship," he said. "It is wasteful but the machines tell me it is true. Very well, then; we shall find out more about your job. Was the crash intentional?" Korvin looked sober. "Yes," he said. The Ruler blinked. "Very well," he said. "Was your job ended when the ship crashed?" The Tr'en word, of course, wasn't ended , nor did it mean exactly that. As nearly as Korvin could make out, it meant "disposed of for all time." "No," he said. "What else does your job entail?" the Ruler said. Korvin decided to throw his first spoke into the wheel. "Staying alive." The Ruler roared. "Do not waste time with the obvious!" he shouted. "Do not try to trick us; we are a logical and scientific race! Answer correctly." "I have told the truth," Korvin said. "But it is not—not the truth we want," the Ruler said. Korvin shrugged. "I replied to your question," he said. "I did not know that there was more than one kind of truth. Surely the truth is the truth, just as the Ruler is the Ruler?" "I—" The Ruler stopped himself in mid-roar. "You try to confuse the Ruler," he said at last, in an approximation of his usual one. "But the Ruler will not be confused. We have experts in matters of logic"—the Tr'en word seemed to mean right-saying —"who will advise the Ruler. They will be called." Korvin's guards were standing around doing nothing of importance now that their captor was strapped down in the lie-detector. The Ruler gestured and they went out the door in a hurry. The Ruler looked down at Korvin. "You will find that you cannot trick us," he said. "You will find that such fiddling"— chulad-like Korvin translated—"attempts will get you nowhere." Korvin devoutly hoped so. The experts in logic arrived shortly, and in no uncertain terms Korvin was given to understand that logical paradox was not going to confuse anybody on the planet. The barber who did, or didn't, shave himself, the secretary of the club whose members were secretaries, Achilles and the tortoise, and all the other lovely paradox-models scattered around were so much primer material for the Tr'en. "They can be treated mathematically," one of the experts, a small emerald-green being, told Korvin thinly. "Of course, you would not understand the mathematics. But that is not important. You need only understand that we cannot be confused by such means." "Good," Korvin said. The experts blinked. "Good?" he said. "Naturally," Korvin said in a friendly tone. The expert frowned horribly, showing all of his teeth. Korvin did his best not to react. "Your plan is a failure," the expert said, "and you call this a good thing. You can mean only that your plan is different from the one we are occupied with." "True," Korvin said. There was a short silence. The expert beamed. He examined the indicators of the lie-detector with great care. "What is your plan?" he said at last, in a conspiratorial whisper. "To answer your questions, truthfully and logically," Korvin said. The silence this time was even longer. "The machine says that you tell the truth," the experts said at last, in a awed tone. "Thus, you must be a traitor to your native planet. You must want us to conquer your planet, and have come here secretly to aid us." Korvin was very glad that wasn't a question. It was, after all, the only logical deduction. But it happened to be wrong. "The name of your planet is Earth?" the Ruler asked. A few minutes had passed; the experts were clustered around the single chair. Korvin was still strapped to the machine; a logical race makes use of a traitor, but a logical race does not trust him. "Sometimes," Korvin said. "It has other names?" the Ruler said. "It has no name," Korvin said truthfully. The Tr'en idiom was like the Earthly one; and certainly a planet had no name. People attached names to it, that was all. It had none of its own. "Yet you call it Earth?" the Ruler said. "I do," Korvin said, "for convenience." "Do you know its location?" the Ruler said. "Not with exactitude," Korvin said. There was a stir. "But you can find it again," the Ruler said. "I can," Korvin said. "And you will tell us about it?" the Ruler went on. "I will," Korvin said, "so far as I am able." "We will wish to know about weapons," the Ruler said, "and about plans and fortifications. But we must first know of the manner of decision on this planet. Is your planet joined with others in a government or does it exist alone?" Korvin nearly smiled. "Both," he said. A short silence was broken by one of the attendant experts. "We have theorized that an underling may be permitted to make some of his own decisions, leaving only the more extensive ones for the master. This seems to us inefficient and liable to error, yet it is a possible system. Is it the system you mean?" Very sharp, Korvin told himself grimly. "It is," he said. "Then the government which reigns over several planets is supreme," the Ruler said. "It is," Korvin said. "Who is it that governs?" the Ruler said. The key question had, at last, been asked. Korvin felt grateful that the logical Tr'en had determined to begin from the beginning, instead of going off after details of armament first; it saved a lot of time. "The answer to that question," Korvin said, "cannot be given to you." "Any question of fact has an answer," the Ruler snapped. "A paradox is not involved here; a government exists, and some being is the governor. Perhaps several beings share this task; perhaps machines do the work. But where there is a government, there is a governor. Is this agreed?" "Certainly," Korvin said. "It is completely obvious and true." "The planet from which you come is part of a system of planets which are governed, you have said," the Ruler went on. "True," Korvin said. "Then there is a governor for this system," the Ruler said. "True," Korvin said again. The ruler sighed gently. "Explain this governor to us," he said. Korvin shrugged. "The explanation cannot be given to you." The Ruler turned to a group of his experts and a short muttered conversation took place. At its end the Ruler turned his gaze back to Korvin. "Is the deficiency in you?" he said. "Are you in some way unable to describe this government?" "It can be described," Korvin said. "Then you will suffer unpleasant consequences if you describe it to us?" the Ruler went on. "I will not," Korvin said. It was the signal for another conference. With some satisfaction, Korvin noticed that the Tr'en were becoming slightly puzzled; they were no longer moving and speaking with calm assurance. The plan was taking hold. The Ruler had finished his conference. "You are attempting again to confuse us," he said. Korvin shook his head earnestly. "I am attempting," he said, "not to confuse you." "Then I ask for an answer," the Ruler said. "I request that I be allowed to ask a question," Korvin said. The Ruler hesitated, then nodded. "Ask it," he said. "We shall answer it if we see fit to do so." Korvin tried to look grateful. "Well, then," he said, "what is your government?" The Ruler beckoned to a heavy-set green being, who stepped forward from a knot of Tr'en, inclined his head in Korvin's direction, and began. "Our government is the only logical form of government," he said in a high, sweet tenor. "The Ruler orders all, and his subjects obey. In this way uniformity is gained, and this uniformity aids in the speed of possible action and in the weight of action. All Tr'en act instantly in the same manner. The Ruler is adopted by the previous Ruler; in this way we are assured of a common wisdom and a steady judgment." "You have heard our government defined," the Ruler said. "Now, you will define yours for us." Korvin shook his head. "If you insist," he said, "I'll try it. But you won't understand it." The Ruler frowned. "We shall understand," he said. "Begin. Who governs you?" "None," Korvin said. "But you are governed?" Korvin nodded. "Yes." "Then there is a governor," the Ruler insisted. "True," Korvin said. "But everyone is the governor." "Then there is no government," the Ruler said. "There is no single decision." "No," Korvin said equably, "there are many decisions binding on all." "Who makes them binding?" the Ruler asked. "Who forces you to accept these decisions? Some of them must be unfavorable to some beings?" "Many of them are unfavorable," Korvin said. "But we are not forced to accept them." "Do you act against your own interests?" Korvin shrugged. "Not knowingly," he said. The Ruler flashed a look at the technicians handling the lie-detector. Korvin turned to see their expression. They needed no words; the lie-detector was telling them, perfectly obviously, that he was speaking the truth. But the truth wasn't making any sense. "I told you you wouldn't understand it," he said. "It is a defect in your explanation," the Ruler almost snarled. "My explanation is as exact as it can be," he said. The Ruler breathed gustily. "Let us try something else," he said. "Everyone is the governor. Do you share a single mind? A racial mind has been theorized, though we have met with no examples—" "Neither have we," Korvin said. "We are all individuals, like yourselves." "But with no single ruler to form policy, to make decisions—" "We have no need of one," Korvin said calmly. "Ah," the Ruler said suddenly, as if he saw daylight ahead. "And why not?" "We call our form of government democracy ," Korvin said. "It means the rule of the people. There is no need for another ruler." One of the experts piped up suddenly. "The beings themselves rule each other?" he said. "This is clearly impossible; for, no one being can have the force to compel acceptance of his commands. Without his force, there can be no effective rule." "That is our form of government," Korvin said. "You are lying," the expert said. One of the technicians chimed in: "The machine tells us—" "Then the machine is faulty," the expert said. "It will be corrected." Korvin wondered, as the technicians argued, how long they'd take studying the machine, before they realized it didn't have any defects to correct. He hoped it wasn't going to be too long; he could foresee another stretch of boredom coming. And, besides, he was getting homesick. It took three days—but boredom never really had a chance to set in. Korvin found himself the object of more attention than he had hoped for; one by one, the experts came to his cell, each with a different method of resolving the obvious contradictions in his statements. Some of them went away fuming. Others simply went away, puzzled. On the third day Korvin escaped. It wasn't very difficult; he hadn't thought it would be. Even the most logical of thinking beings has a subconscious as well as a conscious mind, and one of the ways of dealing with an insoluble problem is to make the problem disappear. There were only two ways of doing that, and killing the problem's main focus was a little more complicated. That couldn't be done by the subconscious mind; the conscious had to intervene somewhere. And it couldn't. Because that would mean recognizing, fully and consciously, that the problem was insoluble. And the Tr'en weren't capable of that sort of thinking. Korvin thanked his lucky stars that their genius had been restricted to the physical and mathematical. Any insight at all into the mental sciences would have given them the key to his existence, and his entire plan, within seconds. But, then, it was lack of that insight that had called for this particular plan. That, and the political structure of the Tr'en. The same lack of insight let the Tr'en subconscious work on his escape without any annoying distractions in the way of deep reflection. Someone left a door unlocked and a weapon nearby—all quite intent, Korvin was sure. Getting to the ship was a little more complicated, but presented no new problems; he was airborne, and then space-borne, inside of a few hours after leaving the cell. He set his course, relaxed, and cleared his mind. He had no psionic talents, but the men at Earth Central did; he couldn't receive messages, but he could send them. He sent one now. Mission accomplished; the Tr'en aren't about to come marauding out into space too soon. They've been given food for thought—nice indigestible food that's going to stick in their craws until they finally manage to digest it. But they can't digest it and stay what they are; you've got to be democratic, to some extent, to understand the idea. What keeps us obeying laws we ourselves make? What keeps us obeying laws that make things inconvenient for us? Sheer self-interest, of course—but try to make a Tr'en see it! With one government and one language, they just weren't equipped for translation. They were too efficient physically to try for the mental sciences at all. No mental sciences, no insight into my mind or their own—and that means no translation. But—damn it—I wish I were home already. I'm bored absolutely stiff! THE END

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CAPTAIN CHAOS By NELSON S. BOND The Callisto-bound Leo needed a cook. What it got was a piping-voiced Jonah who jinxed it straight into Chaos. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We picked up our new cook on Phobos. Not Phoebus or Phoebe; I mean Phobos, Mars' inner moon. Our regular victual mangler came down with acute indigestion—tasted some of his own cooking, no doubt—when we were just one blast of a jet-tube out of Sand City spaceport. But since we were rocketing under sealed orders, we couldn't turn back. So we laid the Leo down on Phobos' tiny cradle-field and bundled our ailing grub-hurler off to a hospital, and the skipper said to me, "Mister Dugan," he said, "go out and find us a cook!" "Aye, sir!" I said, and went. Only it wasn't that easy. In those days, Phobos had only a handful of settlers, and most of them had good-paying jobs. Besides, we were at war with the Outer Planets, and no man in his right senses wanted to sign for a single-trip jump on a rickety old patrolship bound for nobody-knew-where. And, of course, cooks are dime-a-dozen when you don't need one, but when you've got to locate one in a hurry they're as difficult to find as petticoats in a nudist camp. I tried the restaurants and the employment agencies, but it was no dice. I tried the hotels and the tourist homes and even one or two of the cleaner-looking joy-joints. Again I drew a blank. So, getting desperate, I audioed a plaintive appeal to the wealthy Phobosian colonists, asking that one of the more patriotic sons-of-riches donate a chef's services to the good old I.P.S., but my only response was a loud silence. So I went back to the ship. I said, "Sorry, sir. We're up against it. I can't seem to find a cook on the whole darned satellite." The skipper scowled at me from under a corduroy brow and fumed, "But we've got to have a cook, Dugan! We can't go on without one!" "In a pinch," I told him, " I might be able to boil a few pies, or scramble us a steak or something, Skipper." "Thanks, Dugan, but that won't do. On this trip the men must be fed regularly and well. Makeshift meals are O.Q. on an ordinary run, but when you're running the blockade—" He stopped abruptly. But too late; I had caught his slip of the tongue. I stared at him. I said, "The blockade, sir? Then you've read our orders?" The Old Man nodded soberly. "Yes. You might as well know, Lieutenant. Everyone will be told as soon as the Leo lifts gravs again. My orders were to be opened four hours after leaving Sand City. I read them a few minutes ago. "We are to attempt to run the Outer Planets Alliance blockade at any spot which reconnaisance determines as favorable. Our objective is Jupiter's fourth satellite, Callisto. The Solar Federation Intelligence Department has learned of a loyalist uprising on that moon. It is reported that Callisto is weary of the war, with a little prompting will secede from the Alliance and return to the Federation. "If this is true, it means we have at last found the foothold we have been seeking; a salient within easy striking distance of Jupiter, capital of the Alliance government. Our task is to verify the rumor and, if it be true, make a treaty with the Callistans." I said, "Sweet howling stars—some assignment, sir! A chance to end this terrible war ... form a permanent union of the entire Solar family ... bring about a new age of prosperity and happiness." "If," Cap O'Hara reminded me, "we succeed. But it's a tough job. We can't expect to win through the enemy cordon unless our men are in top physical condition. And that means a sound, regular diet. So we must find a cook, or—" "The search," interrupted an oddly high-pitched, but not unpleasant voice, "is over. Where's the galley?" I whirled, and so did the Old Man. Facing us was an outlandish little figure; a slim, trim, natty little Earthman not more than five-foot-two in height; a smooth-cheeked young fellow swaddled in a spaceman's uniform at least three sizes too large. Into the holster of his harness was thrust a Haemholtz ray-pistol big enough to burn an army, and in his right hand he brandished a huge, gleaming carving-knife. He frowned at us impatiently. "Well," he repeated impatiently, "where is it?" The Old Man stared. "W-who," he demanded dazedly, "might you be?" "I might be," retorted the little stranger, "lots of people. But I came here to be your new cook." O'Hara said, "The new—What's your name, mister?" "Andy," replied the newcomer. "Andy Laney." The Old Man's lip curled speculatively. "Well, Andy Laney," he said, "you don't look like much of a cook to me ." But the little mugg just returned the Old Man's gaze coolly. "Which makes it even," he retorted. " You don't look like much of a skipper to me . Do I get the job, or don't I?" The captain's grin faded, and his jowls turned pink. I stepped forward hastily. I said, "Excuse me, sir, shall I handle this?" Then, because the skipper was still struggling for words: "You," I said to the little fellow, "are a cook?" "One of the best!" he claimed complacently. "You're willing to sign for a blind journey?" "Would I be here," he countered, "if I weren't?" "And you have your space certificate?" "I—" began the youngster. "Smart Aleck!" That was the Old Man, exploding into coherence at last. "Rat-tailed, clever-cracking little smart Aleck! Don't look like much of a skipper, eh? Well, my fine young rooster—" I said quickly, "If you don't mind, sir, this is no time to worry over trifles. 'Any port in a storm,' you know. And if this young man can cook—" The skipper's color subsided. So did he, grumbling. "Well, perhaps you're right, Dugan. All right, Slops, you're hired. The galley's on the second level, port side. Mess in three quarters of an hour. Get going! Dugan, call McMurtrie and tell him we lift gravs immediately— Slops! What are you doing at that table?" For the little fellow had sidled across the control-room and now, eyes gleaming inquisitively, was peering at our trajectory charts. At the skipper's roar he glanced up at us eagerly. "Vesta!" he piped in that curiously high-pitched and mellow voice. "Loft trajectory for Vesta! Then we're trying to run the Alliance blockade, Captain?" "None of your business!" bellowed O'Hara in tones of thunderous outrage. "Get below instantly, or by the lavendar lakes of Luna I'll—" "If I were you," interrupted our diminutive new chef thoughtfully, "I'd try to broach the blockade off Iris rather than Vesta. For one thing, their patrol line will be thinner there; for another, you can come in through the Meteor Bog, using it as a cover." " Mr. Dugan! " The Old Man's voice had an ominous ring to it, one I had seldom heard. I sprang to attention and saluted smartly. "Aye, sir?" "Take this—this culinary tactician out of my sight before I forget I'm an officer and a gentleman. And tell him that when I want advice I'll come down to the galley for it!" A hurt look crept into the youngster's eyes. Slowly he turned and followed me from the turret, down the ramp, and into the pan-lined cubicle which was his proper headquarters. When I was turning to leave he said apologetically, "I didn't mean any harm, Mr. Dugan. I was just trying to help." "You must learn not to speak out of turn, youngster," I told him sternly. "The Old Man's one of the smartest space navigators who ever lifted gravs. He doesn't need the advice or suggestions of a cook." "But I was raised in the Belt," said the little chap plaintively. "I know the Bog like a book. And I was right; our safest course is by way of Iris." Well, there you are! You try to be nice to someone, and what happens? He tees off on you. I got a little sore I guess. Anyhow, I told the little squirt off, but definitely. "Now, listen!" I said bluntly. "You volunteered for the job. Now you've got to take what comes with it: orders! From now on, suppose you take care of the cooking and let the rest of us worry about the ship—Captain Slops!" And I left, banging the door behind me hard. So we hit the spaceways for Vesta, and after a while the Old Man called up the crew and told them our destination, and if you think they were scared or nervous or anything like that, why, you just don't know spacemen. From oil-soaked old Jock McMurtrie, the Chief Engineer, all the way down the line to Willy, our cabin-boy, the Leo's complement was as thrilled as a sub-deb at an Academy hop. John Wainwright, our First Officer, licked his chops like a fox in a hen-house and said, "The blockade! Oboyoboy! Maybe we'll tangle with one of the Alliance ships, hey?" Blinky Todd, an ordinary with highest rating, said with a sort of macabre satisfaction, "I hopes we do meet up with 'em, that's whut I does, sir! Never did have no love for them dirty, skulkin' Outlanders, that's whut I didn't!" And one of the black-gang blasters, a taciturn chap, said nothing—but the grim set of his jaw and the purposeful way he spat on his callused paws were mutely eloquent. Only one member of the crew was absent from the conclave. Our new Slops. He was busy preparing midday mess, it seems, because scarcely had the skipper finished talking than the audio hummed and a cheerful call rose from the galley: "Soup's on! Come and get it!" Which we did. And whatever failings "Captain Slops" might have, he had not exaggerated when he called himself one of the best cooks in space. That meal, children, was a meal! When it comes to victuals I can destroy better than describe, but there was stuff and things and such-like, all smothered in gravy and so on, and huge quantities of this and that and the other thing, all of them unbelievably dee-luscious! Beyond a doubt it was the finest feast we of the Leo had enjoyed in a 'coon's age. Even the Old Man admitted that as, leaning back from the table, he patted the pleasant bulge due south of his belt buckle. He rang the bell that summoned Slops from the galley, and the little fellow came bustling in apprehensively. "Was everything all right, sir?" he asked. "Not only all right, Slops," wheezed Captain O'Hara, "but perfect! Accept my congratulations on a superb meal, my boy. Did you find everything O.Q. in the galley?" "Captain Slops" blushed like a stereo-struck school-gal, and fidgeted from one foot to another. "Oh, thank you, sir! Thank you very much. Yes, the galley was in fine order. That is—" He hesitated—"there is one little thing, sir." "So? Well, speak up, son, what is it? I'll get it fixed for you right away." The Old Man smiled archly. "Must have everything shipshape for a tip-top chef, what?" The young hash-slinger still hesitated bashfully. "But it's such a little thing, sir, I almost hate to bother you with it." "No trouble at all. Just say the word." "Well, sir," confessed Slops reluctantly, "I need an incinerator in the galley. The garbage-disposal system in there now is old-fashioned, inconvenient and unsanitary. You see, I have to carry the waste down two levels to the rocket-chamber in order to expel it." The skipper's brow creased. "I'm sorry, Slops," he said, "but I don't see how we can do anything about that. Not just now, at any rate. That job requires equipment we don't have aboard. After this jump is over I'll see what I can do." "Oh, I realize we don't have the regular equipment," said Slops shyly, "but I've figured out a way to get the same effect with equipment we do have. There's an old Nolan heat-cannon rusting in the storeroom. If that could be installed by the galley vent, I could use it as an incinerator." I said, "Hold everything, Slops! You can't do that! It's against regulations. Code 44, Section xvi, says, 'Fixed armament shall be placed only in gunnery embrasures insulated against the repercussions of firing charges, re-radiation, or other hazards accruent to heavy ordnance.'" Our little chef's face fell. "Now, that's too bad," he said discouragedly. "I was planning a special banquet for tomorrow, with roast marsh-duck and all the fixings, pinberry pie—but, oh, well!—if I have no incinerator—" The skipper's eyes bulged, and he drooled like a pup at a barbeque. He was a bit of a sybarite, was Captain David O'Hara; if there was anything he dearly loved to exercise his molars on it was Venusian marsh-duck topped with a dessert of Martian pinberry pie. He said: "We-e-ell, now, Mr. Dugan, let's not be too technical. After all, that rule was put in the book only to prevent persons which shouldn't ought to do so from having control of ordnance. But that isn't what Slops wants the cannon for, is it, son? So I don't see any harm in rigging up the old Nolan in the galley for incineration purposes. Did you say all the fixings, Slops?" Maybe I was mistaken, but for a moment I suspected I caught a queer glint in our little chef's eyes; it might have been gratitude, or, on the other hand, it might have been self-satisfaction. Whatever it was it passed quickly, and Captain Slops' soft voice was smooth as silk when he said: "Yes, Captain, all the fixings. I'll start cooking the meal as soon as the new incinerator is installed." So that was that. During the night watch two men of the crew lugged the ancient Nolan heat cannon from stores and I went below to check. I found young Slops bent over the old cannon, giving it a strenuous and thorough cleaning. The way he was oiling and scrubbing at that antique reminded me of an apprentice gunner coddling his first charge. I must have startled him, entering unexpectedly as I did, for when I said, "Hi, there!" he jumped two feet and let loose a sissy little piping squeal. Then, crimson-faced with embarrassment, he said, "Oh, h-hello, Lieutenant. I was just getting my new incinerator shipshape. Looks O.Q., eh?" "If you ask me," I said, "it looks downright lethal. The Old Man must be off his gravs to let a young chuckle-head like you handle that toy." "But I'm only going to use it," he said plaintively, "to dispose of garbage." "Well, don't dump your cans when there are any ships within range," I warned him glumly, "or there'll be a mess of human scraps littering up the void. That gun may be a museum piece, but it still packs a wallop." "Yes, sir," said Slops meekly. "I'll be careful how I use it, sir." I had finished my inspection, and I sniggered as his words reminded me of a joke I'd heard at a spacemans' smoker. "Speaking of being careful, did you hear the giggler about the old maid at the Martian baths? Well, it seems this perennial spinster wandered, by accident, into the men's shower room and met up with a brawny young prospector—" Captain Slops said, "Er—excuse me, Lieutenant, but I have to get this marsh-duck stuffed." "Plenty of time, Slops. Wait till you hear this; it will kill you. The old maid got flustered and said, 'Oh, I'm sorry! I must be in the wrong compartment—'" "If you don't mind, Mr. Dugan," interrupted the cook loudly, "I'm awfully busy. I don't have any time for—" "The prospector looked her over carefully for a couple of seconds; then answered, 'That's O.Q. by me, sister. I won't—'" "I—I've got to go now, Lieutenant," shouted Slops. "Just remembered something I've got to get from stores." And without even waiting to hear the wallop at the end of my tale he fled from the galley, very pink and flustered. So there was one for the log-book! Not only did our emergency chef lack a sense of humor, but the little punk was bashful, as well! Still, it was no skin off my nose if Slops wanted to miss the funniest yarn of a decade. I shrugged and went back to the control turret. All that, to make an elongated story brief, happened on the first day out of Mars. As any schoolchild knows, it's a full hundred million from the desert planet to the asteroid belt. In those days, there was no such device as a Velocity-Intensifier unit, and the Leo , even though she was then considered a reasonably fast little patroller, muddled along at a mere 400,000 m.p.h. Which meant it would take us at least ten days, perhaps more, to reach that disputed region of space around Vesta, where the Federation outposts were sparse and the Alliance block began. That period of jetting was a mingled joy and pain in the britches. Captain Slops was responsible for both. For one thing, as I've hinted before, he was a bit of a panty-waist. It wasn't so much the squeaky voice or the effeminate gestures he cut loose with from time to time. One of the roughest, toughest scoundrels who ever cut a throat on Venus was "High G" Gordon, who talked like a boy soprano, and the meanest pirate who ever highjacked a freighter was "Runt" Hake—who wore diamond ear-rings and gold fingernail polish! But it was Slops' general attitude that isolated him from the command and crew. In addition to being a most awful prude, he was a kill-joy. When just for a lark we begged him to boil us a pot of spaghetti, so we could pour a cold worm's nest into Rick Bramble's bed, he shuddered and refused. "Certainly not!" he piped indignantly. "You must be out of your minds! I never heard of such a disgusting trick! Of course, I won't be a party to it. Worms—Ugh!" "Yeah!" snorted Johnny Wainwright disdainfully, "And ugh! to you, too. Come on, Joe, let's get out of here before we give Slops bad dreams and goose-flesh!" Nor was hypersensitiveness Slops' worst failing. If he was squeamish about off-color jokes and such stuff, he had no compunctions whatsoever against sticking his nose in where it didn't belong. He was an inveterate prowler. He snooped everywhere and anywhere from ballast-bins to bunk-rooms. He quizzed the Chief about engine-room practices, the gunner's mate on problems of ballistics, even the cabin-boy on matters of supplies and distribution of same. He was not only an asker; he was a teller, as well. More than once during the next nine days he forced on the skipper the same gratuitous advice which before had enraged the Old Man. By sheer perseverance he earned the title I had tagged him with: "Captain Slops." I was willing to give him another title, too—Captain Chaos. God knows he created enough of it! "It's a mistake to broach the blockade at Vesta," he argued over and over again. "O.Q., Slops," the skipper would nod agreeably, with his mouth full of some temper-softening tidbit, "you're right and I'm wrong, as you usually are. But I'm in command of the Leo , and you ain't. Now, run along like a good lad and bring me some more of this salad." So ten days passed, and it was on the morning of the eleventh day out of Sand City that we ran into trouble with a capital trub. I remember that morning well, because I was in the mess-hall having breakfast with Cap O'Hara, and Slops was playing another variation on the old familiar theme. "I glanced at the chart this morning, sir," he began as he minced in with a platterful of golden flapjacks and an ewer of Vermont maple syrup, "and I see we are but an hour or two off Vesta. I am very much afraid this is our last chance to change course—" "And for that," chuckled the Old Man, "Hooray! Pass them pancakes, son. Maybe now you'll stop shooting off about how we ought to of gone by way of Iris. Mmmm! Good!" "Thank you, sir," said Slops mechanically. "But you realize there is extreme danger of encountering enemy ships?" "Keep your pants on, Slops!" "Eh?" The chef looked startled. "Beg pardon, sir?" "I said keep your pants on. Sure, I know. And I've took precautions. There's a double watch on duty, and men at every gun. If we do meet up with an Alliance craft, it'll be just too bad for them! "Yes, sirree!" The Old Man grinned comfortably. "I almost hope we do bump into one. After we burn it out of the void we'll have clear sailing all the way to Callisto." "But—but if there should be more than one, sir?" "Don't be ridiculous, my boy. Why should there be?" "Well, for one thing," wrangled our pint-sized cook, "because rich ekalastron deposits were recently discovered on Vesta. For another, because Vesta's orbit is now going into aphelion stage, which will favor a concentration of raiders." The skipper choked, spluttered, and disgorged a bite of half-masticated pancake. "Eka—Great balls of fire! Are you sure?" "Of course, I'm sure. I told you days ago that I was born and raised in the Belt, Captain." "I know. But why didn't you tell me about Vesta before? I mean about the ekalastron deposits?" "Why—why, because—" said Slops. "Because—" "Don't give me lady-logic, you dope!" roared the Old Man, an enraged lion now, his breakfast completely forgotten. "Give me a sensible answer! If you'd told me that instead of just yipping and yapping about how via Iris was a nicer route I'd have listened to you! As it is, we're blasting smack-dab into the face of danger. And us on the most vital mission of the whole ding-busted war!" He was out of his seat, bustling to the audio, buzzing Lieutenant Wainwright on the bridge. "Johnny—that you? Listen, change traj quick! Set a new course through the Belt by way of Iris and the Bog, and hurry up, because—" What reason he planned to give I do not know, for he never finished that sentence. At that moment the Leo rattled like a Model AA spacesled in an ionic storm, rolled, quivered and slewed like a drunk on a freshly-waxed floor. The motion needed no explanation; it was unmistakeable to any spacer who has ever hopped the blue. Our ship had been gripped, and was now securely locked, in the clutch of a tractor beam! What happened next was everything at once. Officers Wainwright and Bramble were in the turret, and they were both good sailors. They knew their duties and how to perform them. An instant after the Leo had been assaulted, the ship bucked and slithered again, this time with the repercussions of our own ordnance. Over the audio, which Sparks had hastily converted into an all-way, inter-ship communicating unit, came a jumble of voices. A call for Captain O'Hara to "Come to the bridge, sir!" ... the harsh query of Chief McMurtrie, "Tractor beams on stern and prow, sir. Shall I attempt to break them?" ... and a thunderous groooom! from the fore-gunnery port as a crew went into action ... a plaintive little shriek from somebody ... maybe from Slops himself.... Then on an ultra-wave carrier, drowning local noises beneath waves of sheer volume, came English words spoken with a foreign intonation. The voice of the Alliance commander. "Ahoy the Leo ! Calling the captain of the Leo !" O'Hara, his great fists knotted at his sides, called back, "O'Hara of the Leo answering. What do you want?" "Stand by to admit a boarding party, Captain. It is futile to resist. You are surrounded by six armed craft, and your vessel is locked in our tensiles. Any further effort to make combat will bring about your immediate destruction!" From the bridge, topside, snarled Johnny Wainwright, "The hell with 'em, Skipper! Let's fight it out!" And elsewhere on the Leo angry voices echoed the same defi. Never in my life had I felt such a heart-warming love for and pride in my companions as at that tense moment. But the Old Man shook his head, and his eyes were glistening. "It's no use," he moaned strickenly, more to himself than to me. "I can't sacrifice brave men in a useless cause, Dugan. I've got to—" He faced the audio squarely. To the enemy commander he said, "Very good, sir! In accordance with the Rules of War, I surrender into your hands!" The firing ceased, and a stillness like that of death blanketed the Leo . It was then that Andy Laney, who had lingered in the galley doorway like a frozen figuring, broke into babbling incredulous speech. "You—you're giving up like this?" he bleated. "Is this all you're going to do?" The Old Man just looked at him, saying never a word, but that glance would have blistered the hide off a Mercurian steelback. I'm more impetuous. I turned on the little idiot vituperatively. "Shut up, you fool! Don't you realize there's not a thing we can do but surrender? Dead, we're of no earthly use to anyone. Alive, there is always a chance one of us may get away, bring help. We have a mission to fulfil, an important one. Corpses can't run errands." "But—but if they take us prisoners," he questioned fearfully, "what will they do with us?" "A concentration camp somewhere. Perhaps on Vesta." "And the Leo ?" "Who knows? Maybe they'll send it to Jupiter with a prize crew in command." "That's what I thought. But they mustn't be allowed to do that. We're marked with the Federation tricolor!" A sharp retort trembled on the tip of my tongue, but I never uttered it. Indeed, I swallowed it as comprehension dawned. There came to me the beginnings of respect for little Andy Laney's wisdom. He had been right about the danger of the Vesta route, as we had learned to our cost; now he was right on this other score. The skipper got it, too. His jaw dropped. He said, "Heaven help us, it's the truth! To reach Jupiter you've got to pass Callisto. If the Callistans saw a Federation vessel, they'd send out an emissary to greet it. Our secret would be discovered, Callisto occupied by the enemy...." I think he would have turned, then, and given orders to continue the fight even though it meant suicide for all of us. But it was too late. Already our lock had opened to the attackers; down the metal ramp we now heard the crisp cadence of invading footsteps. The door swung open, and the Alliance commandant stood smiling triumphantly before us.

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COMING OF THE GODS By CHESTER WHITEHORN Never had Mars seen such men as these, for they came from black space, carrying weird weapons—to fight for a race of which they had never heard. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Ro moved cautiously. He knew the jungles of Mars well, knew the dangers, the swift death that could come to an unwary traveler. Many times he had seen fellow Martians die by the razor fangs of Gin, the swamp snake. Their clear red skin had become blotched and purple, their eyeballs popped, their faces swollen by the poison that raced through their veins. And Ro had seen the bones of luckless men vomited from the mouths of the Droo, the cannibal plants. And others there had been, some friends of his, who had become game for beasts of prey, or been swallowed by hungry, sucking pools of quicksand. No, the jungles of Mars were not to be taken casually, no matter how light in heart one was at the prospect of seeing home once more. Ro was returning from the north. He had seen the great villages of thatched huts, the strange people who lived in these huts instead of in caves, and wore coverings on their feet and shining rings in their ears. And having quenched his curiosity about these people and their villages, he was satisfied to travel home again. He was a man of the world now, weary of exploring and ready to settle down. He was anxious to see his family again, his father and mother and all his brothers and sisters; to sit round a fire with them at the entrance to their cave and tell of the wondrous places he'd visited. And, most of all, he wanted to see Na, graceful, dark eyed Na, whose fair face had disturbed his slumber so often, appearing in his dreams to call him home. He breathed a sigh of relief as he reached the jungle's edge. Before him lay a broad expanse of plain. And far in the distance rose the great cliffs and the hills that were his home. His handsome face broadened into a smile and he quickened his pace to a trot. There was no need for caution now. The dangers on the plain were few. The sun beat down on his bare head and back. His red skin glistened. His thick black hair shone healthily. Mile after mile fell behind him. His long, well muscled legs carried him swiftly toward the distant hills. His movements were graceful, easy, as the loping of Shee, the great cat. Then, suddenly, he faltered in his stride. He stopped running and, shielding his eyes from the sun's glare, stared ahead. There was a figure running toward him. And behind that first figure, a second gave chase. For a long moment Ro studied the approaching creatures. Then he gasped in surprise. The pursued was a young woman, a woman he knew. Na! The pursuer was a squat, ugly rat man, one of the vicious Oan who lived in the cliffs. Ro exclaimed his surprise, then his rage. His handsome face was grim as he searched the ground with his eyes. When he found what he sought—a round rock that would fit his palm—he stooped, and snatching up the missile, he ran forward. At great speed, he closed the gap between him and the approaching figures. He could see the rat man plainly now—his fanged, frothy mouth; furry face and twitching tail. The Oan, however, was too intent on his prey to notice Ro at first, and when he did, it was too late. For the young Martian had let fly with the round stone he carried. The Oan squealed in terror and tried to swerve from his course. The fear of one who sees approaching death was in his movements and his cry. He had seen many Oan die because of the strength and accuracy in the red men's arms. Despite his frantic contortions, the stone caught him in the side. His ribs and backbone cracked under the blow. He was dead before he struck the ground. With hardly a glance at his fallen foe, Ro ran on to meet the girl. She fell into his arms and pressed her cheek to his bare shoulder. Her dark eyes were wet with gladness. Warm tears ran down Ro's arm. Finally Na lifted her beautiful head. She looked timidly at Ro, her face a mask of respect. The young Martian tried to be stern in meeting her gaze, as was the custom among the men of his tribe when dealing with women; but he smiled instead. "You're home," breathed Na. "I have traveled far to the north," answered Ro simply, "and seen many things. And now I have returned for you." "They must have been great things you saw," Na coaxed. "Yes, great and many. But that tale can wait. Tell me first how you came to be playing tag with the Oan." Na lowered her eyes. "I was caught in the forest below the cliffs. The Oan spied me and I ran. The chase was long and tiring. I was almost ready to drop when you appeared." "You were alone in the woods!" Ro exclaimed. "Since when do the women of our tribe travel from the cliffs alone?" "Since a long time," she answered sadly. Then she cried. And between sobs she spoke: "Many weeks ago a great noise came out of the sky. We ran to the mouths of our caves and looked out, and saw a great sphere of shining metal landing in the valley below. Many colored fire spat from one end of it. "The men of our tribe snatched up stones, and holding one in their hands and one beneath their armpits, they climbed down to battle or greet our visitors. They had surrounded the sphere and were waiting, when suddenly an entrance appeared in the metal and two men stepped out. "They were strange men indeed; white as the foam on water, and clothed in strange garb from the neck down, even to coverings on their feet. They made signs of peace—with one hand only, for they carried weapons of a sort in the other. And the men of our tribe made the same one-handed sign of peace, for they would not risk dropping their stones. Then the white men spoke; but their tongue was strange, and our men signaled that they could not understand. The white men smiled, and a great miracle took place. Suddenly to our minds came pictures and words. The white men spoke with their thoughts. "They came from a place called Earth, they said. And they came in peace. Our men found they could think very hard and answer back with their own thoughts. And there was much talk and happiness, for friendly visitors were always welcome. "There were two more white ones who came from the sphere. One was a woman with golden hair, and the other, a man of age, with hair like silver frost. "There was a great feast then, and our men showed their skill at throwing. Then the white men displayed the power of their strange weapons by pointing them at a tree and causing flame to leap forth to burn the wood in two. We were indeed glad they came in peace. "That night we asked them to sleep with us in the caves, but they made camp in the valley instead. The darkness passed swiftly and silently, and with the dawn we left our caves to rejoin our new friends. But everywhere a red man showed himself, he cried out and died by the flame from the white men's weapons. "I looked into the valley and saw hundreds of Oan. They had captured our friends in the night and were using their weapons to attack us. There was a one-sided battle that lasted three days. Finally, under cover of night, we were forced to leave the caves. One by one we went, and those of us who lived still travel alone." Ro groaned aloud as Na finished her tale. His homecoming was a meeting with tragedy, instead of a joyful occasion. "What of my father?" he asked hopefully. "He was a great warrior. Surely he didn't fall to the Oan?" "He had no chance to fight," Na answered. "Two of your brothers died with him on that first morning." Ro squared his shoulders and set his jaw. He wiped a hint of tears from his eyes. "They shall pay," he murmured, and started off toward the cliffs again. Na trailed behind him. Her face was grave with concern. "They are very many," she said. "Then there will be more to kill," answered Ro without turning. "They have the weapons of the white ones." "And the white ones, as well. They probably keep them alive to repair the weapons if they become useless. But when I have slain a few Oan, I will set the white ones free. They will help me to make more weapons. Together we will fight the rat men." Na smiled. Ro was angry, but anger did not make him blind. He would make a good mate. The sun was setting when the two Martians reached the cliffs. Below them was the valley in which lay the metal sphere. Ro could see it dimly outlined in the shadows, as Na had said. A distance away, in another clearing, he could see many Oan, flitting ghost-like from place to place. There were no fires, for the Oan were more beast than man and feared flame; but Ro could make out four prone figures. They appeared to be white blots in the dimness. One had long, golden hair, like spun sunbeams; another's head was covered with a thatch like a cap of snow on a mountain peak. "You say they came from a place called Earth?" Ro asked Na in wonder. "They traveled through space in their 'ship,'" Na answered. "They called themselves an expedition." Ro was silent then. In a short time it would be dark enough to go down into the valley. When he had rescued the white ones, he would learn more about them. He turned away from the valley to study Na. She was very beautiful. Her dark eyes seemed to sparkle and her hair shone in the twilight. He understood why she had crept into his dreams. The darkness settled quickly. Soon Ro could barely make out the girl's features. It was time for him to leave. He took a pouch from his waist and shook out a gold arm band. This he clasped on Na's wrist. "All men will know now that you are the mate of Ro," he whispered. And he kissed her, as was the custom of his tribe when a man took a wife. Without another word he disappeared over the edge of the cliff. They had already made plans for their next meeting. There was no need for a prolonged farewell. They would be together soon—on the far side of the cliff—if all went well. In his left hand and under his armpit Ro carried stones. They were of a good weight and would make short work of any Oan who was foolish enough to cross his path. His right arm he kept free for climbing. His fingers found crevices to hold to in the almost smooth wall. His toes seemed to have eyes to pierce the darkness in finding footholds. The climb was long and dangerous. Ro's skin glistened with sweat. He had lived in the cliffs all his life, and had made many perilous climbs, but never one on so dark a night. It seemed an eternity before he rested at the bottom. Feeling his way cautiously, he moved toward the camp. He could sense the presence of many Oan close by. The hair at the base of his neck prickled. He prayed he wouldn't be seen. An alarm now would spoil his plan. Ahead of him, he saw a clearing. That would be his destination. On the far side he would find the white ones. He took the stone from his armpit and moved on. Suddenly he halted. A dim figure approached. It was one of the Oan, a guard. He was coming straight at Ro. The young Martian shrank back. "The rat men have eyes to cut the night." It was a memory of his mother's voice. She had spoken those words when he was a child, to keep him from straying too far. The Oan was only a few feet away now, but his eyes were not cutting the night. Ro could see his large ears, hear his twitching tail. In a moment the beast would stumble over him. Like a phantom, Ro arose from his crouch. The rat man was startled, frozen with fear. Ro drove his right arm around. The stone in his hand cracked the Oan's skull like an eggshell. Ro caught the body as it fell, lowered it noiselessly to the ground. Breathing more easily, Ro moved on. He reached the edge of the small clearing without making a sound. Strewn on the ground were shapeless heaps. They would be the slumbering rat men. Ro suppressed an urge to spring amongst them and slay them as they slept. He lay flat on his stomach and inched his way ahead. It was slow work, but safer. When a sound reached his ears he drew himself together and feigned sleep. In the dusk he appeared no different than the others. His chest was scratched in a thousand places when he reached the far side, but he felt no pain. His heart was singing within him. His job was almost simple now. The difficult part was done. Straining his eyes, he caught sight of a golden mass some feet away. Crouching low, he darted toward it. In a moment his outstretched hands contacted a soft body. It seemed to shrink from his touch. A tiny gasp reached his ears. "Be still," he thought. He remembered Na's words: ' We spoke with our thoughts. ' "Be still. I've come to free you." And then, because it seemed so futile, he whispered the words aloud. Then his mind seemed to grow light, as though someone was sharing the weight of his brain. An urgent message to hurry—hurry reached him. It was as though he was feeling words, words spoken in the light, sweet voice of a girl. Pictures that were not actually pictures entered his mind. Waves of thought that took no definite form held a plain meaning. His groping hands found the girl's arm and moved down to the strips of hide that bound her wrists. He fumbled impatiently with the heavy knots. "Don't move when you are free," he warned the girl as he worked. "I must release the others first. When all is ready I will give a signal with my thoughts and you will follow me." Once again his mind grew light. The girl's thoughts assured him she would follow his instructions. Time passed quickly. To Ro, it seemed that his fingers were all thumbs. His breathing was heavy as he struggled with the knots. But finally the golden-haired girl was free. Ro was more confident as he moved to untie the others. He worked more easily as each came free and he started on the next. When they were ready, Ro signaled the four white people to follow him. They rose quietly and trailed him into the woods. The girl whispered something to one of the men. Ro turned and glared at her through the shadows. The progress they made was slow, but gradually the distance between them and Oan camp grew. Ro increased his pace when silence was no longer necessary. The four white people stumbled ahead more quickly. "We journey out of the valley and around the face of the cliffs," Ro told them. "After a short while, we will meet Na." "Who is Na?" asked the girl. "She is the one I have chosen for my mate," Ro answered. The white girl was silent. They traveled quite a distance without communicating. Each was busy with his own thoughts. Finally the man with the silver hair asked, "Why did you risk your life to rescue us?" "With your help I will avenge the death of my father and brothers and the men of my tribe." He stopped walking and stared around him for a landmark. They had traveled far along the foot of the cliff. According to the plan Na should have met them minutes ago. Then he gave a glad cry. Squinting ahead he saw an approaching figure. It was—His cry took on a note of alarm. The figure was bent low under the weight of a burden. It was a rat man, and slung across his shoulders was a girl. Ro's body tensed and quivered. A low growl issued from deep in his throat. He charged forward. The Oan saw him coming and straightened, allowing the girl to fall. He set his twisted legs and bared his fangs. The fur on his back stood out straight as he prepared to meet the young Martian's attack. Ro struck his foe head on. They went down in a frenzied bundle of fury. The rat man's tail lashed out to twist around Ro's neck. With frantic strength, Ro tore it away before it could tighten. Ignoring the Oan's slashing teeth, the young Martian pounded heavy fists into his soft stomach. Suddenly shifting his attack, Ro wrapped his legs around the rat man's waist. His hands caught a furry throat and tightened. Over and over they rolled. The Oan clawed urgently at the Martian's choking fingers. His chest made strange noises as it pleaded for the air that would give it life. But Ro's hands were bands of steel, tightening, ever tightening their deadly grip. Then, as suddenly as it had started, it was over. The rat man quivered and lay still. Ro dismounted the limp body. His face wore a wildly triumphant expression. It changed as he remembered the girl. He ran to her side. Na was just opening her eyes. She stared around her fearfully, then smiled as she recognized Ro. The young Martian breathed a sigh of relief. Na turned her head and saw the body of the rat man. She shuddered. "I was coming down the side of the mountain," she said. "I saw him standing at the foot. The shadows were deceiving. I thought it was you. It wasn't until too late that I discovered my mistake." Ro gathered the girl in his arms. He spoke softly to her to help her forget. When she had recovered from her shock, the small group traveled on. Ro led them about a mile further along the base of the cliff, then up, to a cleverly concealed cave. "We will stay here," he told the others, "until we are ready to attack the Oan." "But there are only six of us," one of the white men protested. "There are hundreds of the beasts. We wouldn't have a chance." Ro smiled. "We will speak of that when it is dawn again," he said with his thoughts. "Now we must rest." He sat in a corner of the cave and leaned back against the wall. His eyes were half shut and he pretended to doze. Actually he was studying the white ones. The man with the silver hair seemed very old and weak, but very wise. The other men had hair as black as any Martian's, but their skin was pure white. They were handsome, Ro thought, in a barbaric sort of way. One was lean and determined, the other, equally determined, but stouter and less impressive. Ro then centered his attention on the girl. Her golden hair gleamed proudly, even in the dusk. She was very beautiful, almost as lovely as Na. "Tell me," he asked suddenly, "where is this strange place you come from? And how is it that you can speak and cause others to speak with their minds?" It was the old man who answered. "We come from a place called Earth, many millions of miles away through space. My daughter, Charlotte, my two assistants, Carlson—" the lean man nodded—"Grimm—" the stouter man acknowledged the introduction—"and myself are an expedition. We came here to Mars to study." Ro introduced himself and Na. "What manner of a place is this Earth?" he asked, after the formalities. "Our part of Earth, America, is a great country. Our cities are built of steel and stone, and we travel about in space boats. Now tell me, what is it like here on Mars? Surely the whole planet isn't wilderness. What year is it?" "You have seen what it is like here," Ro answered. "As for 'year,' I don't understand." "A year is a measure of time," the old man explained. "When we left Earth it was the year twenty-two hundred." "We have nothing like that here," said Ro, still puzzled. "But tell me, about this speaking with the mind. Perhaps I shall understand that." "It's simple telepathy. We have mastered the science on Earth. It takes study from childhood, but once you have mastered the art, it is quite simple to transmit or receive thoughts from anyone. A mere matter of concentration. We—who speak different tongues—understand each other because of action we have in mind as we speak. We want the other to walk, we think of the other walking. A picture is transmitted and understood. It is a message in a Universal language." Ro sighed. "I am afraid we are very backward here on Mars," he said wearily. "I would like to learn more, but we must sleep now. Tomorrow will be a very busy day." Ro slipped his arm about Na's shoulder and drew her closer. With their heads together they slept. Ro awakened with the dawn. He was startled to find that Na had left his side. He rose quickly and strode to the mouth of the cave. Na met him at the entrance. She was returning from a clump of trees a short distance away. Her arms were loaded with Manno, the fruit of Mars, and clusters of wild berries and grapes. "You see," she said, "I will make you a good mate. Our table will be well provided for." "You will make no mate at all," Ro said sternly, "and there will be no table if you wander off. Your next meeting with the Oan may not be so fortunate." He glared at her for a moment, then smiled and helped her with her burden. The others in the cave awakened. Ro noticed that Charlotte had slept beside Carlson, but moved away shyly now that it was daylight. He noticed, too, that Grimm was seeing the same thing and seemed annoyed. Ro smiled. These young white men were no different than Martians where a girl was concerned. When they had finished breakfast, they sat around the floor of the cave and spoke. It was Carlson who asked, "How do you expect the six of us to attack the rat men?" "The Oan are cowards," Ro answered. "They are brave only because they have your weapons. But now that you are free, you can make more of these sticks that shoot fire." Grimm laughed. "It takes intricate machinery to construct a ray gun," he said. "Here in this wilderness we have sticks and stones to work with." Ro sprang to his feet to tower above the man. His handsome face was twisted in anger. "You're lying," he shouted aloud, forgetting that the white man couldn't understand his words. "You're lying because you are afraid. You refuse to help me avenge my people because you are more of a coward than the Oan." Grimm climbed to his feet and backed away. Ro advanced on him, his fists clenched. The old man also rose. He placed a restraining hand on Ro's arm. "He's lying," said Ro with his thoughts. "Tell him I'm speaking the truth, professor," said Grimm aloud. The professor repeated Grimm's words with his thoughts. "It would be impossible to make new guns here," he said. "But there is another way. I have thought about it all night." Ro turned quickly. "What is it?" he demanded. "The space sphere. There are weapons on our ship that are greater than ray guns. With those we could defeat the rat men." The professor shrugged, turned away. "But how could we get into the ship? It is too well guarded." Ro fell silent. He walked to the mouth of the cave and stared out. When he turned back to the others, his attention was centered on Na. "Perhaps the attraction you seem to hold for the Oan can be put to good use," he said aloud. "The sphere is a distance away from the Oan camp. All of the rat men cannot be guarding it. Perhaps, by revealing yourself, you can lure the guards away from their post." He repeated his plan to the others. "But they'll kill her," gasped Charlotte. "She will be a woman alone," said Ro. "The Oan prefer to capture women when they can." "Then she'll be captured," the professor said. "It's much too risky." Ro laughed. "Do you think I will let her go alone? I will be close by. Na can lead the rat men through a narrow part of the valley. I will be above on the cliffs, waiting to pelt them with stones. Carlson or Grimm can be with me to roll an avalanche of rocks on their heads. "In the meantime, you can take over the unguarded sphere. The rest will be easy." The professor smacked his fist into his palm. "It might work at that. Grimm can go with you. Carlson and Charlotte will go with me." "Why me?" Grimm demanded. "Why not Carlson? Or are you saving him for your daughter?" Carlson grabbed Grimm by the shoulder and spun him around. He drove a hard fist into the stout man's face. Grimm stumbled backward. He fell at the cave's entrance. His hand, sprawled behind him to stop his fall, closed over a rock. He flung it at Carlson from a sitting position. It caught Carlson in the shoulder. Gritting his teeth, Carlson charged at Grimm. But Ro moved more swiftly. He caught the white man and forced him back. "This is no time for fighting," he said. "When the Oan are defeated you can kill each other. But not until then." Grimm brushed himself off as he got to his feet "Okay," he sneered. "I'll go with the red man. But when we meet again, it will be a different story." Carlson turned to Ro. "I'll go with you," he said. "Grimm can go with Charlotte and the professor." When they had detailed their plan, the party left the cave. Ro led them into the thickest part of the forest and toward the Oan camp. They moved swiftly. Before long they were at the narrow entrance to the valley. It was about a hundred yards long and twenty feet wide. The walls of the cliff rose almost straight up on both sides. "We leave you here," said Ro to the professor. "Na will lead you to the sphere. She will remain hidden until you have circled away from her. Then she will reveal herself." Ro looked at Na for a long moment before they parted. He grew very proud of what he saw. There was no fear in her eyes. Her small chin was firm. He turned to Carlson. The young Earthman was looking at Charlotte in much the same way. "Come on," Ro said. "If we spend the rest of the morning here, the Oan will try some strategy of their own." Carlson seemed to come out of a trance. He swung around to trail Ro up the sloping part of the mountain. They climbed in silence. Once Ro stopped to look down into the valley. But Na and the others were gone. He felt a pang of regret as he turned to move upward. When they had reached the top, he and Carlson set to work piling rocks and boulders at the edge of the cliff. They chose the point directly over the narrowest part of the valley. If all went well, the Oan would be trapped. They would die under a hailstorm of rock. "You would have liked a more tender goodbye with Charlotte," Ro said to Carlson as they worked. "Was it fear of Grimm that prevented it?" Carlson straightened. He weighed Ro's words before answering. Finally he said, "I didn't want to make trouble. It was a bad time, and senseless, besides. Charlotte and I are planning to be married when we return to America. It's not as though Grimm was still in the running. I'm sure he'll see reason when we tell him. It's foolish to be enemies." "Why don't you take her for your wife here on Mars? That would end the trouble completely." Carlson seemed surprised. "It wouldn't be legal. Who would perform the ceremony?" Ro seemed puzzled, then he laughed. "Last night I thought that we on Mars are backward. Now I'm not so sure. When we find our mates here, we take her. There is no one to speak of 'legal' or 'ceremony.' After all, it's a personal matter. Who can tell us whether it is 'legal' or not? What better ceremony than a kiss and a promise?" He bent back to his work chuckling. "I could argue the point," Carlson laughed. "I could tell you about a place called Hollywood. Marriage and divorce is bad enough there. Under your system, it would really be a mess. But I won't say anything. Here on Mars your kiss and a promise is probably as binding as any ceremony." Ro didn't speak. He didn't concentrate and transmit his thoughts, but kept them to himself. The pictures he'd received from Carlson were confusing. The business at hand was more grim and important than untangling the puzzle.

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The Happy Castaway BY ROBERT E. McDOWELL Being space-wrecked and marooned is tough enough. But to face the horrors of such a planet as this was too much. Imagine Fawkes' terrible predicament; plenty of food—and twenty seven beautiful girls for companions. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Jonathan Fawkes opened his eyes. He was flat on his back, and a girl was bending over him. He detected a frightened expression on the girl's face. His pale blue eyes traveled upward beyond the girl. The sky was his roof, yet he distinctly remembered going to sleep on his bunk aboard the space ship. "You're not dead?" "I've some doubt about that," he replied dryly. He levered himself to his elbows. The girl, he saw, had bright yellow hair. Her nose was pert, tip-tilted. She had on a ragged blue frock and sandals. "Is—is anything broken?" she asked. "Don't know. Help me up." Between them he managed to struggle to his feet. He winced. He said, "My name's Jonathan Fawkes. I'm a space pilot with Universal. What happened? I feel like I'd been poured out of a concrete mixer." She pointed to the wreck of a small space freighter a dozen feet away. Its nose was buried in the turf, folded back like an accordion. It had burst open like a ripe watermelon. He was surprised that he had survived at all. He scratched his head. "I was running from Mars to Jupiter with a load of seed for the colonists." "Oh!" said the girl, biting her lips. "Your co-pilot must be in the wreckage." He shook his head. "No," he reassured her. "I left him on Mars. He had an attack of space sickness. I was all by myself; that was the trouble. I'd stay at the controls as long as I could, then lock her on her course and snatch a couple of hours' sleep. I can remember crawling into my bunk. The next thing I knew you were bending over me." He paused. "I guess the automatic deflectors slowed me up or I would have been a cinder by this time," he said. The girl didn't reply. She continued to watch him, a faint enigmatic smile on her lips. Jonathan glanced away in embarrassment. He wished that pretty women didn't upset him so. He said nervously, "Where am I? I couldn't have slept all the way to Jupiter." The girl shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know." "You don't know!" He almost forgot his self-consciousness in his surprise. His pale blue eyes returned to the landscape. A mile across the plain began a range of jagged foothills, which tossed upward higher and higher until they merged with the blue saw-edge of a chain of mountains. As he looked a puff of smoke belched from a truncated cone-shaped peak. A volcano. Otherwise there was no sign of life: just he and the strange yellow-headed girl alone in the center of that vast rolling prairie. "I was going to explain," he heard her say. "We think that we are on an asteroid." "We?" he looked back at her. "Yes. There are twenty-seven of us. We were on our way to Jupiter, too, only we were going to be wives for the colonists." "I remember," he exclaimed. "Didn't the Jupiter Food-growers Association enlist you girls to go to the colonies?" She nodded her head. "Only twenty-seven of us came through the crash." "Everybody thought your space ship hit a meteor," he said. "We hit this asteroid." "But that was three years ago." "Has it been that long? We lost track of time." She didn't take her eyes off him, not for a second. Such attention made him acutely self conscious. She said, "I'm Ann. Ann Clotilde. I was hunting when I saw your space ship. You had been thrown clear. You were lying all in a heap. I thought you were dead." She stooped, picked up a spear. "Do you feel strong enough to hike back to our camp? It's only about four miles," she said. "I think so," he said. Jonathan Fawkes fidgeted uncomfortably. He would rather pilot a space ship through a meteor field than face twenty-seven young women. They were the only thing in the Spaceways of which he was in awe. Then he realized that the girl's dark blue eyes had strayed beyond him. A frown of concentration marred her regular features. He turned around. On the rim of the prairie he saw a dozen black specks moving toward them. She said: "Get down!" Her voice was agitated. She flung herself on her stomach and began to crawl away from the wreck. Jonathan Fawkes stared after her stupidly. "Get down!" she reiterated in a furious voice. He let himself to his hands and knees. "Ouch!" he said. He felt like he was being jabbed with pins. He must be one big bruise. He scuttled after the girl. "What's wrong?" The girl looked back at him over her shoulder. "Centaurs!" she said. "I didn't know they had returned. There is a small ravine just ahead which leads into the hills. I don't think they've seen us. If we can reach the hills we'll be safe." "Centaurs! Isn't there anything new under the sun?" "Well, personally," she replied, "I never saw a Centaur until I was wrecked on this asteroid." She reached the ravine, crawled head foremost over the edge. Jonathan tumbled after her. He hit the bottom, winced, scrambled to his feet. The girl started at a trot for the hills. Jonathan, groaning at each step, hobbled beside her. "Why won't the Centaurs follow us into the hills?" he panted. "Too rough. They're like horses," she said. "Nothing but a goat could get around in the hills." The gulley, he saw, was deepening into a respectable canyon, then a gorge. In half a mile, the walls towered above them. A narrow ribbon of sky was visible overhead. Yellow fern-like plants sprouted from the crevices and floor of the canyon. They flushed a small furry creature from behind a bush. As it sped away, it resembled a cottontail of Earth. The girl whipped back her arm, flung the spear. It transfixed the rodent. She picked it up, tied it to her waist. Jonathan gaped. Such strength and accuracy astounded him. He thought, amazons and centaurs. He thought, but this is the year 3372; not the time of ancient Greece. The canyon bore to the left. It grew rougher, the walls more precipitate. Jonathan limped to a halt. High boots and breeches, the uniform of Universal's space pilots, hadn't been designed for walking. "Hold on," he said. He felt in his pockets, withdrew an empty cigarette package, crumpled it and hurled it to the ground. "You got a cigarette?" he asked without much hope. The girl shook her head. "We ran out of tobacco the first few months we were here." Jonathan turned around, started back for the space ship. "Where are you going?" cried Ann in alarm. He said, "I've got a couple of cartons of cigarettes back at the freighter. Centaurs or no centaurs, I'm going to get a smoke." "No!" She clutched his arm. He was surprised at the strength of her grip. "They'd kill you," she said. "I can sneak back," he insisted stubbornly. "They might loot the ship. I don't want to lose those cigarettes. I was hauling some good burley tobacco seed too. The colonists were going to experiment with it on Ganymede." "No!" He lifted his eyebrows. He thought, she is an amazon! He firmly detached her hand. The girl flicked up her spear, nicked his neck with the point of it. "We are going to the camp," she said. Jonathan threw himself down backwards, kicked the girl's feet out from under her. Like a cat he scrambled up and wrenched the spear away. A voice shouted: "What's going on there?" He paused shamefacedly. A second girl, he saw, was running toward them from up the canyon. Her bare legs flashed like ivory. She was barefooted, and she had black hair. A green cloth was wrapped around her sarong fashion. She bounced to a stop in front of Jonathan, her brown eyes wide in surprise. He thought her sarong had been a table cloth at one time in its history. "A man!" she breathed. "By Jupiter and all its little moons, it's a man!" "Don't let him get away!" cried Ann. "Hilda!" the brunette shrieked. "A man! It's a man!" A third girl skidded around the bend in the canyon. Jonathan backed off warily. Ann Clotilde cried in anguish: "Don't let him get away!" Jonathan chose the centaurs. He wheeled around, dashed back the way he had come. Someone tackled him. He rolled on the rocky floor of the canyon. He struggled to his feet. He saw six more girls race around the bend in the canyon. With shouts of joy they flung themselves on him. Jonathan was game, but the nine husky amazons pinned him down by sheer weight. They bound him hand and foot. Then four of them picked him up bodily, started up the canyon chanting: " He was a rocket riding daddy from Mars. " He recognized it as a popular song of three years ago. Jonathan had never been so humiliated in his life. He was known in the spaceways from Mercury to Jupiter as a man to leave alone. His nose had been broken three times. A thin white scar crawled down the bronze of his left cheek, relic of a barroom brawl on Venus. He was big, rangy, tough. And these girls had trounced him. Girls! He almost wept from mortification. He said, "Put me down. I'll walk." "You won't try to get away?" said Ann. "No," he replied with as much dignity as he could summon while being held aloft by four barbarous young women. "Let him down," said Ann. "We can catch him, anyway, if he makes a break." Jonathan Fawkes' humiliation was complete. He meekly trudged between two husky females, who ogled him shamelessly. He was amazed at the ease with which they had carried him. He was six feet three and no light weight. He thought enviously of the centaurs, free to gallop across the plains. He wished he was a centaur. The trail left the canyon, struggled up the precipitate walls. Jonathan picked his way gingerly, hugged the rock. "Don't be afraid," advised one of his captors. "Just don't look down." "I'm not afraid," said Jonathan hotly. To prove it he trod the narrow ledge with scorn. His foot struck a pebble. Both feet went out from under him. He slithered halfway over the edge. For one sickening moment he thought he was gone, then Ann grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, hauled him back to safety. He lay gasping on his stomach. They tied a rope around his waist then, and led him the rest of the way to the top like a baby on a leash. He was too crestfallen to resent it. The trail came out on a high ridge. They paused on a bluff overlooking the prairie. "Look!" cried Ann pointing over the edge. A half dozen beasts were trotting beneath on the plain. At first, Jonathan mistook them for horses. Then he saw that from the withers up they resembled men. Waists, shoulders, arms and heads were identical to his own, but their bodies were the bodies of horses. "Centaurs!" Jonathan Fawkes said, not believing his eyes. The girls set up a shout and threw stones down at the centaurs, who reared, pawed the air, and galloped to a safe distance, from which they hurled back insults in a strange tongue. Their voices sounded faintly like the neighing of horses. Amazons and centaurs, he thought again. He couldn't get the problem of the girls' phenomenal strength out of his mind. Then it occurred to him that the asteroid, most likely, was smaller even than Earth's moon. He must weigh about a thirtieth of what he usually did, due to the lessened gravity. It also occurred to him that they would be thirty times as strong. He was staggered. He wished he had a smoke. At length, the amazons and the centaurs tired of bandying insults back and forth. The centaurs galloped off into the prairie, the girls resumed their march. Jonathan scrambled up hills, skidded down slopes. The brunette was beside him helping him over the rough spots. "I'm Olga," she confided. "Has anybody ever told you what a handsome fellow you are?" She pinched his cheek. Jonathan blushed. They climbed a ridge, paused at the crest. Below them, he saw a deep valley. A stream tumbled through the center of it. There were trees along its banks, the first he had seen on the asteroid. At the head of the valley, he made out the massive pile of a space liner. They started down a winding path. The space liner disappeared behind a promontory of the mountain. Jonathan steeled himself for the coming ordeal. He would have sat down and refused to budge except that he knew the girls would hoist him on their shoulders and bear him into the camp like a bag of meal. The trail debouched into the valley. Just ahead the space liner reappeared. He imagined that it had crashed into the mountain, skidded and rolled down its side until it lodged beside the stream. It reminded him of a wounded dinosaur. Three girls were bathing in the stream. He looked away hastily. Someone hailed them from the space ship. "We've caught a man," shrieked one of his captors. A flock of girls streamed out of the wrecked space ship. "A man!" screamed a husky blonde. She was wearing a grass skirt. She had green eyes. "We're rescued!" "No. No," Ann Clotilde hastened to explain. "He was wrecked like us." "Oh," came a disappointed chorus. "He's a man," said the green-eyed blonde. "That's the next best thing." "Oh, Olga," said a strapping brunette. "Who'd ever thought a man could look so good?" "I did," said Olga. She chucked Jonathan under the chin. He shivered like an unbroken colt when the bit first goes in its mouth. He felt like a mouse hemmed in by a ring of cats. A big rawboned brute of a girl strolled into the circle. She said, "Dinner's ready." Her voice was loud, strident. It reminded him of the voices of girls in the honky tonks on Venus. She looked at him appraisingly as if he were a horse she was about to bid on. "Bring him into the ship," she said. "The man must be starved." He was propelled jubilantly into the palatial dining salon of the wrecked liner. A long polished meturilium table occupied the center of the floor. Automatic weight distributing chairs stood around it. His feet sank into a green fiberon carpet. He had stepped back into the Thirty-fourth Century from the fabulous barbarian past. With a sigh of relief, he started to sit down. A lithe red-head sprang forward and held his chair. They all waited politely for him to be seated before they took their places. He felt silly. He felt like a captive princess. All the confidence engendered by the familiar settings of the space ship went out of him like wind. He, Jonathan Fawkes, was a castaway on an asteroid inhabited by twenty-seven wild women. As the meal boisterously progressed, he regained sufficient courage to glance timidly around. Directly across the table sat a striking, grey-eyed girl whose brown hair was coiled severely about her head. She looked to him like a stenographer. He watched horrified as she seized a whole roast fowl, tore it apart with her fingers, gnawed a leg. She caught him staring at her and rolled her eyes at him. He returned his gaze to his plate. Olga said: "Hey, Sultan." He shuddered, but looked up questioningly. She said, "How's the fish?" "Good," he mumbled between a mouthful. "Where did you get it?" "Caught it," said Olga. "The stream's full of 'em. I'll take you fishing tomorrow." She winked at him so brazenly that he choked on a bone. "Heaven forbid," he said. "How about coming with me to gather fruit?" cried the green-eyed blonde; "you great big handsome man." "Or me?" cried another. And the table was in an uproar. The rawboned woman who had summoned them to dinner, pounded the table until the cups and plates danced. Jonathan had gathered that she was called Billy. "Quiet!" She shrieked in her loud strident voice. "Let him be. He can't go anywhere for a few days. He's just been through a wreck. He needs rest." She turned to Jonathan who had shrunk down in his chair. "How about some roast?" she said. "No." He pushed back his plate with a sigh. "If I only had a smoke." Olga gave her unruly black hair a flirt. "Isn't that just like a man?" "I wouldn't know," said the green-eyed blonde. "I've forgotten what they're like." Billy said, "How badly wrecked is your ship?" "It's strewn all over the landscape," he replied sleepily. "Is there any chance of patching it up?" He considered the question. More than anything else, he decided, he wanted to sleep. "What?" he said. "Is there any possibility of repairing your ship?" repeated Billy. "Not outside the space docks." They expelled their breath, but not for an instant did they relax the barrage of their eyes. He shifted position in embarrassment. The movement pulled his muscles like a rack. Furthermore, an overpowering lassitude was threatening to pop him off to sleep before their eyes. "You look exhausted," said Ann. Jonathan dragged himself back from the edge of sleep. "Just tired," he mumbled. "Haven't had a good night's rest since I left Mars." Indeed it was only by the most painful effort that he kept awake at all. His eyelids drooped lower and lower. "First it's tobacco," said Olga; "now he wants to sleep. Twenty-seven girls and he wants to sleep." "He is asleep," said the green-eyed blonde. Jonathan was slumped forward across the table, his head buried in his arms. "Catch a hold," said Billy, pushing back from the table. A dozen girls volunteered with a rush. "Hoist!" said Billy. They lifted him like a sleepy child, bore him tenderly up an incline and into a stateroom, where they deposited him on the bed. Ann said to Olga; "Help me with these boots." But they resisted every tug. "It's no use," groaned Ann, straightening up and wiping her bright yellow hair back from her eyes. "His feet have swollen. We'll have to cut them off." At these words, Jonathan raised upright as if someone had pulled a rope. " Cut off whose feet? " he cried in alarm. "Not your feet, silly," said Ann. "Your boots." "Lay a hand on those boots," he scowled; "and I'll make me another pair out of your hides. They set me back a week's salary." Having delivered himself of this ultimatum, he went back to sleep. Olga clapped her hand to her forehead. "And this," she cried "is what we've been praying for during the last three years." The next day found Jonathan Fawkes hobbling around by the aid of a cane. At the portal of the space ship, he stuck out his head, glanced all around warily. None of the girls were in sight. They had, he presumed, gone about their chores: hunting, fishing, gathering fruits and berries. He emerged all the way and set out for the creek. He walked with an exaggerated limp just in case any of them should be hanging around. As long as he was an invalid he was safe, he hoped. He sighed. Not every man could be waited on so solicitously by twenty-seven handsome strapping amazons. He wished he could carry it off in cavalier fashion. He hobbled to the creek, sat down beneath the shade of a tree. He just wasn't the type, he supposed. And it might be years before they were rescued. As a last resort, he supposed, he could hide out in the hills or join the centaurs. He rather fancied himself galloping across the plains on the back of a centaur. He looked up with a start. Ann Clotilde was ambling toward him. "How's the invalid?" she said, seating herself beside him. "Hot, isn't it?" he said. He started to rise. Ann Clotilde placed the flat of her hand on his chest and shoved. " Ooof! " he grunted. He sat down rather more forcibly than he had risen. "Don't get up because of me," she informed him. "It's my turn to cook, but I saw you out here beneath the trees. Dinner can wait. Jonathan do you know that you are irresistible?" She seized his shoulders, stared into his eyes. He couldn't have felt any more uncomfortable had a hungry boa constrictor draped itself in his arms. He mopped his brow with his sleeve. "Suppose the rest should come," he said in an embarrassed voice. "They're busy. They won't be here until I call them to lunch. Your eyes," she said, "are like deep mysterious pools." "Sure enough?" said Jonathan with involuntary interest. He began to recover his nerve. She said, "You're the best looking thing." She rumpled his hair. "I can't keep my eyes off you." Jonathan put his arm around her gingerly. "Ouch!" He winced. He had forgotten his sore muscles. "I forgot," said Ann Clotilde in a contrite voice. She tried to rise. "You're hurt." He pulled her back down. "Not so you could notice it," he grinned. "Well!" came the strident voice of Billy from behind them. "We're all glad to hear that!" Jonathan leaped to his feet, dumping Ann to the ground. He jerked around. All twenty-six of the girls were lined up on the path. Their features were grim. He said: "I don't feel so well after all." "It don't wash," said Billy. "It's time for a showdown." Jonathan's hair stood on end. He felt rather than saw Ann Clotilde take her stand beside him. He noticed that she was holding her spear at a menacing angle. She said in an angry voice: "He's mine. I found him. Leave him alone." "Where do you get that stuff?" cried Olga. "Share and share alike, say I." "We could draw straws for him," suggested the green-eyed blonde. "Look here," Jonathan broke in. "I've got some say in the matter." "You have not," snapped Billy. "You'll do just as we say." She took a step toward him. Jonathan edged away in consternation. "He's going to run!" Olga shouted. Jonathan never stopped until he was back in the canyon leading to the plain. His nerves were jumping like fleas. He craved the soothing relaxation of a smoke. There was, he remembered, a carton of cigarettes at the wreck. He resumed his flight, but at a more sober pace. At the spot where he and Ann had first crawled away from the centaurs, he scrambled out of the gulley, glanced in the direction of his space ship. He blinked his eyes, stared. Then he waved his arms, shouted and tore across the prairie. A trim space cruiser was resting beside the wreck of his own. Across its gleaming monaloid hull ran an inscription in silver letters: "INTERSTELLAR COSMOGRAPHY SOCIETY." Two men crawled out of Jonathan's wrecked freighter, glanced in surprise at Jonathan. A third man ran from the cruiser, a Dixon Ray Rifle in his hand. "I'm Jonathan Fawkes," said the castaway as he panted up, "pilot for Universal. I was wrecked." A tall elderly man held out his hand. He had a small black waxed mustache and Van Dyke. He was smoking a venusian cigarette in a yellow composition holder. He said, "I'm Doctor Boynton." He had a rich cultivated voice, and a nose like a hawk. "We are members of the Interstellar Cosmography Society. We've been commissioned to make a cursory examination of this asteroid. You had a nasty crack up, Mr. Fawkes. But you are in luck, sir. We were on the point of returning when we sighted the wreck." "I say," said the man who had run out of the cruiser. He was a prim, energetic young man. Jonathan noted that he carried the ray gun gingerly, respectfully. "We're a week overdue now," he said. "If you have any personal belongings that you'd like to take with you, you'd best be getting them aboard." Jonathan's face broke into a grin. He said, "Do any of you know how to grow tobacco?" They glanced at each other in perplexity. "I like it here," continued Jonathan. "I'm not going back." "What?" cried the three explorers in one breath. "I'm going to stay," he repeated. "I only came back here after the cigarettes." "But it will be three years before the asteroid's orbit brings it back in the space lanes," said Doctor Boynton. "You don't possibly expect to be picked up before then!" Jonathan shook his head, began to load himself with tools, tobacco seed, and cigarettes. "Odd." Doctor Boynton shook his head, turned to the others. "Though if I remember correctly, there was quite an epidemic of hermits during the medieval period. It was an esthetic movement. They fled to the wilderness to escape the temptation of women ." Jonathan laughed outright. "You are sure you won't return, young man?" He shook his head. They argued, they cajoled, but Jonathan was adamant. He said, "You might report my accident to Universal. Tell them to stop one of their Jupiter-bound freighters here when the asteroid swings back in the space ways. I'll have a load for them." Inside the ship, Doctor Boynton moved over to a round transparent port hole. "What a strange fellow," he murmured. He was just in time to see the castaway, loaded like a pack mule, disappear in the direction from which he had come. Robinson Crusoe was going back to his man (?) Friday—all twenty-seven of them.

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Conspiracy on Callisto By JAMES MacCREIGH Revolt was flaring on Callisto, and Peter Duane held the secret that would make the uprising a success or failure. Yet he could make no move, could favor no side—his memory was gone—he didn't know for whom he fought. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Duane's hand flicked to his waist and hung there, poised. His dis-gun remained undrawn. The tall, white-haired man—Stevens—smiled. "You're right, Duane," he said. "I could blast you, too. Nobody would win that way, so let's leave the guns where they are." The muscles twitched in Peter Duane's cheeks, but his voice, when it came, was controlled. "Don't think we're going to let this go," he said. "We'll take it up with Andrias tonight. We'll see whether you can cut me out!" The white-haired man's smile faded. He stepped forward, one hand bracing him against the thrust of the rocket engines underneath, holding to the guide rail at the side of the ship's corridor. He said, "Duane, Andrias is your boss, not mine. I'm a free lance; I work for myself. When we land on Callisto tonight I'll be with you when you turn our—shall I say, our cargo ?—over to him. And I'll collect my fair share of the proceeds. That's as far as it goes. I take no orders from him." A heavy-set man in blue appeared at the end of the connecting corridor. He was moving fast, but stopped short when he saw the two men. "Hey!" he said. "Change of course—get to your cabins." He seemed about to walk up to them, then reconsidered and hurried off. Neither man paid any attention. Duane said, "Do I have to kill you?" It was only a question as he asked it, without threatening. A muted alarm bell sounded through the P.A. speakers, signaling a one-minute warning. The white-haired man cocked his eyebrow. "Not at all," he said. He took the measure of his slim, red-headed opponent. Taller, heavier, older, he was still no more uncompromisingly belligerent than Duane, standing there. "Not at all," he repeated. "Just take your ten thousand and let it go at that. Don't make trouble. Leave Andrias out of our private argument." "Damn you!" Duane flared. "I was promised fifty thousand. I need that money. Do you think—" "Forget what I think," Stevens said, his voice clipped and angry. "I don't care about fairness, Duane, except to myself. I've done all the work on this—I've supplied the goods. My price is set, a hundred thousand Earth dollars. What Andrias promised you is no concern of mine. The fact is that, after I've taken my share, there's only ten thousand left. That's all you get!" Duane stared at him a long second, then nodded abruptly. "I was right the first time," he said. "I'll have to kill you!" Already his hand was streaking toward the grip of his dis-gun, touching it, drawing it forth. But the white-haired man was faster. His arms swept up and pinioned Duane, holding him impotent. "Don't be a fool," he grated. "Duane—" The P.A. speaker rattled, blared something unintelligible. Neither man heard it. Duane lunged forward into the taller man's grip, sliding down to the floor. The white-haired man grappled furiously to keep his hold on Peter's gun arm, but Peter was slipping away. Belatedly, Stevens went for his own gun. He was too late. Duane's was out and leveled at him. " Now will you listen to reason?" Duane panted. But he halted, and the muzzle of his weapon wavered. The floor swooped and surged beneath him as the thrust of the mighty jets was cut off. Suddenly there was no gravity. The two men, locked together, floated weightlessly out to the center of the corridor. "Course change!" gasped white-haired Stevens. "Good God!" The ship had reached the midpoint of its flight. The bells had sounded, warning every soul on it to take shelter, to strap themselves in their pressure bunks against the deadly stress of acceleration as the ship reversed itself and began to slow its headlong plunge into Callisto. But the two men had not heeded. The small steering rockets flashed briefly. The men were thrust bruisingly against the side of the corridor as the rocket spun lazily on its axis. The side jets flared once more to halt the spin, when the one-eighty turn was completed, and the men were battered against the opposite wall, still weightless, still clinging to each other, still struggling. Then the main-drive bellowed into life again, and the ship began to battle against its own built-up acceleration. The corridor floor rose up with blinking speed to smite them— And the lights went out in a burst of crashing pain for Peter Duane. Someone was talking to him. Duane tried to force an eye open to see who it was, and failed. Something damp and clinging was all about his face, obscuring his vision. But the voice filtered in. "Open your mouth," it said. "Please, Peter, open your mouth. You're all right. Just swallow this." It was a girl's voice. Duane was suddenly conscious that a girl's light hand was on his shoulder. He shook his head feebly. The voice became more insistent. "Swallow this," it said. "It's only a stimulant, to help you throw off the shock of your—accident. You're all right, otherwise." Obediently he opened his mouth, and choked on a warm, tingly liquid. He managed to swallow it, and lay quiet as deft feminine hands did something to his face. Suddenly light filtered through his closed eyelids, and cool air stirred against his damp face. He opened his eyes. A slight red-headed girl in white nurse's uniform was standing there. She stepped back a pace, a web of wet gauze bandage in her hands, looking at him. "Hello," he whispered. "You—where am I?" "In the sick bay," she said. "You got caught out when the ship changed course. Lucky you weren't hurt, Peter. The man you were with—the old, white-haired one, Stevens—wasn't so lucky. He was underneath when the jets went on. Three ribs broken—his lung was punctured. He died in the other room an hour ago." Duane screwed his eyes tight together and grimaced. When he opened them again there was alertness and clarity in them—but there was also bafflement. "Girl," he said, "who are you? Where am I?" "Peter!" There was shock and hurt in the tone of her voice. "I'm—don't you know me, Peter?" Duane shook his head confusedly. "I don't know anything," he said. "I—I don't even know my own name." "Duane, Duane," a man's heavy voice said. "That won't wash. Don't play dumb on me." "Duane?" he said. "Duane...." He swiveled his head and saw a dark, squat man frowning at him. "Who are you?" Peter asked. The dark man laughed. "Take your time, Duane," he said easily. "You'll remember me. My name's Andrias. I've been waiting here for you to wake up. We have some business matters to discuss." The nurse, still eyeing Duane with an odd bewilderment, said: "I'll leave you alone for a moment. Don't talk too much to him, Mr. Andrias. He's still suffering from shock." "I won't," Andrias promised, grinning. Then, as the girl left the room, the smile dropped from his face. "You play rough, Duane," he observed. "I thought you'd have trouble with Stevens. I didn't think you'd find it necessary to put him out of the way so permanently. Well, no matter. If you had to kill him, it's no skin off my nose. Give me a release on the merchandise. I've got your money here." Duane waved a hand and pushed himself dizzily erect, swinging his legs over the side of the high cot. A sheet had been thrown over him, but he was fully dressed. He examined his clothing with interest—gray tunic, gray leather spaceman's boots. It was unfamiliar. He shook his head in further confusion, and the motion burst within his skull, throbbing hotly. He closed his eyes until it subsided, trying to force his brain to operate, to explain to him where and what he was. He looked at the man named Andrias. "Nobody seems to believe me," he said, "but I really don't know what's going on. Things are moving too fast for me. Really, I—why, I don't even know my own name! My head—it hurts. I can't think clearly." Andrias straightened, turned a darkly-suspicious look on Duane. "Don't play tricks on me," he said savagely. "I haven't time for them. I won't mince words with you. Give me a release on the cargo now, before I have to get rough. This is a lot more important to me than your life is." "Go to hell," Duane said shortly. "I'm playing no tricks." There was an instant's doubt in Andrias' eyes, then it flashed away. He bent closer, peered at Duane. "I almost think—" he began. Then he shook his head. "No," he said. "You're lying all right. You killed Stevens to get his share—and now you're trying to hold me up. That's your last chance that just went by, Duane. From now on, I'm running this show!" He spun around and strode to the door, thrust it open. "Dakin!" he bellowed. "Reed!" Two large, ugly men in field-gray uniforms, emblazoned with the shooting-star insignia of Callisto's League police, came in, looking to Andrias for instructions. "Duane here is resisting arrest," Andrias said. "Take him along. We'll fix up the charges later." "You can't do that," Duane said wearily. "I'm sick. If you've got something against me, save it. Wait till my head clears. I'm sure I can explain—" "Explain, hell." The dark man laughed. "If I wait, this ship will be blasting off for Ganymede within two hours. I'll wait—but so will the ship. It's not going anywhere till I give it clearance. I run Callisto; I'll give the orders here!" II Whoever this man Andrias was, thought Duane, he was certainly a man of importance on Callisto. As he had said, he gave the orders. The crew of the rocket made no objection when Andrias and his men took Duane off without a word. Duane had thought the nurse, who seemed a good enough sort, might have said something on his behalf. But she was out of sight as they left. A curt sentence to a gray-clad official on the blast field where the rocket lay, and the man nodded and hurried off, to tell the rocket's captain that the ship was being refused clearance indefinitely. A long, powerful ground car slid up before them. Andrias got in front, while the two uniformed men shoved Duane into the back of the car, climbed in beside him. Andrias gave a curt order, and the car shot forward. The driver, sitting beside Andrias, leaned forward and readied a hand under the dashboard. The high wail of a siren came instantly from the car's roof, and what traffic was on the broad, straight highway into which they had turned pulled aside to let them race through. Ahead lay the tall spires of a city. Graceful, hundreds of feet high, they seemed dreamlike yet somehow oddly familiar to Duane. Somewhere he had seen them before. He dragged deep into his mind, plumbing the cloudy, impenetrable haze that had settled on it, trying to bring forth the memories that he should have had. Amnesia, they called it; complete forgetting of the happenings of a lifetime. He'd heard of it—but never dreamed it could happen to him! My name, it seems, is Peter Duane , he thought. And they tell me that I killed a man! The thought was starkly incredible to him. A white-haired man, it had been; someone named Stevens. He tried to remember. Yes, there had been a white-haired man. And there had been an argument. Something to do with money, with a shipment of goods that Stevens had supplied to Duane. There has even been talk of killing.... But—murder! Duane looked at his hands helplessly. Andrias, up ahead, was turning around. He looked sharply at Duane, for a long second. An uncertainty clouded his eyes, and abruptly he looked forward again without speaking. "Who's this man Andrias?" Duane whispered to the nearest guard. The man stared at him. "Governor Andrias," he said, "is the League's deputy on Callisto. You know—the Earth-Mars League. They put Governor Andrias here to—well, to govern for them." "League?" Duane asked, wrinkling his brow. He had heard something about a League once, yes. But it was all so nebulous.... The other guard stirred, leaned over. "Shut up," he said heavily. "You'll have plenty of chance for talking later." But the chance was a long time in coming. Duane found himself, an hour later, still in the barred room into which he'd been thrust. The guards had brought him there, at Andrias' order, and left him. That had been all. This was not a regular jail, Duane realized. It was more like a palace, something out of Earth's Roman-empire days, all white stone and frescoed walls. Duane wished for human companionship—particularly that of the nurse. Of all the people he'd met since awakening in that hospital bed, only she seemed warm and human. The others were—brutal, deadly. It was too bad, Duane reflected, that he'd failed to remember her. She'd seemed hurt, and she had certainly known him by first name. But perhaps she would understand. Duane sat down on a lumpy, sagging bed and buried his head in his hands. Dim ghosts of memory were wandering in his mind. He tried to conjure them into stronger relief, or to exorcise them entirely. Somewhere, some time, a man had said to him, " Andrias is secretly arming the Callistan cutthroats for revolt against the League. He wants personal power—he's prepared to pay any price for it. He needs guns, Earth guns smuggled in through the League patrol. If he can wipe out the League police garrison—those who are loyal to the League, still, instead of to Andrias—he can sit back and laugh at any fleet Earth and Mars can send. Rockets are clumsy in an atmosphere. They're helpless. And if he can arm enough of Callisto's rabble, he can't be stopped. That's why he'll pay for electron rifles with their weight in gold. " Duane could remember the scene clearly. Could almost see the sharp, aquiline face of the man who had spoken to him. But there memory stopped. A fugitive recollection raced through his mind. He halted it, dragged it back, pinned it down.... They had stopped in Darkside, the spaceport on the side of Luna that keeps perpetually averted from Earth, as if the moon knows shame and wants to hide the rough and roaring dome city that nestles in one of the great craters. Duane remembered sitting in a low-ceilinged, smoke-heavy room, across the table from a tall man with white hair. Stevens! " Four thousand electron rifles ," the man had said. " Latest government issue. Never mind how I got them; they're perfect. You know my price. Take it or leave it. And it's payable the minute we touch ground on Callisto. " There had been a few minutes of haggling over terms, then a handshake and a drink from a thin-necked flagon of pale-yellow liquid fire. He and the white-haired man had gone out then, made their way by unfrequented side streets to a great windowless building. Duane remembered the white-hot stars overhead, shining piercingly through the great transparent dome that kept the air in the sealed city of Darkside, as they stood at the entrance of the warehouse and spoke in low tones to the man who answered their summons. Then, inside. And they were looking at a huge chamber full of stacked fiber boxes—containing nothing but dehydrated dairy products and mining tools, by the stencils they bore. Duane had turned to the white-haired man with a puzzled question—and the man had laughed aloud. He dragged one of the boxes down, ripped it open with the sharp point of a handling hook. Short-barreled, flare-mouthed guns rolled out, tumbling over the floor. Eight of them were in that one box, and hundreds of boxes all about. Duane picked one up, broke it, peered into the chamber where the tiny capsule of U-235 would explode with infinite violence when the trigger was pulled, spraying radiant death three thousand yards in the direction the gun was aimed.... And that memory ended. Duane got up, stared at his haggard face in the cracked mirror over the bed. " They say I'm a killer ," he thought. " Apparently I'm a gun-runner as well. Good lord—what am I not? " His reflection—white, drawn face made all the more pallid by the red hair that blazed over it—stared back at him. There was no answer there. If only he could remember— "All right, Duane." The deep voice of a guard came to him as the door swung open. "Stop making eyes at yourself." Duane looked around. The guard beckoned. "Governor Andrias wants to speak to you—now. Let's not keep the governor waiting." A long, narrow room, with a long carpet leading from the entrance up to a great heavy desk—that was Andrias' office. Duane felt a click in his memory as he entered. One of the ancient Earth dictators had employed just such a psychological trick to overawe those who came to beg favors of him. Muslini, or some such name. The trick failed to work. Duane had other things on his mind; he walked the thirty-foot length of the room, designed to imbue him with a sense of his own unimportance, as steadily as he'd ever walked in the open air of his home planet. Whichever planet that was. The guard had remained just inside the door, at attention. Andrias waved him out. "Here I am," said Duane. "What do you want?" Andrias said, "I've had the ship inspected and what I want is on it. That saves your life, for now. But the cargo is in your name. I could take it by force, if I had to. I prefer not to." He picked up a paper, handed it to Duane. "In spite of your behavior, you can keep alive. You can even collect the money for the guns—Stevens' share as well as your own. This is a release form, authorizing my men to take four hundred and twenty cases of dehydrated foods and drilling supplies from the hold of the Cameroon —the ship you came on. Sign it, and we'll forget our argument. Only, sign it now and get it over with. I'm losing patience, Duane." Duane said, without expression, "No." Dark red flooded into Andrias' sallow face. His jaws bunched angrily and there was a ragged thread of incomplete control to his voice as he spoke. "I'll have your neck for this, Duane," he said softly. Duane looked at the man's eyes. Death was behind them, peeping out. Mentally he shrugged. What difference did it make? "Give me the pen," he said shortly. Andrias exhaled a deep breath. You could see the tension leave him, the mottled anger fade from his face and leave it without expression. He handed the paper to Duane without a word. He gave him a pen, watched him scrawl his name. "That," he said, "is better." He paused a moment ruminatively. "It would have been better still if you'd not stalled me so long. I find that hard to forgive in my associates." "The money," Peter said. If he were playing a part—pretending he knew what he was doing—he might as well play it to the hilt. "When do I get it?" Andrias picked up the paper and looked carefully at the signature. He creased it thoughtfully, stowed it in a pocket before answering. "Naturally," he said, "there will have to be a revision of terms. I offered a hundred and ten thousand Earth-dollars. I would have paid it—but you made me angry. You'll have to pay for that." Duane said, "I've paid already. I've been dragged from pillar to post by you. That's enough. Pay me what you owe me, if you want any more of the same goods!" That was a shot in the dark—and it missed the mark. Andrias' eyes widened. "You amaze me, Duane," he said. He rose and stepped around the desk, confronting Duane. "I almost think you really have lost your memory, Duane," he said. "Otherwise, surely you would know that this is all the rifles I need. With them I'll take whatever else I want!" Duane said, "You're ready, then...." He took time to think it over, but he knew that no thought was required. Already the hands that he had locked behind him were clenched, taut. Already the muscles of his legs were tensing. "You're ready," he repeated. "You've armed the Callistan exiles—the worst gutter scum on nine planets. You're set to betray the League that gave you power here.... Well, that changes things. I can't let you do it!" He hurled himself at Andrias, hands sweeping around to grapple for the dark man's throat. Andrias, off-balance, staggered backward. But his own hands were diving for the twin heat guns that hung at his waist. Duane saw his danger, and reacted. His foot twisted around Andrias' ankle; his hands at the other's throat gripped tighter. He lunged forward, slamming the hard top of his head into the other's face, feeling flesh and cartilage give as Andrias' nose mashed flat. His own head pin-wheeled dizzily, agonizingly, as the jar revived the pain of his earlier accident. But Andrias, unconscious already, tumbled back with Duane on top of him. His head made an audible, spine-chilling thud as it hit the carpeted floor. Duane got up, retrieving the two heat guns, and stared at him. " They tell me I killed Stevens the same way ," he thought. " I'm getting in a rut! " But Andrias was not dead, though he was out as cold as the void beyond Pluto. The thick carpeting had saved him from a broken head. Duane stepped over the unconscious man and looked around the room. It was furnished severely, to the point of barrenness. Two chairs before Andrias' ornate, bare-topped desk and one luxurious chair behind it; a tasseled bell cord within easy reach of Andrias' chair; the long carpet. That was all it contained. The problem of getting out was serious, he saw. How could one— III Methodically he ransacked the drawers of Andrias' desk. Papers, a whole arsenal of hand guns, Callistan money by the bale, ominously black-covered notebooks with cryptic figures littering their pages—those were the contents. A coldly impersonal desk, without the familiar trivia most men accumulate. There was nothing, certainly, that would get him out of a building that so closely resembled a fortress. He tumbled the things back into the drawers helter-skelter, turned Andrias over and searched his pockets. More money—the man must have had a fortune within reach at all times—and a few meaningless papers. Duane took the release he had signed and tore it to shreds. But that was only a gesture. When Andrias came to, unless Duane had managed to get away and accomplish something, the mere lack of written permission would not keep him from the rocket's lethal cargo! When Andrias came to.... An idea bloomed in Duane's brain. He looked, then, at unconscious Andrias—and the idea withered again. He had thought of forcing Andrias himself to front for him, at gun's point, in the conventional manner of escaping prisoners. But fist fights, fiction to the contrary notwithstanding, leave marks on the men who lose them. Andrias' throat was speckled with the livid marks of Duane's fingers; Duane's head, butting Andrias in the face, had drawn a thick stream of crimson from his nostrils, turned his sharp nose askew. No guard of Andrias' would have been deceived for an instant, looking at that face—even assuming that Andrias could have been forced to cooperate by the threat of a gun. Which, considering the stake Andrias had in this play, was doubtful.... He stood up and looked around. He had to act quickly. Already Andrias' breath was audible; he saw the man grimace and an arm flopped spasmodically on the floor. Consciousness was on its way back. Duane touched the heat gun he'd thrust into his belt; drew it and held it poised, while he sought to discover what was in his own mind. He'd killed a man already, they said. Was he then a killer—could he shoot Andrias now, in cold blood, with so much to gain and nothing to lose? He stood there a moment. Then, abruptly, he reversed the weapon and chopped it down on Andrias' skull. There was a sharp grunt from the still unconscious man, but no other sign. Only—the first tremors of movement that had shown on him halted, and did not reappear. " No ," Duane thought. " Whatever they say, I'm not a killer! " But still he had to get out. How? Once more he stared around the room, catalogued its contents. The guard would be getting impatient. Perhaps any minute he would tap the door, first timorously, then with heavier strokes. The guard! There was a way! Duane eyed the length of the room. Thirty feet—it would take him a couple of seconds to run it at full speed. Was that fast enough? There was only one way to find out. He walked around the desk to the bell cord. He took a deep breath, tugged it savagely, and at once was in speedy motion, racing toward the door, his footsteps muffled in the deep, springy carpet. Almost as he reached it, he saw it begin to open. He quickly sidestepped and was out of the guard's sight, behind the door, as the man looked in. Quick suspicion flared in his eyes, then certainty as he saw Andrias huddled on the floor. He opened his mouth to cry out— But Duane's arm was around his throat, and he had no breath to spare. Duane's foot lashed out and the door slammed shut; Duane's balled left fist came up and connected with the guard's chin. Abruptly the man slumped. Duane took a deep breath and let the man drop to the floor. But he paused only a second; now he had two unconscious men on his hands and he dared let neither revive until he was prepared. He grasped the guard's arm and dragged him roughly the length of the room. He leaped on top of the desk, brutally scarring its gleaming top with the hard spikes of his boots. His agile fingers unfastened the long bell cord without causing it to ring and, bearing it, he dropped again to the floor. Tugging and straining, he got the limp form of Andrias into his own chair, bound him with the bell cord, gagged him with the priceless Venus-wool scarf Andrias wore knotted about his throat. He tested his bindings with full strength, and smiled. Those would hold, let Andrias struggle as he would. The guard he stripped of clothing, bound and gagged with his own belt and spaceman's kerchief. He dragged him around behind the desk, thrust him under it out of sight. Andrias' chair he turned so that the unconscious face was averted from the door. Should anyone look in, then, the fact of Andrias' unconsciousness might not be noticed. Then he took off his own clothes, quickly assumed the field-gray uniform of the guard. It fit like the skin of a fruit. He felt himself bulging out of it in a dozen places. The long cape the guard wore would conceal that, perhaps. In any case, there was nothing better. Trying to make his stride as martial as possible, he walked down the long carpet to the door, opened it and stepped outside.

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THE GIRL IN HIS MIND By ROBERT F. YOUNG [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of Tomorrow April 1963 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Every man's mind is a universe with countless places in which he can hide—even from himself! The dance that the chocoletto girl was performing was an expurgated version of the kylee sex ritual which the Louave maidens of Dubhe 7 practiced on the eve of their betrothal. Expurgated or not, however, it was still on the lascivious side. The G-string that constituted the chocoletto girl's entire costume put her but one degree above the nakedness which the original dance demanded. Nathan Blake's voice was slightly thick when he summoned the waiter who was hovering in the shadows at the back of the room. "Is she free?" he asked. "I do not know, mensakin. Perhaps." Blake resumed watching. The girl's movements were a delicate blend of love and lust. Her face accompanied her body, eyes half-lidded one moment to match the languid motion of her limbs, wide and feral the next to match the furious bump and grind of her hips. For a chocoletto she was light-skinned—more bronze, really, than brown. But then, the word "chocoletto", coined by the early beche-la-mer traders, was misleading, and few of the natives of Dubhe 4's southern-most continent lived up to it completely. She was beautiful too. Her high-cheekboned face was striking—the eyes dark-brown and wide-apart, the mouth sensuous, the teeth showing in a vivid white line between the half-parted purple lips. And her body was splendid. Blake had never seen anyone quite like her. He beckoned to her when the dance was over and, after slipping into a white thigh-length tunic, she joined him at his table. She ordered Martian wine in a liquid voice, and sipped it with a finesse that belied her cannibalistic forebears. "You wish a night?" she asked. Blake nodded. "If you are free." "Three thousand quandoes." He did not haggle, but counted out the amount and handed it to her. She slipped the bills into a thigh sheath-purse, told him her hut number and stood up to leave. "I will meet you there in an hour," she said. Her hut was as good a place to wait for her as any. After buying a bottle of native whiskey at the bar, Blake went out into the Dubhe 4 night and made his way through the labyrinthine alleys of the native sector. In common with all chocoletto huts, Eldoria's was uncared for on the outside, and gave a false impression of poverty. He expected to find the usual hanger-on waiting in the anteroom, and looked forward to booting him out into the alley. Instead he found a young girl— A human girl. He paused in the doorway. The girl was sitting cross-legged on a small mat, a book open on her lap. Xenophon's Anabasis . Her hair made him think of the copper-colored sunrises of Norma 9 and her eyes reminded him of the blue tarns of Fornax 6. "Come in," she said. After closing the door, he sat down opposite her on the guest mat. Behind her, a gaudy arras hid the hut's other room. "You are here to wait for Eldoria?" she asked. Blake nodded. "And you?" She laughed. "I am here because I live here," she said. He tried to assimilate the information, but could not. Perceiving his difficulty, the girl went on, "My parents indentured themselves to the Great Starway Cartel and were assigned to the rubber plantations of Dubhe 4. They died of yellow-water dysentery before their indenture ran out, and in accordance with Interstellar Law I was auctioned off along with the rest of their possessions. Eldoria bought me." Five years as a roving psycheye had hardened Blake to commercial colonization practices; nevertheless, he found the present example of man's inhumanity to man sickening. "How old are you?" Blake asked. "Fourteen." "And what are you going to be when you grow up?" "Probably I shall be a psychiatrist. Eldoria is sending me to the mission school now, and afterward she is going to put me through an institute of higher learning. And when I come of age, she is going to give me my freedom." "I see," Blake said. He indicated the book on her lap. "Homework?" She shook her head. "In addition to my courses at the mission school, I am studying the humanities." "Xenophon," Blake said. "And I suppose Plato too." "And Homer and Virgil and Aeschylus and Euripides and all the rest of them. When I grow up I shall be a most well-educated person." "I'm sure you will be," Blake said, looking at the arras. "My name is Deirdre." "Nathan," Blake said. "Nathan Blake." "Eldoria will be arriving soon. I must go and prepare her dais." She got up, parted the arras, and slipped into the next room. Shame flamed in Blake's cheeks, and for a moment he considered leaving; then he remembered Eldoria's dance, and he went right on sitting where he was. Presently the girl returned, and not long afterward the cloying scent of native incense crept beneath the arras and permeated the anteroom. She sat sideways on the mat this time, and he caught her face in profile. There was a suggestion of saintliness in the line of the nose and chin, a suggestion made all the more poignant by the slender column of the neck. He shifted uncomfortably on the guest mat. She had taken up the Anabasis again, and silence was pounding silent fists upon the walls. He was relieved when Eldoria finally arrived. She ushered him into the next room immediately. It was slightly larger than the anteroom, and much more richly appointed. A thick carpet the color of Martian waterways lay upon the floor, contrasting pleasantly with the golden tapestries that adorned all four walls. The sleeping dais was oval and took up nearly half the floor space. It was strewn with scarlet cushions. Blake sat down upon it. Nervously he watched Eldoria slip out of her white street robe, his eyes moving back and forth from her smooth dark skin to the arras. The incense thickened around him. She noticed the back-and-forth movement of his eyes. "You need not fear the little one," she said, laying her hand upon his knee. "She will not enter." "It's not that so much," Blake said. "What?" The warm bronze shoulder was touching his.... He rose up once in the night, thinking to find his hotel bed. His next awakening was in the grayness of dawn, and he got up and dressed and moved silently to the doorway. The girl slept just without the arras on a thin sleeping-mat, and he had to step over her to gain the anteroom. In sleep, a strand of her copper-colored hair had tumbled down across her forehead and lay like a lovely flower upon the virginal whiteness of her skin. There was something saintly about her quiet face. When he reached the alley he began to run, and he did not stop running till the chocoletto sector was far behind him. The hill was a memory-image and Aldebaran 12 rain-country hills were notoriously steep. Blake was breathing hard when he reached the crest. Before him lay a memory-image of a section of Deneb 1 wasteland. The image extended for no more than half a mile, but Blake was annoyed that he should have remembered even that much of the wretched terrain. Ideally, a man's mind-country should have been comprised only of the places and times he wanted to remember. Practically, however, that was far from being the case. He glanced back down into the rain-pocked valley that he had just crossed. The rain and the mist made for poor visibility. He could only faintly distinguish the three figures of his pursuers. The trio seemed a little closer now. Ever since he had first set foot into his mind, some ten hours ago, they had been on his trail, but for some reason he had been unable to bring himself to go back and find out who they were and what they wanted. Hence he was as vexed with himself as he was with them. After resting for a few minutes, he descended the hill and started across the Deneb 1 wasteland. It was a remarkably detailed materialization, and his quarry's footprints stood out clearly in the duplicated sand. Sabrina York did not even know the rudiments of the art of throwing off a mind-tracker. It would have done her but little good if she had, for twelve years as a psycheye had taught Blake all the tricks. Probably she had taken it for granted that the mere act of hiding out in her tracker's mind was in itself a sufficient guarantee of her safety. After all, she had no way of knowing that he had discovered her presence. Mind-country was as temporally inconsecutive as it was topographically incongruous, so Blake was not surprised when the Deneb 1 wasteland gave way to an expanse of boyhood meadow. Near the meadow was the house where Blake had lived at a much later date. In reality, the places were as far apart in miles as they were in years, but here in the country of his mind they existed side by side, surrounded by heterogeneous landscapes from all over the civilized sector of the galaxy and by the sharply demarcated spectra of a hundred different suns. A few of the suns were in the patchwork sky—Sirius, for example, and its twinkling dwarf companion. Most of them, however, were present only in their remembered radiance. To add to the confusion, scattered night memories interrupted the hodge-podge horizon with columns of darkness, and here and there the gray column of a dawn or dusk memory showed. The house was flanked on one side by a section of a New Earth spaceport and on the other by an excerpt of an Ex-earth city-block. Behind it flowed a brief blue stretch of Martian waterway. Sabrina's footsteps led up to the front door, and the door itself was ajar. Perhaps she was still inside. Perhaps she was watching him even now through one of the remembered windows. He scanned them with a professional eye, but saw no sign of her. Warily he stepped inside, adjusting the temperature of his all-weather jacket to the remembered air-conditioning. His father was sitting in the living room, smoking, and watching 3V. He had no awareness of Blake. At Blake's entry he went right on smoking and watching as though the door had neither opened nor closed. He would go right on smoking and watching till Blake died and the conglomeration of place-times that constituted Blake's mind-world ceased to be. Ironically, he was watching nothing. The 3V program that had been in progress at the time of the unconscious materialization had failed to come through. The memory was a treasured one—the old man had perished in a 'copter crash several years ago—and for a long while Blake did not move. He had never been in his own mind before. Consequently he was more affected than he might otherwise have been. Finally, stirring himself, he walked out into the kitchen. On a shelf above the sink stood a gaily colored box of his mother's favorite detergent with a full-length drawing of Vera Velvetskin, the company's blond and chic visual symbol, on the front. His mother was standing before the huge automatic range, preparing a meal she had served twenty-three years ago. He regarded her with moist eyes. She had died a dozen years before his father, but the wound that her death had caused had never healed. He wanted to go up behind her and touch her shoulder and say, "What's for supper, mom?" but he knew it would do no good. For her he had no reality, not only because he was far in her future, but because in his mind-world she was a mortal and he, a god—a picayune god, perhaps, but a real one. As he was about to turn away, the name-plate on the range caught his eye, and thinking that he had read the two words wrong, he stepped closer so that he could see them more clearly. No, he had made no mistake: the first word was "Sabrina", and the second was "York". He stepped back. Odd that a kitchen range should have the same name as his quarry. But perhaps not unduly so. Giving appliances human names had been common practice for centuries. Even a name like "Sabrina York", while certainly not run-of-the-mill, was bound to be duplicated in real life. Nevertheless a feeling of uneasiness accompanied him when he left the kitchen and climbed the stairs to the second floor. He went through each room systematically, but saw no sign of Sabrina York. He lingered for some time in his own room, wistfully watching his fifteen-year-old self lolling on the bed with a dog-eared copy of The Galaxy Boys and the Secret of the Crab Nebula , then he stepped back out into the hall and started to descend the stairs. At the head of the stairs a narrow window looked out over the front yard and thence out over the meadow. He glanced absently through the panes, and came to an abrupt halt. His three pursuers were wading through the long meadow grass less than a quarter of a mile away—not close enough as yet for him to be able to make out their faces, but close enough for him to be able to see that two of them were wearing dresses and that the third had on a blue skirt and blouse, and a kepi to match. He gasped. It simply hadn't occurred to him that his pursuers might be women. To his consternation he discovered that he was even more loath to go back and accost them than he had been before. He actually had an impulse to flee. He controlled it and descended the stairs with exaggerated slowness, leaving the house by way of the back door. He picked up Sabrina's trail in the back yard and followed it down to the Martian waterway and thence along the bank to where the waterway ended and a campus began. Not the campus of the university which he had visited two days ago to attend his protegee's graduation. It was not a place-time that he cared to revisit, nor a moment that he cared to relive, but Sabrina's trail led straight across the artificially stunted grass toward the little bench where he and Deirdre Eldoria had come to talk after the ceremony was over. He had no choice. The bench stood beneath a towering American elm whose feathery branches traced green arabesques against the blue June sky. A set of footprints slightly deeper than its predecessors indicated that Sabrina had paused by the trunk. Despite himself Blake paused there too. Pain tightened his throat when he looked at Deirdre's delicate profile and copper-colored hair, intensified when he lowered his eyes to the remembered blueness of her graduation dress. The diamond brooch that he had given her as a graduation present, and which she had proudly pinned upon her bodice for the whole wide world to see, made him want to cry. His self-image of two weeks ago shocked him. There were lines on the face that did not as yet exist, and the brown hair was shot with streaks of gray that had yet to come into being. Lord, he must have been feeling old to have pictured himself like that! Deirdre was speaking. "Yes," she was saying, "at nine o'clock. And I should very much like for you to come." Blake Past shook his head. "Proms aren't for parents. You know that as well as I do. That young man you were talking with a few minutes ago—he's the one who should take you. He'd give his right arm for the chance." "I'll thank you not to imply that you're my father. One would think from the way you talk that you are centuries old!" "I'm thirty-eight," Blake Past said, "and while I may not be your father, I'm certainly old enough to be. That young man—" A pink flush of anger climbed into Deirdre Eldoria's girlish cheeks. "What right has he got to take me! Did he scrimp and go without in order to put me through high school and college? Has he booked passage for me to New Earth and paid my tuition to Trevor University?" "Please," Blake Past said, desperation deepening his voice. "You're only making everything worse. After majoring in Trevorism, you certainly ought to realize by now that there was nothing noble about my buying you after Eldoria died. I only did it to ease my conscience—" "What do you know about conscience?" Deirdre demanded. "Conscience is a much more complex mechanism than most laymen realize. Guilt feelings aren't reliable criteria. They can stem from false causes—from ridiculous things like a person's inability to accept himself for what he is." Abruptly she dropped the subject. "Don't you realize, Nate," she went on a little desperately, "that I'm leaving tomorrow and that we won't see each other again for years and years?" "I'll come to New Earth to visit you," Blake said. "Venus is only a few days distant on the new ships." She stood up. "You won't come—I know you won't." She stamped her foot. "And you won't come to the prom either. I know that too. I knew it all along. Sometimes I'm tempted to—" Abruptly she broke off. "Very well then," she went on, "I'll say good-by now then." Blake Past stood up too. "No, not yet. I'll walk back to the sorority house with you." She tossed her head, but the sadness in her tarn-blue eyes belied her hauteur. "If you wish," she said. Blake Present watched them set out side by side toward the remembered halls of learning that showed in the distance. There had been other people present on the campus that afternoon, but as they had failed to register on Blake Past's mind, they did not exist for Blake Present. All that existed for Blake Present were the diminishing figures of the girl and the man, and the pain that was constricting his throat. Wretchedly he turned away. As he did so he saw the three shadows lying at his feet and knew that his pursuers had at last caught up to him. His first reaction when he faced them was amazement. His next reaction was shock. His third was fear. His amazement resulted from recognition. One of the three women arrayed before him was Miss Stoddart, his boyhood Sunday-school teacher. Standing next to her in a familiar blue uniform was Officer Finch, the police woman who had maintained law and order in the collective elementary school he had attended. Standing next to Officer Finch was blond and chic Vera Velvetskin, whose picture he had seen on box after countless box of his mother's favorite detergent. His shock resulted from the expressions on the three faces. Neither Miss Stoddart nor Officer Finch ever particularly liked him, but they had never particularly disliked him either. This Miss Stoddart and this Officer Finch disliked him, though. They hated him. They hated him so much that their hatred had thinned out their faces and darkened their eyes. More shocking yet, Vera Velvetskin, who had never existed save in some copywriter's mind, hated him too. In fact, judging from the greater thinness of her face and the more pronounced darkness of her eyes, she hated him even more than Miss Stoddart and Officer Finch did. His fear resulted from the realization that his mind-world contained phenomena it had no right to contain—not if he was nearly as well-adjusted as he considered himself to be. The three women standing before him definitely were not memory-images. They were too vivid, for one thing. For another, they were aware of him. What were they, then? And what were they doing in his mind? He asked the two questions aloud. Three arms were raised and three forefingers were pointed accusingly at his chest. Three pairs of eyes burned darkly. "You ask us that?" Miss Stoddart said. "Callous creature who did a maiden's innocence affront!" said Officer Finch. "And sought sanctuary in ill-fitting robes of righteousness!" said Vera Velvetskin. The three faces moved together, blurred and seemed to blend into one. The three voices were raised in unison: "You know who we are, Nathan Blake. You know who we are!" Blake stared at them open-mouthed. Then he turned and fled. It had taken man a long time to discover that he was a god in his own right and that he too was capable of creating universes. Trivial universes, to be sure, when compared with the grandeur and scope of the objective one, and peopled with ghosts instead of human beings; but universes nonetheless. The discovery came about quite by accident. After projecting himself into a patient's memory one day, a psychologist named Trevor suddenly found himself clinging to the slope of a traumatically distorted mountain. His patient was beside him. The mountain proved to be an unconscious memory-image out of the patient's boyhood, and its country proved to be the country of the patient's mind. After many trials and errors, Trevor managed to get both himself and his patient back to the objective world, and not long afterward he was able to duplicate the feat on another case. The next logical step was to enter his own mind, and this he also succeeded in doing. It was inevitable that Trevor should write a book about his discovery and set about founding a new school of psychology. It was equally inevitable that he should acquire enemies as well as disciples. However, as the years passed and the new therapy which he devised cured more and more psychoses, the ranks of his disciples swelled and those of his enemies shrank. When, shortly before his death, he published a paper explaining how anyone could enter his or her own mind-world at will, his niche in the Freudian hall of fame was assured. The method employed an ability that had been evolving in the human mind for millennia—the ability to project oneself into a past moment—or, to use Trevor's term, a past "place-time." Considerable practice was required before the first transition could be achieved, but once it was achieved, successive transitions became progressively easier. Entering another person's mind-world was of course a more difficult undertaking, and could be achieved only after an intensive study of a certain moment in that person's past. In order to return to the objective world, it was necessary in both cases to locate the most recently materialized place-time and take one step beyond it. By their very nature, mind-countries were confusing. They existed on a plane of reality that bore no apparent relationship to the plane of the so-called objective universe. In fact, so far as was known, this secondary—or subjective—reality was connected to so-called true reality only through the awareness of the various creators. In addition, these countries had no outward shape in the ordinary sense of the word, and while most countries contained certain parallel images, these images were subject to the interpretation of the individual creator. As a result they were seldom identical. It was inevitable that sooner or later some criminal would hit upon the idea of hiding out in his own mind-world till the statute of limitations that applied to his particular crime ran out, and it was equally inevitable that others should follow suit. Society's answer was the psyche-police, and the psyche-police hadn't been in action very long before the first private psycheye appeared. Blake was one of a long line of such operators. So far as he knew, the present case represented the first time a criminal had ever hidden out in the pursuer's mind. It would have been a superb stratagem indeed if, shortly after her entry, Sabrina York had not betrayed her presence. For her point of entry she had used the place-time materialization of the little office Blake had opened on Ex-earth at the beginning of his career. Unaccountably she had ransacked it before moving into a co-terminous memory-image. Even this action wouldn't have given her away, however, if the office hadn't constituted a sentimental memory. Whenever Blake accepted a case he invariably thought of the bleak and lonely little room with its thin-gauge steel desk and battered filing cabinets, and when he had done so after accepting his case—or was it before? He couldn't quite remember—the mental picture that had come into his mind had revealed open drawers, scattered papers and a general air of disarray. He had suspected the truth immediately, and when he had seen the woman's handkerchief with the initials "SB" embroidered on it lying by one of the filing cabinets he had known definitely that his quarry was hiding out in his mind. Retiring to his bachelor quarters, he had entered at the same place-time and set off in pursuit. Her only advantage lost, Sabrina York was now at his mercy. Unless she discovered his presence and was able to locate his most recently materialized place-time before he over-took her, her capture was assured. Only two things bothered Blake. The little office was far in his past, and it was unlikely that anyone save the few intimate acquaintances whom he had told about it were aware that it had ever existed. How, then, had a total stranger such as Sabrina York learned enough about it to enable her to use it as a point of entry? The other thing that bothered him was of a much more urgent nature. He had been in enough minds and he had read enough on the subject of Trevorism to know that people were sometimes capable of creating beings considerably higher on the scale of mind-country evolution than ordinary memory-ghosts. One woman whom he had apprehended in her own mind had created a walking-talking Virgin Mary who watched over her wherever she went. And once, after tracking down an ex-enlisted man, he had found his quarry holed up in the memory-image of an army barracks with a ten-star general waiting on him hand and foot. But these, and other, similar, cases, had to do with mal-adjusted people, and moreover, the super-image in each instance had been an image that the person involved had wanted to create. Therefore, even assuming that Blake was less well-adjusted than he considered himself to be, why had he created three such malevolent super-images as Miss Stoddart, Officer Finch, and Vera Velvetskin? They followed him off the campus into a vicarious memory-image of Walden Pond, Thoreau's shack, and the encompassing woods. Judging from the ecstatic "oh's" and "ah's" they kept giving voice to, the place delighted them. Once, glancing back over his shoulder, he saw them standing in front of Thoreau's shack, looking at it as though it were a doll's house. Not far away, Thoreau was sitting in under a tall pine, gazing up into the branches at a bird that had come through only as a vague blur of beak and feathers. Blake went on. Presently the Walden Pond memory-image gave way to a memory-image of an English park which the ex-Earth government had set aside as a memorial to the English poets and which had impressed Blake sufficiently when he had visited it in his youth to have found a place for itself in the country of his mind. It consisted of reconstructions of famous dwellings out of the lives of the poets, among them, a dwelling out of the life of a poet who was not in the strictest sense of the word English at all—the birthplace of Robert Burns. Oddly enough, it was Burns's birthplace that had impressed Blake most. Now the little cottage stood out in much more vivid detail than any of the other famous dwellings. Sabrina York must have been attracted to the place, for her footprints showed that she had turned in at the gate, walked up the little path and let herself in the door. They also showed that she had left by the same route, so there was no reason for Blake to linger. As a matter of fact, the fascination that had brought the place into being had been replaced by an illogical repugnance. But repugnance can sometimes be as compelling a force as fascination, and Blake not only lingered but went inside as well. He remembered the living room distinctly—the flagstone floor, the huge grill-fronted hearth, the deeply recessed window, the rack of cups and platters on the wall; the empty straight-backed chair standing sternly in a corner, the bare wooden table— He paused just within the doorway. The chair was no longer empty, the table no longer bare. A man sat on the former and a bottle of wine stood on the latter. Moreover, the room showed signs of having been lived in for a long time. The floor was covered with tracked-in dirt and the walls were blackened from smoke. The grill-work of the hearth was begrimed with grease.

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LOST IN TRANSLATION By LARRY M. HARRIS In language translation, you may get a literally accurate word-for-word translation ... but miss the meaning entirely. And in space-type translation ... the effect may be the same! Illustrated by Schoenherr The cell had been put together more efficiently than any Korvin had ever been in. But that was only natural, he told himself sadly; the Tr'en were an efficient people. All the preliminary reports had agreed on that; their efficiency, as a matter of fact, was what had made Korvin's arrival a necessity. They were well into the atomic era, and were on the verge of developing space travel. Before long they'd be settling the other planets of their system, and then the nearer stars. Faster-than-light travel couldn't be far away, for the magnificently efficient physical scientists of the Tr'en—and that would mean, in the ordinary course of events, an invitation to join the Comity of Planets. An invitation, the Comity was sure, which the Tr'en would not accept. Korvin stretched out on the cell's single bunk, a rigid affair which was hardly meant for comfort, and sighed. He'd had three days of isolation, with nothing to do but explore the resources of his own mind. He'd tried some of the ancient Rhine experiments, but that was no good; he still didn't show any particular psi talents. He couldn't unlock the cell door with his unaided mind; he couldn't even alter the probability of a single dust-mote's Brownian path through the somewhat smelly air. Nor could he disappear from his cell and appear, as if by magic, several miles away near the slightly-damaged hulk of his ship, to the wonder and amazement of his Tr'en captors. He could do, as a matter of fact, precisely nothing. He wished quietly that the Tr'en had seen fit to give him a pack of cards, or a book, or even a folder of tourist pictures. The Wonders of Tr'en, according to all the advance reports, were likely to be pretty boring, but they'd have been better than nothing. In any decently-run jail, he told himself with indignation, there would at least have been other prisoners to talk to. But on Tr'en Korvin was all alone. True, every night the guards came in and gave him a concentrated lesson in the local language, but Korvin failed to get much pleasure out of that, being unconscious at the time. But now he was equipped to discuss almost anything from philosophy to plumbing, but there was nobody to discuss it with. He changed position on the bunk and stared at the walls. The Tr'en were efficient; there weren't even any imperfections in the smooth surface to distract him. He wasn't tired and he wasn't hungry; his captors had left him with a full stock of food concentrates. But he was almightily bored, and about ready to tell anything to anyone, just for the chance at a little conversation. As he reached this dismal conclusion, the cell door opened. Korvin got up off the bunk in a hurry and spun around to face his visitor. The Tr'en was tall, and slightly green. He looked, as all the Tr'en did, vaguely humanoid—that is, if you don't bother to examine him closely. Life in the universe appeared to be rigidly limited to humanoid types on oxygen planets; Korvin didn't know why, and neither did anybody else. There were a lot of theories, but none that accounted for all the facts satisfactorily. Korvin really didn't care about it; it was none of his business. The Tr'en regarded him narrowly through catlike pupils. "You are Korvin," he said. It was a ritual, Korvin had learned. "You are of the Tr'en," he replied. The green being nodded. "I am Didyak of the Tr'en," he said. Amenities over with, he relaxed slightly—but no more than slightly—and came into the cell, closing the door behind him. Korvin thought of jumping the Tr'en, but decided quickly against it. He was a captive, and it was unwise to assume that his captors had no more resources than the ones he saw: a small translucent pistollike affair in a holster at the Tr'en's side, and a small knife in a sheath at the belt. Those Korvin could deal with; but there might be almost anything else hidden and ready to fire on him. "What do you want with me?" Korvin said. The Tr'en speech—apparently there was only one language on the planet—was stiff and slightly awkward, but easily enough learned under drug hypnosis; it was the most rigorously logical construction of its kind Korvin had ever come across. It reminded him of some of the mathematical metalanguages he'd dealt with back on Earth, in training; but it was more closely and carefully constructed than even those marvels. "I want nothing with you," Didyak said, leaning against the door-frame. "You have other questions?" Korvin sighed. "What are you doing here, then?" he asked. As conversation, it wasn't very choice; but it was, he admitted, better than solitude. "I am leaning against the door," Didyak said. The Tr'en literalist approach to the smallest problems of everyday living was a little hard to get the hang of, Korvin told himself bitterly. He thought for a second. "Why did you come to me?" he said at last. Didyak beamed at him. The sight was remarkably unpleasant, involving as it did the disclosure of the Tr'en fifty-eight teeth, mostly pointed. Korvin stared back impassively. "I have been ordered to come to you," Didyak said, "by the Ruler. The Ruler wishes to talk with you." It wasn't quite "talk"; that was a general word in the Tr'en language, and Didyak had used a specific meaning, roughly: "gain information from, by peaceful and vocal means." Korvin filed it away for future reference. "Why did the Ruler not come to me?" Korvin asked. "The Ruler is the Ruler," Didyak said, slightly discomfited. "You are to go to him. Such is his command." Korvin shrugged, sighed and smoothed back his hair. "I obey the command of the Ruler," he said—another ritual. Everybody obeyed the command of the Ruler. If you didn't, you never had a second chance to try. But Korvin meant exactly what he'd said. He was going to obey the commands of the Ruler of the Tr'en—and remove the Tr'en threat from the rest of the galaxy forever. That, after all, was his job. The Room of the Ruler was large, square and excessively brown. The walls were dark-brown, the furnishings—a single great chair, several kneeling-benches and a small table near the chair—were light-brown, of some metallic substance, and even the drapes were tan. It was, Korvin decided, much too much of a bad idea, even when the color contrast of the Tr'en themselves were figured in. The Ruler himself, a Tr'en over seven feet tall and correspondingly broad, sat in the great chair, his four fingers tapping gently on the table near him, staring at Korvin and his guards. The guards stood on either side of their captive, looking as impassive as jade statues, six and a half feet high. Korvin wasn't attempting to escape. He wasn't pleading with the Ruler. He wasn't defying the Ruler, either. He was just answering questions. The Tr'en liked to have everything clear. They were a logical race. The Ruler had started with Korvin's race, his name, his sex—if any—and whether or not his appearance were normal for humanity. Korvin was answering the last question. "Some men are larger than I am," he said, "and some are smaller." "Within what limits?" Korvin shrugged. "Some are over eight feet tall," he said, "and others under four feet." He used the Tr'en measurement scale, of course; it didn't seem necessary, though, to mention that both extremes of height were at the circus-freak level. "Then there is a group of humans," he went on, "who are never more than a foot and a half in height, and usually less than that—approximately nine or ten inches. We call these children ," he volunteered helpfully. "Approximately?" the Ruler growled. "We ask for precision here," he said. "We are scientific men. We are exact." Korvin nodded hurriedly. "Our race is more ... more approximate," he said apologetically. "Slipshod," the Ruler muttered. "Undoubtedly," Korvin agreed politely. "I'll try to do the best I can for you." "You will answer my questions," the Ruler said, "with exactitude." He paused, frowning slightly. "You landed your ship on this planet," he went on. "Why?" "My job required it," Korvin said. "A clumsy lie," the Ruler said. "The ship crashed; our examinations prove that beyond any doubt." "True," Korvin said. "And it is your job to crash your ship?" the Ruler said. "Wasteful." Korvin shrugged again. "What I say is true," he announced. "Do you have tests for such matters?" "We do," the Ruler told him. "We are an exact and a scientific race. A machine for the testing of truth has been adjusted to your physiology. It will be attached to you." Korvin looked around and saw it coming through the door, pushed by two technicians. It was large and squat and metallic, and it had wheels, dials, blinking lights, tubes and wires, and a seat with armrests and straps. It was obviously a form of lie-detector—and Korvin felt himself marveling again at this race. Earth science had nothing to match their enormous command of the physical universe; adapting a hypnopædic language-course to an alien being so quickly had been wonder enough, but adapting the perilously delicate mechanisms that necessarily made up any lie-detector machinery was almost a miracle. The Tr'en, under other circumstances, would have been a valuable addition to the Comity of Nations. Being what they were, though, they could only be a menace. And Korvin's appreciation of the size of that menace was growing hourly. He hoped the lie-detector had been adjusted correctly. If it showed him telling an untruth, he wasn't likely to live long, and his job—not to mention the strongest personal inclinations—demanded most strongly that he stay alive. He swallowed hard. But when the technicians forced him down into the seat, buckled straps around him, attached wires and electrodes and elastic bands to him at appropriate places and tightened some final screws, he made no resistance. "We shall test the machine," the Ruler said. "In what room are you?" "In the Room of the Ruler," Korvin said equably. "Are you standing or sitting?" "I am sitting," Korvin said. "Are you a chulad ?" the Ruler asked. A chulad was a small native pet, Korvin knew, something like a greatly magnified deathwatch beetle. "I am not," he said. The Ruler looked to his technicians for a signal, and nodded on receiving it. "You will tell an untruth now," he said. "Are you standing or sitting?" "I am standing," Korvin said. The technicians gave another signal. The Ruler looked, in his frowning manner, reasonably satisfied. "The machine," he announced, "has been adjusted satisfactorily to your physiology. The questioning will now continue." Korvin swallowed again. The test hadn't really seemed extensive enough to him. But, after all, the Tr'en knew their business, better than anyone else could know it. They had the technique and the logic and the training. He hoped they were right. The Ruler was frowning at him. Korvin did his best to look receptive. "Why did you land your ship on this planet?" the Ruler said. "My job required it," Korvin said. The Ruler nodded. "Your job is to crash your ship," he said. "It is wasteful but the machines tell me it is true. Very well, then; we shall find out more about your job. Was the crash intentional?" Korvin looked sober. "Yes," he said. The Ruler blinked. "Very well," he said. "Was your job ended when the ship crashed?" The Tr'en word, of course, wasn't ended , nor did it mean exactly that. As nearly as Korvin could make out, it meant "disposed of for all time." "No," he said. "What else does your job entail?" the Ruler said. Korvin decided to throw his first spoke into the wheel. "Staying alive." The Ruler roared. "Do not waste time with the obvious!" he shouted. "Do not try to trick us; we are a logical and scientific race! Answer correctly." "I have told the truth," Korvin said. "But it is not—not the truth we want," the Ruler said. Korvin shrugged. "I replied to your question," he said. "I did not know that there was more than one kind of truth. Surely the truth is the truth, just as the Ruler is the Ruler?" "I—" The Ruler stopped himself in mid-roar. "You try to confuse the Ruler," he said at last, in an approximation of his usual one. "But the Ruler will not be confused. We have experts in matters of logic"—the Tr'en word seemed to mean right-saying —"who will advise the Ruler. They will be called." Korvin's guards were standing around doing nothing of importance now that their captor was strapped down in the lie-detector. The Ruler gestured and they went out the door in a hurry. The Ruler looked down at Korvin. "You will find that you cannot trick us," he said. "You will find that such fiddling"— chulad-like Korvin translated—"attempts will get you nowhere." Korvin devoutly hoped so. The experts in logic arrived shortly, and in no uncertain terms Korvin was given to understand that logical paradox was not going to confuse anybody on the planet. The barber who did, or didn't, shave himself, the secretary of the club whose members were secretaries, Achilles and the tortoise, and all the other lovely paradox-models scattered around were so much primer material for the Tr'en. "They can be treated mathematically," one of the experts, a small emerald-green being, told Korvin thinly. "Of course, you would not understand the mathematics. But that is not important. You need only understand that we cannot be confused by such means." "Good," Korvin said. The experts blinked. "Good?" he said. "Naturally," Korvin said in a friendly tone. The expert frowned horribly, showing all of his teeth. Korvin did his best not to react. "Your plan is a failure," the expert said, "and you call this a good thing. You can mean only that your plan is different from the one we are occupied with." "True," Korvin said. There was a short silence. The expert beamed. He examined the indicators of the lie-detector with great care. "What is your plan?" he said at last, in a conspiratorial whisper. "To answer your questions, truthfully and logically," Korvin said. The silence this time was even longer. "The machine says that you tell the truth," the experts said at last, in a awed tone. "Thus, you must be a traitor to your native planet. You must want us to conquer your planet, and have come here secretly to aid us." Korvin was very glad that wasn't a question. It was, after all, the only logical deduction. But it happened to be wrong. "The name of your planet is Earth?" the Ruler asked. A few minutes had passed; the experts were clustered around the single chair. Korvin was still strapped to the machine; a logical race makes use of a traitor, but a logical race does not trust him. "Sometimes," Korvin said. "It has other names?" the Ruler said. "It has no name," Korvin said truthfully. The Tr'en idiom was like the Earthly one; and certainly a planet had no name. People attached names to it, that was all. It had none of its own. "Yet you call it Earth?" the Ruler said. "I do," Korvin said, "for convenience." "Do you know its location?" the Ruler said. "Not with exactitude," Korvin said. There was a stir. "But you can find it again," the Ruler said. "I can," Korvin said. "And you will tell us about it?" the Ruler went on. "I will," Korvin said, "so far as I am able." "We will wish to know about weapons," the Ruler said, "and about plans and fortifications. But we must first know of the manner of decision on this planet. Is your planet joined with others in a government or does it exist alone?" Korvin nearly smiled. "Both," he said. A short silence was broken by one of the attendant experts. "We have theorized that an underling may be permitted to make some of his own decisions, leaving only the more extensive ones for the master. This seems to us inefficient and liable to error, yet it is a possible system. Is it the system you mean?" Very sharp, Korvin told himself grimly. "It is," he said. "Then the government which reigns over several planets is supreme," the Ruler said. "It is," Korvin said. "Who is it that governs?" the Ruler said. The key question had, at last, been asked. Korvin felt grateful that the logical Tr'en had determined to begin from the beginning, instead of going off after details of armament first; it saved a lot of time. "The answer to that question," Korvin said, "cannot be given to you." "Any question of fact has an answer," the Ruler snapped. "A paradox is not involved here; a government exists, and some being is the governor. Perhaps several beings share this task; perhaps machines do the work. But where there is a government, there is a governor. Is this agreed?" "Certainly," Korvin said. "It is completely obvious and true." "The planet from which you come is part of a system of planets which are governed, you have said," the Ruler went on. "True," Korvin said. "Then there is a governor for this system," the Ruler said. "True," Korvin said again. The ruler sighed gently. "Explain this governor to us," he said. Korvin shrugged. "The explanation cannot be given to you." The Ruler turned to a group of his experts and a short muttered conversation took place. At its end the Ruler turned his gaze back to Korvin. "Is the deficiency in you?" he said. "Are you in some way unable to describe this government?" "It can be described," Korvin said. "Then you will suffer unpleasant consequences if you describe it to us?" the Ruler went on. "I will not," Korvin said. It was the signal for another conference. With some satisfaction, Korvin noticed that the Tr'en were becoming slightly puzzled; they were no longer moving and speaking with calm assurance. The plan was taking hold. The Ruler had finished his conference. "You are attempting again to confuse us," he said. Korvin shook his head earnestly. "I am attempting," he said, "not to confuse you." "Then I ask for an answer," the Ruler said. "I request that I be allowed to ask a question," Korvin said. The Ruler hesitated, then nodded. "Ask it," he said. "We shall answer it if we see fit to do so." Korvin tried to look grateful. "Well, then," he said, "what is your government?" The Ruler beckoned to a heavy-set green being, who stepped forward from a knot of Tr'en, inclined his head in Korvin's direction, and began. "Our government is the only logical form of government," he said in a high, sweet tenor. "The Ruler orders all, and his subjects obey. In this way uniformity is gained, and this uniformity aids in the speed of possible action and in the weight of action. All Tr'en act instantly in the same manner. The Ruler is adopted by the previous Ruler; in this way we are assured of a common wisdom and a steady judgment." "You have heard our government defined," the Ruler said. "Now, you will define yours for us." Korvin shook his head. "If you insist," he said, "I'll try it. But you won't understand it." The Ruler frowned. "We shall understand," he said. "Begin. Who governs you?" "None," Korvin said. "But you are governed?" Korvin nodded. "Yes." "Then there is a governor," the Ruler insisted. "True," Korvin said. "But everyone is the governor." "Then there is no government," the Ruler said. "There is no single decision." "No," Korvin said equably, "there are many decisions binding on all." "Who makes them binding?" the Ruler asked. "Who forces you to accept these decisions? Some of them must be unfavorable to some beings?" "Many of them are unfavorable," Korvin said. "But we are not forced to accept them." "Do you act against your own interests?" Korvin shrugged. "Not knowingly," he said. The Ruler flashed a look at the technicians handling the lie-detector. Korvin turned to see their expression. They needed no words; the lie-detector was telling them, perfectly obviously, that he was speaking the truth. But the truth wasn't making any sense. "I told you you wouldn't understand it," he said. "It is a defect in your explanation," the Ruler almost snarled. "My explanation is as exact as it can be," he said. The Ruler breathed gustily. "Let us try something else," he said. "Everyone is the governor. Do you share a single mind? A racial mind has been theorized, though we have met with no examples—" "Neither have we," Korvin said. "We are all individuals, like yourselves." "But with no single ruler to form policy, to make decisions—" "We have no need of one," Korvin said calmly. "Ah," the Ruler said suddenly, as if he saw daylight ahead. "And why not?" "We call our form of government democracy ," Korvin said. "It means the rule of the people. There is no need for another ruler." One of the experts piped up suddenly. "The beings themselves rule each other?" he said. "This is clearly impossible; for, no one being can have the force to compel acceptance of his commands. Without his force, there can be no effective rule." "That is our form of government," Korvin said. "You are lying," the expert said. One of the technicians chimed in: "The machine tells us—" "Then the machine is faulty," the expert said. "It will be corrected." Korvin wondered, as the technicians argued, how long they'd take studying the machine, before they realized it didn't have any defects to correct. He hoped it wasn't going to be too long; he could foresee another stretch of boredom coming. And, besides, he was getting homesick. It took three days—but boredom never really had a chance to set in. Korvin found himself the object of more attention than he had hoped for; one by one, the experts came to his cell, each with a different method of resolving the obvious contradictions in his statements. Some of them went away fuming. Others simply went away, puzzled. On the third day Korvin escaped. It wasn't very difficult; he hadn't thought it would be. Even the most logical of thinking beings has a subconscious as well as a conscious mind, and one of the ways of dealing with an insoluble problem is to make the problem disappear. There were only two ways of doing that, and killing the problem's main focus was a little more complicated. That couldn't be done by the subconscious mind; the conscious had to intervene somewhere. And it couldn't. Because that would mean recognizing, fully and consciously, that the problem was insoluble. And the Tr'en weren't capable of that sort of thinking. Korvin thanked his lucky stars that their genius had been restricted to the physical and mathematical. Any insight at all into the mental sciences would have given them the key to his existence, and his entire plan, within seconds. But, then, it was lack of that insight that had called for this particular plan. That, and the political structure of the Tr'en. The same lack of insight let the Tr'en subconscious work on his escape without any annoying distractions in the way of deep reflection. Someone left a door unlocked and a weapon nearby—all quite intent, Korvin was sure. Getting to the ship was a little more complicated, but presented no new problems; he was airborne, and then space-borne, inside of a few hours after leaving the cell. He set his course, relaxed, and cleared his mind. He had no psionic talents, but the men at Earth Central did; he couldn't receive messages, but he could send them. He sent one now. Mission accomplished; the Tr'en aren't about to come marauding out into space too soon. They've been given food for thought—nice indigestible food that's going to stick in their craws until they finally manage to digest it. But they can't digest it and stay what they are; you've got to be democratic, to some extent, to understand the idea. What keeps us obeying laws we ourselves make? What keeps us obeying laws that make things inconvenient for us? Sheer self-interest, of course—but try to make a Tr'en see it! With one government and one language, they just weren't equipped for translation. They were too efficient physically to try for the mental sciences at all. No mental sciences, no insight into my mind or their own—and that means no translation. But—damn it—I wish I were home already. I'm bored absolutely stiff! THE END

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CAPTAIN CHAOS By NELSON S. BOND The Callisto-bound Leo needed a cook. What it got was a piping-voiced Jonah who jinxed it straight into Chaos. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] We picked up our new cook on Phobos. Not Phoebus or Phoebe; I mean Phobos, Mars' inner moon. Our regular victual mangler came down with acute indigestion—tasted some of his own cooking, no doubt—when we were just one blast of a jet-tube out of Sand City spaceport. But since we were rocketing under sealed orders, we couldn't turn back. So we laid the Leo down on Phobos' tiny cradle-field and bundled our ailing grub-hurler off to a hospital, and the skipper said to me, "Mister Dugan," he said, "go out and find us a cook!" "Aye, sir!" I said, and went. Only it wasn't that easy. In those days, Phobos had only a handful of settlers, and most of them had good-paying jobs. Besides, we were at war with the Outer Planets, and no man in his right senses wanted to sign for a single-trip jump on a rickety old patrolship bound for nobody-knew-where. And, of course, cooks are dime-a-dozen when you don't need one, but when you've got to locate one in a hurry they're as difficult to find as petticoats in a nudist camp. I tried the restaurants and the employment agencies, but it was no dice. I tried the hotels and the tourist homes and even one or two of the cleaner-looking joy-joints. Again I drew a blank. So, getting desperate, I audioed a plaintive appeal to the wealthy Phobosian colonists, asking that one of the more patriotic sons-of-riches donate a chef's services to the good old I.P.S., but my only response was a loud silence. So I went back to the ship. I said, "Sorry, sir. We're up against it. I can't seem to find a cook on the whole darned satellite." The skipper scowled at me from under a corduroy brow and fumed, "But we've got to have a cook, Dugan! We can't go on without one!" "In a pinch," I told him, " I might be able to boil a few pies, or scramble us a steak or something, Skipper." "Thanks, Dugan, but that won't do. On this trip the men must be fed regularly and well. Makeshift meals are O.Q. on an ordinary run, but when you're running the blockade—" He stopped abruptly. But too late; I had caught his slip of the tongue. I stared at him. I said, "The blockade, sir? Then you've read our orders?" The Old Man nodded soberly. "Yes. You might as well know, Lieutenant. Everyone will be told as soon as the Leo lifts gravs again. My orders were to be opened four hours after leaving Sand City. I read them a few minutes ago. "We are to attempt to run the Outer Planets Alliance blockade at any spot which reconnaisance determines as favorable. Our objective is Jupiter's fourth satellite, Callisto. The Solar Federation Intelligence Department has learned of a loyalist uprising on that moon. It is reported that Callisto is weary of the war, with a little prompting will secede from the Alliance and return to the Federation. "If this is true, it means we have at last found the foothold we have been seeking; a salient within easy striking distance of Jupiter, capital of the Alliance government. Our task is to verify the rumor and, if it be true, make a treaty with the Callistans." I said, "Sweet howling stars—some assignment, sir! A chance to end this terrible war ... form a permanent union of the entire Solar family ... bring about a new age of prosperity and happiness." "If," Cap O'Hara reminded me, "we succeed. But it's a tough job. We can't expect to win through the enemy cordon unless our men are in top physical condition. And that means a sound, regular diet. So we must find a cook, or—" "The search," interrupted an oddly high-pitched, but not unpleasant voice, "is over. Where's the galley?" I whirled, and so did the Old Man. Facing us was an outlandish little figure; a slim, trim, natty little Earthman not more than five-foot-two in height; a smooth-cheeked young fellow swaddled in a spaceman's uniform at least three sizes too large. Into the holster of his harness was thrust a Haemholtz ray-pistol big enough to burn an army, and in his right hand he brandished a huge, gleaming carving-knife. He frowned at us impatiently. "Well," he repeated impatiently, "where is it?" The Old Man stared. "W-who," he demanded dazedly, "might you be?" "I might be," retorted the little stranger, "lots of people. But I came here to be your new cook." O'Hara said, "The new—What's your name, mister?" "Andy," replied the newcomer. "Andy Laney." The Old Man's lip curled speculatively. "Well, Andy Laney," he said, "you don't look like much of a cook to me ." But the little mugg just returned the Old Man's gaze coolly. "Which makes it even," he retorted. " You don't look like much of a skipper to me . Do I get the job, or don't I?" The captain's grin faded, and his jowls turned pink. I stepped forward hastily. I said, "Excuse me, sir, shall I handle this?" Then, because the skipper was still struggling for words: "You," I said to the little fellow, "are a cook?" "One of the best!" he claimed complacently. "You're willing to sign for a blind journey?" "Would I be here," he countered, "if I weren't?" "And you have your space certificate?" "I—" began the youngster. "Smart Aleck!" That was the Old Man, exploding into coherence at last. "Rat-tailed, clever-cracking little smart Aleck! Don't look like much of a skipper, eh? Well, my fine young rooster—" I said quickly, "If you don't mind, sir, this is no time to worry over trifles. 'Any port in a storm,' you know. And if this young man can cook—" The skipper's color subsided. So did he, grumbling. "Well, perhaps you're right, Dugan. All right, Slops, you're hired. The galley's on the second level, port side. Mess in three quarters of an hour. Get going! Dugan, call McMurtrie and tell him we lift gravs immediately— Slops! What are you doing at that table?" For the little fellow had sidled across the control-room and now, eyes gleaming inquisitively, was peering at our trajectory charts. At the skipper's roar he glanced up at us eagerly. "Vesta!" he piped in that curiously high-pitched and mellow voice. "Loft trajectory for Vesta! Then we're trying to run the Alliance blockade, Captain?" "None of your business!" bellowed O'Hara in tones of thunderous outrage. "Get below instantly, or by the lavendar lakes of Luna I'll—" "If I were you," interrupted our diminutive new chef thoughtfully, "I'd try to broach the blockade off Iris rather than Vesta. For one thing, their patrol line will be thinner there; for another, you can come in through the Meteor Bog, using it as a cover." " Mr. Dugan! " The Old Man's voice had an ominous ring to it, one I had seldom heard. I sprang to attention and saluted smartly. "Aye, sir?" "Take this—this culinary tactician out of my sight before I forget I'm an officer and a gentleman. And tell him that when I want advice I'll come down to the galley for it!" A hurt look crept into the youngster's eyes. Slowly he turned and followed me from the turret, down the ramp, and into the pan-lined cubicle which was his proper headquarters. When I was turning to leave he said apologetically, "I didn't mean any harm, Mr. Dugan. I was just trying to help." "You must learn not to speak out of turn, youngster," I told him sternly. "The Old Man's one of the smartest space navigators who ever lifted gravs. He doesn't need the advice or suggestions of a cook." "But I was raised in the Belt," said the little chap plaintively. "I know the Bog like a book. And I was right; our safest course is by way of Iris." Well, there you are! You try to be nice to someone, and what happens? He tees off on you. I got a little sore I guess. Anyhow, I told the little squirt off, but definitely. "Now, listen!" I said bluntly. "You volunteered for the job. Now you've got to take what comes with it: orders! From now on, suppose you take care of the cooking and let the rest of us worry about the ship—Captain Slops!" And I left, banging the door behind me hard. So we hit the spaceways for Vesta, and after a while the Old Man called up the crew and told them our destination, and if you think they were scared or nervous or anything like that, why, you just don't know spacemen. From oil-soaked old Jock McMurtrie, the Chief Engineer, all the way down the line to Willy, our cabin-boy, the Leo's complement was as thrilled as a sub-deb at an Academy hop. John Wainwright, our First Officer, licked his chops like a fox in a hen-house and said, "The blockade! Oboyoboy! Maybe we'll tangle with one of the Alliance ships, hey?" Blinky Todd, an ordinary with highest rating, said with a sort of macabre satisfaction, "I hopes we do meet up with 'em, that's whut I does, sir! Never did have no love for them dirty, skulkin' Outlanders, that's whut I didn't!" And one of the black-gang blasters, a taciturn chap, said nothing—but the grim set of his jaw and the purposeful way he spat on his callused paws were mutely eloquent. Only one member of the crew was absent from the conclave. Our new Slops. He was busy preparing midday mess, it seems, because scarcely had the skipper finished talking than the audio hummed and a cheerful call rose from the galley: "Soup's on! Come and get it!" Which we did. And whatever failings "Captain Slops" might have, he had not exaggerated when he called himself one of the best cooks in space. That meal, children, was a meal! When it comes to victuals I can destroy better than describe, but there was stuff and things and such-like, all smothered in gravy and so on, and huge quantities of this and that and the other thing, all of them unbelievably dee-luscious! Beyond a doubt it was the finest feast we of the Leo had enjoyed in a 'coon's age. Even the Old Man admitted that as, leaning back from the table, he patted the pleasant bulge due south of his belt buckle. He rang the bell that summoned Slops from the galley, and the little fellow came bustling in apprehensively. "Was everything all right, sir?" he asked. "Not only all right, Slops," wheezed Captain O'Hara, "but perfect! Accept my congratulations on a superb meal, my boy. Did you find everything O.Q. in the galley?" "Captain Slops" blushed like a stereo-struck school-gal, and fidgeted from one foot to another. "Oh, thank you, sir! Thank you very much. Yes, the galley was in fine order. That is—" He hesitated—"there is one little thing, sir." "So? Well, speak up, son, what is it? I'll get it fixed for you right away." The Old Man smiled archly. "Must have everything shipshape for a tip-top chef, what?" The young hash-slinger still hesitated bashfully. "But it's such a little thing, sir, I almost hate to bother you with it." "No trouble at all. Just say the word." "Well, sir," confessed Slops reluctantly, "I need an incinerator in the galley. The garbage-disposal system in there now is old-fashioned, inconvenient and unsanitary. You see, I have to carry the waste down two levels to the rocket-chamber in order to expel it." The skipper's brow creased. "I'm sorry, Slops," he said, "but I don't see how we can do anything about that. Not just now, at any rate. That job requires equipment we don't have aboard. After this jump is over I'll see what I can do." "Oh, I realize we don't have the regular equipment," said Slops shyly, "but I've figured out a way to get the same effect with equipment we do have. There's an old Nolan heat-cannon rusting in the storeroom. If that could be installed by the galley vent, I could use it as an incinerator." I said, "Hold everything, Slops! You can't do that! It's against regulations. Code 44, Section xvi, says, 'Fixed armament shall be placed only in gunnery embrasures insulated against the repercussions of firing charges, re-radiation, or other hazards accruent to heavy ordnance.'" Our little chef's face fell. "Now, that's too bad," he said discouragedly. "I was planning a special banquet for tomorrow, with roast marsh-duck and all the fixings, pinberry pie—but, oh, well!—if I have no incinerator—" The skipper's eyes bulged, and he drooled like a pup at a barbeque. He was a bit of a sybarite, was Captain David O'Hara; if there was anything he dearly loved to exercise his molars on it was Venusian marsh-duck topped with a dessert of Martian pinberry pie. He said: "We-e-ell, now, Mr. Dugan, let's not be too technical. After all, that rule was put in the book only to prevent persons which shouldn't ought to do so from having control of ordnance. But that isn't what Slops wants the cannon for, is it, son? So I don't see any harm in rigging up the old Nolan in the galley for incineration purposes. Did you say all the fixings, Slops?" Maybe I was mistaken, but for a moment I suspected I caught a queer glint in our little chef's eyes; it might have been gratitude, or, on the other hand, it might have been self-satisfaction. Whatever it was it passed quickly, and Captain Slops' soft voice was smooth as silk when he said: "Yes, Captain, all the fixings. I'll start cooking the meal as soon as the new incinerator is installed." So that was that. During the night watch two men of the crew lugged the ancient Nolan heat cannon from stores and I went below to check. I found young Slops bent over the old cannon, giving it a strenuous and thorough cleaning. The way he was oiling and scrubbing at that antique reminded me of an apprentice gunner coddling his first charge. I must have startled him, entering unexpectedly as I did, for when I said, "Hi, there!" he jumped two feet and let loose a sissy little piping squeal. Then, crimson-faced with embarrassment, he said, "Oh, h-hello, Lieutenant. I was just getting my new incinerator shipshape. Looks O.Q., eh?" "If you ask me," I said, "it looks downright lethal. The Old Man must be off his gravs to let a young chuckle-head like you handle that toy." "But I'm only going to use it," he said plaintively, "to dispose of garbage." "Well, don't dump your cans when there are any ships within range," I warned him glumly, "or there'll be a mess of human scraps littering up the void. That gun may be a museum piece, but it still packs a wallop." "Yes, sir," said Slops meekly. "I'll be careful how I use it, sir." I had finished my inspection, and I sniggered as his words reminded me of a joke I'd heard at a spacemans' smoker. "Speaking of being careful, did you hear the giggler about the old maid at the Martian baths? Well, it seems this perennial spinster wandered, by accident, into the men's shower room and met up with a brawny young prospector—" Captain Slops said, "Er—excuse me, Lieutenant, but I have to get this marsh-duck stuffed." "Plenty of time, Slops. Wait till you hear this; it will kill you. The old maid got flustered and said, 'Oh, I'm sorry! I must be in the wrong compartment—'" "If you don't mind, Mr. Dugan," interrupted the cook loudly, "I'm awfully busy. I don't have any time for—" "The prospector looked her over carefully for a couple of seconds; then answered, 'That's O.Q. by me, sister. I won't—'" "I—I've got to go now, Lieutenant," shouted Slops. "Just remembered something I've got to get from stores." And without even waiting to hear the wallop at the end of my tale he fled from the galley, very pink and flustered. So there was one for the log-book! Not only did our emergency chef lack a sense of humor, but the little punk was bashful, as well! Still, it was no skin off my nose if Slops wanted to miss the funniest yarn of a decade. I shrugged and went back to the control turret. All that, to make an elongated story brief, happened on the first day out of Mars. As any schoolchild knows, it's a full hundred million from the desert planet to the asteroid belt. In those days, there was no such device as a Velocity-Intensifier unit, and the Leo , even though she was then considered a reasonably fast little patroller, muddled along at a mere 400,000 m.p.h. Which meant it would take us at least ten days, perhaps more, to reach that disputed region of space around Vesta, where the Federation outposts were sparse and the Alliance block began. That period of jetting was a mingled joy and pain in the britches. Captain Slops was responsible for both. For one thing, as I've hinted before, he was a bit of a panty-waist. It wasn't so much the squeaky voice or the effeminate gestures he cut loose with from time to time. One of the roughest, toughest scoundrels who ever cut a throat on Venus was "High G" Gordon, who talked like a boy soprano, and the meanest pirate who ever highjacked a freighter was "Runt" Hake—who wore diamond ear-rings and gold fingernail polish! But it was Slops' general attitude that isolated him from the command and crew. In addition to being a most awful prude, he was a kill-joy. When just for a lark we begged him to boil us a pot of spaghetti, so we could pour a cold worm's nest into Rick Bramble's bed, he shuddered and refused. "Certainly not!" he piped indignantly. "You must be out of your minds! I never heard of such a disgusting trick! Of course, I won't be a party to it. Worms—Ugh!" "Yeah!" snorted Johnny Wainwright disdainfully, "And ugh! to you, too. Come on, Joe, let's get out of here before we give Slops bad dreams and goose-flesh!" Nor was hypersensitiveness Slops' worst failing. If he was squeamish about off-color jokes and such stuff, he had no compunctions whatsoever against sticking his nose in where it didn't belong. He was an inveterate prowler. He snooped everywhere and anywhere from ballast-bins to bunk-rooms. He quizzed the Chief about engine-room practices, the gunner's mate on problems of ballistics, even the cabin-boy on matters of supplies and distribution of same. He was not only an asker; he was a teller, as well. More than once during the next nine days he forced on the skipper the same gratuitous advice which before had enraged the Old Man. By sheer perseverance he earned the title I had tagged him with: "Captain Slops." I was willing to give him another title, too—Captain Chaos. God knows he created enough of it! "It's a mistake to broach the blockade at Vesta," he argued over and over again. "O.Q., Slops," the skipper would nod agreeably, with his mouth full of some temper-softening tidbit, "you're right and I'm wrong, as you usually are. But I'm in command of the Leo , and you ain't. Now, run along like a good lad and bring me some more of this salad." So ten days passed, and it was on the morning of the eleventh day out of Sand City that we ran into trouble with a capital trub. I remember that morning well, because I was in the mess-hall having breakfast with Cap O'Hara, and Slops was playing another variation on the old familiar theme. "I glanced at the chart this morning, sir," he began as he minced in with a platterful of golden flapjacks and an ewer of Vermont maple syrup, "and I see we are but an hour or two off Vesta. I am very much afraid this is our last chance to change course—" "And for that," chuckled the Old Man, "Hooray! Pass them pancakes, son. Maybe now you'll stop shooting off about how we ought to of gone by way of Iris. Mmmm! Good!" "Thank you, sir," said Slops mechanically. "But you realize there is extreme danger of encountering enemy ships?" "Keep your pants on, Slops!" "Eh?" The chef looked startled. "Beg pardon, sir?" "I said keep your pants on. Sure, I know. And I've took precautions. There's a double watch on duty, and men at every gun. If we do meet up with an Alliance craft, it'll be just too bad for them! "Yes, sirree!" The Old Man grinned comfortably. "I almost hope we do bump into one. After we burn it out of the void we'll have clear sailing all the way to Callisto." "But—but if there should be more than one, sir?" "Don't be ridiculous, my boy. Why should there be?" "Well, for one thing," wrangled our pint-sized cook, "because rich ekalastron deposits were recently discovered on Vesta. For another, because Vesta's orbit is now going into aphelion stage, which will favor a concentration of raiders." The skipper choked, spluttered, and disgorged a bite of half-masticated pancake. "Eka—Great balls of fire! Are you sure?" "Of course, I'm sure. I told you days ago that I was born and raised in the Belt, Captain." "I know. But why didn't you tell me about Vesta before? I mean about the ekalastron deposits?" "Why—why, because—" said Slops. "Because—" "Don't give me lady-logic, you dope!" roared the Old Man, an enraged lion now, his breakfast completely forgotten. "Give me a sensible answer! If you'd told me that instead of just yipping and yapping about how via Iris was a nicer route I'd have listened to you! As it is, we're blasting smack-dab into the face of danger. And us on the most vital mission of the whole ding-busted war!" He was out of his seat, bustling to the audio, buzzing Lieutenant Wainwright on the bridge. "Johnny—that you? Listen, change traj quick! Set a new course through the Belt by way of Iris and the Bog, and hurry up, because—" What reason he planned to give I do not know, for he never finished that sentence. At that moment the Leo rattled like a Model AA spacesled in an ionic storm, rolled, quivered and slewed like a drunk on a freshly-waxed floor. The motion needed no explanation; it was unmistakeable to any spacer who has ever hopped the blue. Our ship had been gripped, and was now securely locked, in the clutch of a tractor beam! What happened next was everything at once. Officers Wainwright and Bramble were in the turret, and they were both good sailors. They knew their duties and how to perform them. An instant after the Leo had been assaulted, the ship bucked and slithered again, this time with the repercussions of our own ordnance. Over the audio, which Sparks had hastily converted into an all-way, inter-ship communicating unit, came a jumble of voices. A call for Captain O'Hara to "Come to the bridge, sir!" ... the harsh query of Chief McMurtrie, "Tractor beams on stern and prow, sir. Shall I attempt to break them?" ... and a thunderous groooom! from the fore-gunnery port as a crew went into action ... a plaintive little shriek from somebody ... maybe from Slops himself.... Then on an ultra-wave carrier, drowning local noises beneath waves of sheer volume, came English words spoken with a foreign intonation. The voice of the Alliance commander. "Ahoy the Leo ! Calling the captain of the Leo !" O'Hara, his great fists knotted at his sides, called back, "O'Hara of the Leo answering. What do you want?" "Stand by to admit a boarding party, Captain. It is futile to resist. You are surrounded by six armed craft, and your vessel is locked in our tensiles. Any further effort to make combat will bring about your immediate destruction!" From the bridge, topside, snarled Johnny Wainwright, "The hell with 'em, Skipper! Let's fight it out!" And elsewhere on the Leo angry voices echoed the same defi. Never in my life had I felt such a heart-warming love for and pride in my companions as at that tense moment. But the Old Man shook his head, and his eyes were glistening. "It's no use," he moaned strickenly, more to himself than to me. "I can't sacrifice brave men in a useless cause, Dugan. I've got to—" He faced the audio squarely. To the enemy commander he said, "Very good, sir! In accordance with the Rules of War, I surrender into your hands!" The firing ceased, and a stillness like that of death blanketed the Leo . It was then that Andy Laney, who had lingered in the galley doorway like a frozen figuring, broke into babbling incredulous speech. "You—you're giving up like this?" he bleated. "Is this all you're going to do?" The Old Man just looked at him, saying never a word, but that glance would have blistered the hide off a Mercurian steelback. I'm more impetuous. I turned on the little idiot vituperatively. "Shut up, you fool! Don't you realize there's not a thing we can do but surrender? Dead, we're of no earthly use to anyone. Alive, there is always a chance one of us may get away, bring help. We have a mission to fulfil, an important one. Corpses can't run errands." "But—but if they take us prisoners," he questioned fearfully, "what will they do with us?" "A concentration camp somewhere. Perhaps on Vesta." "And the Leo ?" "Who knows? Maybe they'll send it to Jupiter with a prize crew in command." "That's what I thought. But they mustn't be allowed to do that. We're marked with the Federation tricolor!" A sharp retort trembled on the tip of my tongue, but I never uttered it. Indeed, I swallowed it as comprehension dawned. There came to me the beginnings of respect for little Andy Laney's wisdom. He had been right about the danger of the Vesta route, as we had learned to our cost; now he was right on this other score. The skipper got it, too. His jaw dropped. He said, "Heaven help us, it's the truth! To reach Jupiter you've got to pass Callisto. If the Callistans saw a Federation vessel, they'd send out an emissary to greet it. Our secret would be discovered, Callisto occupied by the enemy...." I think he would have turned, then, and given orders to continue the fight even though it meant suicide for all of us. But it was too late. Already our lock had opened to the attackers; down the metal ramp we now heard the crisp cadence of invading footsteps. The door swung open, and the Alliance commandant stood smiling triumphantly before us.

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COMING OF THE GODS By CHESTER WHITEHORN Never had Mars seen such men as these, for they came from black space, carrying weird weapons—to fight for a race of which they had never heard. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Ro moved cautiously. He knew the jungles of Mars well, knew the dangers, the swift death that could come to an unwary traveler. Many times he had seen fellow Martians die by the razor fangs of Gin, the swamp snake. Their clear red skin had become blotched and purple, their eyeballs popped, their faces swollen by the poison that raced through their veins. And Ro had seen the bones of luckless men vomited from the mouths of the Droo, the cannibal plants. And others there had been, some friends of his, who had become game for beasts of prey, or been swallowed by hungry, sucking pools of quicksand. No, the jungles of Mars were not to be taken casually, no matter how light in heart one was at the prospect of seeing home once more. Ro was returning from the north. He had seen the great villages of thatched huts, the strange people who lived in these huts instead of in caves, and wore coverings on their feet and shining rings in their ears. And having quenched his curiosity about these people and their villages, he was satisfied to travel home again. He was a man of the world now, weary of exploring and ready to settle down. He was anxious to see his family again, his father and mother and all his brothers and sisters; to sit round a fire with them at the entrance to their cave and tell of the wondrous places he'd visited. And, most of all, he wanted to see Na, graceful, dark eyed Na, whose fair face had disturbed his slumber so often, appearing in his dreams to call him home. He breathed a sigh of relief as he reached the jungle's edge. Before him lay a broad expanse of plain. And far in the distance rose the great cliffs and the hills that were his home. His handsome face broadened into a smile and he quickened his pace to a trot. There was no need for caution now. The dangers on the plain were few. The sun beat down on his bare head and back. His red skin glistened. His thick black hair shone healthily. Mile after mile fell behind him. His long, well muscled legs carried him swiftly toward the distant hills. His movements were graceful, easy, as the loping of Shee, the great cat. Then, suddenly, he faltered in his stride. He stopped running and, shielding his eyes from the sun's glare, stared ahead. There was a figure running toward him. And behind that first figure, a second gave chase. For a long moment Ro studied the approaching creatures. Then he gasped in surprise. The pursued was a young woman, a woman he knew. Na! The pursuer was a squat, ugly rat man, one of the vicious Oan who lived in the cliffs. Ro exclaimed his surprise, then his rage. His handsome face was grim as he searched the ground with his eyes. When he found what he sought—a round rock that would fit his palm—he stooped, and snatching up the missile, he ran forward. At great speed, he closed the gap between him and the approaching figures. He could see the rat man plainly now—his fanged, frothy mouth; furry face and twitching tail. The Oan, however, was too intent on his prey to notice Ro at first, and when he did, it was too late. For the young Martian had let fly with the round stone he carried. The Oan squealed in terror and tried to swerve from his course. The fear of one who sees approaching death was in his movements and his cry. He had seen many Oan die because of the strength and accuracy in the red men's arms. Despite his frantic contortions, the stone caught him in the side. His ribs and backbone cracked under the blow. He was dead before he struck the ground. With hardly a glance at his fallen foe, Ro ran on to meet the girl. She fell into his arms and pressed her cheek to his bare shoulder. Her dark eyes were wet with gladness. Warm tears ran down Ro's arm. Finally Na lifted her beautiful head. She looked timidly at Ro, her face a mask of respect. The young Martian tried to be stern in meeting her gaze, as was the custom among the men of his tribe when dealing with women; but he smiled instead. "You're home," breathed Na. "I have traveled far to the north," answered Ro simply, "and seen many things. And now I have returned for you." "They must have been great things you saw," Na coaxed. "Yes, great and many. But that tale can wait. Tell me first how you came to be playing tag with the Oan." Na lowered her eyes. "I was caught in the forest below the cliffs. The Oan spied me and I ran. The chase was long and tiring. I was almost ready to drop when you appeared." "You were alone in the woods!" Ro exclaimed. "Since when do the women of our tribe travel from the cliffs alone?" "Since a long time," she answered sadly. Then she cried. And between sobs she spoke: "Many weeks ago a great noise came out of the sky. We ran to the mouths of our caves and looked out, and saw a great sphere of shining metal landing in the valley below. Many colored fire spat from one end of it. "The men of our tribe snatched up stones, and holding one in their hands and one beneath their armpits, they climbed down to battle or greet our visitors. They had surrounded the sphere and were waiting, when suddenly an entrance appeared in the metal and two men stepped out. "They were strange men indeed; white as the foam on water, and clothed in strange garb from the neck down, even to coverings on their feet. They made signs of peace—with one hand only, for they carried weapons of a sort in the other. And the men of our tribe made the same one-handed sign of peace, for they would not risk dropping their stones. Then the white men spoke; but their tongue was strange, and our men signaled that they could not understand. The white men smiled, and a great miracle took place. Suddenly to our minds came pictures and words. The white men spoke with their thoughts. "They came from a place called Earth, they said. And they came in peace. Our men found they could think very hard and answer back with their own thoughts. And there was much talk and happiness, for friendly visitors were always welcome. "There were two more white ones who came from the sphere. One was a woman with golden hair, and the other, a man of age, with hair like silver frost. "There was a great feast then, and our men showed their skill at throwing. Then the white men displayed the power of their strange weapons by pointing them at a tree and causing flame to leap forth to burn the wood in two. We were indeed glad they came in peace. "That night we asked them to sleep with us in the caves, but they made camp in the valley instead. The darkness passed swiftly and silently, and with the dawn we left our caves to rejoin our new friends. But everywhere a red man showed himself, he cried out and died by the flame from the white men's weapons. "I looked into the valley and saw hundreds of Oan. They had captured our friends in the night and were using their weapons to attack us. There was a one-sided battle that lasted three days. Finally, under cover of night, we were forced to leave the caves. One by one we went, and those of us who lived still travel alone." Ro groaned aloud as Na finished her tale. His homecoming was a meeting with tragedy, instead of a joyful occasion. "What of my father?" he asked hopefully. "He was a great warrior. Surely he didn't fall to the Oan?" "He had no chance to fight," Na answered. "Two of your brothers died with him on that first morning." Ro squared his shoulders and set his jaw. He wiped a hint of tears from his eyes. "They shall pay," he murmured, and started off toward the cliffs again. Na trailed behind him. Her face was grave with concern. "They are very many," she said. "Then there will be more to kill," answered Ro without turning. "They have the weapons of the white ones." "And the white ones, as well. They probably keep them alive to repair the weapons if they become useless. But when I have slain a few Oan, I will set the white ones free. They will help me to make more weapons. Together we will fight the rat men." Na smiled. Ro was angry, but anger did not make him blind. He would make a good mate. The sun was setting when the two Martians reached the cliffs. Below them was the valley in which lay the metal sphere. Ro could see it dimly outlined in the shadows, as Na had said. A distance away, in another clearing, he could see many Oan, flitting ghost-like from place to place. There were no fires, for the Oan were more beast than man and feared flame; but Ro could make out four prone figures. They appeared to be white blots in the dimness. One had long, golden hair, like spun sunbeams; another's head was covered with a thatch like a cap of snow on a mountain peak. "You say they came from a place called Earth?" Ro asked Na in wonder. "They traveled through space in their 'ship,'" Na answered. "They called themselves an expedition." Ro was silent then. In a short time it would be dark enough to go down into the valley. When he had rescued the white ones, he would learn more about them. He turned away from the valley to study Na. She was very beautiful. Her dark eyes seemed to sparkle and her hair shone in the twilight. He understood why she had crept into his dreams. The darkness settled quickly. Soon Ro could barely make out the girl's features. It was time for him to leave. He took a pouch from his waist and shook out a gold arm band. This he clasped on Na's wrist. "All men will know now that you are the mate of Ro," he whispered. And he kissed her, as was the custom of his tribe when a man took a wife. Without another word he disappeared over the edge of the cliff. They had already made plans for their next meeting. There was no need for a prolonged farewell. They would be together soon—on the far side of the cliff—if all went well. In his left hand and under his armpit Ro carried stones. They were of a good weight and would make short work of any Oan who was foolish enough to cross his path. His right arm he kept free for climbing. His fingers found crevices to hold to in the almost smooth wall. His toes seemed to have eyes to pierce the darkness in finding footholds. The climb was long and dangerous. Ro's skin glistened with sweat. He had lived in the cliffs all his life, and had made many perilous climbs, but never one on so dark a night. It seemed an eternity before he rested at the bottom. Feeling his way cautiously, he moved toward the camp. He could sense the presence of many Oan close by. The hair at the base of his neck prickled. He prayed he wouldn't be seen. An alarm now would spoil his plan. Ahead of him, he saw a clearing. That would be his destination. On the far side he would find the white ones. He took the stone from his armpit and moved on. Suddenly he halted. A dim figure approached. It was one of the Oan, a guard. He was coming straight at Ro. The young Martian shrank back. "The rat men have eyes to cut the night." It was a memory of his mother's voice. She had spoken those words when he was a child, to keep him from straying too far. The Oan was only a few feet away now, but his eyes were not cutting the night. Ro could see his large ears, hear his twitching tail. In a moment the beast would stumble over him. Like a phantom, Ro arose from his crouch. The rat man was startled, frozen with fear. Ro drove his right arm around. The stone in his hand cracked the Oan's skull like an eggshell. Ro caught the body as it fell, lowered it noiselessly to the ground. Breathing more easily, Ro moved on. He reached the edge of the small clearing without making a sound. Strewn on the ground were shapeless heaps. They would be the slumbering rat men. Ro suppressed an urge to spring amongst them and slay them as they slept. He lay flat on his stomach and inched his way ahead. It was slow work, but safer. When a sound reached his ears he drew himself together and feigned sleep. In the dusk he appeared no different than the others. His chest was scratched in a thousand places when he reached the far side, but he felt no pain. His heart was singing within him. His job was almost simple now. The difficult part was done. Straining his eyes, he caught sight of a golden mass some feet away. Crouching low, he darted toward it. In a moment his outstretched hands contacted a soft body. It seemed to shrink from his touch. A tiny gasp reached his ears. "Be still," he thought. He remembered Na's words: ' We spoke with our thoughts. ' "Be still. I've come to free you." And then, because it seemed so futile, he whispered the words aloud. Then his mind seemed to grow light, as though someone was sharing the weight of his brain. An urgent message to hurry—hurry reached him. It was as though he was feeling words, words spoken in the light, sweet voice of a girl. Pictures that were not actually pictures entered his mind. Waves of thought that took no definite form held a plain meaning. His groping hands found the girl's arm and moved down to the strips of hide that bound her wrists. He fumbled impatiently with the heavy knots. "Don't move when you are free," he warned the girl as he worked. "I must release the others first. When all is ready I will give a signal with my thoughts and you will follow me." Once again his mind grew light. The girl's thoughts assured him she would follow his instructions. Time passed quickly. To Ro, it seemed that his fingers were all thumbs. His breathing was heavy as he struggled with the knots. But finally the golden-haired girl was free. Ro was more confident as he moved to untie the others. He worked more easily as each came free and he started on the next. When they were ready, Ro signaled the four white people to follow him. They rose quietly and trailed him into the woods. The girl whispered something to one of the men. Ro turned and glared at her through the shadows. The progress they made was slow, but gradually the distance between them and Oan camp grew. Ro increased his pace when silence was no longer necessary. The four white people stumbled ahead more quickly. "We journey out of the valley and around the face of the cliffs," Ro told them. "After a short while, we will meet Na." "Who is Na?" asked the girl. "She is the one I have chosen for my mate," Ro answered. The white girl was silent. They traveled quite a distance without communicating. Each was busy with his own thoughts. Finally the man with the silver hair asked, "Why did you risk your life to rescue us?" "With your help I will avenge the death of my father and brothers and the men of my tribe." He stopped walking and stared around him for a landmark. They had traveled far along the foot of the cliff. According to the plan Na should have met them minutes ago. Then he gave a glad cry. Squinting ahead he saw an approaching figure. It was—His cry took on a note of alarm. The figure was bent low under the weight of a burden. It was a rat man, and slung across his shoulders was a girl. Ro's body tensed and quivered. A low growl issued from deep in his throat. He charged forward. The Oan saw him coming and straightened, allowing the girl to fall. He set his twisted legs and bared his fangs. The fur on his back stood out straight as he prepared to meet the young Martian's attack. Ro struck his foe head on. They went down in a frenzied bundle of fury. The rat man's tail lashed out to twist around Ro's neck. With frantic strength, Ro tore it away before it could tighten. Ignoring the Oan's slashing teeth, the young Martian pounded heavy fists into his soft stomach. Suddenly shifting his attack, Ro wrapped his legs around the rat man's waist. His hands caught a furry throat and tightened. Over and over they rolled. The Oan clawed urgently at the Martian's choking fingers. His chest made strange noises as it pleaded for the air that would give it life. But Ro's hands were bands of steel, tightening, ever tightening their deadly grip. Then, as suddenly as it had started, it was over. The rat man quivered and lay still. Ro dismounted the limp body. His face wore a wildly triumphant expression. It changed as he remembered the girl. He ran to her side. Na was just opening her eyes. She stared around her fearfully, then smiled as she recognized Ro. The young Martian breathed a sigh of relief. Na turned her head and saw the body of the rat man. She shuddered. "I was coming down the side of the mountain," she said. "I saw him standing at the foot. The shadows were deceiving. I thought it was you. It wasn't until too late that I discovered my mistake." Ro gathered the girl in his arms. He spoke softly to her to help her forget. When she had recovered from her shock, the small group traveled on. Ro led them about a mile further along the base of the cliff, then up, to a cleverly concealed cave. "We will stay here," he told the others, "until we are ready to attack the Oan." "But there are only six of us," one of the white men protested. "There are hundreds of the beasts. We wouldn't have a chance." Ro smiled. "We will speak of that when it is dawn again," he said with his thoughts. "Now we must rest." He sat in a corner of the cave and leaned back against the wall. His eyes were half shut and he pretended to doze. Actually he was studying the white ones. The man with the silver hair seemed very old and weak, but very wise. The other men had hair as black as any Martian's, but their skin was pure white. They were handsome, Ro thought, in a barbaric sort of way. One was lean and determined, the other, equally determined, but stouter and less impressive. Ro then centered his attention on the girl. Her golden hair gleamed proudly, even in the dusk. She was very beautiful, almost as lovely as Na. "Tell me," he asked suddenly, "where is this strange place you come from? And how is it that you can speak and cause others to speak with their minds?" It was the old man who answered. "We come from a place called Earth, many millions of miles away through space. My daughter, Charlotte, my two assistants, Carlson—" the lean man nodded—"Grimm—" the stouter man acknowledged the introduction—"and myself are an expedition. We came here to Mars to study." Ro introduced himself and Na. "What manner of a place is this Earth?" he asked, after the formalities. "Our part of Earth, America, is a great country. Our cities are built of steel and stone, and we travel about in space boats. Now tell me, what is it like here on Mars? Surely the whole planet isn't wilderness. What year is it?" "You have seen what it is like here," Ro answered. "As for 'year,' I don't understand." "A year is a measure of time," the old man explained. "When we left Earth it was the year twenty-two hundred." "We have nothing like that here," said Ro, still puzzled. "But tell me, about this speaking with the mind. Perhaps I shall understand that." "It's simple telepathy. We have mastered the science on Earth. It takes study from childhood, but once you have mastered the art, it is quite simple to transmit or receive thoughts from anyone. A mere matter of concentration. We—who speak different tongues—understand each other because of action we have in mind as we speak. We want the other to walk, we think of the other walking. A picture is transmitted and understood. It is a message in a Universal language." Ro sighed. "I am afraid we are very backward here on Mars," he said wearily. "I would like to learn more, but we must sleep now. Tomorrow will be a very busy day." Ro slipped his arm about Na's shoulder and drew her closer. With their heads together they slept. Ro awakened with the dawn. He was startled to find that Na had left his side. He rose quickly and strode to the mouth of the cave. Na met him at the entrance. She was returning from a clump of trees a short distance away. Her arms were loaded with Manno, the fruit of Mars, and clusters of wild berries and grapes. "You see," she said, "I will make you a good mate. Our table will be well provided for." "You will make no mate at all," Ro said sternly, "and there will be no table if you wander off. Your next meeting with the Oan may not be so fortunate." He glared at her for a moment, then smiled and helped her with her burden. The others in the cave awakened. Ro noticed that Charlotte had slept beside Carlson, but moved away shyly now that it was daylight. He noticed, too, that Grimm was seeing the same thing and seemed annoyed. Ro smiled. These young white men were no different than Martians where a girl was concerned. When they had finished breakfast, they sat around the floor of the cave and spoke. It was Carlson who asked, "How do you expect the six of us to attack the rat men?" "The Oan are cowards," Ro answered. "They are brave only because they have your weapons. But now that you are free, you can make more of these sticks that shoot fire." Grimm laughed. "It takes intricate machinery to construct a ray gun," he said. "Here in this wilderness we have sticks and stones to work with." Ro sprang to his feet to tower above the man. His handsome face was twisted in anger. "You're lying," he shouted aloud, forgetting that the white man couldn't understand his words. "You're lying because you are afraid. You refuse to help me avenge my people because you are more of a coward than the Oan." Grimm climbed to his feet and backed away. Ro advanced on him, his fists clenched. The old man also rose. He placed a restraining hand on Ro's arm. "He's lying," said Ro with his thoughts. "Tell him I'm speaking the truth, professor," said Grimm aloud. The professor repeated Grimm's words with his thoughts. "It would be impossible to make new guns here," he said. "But there is another way. I have thought about it all night." Ro turned quickly. "What is it?" he demanded. "The space sphere. There are weapons on our ship that are greater than ray guns. With those we could defeat the rat men." The professor shrugged, turned away. "But how could we get into the ship? It is too well guarded." Ro fell silent. He walked to the mouth of the cave and stared out. When he turned back to the others, his attention was centered on Na. "Perhaps the attraction you seem to hold for the Oan can be put to good use," he said aloud. "The sphere is a distance away from the Oan camp. All of the rat men cannot be guarding it. Perhaps, by revealing yourself, you can lure the guards away from their post." He repeated his plan to the others. "But they'll kill her," gasped Charlotte. "She will be a woman alone," said Ro. "The Oan prefer to capture women when they can." "Then she'll be captured," the professor said. "It's much too risky." Ro laughed. "Do you think I will let her go alone? I will be close by. Na can lead the rat men through a narrow part of the valley. I will be above on the cliffs, waiting to pelt them with stones. Carlson or Grimm can be with me to roll an avalanche of rocks on their heads. "In the meantime, you can take over the unguarded sphere. The rest will be easy." The professor smacked his fist into his palm. "It might work at that. Grimm can go with you. Carlson and Charlotte will go with me." "Why me?" Grimm demanded. "Why not Carlson? Or are you saving him for your daughter?" Carlson grabbed Grimm by the shoulder and spun him around. He drove a hard fist into the stout man's face. Grimm stumbled backward. He fell at the cave's entrance. His hand, sprawled behind him to stop his fall, closed over a rock. He flung it at Carlson from a sitting position. It caught Carlson in the shoulder. Gritting his teeth, Carlson charged at Grimm. But Ro moved more swiftly. He caught the white man and forced him back. "This is no time for fighting," he said. "When the Oan are defeated you can kill each other. But not until then." Grimm brushed himself off as he got to his feet "Okay," he sneered. "I'll go with the red man. But when we meet again, it will be a different story." Carlson turned to Ro. "I'll go with you," he said. "Grimm can go with Charlotte and the professor." When they had detailed their plan, the party left the cave. Ro led them into the thickest part of the forest and toward the Oan camp. They moved swiftly. Before long they were at the narrow entrance to the valley. It was about a hundred yards long and twenty feet wide. The walls of the cliff rose almost straight up on both sides. "We leave you here," said Ro to the professor. "Na will lead you to the sphere. She will remain hidden until you have circled away from her. Then she will reveal herself." Ro looked at Na for a long moment before they parted. He grew very proud of what he saw. There was no fear in her eyes. Her small chin was firm. He turned to Carlson. The young Earthman was looking at Charlotte in much the same way. "Come on," Ro said. "If we spend the rest of the morning here, the Oan will try some strategy of their own." Carlson seemed to come out of a trance. He swung around to trail Ro up the sloping part of the mountain. They climbed in silence. Once Ro stopped to look down into the valley. But Na and the others were gone. He felt a pang of regret as he turned to move upward. When they had reached the top, he and Carlson set to work piling rocks and boulders at the edge of the cliff. They chose the point directly over the narrowest part of the valley. If all went well, the Oan would be trapped. They would die under a hailstorm of rock. "You would have liked a more tender goodbye with Charlotte," Ro said to Carlson as they worked. "Was it fear of Grimm that prevented it?" Carlson straightened. He weighed Ro's words before answering. Finally he said, "I didn't want to make trouble. It was a bad time, and senseless, besides. Charlotte and I are planning to be married when we return to America. It's not as though Grimm was still in the running. I'm sure he'll see reason when we tell him. It's foolish to be enemies." "Why don't you take her for your wife here on Mars? That would end the trouble completely." Carlson seemed surprised. "It wouldn't be legal. Who would perform the ceremony?" Ro seemed puzzled, then he laughed. "Last night I thought that we on Mars are backward. Now I'm not so sure. When we find our mates here, we take her. There is no one to speak of 'legal' or 'ceremony.' After all, it's a personal matter. Who can tell us whether it is 'legal' or not? What better ceremony than a kiss and a promise?" He bent back to his work chuckling. "I could argue the point," Carlson laughed. "I could tell you about a place called Hollywood. Marriage and divorce is bad enough there. Under your system, it would really be a mess. But I won't say anything. Here on Mars your kiss and a promise is probably as binding as any ceremony." Ro didn't speak. He didn't concentrate and transmit his thoughts, but kept them to himself. The pictures he'd received from Carlson were confusing. The business at hand was more grim and important than untangling the puzzle.

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The Happy Castaway BY ROBERT E. McDOWELL Being space-wrecked and marooned is tough enough. But to face the horrors of such a planet as this was too much. Imagine Fawkes' terrible predicament; plenty of food—and twenty seven beautiful girls for companions. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Jonathan Fawkes opened his eyes. He was flat on his back, and a girl was bending over him. He detected a frightened expression on the girl's face. His pale blue eyes traveled upward beyond the girl. The sky was his roof, yet he distinctly remembered going to sleep on his bunk aboard the space ship. "You're not dead?" "I've some doubt about that," he replied dryly. He levered himself to his elbows. The girl, he saw, had bright yellow hair. Her nose was pert, tip-tilted. She had on a ragged blue frock and sandals. "Is—is anything broken?" she asked. "Don't know. Help me up." Between them he managed to struggle to his feet. He winced. He said, "My name's Jonathan Fawkes. I'm a space pilot with Universal. What happened? I feel like I'd been poured out of a concrete mixer." She pointed to the wreck of a small space freighter a dozen feet away. Its nose was buried in the turf, folded back like an accordion. It had burst open like a ripe watermelon. He was surprised that he had survived at all. He scratched his head. "I was running from Mars to Jupiter with a load of seed for the colonists." "Oh!" said the girl, biting her lips. "Your co-pilot must be in the wreckage." He shook his head. "No," he reassured her. "I left him on Mars. He had an attack of space sickness. I was all by myself; that was the trouble. I'd stay at the controls as long as I could, then lock her on her course and snatch a couple of hours' sleep. I can remember crawling into my bunk. The next thing I knew you were bending over me." He paused. "I guess the automatic deflectors slowed me up or I would have been a cinder by this time," he said. The girl didn't reply. She continued to watch him, a faint enigmatic smile on her lips. Jonathan glanced away in embarrassment. He wished that pretty women didn't upset him so. He said nervously, "Where am I? I couldn't have slept all the way to Jupiter." The girl shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know." "You don't know!" He almost forgot his self-consciousness in his surprise. His pale blue eyes returned to the landscape. A mile across the plain began a range of jagged foothills, which tossed upward higher and higher until they merged with the blue saw-edge of a chain of mountains. As he looked a puff of smoke belched from a truncated cone-shaped peak. A volcano. Otherwise there was no sign of life: just he and the strange yellow-headed girl alone in the center of that vast rolling prairie. "I was going to explain," he heard her say. "We think that we are on an asteroid." "We?" he looked back at her. "Yes. There are twenty-seven of us. We were on our way to Jupiter, too, only we were going to be wives for the colonists." "I remember," he exclaimed. "Didn't the Jupiter Food-growers Association enlist you girls to go to the colonies?" She nodded her head. "Only twenty-seven of us came through the crash." "Everybody thought your space ship hit a meteor," he said. "We hit this asteroid." "But that was three years ago." "Has it been that long? We lost track of time." She didn't take her eyes off him, not for a second. Such attention made him acutely self conscious. She said, "I'm Ann. Ann Clotilde. I was hunting when I saw your space ship. You had been thrown clear. You were lying all in a heap. I thought you were dead." She stooped, picked up a spear. "Do you feel strong enough to hike back to our camp? It's only about four miles," she said. "I think so," he said. Jonathan Fawkes fidgeted uncomfortably. He would rather pilot a space ship through a meteor field than face twenty-seven young women. They were the only thing in the Spaceways of which he was in awe. Then he realized that the girl's dark blue eyes had strayed beyond him. A frown of concentration marred her regular features. He turned around. On the rim of the prairie he saw a dozen black specks moving toward them. She said: "Get down!" Her voice was agitated. She flung herself on her stomach and began to crawl away from the wreck. Jonathan Fawkes stared after her stupidly. "Get down!" she reiterated in a furious voice. He let himself to his hands and knees. "Ouch!" he said. He felt like he was being jabbed with pins. He must be one big bruise. He scuttled after the girl. "What's wrong?" The girl looked back at him over her shoulder. "Centaurs!" she said. "I didn't know they had returned. There is a small ravine just ahead which leads into the hills. I don't think they've seen us. If we can reach the hills we'll be safe." "Centaurs! Isn't there anything new under the sun?" "Well, personally," she replied, "I never saw a Centaur until I was wrecked on this asteroid." She reached the ravine, crawled head foremost over the edge. Jonathan tumbled after her. He hit the bottom, winced, scrambled to his feet. The girl started at a trot for the hills. Jonathan, groaning at each step, hobbled beside her. "Why won't the Centaurs follow us into the hills?" he panted. "Too rough. They're like horses," she said. "Nothing but a goat could get around in the hills." The gulley, he saw, was deepening into a respectable canyon, then a gorge. In half a mile, the walls towered above them. A narrow ribbon of sky was visible overhead. Yellow fern-like plants sprouted from the crevices and floor of the canyon. They flushed a small furry creature from behind a bush. As it sped away, it resembled a cottontail of Earth. The girl whipped back her arm, flung the spear. It transfixed the rodent. She picked it up, tied it to her waist. Jonathan gaped. Such strength and accuracy astounded him. He thought, amazons and centaurs. He thought, but this is the year 3372; not the time of ancient Greece. The canyon bore to the left. It grew rougher, the walls more precipitate. Jonathan limped to a halt. High boots and breeches, the uniform of Universal's space pilots, hadn't been designed for walking. "Hold on," he said. He felt in his pockets, withdrew an empty cigarette package, crumpled it and hurled it to the ground. "You got a cigarette?" he asked without much hope. The girl shook her head. "We ran out of tobacco the first few months we were here." Jonathan turned around, started back for the space ship. "Where are you going?" cried Ann in alarm. He said, "I've got a couple of cartons of cigarettes back at the freighter. Centaurs or no centaurs, I'm going to get a smoke." "No!" She clutched his arm. He was surprised at the strength of her grip. "They'd kill you," she said. "I can sneak back," he insisted stubbornly. "They might loot the ship. I don't want to lose those cigarettes. I was hauling some good burley tobacco seed too. The colonists were going to experiment with it on Ganymede." "No!" He lifted his eyebrows. He thought, she is an amazon! He firmly detached her hand. The girl flicked up her spear, nicked his neck with the point of it. "We are going to the camp," she said. Jonathan threw himself down backwards, kicked the girl's feet out from under her. Like a cat he scrambled up and wrenched the spear away. A voice shouted: "What's going on there?" He paused shamefacedly. A second girl, he saw, was running toward them from up the canyon. Her bare legs flashed like ivory. She was barefooted, and she had black hair. A green cloth was wrapped around her sarong fashion. She bounced to a stop in front of Jonathan, her brown eyes wide in surprise. He thought her sarong had been a table cloth at one time in its history. "A man!" she breathed. "By Jupiter and all its little moons, it's a man!" "Don't let him get away!" cried Ann. "Hilda!" the brunette shrieked. "A man! It's a man!" A third girl skidded around the bend in the canyon. Jonathan backed off warily. Ann Clotilde cried in anguish: "Don't let him get away!" Jonathan chose the centaurs. He wheeled around, dashed back the way he had come. Someone tackled him. He rolled on the rocky floor of the canyon. He struggled to his feet. He saw six more girls race around the bend in the canyon. With shouts of joy they flung themselves on him. Jonathan was game, but the nine husky amazons pinned him down by sheer weight. They bound him hand and foot. Then four of them picked him up bodily, started up the canyon chanting: " He was a rocket riding daddy from Mars. " He recognized it as a popular song of three years ago. Jonathan had never been so humiliated in his life. He was known in the spaceways from Mercury to Jupiter as a man to leave alone. His nose had been broken three times. A thin white scar crawled down the bronze of his left cheek, relic of a barroom brawl on Venus. He was big, rangy, tough. And these girls had trounced him. Girls! He almost wept from mortification. He said, "Put me down. I'll walk." "You won't try to get away?" said Ann. "No," he replied with as much dignity as he could summon while being held aloft by four barbarous young women. "Let him down," said Ann. "We can catch him, anyway, if he makes a break." Jonathan Fawkes' humiliation was complete. He meekly trudged between two husky females, who ogled him shamelessly. He was amazed at the ease with which they had carried him. He was six feet three and no light weight. He thought enviously of the centaurs, free to gallop across the plains. He wished he was a centaur. The trail left the canyon, struggled up the precipitate walls. Jonathan picked his way gingerly, hugged the rock. "Don't be afraid," advised one of his captors. "Just don't look down." "I'm not afraid," said Jonathan hotly. To prove it he trod the narrow ledge with scorn. His foot struck a pebble. Both feet went out from under him. He slithered halfway over the edge. For one sickening moment he thought he was gone, then Ann grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, hauled him back to safety. He lay gasping on his stomach. They tied a rope around his waist then, and led him the rest of the way to the top like a baby on a leash. He was too crestfallen to resent it. The trail came out on a high ridge. They paused on a bluff overlooking the prairie. "Look!" cried Ann pointing over the edge. A half dozen beasts were trotting beneath on the plain. At first, Jonathan mistook them for horses. Then he saw that from the withers up they resembled men. Waists, shoulders, arms and heads were identical to his own, but their bodies were the bodies of horses. "Centaurs!" Jonathan Fawkes said, not believing his eyes. The girls set up a shout and threw stones down at the centaurs, who reared, pawed the air, and galloped to a safe distance, from which they hurled back insults in a strange tongue. Their voices sounded faintly like the neighing of horses. Amazons and centaurs, he thought again. He couldn't get the problem of the girls' phenomenal strength out of his mind. Then it occurred to him that the asteroid, most likely, was smaller even than Earth's moon. He must weigh about a thirtieth of what he usually did, due to the lessened gravity. It also occurred to him that they would be thirty times as strong. He was staggered. He wished he had a smoke. At length, the amazons and the centaurs tired of bandying insults back and forth. The centaurs galloped off into the prairie, the girls resumed their march. Jonathan scrambled up hills, skidded down slopes. The brunette was beside him helping him over the rough spots. "I'm Olga," she confided. "Has anybody ever told you what a handsome fellow you are?" She pinched his cheek. Jonathan blushed. They climbed a ridge, paused at the crest. Below them, he saw a deep valley. A stream tumbled through the center of it. There were trees along its banks, the first he had seen on the asteroid. At the head of the valley, he made out the massive pile of a space liner. They started down a winding path. The space liner disappeared behind a promontory of the mountain. Jonathan steeled himself for the coming ordeal. He would have sat down and refused to budge except that he knew the girls would hoist him on their shoulders and bear him into the camp like a bag of meal. The trail debouched into the valley. Just ahead the space liner reappeared. He imagined that it had crashed into the mountain, skidded and rolled down its side until it lodged beside the stream. It reminded him of a wounded dinosaur. Three girls were bathing in the stream. He looked away hastily. Someone hailed them from the space ship. "We've caught a man," shrieked one of his captors. A flock of girls streamed out of the wrecked space ship. "A man!" screamed a husky blonde. She was wearing a grass skirt. She had green eyes. "We're rescued!" "No. No," Ann Clotilde hastened to explain. "He was wrecked like us." "Oh," came a disappointed chorus. "He's a man," said the green-eyed blonde. "That's the next best thing." "Oh, Olga," said a strapping brunette. "Who'd ever thought a man could look so good?" "I did," said Olga. She chucked Jonathan under the chin. He shivered like an unbroken colt when the bit first goes in its mouth. He felt like a mouse hemmed in by a ring of cats. A big rawboned brute of a girl strolled into the circle. She said, "Dinner's ready." Her voice was loud, strident. It reminded him of the voices of girls in the honky tonks on Venus. She looked at him appraisingly as if he were a horse she was about to bid on. "Bring him into the ship," she said. "The man must be starved." He was propelled jubilantly into the palatial dining salon of the wrecked liner. A long polished meturilium table occupied the center of the floor. Automatic weight distributing chairs stood around it. His feet sank into a green fiberon carpet. He had stepped back into the Thirty-fourth Century from the fabulous barbarian past. With a sigh of relief, he started to sit down. A lithe red-head sprang forward and held his chair. They all waited politely for him to be seated before they took their places. He felt silly. He felt like a captive princess. All the confidence engendered by the familiar settings of the space ship went out of him like wind. He, Jonathan Fawkes, was a castaway on an asteroid inhabited by twenty-seven wild women. As the meal boisterously progressed, he regained sufficient courage to glance timidly around. Directly across the table sat a striking, grey-eyed girl whose brown hair was coiled severely about her head. She looked to him like a stenographer. He watched horrified as she seized a whole roast fowl, tore it apart with her fingers, gnawed a leg. She caught him staring at her and rolled her eyes at him. He returned his gaze to his plate. Olga said: "Hey, Sultan." He shuddered, but looked up questioningly. She said, "How's the fish?" "Good," he mumbled between a mouthful. "Where did you get it?" "Caught it," said Olga. "The stream's full of 'em. I'll take you fishing tomorrow." She winked at him so brazenly that he choked on a bone. "Heaven forbid," he said. "How about coming with me to gather fruit?" cried the green-eyed blonde; "you great big handsome man." "Or me?" cried another. And the table was in an uproar. The rawboned woman who had summoned them to dinner, pounded the table until the cups and plates danced. Jonathan had gathered that she was called Billy. "Quiet!" She shrieked in her loud strident voice. "Let him be. He can't go anywhere for a few days. He's just been through a wreck. He needs rest." She turned to Jonathan who had shrunk down in his chair. "How about some roast?" she said. "No." He pushed back his plate with a sigh. "If I only had a smoke." Olga gave her unruly black hair a flirt. "Isn't that just like a man?" "I wouldn't know," said the green-eyed blonde. "I've forgotten what they're like." Billy said, "How badly wrecked is your ship?" "It's strewn all over the landscape," he replied sleepily. "Is there any chance of patching it up?" He considered the question. More than anything else, he decided, he wanted to sleep. "What?" he said. "Is there any possibility of repairing your ship?" repeated Billy. "Not outside the space docks." They expelled their breath, but not for an instant did they relax the barrage of their eyes. He shifted position in embarrassment. The movement pulled his muscles like a rack. Furthermore, an overpowering lassitude was threatening to pop him off to sleep before their eyes. "You look exhausted," said Ann. Jonathan dragged himself back from the edge of sleep. "Just tired," he mumbled. "Haven't had a good night's rest since I left Mars." Indeed it was only by the most painful effort that he kept awake at all. His eyelids drooped lower and lower. "First it's tobacco," said Olga; "now he wants to sleep. Twenty-seven girls and he wants to sleep." "He is asleep," said the green-eyed blonde. Jonathan was slumped forward across the table, his head buried in his arms. "Catch a hold," said Billy, pushing back from the table. A dozen girls volunteered with a rush. "Hoist!" said Billy. They lifted him like a sleepy child, bore him tenderly up an incline and into a stateroom, where they deposited him on the bed. Ann said to Olga; "Help me with these boots." But they resisted every tug. "It's no use," groaned Ann, straightening up and wiping her bright yellow hair back from her eyes. "His feet have swollen. We'll have to cut them off." At these words, Jonathan raised upright as if someone had pulled a rope. " Cut off whose feet? " he cried in alarm. "Not your feet, silly," said Ann. "Your boots." "Lay a hand on those boots," he scowled; "and I'll make me another pair out of your hides. They set me back a week's salary." Having delivered himself of this ultimatum, he went back to sleep. Olga clapped her hand to her forehead. "And this," she cried "is what we've been praying for during the last three years." The next day found Jonathan Fawkes hobbling around by the aid of a cane. At the portal of the space ship, he stuck out his head, glanced all around warily. None of the girls were in sight. They had, he presumed, gone about their chores: hunting, fishing, gathering fruits and berries. He emerged all the way and set out for the creek. He walked with an exaggerated limp just in case any of them should be hanging around. As long as he was an invalid he was safe, he hoped. He sighed. Not every man could be waited on so solicitously by twenty-seven handsome strapping amazons. He wished he could carry it off in cavalier fashion. He hobbled to the creek, sat down beneath the shade of a tree. He just wasn't the type, he supposed. And it might be years before they were rescued. As a last resort, he supposed, he could hide out in the hills or join the centaurs. He rather fancied himself galloping across the plains on the back of a centaur. He looked up with a start. Ann Clotilde was ambling toward him. "How's the invalid?" she said, seating herself beside him. "Hot, isn't it?" he said. He started to rise. Ann Clotilde placed the flat of her hand on his chest and shoved. " Ooof! " he grunted. He sat down rather more forcibly than he had risen. "Don't get up because of me," she informed him. "It's my turn to cook, but I saw you out here beneath the trees. Dinner can wait. Jonathan do you know that you are irresistible?" She seized his shoulders, stared into his eyes. He couldn't have felt any more uncomfortable had a hungry boa constrictor draped itself in his arms. He mopped his brow with his sleeve. "Suppose the rest should come," he said in an embarrassed voice. "They're busy. They won't be here until I call them to lunch. Your eyes," she said, "are like deep mysterious pools." "Sure enough?" said Jonathan with involuntary interest. He began to recover his nerve. She said, "You're the best looking thing." She rumpled his hair. "I can't keep my eyes off you." Jonathan put his arm around her gingerly. "Ouch!" He winced. He had forgotten his sore muscles. "I forgot," said Ann Clotilde in a contrite voice. She tried to rise. "You're hurt." He pulled her back down. "Not so you could notice it," he grinned. "Well!" came the strident voice of Billy from behind them. "We're all glad to hear that!" Jonathan leaped to his feet, dumping Ann to the ground. He jerked around. All twenty-six of the girls were lined up on the path. Their features were grim. He said: "I don't feel so well after all." "It don't wash," said Billy. "It's time for a showdown." Jonathan's hair stood on end. He felt rather than saw Ann Clotilde take her stand beside him. He noticed that she was holding her spear at a menacing angle. She said in an angry voice: "He's mine. I found him. Leave him alone." "Where do you get that stuff?" cried Olga. "Share and share alike, say I." "We could draw straws for him," suggested the green-eyed blonde. "Look here," Jonathan broke in. "I've got some say in the matter." "You have not," snapped Billy. "You'll do just as we say." She took a step toward him. Jonathan edged away in consternation. "He's going to run!" Olga shouted. Jonathan never stopped until he was back in the canyon leading to the plain. His nerves were jumping like fleas. He craved the soothing relaxation of a smoke. There was, he remembered, a carton of cigarettes at the wreck. He resumed his flight, but at a more sober pace. At the spot where he and Ann had first crawled away from the centaurs, he scrambled out of the gulley, glanced in the direction of his space ship. He blinked his eyes, stared. Then he waved his arms, shouted and tore across the prairie. A trim space cruiser was resting beside the wreck of his own. Across its gleaming monaloid hull ran an inscription in silver letters: "INTERSTELLAR COSMOGRAPHY SOCIETY." Two men crawled out of Jonathan's wrecked freighter, glanced in surprise at Jonathan. A third man ran from the cruiser, a Dixon Ray Rifle in his hand. "I'm Jonathan Fawkes," said the castaway as he panted up, "pilot for Universal. I was wrecked." A tall elderly man held out his hand. He had a small black waxed mustache and Van Dyke. He was smoking a venusian cigarette in a yellow composition holder. He said, "I'm Doctor Boynton." He had a rich cultivated voice, and a nose like a hawk. "We are members of the Interstellar Cosmography Society. We've been commissioned to make a cursory examination of this asteroid. You had a nasty crack up, Mr. Fawkes. But you are in luck, sir. We were on the point of returning when we sighted the wreck." "I say," said the man who had run out of the cruiser. He was a prim, energetic young man. Jonathan noted that he carried the ray gun gingerly, respectfully. "We're a week overdue now," he said. "If you have any personal belongings that you'd like to take with you, you'd best be getting them aboard." Jonathan's face broke into a grin. He said, "Do any of you know how to grow tobacco?" They glanced at each other in perplexity. "I like it here," continued Jonathan. "I'm not going back." "What?" cried the three explorers in one breath. "I'm going to stay," he repeated. "I only came back here after the cigarettes." "But it will be three years before the asteroid's orbit brings it back in the space lanes," said Doctor Boynton. "You don't possibly expect to be picked up before then!" Jonathan shook his head, began to load himself with tools, tobacco seed, and cigarettes. "Odd." Doctor Boynton shook his head, turned to the others. "Though if I remember correctly, there was quite an epidemic of hermits during the medieval period. It was an esthetic movement. They fled to the wilderness to escape the temptation of women ." Jonathan laughed outright. "You are sure you won't return, young man?" He shook his head. They argued, they cajoled, but Jonathan was adamant. He said, "You might report my accident to Universal. Tell them to stop one of their Jupiter-bound freighters here when the asteroid swings back in the space ways. I'll have a load for them." Inside the ship, Doctor Boynton moved over to a round transparent port hole. "What a strange fellow," he murmured. He was just in time to see the castaway, loaded like a pack mule, disappear in the direction from which he had come. Robinson Crusoe was going back to his man (?) Friday—all twenty-seven of them.

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Conspiracy on Callisto By JAMES MacCREIGH Revolt was flaring on Callisto, and Peter Duane held the secret that would make the uprising a success or failure. Yet he could make no move, could favor no side—his memory was gone—he didn't know for whom he fought. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Duane's hand flicked to his waist and hung there, poised. His dis-gun remained undrawn. The tall, white-haired man—Stevens—smiled. "You're right, Duane," he said. "I could blast you, too. Nobody would win that way, so let's leave the guns where they are." The muscles twitched in Peter Duane's cheeks, but his voice, when it came, was controlled. "Don't think we're going to let this go," he said. "We'll take it up with Andrias tonight. We'll see whether you can cut me out!" The white-haired man's smile faded. He stepped forward, one hand bracing him against the thrust of the rocket engines underneath, holding to the guide rail at the side of the ship's corridor. He said, "Duane, Andrias is your boss, not mine. I'm a free lance; I work for myself. When we land on Callisto tonight I'll be with you when you turn our—shall I say, our cargo ?—over to him. And I'll collect my fair share of the proceeds. That's as far as it goes. I take no orders from him." A heavy-set man in blue appeared at the end of the connecting corridor. He was moving fast, but stopped short when he saw the two men. "Hey!" he said. "Change of course—get to your cabins." He seemed about to walk up to them, then reconsidered and hurried off. Neither man paid any attention. Duane said, "Do I have to kill you?" It was only a question as he asked it, without threatening. A muted alarm bell sounded through the P.A. speakers, signaling a one-minute warning. The white-haired man cocked his eyebrow. "Not at all," he said. He took the measure of his slim, red-headed opponent. Taller, heavier, older, he was still no more uncompromisingly belligerent than Duane, standing there. "Not at all," he repeated. "Just take your ten thousand and let it go at that. Don't make trouble. Leave Andrias out of our private argument." "Damn you!" Duane flared. "I was promised fifty thousand. I need that money. Do you think—" "Forget what I think," Stevens said, his voice clipped and angry. "I don't care about fairness, Duane, except to myself. I've done all the work on this—I've supplied the goods. My price is set, a hundred thousand Earth dollars. What Andrias promised you is no concern of mine. The fact is that, after I've taken my share, there's only ten thousand left. That's all you get!" Duane stared at him a long second, then nodded abruptly. "I was right the first time," he said. "I'll have to kill you!" Already his hand was streaking toward the grip of his dis-gun, touching it, drawing it forth. But the white-haired man was faster. His arms swept up and pinioned Duane, holding him impotent. "Don't be a fool," he grated. "Duane—" The P.A. speaker rattled, blared something unintelligible. Neither man heard it. Duane lunged forward into the taller man's grip, sliding down to the floor. The white-haired man grappled furiously to keep his hold on Peter's gun arm, but Peter was slipping away. Belatedly, Stevens went for his own gun. He was too late. Duane's was out and leveled at him. " Now will you listen to reason?" Duane panted. But he halted, and the muzzle of his weapon wavered. The floor swooped and surged beneath him as the thrust of the mighty jets was cut off. Suddenly there was no gravity. The two men, locked together, floated weightlessly out to the center of the corridor. "Course change!" gasped white-haired Stevens. "Good God!" The ship had reached the midpoint of its flight. The bells had sounded, warning every soul on it to take shelter, to strap themselves in their pressure bunks against the deadly stress of acceleration as the ship reversed itself and began to slow its headlong plunge into Callisto. But the two men had not heeded. The small steering rockets flashed briefly. The men were thrust bruisingly against the side of the corridor as the rocket spun lazily on its axis. The side jets flared once more to halt the spin, when the one-eighty turn was completed, and the men were battered against the opposite wall, still weightless, still clinging to each other, still struggling. Then the main-drive bellowed into life again, and the ship began to battle against its own built-up acceleration. The corridor floor rose up with blinking speed to smite them— And the lights went out in a burst of crashing pain for Peter Duane. Someone was talking to him. Duane tried to force an eye open to see who it was, and failed. Something damp and clinging was all about his face, obscuring his vision. But the voice filtered in. "Open your mouth," it said. "Please, Peter, open your mouth. You're all right. Just swallow this." It was a girl's voice. Duane was suddenly conscious that a girl's light hand was on his shoulder. He shook his head feebly. The voice became more insistent. "Swallow this," it said. "It's only a stimulant, to help you throw off the shock of your—accident. You're all right, otherwise." Obediently he opened his mouth, and choked on a warm, tingly liquid. He managed to swallow it, and lay quiet as deft feminine hands did something to his face. Suddenly light filtered through his closed eyelids, and cool air stirred against his damp face. He opened his eyes. A slight red-headed girl in white nurse's uniform was standing there. She stepped back a pace, a web of wet gauze bandage in her hands, looking at him. "Hello," he whispered. "You—where am I?" "In the sick bay," she said. "You got caught out when the ship changed course. Lucky you weren't hurt, Peter. The man you were with—the old, white-haired one, Stevens—wasn't so lucky. He was underneath when the jets went on. Three ribs broken—his lung was punctured. He died in the other room an hour ago." Duane screwed his eyes tight together and grimaced. When he opened them again there was alertness and clarity in them—but there was also bafflement. "Girl," he said, "who are you? Where am I?" "Peter!" There was shock and hurt in the tone of her voice. "I'm—don't you know me, Peter?" Duane shook his head confusedly. "I don't know anything," he said. "I—I don't even know my own name." "Duane, Duane," a man's heavy voice said. "That won't wash. Don't play dumb on me." "Duane?" he said. "Duane...." He swiveled his head and saw a dark, squat man frowning at him. "Who are you?" Peter asked. The dark man laughed. "Take your time, Duane," he said easily. "You'll remember me. My name's Andrias. I've been waiting here for you to wake up. We have some business matters to discuss." The nurse, still eyeing Duane with an odd bewilderment, said: "I'll leave you alone for a moment. Don't talk too much to him, Mr. Andrias. He's still suffering from shock." "I won't," Andrias promised, grinning. Then, as the girl left the room, the smile dropped from his face. "You play rough, Duane," he observed. "I thought you'd have trouble with Stevens. I didn't think you'd find it necessary to put him out of the way so permanently. Well, no matter. If you had to kill him, it's no skin off my nose. Give me a release on the merchandise. I've got your money here." Duane waved a hand and pushed himself dizzily erect, swinging his legs over the side of the high cot. A sheet had been thrown over him, but he was fully dressed. He examined his clothing with interest—gray tunic, gray leather spaceman's boots. It was unfamiliar. He shook his head in further confusion, and the motion burst within his skull, throbbing hotly. He closed his eyes until it subsided, trying to force his brain to operate, to explain to him where and what he was. He looked at the man named Andrias. "Nobody seems to believe me," he said, "but I really don't know what's going on. Things are moving too fast for me. Really, I—why, I don't even know my own name! My head—it hurts. I can't think clearly." Andrias straightened, turned a darkly-suspicious look on Duane. "Don't play tricks on me," he said savagely. "I haven't time for them. I won't mince words with you. Give me a release on the cargo now, before I have to get rough. This is a lot more important to me than your life is." "Go to hell," Duane said shortly. "I'm playing no tricks." There was an instant's doubt in Andrias' eyes, then it flashed away. He bent closer, peered at Duane. "I almost think—" he began. Then he shook his head. "No," he said. "You're lying all right. You killed Stevens to get his share—and now you're trying to hold me up. That's your last chance that just went by, Duane. From now on, I'm running this show!" He spun around and strode to the door, thrust it open. "Dakin!" he bellowed. "Reed!" Two large, ugly men in field-gray uniforms, emblazoned with the shooting-star insignia of Callisto's League police, came in, looking to Andrias for instructions. "Duane here is resisting arrest," Andrias said. "Take him along. We'll fix up the charges later." "You can't do that," Duane said wearily. "I'm sick. If you've got something against me, save it. Wait till my head clears. I'm sure I can explain—" "Explain, hell." The dark man laughed. "If I wait, this ship will be blasting off for Ganymede within two hours. I'll wait—but so will the ship. It's not going anywhere till I give it clearance. I run Callisto; I'll give the orders here!" II Whoever this man Andrias was, thought Duane, he was certainly a man of importance on Callisto. As he had said, he gave the orders. The crew of the rocket made no objection when Andrias and his men took Duane off without a word. Duane had thought the nurse, who seemed a good enough sort, might have said something on his behalf. But she was out of sight as they left. A curt sentence to a gray-clad official on the blast field where the rocket lay, and the man nodded and hurried off, to tell the rocket's captain that the ship was being refused clearance indefinitely. A long, powerful ground car slid up before them. Andrias got in front, while the two uniformed men shoved Duane into the back of the car, climbed in beside him. Andrias gave a curt order, and the car shot forward. The driver, sitting beside Andrias, leaned forward and readied a hand under the dashboard. The high wail of a siren came instantly from the car's roof, and what traffic was on the broad, straight highway into which they had turned pulled aside to let them race through. Ahead lay the tall spires of a city. Graceful, hundreds of feet high, they seemed dreamlike yet somehow oddly familiar to Duane. Somewhere he had seen them before. He dragged deep into his mind, plumbing the cloudy, impenetrable haze that had settled on it, trying to bring forth the memories that he should have had. Amnesia, they called it; complete forgetting of the happenings of a lifetime. He'd heard of it—but never dreamed it could happen to him! My name, it seems, is Peter Duane , he thought. And they tell me that I killed a man! The thought was starkly incredible to him. A white-haired man, it had been; someone named Stevens. He tried to remember. Yes, there had been a white-haired man. And there had been an argument. Something to do with money, with a shipment of goods that Stevens had supplied to Duane. There has even been talk of killing.... But—murder! Duane looked at his hands helplessly. Andrias, up ahead, was turning around. He looked sharply at Duane, for a long second. An uncertainty clouded his eyes, and abruptly he looked forward again without speaking. "Who's this man Andrias?" Duane whispered to the nearest guard. The man stared at him. "Governor Andrias," he said, "is the League's deputy on Callisto. You know—the Earth-Mars League. They put Governor Andrias here to—well, to govern for them." "League?" Duane asked, wrinkling his brow. He had heard something about a League once, yes. But it was all so nebulous.... The other guard stirred, leaned over. "Shut up," he said heavily. "You'll have plenty of chance for talking later." But the chance was a long time in coming. Duane found himself, an hour later, still in the barred room into which he'd been thrust. The guards had brought him there, at Andrias' order, and left him. That had been all. This was not a regular jail, Duane realized. It was more like a palace, something out of Earth's Roman-empire days, all white stone and frescoed walls. Duane wished for human companionship—particularly that of the nurse. Of all the people he'd met since awakening in that hospital bed, only she seemed warm and human. The others were—brutal, deadly. It was too bad, Duane reflected, that he'd failed to remember her. She'd seemed hurt, and she had certainly known him by first name. But perhaps she would understand. Duane sat down on a lumpy, sagging bed and buried his head in his hands. Dim ghosts of memory were wandering in his mind. He tried to conjure them into stronger relief, or to exorcise them entirely. Somewhere, some time, a man had said to him, " Andrias is secretly arming the Callistan cutthroats for revolt against the League. He wants personal power—he's prepared to pay any price for it. He needs guns, Earth guns smuggled in through the League patrol. If he can wipe out the League police garrison—those who are loyal to the League, still, instead of to Andrias—he can sit back and laugh at any fleet Earth and Mars can send. Rockets are clumsy in an atmosphere. They're helpless. And if he can arm enough of Callisto's rabble, he can't be stopped. That's why he'll pay for electron rifles with their weight in gold. " Duane could remember the scene clearly. Could almost see the sharp, aquiline face of the man who had spoken to him. But there memory stopped. A fugitive recollection raced through his mind. He halted it, dragged it back, pinned it down.... They had stopped in Darkside, the spaceport on the side of Luna that keeps perpetually averted from Earth, as if the moon knows shame and wants to hide the rough and roaring dome city that nestles in one of the great craters. Duane remembered sitting in a low-ceilinged, smoke-heavy room, across the table from a tall man with white hair. Stevens! " Four thousand electron rifles ," the man had said. " Latest government issue. Never mind how I got them; they're perfect. You know my price. Take it or leave it. And it's payable the minute we touch ground on Callisto. " There had been a few minutes of haggling over terms, then a handshake and a drink from a thin-necked flagon of pale-yellow liquid fire. He and the white-haired man had gone out then, made their way by unfrequented side streets to a great windowless building. Duane remembered the white-hot stars overhead, shining piercingly through the great transparent dome that kept the air in the sealed city of Darkside, as they stood at the entrance of the warehouse and spoke in low tones to the man who answered their summons. Then, inside. And they were looking at a huge chamber full of stacked fiber boxes—containing nothing but dehydrated dairy products and mining tools, by the stencils they bore. Duane had turned to the white-haired man with a puzzled question—and the man had laughed aloud. He dragged one of the boxes down, ripped it open with the sharp point of a handling hook. Short-barreled, flare-mouthed guns rolled out, tumbling over the floor. Eight of them were in that one box, and hundreds of boxes all about. Duane picked one up, broke it, peered into the chamber where the tiny capsule of U-235 would explode with infinite violence when the trigger was pulled, spraying radiant death three thousand yards in the direction the gun was aimed.... And that memory ended. Duane got up, stared at his haggard face in the cracked mirror over the bed. " They say I'm a killer ," he thought. " Apparently I'm a gun-runner as well. Good lord—what am I not? " His reflection—white, drawn face made all the more pallid by the red hair that blazed over it—stared back at him. There was no answer there. If only he could remember— "All right, Duane." The deep voice of a guard came to him as the door swung open. "Stop making eyes at yourself." Duane looked around. The guard beckoned. "Governor Andrias wants to speak to you—now. Let's not keep the governor waiting." A long, narrow room, with a long carpet leading from the entrance up to a great heavy desk—that was Andrias' office. Duane felt a click in his memory as he entered. One of the ancient Earth dictators had employed just such a psychological trick to overawe those who came to beg favors of him. Muslini, or some such name. The trick failed to work. Duane had other things on his mind; he walked the thirty-foot length of the room, designed to imbue him with a sense of his own unimportance, as steadily as he'd ever walked in the open air of his home planet. Whichever planet that was. The guard had remained just inside the door, at attention. Andrias waved him out. "Here I am," said Duane. "What do you want?" Andrias said, "I've had the ship inspected and what I want is on it. That saves your life, for now. But the cargo is in your name. I could take it by force, if I had to. I prefer not to." He picked up a paper, handed it to Duane. "In spite of your behavior, you can keep alive. You can even collect the money for the guns—Stevens' share as well as your own. This is a release form, authorizing my men to take four hundred and twenty cases of dehydrated foods and drilling supplies from the hold of the Cameroon —the ship you came on. Sign it, and we'll forget our argument. Only, sign it now and get it over with. I'm losing patience, Duane." Duane said, without expression, "No." Dark red flooded into Andrias' sallow face. His jaws bunched angrily and there was a ragged thread of incomplete control to his voice as he spoke. "I'll have your neck for this, Duane," he said softly. Duane looked at the man's eyes. Death was behind them, peeping out. Mentally he shrugged. What difference did it make? "Give me the pen," he said shortly. Andrias exhaled a deep breath. You could see the tension leave him, the mottled anger fade from his face and leave it without expression. He handed the paper to Duane without a word. He gave him a pen, watched him scrawl his name. "That," he said, "is better." He paused a moment ruminatively. "It would have been better still if you'd not stalled me so long. I find that hard to forgive in my associates." "The money," Peter said. If he were playing a part—pretending he knew what he was doing—he might as well play it to the hilt. "When do I get it?" Andrias picked up the paper and looked carefully at the signature. He creased it thoughtfully, stowed it in a pocket before answering. "Naturally," he said, "there will have to be a revision of terms. I offered a hundred and ten thousand Earth-dollars. I would have paid it—but you made me angry. You'll have to pay for that." Duane said, "I've paid already. I've been dragged from pillar to post by you. That's enough. Pay me what you owe me, if you want any more of the same goods!" That was a shot in the dark—and it missed the mark. Andrias' eyes widened. "You amaze me, Duane," he said. He rose and stepped around the desk, confronting Duane. "I almost think you really have lost your memory, Duane," he said. "Otherwise, surely you would know that this is all the rifles I need. With them I'll take whatever else I want!" Duane said, "You're ready, then...." He took time to think it over, but he knew that no thought was required. Already the hands that he had locked behind him were clenched, taut. Already the muscles of his legs were tensing. "You're ready," he repeated. "You've armed the Callistan exiles—the worst gutter scum on nine planets. You're set to betray the League that gave you power here.... Well, that changes things. I can't let you do it!" He hurled himself at Andrias, hands sweeping around to grapple for the dark man's throat. Andrias, off-balance, staggered backward. But his own hands were diving for the twin heat guns that hung at his waist. Duane saw his danger, and reacted. His foot twisted around Andrias' ankle; his hands at the other's throat gripped tighter. He lunged forward, slamming the hard top of his head into the other's face, feeling flesh and cartilage give as Andrias' nose mashed flat. His own head pin-wheeled dizzily, agonizingly, as the jar revived the pain of his earlier accident. But Andrias, unconscious already, tumbled back with Duane on top of him. His head made an audible, spine-chilling thud as it hit the carpeted floor. Duane got up, retrieving the two heat guns, and stared at him. " They tell me I killed Stevens the same way ," he thought. " I'm getting in a rut! " But Andrias was not dead, though he was out as cold as the void beyond Pluto. The thick carpeting had saved him from a broken head. Duane stepped over the unconscious man and looked around the room. It was furnished severely, to the point of barrenness. Two chairs before Andrias' ornate, bare-topped desk and one luxurious chair behind it; a tasseled bell cord within easy reach of Andrias' chair; the long carpet. That was all it contained. The problem of getting out was serious, he saw. How could one— III Methodically he ransacked the drawers of Andrias' desk. Papers, a whole arsenal of hand guns, Callistan money by the bale, ominously black-covered notebooks with cryptic figures littering their pages—those were the contents. A coldly impersonal desk, without the familiar trivia most men accumulate. There was nothing, certainly, that would get him out of a building that so closely resembled a fortress. He tumbled the things back into the drawers helter-skelter, turned Andrias over and searched his pockets. More money—the man must have had a fortune within reach at all times—and a few meaningless papers. Duane took the release he had signed and tore it to shreds. But that was only a gesture. When Andrias came to, unless Duane had managed to get away and accomplish something, the mere lack of written permission would not keep him from the rocket's lethal cargo! When Andrias came to.... An idea bloomed in Duane's brain. He looked, then, at unconscious Andrias—and the idea withered again. He had thought of forcing Andrias himself to front for him, at gun's point, in the conventional manner of escaping prisoners. But fist fights, fiction to the contrary notwithstanding, leave marks on the men who lose them. Andrias' throat was speckled with the livid marks of Duane's fingers; Duane's head, butting Andrias in the face, had drawn a thick stream of crimson from his nostrils, turned his sharp nose askew. No guard of Andrias' would have been deceived for an instant, looking at that face—even assuming that Andrias could have been forced to cooperate by the threat of a gun. Which, considering the stake Andrias had in this play, was doubtful.... He stood up and looked around. He had to act quickly. Already Andrias' breath was audible; he saw the man grimace and an arm flopped spasmodically on the floor. Consciousness was on its way back. Duane touched the heat gun he'd thrust into his belt; drew it and held it poised, while he sought to discover what was in his own mind. He'd killed a man already, they said. Was he then a killer—could he shoot Andrias now, in cold blood, with so much to gain and nothing to lose? He stood there a moment. Then, abruptly, he reversed the weapon and chopped it down on Andrias' skull. There was a sharp grunt from the still unconscious man, but no other sign. Only—the first tremors of movement that had shown on him halted, and did not reappear. " No ," Duane thought. " Whatever they say, I'm not a killer! " But still he had to get out. How? Once more he stared around the room, catalogued its contents. The guard would be getting impatient. Perhaps any minute he would tap the door, first timorously, then with heavier strokes. The guard! There was a way! Duane eyed the length of the room. Thirty feet—it would take him a couple of seconds to run it at full speed. Was that fast enough? There was only one way to find out. He walked around the desk to the bell cord. He took a deep breath, tugged it savagely, and at once was in speedy motion, racing toward the door, his footsteps muffled in the deep, springy carpet. Almost as he reached it, he saw it begin to open. He quickly sidestepped and was out of the guard's sight, behind the door, as the man looked in. Quick suspicion flared in his eyes, then certainty as he saw Andrias huddled on the floor. He opened his mouth to cry out— But Duane's arm was around his throat, and he had no breath to spare. Duane's foot lashed out and the door slammed shut; Duane's balled left fist came up and connected with the guard's chin. Abruptly the man slumped. Duane took a deep breath and let the man drop to the floor. But he paused only a second; now he had two unconscious men on his hands and he dared let neither revive until he was prepared. He grasped the guard's arm and dragged him roughly the length of the room. He leaped on top of the desk, brutally scarring its gleaming top with the hard spikes of his boots. His agile fingers unfastened the long bell cord without causing it to ring and, bearing it, he dropped again to the floor. Tugging and straining, he got the limp form of Andrias into his own chair, bound him with the bell cord, gagged him with the priceless Venus-wool scarf Andrias wore knotted about his throat. He tested his bindings with full strength, and smiled. Those would hold, let Andrias struggle as he would. The guard he stripped of clothing, bound and gagged with his own belt and spaceman's kerchief. He dragged him around behind the desk, thrust him under it out of sight. Andrias' chair he turned so that the unconscious face was averted from the door. Should anyone look in, then, the fact of Andrias' unconsciousness might not be noticed. Then he took off his own clothes, quickly assumed the field-gray uniform of the guard. It fit like the skin of a fruit. He felt himself bulging out of it in a dozen places. The long cape the guard wore would conceal that, perhaps. In any case, there was nothing better. Trying to make his stride as martial as possible, he walked down the long carpet to the door, opened it and stepped outside.

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Morgue Ship By RAY BRADBURY This was Burnett's last trip. Three more shelves to fill with space-slain warriors—and he would be among the living again. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] He heard the star-port grind open, and the movement of the metal claws groping into space, and then the star-port closed. There was another dead man aboard the Constellation . Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid and quiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him; machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't see anything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall of the laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet, keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm. Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgical gown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling all tight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship. Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poor warrior's body out of the void. He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke, who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a decent burial. "Number ninety-eight." Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice from the ceiling radio hit Burnett. "Number ninety-eight," Burnett repeated. "Working on ninety-five, ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight surgery." Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded deep. It didn't belong to him anymore. Rice said: "Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day drunk!" Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships, salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict. Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again. Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved for action. This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why! "Sam!" Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins. "Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!" Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood cooling in it. Shaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed without making any noise on the rungs. He kept thinking the one thing he couldn't forget. You never catch up with the war. All the color is ahead of you. The drive of orange rocket traces across stars, the whamming of steel-nosed bombs into elusive targets, the titanic explosions and breathless pursuits, the flags and the excited glory are always a million miles ahead. He bit his teeth together. You never catch up with the war. You come along when space has settled back, when the vacuum has stopped trembling from unleashed forces between worlds. You come along in the dark quiet of death to find the wreckage plunging with all the fury of its original acceleration in no particular direction. You can only see it; you don't hear anything in space but your own heart kicking your ribs. You see bodies, each in its own terrific orbit, given impetus by grinding collisions, tossed from mother ships and dancing head over feet forever and forever with no goal. Bits of flesh in ruptured space suits, mouths open for air that had never been there in a hundred billion centuries. And they kept dancing without music until you extended the retriever-claw and culled them into the air-lock. That was all the war-glory he got. Nothing but the stunned, shivering silence, the memory of rockets long gone, and the shelves filling up all too quickly with men who had once loved laughing. You wondered who all the men were; and who the next ones would be. After ten years you made yourself blind to them. You went around doing your job with mechanical hands. But even a machine breaks down.... "Sam!" Rice turned swiftly as Burnett dragged himself up the ladder. Red and warm, Rice's face hovered over the body of a sprawled enemy official. "Take a look at this!" Burnett caught his breath. His eyes narrowed. There was something wrong with the body; his experienced glance knew that. He didn't know what it was. Maybe it was because the body looked a little too dead. Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way, stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle. Burnett rubbed his jaw. "Well?" Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and black. "Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?" Burnett scowled uneasily and said no. "It's Lethla!" Rice retorted. Burnett said, "Lethla?" And then: "Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That right?" "Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in space, then Kriere's not far away from him!" Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell. What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone else. Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. "Snap out of it, Sam. Think! Kriere—The All-Mighty—in our territory. His right hand man dead. That means Kriere was in an accident, too!" Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves. "Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine. "As for Kriere—if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution is taken to protect that one." "But Lethla! His body must mean something!" "And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a battle-cuiser to go against him?" "We'll radio for help?" "Yeah? If there's a warship within our radio range, seven hundred thousand miles, we'll get it. Unfortunately, the tide of battle has swept out past Earth in a new war concerning Io. That's out, Rice." Rice stood about three inches below Sam Burnett's six-foot-one. Jaw hard and determined, he stared at Sam, a funny light in his eyes. His fingers twitched all by themselves at his sides. His mouth twisted, "You're one hell of a patriot, Sam Burnett!" Burnett reached out with one long finger, tapped it quietly on Rice's barrel-chest. "Haul a cargo of corpses for three thousand nights and days and see how patriotic you feel. All those fine muscled lads bloated and crushed by space pressures and heat-blasts. Fine lads who start out smiling and get the smile burned off down to the bone—" Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes. He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship, hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat. "This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here—what's his name? Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!" Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time. Lethla was alive. He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream. He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what language it would use if it had to. Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it like a dead cold star. Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight, biting lines into his sharp face. Rice got it out, finally. "How'd you do it?" he demanded, bitterly. "How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!" A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head. You never catch up with the war! But what if the war catches up with you? What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship? Lethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen. He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. "That's how I did it, Earthman." "Glassite!" said Rice. "A face-moulded mask of glassite!" Lethla nodded. His milk-blue eyes dilated. "Very marvelously pared to an unbreakable thickness of one-thirtieth of an inch; worn only on the head. You have to look quickly to notice it, and, unfortunately, viewed as you saw it, outside the ship, floating in the void, not discernible at all." Prickles of sweat appeared on Rice's face. He swore at the Venusian and the Venusian laughed like some sort of stringed instrument, high and quick. Burnett laughed, too. Ironically. "First time in years a man ever came aboard the Constellation alive. It's a welcome change." Lethla showed his needle-like teeth. "I thought it might be. Where's your radio?" "Go find it!" snapped Rice, hotly. "I will." One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused. "I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock is safe. Don't move." Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and coils. The radio. Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by the new bitterness in it. Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs. He smiled. "That's better. Now. We can talk—" Rice said it, slow: "Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead men belong here." Lethla's gun grip tightened. "More talk of that nature, and only dead men there will be." He blinked. "But first—we must rescue Kriere...." "Kriere!" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw. Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama. Lethla's voice came next: "Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever. "We saw your morgue ship an hour ago. It's a long, long way to Venus. We were running out of fuel, food, water. Radio was broken. Capture was certain. You were coming our way; we took the chance. We set a small time-bomb to destroy the life-rocket, and cast off, wearing our chrysali-helmets. It was the first time we had ever tried using them to trick anyone. We knew you wouldn't know we were alive until it was too late and we controlled your ship. We knew you picked up all bodies for brief exams, returning alien corpses to space later." Rice's voice was sullen. "A set-up for you, huh? Traveling under the protection of the Purple Cross you can get your damned All-Mighty safe to Venus." Lethla bowed slightly. "Who would suspect a Morgue Rocket of providing safe hiding for precious Venusian cargo?" "Precious is the word for you, brother!" said Rice. "Enough!" Lethla moved his gun several inches. "Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be picked up— now! " Rice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time in years. "Sure," said Sam, smiling. "We'll pick him up." "No tricks," said Lethla. Burnett scowled and smiled together. "No tricks. You'll have Kriere on board the Constellation in half an hour or I'm no coroner." "Follow me up the ladder." Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. "Come on." Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor. Rice grumbled and cursed after him. On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere. There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you never knew who it would be. He came out of the quick thoughts when he looped his long leg over the hole-rim, stepped up, faced Lethla in a cramped control room that was one glittering swirl of silver levers, audio-plates and visuals. Chronometers, clicking, told of the steady dropping toward the sun at a slow pace. Burnett set his teeth together, bone against bone. Help Kriere escape? See him safely to Venus, and then be freed? Sounded easy, wouldn't be hard. Venusians weren't blind with malice. Rice and he could come out alive; if they cooperated. But there were a lot of warriors sleeping on a lot of numbered shelves in the dim corridors of the long years. And their dead lips were stirring to life in Burnett's ears. Not so easily could they be ignored. You may never catch up with the war again. The last trip! Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it? Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms, wet thin lips. "Now, where do you want this crate?" he asked Lethla easily. Lethla exhaled softly. "Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman." "Very," said Burnett. He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it would all be over. Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead, he squinted. "There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good trick." "Cut power! We don't want to burn him!" Burnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen, eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars. "We're about fifty miles from him, catching up." Burnett turned to Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last time anybody would ever board the Constellation alive. His stomach went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear. If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that— Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat, water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored because of his gun. Kriere would make odds impossible. Something had to be done before Kriere came in. Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered, fooled—somehow. But—how? Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew, artery—heart. There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and this would be the last trip. Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear. "Steady, Rice," he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in the center of that silence. "Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the star-port." Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly. Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first, why— Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the Constellation . Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about to be rescued. Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he was about to end a ten-years' war. There was only one way of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be fast. Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies from space. Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet, too. The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its slowness. It reached Kriere. Burnett inhaled a deep breath. The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm. Lethla watched. He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: "You know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the Constellation . I believe it." And the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the head, which was carefully preserved for identification. That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard. Burnett spun about and leaped. The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun. Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner. Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and started laughing. He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut. Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's young face over him. Burnett groaned. Rice said, "Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam." "To hell with it." Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open. Something wet and sticky covered his chest. "I said this was my last trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!" "This is the hard way—" "Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never have to come aboard the Constellation , though, Rice." His voice trailed off. "You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago—" Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of them out: "Rice?" "Yeah, Sam?" "We haven't got a full cargo, boy." "Full enough for me, sir." "But still not full. If we went back to Center Base without filling the shelves, it wouldn't be right. Look there—number ninety-eight is Lethla—number ninety-nine is Kriere. Three thousand days of rolling this rocket, and not once come back without a bunch of the kids who want to sleep easy on the good green earth. Not right to be going back any way—but—the way—we used to—" His voice got all full of fog. As thick as the fists of a dozen warriors. Rice was going away from him. Rice was standing still, and Burnett was lying down, not moving, but somehow Rice was going away a million miles. "Ain't I one hell of a patriot, Rice?" Then everything got dark except Rice's face. And that was starting to dissolve. Ninety-eight: Lethla. Ninety-nine: Kriere. He could still see Rice standing over him for a long time, breathing out and in. Down under the tables the blood-pumps pulsed and pulsed, thick and slow. Rice looked down at Burnett and then at the empty shelf at the far end of the room, and then back at Burnett again. And then he said softly: " One hundred. "

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30035

Shure and begorra, it was a great day for the Earth! The first envoy from another world was about to speak—that is, if he could forget that horse for a minute.... off course By Mack Reynolds Illustrated by Kelly Freas First on the scene were Larry Dermott and Tim Casey of the State Highway Patrol. They assumed they were witnessing the crash of a new type of Air Force plane and slipped and skidded desperately across the field to within thirty feet of the strange craft, only to discover that the landing had been made without accident. Patrolman Dermott shook his head. "They're gettin' queerer looking every year. Get a load of it—no wheels, no propeller, no cockpit." They left the car and made their way toward the strange egg-shaped vessel. Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its holster and said, "Sure, and I'm beginning to wonder if it's one of ours. No insignia and—" A circular door slid open at that point and Dameri Tass stepped out, yawning. He spotted them, smiled and said, "Glork." They gaped at him. "Glork is right," Dermott swallowed. Tim Casey closed his mouth with an effort. "Do you mind the color of his face?" he blurted. "How could I help it?" Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed pink hand down his purplish countenance and yawned again. "Gorra manigan horp soratium," he said. Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman Casey shot stares at each other. "'Tis double talk he's after givin' us," Casey said. Dameri Tass frowned. "Harama?" he asked. Larry Dermott pushed his cap to the back of his head. "That doesn't sound like any language I've even heard about." Dameri Tass grimaced, turned and reentered his spacecraft to emerge in half a minute with his hands full of contraption. He held a box-like arrangement under his left arm; in his right hand were two metal caps connected to the box by wires. While the patrolmen watched him, he set the box on the ground, twirled two dials and put one of the caps on his head. He offered the other to Larry Dermott; his desire was obvious. Trained to grasp a situation and immediately respond in manner best suited to protect the welfare of the people of New York State, Dermott cleared his throat and said, "Tim, take over while I report." "Hey!" Casey protested, but his fellow minion had left. "Mandaia," Dameri Tass told Casey, holding out the metal cap. "Faith, an' do I look balmy?" Casey told him. "I wouldn't be puttin' that dingus on my head for all the colleens in Ireland." "Mandaia," the stranger said impatiently. "Bejasus," Casey snorted, "ye can't—" Dermott called from the car, "Tim, the captain says to humor this guy. We're to keep him here until the officials arrive." Tim Casey closed his eyes and groaned. "Humor him, he's after sayin'. Orders it is." He shouted back, "Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's in technicolor? Begorra, he looks like a man from Mars." "That's what they think," Larry yelled, "and the governor is on his way. We're to do everything possible short of violence to keep this character here. Humor him, Tim!" "Mandaia," Dameri Tass snapped, pushing the cap into Casey's reluctant hands. Muttering his protests, Casey lifted it gingerly and placed it on his head. Not feeling any immediate effect, he said, "There, 'tis satisfied ye are now, I'm supposin'." The alien stooped down and flicked a switch on the little box. It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly shrieked and sat down on the stubble and grass of the field. "Begorra," he yelped, "I've been murthered!" He tore the cap from his head. His companion came running, "What's the matter, Tim?" he shouted. Dameri Tass removed the metal cap from his own head. "Sure, an' nothin' is after bein' the matter with him," he said. "Evidently the bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt him not at all." "You can talk!" Dermott blurted, skidding to a stop. Dameri Tass shrugged. "Faith, an' why not? As I was after sayin', I shared the kerit helmet with Tim Casey." Patrolman Dermott glared at him unbelievingly. "You learned the language just by sticking that Rube Goldberg deal on Tim's head?" "Sure, an' why not?" Dermott muttered, "And with it he has to pick up the corniest brogue west of Dublin." Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly. "I'm after resentin' that, Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way we talk in Ireland is—" Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing to a bedraggled horse that had made its way to within fifty feet of the vessel. "Now what could that be after bein'?" The patrolmen followed his stare. "It's a horse. What else?" "A horse?" Larry Dermott looked again, just to make sure. "Yeah—not much of a horse, but a horse." Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically. "And jist what is a horse, if I may be so bold as to be askin'?" "It's an animal you ride on." The alien tore his gaze from the animal to look his disbelief at the other. "Are you after meanin' that you climb upon the crature's back and ride him? Faith now, quit your blarney." He looked at the horse again, then down at his equipment. "Begorra," he muttered, "I'll share the kerit helmet with the crature." "Hey, hold it," Dermott said anxiously. He was beginning to feel like a character in a shaggy dog story. Interest in the horse was ended with the sudden arrival of a helicopter. It swooped down on the field and settled within twenty feet of the alien craft. Almost before it had touched, the door was flung open and the flying windmill disgorged two bestarred and efficient-looking Army officers. Casey and Dermott snapped them a salute. The senior general didn't take his eyes from the alien and the spacecraft as he spoke, and they bugged quite as effectively as had those of the patrolmen when they'd first arrived on the scene. "I'm Major General Browning," he rapped. "I want a police cordon thrown up around this, er, vessel. No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody without my permission. As soon as Army personnel arrives, we'll take over completely." "Yes, sir," Larry Dermott said. "I just got a report on the radio that the governor is on his way, sir. How about him?" The general muttered something under his breath. Then, "When the governor arrives, let me know; otherwise, nobody gets through!" Dameri Tass said, "Faith, and what goes on?" The general's eyes bugged still further. " He talks! " he accused. "Yes, sir," Dermott said. "He had some kind of a machine. He put it over Tim's head and seconds later he could talk." "Nonsense!" the general snapped. Further discussion was interrupted by the screaming arrival of several motorcycle patrolmen followed by three heavily laden patrol cars. Overhead, pursuit planes zoomed in and began darting about nervously above the field. "Sure, and it's quite a reception I'm after gettin'," Dameri Tass said. He yawned. "But what I'm wantin' is a chance to get some sleep. Faith, an' I've been awake for almost a decal ." Dameri Tass was hurried, via helicopter, to Washington. There he disappeared for several days, being held incommunicado while White House, Pentagon, State Department and Congress tried to figure out just what to do with him. Never in the history of the planet had such a furor arisen. Thus far, no newspapermen had been allowed within speaking distance. Administration higher-ups were being subjected to a volcano of editorial heat but the longer the space alien was discussed the more they viewed with alarm the situation his arrival had precipitated. There were angles that hadn't at first been evident. Obviously he was from some civilization far beyond that of Earth's. That was the rub. No matter what he said, it would shake governments, possibly overthrow social systems, perhaps even destroy established religious concepts. But they couldn't keep him under wraps indefinitely. It was the United Nations that cracked the iron curtain. Their demands that the alien be heard before their body were too strong and had too much public opinion behind them to be ignored. The White House yielded and the date was set for the visitor to speak before the Assembly. Excitement, anticipation, blanketed the world. Shepherds in Sinkiang, multi-millionaires in Switzerland, fakirs in Pakistan, gauchos in the Argentine were raised to a zenith of expectation. Panhandlers debated the message to come with pedestrians; jinrikisha men argued it with their passengers; miners discussed it deep beneath the surface; pilots argued with their co-pilots thousands of feet above. It was the most universally awaited event of the ages. By the time the delegates from every nation, tribe, religion, class, color, and race had gathered in New York to receive the message from the stars, the majority of Earth had decided that Dameri Tass was the plenipotentiary of a super-civilization which had been viewing developments on this planet with misgivings. It was thought this other civilization had advanced greatly beyond Earth's and that the problems besetting us—social, economic, scientific—had been solved by the super-civilization. Obviously, then, Dameri Tass had come, an advisor from a benevolent and friendly people, to guide the world aright. And nine-tenths of the population of Earth stood ready and willing to be guided. The other tenth liked things as they were and were quite convinced that the space envoy would upset their applecarts. Viljalmar Andersen , Secretary-General of the U.N., was to introduce the space emissary. "Can you give me an idea at all of what he is like?" he asked nervously. President McCord was as upset as the Dane. He shrugged in agitation. "I know almost as little as you do." Sir Alfred Oxford protested, "But my dear chap, you've had him for almost two weeks. Certainly in that time—" The President snapped back, "You probably won't believe this, but he's been asleep until yesterday. When he first arrived he told us he hadn't slept for a decal , whatever that is; so we held off our discussion with him until morning. Well—he didn't awaken in the morning, nor the next. Six days later, fearing something was wrong we woke him." "What happened?" Sir Alfred asked. The President showed embarrassment. "He used some rather ripe Irish profanity on us, rolled over, and went back to sleep." Viljalmar Andersen asked, "Well, what happened yesterday?" "We actually haven't had time to question him. Among other things, there's been some controversy about whose jurisdiction he comes under. The State Department claims the Army shouldn't—" The Secretary General sighed deeply. "Just what did he do?" "The Secret Service reports he spent the day whistling Mother Machree and playing with his dog, cat and mouse." "Dog, cat and mouse? I say!" blurted Sir Alfred. The President was defensive. "He had to have some occupation, and he seems to be particularly interested in our animal life. He wanted a horse but compromised for the others. I understand he insists all three of them come with him wherever he goes." "I wish we knew what he was going to say," Andersen worried. "Here he comes," said Sir Alfred. Surrounded by F.B.I. men, Dameri Tass was ushered to the speaker's stand. He had a kitten in his arms; a Scotty followed him. The alien frowned worriedly. "Sure," he said, "and what kin all this be? Is it some ordinance I've been after breakin'?" McCord, Sir Alfred and Andersen hastened to reassure him and made him comfortable in a chair. Viljalmar Andersen faced the thousands in the audience and held up his hands, but it was ten minutes before he was able to quiet the cheering, stamping delegates from all Earth. Finally: "Fellow Terrans, I shall not take your time for a lengthy introduction of the envoy from the stars. I will only say that, without doubt, this is the most important moment in the history of the human race. We will now hear from the first being to come to Earth from another world." He turned and gestured to Dameri Tass who hadn't been paying overmuch attention to the chairman in view of some dog and cat hostilities that had been developing about his feet. But now the alien's purplish face faded to a light blue. He stood and said hoarsely. "Faith, an' what was that last you said?" Viljalmar Andersen repeated, "We will now hear from the first being ever to come to Earth from another world." The face of the alien went a lighter blue. "Sure, an' ye wouldn't jist be frightenin' a body, would ye? You don't mean to tell me this planet isn't after bein' a member of the Galactic League?" Andersen's face was blank. "Galactic League?" "Cushlamachree," Dameri Tass moaned. "I've gone and put me foot in it again. I'll be after getting kert for this." Sir Alfred was on his feet. "I don't understand! Do you mean you aren't an envoy from another planet?" Dameri Tass held his head in his hands and groaned. "An envoy, he's sayin', and meself only a second-rate collector of specimens for the Carthis zoo." He straightened and started off the speaker's stand. "Sure, an' I must blast off immediately." Things were moving fast for President McCord but already an edge of relief was manifesting itself. Taking the initiative, he said, "Of course, of course, if that is your desire." He signaled to the bodyguard who had accompanied the alien to the assemblage. A dull roar was beginning to emanate from the thousands gathered in the tremendous hall, murmuring, questioning, disbelieving. Viljalmar Andersen felt that he must say something. He extended a detaining hand. "Now you are here," he said urgently, "even though by mistake, before you go can't you give us some brief word? Our world is in chaos. Many of us have lost faith. Perhaps ..." Dameri Tass shook off the restraining hand. "Do I look daft? Begorry, I should have been a-knowin' something was queer. All your weapons and your strange ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised if ye hadn't yet established a planet-wide government. Sure, an' I'll go still further. Ye probably still have wars on this benighted world. No wonder it is ye haven't been invited to join the Galactic League an' take your place among the civilized planets." He hustled from the rostrum and made his way, still surrounded by guards, to the door by which he had entered. The dog and the cat trotted after, undismayed by the furor about them. They arrived about four hours later at the field on which he'd landed, and the alien from space hurried toward his craft, still muttering. He'd been accompanied by a general and by the President, but all the way he had refrained from speaking. He scurried from the car and toward the spacecraft. President McCord said, "You've forgotten your pets. We would be glad if you would accept them as—" The alien's face faded a light blue again. "Faith, an' I'd almost forgotten," he said. "If I'd taken a crature from this quarantined planet, my name'd be nork . Keep your dog and your kitty." He shook his head sadly and extracted a mouse from a pocket. "An' this amazin' little crature as well." They followed him to the spacecraft. Just before entering, he spotted the bedraggled horse that had been present on his landing. A longing expression came over his highly colored face. "Jist one thing," he said. "Faith now, were they pullin' my leg when they said you were after ridin' on the back of those things?" The President looked at the woebegone nag. "It's a horse," he said, surprised. "Man has been riding them for centuries." Dameri Tass shook his head. "Sure, an' 'twould've been my makin' if I could've taken one back to Carthis." He entered his vessel. The others drew back, out of range of the expected blast, and watched, each with his own thoughts, as the first visitor from space hurriedly left Earth. ... THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction January 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

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THE DESERT AND THE STARS BY KEITH LAUMER The Aga Kaga wanted peace—a piece of everything in sight! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, November 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "I'm not at all sure," Under-Secretary Sternwheeler said, "that I fully understand the necessity for your ... ah ... absenting yourself from your post of duty, Mr. Retief. Surely this matter could have been dealt with in the usual way—assuming any action is necessary." "I had a sharp attack of writer's cramp, Mr. Secretary," Retief said. "So I thought I'd better come along in person—just to be sure I was positive of making my point." "Eh?" "Why, ah, there were a number of dispatches," Deputy Under-Secretary Magnan put in. "Unfortunately, this being end-of-the-fiscal-year time, we found ourselves quite inundated with reports. Reports, reports, reports—" "Not criticizing the reporting system, are you, Mr. Magnan?" the Under-Secretary barked. "Gracious, no," Magnan said. "I love reports." "It seems nobody's told the Aga Kagans about fiscal years," Retief said. "They're going right ahead with their program of land-grabbing on Flamme. So far, I've persuaded the Boyars that this is a matter for the Corps, and not to take matters into their own hands." The Under-Secretary nodded. "Quite right. Carry on along the same lines. Now, if there's nothing further—" "Thank you, Mr. Secretary," Magnan said, rising. "We certainly appreciate your guidance." "There is a little something further," said Retief, sitting solidly in his chair. "What's the Corps going to do about the Aga Kagans?" The Under-Secretary turned a liverish eye on Retief. "As Minister to Flamme, you should know that the function of a diplomatic representative is merely to ... what shall I say...?" "String them along?" Magnan suggested. "An unfortunate choice of phrase," the Under-Secretary said. "However, it embodies certain realities of Galactic politics. The Corps must concern itself with matters of broad policy." "Sixty years ago the Corps was encouraging the Boyars to settle Flamme," Retief said. "They were assured of Corps support." "I don't believe you'll find that in writing," said the Under-Secretary blandly. "In any event, that was sixty years ago. At that time a foothold against Neo-Concordiatist elements was deemed desirable. Now the situation has changed." "The Boyars have spent sixty years terraforming Flamme," Retief said. "They've cleared jungle, descummed the seas, irrigated deserts, set out forests. They've just about reached the point where they can begin to enjoy it. The Aga Kagans have picked this as a good time to move in. They've landed thirty detachments of 'fishermen'—complete with armored trawlers mounting 40 mm infinite repeaters—and another two dozen parties of 'homesteaders'—all male and toting rocket launchers." "Surely there's land enough on the world to afford space to both groups," the Under-Secretary said. "A spirit of co-operation—" "The Boyars needed some co-operation sixty years ago," Retief said. "They tried to get the Aga Kagans to join in and help them beat back some of the saurian wild life that liked to graze on people. The Corps didn't like the idea. They wanted to see an undisputed anti-Concordiatist enclave. The Aga Kagans didn't want to play, either. But now that the world is tamed, they're moving in." "The exigencies of diplomacy require a flexible policy—" "I want a firm assurance of Corps support to take back to Flamme," Retief said. "The Boyars are a little naive. They don't understand diplomatic triple-speak. They just want to hold onto the homes they've made out of a wasteland." "I'm warning you, Retief!" the Under-Secretary snapped, leaning forward, wattles quivering. "Corps policy with regard to Flamme includes no inflammatory actions based on outmoded concepts. The Boyars will have to accommodate themselves to the situation!" "That's what I'm afraid of," Retief said. "They're not going to sit still and watch it happen. If I don't take back concrete evidence of Corps backing, we're going to have a nice hot little shooting war on our hands." The Under-Secretary pushed out his lips and drummed his fingers on the desk. "Confounded hot-heads," he muttered. "Very well, Retief. I'll go along to the extent of a Note; but positively no further." "A Note? I was thinking of something more like a squadron of Corps Peace Enforcers running through a few routine maneuvers off Flamme." "Out of the question. A stiffly worded Protest Note is the best I can do. That's final." Back in the corridor, Magnan turned to Retief. "When will you learn not to argue with Under-Secretaries? One would think you actively disliked the idea of ever receiving a promotion. I was astonished at the Under-Secretary's restraint. Frankly, I was stunned when he actually agreed to a Note. I, of course, will have to draft it." Magnan pulled at his lower lip thoughtfully. "Now, I wonder, should I view with deep concern an act of open aggression, or merely point out an apparent violation of technicalities...." "Don't bother," Retief said. "I have a draft all ready to go." "But how—?" "I had a feeling I'd get paper instead of action," Retief said. "I thought I'd save a little time all around." "At times, your cynicism borders on impudence." "At other times, it borders on disgust. Now, if you'll run the Note through for signature, I'll try to catch the six o'clock shuttle." "Leaving so soon? There's an important reception tonight. Some of our biggest names will be there. An excellent opportunity for you to join in the diplomatic give-and-take." "No, thanks. I want to get back to Flamme and join in something mild, like a dinosaur hunt." "When you get there," said Magnan, "I hope you'll make it quite clear that this matter is to be settled without violence." "Don't worry. I'll keep the peace, if I have to start a war to do it." On the broad verandah at Government House, Retief settled himself comfortably in a lounge chair. He accepted a tall glass from a white-jacketed waiter and regarded the flamboyant Flamme sunset, a gorgeous blaze of vermillion and purple that reflected from a still lake, tinged the broad lawn with color, silhouetted tall poplars among flower beds. "You've done great things here in sixty years, Georges," said Retief. "Not that natural geological processes wouldn't have produced the same results, given a couple of hundred million years." "Don't belabor the point," the Boyar Chef d'Regime said. "Since we seem to be on the verge of losing it." "You're forgetting the Note." "A Note," Georges said, waving his cigar. "What the purple polluted hell is a Note supposed to do? I've got Aga Kagan claim-jumpers camped in the middle of what used to be a fine stand of barley, cooking sheep's brains over dung fires not ten miles from Government House—and upwind at that." "Say, if that's the same barley you distill your whiskey from, I'd call that a first-class atrocity." "Retief, on your say-so, I've kept my boys on a short leash. They've put up with plenty. Last week, while you were away, these barbarians sailed that flotilla of armor-plated junks right through the middle of one of our best oyster breeding beds. It was all I could do to keep a bunch of our men from going out in private helis and blasting 'em out of the water." "That wouldn't have been good for the oysters, either." "That's what I told 'em. I also said you'd be back here in a few days with something from Corps HQ. When I tell 'em all we've got is a piece of paper, that'll be the end. There's a strong vigilante organization here that's been outfitting for the last four weeks. If I hadn't held them back with assurances that the CDT would step in and take care of this invasion, they would have hit them before now." "That would have been a mistake," said Retief. "The Aga Kagans are tough customers. They're active on half a dozen worlds at the moment. They've been building up for this push for the last five years. A show of resistance by you Boyars without Corps backing would be an invitation to slaughter—with the excuse that you started it." "So what are we going to do? Sit here and watch these goat-herders take over our farms and fisheries?" "Those goat-herders aren't all they seem. They've got a first-class modern navy." "I've seen 'em. They camp in goat-skin tents, gallop around on animal-back, wear dresses down to their ankles—" "The 'goat-skin' tents are a high-polymer plastic, made in the same factory that turns out those long flowing bullet-proof robes you mention. The animals are just for show. Back home they use helis and ground cars of the most modern design." The Chef d'Regime chewed his cigar. "Why the masquerade?" "Something to do with internal policies, I suppose." "So we sit tight and watch 'em take our world away from us. That's what I get for playing along with you, Retief. We should have clobbered these monkeys as soon as they set foot on our world." "Slow down, I haven't finished yet. There's still the Note." "I've got plenty of paper already. Rolls and rolls of it." "Give diplomatic processes a chance," said Retief. "The Note hasn't even been delivered yet. Who knows? We may get surprising results." "If you expect me to supply a runner for the purpose, you're out of luck. From what I hear, he's likely to come back with his ears stuffed in his hip pocket." "I'll deliver the Note personally," Retief said. "I could use a couple of escorts—preferably strong-arm lads." The Chef d'Regime frowned, blew out a cloud of smoke. "I wasn't kidding about these Aga Kagans," he said. "I hear they have some nasty habits. I don't want to see you operated on with the same knives they use to skin out the goats." "I'd be against that myself. Still, the mail must go through." "Strong-arm lads, eh? What have you got in mind, Retief?" "A little muscle in the background is an old diplomatic custom," Retief said. The Chef d'Regime stubbed out his cigar thoughtfully. "I used to be a pretty fair elbow-wrestler myself," he said. "Suppose I go along...?" "That," said Retief, "should lend just the right note of solidarity to our little delegation." He hitched his chair closer. "Now, depending on what we run into, here's how we'll play it...." II Eight miles into the rolling granite hills west of the capital, a black-painted official air-car flying the twin flags of Chief of State and Terrestrial Minister skimmed along a foot above a pot-holed road. Slumped in the padded seat, the Boyar Chef d'Regime waved his cigar glumly at the surrounding hills. "Fifty years ago this was bare rock," he said. "We've bred special strains of bacteria here to break down the formations into soil, and we followed up with a program of broad-spectrum fertilization. We planned to put the whole area into crops by next year. Now it looks like the goats will get it." "Will that scrubland support a crop?" Retief said, eyeing the lichen-covered knolls. "Sure. We start with legumes and follow up with cereals. Wait until you see this next section. It's an old flood plain, came into production thirty years ago. One of our finest—" The air-car topped a rise. The Chef dropped his cigar and half rose, with a hoarse yell. A herd of scraggly goats tossed their heads among a stand of ripe grain. The car pulled to a stop. Retief held the Boyar's arm. "Keep calm, Georges," he said. "Remember, we're on a diplomatic mission. It wouldn't do to come to the conference table smelling of goats." "Let me at 'em!" Georges roared. "I'll throttle 'em with my bare hands!" A bearded goat eyed the Boyar Chef sardonically, jaw working. "Look at that long-nosed son!" The goat gave a derisive bleat and took another mouthful of ripe grain. "Did you see that?" Georges yelled. "They've trained the son of a—" "Chin up, Georges," Retief said. "We'll take up the goat problem along with the rest." "I'll murder 'em!" "Hold it, Georges. Look over there." A hundred yards away, a trio of brown-cloaked horsemen topped a rise, paused dramatically against the cloudless pale sky, then galloped down the slope toward the car, rifles bobbing at their backs, cloaks billowing out behind. Side by side they rode, through the brown-golden grain, cutting three narrow swaths that ran in a straight sweep from the ridge to the air-car where Retief and the Chef d'Regime hovered, waiting. Georges scrambled for the side of the car. "Just wait 'til I get my hands on him!" Retief pulled him back. "Sit tight and look pleased, Georges. Never give the opposition a hint of your true feelings. Pretend you're a goat lover—and hand me one of your cigars." The three horsemen pulled up in a churn of chaff and a clatter of pebbles. Georges coughed, batting a hand at the settling dust. Retief peeled the cigar unhurriedly, sniffed, at it and thumbed it alight. He drew at it, puffed out a cloud of smoke and glanced casually at the trio of Aga Kagan cavaliers. "Peace be with you," he intoned in accent-free Kagan. "May your shadows never grow less." The leader of the three, a hawk-faced man with a heavy beard, unlimbered his rifle. He fingered it, frowning ferociously. "Have no fear," Retief said, smiling graciously. "He who comes as a guest enjoys perfect safety." A smooth-faced member of the threesome barked an oath and leveled his rifle at Retief. "Youth is the steed of folly," Retief said. "Take care that the beardless one does not disgrace his house." The leader whirled on the youth and snarled an order. He lowered the rifle, muttering. Blackbeard turned back to Retief. "Begone, interlopers," he said. "You disturb the goats." "Provision is not taken to the houses of the generous," Retief said. "May the creatures dine well ere they move on." "Hah! The goats of the Aga Kaga graze on the lands of the Aga Kaga." The leader edged his horse close, eyed Retief fiercely. "We welcome no intruders on our lands." "To praise a man for what he does not possess is to make him appear foolish," Retief said. "These are the lands of the Boyars. But enough of these pleasantries. We seek audience with your ruler." "You may address me as 'Exalted One'," the leader said. "Now dismount from that steed of Shaitan." "It is written, if you need anything from a dog, call him 'sir'," Retief said. "I must decline to impute canine ancestry to a guest. Now you may conduct us to your headquarters." "Enough of your insolence!" The bearded man cocked his rifle. "I could blow your heads off!" "The hen has feathers, but it does not fly," Retief said. "We have asked for escort. A slave must be beaten with a stick; for a free man, a hint is enough." "You mock me, pale one. I warn you—" "Only love makes me weep," Retief said. "I laugh at hatred." "Get out of the car!" Retief puffed at his cigar, eyeing the Aga Kagan cheerfully. The youth in the rear moved forward, teeth bared. "Never give in to the fool, lest he say, 'He fears me,'" Retief said. "I cannot restrain my men in the face of your insults," the bearded Aga Kagan roared. "These hens of mine have feathers—and talons as well!" "When God would destroy an ant, he gives him wings," Retief said. "Distress in misfortune is another misfortune." The bearded man's face grew purple. Retief dribbled the ash from his cigar over the side of the car. "Now I think we'd better be getting on," he said briskly. "I've enjoyed our chat, but we do have business to attend to." The bearded leader laughed shortly. "Does the condemned man beg for the axe?" he enquired rhetorically. "You shall visit the Aga Kaga, then. Move on! And make no attempt to escape, else my gun will speak you a brief farewell." The horsemen glowered, then, at a word from the leader, took positions around the car. Georges started the vehicle forward, following the leading rider. Retief leaned back and let out a long sigh. "That was close," he said. "I was about out of proverbs." "You sound as though you'd brought off a coup," Georges said. "From the expression on the whiskery one's face, we're in for trouble. What was he saying?" "Just a routine exchange of bluffs," Retief said. "Now when we get there, remember to make your flattery sound like insults and your insults sound like flattery, and you'll be all right." "These birds are armed. And they don't like strangers," Georges said. "Maybe I should have boned up on their habits before I joined this expedition." "Just stick to the plan," Retief said. "And remember: a handful of luck is better than a camel-load of learning." The air car followed the escort down a long slope to a dry river bed and across it, through a barren stretch of shifting sand to a green oasis set with canopies. The armed escort motioned the car to a halt before an immense tent of glistening black. Before the tent armed men lounged under a pennant bearing a lion couchant in crimson on a field verte. "Get out," Blackbeard ordered. The guards eyed the visitors, their drawn sabers catching sunlight. Retief and Georges stepped from the car onto rich rugs spread on the grass. They followed the ferocious gesture of the bearded man through the opening into a perfumed interior of luminous shadows. A heavy odor of incense hung in the air, and the strumming of stringed instruments laid a muted pattern of sound behind the decorations of gold and blue, silver and green. At the far end of the room, among a bevy of female slaves, a large and resplendently clad man with blue-black hair and a clean-shaven chin popped a grape into his mouth. He wiped his fingers negligently on a wisp of silk offered by a handmaiden, belched loudly and looked the callers over. Blackbeard cleared his throat. "Down on your faces in the presence of the Exalted One, the Aga Kaga, ruler of East and West." "Sorry," Retief said firmly. "My hay-fever, you know." The reclining giant waved a hand languidly. "Never mind the formalities," he said. "Approach." Retief and Georges crossed the thick rugs. A cold draft blew toward them. The reclining man sneezed violently, wiped his nose on another silken scarf and held up a hand. "Night and the horses and the desert know me," he said in resonant tones. "Also the sword and the guest and paper and pen—" He paused, wrinkled his nose and sneezed again. "Turn off that damned air-conditioner," he snapped. He settled himself and motioned the bearded man to him. The two exchanged muted remarks. Then the bearded man stepped back, ducked his head and withdrew to the rear. "Excellency," Retief said, "I have the honor to present M. Georges Duror, Chef d'Regime of the Planetary government." "Planetary government?" The Aga Kaga spat grape seeds on the rug. "My men have observed a few squatters along the shore. If they're in distress, I'll see about a distribution of goat-meat." "It is the punishment of the envious to grieve at anothers' plenty," Retief said. "No goat-meat will be required." "Ralph told me you talk like a page out of Mustapha ben Abdallah Katib Jelebi," the Aga Kaga said. "I know a few old sayings myself. For example, 'A Bedouin is only cheated once.'" "We have no such intentions, Excellency," Retief said. "Is it not written, 'Have no faith in the Prince whose minister cheats you'?" "I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers," the Aga Kaga said. "It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated." III Handmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence. "We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne," Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered grapes. "Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge," the Aga Kaga said. "What brings the CDT into the picture?" "The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern," Retief said. "Whereas the words of kings...." "Very well, I concede the point." The Aga Kaga waved a hand at the serving maids. "Depart, my dears. Attend me later. You too, Ralph. These are mere diplomats. They are men of words, not deeds." The bearded man glared and departed. The girls hurried after him. "Now," the Aga Kaga said. "Let's drop the wisdom of the ages and get down to the issues. Not that I don't admire your repertoire of platitudes. How do you remember them all?" "Diplomats and other liars require good memories," said Retief. "But as you point out, small wisdom to small minds. I'm here to effect a settlement of certain differences between yourself and the planetary authorities. I have here a Note, which I'm conveying on behalf of the Sector Under-Secretary. With your permission, I'll read it." "Go ahead." The Aga Kaga kicked a couple of cushions onto the floor, eased a bottle from under the couch and reached for glasses. "The Under-Secretary for Sector Affairs presents his compliments to his Excellency, the Aga Kaga of the Aga Kaga, Primary Potentate, Hereditary Sheik, Emir of the—" "Yes, yes. Skip the titles." Retief flipped over two pages. "... and with reference to the recent relocation of persons under the jurisdiction of his Excellency, has the honor to point out that the territories now under settlement comprise a portion of that area, hereinafter designated as Sub-sector Alpha, which, under terms of the Agreement entered into by his Excellency's predecessor, and as referenced in Sector Ministry's Notes numbers G-175846573957-b and X-7584736 c-1, with particular pertinence to that body designated in the Revised Galactic Catalogue, Tenth Edition, as amended, Volume Nine, reel 43, as 54 Cygni Alpha, otherwise referred to hereinafter as Flamme—" "Come to the point," the Aga Kaga cut in. "You're here to lodge a complaint that I'm invading territories to which someone else lays claim, is that it?" He smiled broadly, offered dope-sticks and lit one. "Well, I've been expecting a call. After all, it's what you gentlemen are paid for. Cheers." "Your Excellency has a lucid way of putting things," Retief said. "Call me Stanley," the Aga Kaga said. "The other routine is just to please some of the old fools—I mean the more conservative members of my government. They're still gnawing their beards and kicking themselves because their ancestors dropped science in favor of alchemy and got themselves stranded in a cultural dead end. This charade is supposed to prove they were right all along. However, I've no time to waste in neurotic compensations. I have places to go and deeds to accomplish." "At first glance," Retief said, "it looks as though the places are already occupied, and the deeds are illegal." The Aga Kaga guffawed. "For a diplomat, you speak plainly, Retief. Have another drink." He poured, eyeing Georges. "What of M. Duror? How does he feel about it?" Georges took a thoughtful swallow of whiskey. "Not bad," he said. "But not quite good enough to cover the odor of goats." The Aga Kaga snorted. "I thought the goats were overdoing it a bit myself," he said. "Still, the graybeards insisted. And I need their support." "Also," Georges said distinctly, "I think you're soft. You lie around letting women wait on you, while your betters are out doing an honest day's work." The Aga Kaga looked startled. "Soft? I can tie a knot in an iron bar as big as your thumb." He popped a grape into his mouth. "As for the rest, your pious views about the virtues of hard labor are as childish as my advisors' faith in the advantages of primitive plumbing. As for myself, I am a realist. If two monkeys want the same banana, in the end one will have it, and the other will cry morality. The days of my years are numbered, praise be to God. While they last, I hope to eat well, hunt well, fight well and take my share of pleasure. I leave to others the arid satisfactions of self-denial and other perversions." "You admit you're here to grab our land, then," Georges said. "That's the damnedest piece of bare-faced aggression—" "Ah, ah!" The Aga Kaga held up a hand. "Watch your vocabulary, my dear sir. I'm sure that 'justifiable yearnings for territorial self-realization' would be more appropriate to the situation. Or possibly 'legitimate aspirations, for self-determination of formerly exploited peoples' might fit the case. Aggression is, by definition, an activity carried on only by those who have inherited the mantle of Colonial Imperialism." "Imperialism! Why, you Aga Kagans have been the most notorious planet-grabbers in Sector history, you—you—" "Call me Stanley." The Aga Kaga munched a grape. "I merely face the realities of popular folk-lore. Let's be pragmatic; it's a matter of historical association. Some people can grab land and pass it off lightly as a moral duty; others are dubbed imperialist merely for holding onto their own. Unfair, you say. But that's life, my friends. And I shall continue to take every advantage of it." "We'll fight you!" Georges bellowed. He took another gulp of whiskey and slammed the glass down. "You won't take this world without a struggle!" "Another?" the Aga Kaga said, offering the bottle. Georges glowered as his glass was filled. The Aga Kaga held the glass up to the light. "Excellent color, don't you agree?" He turned his eyes on Georges. "It's pointless to resist," he said. "We have you outgunned and outmanned. Your small nation has no chance against us. But we're prepared to be generous. You may continue to occupy such areas as we do not immediately require until such time as you're able to make other arrangements." "And by the time we've got a crop growing out of what was bare rock, you'll be ready to move in," the Boyar Chef d'Regime snapped. "But you'll find that we aren't alone!" "Quite alone," the Aga said. He nodded sagely. "Yes, one need but read the lesson of history. The Corps Diplomatique will make expostulatory noises, but it will accept the fait accompli . You, my dear sir, are but a very small nibble. We won't make the mistake of excessive greed. We shall inch our way to empire—and those who stand in our way shall be dubbed warmongers." "I see you're quite a student of history, Stanley," Retief said. "I wonder if you recall the eventual fate of most of the would-be empire nibblers of the past?" "Ah, but they grew incautious. They went too far, too fast." "The confounded impudence," Georges rasped. "Tells us to our face what he has in mind!" "An ancient and honorable custom, from the time of Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto through the Porcelain Wall of Leung. Such declarations have a legendary quality. It's traditional that they're never taken at face value." "But always," Retief said, "there was a critical point at which the man on horseback could have been pulled from the saddle." " Could have been," the Aga Kaga chuckled. He finished the grapes and began peeling an orange. "But they never were. Hitler could have been stopped by the Czech Air Force in 1938; Stalin was at the mercy of the primitive atomics of the west in 1946; Leung was grossly over-extended at Rangoon. But the onus of that historic role could not be overcome. It has been the fate of your spiritual forebears to carve civilization from the wilderness and then, amid tearing of garments and the heaping of ashes of self-accusation on your own confused heads, to withdraw, leaving the spoils for local political opportunists and mob leaders, clothed in the mystical virtue of native birth. Have a banana." "You're stretching your analogy a little too far," Retief said. "You're banking on the inaction of the Corps. You could be wrong." "I shall know when to stop," the Aga Kaga said. "Tell me, Stanley," Retief said, rising. "Are we quite private here?" "Yes, perfectly so," the Aga Kaga said. "None would dare to intrude in my council." He cocked an eyebrow at Retief. "You have a proposal to make in confidence? But what of our dear friend Georges? One would not like to see him disillusioned." "Don't worry about Georges. He's a realist, like you. He's prepared to deal in facts. Hard facts, in this case." The Aga Kaga nodded thoughtfully. "What are you getting at?" "You're basing your plan of action on the certainty that the Corps will sit by, wringing its hands, while you embark on a career of planetary piracy." "Isn't it the custom?" the Aga Kaga smiled complacently. "I have news for you, Stanley. In this instance, neck-wringing seems more in order than hand-wringing." The Aga Kaga frowned. "Your manner—" "Never mind our manners!" Georges blurted, standing. "We don't need any lessons from goat-herding land-thieves!" The Aga Kaga's face darkened. "You dare to speak thus to me, pig of a muck-grubber!"

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Planet of No-Return By WILBUR S. PEACOCK The orders were explicit: "Destroy the 'THING' of Venus." But Patrolmen Kerry Blane and Splinter Wood, their space-ship wrecked, could not follow orders—their weapons were useless on the Water-world. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Old Kerry Blane exploded. "Damn it!" he roared. "I don't like you; and I don't like this ship; and I don't like the assignment; and I don't like those infernal pills you keep eating; and I—" "Splinter" Wood grinned. "Seems to me, Kerry," he remarked humorously, "that you don't like much of anything!" Kerry Blane growled unintelligibly, batted the injector lever with a calloused hand. His grizzled hair was a stiff wiry mop on his small head, and his oversize jaw was thrust belligerently forward. But deep within his eyes, where he hoped it was hidden, was a friendly twinkle that gave the lie to his speech. "You're a squirt!" he snapped disagreeably. "You're not dry behind the ears, yet. You're like the rest of these kids who call themselves pilots—only more so! And why the hell the chief had to sic you on me, on an exploration trip this important—well, I'll never understand." Splinter rolled his six foot three of lanky body into a more comfortable position on the air-bunk. He yawned tremendously, fumbled a small box from his shirt pocket, and removed a marble-like capsule. "Better take one of these," he warned. "You're liable to get the space bends at any moment." Old Kerry Blane snorted, batted the box aside impatiently, scowled moodily at the capsules that bounced for a moment against the pilot room's walls before hanging motionless in the air. "Mister Wood," he said icily, "I was flying a space ship while they were changing your pants twenty times a day. When I want advice on how to fly a ship, how to cure space bends, how to handle a Zelta ray, or how to spit—I'll ask you! Until then, you and your bloody marbles can go plumb straight to the devil!" "Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!" Splinter reached out lazily, plucked the capsules from the air, one by one. Kerry Blane lit one of the five allotted cigarettes of the day. "Don't 'tsk' me, you young squirt," he grunted around a mouthful of fragrant smoke. "I know all the arguments you can put up; ain't that all I been hearing for a week? You take your vitamins A, B, C, D, all you want, but you leave me alone—or I'll stuff your head down your throat, P.D.Q.!" "All right, all right!" Splinter tucked the capsule box back into his pocket, grinned mockingly. "But don't say I didn't warn you. With this shielded ship, and with no sunlight reaching Venus' surface, you're gonna be begging for some of my vitamin, super-concentrated pills before we get back to Earth." Kerry Blane made a rich, ripe noise with his mouth. "Pfuii!" he said very distinctly. "Gracious!" Splinter said in mock horror. They made a strange contrast as they lay in their air bunks. Splinter was fully a head taller than the dour Irishman, and his lanky build gave a false impression of awkwardness. While the vitriolic Kerry Blane was short and compact, strength and quickness evident in every movement. Kerry Blane had flown every type of ship that rode in space. In the passing years, he had flight-tested almost every new experimental ship, had flown them with increasing skill, had earned a reputation as a trouble shooter on any kind of craft. But even Kerry Blane had to retire eventually. A great retirement banquet had been given in his honor by the Interplanetary Squadron. There had been the usual speeches and presentations; and Kerry Blane had heard them all, had thanked the donors of the gifts. But it was not until the next morning, when he was dressed in civilian clothes for the first time in forty years, that he realized the enormity of the thing that had happened to his life. Something died within Kerry Blane's heart that morning, shriveled and passed away, leaving him suddenly shrunken and old. He had become like a rusty old freighter couched between the gleaming bodies of great space warriors. Finally, as a last resort so that he would not be thrown entirely aside, he had taken a desk job in the squadron offices. For six years he had dry-rotted there, waiting hopefully for the moment when his active services would be needed again. It was there that he had met and liked the ungainly Splinter Wood. There was something in the boy that had found a kindred spirit in Kerry Blane's heart, and he had taken the youngster in hand to give him the benefits of experience that had become legendary. Splinter Wood was a probationary pilot, had been admitted to the Interplanetary Squadron because of his inherent skill, even though his formal education had been fairly well neglected. Now, the two of them rode the pounding jets of a DX cruiser, bound for Venus to make a personal survey of its floating islands for the Interplanetary Squadron's Medical Division. "Ten to one we don't get back!" Splinter said pessimistically. Kerry Blane scrubbed out his cigarette, scowled bleakly at the instrument panel. He sensed the faint thread of fear in the youngster's tone, and a nostalgic twinge touched his heart, for he was remembering the days of his youth when he had a full life to look forward to. "If you're afraid, you can get out and walk back," he snapped disagreeably. A grin lifted the corners of Splinter's long mouth, spread into his eyes. His hand unconsciously came up, touched the tiny squadron pin on his lapel. "Sorry to disappoint you, glory grabber," he said mockingly, "but I've got definite orders to take care of you." " Me! You've got orders to take care of me ?" Kerry Blane choked incoherently for a moment, red tiding cholerically upward from his loosened collar. "Of course!" Splinter grinned. Kerry Blane exploded, words spewing volcanically forth. Splinter relaxed, his booted foot beating out a dull rhythm to the colorful language learned through almost fifty years of spacing. And at last, when Kerry Blane had quieted until he but smoldered, he leaned over and touched the old spacer on the sleeve. "Seventy-eight!" he remarked pleasantly. "Seventy-eight what?" Kerry Blane asked sullenly, the old twinkle beginning to light again deep in his eyes. "Seventy-eight new words—and you swore them beautifully!" Splinter beamed. "Some day you can teach them to me." They laughed then, Old Kerry Blane and young Splinter Wood, and the warmth of their friendship was a tangible thing in the small control-room of the cruiser. And in the midst of their laughter, Old Kerry Blane choked in agony, surged desperately against his bunk straps. He screamed unknowingly, feeling only the horrible excruciating agony of his body, tasting the blood that gushed from his mouth and nostrils. His muscles were knotted cords that he could not loosen, and his blood was a surging stream that pounded at his throbbing temples. The air he breathed seemed to be molten flame. His body arced again and again against the restraining straps, and his mouth was open in a soundless scream. He sensed dimly that his partner had wrenched open a wall door, removed metal medicine kits, and was fumbling through their contents. He felt the bite of the hypodermic, felt a deadly numbness replace the raging torment that had been his for seconds. He swallowed three capsules automatically, passed into a coma-like sleep, woke hours later to stare clear-eyed into Splinter's concerned face. "Close, wasn't it?" he said weakly, conversationally. "Close enough!" Splinter agreed relievedly. "If you had followed my advice and taken those vitamin capsules, you'd never have had the bends." Kerry Blane grinned, winced when he felt the dull ache in his body. "I've had the bends before, and lived through them!" he said, still weakly defiant. "That's the past," Splinter said quietly. "This is the present, and you take your pills every day, just as I do—from now on." "All right—and thanks!" "Forget it!" Splinter flushed in quick embarrassment. A buzzer sounded from the instrument panel, and a tiny light glowed redly. "Six hours more," Splinter said, turned to the instrument panel. His long hands played over the instrument panel, checking, controlling the rocket fire, adjusting delicate instruments to hairline marks. Kerry Blane nodded in silent approval. They could feel the first tug of gravity on their bodies, and through the vision port could see the greenish ball that was cloud-covered Venus. Excitement lifted their spirits, brought light to their eyes as they peered eagerly ahead. "What's it really like?" Splinter asked impatiently. Kerry Blane yawned, settled back luxuriously. "I'll tell you later," he said, "I'm going to take a nap and try to ease this bellyache of mine. Wake me up so that I can take over, when we land; Venus is a tricky place to set a ship on." He yawned again, drifted instantly into sleep, relaxing with the ability of a spaceman who sleeps when and if he can. Splinter smiled down at his sleeping partner, then turned back to the quartzite port. He shook his head a bit, remembering the stories he had heard about the water planet, wondering—wondering— II Venus was a fluffy cotton ball hanging motionless in bottomless space. Far to the left, Mercury gleamed like a polished diamond in the sunlight. Kerry Blane cut the driving rockets, let the cruiser sink into a fast gravity-dive, guiding it only now and then by a brief flicker of a side jet. Splinter Wood watched breathlessly from the vision port, his long face eager and reckless, his eyes seeking to pierce the clouds that roiled and twisted uneasily over the surface of the planet. Kerry Blane glanced tolerantly at his young companion, felt a nostalgic tug at his heart when he remembered the first time he had approached the water-planet years before. Then, he had been a young and reckless firebrand, his fame already spreading, an unquenchable fire of adventure flaming in his heart. Now, his aged but steady fingers rested lightly on the controls, brought the patrol cruiser closer to the cloud-banks on the line of demarcation between the sunward and sunless sides of the planet. He hummed tunelessly, strangely happy, as he peered ahead. "Val Kenton died there," Splinter whispered softly, "Died to save the lives of three other people!" Kerry Blane nodded. "Yes," he agreed, and his voice changed subtly. "Val was a blackguard, a criminal; but he died in the best traditions of the service." He sighed. "He never had a chance." "Murdered!" Kerry Blane smiled grimly. "I guess I used too broad an interpretation of the word," he said gently. "Anyway, one of our main tasks is to destroy the thing that killed him." His lean fingers tightened unconsciously. "I'd like nothing better than to turn a Zelta-blaster on that chunk of living protoplasm and cremate it." Splinters shivered slightly. "Do you think we'll find it?" he asked. Kerry Blane nodded. "I think it will find us; after all, it's just an animated appetite looking for food." He turned back to the controls, flipped a switch, and the cutting of the nose rocket dropped the ship in an angling glide toward the clouds a few miles below. Gravity was full strength now, and although not as great as Earth's, was still strong enough to bring a sense of giddiness to the men. "Here we go!" Splinter said tonelessly. The great cottony batts of roiling clouds rushed up to meet the ship, bringing the first sense of violent movement in more than a week of flying. There was something awesome and breath-taking in the speed with which the ship dropped toward the planet. Tendrils of vapor touched the ports, were whipped aside, then were replaced by heavier fingers of cloud. Kerry Blane pressed a firing stud, and nose rockets thrummed in a rising crescendo as the free fall of the cruiser was checked. Heat rose in the cabin from the friction of the outer air, then dissipated, as the force-screen voltometer leaped higher. Then, as though it had never been, the sun disappeared, and there was only a gray blankness pressing about the ship. Gone was all sense of movement, and the ship seemed to hover in a gray nothingness. Kerry Blane crouched over the control panel, his hands moving deftly, his eyes flicking from one instrument to another. Tiny lines of concentration etched themselves about his mouth, and perspiration beaded his forehead. He rode that cruiser through the miles of clouds through sheer instinctive ability, seeming to fly it as though he were an integral part of the ship. Splinter Wood watched him with awe in his eyes, seeing for the first time the incredible instinct that had made Kerry Blane the idol of a billion people. He relaxed visibly, all instinctive fear allayed by the brilliant competence of his companion. Seconds flowed into moments, and the moments merged into one another, and still the clouds pressed with a visible strength against the ports. The rockets drummed steadily, holding the ship aloft, dropping it slowly toward the planet below. Then the clouds thinned, and, incredibly, were permeated with a dim and glowing light. A second later, and the clouds were gone, and a thousand feet below tumbled and tossed in a majestic display of ruthless strength an ocean that seemed to be composed of liquid fluorescence. Kerry Blane heard Splinter's instant sigh of unbelief. "Good Lord!" Splinter said, "What—" His voice stilled, and he was silent, his eyes drinking in the weird incredible scene below. The ocean was a shifting, white-capped wash of silvery light that gleamed with a bright phosphorescence of a hundred, intermingled, kaleidoscopic colors. And the unreal, unearthly light continued unbroken everywhere, reflected from the low-hanging clouds, reaching to the far horizon, bathing every detail of the planet in a brilliance more bright than moonlight. Splinter turned a wondering face. "But the official reports say that there is no light on Venus," he exclaimed. "That was one of the reasons given when exploration was forbidden!" Kerry Blane nodded. "That was merely a pretext to keep foolhardy spacemen from losing their lives on the planet. In reality, the ocean is alive with an incredibly tiny marine worm that glows phosphorescently. The light generated from those billions of worms is reflected back from the clouds, makes Venus eternally lighted." He turned the ship to the North, relaxed a bit on the air bunk. He felt tired and worn, his body aching from the space bends of a few hours before. "Take over," he said wearily. "Take the ship North, and watch for any island." Splinter nodded, rested his long hands on the controls. The space cruiser lifted a bit in a sudden spurt of speed, and the rocket-sound was a solid thrum of unleashed power. Kerry Blane lit a cigarette, leaned toward a vision port. He felt again that thrill he had experienced when he had first flashed his single-man cruiser through the clouds years before. Then the breath caught in his throat, and he tapped his companion's arm. "Take a look!" he called excitedly. They fought in the ocean below, fought in a never-ending splashing of what seemed to be liquid fire. It was like watching a tri-dim screen of a news event, except for the utter lack of sound. One was scaly, while the other was skinned, and both were fully three hundred feet long. Great scimitars of teeth flashed in the light, and blood gouted and stained the water crimson whenever a slashing blow was struck. They threshed in a mad paroxysm of rage, whirling and spinning in the phosphorescent water like beings from a nightmare, exploding out of their element time and again, only to fall back in a gargantuan spray of fluorescence. And then the scaly monster flashed in a half-turn, drove forward with jaws agape, wrenched and ripped at the smooth black throat of the other creature. The second creature rippled and undulated in agony, whipping the ocean to foam, then went limp. The victorious monster circled the body of its dead foe, then, majestically, plunged from sight into the ocean's depths. An instant later, the water frothed, as hundreds of lesser marine monsters attacked and fed on the floating corpse. "Brrrr!" Splinter shivered in sudden horror. Kerry Blane chuckled dryly. "Feel like going for a swim?" he asked conversationally. Splinter shook his head, watched the scene disappear from view to the rear of the line of flight, then sank back onto his bunk. "Not me!" he said deprecatingly. Kerry Blane chuckled again, swung the cruiser toward the tiny smudge of black on the horizon. Glowing water flashed beneath the ship, seeming to smooth into a gleaming mirror shot with dancing colors. There was no sign of life anywhere. Thirty minutes later, Kerry Blane circled the island that floated free in the phosphorescent ocean. His keen eyes searched the tangled luxuriant growth of the jungle below, searching for some indication that the protoplasmic monster he seeked was there. "I don't see anything suspicious," Splinter contributed. "There's nothing special to see," Kerry Blane said shortly. "As I understand it, anyway, this chunk of animated appetite hangs around an island shaped like a turtle. However, our orders are to investigate every island, just in case there might be more than one of the monsters." Splinter buckled on his dis-gun, excitement flaring in his eyes. "Let's do a little exploring?" he said eagerly. Kerry Blane shook his head, swung the cruiser north again. "Plenty of time for that later," he said mildly. "We'll find this turtle-island, make a landing, and take a look around. Later, if we're lucky enough to blow our objective to Kingdom Come, we'll do a little exploring of the other islands." "Hell!" Splinter scowled in mock disgust. "An old woman like you should be taking in knitting for a living!" "Orders are orders!" Kerry Blane shrugged. He swung the cruiser in a wide arc to the north, trebling the flying speed within minutes, handling the controls with a familiar dexterity. He said nothing, searched the gleaming ocean for the smudge of blackness that would denote another island. His gaze flicked amusedly, now and then, to the lanky Splinter who scowled moodily and toyed with the dis-gun in his long hands. "Cheer up, lad," Kerry Blane said finally. "I think you'll find plenty to occupy your time shortly." "Maybe?" Splinter said gloomily. He idly swallowed another vitamin capsule, grinned, when he saw Kerry Blane's automatic grimace of distaste. Then he yawned hugely, twisted into a comfortable position, dozed sleepily. Kerry Blane rode the controls for the next three hours, searching the limitless ocean for the few specks of islands that followed the slow currents of the water planet. Always, there was the same misty light surrounding the ship, never dimming, giving a sense of unreality to the scene below. Nowhere was there the slightest sign of life until, in the fourth hour of flight, a tiny dot of blackness came slowly over the horizon's water line. Kerry Blane spun the ship in a tight circle, sent it flashing to the west. His keen eyes lighted, when he finally made out the turtle-like outline of the island, and he whistled softly, off-key, as he nudged the snoring Splinter. "This is it, Sleeping Beauty," he called. "Snap out of it!" "Huh? Whuzzat?" Splinter grunted, rolled to his elbow. "Here's the island." "Oh!" Splinter swung his feet from the bunk, peered from the vision port, sleepiness instantly erased from his face. "Hot damn!" he chortled. "Now we'll see a little action!" Kerry Blane grinned, tried to conceal the excitement he felt. He shook his head, his fingers flickering over the control studs. "Don't get your hopes too high, lad," he counseled. "With those super Zelta guns, it won't take ten minutes to wipe out that monster." Splinter rubbed his hands together, sighed like a boy seeing his first circus. "Listen, for ten minutes of that, I'd ride this chunk of metal for a year!" "Could be!" Kerry Blane agreed. He peered through the port, seeking any spot clear enough for a landing field. Except for a strip of open beach, the island was a solid mass of heavy fern-like growth. "Belt yourself," Kerry Blane warned. "If that beach isn't solid, I'll have to lift the ship in a hell of a hurry." "Right!" Splinter's fingers were all thumbs in his excitement. Kerry Blane set the controls for a shallow glide, his fingers moving like a concert pianist's. The cruiser yawed slightly, settled slowly in a flat shallow glide. "We're going in," Kerry Blane said quietly. He closed a knife switch, seeing too late the vitamin capsule that was lodged in the slot. There was the sharp splutter of a short-circuit, and a thin tendril of smoke drifted upward. "Damn!" Kerry Blane swore briefly. There was an instant, terrific explosion of the stern jets, and the cruiser hurtled toward the beach like a gravity-crazed comet. Kerry Blane said absolutely nothing, his breath driven from him by the suck of inertia. His hands darted for the controls, seeking to balance the forces that threw the ship about like a toy. He cut all rockets with a smashing swoop of his hand, tried to fire the bow rockets. But the short had ruined the entire control system. For one interminable second, he saw the uncanny uprush of the island below. He flicked his gaze about, saw the instant terror that wiped all other expression from his young companion's face. Then the cruiser plowed into the silvery sand. Belts parted like rotten string; they were thrown forward with crushing force against the control panel. They groped feebly for support, their bodies twisting involuntarily, as the ship cartwheeled a dozen times in a few seconds. Almost instantly, consciousness was battered from them. With one final, grinding bounce, the cruiser rolled to its side, twisted over and over for a hundred yards, then came to a metal-ripping stop against a moss-grown boulder at the water's edge. III Kerry Blane choked, tried to turn his head from the water that trickled into his face. He opened his eyes, stared blankly, uncomprehendingly into the bloody features of the man bending over him. "What happened?" he gasped. Splinter Wood laughed, almost hysterically, mopped at his forehead with a wet handkerchief. "I thought you were dead!" he said simply. Kerry Blane moved his arm experimentally, felt broken bones grate in an exquisite wave of pain. He fought back the nausea, gazed about the cabin, realized the ship lay on its side. "Maybe I am," he said ruefully. "No man could live through that crash." Splinter moved away, sat down tiredly on the edge of a bunk. He shook his head dazedly, inspected the long cut on his leg. "We seem to have done it," he said dully. Kerry Blane nodded, clambered to his feet, favoring his broken arm. He leaned over the control panel, inspecting the dials with a worried gaze. Slowly, his eyes lightened, and his voice was almost cheerful as he swung about. "Everything is more or less okay," he said. "The board will have to be rewired, but nothing else seems to be damaged so that repairs are needed." Splinter looked up from his task of bandaging his leg. "What caused the crash?" he asked. "One minute, everything was all right; the next, Blooey!" Anger suddenly mottled Kerry Blane's face; he swore monotonously and bitterly for a moment. "Those gol-damned pills you been taking caused the crash!" he roared. "One of them broke and shorted out the control board." He scowled at the incredulous Splinter. "By the three tails of a Martian sand-pup, I ought to cram the rest of them down your throat, boxes and all!" Splinter flushed, seemed to be fumbling for words. After a bit, Kerry Blane grinned. "Forget it, lad," he said more kindly, "those things happen. Now, if you'll bind a splint about my arm, we'll see what we can do about righting the ship." Splinter nodded, opened the medical locker, worked with tape and splints for minutes. Great beads of perspiration stood out in high relief on Kerry Blane's forehead, but he made no sound. At last, Splinter finished, tucked the supplies away. "Now what?" he asked subduedly. "Let's take a look outside, maybe set up the Zelta guns. Can't tell but what that protoplasmic nightmare might take a notion to pay us a visit in the near future!" "Right!" Splinter unscrewed the port cogs, swung the portal back. He swung lithely from the portal, reached down a hand to help the older man. After much puffing and grunting, Kerry Blane managed to clamber through the port. They stood for a moment in silent wonder, staring at the long lazy rollers of milky fluorescence that rolled endlessly toward the beach, then turned to gaze at the great fern-like trees that towered two hundred feet into the air. "How big do you feel now?" Kerry Blane asked quietly. Splinter Wood was silent, awed by the beauty and the tremendous size of the growths on the water world. Kerry Blane walked the length of the cruiser, examining the slight damage done by the crash, evaluating the situation with a practiced gaze. He nodded slowly, retraced his steps, and stood looking at the furrow plowed in the sand. "Won't be any trouble at all to lift the ship," he called. "After rewiring the board, we'll turn the ship with an underjet, swing it about, and head her toward the sea." Splinter nodded, dropped into the open port. A moment later, he flipped a rope ladder outside, where it dangled to the ground, then climbed out himself, carrying the two Zelta guns. "We'd better test these," he said. "We don't want any slip-ups when we do go into action." He climbed down the ladder, laid the guns aside, then reached up a hand to aid Kerry Blane's descent. Kerry Blane came down slowly and awkwardly, jumped the last few feet. He felt surprisingly light and strong in the lesser gravity. He stood, leaning against the ship, watching as Splinter picked up the first gun and leveled it at a gigantic tree. Splinter sighted carefully, winked at the older man, then pressed the firing stud. Nothing happened; there was no hissing crackle of released energy. Kerry Blane strode forward, puzzlement on his lined face, his hand out-stretched toward the defective weapon. Splinter gaped at the gun in his hands, held it out wordlessly. "The crash must have broken something," Kerry Blane said slowly. Splinter shook his head. "There's only one moving part," he said, "and that's the force gate on the firing stud." "Try the other," Kerry Blane said slowly. "Okay!" Splinter lifted the second gun, pressed the stud, gazed white-faced at his companion. "It won't work, either," he said stupidly. "I don't get it? The source of power is limitless. Solar rays never—" Old Kerry Blane dropped the first gun to his side, swore harshly. "Damn it," he said. "They didn't think of it; you didn't think of it; and I most certainly forgot! Solar rays can't penetrate the miles of clouds on Venus. Those guns are utterly useless as weapons!"

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STRANGER FROM SPACE By HANNES BOK She prayed that a God would come from the skies and carry her away to bright adventures. But when he came in a metal globe, she knew only disappointment—for his godliness was oddly strange! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It was twilight on Venus—the rusty red that the eyes notice when their closed lids are raised to light. Against the glow, fantastically twisted trees spread claws of spiky leaves, and a group of clay huts thrust up sharp edges of shadow, like the abandoned toy blocks of a gigantic child. There was no sign of clear sky and stars—the heavens were roofed by a perpetual ceiling of dust-clouds. A light glimmered in one of the huts. Feminine voices rippled across the clearing and into the jungle. There was laughter, then someone's faint and wistful sigh. One of the voices mourned, in the twittering Venusian speech, "How I envy you, Koroby! I wish I were being married tonight, like you!" Koroby stared defiantly at the laughing faces of her bridesmaids. She shrugged hopelessly. "I don't care," she said slowly. "It will be nice to have Yasak for a husband—yes. And perhaps I do love him. I don't know." She tightened her lips as she reflected on it. She left them, moving gracefully to the door. Venus-girls were generally of truly elfin proportions, so delicately slim that they seemed incapable of the slightest exertion. But Koroby's body was—compared to her friends'—voluptuous. She rested against the door-frame, watching the red of the afterglow deepen to purple. "I want romance," she said, so softly that the girls had to strain forward to hear her. "I wish that there were other worlds than this—and that someone would drop out of the skies and claim me ... and take me away from here, away from all this—this monotony!" She turned back to her friends, went to them, one of her hands, patting the head of the kneeling one. She eyed herself in the mirror. "Well—heigh-ho! There don't seem to be any other worlds, and nobody is going to steal me away from Yasak, so I might as well get on with my preparations. The men with the litter will be here soon to carry me to the Stone City." She ran slim hands down her sides, smoothing the blue sarong; she fondled her dark braids. "Trossa, how about some flowers at my ears—or do you think that it would look a little too much—?" Her eyes sought the mirror, and her lips parted in an irreprehensible smile. She trilled softly to herself, "Yes, I am beautiful tonight—the loveliest woman Yasak will ever see!" And then, regretfully, sullenly, "But oh, if only He would come ... the man of my dreams!" There was a rap at the doorway; they turned. One of the litter-bearers loomed darker than the gloomy sky. "Are you ready?" he asked. Koroby twirled before the mirror, criticizing her appearance. "Yes, ready," she said. "Ready!" the girls cried. Then there was a little silence. "Shall we go now?" Koroby asked, and the litter-carrier nodded. Koroby kissed the girls, one after another. "Here, Shonka—you can have this bracelet you've always liked. And this is for you, Lolla. And here, Trossa—and you, Shia. Goodbye, darlings, goodbye—come and see me whenever you can!" "Goodbye, Koroby!" "Goodbye! Goodbye!" They crowded around her, embracing, babbling farewells, shreds of advice. Trossa began to cry. Finally Koroby broke away from them, went to the door. She took a last look at the interior of the little hut, dim in the lamplight—at the hard bed of laced gnau -hide strips, the crude but beautifully-carved charts and chests. Then she turned and stepped out into the night. "This way," the litter-carrier announced, touching the girl's arm. They stumbled over the rutted clearing toward the twinkling sparks that were the lights of the other litter-bearers, colored sparks as befitted a wedding-conveyance. The winking lights were enclosed in shells of colored glass for another reason—the danger of their firing the papery jungle verdure. It was not a new litter, built especially for the occasion—Yasak was too practical a man to sanction any kind of waste. It was the same old litter that Koroby had been watching come and go ever since she was a little girl, a canopied framework of gaudily-painted carvings. She had wondered, watching it pass, whether its cushioned floor was soft, and now, as she stepped into the litter, she patted the padding experimentally. Yes, it was soft .... And fragrant, too—a shade too fragrant. It smelled stale, hinting of other occupants, other brides being borne to other weddings.... Garlands of flowers occupied a good deal of space in it. Settled among them, she felt like a bird in a strange nest. She leaned back among them; they rustled dryly. Too bad—it had been such a dry year— "You're comfortable?" the litter bearer asked. Koroby nodded, and the litter was lifted, was carried along the path. The procession filed into the jungle, into a tunnel of arched branches, of elephant-eared leaves. Above the monotonous music came the hiss of the torches, the occasional startled cry of a wakened bird. The glow of the flames, in the dusty air, hung around the party, sharply defined, like a cloak of light. At times a breeze would shake the ceiling of foliage, producing the sound of rolling surf. Koroby fingered the flowers around her throat, her eyes rapt on the passing trees. Her lips moved in the barest murmur: "If only—!" and again, "Oh, if only—!" But the music trickled on, and nothing happened; the litter seemed to float along—none of the bearers even stumbled. They came to a cleared space of waist-high grass. It was like a canyon steeply walled by cliffs of verdure. The litter jerked as it glided along, and Koroby heard one of the bearers exclaim gruffly, "Listen!" Then the litter resumed its dream-like floating on the backs of the men. "What was it?" another bearer asked. "Thought I heard something," the other replied. "Shrill and high—like something screaming—" Koroby peered out. "A gnau ?" she asked. "I don't know," the bearer volunteered. Koroby lifted a hand. "Stop the litter," she said. The conveyance halted. Koroby leaning out, the men peering around them, they listened. One of the bearers shouted at the musicians; the music ceased. There was nothing to be heard except the whisper of the breeze in the grass. Then the girl heard it—a shrill, distant whine, dying away, then growing louder—and louder—it seemed to be approaching—from the sky— All the faces were lifted up now, worriedly. The whine grew louder—Koroby's hands clenched nervously on the wreaths at her throat— Then, far ahead, a series of bright flashes, like the lightning of the dust-storms, but brilliantly green. A silence, then staccatto reports, certainly not thunder—unlike any sound that Koroby had ever heard. There was a babble of voices as the musicians crowded together, asking what had it been, and where—just exactly—could one suppose it had happened, that thunder—was it going to storm! They waited, but nothing further happened—there were no more stabs of green light nor detonations. The bearers stooped to lift the litter's poles to their shoulders. "Shall we go on?" one of them asked Koroby. She waved a hand. "Yes, go on." The litter resumed its gentle swaying, but the music did not start again. Then, from the direction of the light-flashes, a glow appeared, shining steadily, green as the flashes had been. Noticing it, Koroby frowned. Then the path bent, and the glow swung to one side. Suddenly Koroby reached out, tapped the shoulder of the closet bearer. "Go toward the light." His face swung up to hers. "But—there's no path that way—" "I don't care," she said. "Take me there." Her order had reached the others' ears, and they slowed their pace. "Lady—believe me—it's impossible. There's nothing but matted jungle in that direction—we'd have to hack our way as we go along. And who knows how far away that light is? Besides, you're on your way to be married." "Take me to that light!" she persisted. They set the litter down. "We can't do that," one man said to another. Koroby stepped out to the path, straightened up, her eyes on the glow. "You'd better," she said ominously. "Otherwise, I'll make a complaint to Yasak—" The men eyed each other, mentally shrugging. "Well—" one yielded. The girl whirled impatiently on the others. "Hurry!" she cried. "If you won't take me, I'll go by myself. I must get to that fire, whatever it is!" She put a hand to her heart. "I must! I must!" Then she faced the green glare again, smiling to herself. "You can't do that!" a carrier cried. "Well, then, you take me," she said over her shoulder. Grumbling, they bent to the conveyance's poles, and Koroby lithely slipped to the cushions. They turned off the path, plodded through the deep grass toward the light. The litter lurched violently as their feet caught in the tangled grass, and clouds of fine dust arose from the disturbed blades. By the time they reached the source of the light, they were quite demoralized. The musicians had not accompanied them, preferring to carry the message to Yasak in the Stone City that his prospective bride had gone off on a mad journey. The bearers were powdered grey with dust, striped with blood where the dry grass-stems had cut them. They were exhausted and panting. Koroby was walking beside them, for they had abandoned the litter finally. Her blue drapery was ripped and rumpled; her carefully-arranged braids had fallen loose; dust on her face had hid its youthful color, aging her. The expedition emerged from the jungle on a sandy stretch of barren land. A thousand feet away a gigantic metal object lay on the sand, crumpled as though it had dropped from a great distance. It had been globular before the crash, and was pierced with holes like windows. What could it possibly be? A house? But whoever heard of a metal house? Why, who could forge such a thing! Yasak's house in the City had iron doors, and they were considered one of the most wonderful things of the age. It would take a giant to make such a ponderous thing as this. A house, fallen from the sky? The green lights poured out of its crumpled part, and a strange bubbling and hissing filled the air. Koroby stopped short, clasping her hands and involuntarily uttering a squeal of joyful excitement, for between her and the blaze, his eyes on the destruction, stood a man..... He was very tall, and his shoulders were very wide. Oh, but he looked like a man, and stood like one—even though his hands were folded behind his back and he was probably dejected. A man in a house from the sky— Koroby hastily grasped a corner of her gown, moistened it with saliva, and scrubbed her face. She rearranged her hair, and stepped forward. "Don't go there—it's magic—he'll cast a spell—!" one of the bearers whispered urgently, reaching after her, but Koroby pushed him away. The litter-carriers watched the girl go, unconsciously huddling together as if feeling the need for combined strength. They withdrew into the jungle's shadows, and waited there anxiously, ready at any moment to run away. But Koroby, with supreme confidence, walked toward the stranger, her lovely body graceful as a cat's, her face radiant. The man did not hear her. She halted behind him, waited silent, expectant, excited—but he did not turn. The green fire sputtered upward. At last the girl stepped to the man's side and gently touched him again. He turned, and her heart faltered: she swayed with bliss. He was probably a god. Not even handsome Yasak looked like this. Here was a face so finely-chiseled, so perfectly proportioned, that it was almost frightening, unhuman, mechanical. It was unlined and without expression, somehow unreal. Mysterious, compelling. He was clothed very peculiarly. A wonderfully-made metallic garment enclosed his whole body—legs and all, unlike the Venus-men's tunics. Even his feet were covered. Perhaps it was armor—though the Venus-men usually wore only breastplate and greaves. And a helmet hid all of the man's head except his face. Around his waist was a belt with many incomprehensible objects dangling from it. If he was so well armored, why was he not carrying a sword—a dagger at least! Of what use were those things on his belt—for instance, that notched L-shaped thing? It would not even make a decent club! The stranger did not speak, merely gazed deeply into Koroby's eyes. And she, returning the gaze, wondered if he was peering into her very soul. The words of a folk-ballad came to her: "—He'll smile and touch my cheek, And maybe more; And though we'll neither speak, We'll know the score—" Suddenly he put his hands to her cheeks and bent close to her, his eyes peering into hers as though he were searching for something he had lost in them. She spoke her thought: "What are you doing? You seem to be reading my mind!" Without removing hands, he nodded. "Reading—mind." He stared long into her eyes. His dispassionate, too-perfect face began to frighten her. She slipped back from him, her hand clutching her throat. He straightened up and spoke—haltingly at first, then with growing assurance. "Don't be afraid. I mean you no harm." She trembled. It was such a wonderful voice—it was as she had always dreamed it! But she had never really believed in the dream.... He was looking at the wrecked globe of metal. "So there are people on Venus!" he said slowly. Koroby watched him, forgot her fear, and went eagerly to him, took his arm. "Who are you?" she asked. "Tell me your name!" He turned his mask of a face to her. "My name? I have none," he said. "No name? But who are you? Where are you from? And what is that?" She pointed at the metal globe. "The vehicle by which I came here from a land beyond the sky," he said. She had no concept of stars or space, and he could not fully explain. "From a world known as Terra." She was silent a moment, stunned. So there was another world! Then she asked, "Is it far? Have you come to take me there?" Here the similarity between her dream and actual experience ended. What was he thinking as he eyed her for a long moment? She had no way of guessing. He said, "No, I am not going to take you back there." Her month gaped in surprise, and he continued, "As for the distance to Terra—it is incredibly far away." The glare was beginning to die, the green flames' hissing fading to a whisper. They watched the melting globe sag on the sand. Then Koroby said, "But if it is so far away, how could you speak my language? There are some tribes beyond the jungle whose language is unlike ours—" "I read your mind," he explained indifferently. "I have a remarkable memory." "Remarkable indeed!" she mocked. "No one here could do that." "But my race is infinitely superior to yours," he said blandly. "You little people—ah—" He gestured airily. Her lips tightened and her eyes narrowed. "And I?" His voice sounded almost surprised. "What about you?" "You see nothing about me worthy of your respect? Are you infinitely superior to me— me ?" He looked her up and down. "Of course!" Her eyes jerked wide open and she took a deep breath. "And just who do you think you are? A god?" He shook his head. "No. Just better informed, for one thing. And—" Koroby cut him short. "What's your name?" "I have none." "What do you mean, you have none?" He seemed just a trifle bored. "We gave up names long ago on my world. We are concerned with more weighty things than our own selves. But I have a personal problem now," he said, making a peculiar sound that was not quite a sigh. "Here I am stranded on Venus, my ship utterly wrecked, and I'm due at the Reisezek Convention in two weeks. You"—he gripped Koroby's shoulder, and his strength made her wince—"tell me, where is the nearest city? I must communicate with my people at once." She pointed. "The Stone City's that way." "Good," he said. "Let's go there." They took another glance at the metal globe and the green fire, which by now had died to a fitful glimmer. Then the stranger and the girl started toward the jungle, where the litter-bearers awaited them. As the party was struggling through the prairie's tall grass, the man said to Koroby, "I realize from the pictures in your mind that there is no means in your city of communicating directly with my people. But it seems that there are materials which I can utilize in building a signal—" He was walking along, head erect, apparently quite at ease, while the litter bearers and Koroby could barely drag themselves with him. The girl's garment was a tattered ruin. Her skin was gritty with dust, and she was bleeding from many scratches. She tripped over tangled roots and exclaimed in pain. Then the man took one of the strange implements from his belt, pressed a knob on it, and light appeared as if by magic! He handed the stick to Koroby, but she was afraid to touch it. This was a strange light that gave no heat, nor flickered in the breeze. Finally she accepted it from him, but carried it gingerly at arm's length. She refused to believe that he had no name, and so he named himself. "Call me Robert. It is an ancient name on Terra." "Robert," she said, and, "Robert." But at last she could go no farther. She had forced herself along because she wanted to impress this indifferent man that she was not as inferior as he might think—but now she could not go on. With a little cry almost of relief, she sank to the ground and lay semi-conscious, so weary that the very pain of it seemed on the point of pleasure. Robert dipped down, scooped her up, and carried her. Lights glimmered ahead; shouts reached them. It was a searching party, Yasak in it. The litter-carriers who could still speak blurted out what had happened. "A green light—loud sounds—fire—this man there—" and then dropped into sleep. "Someone carry these men," Yasak ordered. To Robert he said, "We're not very far from the path to the City now. Shall I carry the girl?" "It makes no difference," Robert said. "You will stay with me while you are in the City, of course," Yasak said, as they walked. He eyed this handsome stranger speculatively, and then turned to shout an necessary order. "You, there, keep in line!" He glanced at Robert furtively to see if this had impressed him at all. It was day. Koroby sat up in bed and scanned her surroundings. She was in Yasak's house. The bed was very soft, the coverlets of the finest weave. The furniture was elegantly carved and painted; there were even paintings on the walls. A woman came to the bed. She was stocky and wore drab grey: the blue circles tattooed on her cheeks proclaimed her a slave. "How do you feel?" she asked. "Fairly well. How long have I been ill?" Koroby asked, sweetly weak. "You haven't been ill. They brought you in last night." "Oh," Koroby said disappointedly, and sat upright. "I feel as if I'd been lying here for weeks. Where's Yasak? Where's the strange man in armor?" "Yasak's out somewhere. The stranger man is in the room at the end of the hall." "Fetch me something to wear—that's good enough," the girl accepted the mantle offered by the slave. "Quick, some water—I must wash." In a few minutes she was lightly running down the hall; she knocked on the door of Robert's room. "May I come in?" He did not answer. She waited a little and went in. He was seated on one of the carved chairs, fussing over some scraps of metal on the table. He did not look up. "Thank you for carrying me, Robert." He did not reply. "Robert—I dreamed of you last night. I dreamed you built another round house and that we both flew away in it. Yasak had to stay behind, and he was furious. Robert! Aren't you listening?" "I hear you." "Don't you think it was an exciting dream?" He shook his head. "But why? Robert"—she laid longing hands on his shoulders—"can't you see that I'm in love with you?" He shrugged. "I believe you don't know what love is!" "I had a faint idea of it when I looked into your mind," he said. "I'm afraid I haven't any use for it. Where I come from there is no love, and there shouldn't be here, either. It's a waste of time." "Robert—I'm mad about you! I've dreamed of your coming—all my life! Don't be so cruel—so cold to me! You mock me, say that I'm nothing, that I'm not worthy of you—" She stepped back from him, clenching her hands. "Oh, I hate you—hate you! You don't care the least bit about me—and I've shamed myself in front of you—I, supposed to be Yasak's wife by now!" She began to cry, hid her face in suddenly lax fingers. She looked up fiercely. "I could kill you!" Robert stood immobile, no trace of feeling marring the perfection of his face. "I could kill you, and I will kill you!" she sprang at him. "You'll hurt yourself," he admonished kindly, and after she had pummeled his chest, bruising her fingers on his armor, she turned away. "And now if you're through playing your incomprehensible little scene," Robert said, "I hope you will excuse me. I regret that I have no emotions—I was never allowed them. But it is an esthetic regret.... I must go back to my wrecked ship now and arrange the signals there." He did not wait for her leave, but strode out of the room. Koroby huddled on a chair, sobbing. Then she dried her eyes on the backs of her hands. She went to the narrow slits that served as windows and unfastened the translucent shutter of one. Down in the City street, Robert was walking away. Her eyes hardened, and her fingers spread into ugly claws. Without bothering to pull the shutter in place she hurried out of the room, ran eagerly down the hall. She stopped at the armor-rack at the main hall on her way outside, and snatched up a siatcha —a firestone. Then she slipped outside and down the street. The City's wall was not far behind. Robert was visible in the distance, striding toward his sky-ship, a widening cloud of dust rising behind him like the spreading wake of a boat. Koroby stood on tip-toe, waving and calling after him, "Robert! Robert! Come back!" but he did not seem to hear. She watched him a little longer. Then she deliberately stooped and drew the firestone out of its sheath. She touched it to a blade of the tall grass. A little orange flame licked up, slowly quested along the blade, down to the ground and up another stem. It slipped over to another stem, and another, growing larger, hotter—Koroby stepped back from the writhing fire, her hand protectively over her face. The flames crackled at first—like the crumpling of thin paper. Then, as they widened and began climbing hand over hand up an invisible ladder, they roared. Koroby was running back toward the City now, away from the heat. The fire spread in a long line over the prairie. Above its roar came shouts from the City. The flames rose in a monstrous twisting pillar, brighter than even the dust-palled sky, lighting the buildings and the prairie. The heat was dreadful. Koroby reached the City wall, panted through the gate into a shrieking crowd. Someone grasped her roughly—she was too breathless to do more than gasp for air—and shook her violently. "You fool, you utter fool! What did you think you were doing?" Others clamored around her, reaching for her. Then she heard Yasak's voice. Face stern, he pushed through the crowd, pressed her to him. "Let her alone—Let her alone, I say!" They watched the conflagration, Yasak and Koroby, from a higher part of the wall than where the others were gathered. They could glimpse Robert now and then. He was running, trying to outrace the flames. Then they swept around him, circling him—his arms flailed frantically. The fire had passed over the horizon. The air was blue with smoke, difficult to breathe, and ashes were drifting lightly down like dove-colored snow. Yasak, watery eyed, a cloth pressed to his nose, was walking with several others over the smoking earth and still warm ashes up to his knees. In one hand he held a stick. He stopped and pointed. "He fell about here," he said, and began to probe the ashes with the stick. He struck something. "Here he is!" he cried. The others hurried to the spot and scooped ashes away, dog-fashion, until Robert's remains were laid clear. There were exclamations of amazement and perplexity from the people. It was a metal skeleton, and the fragments of complicated machinery, caked with soot. "He wasn't human at all!" Yasak marvelled. "He was some kind of a toy made to look like a man—that's why he wore armor, and his face never changed expression—" "Magic!" someone cried, and backed away. "Magic!" the others repeated, and edged back ... and that was the end of one of those robots which had been fashioned as servants for Terrestial men, made in Man's likeness to appease Man's vanity, then conquered him.

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MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE THRID BY MURRAY LEINSTER The Thrid were the wisest creatures in space—they even said so themselves! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I The real trouble was that Jorgenson saw things as a business man does. But also, and contradictorily, he saw them as right and just, or as wrong and intolerable. As a business man, he should have kept his mind on business and never bothered about Ganti. As a believer in right and wrong, it would have been wiser for him to have stayed off the planet Thriddar altogether. Thriddar was no place for him, anyhow you look at it. On this particular morning it was especially the wrong place for him to be trying to live and do business. He woke up thinking of Ganti, and in consequence he was in a bad mood right away. Most humans couldn't take the sort of thing that went on on Thriddar. Most of them wanted to use missile weapons—which the Thrid did not use—to change the local social system. Most humans got off Thriddar—fast! And boiling mad. Jorgenson had stood it longer than most because in spite of their convictions he liked the Thrid. Their minds did do outside loops, and come up with intolerable convictions. But they were intelligent enough. They had steam-power and even steam-driven atmosphere fliers, but they didn't have missile weapons and they did have a social system that humans simply couldn't accept—even though it applied only to Thrid. The ordinary Thrid, with whom Jorgenson did business, weren't bad people. It was the officials who made him grind his teeth. And though it was his business only to run the trading post of the Rim Stars Trading Corporation, sometimes he got fed up. This morning was especially beyond the limit. There was a new Grand Panjandrum—the term was Jorgenson's own for the supreme ruler over all the Thrid—and when Jorgenson finished his breakfast a high Thrid official waited in the trading-post compound. Around him clustered other Thrid, wearing the formal headgear that said they were Witnesses to an official act. Jorgenson went out, scowling, and exchanged the customary ceremonial greetings. Then the high official beamed at him and extracted a scroll from his voluminous garments. Jorgenson saw the glint of gold and was suspicious at once. The words of a current Grand Panjandrum were always written in gold. If they didn't get written in gold they didn't get written at all; but it was too bad if anybody ignored any of them. The high official unrolled the scroll. The Thrid around him, wearing Witness hats, became utterly silent. The high official made a sound equivalent to clearing his throat. The stillness became death-like. "On this day," intoned the high official, while the Witnesses listened reverently, "on this day did Glen-U the Never-Mistaken, as have been his predecessors throughout the ages;—on this day did the Never-Mistaken Glen-U speak and say and observe a truth in the presence of the governors and the rulers of the universe." Jorgenson reflected sourly that the governors and the rulers of the universe were whoever happened to be within hearing of the Grand Panjandrum. They were not imposing. They were scared. Everybody is always scared under an absolute ruler, but the Grand Panjandrum was worse than that. He couldn't make a mistake. Whatever he said had to be true, because he said it, and sometimes it had drastic results. But past Grand Panjandrums had spoken highly of the trading post. Jorgenson shouldn't have much to worry about. He waited. He thought of Ganti. He scowled. "The great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U," intoned the official again, "in the presence of the governors and the rulers of the universe, did speak and say and observe that it is the desire of the Rim Star Trading Corporation to present to him, the great and never-mistaken Glen-U, all of the present possessions of the said Rim Stars Trading Corporation, and thereafter to remit to him all moneys, goods, and benefactions to and of the said Rim Stars Trading Corporation as they shall be received. The great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U did further speak and say and observe that anyone hindering this loyal and admirable gift must, by the operation of truth, vanish from sight and nevermore be seen face to face by any rational being." The high official rolled up the scroll, while Jorgenson exploded inside. A part of this was reaction as a business man. A part was recognition of all the intolerable things that the Thrid took as a matter of course. If Jorgenson had reacted solely as a business man he'd have swallowed it, departed on the next Rim Stars trading-ship—which would not have left any trade-goods behind—and left the Grand Panjandrum to realize what he had lost when no off-planet goods arrived on Thriddar. In time he'd speak and say and observe that he, out of his generosity, gave the loot back. Then the trading could resume. But Jorgenson didn't feel only like a business man this morning. He thought of Ganti, who was a particular case of everything he disliked on Thriddar. It was not wise to be moved by such sympathetic feelings. The Grand Panjandrum could not be mistaken. It was definitely unwise to contradict him. It could even be dangerous. Jorgenson was in a nasty spot. The Witnesses murmured reverently: "We hear the words of the Never-Mistaken Glen-U." The high official tucked away the scroll and said blandly: "I will receive the moneys, goods, and benefactions it is the desire of the Rim Stars Trading Corporation to present to the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U." Jorgenson, boiling inside, nevertheless knew what he was doing. He said succinctly: "Like hell you will!" There was an idiom in Thrid speech that had exactly the meaning of the human phrase. Jorgenson used it. The high official looked at him in utter stupefaction. Nobody contradicted the Grand Panjandrum! Nobody! The Thrid had noticed long ago that they were the most intelligent race in the universe. Since that was so, obviously they must have the most perfect government. But no government could be perfect if its officials made mistakes. So no Thrid official ever made a mistake. In particular the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U could not conceivably blunder! When he said a thing, it was true! It had to be! He'd said it! And this was the fundamental fact in the culture of the Thrid. "Like hell you'll receive moneys and goods and such!" snapped Jorgenson. "Like hell you will!" The high official literally couldn't believe his ears. "But—but the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U—" "Is mistaken!" said Jorgenson bitingly. "He's wrong! The Rim Stars Trading Corporation does not want to give him anything! What he has said is not true!" This was the equivalent of treason, blasphemy and the ultimate of indecorous behavior toward a virgin Pelean princess. "I won't give him anything! I'm not even vanishing from sight! Glen-U is wrong about that, too! Now—git!" He jerked out his blaster and pulled the trigger. There was an explosive burst of flame from the ground between the official and himself. The official fled. With him fled all the Witnesses, some even losing their headgear in their haste to get away. Jorgenson stamped into the trading-post building. His eyes were stormy and his jaw was set. He snapped orders. The hired Thrid of the trading-post staff had not quite grasped the situation. They couldn't believe it. Automatically, as he commanded the iron doors and shutters of the trading post closed, they obeyed. They saw him turn on the shocker-field so that nobody could cross the compound without getting an electric shock that would discourage him. They began to believe. Then he sent for the trading-post Thrid consultant. On Earth he'd have called for a lawyer. On a hostile world there'd have been a soldier to advise him. On Thrid the specialist to be consulted wasn't exactly a theologian, but he was nearer that than anything else. Jorgenson laid the matter indignantly before him, repeating the exact phrases that said the trading company wanted—wanted!—practically to give itself to the Never-Mistaken Glen-U, who was the Grand Panjandrum of Thriddar. He waited to be told that it couldn't have happened; that anyhow it couldn't be intended. But the theologian's Thriddish ears went limp, which amounted to the same thing as a man's face turning pale. He stammered agitatedly that if the Grand Panjandrum said it, it was true. It couldn't be otherwise! If the trading company wanted to give itself to him, there was nothing to be done. It wanted to! The Grand Panjandrum had said so! "He also said," said Jorgenson irritably, "that I'm to vanish and nevermore be seen face to face by any rational being. How does that happen? Do I get speared?" The trading-post theologian quivered. Jorgenson made things much worse. "This," he raged, "this is crazy! The Grand Panjandrum's an ordinary Thrid just like you are! Of course he can make a mistake! There's nobody who can't be wrong!" The theologian put up feebly protesting, human-like hands. He begged hysterically to be allowed to go home before Jorgenson vanished, with unknown consequences for any Thrid who might be nearby. When Jorgenson opened a door to kick him out of it, the whole staff of the trading-post plunged after him. They'd been eavesdropping and they fled in pure horror. Jorgenson swore impartially at all of them and turned the shocker-field back on. He plugged in a capacity circuit which would turn on warning sirens if anything like a steam-driven copter passed or hovered over the trading-post. He put blasters in handy positions. The Thrid used only spears, knives and scimitars. Blasters would defend the post against a multitude. As a business man, he'd acted very foolishly. But he'd acted even less sensibly as a human being. He'd gotten fed up with a social system and a—call it—theology it wasn't his business to change. True, the Thrid way of life was appalling, and what had happened to Ganti was probably typical. But it wasn't Jorgenson's affair. He'd been unwise to let it disturb him. If the Thrid wanted things this way, it was their privilege. In theory, no Thrid should ever make a mistake, because he belonged to the most intelligent race in the universe. But a local governor was even more intelligent. If an ordinary Thrid challenged a local governor's least and lightest remark—why—he must be either a criminal or insane. The local governor decided—correctly, of course—which he was. If he was a criminal, he spent the rest of his life in a gang of criminals chained together and doing the most exhausting labor the Thrid could contrive. If he was mad, he was confined for life. There'd been Ganti, a Thrid of whom Jorgenson had had much hope. He believed that Ganti could learn to run the trading post without human supervision. If he could, the trading company could simply bring trade goods to Thriddar and take away other trade goods. The cost of doing business would be decreased. There could be no human-Thrid friction. Jorgenson had been training Ganti for this work. But the local Thrid governor had spoken and said and observed that Ganti's wife wanted to enter his household. He added that Ganti wanted to yield her to him. Jorgenson had fumed—but not as a business man—when the transfer took place. But Ganti had been conditioned to believe that when a governor said he wanted to do something, he did. He couldn't quite grasp the contrary idea. But he moped horribly, and Jorgenson talked sardonically to him, and he almost doubted that an official was necessarily right. When his former wife died of grief, his disbelief became positive. And immediately afterward he disappeared. Jorgenson couldn't find out what had become of him. Dour reflection on the happening had put him in the bad mood which had started things, this morning. Time passed. He had the trading-post in a position of defense. He prepared his lunch, and glowered. More time passed. He cooked his dinner, and ate. Afterward he went up on the trading-post roof to smoke and to coddle his anger. He observed the sunset. There was always some haze in the air on Thriddar, and the colorings were very beautiful. He could see the towers of the capital city of the Thrid. He could see a cumbersome but still graceful steam-driven aircraft descend heavily to the field at the city's edge. Later he saw another steam-plane rise slowly but reliably and head away somewhere else. He saw the steam helicopters go skittering above the city's buildings. He fumed because creatures intelligent enough to build steam fliers weren't intelligent enough to see what a racket their government was. Now that the new Grand Panjandrum had moved against him, Jorgenson made an angry, dogged resolution to do something permanent to make matters better. For the Thrid themselves. Here he thought not as a business man only, but as a humanitarian. As both. When a whim of the Grand Panjandrum could ruin a business, something should be done. And when Ganti and countless others had been victims of capricious tyranny.... And Jorgenson was slated to vanish from sight and never again be seen.... It definitely called for strong measures! He reflected with grim pleasure that the Grand Panjandrum would soon be in the position of a Thrid whom everybody knew was mistaken. With the trading-post denied him and Jorgenson still visible, he'd be notoriously wrong. And he couldn't be, and still be Grand Panjandrum! It would be a nice situation for Glen-U. He'd have to do something about it, and there was nothing he could do. He'd blundered, and it would soon be public knowledge. Jorgenson dozed lightly. Then more heavily. Then more heavily still. The night was not two hours old when the warning sirens made a terrific uproar. The Thrid for miles around heard the wailing, ullulating sound of the sirens that should have awakened Jorgenson. But they didn't wake him. He slept on. When he woke, he knew that he was cold. His muscles were cramped. Half awake, he tried to move and could not. Then he tried to waken fully, and he couldn't do that either. He stayed in a dream-like, frustrated state which was partly like a nightmare, while very gradually new sensations came to him. He felt a cushioned throbbing against his chest, in the very hard surface on which he lay face down. That surface swayed and rocked slightly. He tried again to move, and realized that his hands and feet were bound. He found that he shivered, and realized that his clothing had been taken from him. He was completely helpless and lying on his stomach in the cargo-space of a steam helicopter: now he could hear the sound of its machinery. Then he knew what had happened. He'd committed The unthinkable crime—or lunacy—of declaring the Grand Panjandrum mistaken. So by the operation of truth, which was really an anesthetic gas cloud drifted over the trading post, he had vanished from sight. Now it was evidently to be arranged that he would never again be seen face to face by a rational being. The Grand Panjandrum had won the argument. Within a few months a Rim Stars trading ship would land, and Jorgenson would be gone and the trading post confiscated. It would be hopeless to ask questions, and worse than hopeless to try to trade. So the ship would lift off and there'd be no more ships for at least a generation. Then there might—there might!—be another. Jorgenson swore fluently and with passion. "It will not be long," said a tranquil voice. Jorgenson changed from human-speech profanity to Thrid. He directed his words to the unseen creature who'd spoken. That Thrid listened, apparently without emotion. When Jorgenson ran out of breath, the voice said severely: "You declared the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U mistaken. This could not be. It proved you either a criminal or insane, because no rational creature could believe him mistaken. He declared you insane, and he cannot be wrong. So soon you will arrive where you are to be confined and no rational being will ever see you face to face." Jorgenson switched back to human swearing. Then he blended both languages, using all the applicable words he knew both in human speech and Thrid. He knew a great many. The soft throbbing of the steam-driven rotors went on, and Jorgenson swore both as a business man and a humanitarian. Both were frustrated. Presently the motion of the copter changed. He knew the ship was descending. There were more violent swayings, as if from wind gusts deflected by something large and solid. Jorgenson even heard deep-bass rumblings like sea upon a rocky coast. Then there were movements near him, a rope went around his waist, a loading-bay opened and he found himself lifted and lowered through it. He dangled in midair, a couple of hundred feet above an utterly barren island on which huge ocean swells beat. The downdraft from the copter made him sway wildly, and once it had him spinning dizzily. The horizon was empty. He was being lowered swiftly to the island. And his hands and feet were still securely tied. Then he saw a figure on the island. It was a Thrid stripped of all clothing like Jorgenson and darkened by the sun. That figure came agilely toward where he was let down. It caught him. It checked his wild swingings, which could have broken bones. The rope slackened. The Thrid laid Jorgenson down. He did not cast off the rope. He seemed to essay to climb it. It was cut at the steam-copter and came tumbling down all over both of them. The Thrid waved his arms wildly and seemed to screech gibberish at the sky. There was an impact nearby, of something dropped. Jorgenson heard the throbbing sound of the copter as it lifted and swept away. Then he felt the bounds about his arms and legs being removed. Then a Thrid voice—amazingly, a familiar Thrid voice—said: "This is not good, Jorgenson. Who did you contradict?" The Thrid was Ganti, of whom Jorgenson had once had hopes as a business man, and for whose disaster he had felt indignation as something else. He loosened the last of Jorgenson's bonds and helped him sit up. Jorgenson glared around. The island was roughly one hundred feet by two. It was twisted, curdled yellow stone from one end to the other. There were stone hillocks and a miniature stony peak, and a narrow valley between two patches of higher rock. Huge seas boomed against the windward shore, throwing spray higher than the island's topmost point. There were some places where sand had gathered. There was one spot—perhaps a square yard of it—where sand had been made fertile by the droppings of flying things and where two or three starveling plants showed foliage of sorts. That was all. Jorgenson ground his teeth. "Go ahead," said Ganti grimly, "but it may be even worse than you think." He scrambled over the twisted stone of the island. He came back, carrying something. "It isn't worse," he said. "It's only as bad. They did drop food and water for both of us. I wasn't sure they would." His calmness sobered Jorgenson. As a business man, he was moved to make his situation clear. He told Ganti of the Grand Panjandrum's move to take over the Rim Stars trading post, which was bad business. He told of his own reaction, which was not a business-like one at all. Then he said dourly: "But he's still wrong. No rational being is supposed ever to see me face to face. But you do." "But I'm crazy," said Ganti calmly. "I tried to kill the governor who'd taken my wife. So he said I was crazy and that made it true. So I wasn't put in a chained group of laborers. Somebody might have seen me and thought about it. But, sent here, it's worse for me and I'm probably forgotten by now." He was calm about it. Only a Thrid would have been so calm. But they've had at least hundreds of generations in which to get used to injustice. He accepted it. But Jorgenson frowned. "You've got brains, Ganti. What's the chance of escape?" "None," said Ganti unemotionally. "You'd better get out of the sun. It'll burn you badly. Come along." He led the way over the bare, scorching rocky surface. He turned past a small pinnacle. There was shadow. Jorgenson crawled into it, and found himself in a cave. It was not a natural one. It had been hacked out, morsel by morsel. It was cool inside. It was astonishingly roomy. "How'd this happen?" demanded Jorgenson the business man. "This is a prison," Ganti explained matter-of-factly. "They let me down here and dropped food and water for a week. They went away. I found there'd been another prisoner here before me. His skeleton was in this cave. I reasoned it out. There must have been others before him. When there is a prisoner here, every so often a copter drops food and water. When the prisoner doesn't pick it up, they stop coming. When, presently, they have another prisoner they drop him off, like me, and he finds the skeleton of the previous prisoner, like me, and he dumps it overboard as I did. They'll drop food and water for me until I stop picking it up. And presently they'll do the same thing all over again." Jorgenson glowered. That was his reaction as a person. Then he gestured to the cave around him. There was a pile of dried-out seaweed for sleeping purposes. "And this?" "Somebody dug it out," said Ganti without resentment. "To keep busy. Maybe one prisoner only began it. A later one saw it started and worked on it to keep busy. Then others in their turn. It took a good many lives to make this cave." Jorgenson ground his teeth a second time. "And just because they'd contradicted somebody who couldn't be wrong! Or because they had a business an official wanted!" "Or a wife," agreed Ganti. "Here!" He offered food. Jorgenson ate, scowling. Afterward, near sundown, he went over the island. It was rock, nothing else. There was a pile of small broken stones from the excavation of the cave. There were the few starveling plants. There was the cordage with which Jorgenson had been lowered. There was the parcel containing food and water. Ganti observed that the plastic went to pieces in a week or so, so it couldn't be used for anything. There was nothing to escape with. Nothing to make anything to escape with. Even the dried seaweed bed was not comfortable. Jorgenson slept badly and waked with aching muscles. Ganti assured him unemotionally that he'd get used to it. He did. By the time the copter came to drop food and water again, Jorgenson was physically adjusted to the island. But neither as a business man or as a person could he adjust to hopelessness. He racked his brains for the most preposterous or faintest hope of deliverance. There were times when as a business man he reproached himself for staying on Thriddar after he became indignant with the way the planet was governed. It was very foolish. But much more often he felt such hatred of the manners and customs of the Thrid—which had put him here—that it seemed that something must somehow be possible if only so he could take revenge. III The copter came, it dropped food and water, and it went away. It came, dropped food and water, and went away. Once a water-bag burst when dropped. They lost nearly half a week's water supply. Before the copter came again they'd gone two days without drinking. There were other incidents, of course. The dried seaweed they slept on turned to powdery trash. They got more seaweed hauling long kelp-like strands of it ashore from where it clung to the island's submerged rocks. Ganti mentioned that they must do it right after the copter came, so there would be no sign of enterprise to be seen from aloft. The seaweed had long, flexible stems of which no use whatever could be made. When it dried, it became stiff and brittle but without strength. Once Ganti abruptly began to talk of his youth. As if he were examining something he'd never noticed before, he told of the incredible conditioning-education of the young members of his race. They learned that they must never make a mistake. Never! It did not matter if they were unskilled or inefficient. It did not matter if they accomplished nothing. There was no penalty for anything but making mistakes or differing from officials who could not make mistakes. So Thrid younglings were trained not to think; not to have any opinion about anything; only to repeat what nobody questioned; only to do what they were told by authority. It occurred to Jorgenson that on a planet with such a population, a skeptic could make a great deal of confusion. Then, another time, Jorgenson decided to make use of the weathering cord which had been cut from the copter when he was landed. He cut off a part of it with a sharp-edged fragment of stone from the pile some former prisoner on the island had made. He unravelled the twisted fibers. Then he ground fishhooks from shells attached to the island's rocky walls just below water-line. After that they fished. Sometimes they even caught something to eat. But they never fished when the copter was due. Jorgenson found that a fish-fillet, strongly squeezed and wrung like a wet cloth, would yield a drinkable liquid which was not salt and would substitute for water. And this was a reason to make a string bag in which caught fish could be let back into the sea so they were there when wanted but could not escape. They had used it for weeks when he saw Ganti, carrying it to place it where they left it overboard, swinging it idly back and forth as he walked. If Jorgenson had been only a businessman, it would have had no particular meaning. But he was also a person, filled with hatred of the Thrid who had condemned him for life to this small island. He saw the swinging of the fish. It gave him an idea. He did not speak at all during all the rest of that day. He was thinking. The matter needed much thought. Ganti left him alone. But by sunset he'd worked it out. While they watched Thrid's red sun sink below the horizon, Jorgenson said thoughtfully: "There is a way to escape, Ganti." "On what? In what?" demanded Ganti. "In the helicopter that feeds us," said Jorgenson. "It never lands," said Ganti practically. "We can make it land," said Jorgenson. Thrid weren't allowed to make mistakes; he could make it a mistake not to land. "The crew is armed," said Ganti. "There are three of them." "They've only knives and scimitars," said Jorgenson. "They don't count. We can make better weapons than they have." Ganti looked skeptical. Jorgenson explained. He had to demonstrate crudely. The whole idea was novel to Ganti, but the Thrid were smart. Presently he grasped it. He said: "I see the theory. If we can make it work, all right. But how do we make the copter land?" Jorgenson realized that they talked oddly. They spoke with leisurely lack of haste, with the lack of hope normal to prisoners to whom escape is impossible, even when they talk about escape. They could have been discussing a matter that would not affect either of them. But Jorgenson quivered inside. He hoped. "We'll try it," said Ganti detachedly, when he'd explained again. "If it fails, they'll only stop giving us food and water." That, of course, did not seem either to him or Jorgenson a reason to hesitate to try what Jorgenson had planned. It was not at all a direct and forthright scheme. It began with the untwisting of more of the rope that had lowered Jorgenson. It went on with the making of string from that fiber. They made a great deal of string. Then, very clumsily and awkwardly, they wove strips of cloth, a couple of inches wide and five or six long. They made light strong cords extend from the ends of the cloth strips. Then they practiced with these bits of cloth and the broken stones a former prisoner had piled so neatly. The copter came and dropped food and water. When it left, they practiced. When it came again they were not practicing, but when it went away they practiced. They were a naked man and a naked Thrid, left upon a morsel of rock in a boundless sea, rehearsing themselves in an art so long-forgotten that they had to reinvent the finer parts of the technique. They experimented. They tried this. They tried that. When the copter appeared, they showed themselves. They rushed upon the dropped bag containing food and water as if fiercely trying to deny each other a full share. Once they seemed to fight over the dropped bag. The copter hovered to watch. The fight seemed furious and deadly, but inconclusive. When the copter went away Jorgenson and Ganti went briskly back to their practicing.

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Morgue Ship By RAY BRADBURY This was Burnett's last trip. Three more shelves to fill with space-slain warriors—and he would be among the living again. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] He heard the star-port grind open, and the movement of the metal claws groping into space, and then the star-port closed. There was another dead man aboard the Constellation . Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid and quiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him; machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't see anything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall of the laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet, keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm. Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgical gown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling all tight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship. Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poor warrior's body out of the void. He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke, who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a decent burial. "Number ninety-eight." Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice from the ceiling radio hit Burnett. "Number ninety-eight," Burnett repeated. "Working on ninety-five, ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight surgery." Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded deep. It didn't belong to him anymore. Rice said: "Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day drunk!" Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships, salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict. Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again. Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved for action. This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why! "Sam!" Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins. "Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!" Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood cooling in it. Shaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed without making any noise on the rungs. He kept thinking the one thing he couldn't forget. You never catch up with the war. All the color is ahead of you. The drive of orange rocket traces across stars, the whamming of steel-nosed bombs into elusive targets, the titanic explosions and breathless pursuits, the flags and the excited glory are always a million miles ahead. He bit his teeth together. You never catch up with the war. You come along when space has settled back, when the vacuum has stopped trembling from unleashed forces between worlds. You come along in the dark quiet of death to find the wreckage plunging with all the fury of its original acceleration in no particular direction. You can only see it; you don't hear anything in space but your own heart kicking your ribs. You see bodies, each in its own terrific orbit, given impetus by grinding collisions, tossed from mother ships and dancing head over feet forever and forever with no goal. Bits of flesh in ruptured space suits, mouths open for air that had never been there in a hundred billion centuries. And they kept dancing without music until you extended the retriever-claw and culled them into the air-lock. That was all the war-glory he got. Nothing but the stunned, shivering silence, the memory of rockets long gone, and the shelves filling up all too quickly with men who had once loved laughing. You wondered who all the men were; and who the next ones would be. After ten years you made yourself blind to them. You went around doing your job with mechanical hands. But even a machine breaks down.... "Sam!" Rice turned swiftly as Burnett dragged himself up the ladder. Red and warm, Rice's face hovered over the body of a sprawled enemy official. "Take a look at this!" Burnett caught his breath. His eyes narrowed. There was something wrong with the body; his experienced glance knew that. He didn't know what it was. Maybe it was because the body looked a little too dead. Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way, stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle. Burnett rubbed his jaw. "Well?" Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and black. "Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?" Burnett scowled uneasily and said no. "It's Lethla!" Rice retorted. Burnett said, "Lethla?" And then: "Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That right?" "Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in space, then Kriere's not far away from him!" Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell. What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone else. Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. "Snap out of it, Sam. Think! Kriere—The All-Mighty—in our territory. His right hand man dead. That means Kriere was in an accident, too!" Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves. "Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine. "As for Kriere—if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution is taken to protect that one." "But Lethla! His body must mean something!" "And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a battle-cuiser to go against him?" "We'll radio for help?" "Yeah? If there's a warship within our radio range, seven hundred thousand miles, we'll get it. Unfortunately, the tide of battle has swept out past Earth in a new war concerning Io. That's out, Rice." Rice stood about three inches below Sam Burnett's six-foot-one. Jaw hard and determined, he stared at Sam, a funny light in his eyes. His fingers twitched all by themselves at his sides. His mouth twisted, "You're one hell of a patriot, Sam Burnett!" Burnett reached out with one long finger, tapped it quietly on Rice's barrel-chest. "Haul a cargo of corpses for three thousand nights and days and see how patriotic you feel. All those fine muscled lads bloated and crushed by space pressures and heat-blasts. Fine lads who start out smiling and get the smile burned off down to the bone—" Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes. He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship, hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat. "This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here—what's his name? Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!" Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time. Lethla was alive. He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream. He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what language it would use if it had to. Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it like a dead cold star. Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight, biting lines into his sharp face. Rice got it out, finally. "How'd you do it?" he demanded, bitterly. "How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!" A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head. You never catch up with the war! But what if the war catches up with you? What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship? Lethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen. He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. "That's how I did it, Earthman." "Glassite!" said Rice. "A face-moulded mask of glassite!" Lethla nodded. His milk-blue eyes dilated. "Very marvelously pared to an unbreakable thickness of one-thirtieth of an inch; worn only on the head. You have to look quickly to notice it, and, unfortunately, viewed as you saw it, outside the ship, floating in the void, not discernible at all." Prickles of sweat appeared on Rice's face. He swore at the Venusian and the Venusian laughed like some sort of stringed instrument, high and quick. Burnett laughed, too. Ironically. "First time in years a man ever came aboard the Constellation alive. It's a welcome change." Lethla showed his needle-like teeth. "I thought it might be. Where's your radio?" "Go find it!" snapped Rice, hotly. "I will." One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused. "I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock is safe. Don't move." Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and coils. The radio. Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by the new bitterness in it. Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs. He smiled. "That's better. Now. We can talk—" Rice said it, slow: "Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead men belong here." Lethla's gun grip tightened. "More talk of that nature, and only dead men there will be." He blinked. "But first—we must rescue Kriere...." "Kriere!" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw. Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama. Lethla's voice came next: "Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever. "We saw your morgue ship an hour ago. It's a long, long way to Venus. We were running out of fuel, food, water. Radio was broken. Capture was certain. You were coming our way; we took the chance. We set a small time-bomb to destroy the life-rocket, and cast off, wearing our chrysali-helmets. It was the first time we had ever tried using them to trick anyone. We knew you wouldn't know we were alive until it was too late and we controlled your ship. We knew you picked up all bodies for brief exams, returning alien corpses to space later." Rice's voice was sullen. "A set-up for you, huh? Traveling under the protection of the Purple Cross you can get your damned All-Mighty safe to Venus." Lethla bowed slightly. "Who would suspect a Morgue Rocket of providing safe hiding for precious Venusian cargo?" "Precious is the word for you, brother!" said Rice. "Enough!" Lethla moved his gun several inches. "Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be picked up— now! " Rice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time in years. "Sure," said Sam, smiling. "We'll pick him up." "No tricks," said Lethla. Burnett scowled and smiled together. "No tricks. You'll have Kriere on board the Constellation in half an hour or I'm no coroner." "Follow me up the ladder." Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. "Come on." Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor. Rice grumbled and cursed after him. On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere. There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you never knew who it would be. He came out of the quick thoughts when he looped his long leg over the hole-rim, stepped up, faced Lethla in a cramped control room that was one glittering swirl of silver levers, audio-plates and visuals. Chronometers, clicking, told of the steady dropping toward the sun at a slow pace. Burnett set his teeth together, bone against bone. Help Kriere escape? See him safely to Venus, and then be freed? Sounded easy, wouldn't be hard. Venusians weren't blind with malice. Rice and he could come out alive; if they cooperated. But there were a lot of warriors sleeping on a lot of numbered shelves in the dim corridors of the long years. And their dead lips were stirring to life in Burnett's ears. Not so easily could they be ignored. You may never catch up with the war again. The last trip! Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it? Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms, wet thin lips. "Now, where do you want this crate?" he asked Lethla easily. Lethla exhaled softly. "Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman." "Very," said Burnett. He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it would all be over. Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead, he squinted. "There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good trick." "Cut power! We don't want to burn him!" Burnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen, eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars. "We're about fifty miles from him, catching up." Burnett turned to Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last time anybody would ever board the Constellation alive. His stomach went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear. If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that— Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat, water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored because of his gun. Kriere would make odds impossible. Something had to be done before Kriere came in. Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered, fooled—somehow. But—how? Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew, artery—heart. There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and this would be the last trip. Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear. "Steady, Rice," he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in the center of that silence. "Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the star-port." Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly. Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first, why— Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the Constellation . Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about to be rescued. Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he was about to end a ten-years' war. There was only one way of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be fast. Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies from space. Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet, too. The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its slowness. It reached Kriere. Burnett inhaled a deep breath. The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm. Lethla watched. He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: "You know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the Constellation . I believe it." And the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the head, which was carefully preserved for identification. That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard. Burnett spun about and leaped. The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun. Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner. Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and started laughing. He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut. Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's young face over him. Burnett groaned. Rice said, "Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam." "To hell with it." Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open. Something wet and sticky covered his chest. "I said this was my last trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!" "This is the hard way—" "Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never have to come aboard the Constellation , though, Rice." His voice trailed off. "You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago—" Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of them out: "Rice?" "Yeah, Sam?" "We haven't got a full cargo, boy." "Full enough for me, sir." "But still not full. If we went back to Center Base without filling the shelves, it wouldn't be right. Look there—number ninety-eight is Lethla—number ninety-nine is Kriere. Three thousand days of rolling this rocket, and not once come back without a bunch of the kids who want to sleep easy on the good green earth. Not right to be going back any way—but—the way—we used to—" His voice got all full of fog. As thick as the fists of a dozen warriors. Rice was going away from him. Rice was standing still, and Burnett was lying down, not moving, but somehow Rice was going away a million miles. "Ain't I one hell of a patriot, Rice?" Then everything got dark except Rice's face. And that was starting to dissolve. Ninety-eight: Lethla. Ninety-nine: Kriere. He could still see Rice standing over him for a long time, breathing out and in. Down under the tables the blood-pumps pulsed and pulsed, thick and slow. Rice looked down at Burnett and then at the empty shelf at the far end of the room, and then back at Burnett again. And then he said softly: " One hundred. "

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Shure and begorra, it was a great day for the Earth! The first envoy from another world was about to speak—that is, if he could forget that horse for a minute.... off course By Mack Reynolds Illustrated by Kelly Freas First on the scene were Larry Dermott and Tim Casey of the State Highway Patrol. They assumed they were witnessing the crash of a new type of Air Force plane and slipped and skidded desperately across the field to within thirty feet of the strange craft, only to discover that the landing had been made without accident. Patrolman Dermott shook his head. "They're gettin' queerer looking every year. Get a load of it—no wheels, no propeller, no cockpit." They left the car and made their way toward the strange egg-shaped vessel. Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its holster and said, "Sure, and I'm beginning to wonder if it's one of ours. No insignia and—" A circular door slid open at that point and Dameri Tass stepped out, yawning. He spotted them, smiled and said, "Glork." They gaped at him. "Glork is right," Dermott swallowed. Tim Casey closed his mouth with an effort. "Do you mind the color of his face?" he blurted. "How could I help it?" Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed pink hand down his purplish countenance and yawned again. "Gorra manigan horp soratium," he said. Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman Casey shot stares at each other. "'Tis double talk he's after givin' us," Casey said. Dameri Tass frowned. "Harama?" he asked. Larry Dermott pushed his cap to the back of his head. "That doesn't sound like any language I've even heard about." Dameri Tass grimaced, turned and reentered his spacecraft to emerge in half a minute with his hands full of contraption. He held a box-like arrangement under his left arm; in his right hand were two metal caps connected to the box by wires. While the patrolmen watched him, he set the box on the ground, twirled two dials and put one of the caps on his head. He offered the other to Larry Dermott; his desire was obvious. Trained to grasp a situation and immediately respond in manner best suited to protect the welfare of the people of New York State, Dermott cleared his throat and said, "Tim, take over while I report." "Hey!" Casey protested, but his fellow minion had left. "Mandaia," Dameri Tass told Casey, holding out the metal cap. "Faith, an' do I look balmy?" Casey told him. "I wouldn't be puttin' that dingus on my head for all the colleens in Ireland." "Mandaia," the stranger said impatiently. "Bejasus," Casey snorted, "ye can't—" Dermott called from the car, "Tim, the captain says to humor this guy. We're to keep him here until the officials arrive." Tim Casey closed his eyes and groaned. "Humor him, he's after sayin'. Orders it is." He shouted back, "Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's in technicolor? Begorra, he looks like a man from Mars." "That's what they think," Larry yelled, "and the governor is on his way. We're to do everything possible short of violence to keep this character here. Humor him, Tim!" "Mandaia," Dameri Tass snapped, pushing the cap into Casey's reluctant hands. Muttering his protests, Casey lifted it gingerly and placed it on his head. Not feeling any immediate effect, he said, "There, 'tis satisfied ye are now, I'm supposin'." The alien stooped down and flicked a switch on the little box. It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly shrieked and sat down on the stubble and grass of the field. "Begorra," he yelped, "I've been murthered!" He tore the cap from his head. His companion came running, "What's the matter, Tim?" he shouted. Dameri Tass removed the metal cap from his own head. "Sure, an' nothin' is after bein' the matter with him," he said. "Evidently the bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt him not at all." "You can talk!" Dermott blurted, skidding to a stop. Dameri Tass shrugged. "Faith, an' why not? As I was after sayin', I shared the kerit helmet with Tim Casey." Patrolman Dermott glared at him unbelievingly. "You learned the language just by sticking that Rube Goldberg deal on Tim's head?" "Sure, an' why not?" Dermott muttered, "And with it he has to pick up the corniest brogue west of Dublin." Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly. "I'm after resentin' that, Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way we talk in Ireland is—" Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing to a bedraggled horse that had made its way to within fifty feet of the vessel. "Now what could that be after bein'?" The patrolmen followed his stare. "It's a horse. What else?" "A horse?" Larry Dermott looked again, just to make sure. "Yeah—not much of a horse, but a horse." Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically. "And jist what is a horse, if I may be so bold as to be askin'?" "It's an animal you ride on." The alien tore his gaze from the animal to look his disbelief at the other. "Are you after meanin' that you climb upon the crature's back and ride him? Faith now, quit your blarney." He looked at the horse again, then down at his equipment. "Begorra," he muttered, "I'll share the kerit helmet with the crature." "Hey, hold it," Dermott said anxiously. He was beginning to feel like a character in a shaggy dog story. Interest in the horse was ended with the sudden arrival of a helicopter. It swooped down on the field and settled within twenty feet of the alien craft. Almost before it had touched, the door was flung open and the flying windmill disgorged two bestarred and efficient-looking Army officers. Casey and Dermott snapped them a salute. The senior general didn't take his eyes from the alien and the spacecraft as he spoke, and they bugged quite as effectively as had those of the patrolmen when they'd first arrived on the scene. "I'm Major General Browning," he rapped. "I want a police cordon thrown up around this, er, vessel. No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody without my permission. As soon as Army personnel arrives, we'll take over completely." "Yes, sir," Larry Dermott said. "I just got a report on the radio that the governor is on his way, sir. How about him?" The general muttered something under his breath. Then, "When the governor arrives, let me know; otherwise, nobody gets through!" Dameri Tass said, "Faith, and what goes on?" The general's eyes bugged still further. " He talks! " he accused. "Yes, sir," Dermott said. "He had some kind of a machine. He put it over Tim's head and seconds later he could talk." "Nonsense!" the general snapped. Further discussion was interrupted by the screaming arrival of several motorcycle patrolmen followed by three heavily laden patrol cars. Overhead, pursuit planes zoomed in and began darting about nervously above the field. "Sure, and it's quite a reception I'm after gettin'," Dameri Tass said. He yawned. "But what I'm wantin' is a chance to get some sleep. Faith, an' I've been awake for almost a decal ." Dameri Tass was hurried, via helicopter, to Washington. There he disappeared for several days, being held incommunicado while White House, Pentagon, State Department and Congress tried to figure out just what to do with him. Never in the history of the planet had such a furor arisen. Thus far, no newspapermen had been allowed within speaking distance. Administration higher-ups were being subjected to a volcano of editorial heat but the longer the space alien was discussed the more they viewed with alarm the situation his arrival had precipitated. There were angles that hadn't at first been evident. Obviously he was from some civilization far beyond that of Earth's. That was the rub. No matter what he said, it would shake governments, possibly overthrow social systems, perhaps even destroy established religious concepts. But they couldn't keep him under wraps indefinitely. It was the United Nations that cracked the iron curtain. Their demands that the alien be heard before their body were too strong and had too much public opinion behind them to be ignored. The White House yielded and the date was set for the visitor to speak before the Assembly. Excitement, anticipation, blanketed the world. Shepherds in Sinkiang, multi-millionaires in Switzerland, fakirs in Pakistan, gauchos in the Argentine were raised to a zenith of expectation. Panhandlers debated the message to come with pedestrians; jinrikisha men argued it with their passengers; miners discussed it deep beneath the surface; pilots argued with their co-pilots thousands of feet above. It was the most universally awaited event of the ages. By the time the delegates from every nation, tribe, religion, class, color, and race had gathered in New York to receive the message from the stars, the majority of Earth had decided that Dameri Tass was the plenipotentiary of a super-civilization which had been viewing developments on this planet with misgivings. It was thought this other civilization had advanced greatly beyond Earth's and that the problems besetting us—social, economic, scientific—had been solved by the super-civilization. Obviously, then, Dameri Tass had come, an advisor from a benevolent and friendly people, to guide the world aright. And nine-tenths of the population of Earth stood ready and willing to be guided. The other tenth liked things as they were and were quite convinced that the space envoy would upset their applecarts. Viljalmar Andersen , Secretary-General of the U.N., was to introduce the space emissary. "Can you give me an idea at all of what he is like?" he asked nervously. President McCord was as upset as the Dane. He shrugged in agitation. "I know almost as little as you do." Sir Alfred Oxford protested, "But my dear chap, you've had him for almost two weeks. Certainly in that time—" The President snapped back, "You probably won't believe this, but he's been asleep until yesterday. When he first arrived he told us he hadn't slept for a decal , whatever that is; so we held off our discussion with him until morning. Well—he didn't awaken in the morning, nor the next. Six days later, fearing something was wrong we woke him." "What happened?" Sir Alfred asked. The President showed embarrassment. "He used some rather ripe Irish profanity on us, rolled over, and went back to sleep." Viljalmar Andersen asked, "Well, what happened yesterday?" "We actually haven't had time to question him. Among other things, there's been some controversy about whose jurisdiction he comes under. The State Department claims the Army shouldn't—" The Secretary General sighed deeply. "Just what did he do?" "The Secret Service reports he spent the day whistling Mother Machree and playing with his dog, cat and mouse." "Dog, cat and mouse? I say!" blurted Sir Alfred. The President was defensive. "He had to have some occupation, and he seems to be particularly interested in our animal life. He wanted a horse but compromised for the others. I understand he insists all three of them come with him wherever he goes." "I wish we knew what he was going to say," Andersen worried. "Here he comes," said Sir Alfred. Surrounded by F.B.I. men, Dameri Tass was ushered to the speaker's stand. He had a kitten in his arms; a Scotty followed him. The alien frowned worriedly. "Sure," he said, "and what kin all this be? Is it some ordinance I've been after breakin'?" McCord, Sir Alfred and Andersen hastened to reassure him and made him comfortable in a chair. Viljalmar Andersen faced the thousands in the audience and held up his hands, but it was ten minutes before he was able to quiet the cheering, stamping delegates from all Earth. Finally: "Fellow Terrans, I shall not take your time for a lengthy introduction of the envoy from the stars. I will only say that, without doubt, this is the most important moment in the history of the human race. We will now hear from the first being to come to Earth from another world." He turned and gestured to Dameri Tass who hadn't been paying overmuch attention to the chairman in view of some dog and cat hostilities that had been developing about his feet. But now the alien's purplish face faded to a light blue. He stood and said hoarsely. "Faith, an' what was that last you said?" Viljalmar Andersen repeated, "We will now hear from the first being ever to come to Earth from another world." The face of the alien went a lighter blue. "Sure, an' ye wouldn't jist be frightenin' a body, would ye? You don't mean to tell me this planet isn't after bein' a member of the Galactic League?" Andersen's face was blank. "Galactic League?" "Cushlamachree," Dameri Tass moaned. "I've gone and put me foot in it again. I'll be after getting kert for this." Sir Alfred was on his feet. "I don't understand! Do you mean you aren't an envoy from another planet?" Dameri Tass held his head in his hands and groaned. "An envoy, he's sayin', and meself only a second-rate collector of specimens for the Carthis zoo." He straightened and started off the speaker's stand. "Sure, an' I must blast off immediately." Things were moving fast for President McCord but already an edge of relief was manifesting itself. Taking the initiative, he said, "Of course, of course, if that is your desire." He signaled to the bodyguard who had accompanied the alien to the assemblage. A dull roar was beginning to emanate from the thousands gathered in the tremendous hall, murmuring, questioning, disbelieving. Viljalmar Andersen felt that he must say something. He extended a detaining hand. "Now you are here," he said urgently, "even though by mistake, before you go can't you give us some brief word? Our world is in chaos. Many of us have lost faith. Perhaps ..." Dameri Tass shook off the restraining hand. "Do I look daft? Begorry, I should have been a-knowin' something was queer. All your weapons and your strange ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised if ye hadn't yet established a planet-wide government. Sure, an' I'll go still further. Ye probably still have wars on this benighted world. No wonder it is ye haven't been invited to join the Galactic League an' take your place among the civilized planets." He hustled from the rostrum and made his way, still surrounded by guards, to the door by which he had entered. The dog and the cat trotted after, undismayed by the furor about them. They arrived about four hours later at the field on which he'd landed, and the alien from space hurried toward his craft, still muttering. He'd been accompanied by a general and by the President, but all the way he had refrained from speaking. He scurried from the car and toward the spacecraft. President McCord said, "You've forgotten your pets. We would be glad if you would accept them as—" The alien's face faded a light blue again. "Faith, an' I'd almost forgotten," he said. "If I'd taken a crature from this quarantined planet, my name'd be nork . Keep your dog and your kitty." He shook his head sadly and extracted a mouse from a pocket. "An' this amazin' little crature as well." They followed him to the spacecraft. Just before entering, he spotted the bedraggled horse that had been present on his landing. A longing expression came over his highly colored face. "Jist one thing," he said. "Faith now, were they pullin' my leg when they said you were after ridin' on the back of those things?" The President looked at the woebegone nag. "It's a horse," he said, surprised. "Man has been riding them for centuries." Dameri Tass shook his head. "Sure, an' 'twould've been my makin' if I could've taken one back to Carthis." He entered his vessel. The others drew back, out of range of the expected blast, and watched, each with his own thoughts, as the first visitor from space hurriedly left Earth. ... THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction January 1954. 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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61285

THE DESERT AND THE STARS BY KEITH LAUMER The Aga Kaga wanted peace—a piece of everything in sight! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, November 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "I'm not at all sure," Under-Secretary Sternwheeler said, "that I fully understand the necessity for your ... ah ... absenting yourself from your post of duty, Mr. Retief. Surely this matter could have been dealt with in the usual way—assuming any action is necessary." "I had a sharp attack of writer's cramp, Mr. Secretary," Retief said. "So I thought I'd better come along in person—just to be sure I was positive of making my point." "Eh?" "Why, ah, there were a number of dispatches," Deputy Under-Secretary Magnan put in. "Unfortunately, this being end-of-the-fiscal-year time, we found ourselves quite inundated with reports. Reports, reports, reports—" "Not criticizing the reporting system, are you, Mr. Magnan?" the Under-Secretary barked. "Gracious, no," Magnan said. "I love reports." "It seems nobody's told the Aga Kagans about fiscal years," Retief said. "They're going right ahead with their program of land-grabbing on Flamme. So far, I've persuaded the Boyars that this is a matter for the Corps, and not to take matters into their own hands." The Under-Secretary nodded. "Quite right. Carry on along the same lines. Now, if there's nothing further—" "Thank you, Mr. Secretary," Magnan said, rising. "We certainly appreciate your guidance." "There is a little something further," said Retief, sitting solidly in his chair. "What's the Corps going to do about the Aga Kagans?" The Under-Secretary turned a liverish eye on Retief. "As Minister to Flamme, you should know that the function of a diplomatic representative is merely to ... what shall I say...?" "String them along?" Magnan suggested. "An unfortunate choice of phrase," the Under-Secretary said. "However, it embodies certain realities of Galactic politics. The Corps must concern itself with matters of broad policy." "Sixty years ago the Corps was encouraging the Boyars to settle Flamme," Retief said. "They were assured of Corps support." "I don't believe you'll find that in writing," said the Under-Secretary blandly. "In any event, that was sixty years ago. At that time a foothold against Neo-Concordiatist elements was deemed desirable. Now the situation has changed." "The Boyars have spent sixty years terraforming Flamme," Retief said. "They've cleared jungle, descummed the seas, irrigated deserts, set out forests. They've just about reached the point where they can begin to enjoy it. The Aga Kagans have picked this as a good time to move in. They've landed thirty detachments of 'fishermen'—complete with armored trawlers mounting 40 mm infinite repeaters—and another two dozen parties of 'homesteaders'—all male and toting rocket launchers." "Surely there's land enough on the world to afford space to both groups," the Under-Secretary said. "A spirit of co-operation—" "The Boyars needed some co-operation sixty years ago," Retief said. "They tried to get the Aga Kagans to join in and help them beat back some of the saurian wild life that liked to graze on people. The Corps didn't like the idea. They wanted to see an undisputed anti-Concordiatist enclave. The Aga Kagans didn't want to play, either. But now that the world is tamed, they're moving in." "The exigencies of diplomacy require a flexible policy—" "I want a firm assurance of Corps support to take back to Flamme," Retief said. "The Boyars are a little naive. They don't understand diplomatic triple-speak. They just want to hold onto the homes they've made out of a wasteland." "I'm warning you, Retief!" the Under-Secretary snapped, leaning forward, wattles quivering. "Corps policy with regard to Flamme includes no inflammatory actions based on outmoded concepts. The Boyars will have to accommodate themselves to the situation!" "That's what I'm afraid of," Retief said. "They're not going to sit still and watch it happen. If I don't take back concrete evidence of Corps backing, we're going to have a nice hot little shooting war on our hands." The Under-Secretary pushed out his lips and drummed his fingers on the desk. "Confounded hot-heads," he muttered. "Very well, Retief. I'll go along to the extent of a Note; but positively no further." "A Note? I was thinking of something more like a squadron of Corps Peace Enforcers running through a few routine maneuvers off Flamme." "Out of the question. A stiffly worded Protest Note is the best I can do. That's final." Back in the corridor, Magnan turned to Retief. "When will you learn not to argue with Under-Secretaries? One would think you actively disliked the idea of ever receiving a promotion. I was astonished at the Under-Secretary's restraint. Frankly, I was stunned when he actually agreed to a Note. I, of course, will have to draft it." Magnan pulled at his lower lip thoughtfully. "Now, I wonder, should I view with deep concern an act of open aggression, or merely point out an apparent violation of technicalities...." "Don't bother," Retief said. "I have a draft all ready to go." "But how—?" "I had a feeling I'd get paper instead of action," Retief said. "I thought I'd save a little time all around." "At times, your cynicism borders on impudence." "At other times, it borders on disgust. Now, if you'll run the Note through for signature, I'll try to catch the six o'clock shuttle." "Leaving so soon? There's an important reception tonight. Some of our biggest names will be there. An excellent opportunity for you to join in the diplomatic give-and-take." "No, thanks. I want to get back to Flamme and join in something mild, like a dinosaur hunt." "When you get there," said Magnan, "I hope you'll make it quite clear that this matter is to be settled without violence." "Don't worry. I'll keep the peace, if I have to start a war to do it." On the broad verandah at Government House, Retief settled himself comfortably in a lounge chair. He accepted a tall glass from a white-jacketed waiter and regarded the flamboyant Flamme sunset, a gorgeous blaze of vermillion and purple that reflected from a still lake, tinged the broad lawn with color, silhouetted tall poplars among flower beds. "You've done great things here in sixty years, Georges," said Retief. "Not that natural geological processes wouldn't have produced the same results, given a couple of hundred million years." "Don't belabor the point," the Boyar Chef d'Regime said. "Since we seem to be on the verge of losing it." "You're forgetting the Note." "A Note," Georges said, waving his cigar. "What the purple polluted hell is a Note supposed to do? I've got Aga Kagan claim-jumpers camped in the middle of what used to be a fine stand of barley, cooking sheep's brains over dung fires not ten miles from Government House—and upwind at that." "Say, if that's the same barley you distill your whiskey from, I'd call that a first-class atrocity." "Retief, on your say-so, I've kept my boys on a short leash. They've put up with plenty. Last week, while you were away, these barbarians sailed that flotilla of armor-plated junks right through the middle of one of our best oyster breeding beds. It was all I could do to keep a bunch of our men from going out in private helis and blasting 'em out of the water." "That wouldn't have been good for the oysters, either." "That's what I told 'em. I also said you'd be back here in a few days with something from Corps HQ. When I tell 'em all we've got is a piece of paper, that'll be the end. There's a strong vigilante organization here that's been outfitting for the last four weeks. If I hadn't held them back with assurances that the CDT would step in and take care of this invasion, they would have hit them before now." "That would have been a mistake," said Retief. "The Aga Kagans are tough customers. They're active on half a dozen worlds at the moment. They've been building up for this push for the last five years. A show of resistance by you Boyars without Corps backing would be an invitation to slaughter—with the excuse that you started it." "So what are we going to do? Sit here and watch these goat-herders take over our farms and fisheries?" "Those goat-herders aren't all they seem. They've got a first-class modern navy." "I've seen 'em. They camp in goat-skin tents, gallop around on animal-back, wear dresses down to their ankles—" "The 'goat-skin' tents are a high-polymer plastic, made in the same factory that turns out those long flowing bullet-proof robes you mention. The animals are just for show. Back home they use helis and ground cars of the most modern design." The Chef d'Regime chewed his cigar. "Why the masquerade?" "Something to do with internal policies, I suppose." "So we sit tight and watch 'em take our world away from us. That's what I get for playing along with you, Retief. We should have clobbered these monkeys as soon as they set foot on our world." "Slow down, I haven't finished yet. There's still the Note." "I've got plenty of paper already. Rolls and rolls of it." "Give diplomatic processes a chance," said Retief. "The Note hasn't even been delivered yet. Who knows? We may get surprising results." "If you expect me to supply a runner for the purpose, you're out of luck. From what I hear, he's likely to come back with his ears stuffed in his hip pocket." "I'll deliver the Note personally," Retief said. "I could use a couple of escorts—preferably strong-arm lads." The Chef d'Regime frowned, blew out a cloud of smoke. "I wasn't kidding about these Aga Kagans," he said. "I hear they have some nasty habits. I don't want to see you operated on with the same knives they use to skin out the goats." "I'd be against that myself. Still, the mail must go through." "Strong-arm lads, eh? What have you got in mind, Retief?" "A little muscle in the background is an old diplomatic custom," Retief said. The Chef d'Regime stubbed out his cigar thoughtfully. "I used to be a pretty fair elbow-wrestler myself," he said. "Suppose I go along...?" "That," said Retief, "should lend just the right note of solidarity to our little delegation." He hitched his chair closer. "Now, depending on what we run into, here's how we'll play it...." II Eight miles into the rolling granite hills west of the capital, a black-painted official air-car flying the twin flags of Chief of State and Terrestrial Minister skimmed along a foot above a pot-holed road. Slumped in the padded seat, the Boyar Chef d'Regime waved his cigar glumly at the surrounding hills. "Fifty years ago this was bare rock," he said. "We've bred special strains of bacteria here to break down the formations into soil, and we followed up with a program of broad-spectrum fertilization. We planned to put the whole area into crops by next year. Now it looks like the goats will get it." "Will that scrubland support a crop?" Retief said, eyeing the lichen-covered knolls. "Sure. We start with legumes and follow up with cereals. Wait until you see this next section. It's an old flood plain, came into production thirty years ago. One of our finest—" The air-car topped a rise. The Chef dropped his cigar and half rose, with a hoarse yell. A herd of scraggly goats tossed their heads among a stand of ripe grain. The car pulled to a stop. Retief held the Boyar's arm. "Keep calm, Georges," he said. "Remember, we're on a diplomatic mission. It wouldn't do to come to the conference table smelling of goats." "Let me at 'em!" Georges roared. "I'll throttle 'em with my bare hands!" A bearded goat eyed the Boyar Chef sardonically, jaw working. "Look at that long-nosed son!" The goat gave a derisive bleat and took another mouthful of ripe grain. "Did you see that?" Georges yelled. "They've trained the son of a—" "Chin up, Georges," Retief said. "We'll take up the goat problem along with the rest." "I'll murder 'em!" "Hold it, Georges. Look over there." A hundred yards away, a trio of brown-cloaked horsemen topped a rise, paused dramatically against the cloudless pale sky, then galloped down the slope toward the car, rifles bobbing at their backs, cloaks billowing out behind. Side by side they rode, through the brown-golden grain, cutting three narrow swaths that ran in a straight sweep from the ridge to the air-car where Retief and the Chef d'Regime hovered, waiting. Georges scrambled for the side of the car. "Just wait 'til I get my hands on him!" Retief pulled him back. "Sit tight and look pleased, Georges. Never give the opposition a hint of your true feelings. Pretend you're a goat lover—and hand me one of your cigars." The three horsemen pulled up in a churn of chaff and a clatter of pebbles. Georges coughed, batting a hand at the settling dust. Retief peeled the cigar unhurriedly, sniffed, at it and thumbed it alight. He drew at it, puffed out a cloud of smoke and glanced casually at the trio of Aga Kagan cavaliers. "Peace be with you," he intoned in accent-free Kagan. "May your shadows never grow less." The leader of the three, a hawk-faced man with a heavy beard, unlimbered his rifle. He fingered it, frowning ferociously. "Have no fear," Retief said, smiling graciously. "He who comes as a guest enjoys perfect safety." A smooth-faced member of the threesome barked an oath and leveled his rifle at Retief. "Youth is the steed of folly," Retief said. "Take care that the beardless one does not disgrace his house." The leader whirled on the youth and snarled an order. He lowered the rifle, muttering. Blackbeard turned back to Retief. "Begone, interlopers," he said. "You disturb the goats." "Provision is not taken to the houses of the generous," Retief said. "May the creatures dine well ere they move on." "Hah! The goats of the Aga Kaga graze on the lands of the Aga Kaga." The leader edged his horse close, eyed Retief fiercely. "We welcome no intruders on our lands." "To praise a man for what he does not possess is to make him appear foolish," Retief said. "These are the lands of the Boyars. But enough of these pleasantries. We seek audience with your ruler." "You may address me as 'Exalted One'," the leader said. "Now dismount from that steed of Shaitan." "It is written, if you need anything from a dog, call him 'sir'," Retief said. "I must decline to impute canine ancestry to a guest. Now you may conduct us to your headquarters." "Enough of your insolence!" The bearded man cocked his rifle. "I could blow your heads off!" "The hen has feathers, but it does not fly," Retief said. "We have asked for escort. A slave must be beaten with a stick; for a free man, a hint is enough." "You mock me, pale one. I warn you—" "Only love makes me weep," Retief said. "I laugh at hatred." "Get out of the car!" Retief puffed at his cigar, eyeing the Aga Kagan cheerfully. The youth in the rear moved forward, teeth bared. "Never give in to the fool, lest he say, 'He fears me,'" Retief said. "I cannot restrain my men in the face of your insults," the bearded Aga Kagan roared. "These hens of mine have feathers—and talons as well!" "When God would destroy an ant, he gives him wings," Retief said. "Distress in misfortune is another misfortune." The bearded man's face grew purple. Retief dribbled the ash from his cigar over the side of the car. "Now I think we'd better be getting on," he said briskly. "I've enjoyed our chat, but we do have business to attend to." The bearded leader laughed shortly. "Does the condemned man beg for the axe?" he enquired rhetorically. "You shall visit the Aga Kaga, then. Move on! And make no attempt to escape, else my gun will speak you a brief farewell." The horsemen glowered, then, at a word from the leader, took positions around the car. Georges started the vehicle forward, following the leading rider. Retief leaned back and let out a long sigh. "That was close," he said. "I was about out of proverbs." "You sound as though you'd brought off a coup," Georges said. "From the expression on the whiskery one's face, we're in for trouble. What was he saying?" "Just a routine exchange of bluffs," Retief said. "Now when we get there, remember to make your flattery sound like insults and your insults sound like flattery, and you'll be all right." "These birds are armed. And they don't like strangers," Georges said. "Maybe I should have boned up on their habits before I joined this expedition." "Just stick to the plan," Retief said. "And remember: a handful of luck is better than a camel-load of learning." The air car followed the escort down a long slope to a dry river bed and across it, through a barren stretch of shifting sand to a green oasis set with canopies. The armed escort motioned the car to a halt before an immense tent of glistening black. Before the tent armed men lounged under a pennant bearing a lion couchant in crimson on a field verte. "Get out," Blackbeard ordered. The guards eyed the visitors, their drawn sabers catching sunlight. Retief and Georges stepped from the car onto rich rugs spread on the grass. They followed the ferocious gesture of the bearded man through the opening into a perfumed interior of luminous shadows. A heavy odor of incense hung in the air, and the strumming of stringed instruments laid a muted pattern of sound behind the decorations of gold and blue, silver and green. At the far end of the room, among a bevy of female slaves, a large and resplendently clad man with blue-black hair and a clean-shaven chin popped a grape into his mouth. He wiped his fingers negligently on a wisp of silk offered by a handmaiden, belched loudly and looked the callers over. Blackbeard cleared his throat. "Down on your faces in the presence of the Exalted One, the Aga Kaga, ruler of East and West." "Sorry," Retief said firmly. "My hay-fever, you know." The reclining giant waved a hand languidly. "Never mind the formalities," he said. "Approach." Retief and Georges crossed the thick rugs. A cold draft blew toward them. The reclining man sneezed violently, wiped his nose on another silken scarf and held up a hand. "Night and the horses and the desert know me," he said in resonant tones. "Also the sword and the guest and paper and pen—" He paused, wrinkled his nose and sneezed again. "Turn off that damned air-conditioner," he snapped. He settled himself and motioned the bearded man to him. The two exchanged muted remarks. Then the bearded man stepped back, ducked his head and withdrew to the rear. "Excellency," Retief said, "I have the honor to present M. Georges Duror, Chef d'Regime of the Planetary government." "Planetary government?" The Aga Kaga spat grape seeds on the rug. "My men have observed a few squatters along the shore. If they're in distress, I'll see about a distribution of goat-meat." "It is the punishment of the envious to grieve at anothers' plenty," Retief said. "No goat-meat will be required." "Ralph told me you talk like a page out of Mustapha ben Abdallah Katib Jelebi," the Aga Kaga said. "I know a few old sayings myself. For example, 'A Bedouin is only cheated once.'" "We have no such intentions, Excellency," Retief said. "Is it not written, 'Have no faith in the Prince whose minister cheats you'?" "I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers," the Aga Kaga said. "It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated." III Handmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence. "We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne," Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered grapes. "Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge," the Aga Kaga said. "What brings the CDT into the picture?" "The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern," Retief said. "Whereas the words of kings...." "Very well, I concede the point." The Aga Kaga waved a hand at the serving maids. "Depart, my dears. Attend me later. You too, Ralph. These are mere diplomats. They are men of words, not deeds." The bearded man glared and departed. The girls hurried after him. "Now," the Aga Kaga said. "Let's drop the wisdom of the ages and get down to the issues. Not that I don't admire your repertoire of platitudes. How do you remember them all?" "Diplomats and other liars require good memories," said Retief. "But as you point out, small wisdom to small minds. I'm here to effect a settlement of certain differences between yourself and the planetary authorities. I have here a Note, which I'm conveying on behalf of the Sector Under-Secretary. With your permission, I'll read it." "Go ahead." The Aga Kaga kicked a couple of cushions onto the floor, eased a bottle from under the couch and reached for glasses. "The Under-Secretary for Sector Affairs presents his compliments to his Excellency, the Aga Kaga of the Aga Kaga, Primary Potentate, Hereditary Sheik, Emir of the—" "Yes, yes. Skip the titles." Retief flipped over two pages. "... and with reference to the recent relocation of persons under the jurisdiction of his Excellency, has the honor to point out that the territories now under settlement comprise a portion of that area, hereinafter designated as Sub-sector Alpha, which, under terms of the Agreement entered into by his Excellency's predecessor, and as referenced in Sector Ministry's Notes numbers G-175846573957-b and X-7584736 c-1, with particular pertinence to that body designated in the Revised Galactic Catalogue, Tenth Edition, as amended, Volume Nine, reel 43, as 54 Cygni Alpha, otherwise referred to hereinafter as Flamme—" "Come to the point," the Aga Kaga cut in. "You're here to lodge a complaint that I'm invading territories to which someone else lays claim, is that it?" He smiled broadly, offered dope-sticks and lit one. "Well, I've been expecting a call. After all, it's what you gentlemen are paid for. Cheers." "Your Excellency has a lucid way of putting things," Retief said. "Call me Stanley," the Aga Kaga said. "The other routine is just to please some of the old fools—I mean the more conservative members of my government. They're still gnawing their beards and kicking themselves because their ancestors dropped science in favor of alchemy and got themselves stranded in a cultural dead end. This charade is supposed to prove they were right all along. However, I've no time to waste in neurotic compensations. I have places to go and deeds to accomplish." "At first glance," Retief said, "it looks as though the places are already occupied, and the deeds are illegal." The Aga Kaga guffawed. "For a diplomat, you speak plainly, Retief. Have another drink." He poured, eyeing Georges. "What of M. Duror? How does he feel about it?" Georges took a thoughtful swallow of whiskey. "Not bad," he said. "But not quite good enough to cover the odor of goats." The Aga Kaga snorted. "I thought the goats were overdoing it a bit myself," he said. "Still, the graybeards insisted. And I need their support." "Also," Georges said distinctly, "I think you're soft. You lie around letting women wait on you, while your betters are out doing an honest day's work." The Aga Kaga looked startled. "Soft? I can tie a knot in an iron bar as big as your thumb." He popped a grape into his mouth. "As for the rest, your pious views about the virtues of hard labor are as childish as my advisors' faith in the advantages of primitive plumbing. As for myself, I am a realist. If two monkeys want the same banana, in the end one will have it, and the other will cry morality. The days of my years are numbered, praise be to God. While they last, I hope to eat well, hunt well, fight well and take my share of pleasure. I leave to others the arid satisfactions of self-denial and other perversions." "You admit you're here to grab our land, then," Georges said. "That's the damnedest piece of bare-faced aggression—" "Ah, ah!" The Aga Kaga held up a hand. "Watch your vocabulary, my dear sir. I'm sure that 'justifiable yearnings for territorial self-realization' would be more appropriate to the situation. Or possibly 'legitimate aspirations, for self-determination of formerly exploited peoples' might fit the case. Aggression is, by definition, an activity carried on only by those who have inherited the mantle of Colonial Imperialism." "Imperialism! Why, you Aga Kagans have been the most notorious planet-grabbers in Sector history, you—you—" "Call me Stanley." The Aga Kaga munched a grape. "I merely face the realities of popular folk-lore. Let's be pragmatic; it's a matter of historical association. Some people can grab land and pass it off lightly as a moral duty; others are dubbed imperialist merely for holding onto their own. Unfair, you say. But that's life, my friends. And I shall continue to take every advantage of it." "We'll fight you!" Georges bellowed. He took another gulp of whiskey and slammed the glass down. "You won't take this world without a struggle!" "Another?" the Aga Kaga said, offering the bottle. Georges glowered as his glass was filled. The Aga Kaga held the glass up to the light. "Excellent color, don't you agree?" He turned his eyes on Georges. "It's pointless to resist," he said. "We have you outgunned and outmanned. Your small nation has no chance against us. But we're prepared to be generous. You may continue to occupy such areas as we do not immediately require until such time as you're able to make other arrangements." "And by the time we've got a crop growing out of what was bare rock, you'll be ready to move in," the Boyar Chef d'Regime snapped. "But you'll find that we aren't alone!" "Quite alone," the Aga said. He nodded sagely. "Yes, one need but read the lesson of history. The Corps Diplomatique will make expostulatory noises, but it will accept the fait accompli . You, my dear sir, are but a very small nibble. We won't make the mistake of excessive greed. We shall inch our way to empire—and those who stand in our way shall be dubbed warmongers." "I see you're quite a student of history, Stanley," Retief said. "I wonder if you recall the eventual fate of most of the would-be empire nibblers of the past?" "Ah, but they grew incautious. They went too far, too fast." "The confounded impudence," Georges rasped. "Tells us to our face what he has in mind!" "An ancient and honorable custom, from the time of Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto through the Porcelain Wall of Leung. Such declarations have a legendary quality. It's traditional that they're never taken at face value." "But always," Retief said, "there was a critical point at which the man on horseback could have been pulled from the saddle." " Could have been," the Aga Kaga chuckled. He finished the grapes and began peeling an orange. "But they never were. Hitler could have been stopped by the Czech Air Force in 1938; Stalin was at the mercy of the primitive atomics of the west in 1946; Leung was grossly over-extended at Rangoon. But the onus of that historic role could not be overcome. It has been the fate of your spiritual forebears to carve civilization from the wilderness and then, amid tearing of garments and the heaping of ashes of self-accusation on your own confused heads, to withdraw, leaving the spoils for local political opportunists and mob leaders, clothed in the mystical virtue of native birth. Have a banana." "You're stretching your analogy a little too far," Retief said. "You're banking on the inaction of the Corps. You could be wrong." "I shall know when to stop," the Aga Kaga said. "Tell me, Stanley," Retief said, rising. "Are we quite private here?" "Yes, perfectly so," the Aga Kaga said. "None would dare to intrude in my council." He cocked an eyebrow at Retief. "You have a proposal to make in confidence? But what of our dear friend Georges? One would not like to see him disillusioned." "Don't worry about Georges. He's a realist, like you. He's prepared to deal in facts. Hard facts, in this case." The Aga Kaga nodded thoughtfully. "What are you getting at?" "You're basing your plan of action on the certainty that the Corps will sit by, wringing its hands, while you embark on a career of planetary piracy." "Isn't it the custom?" the Aga Kaga smiled complacently. "I have news for you, Stanley. In this instance, neck-wringing seems more in order than hand-wringing." The Aga Kaga frowned. "Your manner—" "Never mind our manners!" Georges blurted, standing. "We don't need any lessons from goat-herding land-thieves!" The Aga Kaga's face darkened. "You dare to speak thus to me, pig of a muck-grubber!"

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62261

Planet of No-Return By WILBUR S. PEACOCK The orders were explicit: "Destroy the 'THING' of Venus." But Patrolmen Kerry Blane and Splinter Wood, their space-ship wrecked, could not follow orders—their weapons were useless on the Water-world. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Old Kerry Blane exploded. "Damn it!" he roared. "I don't like you; and I don't like this ship; and I don't like the assignment; and I don't like those infernal pills you keep eating; and I—" "Splinter" Wood grinned. "Seems to me, Kerry," he remarked humorously, "that you don't like much of anything!" Kerry Blane growled unintelligibly, batted the injector lever with a calloused hand. His grizzled hair was a stiff wiry mop on his small head, and his oversize jaw was thrust belligerently forward. But deep within his eyes, where he hoped it was hidden, was a friendly twinkle that gave the lie to his speech. "You're a squirt!" he snapped disagreeably. "You're not dry behind the ears, yet. You're like the rest of these kids who call themselves pilots—only more so! And why the hell the chief had to sic you on me, on an exploration trip this important—well, I'll never understand." Splinter rolled his six foot three of lanky body into a more comfortable position on the air-bunk. He yawned tremendously, fumbled a small box from his shirt pocket, and removed a marble-like capsule. "Better take one of these," he warned. "You're liable to get the space bends at any moment." Old Kerry Blane snorted, batted the box aside impatiently, scowled moodily at the capsules that bounced for a moment against the pilot room's walls before hanging motionless in the air. "Mister Wood," he said icily, "I was flying a space ship while they were changing your pants twenty times a day. When I want advice on how to fly a ship, how to cure space bends, how to handle a Zelta ray, or how to spit—I'll ask you! Until then, you and your bloody marbles can go plumb straight to the devil!" "Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!" Splinter reached out lazily, plucked the capsules from the air, one by one. Kerry Blane lit one of the five allotted cigarettes of the day. "Don't 'tsk' me, you young squirt," he grunted around a mouthful of fragrant smoke. "I know all the arguments you can put up; ain't that all I been hearing for a week? You take your vitamins A, B, C, D, all you want, but you leave me alone—or I'll stuff your head down your throat, P.D.Q.!" "All right, all right!" Splinter tucked the capsule box back into his pocket, grinned mockingly. "But don't say I didn't warn you. With this shielded ship, and with no sunlight reaching Venus' surface, you're gonna be begging for some of my vitamin, super-concentrated pills before we get back to Earth." Kerry Blane made a rich, ripe noise with his mouth. "Pfuii!" he said very distinctly. "Gracious!" Splinter said in mock horror. They made a strange contrast as they lay in their air bunks. Splinter was fully a head taller than the dour Irishman, and his lanky build gave a false impression of awkwardness. While the vitriolic Kerry Blane was short and compact, strength and quickness evident in every movement. Kerry Blane had flown every type of ship that rode in space. In the passing years, he had flight-tested almost every new experimental ship, had flown them with increasing skill, had earned a reputation as a trouble shooter on any kind of craft. But even Kerry Blane had to retire eventually. A great retirement banquet had been given in his honor by the Interplanetary Squadron. There had been the usual speeches and presentations; and Kerry Blane had heard them all, had thanked the donors of the gifts. But it was not until the next morning, when he was dressed in civilian clothes for the first time in forty years, that he realized the enormity of the thing that had happened to his life. Something died within Kerry Blane's heart that morning, shriveled and passed away, leaving him suddenly shrunken and old. He had become like a rusty old freighter couched between the gleaming bodies of great space warriors. Finally, as a last resort so that he would not be thrown entirely aside, he had taken a desk job in the squadron offices. For six years he had dry-rotted there, waiting hopefully for the moment when his active services would be needed again. It was there that he had met and liked the ungainly Splinter Wood. There was something in the boy that had found a kindred spirit in Kerry Blane's heart, and he had taken the youngster in hand to give him the benefits of experience that had become legendary. Splinter Wood was a probationary pilot, had been admitted to the Interplanetary Squadron because of his inherent skill, even though his formal education had been fairly well neglected. Now, the two of them rode the pounding jets of a DX cruiser, bound for Venus to make a personal survey of its floating islands for the Interplanetary Squadron's Medical Division. "Ten to one we don't get back!" Splinter said pessimistically. Kerry Blane scrubbed out his cigarette, scowled bleakly at the instrument panel. He sensed the faint thread of fear in the youngster's tone, and a nostalgic twinge touched his heart, for he was remembering the days of his youth when he had a full life to look forward to. "If you're afraid, you can get out and walk back," he snapped disagreeably. A grin lifted the corners of Splinter's long mouth, spread into his eyes. His hand unconsciously came up, touched the tiny squadron pin on his lapel. "Sorry to disappoint you, glory grabber," he said mockingly, "but I've got definite orders to take care of you." " Me! You've got orders to take care of me ?" Kerry Blane choked incoherently for a moment, red tiding cholerically upward from his loosened collar. "Of course!" Splinter grinned. Kerry Blane exploded, words spewing volcanically forth. Splinter relaxed, his booted foot beating out a dull rhythm to the colorful language learned through almost fifty years of spacing. And at last, when Kerry Blane had quieted until he but smoldered, he leaned over and touched the old spacer on the sleeve. "Seventy-eight!" he remarked pleasantly. "Seventy-eight what?" Kerry Blane asked sullenly, the old twinkle beginning to light again deep in his eyes. "Seventy-eight new words—and you swore them beautifully!" Splinter beamed. "Some day you can teach them to me." They laughed then, Old Kerry Blane and young Splinter Wood, and the warmth of their friendship was a tangible thing in the small control-room of the cruiser. And in the midst of their laughter, Old Kerry Blane choked in agony, surged desperately against his bunk straps. He screamed unknowingly, feeling only the horrible excruciating agony of his body, tasting the blood that gushed from his mouth and nostrils. His muscles were knotted cords that he could not loosen, and his blood was a surging stream that pounded at his throbbing temples. The air he breathed seemed to be molten flame. His body arced again and again against the restraining straps, and his mouth was open in a soundless scream. He sensed dimly that his partner had wrenched open a wall door, removed metal medicine kits, and was fumbling through their contents. He felt the bite of the hypodermic, felt a deadly numbness replace the raging torment that had been his for seconds. He swallowed three capsules automatically, passed into a coma-like sleep, woke hours later to stare clear-eyed into Splinter's concerned face. "Close, wasn't it?" he said weakly, conversationally. "Close enough!" Splinter agreed relievedly. "If you had followed my advice and taken those vitamin capsules, you'd never have had the bends." Kerry Blane grinned, winced when he felt the dull ache in his body. "I've had the bends before, and lived through them!" he said, still weakly defiant. "That's the past," Splinter said quietly. "This is the present, and you take your pills every day, just as I do—from now on." "All right—and thanks!" "Forget it!" Splinter flushed in quick embarrassment. A buzzer sounded from the instrument panel, and a tiny light glowed redly. "Six hours more," Splinter said, turned to the instrument panel. His long hands played over the instrument panel, checking, controlling the rocket fire, adjusting delicate instruments to hairline marks. Kerry Blane nodded in silent approval. They could feel the first tug of gravity on their bodies, and through the vision port could see the greenish ball that was cloud-covered Venus. Excitement lifted their spirits, brought light to their eyes as they peered eagerly ahead. "What's it really like?" Splinter asked impatiently. Kerry Blane yawned, settled back luxuriously. "I'll tell you later," he said, "I'm going to take a nap and try to ease this bellyache of mine. Wake me up so that I can take over, when we land; Venus is a tricky place to set a ship on." He yawned again, drifted instantly into sleep, relaxing with the ability of a spaceman who sleeps when and if he can. Splinter smiled down at his sleeping partner, then turned back to the quartzite port. He shook his head a bit, remembering the stories he had heard about the water planet, wondering—wondering— II Venus was a fluffy cotton ball hanging motionless in bottomless space. Far to the left, Mercury gleamed like a polished diamond in the sunlight. Kerry Blane cut the driving rockets, let the cruiser sink into a fast gravity-dive, guiding it only now and then by a brief flicker of a side jet. Splinter Wood watched breathlessly from the vision port, his long face eager and reckless, his eyes seeking to pierce the clouds that roiled and twisted uneasily over the surface of the planet. Kerry Blane glanced tolerantly at his young companion, felt a nostalgic tug at his heart when he remembered the first time he had approached the water-planet years before. Then, he had been a young and reckless firebrand, his fame already spreading, an unquenchable fire of adventure flaming in his heart. Now, his aged but steady fingers rested lightly on the controls, brought the patrol cruiser closer to the cloud-banks on the line of demarcation between the sunward and sunless sides of the planet. He hummed tunelessly, strangely happy, as he peered ahead. "Val Kenton died there," Splinter whispered softly, "Died to save the lives of three other people!" Kerry Blane nodded. "Yes," he agreed, and his voice changed subtly. "Val was a blackguard, a criminal; but he died in the best traditions of the service." He sighed. "He never had a chance." "Murdered!" Kerry Blane smiled grimly. "I guess I used too broad an interpretation of the word," he said gently. "Anyway, one of our main tasks is to destroy the thing that killed him." His lean fingers tightened unconsciously. "I'd like nothing better than to turn a Zelta-blaster on that chunk of living protoplasm and cremate it." Splinters shivered slightly. "Do you think we'll find it?" he asked. Kerry Blane nodded. "I think it will find us; after all, it's just an animated appetite looking for food." He turned back to the controls, flipped a switch, and the cutting of the nose rocket dropped the ship in an angling glide toward the clouds a few miles below. Gravity was full strength now, and although not as great as Earth's, was still strong enough to bring a sense of giddiness to the men. "Here we go!" Splinter said tonelessly. The great cottony batts of roiling clouds rushed up to meet the ship, bringing the first sense of violent movement in more than a week of flying. There was something awesome and breath-taking in the speed with which the ship dropped toward the planet. Tendrils of vapor touched the ports, were whipped aside, then were replaced by heavier fingers of cloud. Kerry Blane pressed a firing stud, and nose rockets thrummed in a rising crescendo as the free fall of the cruiser was checked. Heat rose in the cabin from the friction of the outer air, then dissipated, as the force-screen voltometer leaped higher. Then, as though it had never been, the sun disappeared, and there was only a gray blankness pressing about the ship. Gone was all sense of movement, and the ship seemed to hover in a gray nothingness. Kerry Blane crouched over the control panel, his hands moving deftly, his eyes flicking from one instrument to another. Tiny lines of concentration etched themselves about his mouth, and perspiration beaded his forehead. He rode that cruiser through the miles of clouds through sheer instinctive ability, seeming to fly it as though he were an integral part of the ship. Splinter Wood watched him with awe in his eyes, seeing for the first time the incredible instinct that had made Kerry Blane the idol of a billion people. He relaxed visibly, all instinctive fear allayed by the brilliant competence of his companion. Seconds flowed into moments, and the moments merged into one another, and still the clouds pressed with a visible strength against the ports. The rockets drummed steadily, holding the ship aloft, dropping it slowly toward the planet below. Then the clouds thinned, and, incredibly, were permeated with a dim and glowing light. A second later, and the clouds were gone, and a thousand feet below tumbled and tossed in a majestic display of ruthless strength an ocean that seemed to be composed of liquid fluorescence. Kerry Blane heard Splinter's instant sigh of unbelief. "Good Lord!" Splinter said, "What—" His voice stilled, and he was silent, his eyes drinking in the weird incredible scene below. The ocean was a shifting, white-capped wash of silvery light that gleamed with a bright phosphorescence of a hundred, intermingled, kaleidoscopic colors. And the unreal, unearthly light continued unbroken everywhere, reflected from the low-hanging clouds, reaching to the far horizon, bathing every detail of the planet in a brilliance more bright than moonlight. Splinter turned a wondering face. "But the official reports say that there is no light on Venus," he exclaimed. "That was one of the reasons given when exploration was forbidden!" Kerry Blane nodded. "That was merely a pretext to keep foolhardy spacemen from losing their lives on the planet. In reality, the ocean is alive with an incredibly tiny marine worm that glows phosphorescently. The light generated from those billions of worms is reflected back from the clouds, makes Venus eternally lighted." He turned the ship to the North, relaxed a bit on the air bunk. He felt tired and worn, his body aching from the space bends of a few hours before. "Take over," he said wearily. "Take the ship North, and watch for any island." Splinter nodded, rested his long hands on the controls. The space cruiser lifted a bit in a sudden spurt of speed, and the rocket-sound was a solid thrum of unleashed power. Kerry Blane lit a cigarette, leaned toward a vision port. He felt again that thrill he had experienced when he had first flashed his single-man cruiser through the clouds years before. Then the breath caught in his throat, and he tapped his companion's arm. "Take a look!" he called excitedly. They fought in the ocean below, fought in a never-ending splashing of what seemed to be liquid fire. It was like watching a tri-dim screen of a news event, except for the utter lack of sound. One was scaly, while the other was skinned, and both were fully three hundred feet long. Great scimitars of teeth flashed in the light, and blood gouted and stained the water crimson whenever a slashing blow was struck. They threshed in a mad paroxysm of rage, whirling and spinning in the phosphorescent water like beings from a nightmare, exploding out of their element time and again, only to fall back in a gargantuan spray of fluorescence. And then the scaly monster flashed in a half-turn, drove forward with jaws agape, wrenched and ripped at the smooth black throat of the other creature. The second creature rippled and undulated in agony, whipping the ocean to foam, then went limp. The victorious monster circled the body of its dead foe, then, majestically, plunged from sight into the ocean's depths. An instant later, the water frothed, as hundreds of lesser marine monsters attacked and fed on the floating corpse. "Brrrr!" Splinter shivered in sudden horror. Kerry Blane chuckled dryly. "Feel like going for a swim?" he asked conversationally. Splinter shook his head, watched the scene disappear from view to the rear of the line of flight, then sank back onto his bunk. "Not me!" he said deprecatingly. Kerry Blane chuckled again, swung the cruiser toward the tiny smudge of black on the horizon. Glowing water flashed beneath the ship, seeming to smooth into a gleaming mirror shot with dancing colors. There was no sign of life anywhere. Thirty minutes later, Kerry Blane circled the island that floated free in the phosphorescent ocean. His keen eyes searched the tangled luxuriant growth of the jungle below, searching for some indication that the protoplasmic monster he seeked was there. "I don't see anything suspicious," Splinter contributed. "There's nothing special to see," Kerry Blane said shortly. "As I understand it, anyway, this chunk of animated appetite hangs around an island shaped like a turtle. However, our orders are to investigate every island, just in case there might be more than one of the monsters." Splinter buckled on his dis-gun, excitement flaring in his eyes. "Let's do a little exploring?" he said eagerly. Kerry Blane shook his head, swung the cruiser north again. "Plenty of time for that later," he said mildly. "We'll find this turtle-island, make a landing, and take a look around. Later, if we're lucky enough to blow our objective to Kingdom Come, we'll do a little exploring of the other islands." "Hell!" Splinter scowled in mock disgust. "An old woman like you should be taking in knitting for a living!" "Orders are orders!" Kerry Blane shrugged. He swung the cruiser in a wide arc to the north, trebling the flying speed within minutes, handling the controls with a familiar dexterity. He said nothing, searched the gleaming ocean for the smudge of blackness that would denote another island. His gaze flicked amusedly, now and then, to the lanky Splinter who scowled moodily and toyed with the dis-gun in his long hands. "Cheer up, lad," Kerry Blane said finally. "I think you'll find plenty to occupy your time shortly." "Maybe?" Splinter said gloomily. He idly swallowed another vitamin capsule, grinned, when he saw Kerry Blane's automatic grimace of distaste. Then he yawned hugely, twisted into a comfortable position, dozed sleepily. Kerry Blane rode the controls for the next three hours, searching the limitless ocean for the few specks of islands that followed the slow currents of the water planet. Always, there was the same misty light surrounding the ship, never dimming, giving a sense of unreality to the scene below. Nowhere was there the slightest sign of life until, in the fourth hour of flight, a tiny dot of blackness came slowly over the horizon's water line. Kerry Blane spun the ship in a tight circle, sent it flashing to the west. His keen eyes lighted, when he finally made out the turtle-like outline of the island, and he whistled softly, off-key, as he nudged the snoring Splinter. "This is it, Sleeping Beauty," he called. "Snap out of it!" "Huh? Whuzzat?" Splinter grunted, rolled to his elbow. "Here's the island." "Oh!" Splinter swung his feet from the bunk, peered from the vision port, sleepiness instantly erased from his face. "Hot damn!" he chortled. "Now we'll see a little action!" Kerry Blane grinned, tried to conceal the excitement he felt. He shook his head, his fingers flickering over the control studs. "Don't get your hopes too high, lad," he counseled. "With those super Zelta guns, it won't take ten minutes to wipe out that monster." Splinter rubbed his hands together, sighed like a boy seeing his first circus. "Listen, for ten minutes of that, I'd ride this chunk of metal for a year!" "Could be!" Kerry Blane agreed. He peered through the port, seeking any spot clear enough for a landing field. Except for a strip of open beach, the island was a solid mass of heavy fern-like growth. "Belt yourself," Kerry Blane warned. "If that beach isn't solid, I'll have to lift the ship in a hell of a hurry." "Right!" Splinter's fingers were all thumbs in his excitement. Kerry Blane set the controls for a shallow glide, his fingers moving like a concert pianist's. The cruiser yawed slightly, settled slowly in a flat shallow glide. "We're going in," Kerry Blane said quietly. He closed a knife switch, seeing too late the vitamin capsule that was lodged in the slot. There was the sharp splutter of a short-circuit, and a thin tendril of smoke drifted upward. "Damn!" Kerry Blane swore briefly. There was an instant, terrific explosion of the stern jets, and the cruiser hurtled toward the beach like a gravity-crazed comet. Kerry Blane said absolutely nothing, his breath driven from him by the suck of inertia. His hands darted for the controls, seeking to balance the forces that threw the ship about like a toy. He cut all rockets with a smashing swoop of his hand, tried to fire the bow rockets. But the short had ruined the entire control system. For one interminable second, he saw the uncanny uprush of the island below. He flicked his gaze about, saw the instant terror that wiped all other expression from his young companion's face. Then the cruiser plowed into the silvery sand. Belts parted like rotten string; they were thrown forward with crushing force against the control panel. They groped feebly for support, their bodies twisting involuntarily, as the ship cartwheeled a dozen times in a few seconds. Almost instantly, consciousness was battered from them. With one final, grinding bounce, the cruiser rolled to its side, twisted over and over for a hundred yards, then came to a metal-ripping stop against a moss-grown boulder at the water's edge. III Kerry Blane choked, tried to turn his head from the water that trickled into his face. He opened his eyes, stared blankly, uncomprehendingly into the bloody features of the man bending over him. "What happened?" he gasped. Splinter Wood laughed, almost hysterically, mopped at his forehead with a wet handkerchief. "I thought you were dead!" he said simply. Kerry Blane moved his arm experimentally, felt broken bones grate in an exquisite wave of pain. He fought back the nausea, gazed about the cabin, realized the ship lay on its side. "Maybe I am," he said ruefully. "No man could live through that crash." Splinter moved away, sat down tiredly on the edge of a bunk. He shook his head dazedly, inspected the long cut on his leg. "We seem to have done it," he said dully. Kerry Blane nodded, clambered to his feet, favoring his broken arm. He leaned over the control panel, inspecting the dials with a worried gaze. Slowly, his eyes lightened, and his voice was almost cheerful as he swung about. "Everything is more or less okay," he said. "The board will have to be rewired, but nothing else seems to be damaged so that repairs are needed." Splinter looked up from his task of bandaging his leg. "What caused the crash?" he asked. "One minute, everything was all right; the next, Blooey!" Anger suddenly mottled Kerry Blane's face; he swore monotonously and bitterly for a moment. "Those gol-damned pills you been taking caused the crash!" he roared. "One of them broke and shorted out the control board." He scowled at the incredulous Splinter. "By the three tails of a Martian sand-pup, I ought to cram the rest of them down your throat, boxes and all!" Splinter flushed, seemed to be fumbling for words. After a bit, Kerry Blane grinned. "Forget it, lad," he said more kindly, "those things happen. Now, if you'll bind a splint about my arm, we'll see what we can do about righting the ship." Splinter nodded, opened the medical locker, worked with tape and splints for minutes. Great beads of perspiration stood out in high relief on Kerry Blane's forehead, but he made no sound. At last, Splinter finished, tucked the supplies away. "Now what?" he asked subduedly. "Let's take a look outside, maybe set up the Zelta guns. Can't tell but what that protoplasmic nightmare might take a notion to pay us a visit in the near future!" "Right!" Splinter unscrewed the port cogs, swung the portal back. He swung lithely from the portal, reached down a hand to help the older man. After much puffing and grunting, Kerry Blane managed to clamber through the port. They stood for a moment in silent wonder, staring at the long lazy rollers of milky fluorescence that rolled endlessly toward the beach, then turned to gaze at the great fern-like trees that towered two hundred feet into the air. "How big do you feel now?" Kerry Blane asked quietly. Splinter Wood was silent, awed by the beauty and the tremendous size of the growths on the water world. Kerry Blane walked the length of the cruiser, examining the slight damage done by the crash, evaluating the situation with a practiced gaze. He nodded slowly, retraced his steps, and stood looking at the furrow plowed in the sand. "Won't be any trouble at all to lift the ship," he called. "After rewiring the board, we'll turn the ship with an underjet, swing it about, and head her toward the sea." Splinter nodded, dropped into the open port. A moment later, he flipped a rope ladder outside, where it dangled to the ground, then climbed out himself, carrying the two Zelta guns. "We'd better test these," he said. "We don't want any slip-ups when we do go into action." He climbed down the ladder, laid the guns aside, then reached up a hand to aid Kerry Blane's descent. Kerry Blane came down slowly and awkwardly, jumped the last few feet. He felt surprisingly light and strong in the lesser gravity. He stood, leaning against the ship, watching as Splinter picked up the first gun and leveled it at a gigantic tree. Splinter sighted carefully, winked at the older man, then pressed the firing stud. Nothing happened; there was no hissing crackle of released energy. Kerry Blane strode forward, puzzlement on his lined face, his hand out-stretched toward the defective weapon. Splinter gaped at the gun in his hands, held it out wordlessly. "The crash must have broken something," Kerry Blane said slowly. Splinter shook his head. "There's only one moving part," he said, "and that's the force gate on the firing stud." "Try the other," Kerry Blane said slowly. "Okay!" Splinter lifted the second gun, pressed the stud, gazed white-faced at his companion. "It won't work, either," he said stupidly. "I don't get it? The source of power is limitless. Solar rays never—" Old Kerry Blane dropped the first gun to his side, swore harshly. "Damn it," he said. "They didn't think of it; you didn't think of it; and I most certainly forgot! Solar rays can't penetrate the miles of clouds on Venus. Those guns are utterly useless as weapons!"

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STRANGER FROM SPACE By HANNES BOK She prayed that a God would come from the skies and carry her away to bright adventures. But when he came in a metal globe, she knew only disappointment—for his godliness was oddly strange! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] It was twilight on Venus—the rusty red that the eyes notice when their closed lids are raised to light. Against the glow, fantastically twisted trees spread claws of spiky leaves, and a group of clay huts thrust up sharp edges of shadow, like the abandoned toy blocks of a gigantic child. There was no sign of clear sky and stars—the heavens were roofed by a perpetual ceiling of dust-clouds. A light glimmered in one of the huts. Feminine voices rippled across the clearing and into the jungle. There was laughter, then someone's faint and wistful sigh. One of the voices mourned, in the twittering Venusian speech, "How I envy you, Koroby! I wish I were being married tonight, like you!" Koroby stared defiantly at the laughing faces of her bridesmaids. She shrugged hopelessly. "I don't care," she said slowly. "It will be nice to have Yasak for a husband—yes. And perhaps I do love him. I don't know." She tightened her lips as she reflected on it. She left them, moving gracefully to the door. Venus-girls were generally of truly elfin proportions, so delicately slim that they seemed incapable of the slightest exertion. But Koroby's body was—compared to her friends'—voluptuous. She rested against the door-frame, watching the red of the afterglow deepen to purple. "I want romance," she said, so softly that the girls had to strain forward to hear her. "I wish that there were other worlds than this—and that someone would drop out of the skies and claim me ... and take me away from here, away from all this—this monotony!" She turned back to her friends, went to them, one of her hands, patting the head of the kneeling one. She eyed herself in the mirror. "Well—heigh-ho! There don't seem to be any other worlds, and nobody is going to steal me away from Yasak, so I might as well get on with my preparations. The men with the litter will be here soon to carry me to the Stone City." She ran slim hands down her sides, smoothing the blue sarong; she fondled her dark braids. "Trossa, how about some flowers at my ears—or do you think that it would look a little too much—?" Her eyes sought the mirror, and her lips parted in an irreprehensible smile. She trilled softly to herself, "Yes, I am beautiful tonight—the loveliest woman Yasak will ever see!" And then, regretfully, sullenly, "But oh, if only He would come ... the man of my dreams!" There was a rap at the doorway; they turned. One of the litter-bearers loomed darker than the gloomy sky. "Are you ready?" he asked. Koroby twirled before the mirror, criticizing her appearance. "Yes, ready," she said. "Ready!" the girls cried. Then there was a little silence. "Shall we go now?" Koroby asked, and the litter-carrier nodded. Koroby kissed the girls, one after another. "Here, Shonka—you can have this bracelet you've always liked. And this is for you, Lolla. And here, Trossa—and you, Shia. Goodbye, darlings, goodbye—come and see me whenever you can!" "Goodbye, Koroby!" "Goodbye! Goodbye!" They crowded around her, embracing, babbling farewells, shreds of advice. Trossa began to cry. Finally Koroby broke away from them, went to the door. She took a last look at the interior of the little hut, dim in the lamplight—at the hard bed of laced gnau -hide strips, the crude but beautifully-carved charts and chests. Then she turned and stepped out into the night. "This way," the litter-carrier announced, touching the girl's arm. They stumbled over the rutted clearing toward the twinkling sparks that were the lights of the other litter-bearers, colored sparks as befitted a wedding-conveyance. The winking lights were enclosed in shells of colored glass for another reason—the danger of their firing the papery jungle verdure. It was not a new litter, built especially for the occasion—Yasak was too practical a man to sanction any kind of waste. It was the same old litter that Koroby had been watching come and go ever since she was a little girl, a canopied framework of gaudily-painted carvings. She had wondered, watching it pass, whether its cushioned floor was soft, and now, as she stepped into the litter, she patted the padding experimentally. Yes, it was soft .... And fragrant, too—a shade too fragrant. It smelled stale, hinting of other occupants, other brides being borne to other weddings.... Garlands of flowers occupied a good deal of space in it. Settled among them, she felt like a bird in a strange nest. She leaned back among them; they rustled dryly. Too bad—it had been such a dry year— "You're comfortable?" the litter bearer asked. Koroby nodded, and the litter was lifted, was carried along the path. The procession filed into the jungle, into a tunnel of arched branches, of elephant-eared leaves. Above the monotonous music came the hiss of the torches, the occasional startled cry of a wakened bird. The glow of the flames, in the dusty air, hung around the party, sharply defined, like a cloak of light. At times a breeze would shake the ceiling of foliage, producing the sound of rolling surf. Koroby fingered the flowers around her throat, her eyes rapt on the passing trees. Her lips moved in the barest murmur: "If only—!" and again, "Oh, if only—!" But the music trickled on, and nothing happened; the litter seemed to float along—none of the bearers even stumbled. They came to a cleared space of waist-high grass. It was like a canyon steeply walled by cliffs of verdure. The litter jerked as it glided along, and Koroby heard one of the bearers exclaim gruffly, "Listen!" Then the litter resumed its dream-like floating on the backs of the men. "What was it?" another bearer asked. "Thought I heard something," the other replied. "Shrill and high—like something screaming—" Koroby peered out. "A gnau ?" she asked. "I don't know," the bearer volunteered. Koroby lifted a hand. "Stop the litter," she said. The conveyance halted. Koroby leaning out, the men peering around them, they listened. One of the bearers shouted at the musicians; the music ceased. There was nothing to be heard except the whisper of the breeze in the grass. Then the girl heard it—a shrill, distant whine, dying away, then growing louder—and louder—it seemed to be approaching—from the sky— All the faces were lifted up now, worriedly. The whine grew louder—Koroby's hands clenched nervously on the wreaths at her throat— Then, far ahead, a series of bright flashes, like the lightning of the dust-storms, but brilliantly green. A silence, then staccatto reports, certainly not thunder—unlike any sound that Koroby had ever heard. There was a babble of voices as the musicians crowded together, asking what had it been, and where—just exactly—could one suppose it had happened, that thunder—was it going to storm! They waited, but nothing further happened—there were no more stabs of green light nor detonations. The bearers stooped to lift the litter's poles to their shoulders. "Shall we go on?" one of them asked Koroby. She waved a hand. "Yes, go on." The litter resumed its gentle swaying, but the music did not start again. Then, from the direction of the light-flashes, a glow appeared, shining steadily, green as the flashes had been. Noticing it, Koroby frowned. Then the path bent, and the glow swung to one side. Suddenly Koroby reached out, tapped the shoulder of the closet bearer. "Go toward the light." His face swung up to hers. "But—there's no path that way—" "I don't care," she said. "Take me there." Her order had reached the others' ears, and they slowed their pace. "Lady—believe me—it's impossible. There's nothing but matted jungle in that direction—we'd have to hack our way as we go along. And who knows how far away that light is? Besides, you're on your way to be married." "Take me to that light!" she persisted. They set the litter down. "We can't do that," one man said to another. Koroby stepped out to the path, straightened up, her eyes on the glow. "You'd better," she said ominously. "Otherwise, I'll make a complaint to Yasak—" The men eyed each other, mentally shrugging. "Well—" one yielded. The girl whirled impatiently on the others. "Hurry!" she cried. "If you won't take me, I'll go by myself. I must get to that fire, whatever it is!" She put a hand to her heart. "I must! I must!" Then she faced the green glare again, smiling to herself. "You can't do that!" a carrier cried. "Well, then, you take me," she said over her shoulder. Grumbling, they bent to the conveyance's poles, and Koroby lithely slipped to the cushions. They turned off the path, plodded through the deep grass toward the light. The litter lurched violently as their feet caught in the tangled grass, and clouds of fine dust arose from the disturbed blades. By the time they reached the source of the light, they were quite demoralized. The musicians had not accompanied them, preferring to carry the message to Yasak in the Stone City that his prospective bride had gone off on a mad journey. The bearers were powdered grey with dust, striped with blood where the dry grass-stems had cut them. They were exhausted and panting. Koroby was walking beside them, for they had abandoned the litter finally. Her blue drapery was ripped and rumpled; her carefully-arranged braids had fallen loose; dust on her face had hid its youthful color, aging her. The expedition emerged from the jungle on a sandy stretch of barren land. A thousand feet away a gigantic metal object lay on the sand, crumpled as though it had dropped from a great distance. It had been globular before the crash, and was pierced with holes like windows. What could it possibly be? A house? But whoever heard of a metal house? Why, who could forge such a thing! Yasak's house in the City had iron doors, and they were considered one of the most wonderful things of the age. It would take a giant to make such a ponderous thing as this. A house, fallen from the sky? The green lights poured out of its crumpled part, and a strange bubbling and hissing filled the air. Koroby stopped short, clasping her hands and involuntarily uttering a squeal of joyful excitement, for between her and the blaze, his eyes on the destruction, stood a man..... He was very tall, and his shoulders were very wide. Oh, but he looked like a man, and stood like one—even though his hands were folded behind his back and he was probably dejected. A man in a house from the sky— Koroby hastily grasped a corner of her gown, moistened it with saliva, and scrubbed her face. She rearranged her hair, and stepped forward. "Don't go there—it's magic—he'll cast a spell—!" one of the bearers whispered urgently, reaching after her, but Koroby pushed him away. The litter-carriers watched the girl go, unconsciously huddling together as if feeling the need for combined strength. They withdrew into the jungle's shadows, and waited there anxiously, ready at any moment to run away. But Koroby, with supreme confidence, walked toward the stranger, her lovely body graceful as a cat's, her face radiant. The man did not hear her. She halted behind him, waited silent, expectant, excited—but he did not turn. The green fire sputtered upward. At last the girl stepped to the man's side and gently touched him again. He turned, and her heart faltered: she swayed with bliss. He was probably a god. Not even handsome Yasak looked like this. Here was a face so finely-chiseled, so perfectly proportioned, that it was almost frightening, unhuman, mechanical. It was unlined and without expression, somehow unreal. Mysterious, compelling. He was clothed very peculiarly. A wonderfully-made metallic garment enclosed his whole body—legs and all, unlike the Venus-men's tunics. Even his feet were covered. Perhaps it was armor—though the Venus-men usually wore only breastplate and greaves. And a helmet hid all of the man's head except his face. Around his waist was a belt with many incomprehensible objects dangling from it. If he was so well armored, why was he not carrying a sword—a dagger at least! Of what use were those things on his belt—for instance, that notched L-shaped thing? It would not even make a decent club! The stranger did not speak, merely gazed deeply into Koroby's eyes. And she, returning the gaze, wondered if he was peering into her very soul. The words of a folk-ballad came to her: "—He'll smile and touch my cheek, And maybe more; And though we'll neither speak, We'll know the score—" Suddenly he put his hands to her cheeks and bent close to her, his eyes peering into hers as though he were searching for something he had lost in them. She spoke her thought: "What are you doing? You seem to be reading my mind!" Without removing hands, he nodded. "Reading—mind." He stared long into her eyes. His dispassionate, too-perfect face began to frighten her. She slipped back from him, her hand clutching her throat. He straightened up and spoke—haltingly at first, then with growing assurance. "Don't be afraid. I mean you no harm." She trembled. It was such a wonderful voice—it was as she had always dreamed it! But she had never really believed in the dream.... He was looking at the wrecked globe of metal. "So there are people on Venus!" he said slowly. Koroby watched him, forgot her fear, and went eagerly to him, took his arm. "Who are you?" she asked. "Tell me your name!" He turned his mask of a face to her. "My name? I have none," he said. "No name? But who are you? Where are you from? And what is that?" She pointed at the metal globe. "The vehicle by which I came here from a land beyond the sky," he said. She had no concept of stars or space, and he could not fully explain. "From a world known as Terra." She was silent a moment, stunned. So there was another world! Then she asked, "Is it far? Have you come to take me there?" Here the similarity between her dream and actual experience ended. What was he thinking as he eyed her for a long moment? She had no way of guessing. He said, "No, I am not going to take you back there." Her month gaped in surprise, and he continued, "As for the distance to Terra—it is incredibly far away." The glare was beginning to die, the green flames' hissing fading to a whisper. They watched the melting globe sag on the sand. Then Koroby said, "But if it is so far away, how could you speak my language? There are some tribes beyond the jungle whose language is unlike ours—" "I read your mind," he explained indifferently. "I have a remarkable memory." "Remarkable indeed!" she mocked. "No one here could do that." "But my race is infinitely superior to yours," he said blandly. "You little people—ah—" He gestured airily. Her lips tightened and her eyes narrowed. "And I?" His voice sounded almost surprised. "What about you?" "You see nothing about me worthy of your respect? Are you infinitely superior to me— me ?" He looked her up and down. "Of course!" Her eyes jerked wide open and she took a deep breath. "And just who do you think you are? A god?" He shook his head. "No. Just better informed, for one thing. And—" Koroby cut him short. "What's your name?" "I have none." "What do you mean, you have none?" He seemed just a trifle bored. "We gave up names long ago on my world. We are concerned with more weighty things than our own selves. But I have a personal problem now," he said, making a peculiar sound that was not quite a sigh. "Here I am stranded on Venus, my ship utterly wrecked, and I'm due at the Reisezek Convention in two weeks. You"—he gripped Koroby's shoulder, and his strength made her wince—"tell me, where is the nearest city? I must communicate with my people at once." She pointed. "The Stone City's that way." "Good," he said. "Let's go there." They took another glance at the metal globe and the green fire, which by now had died to a fitful glimmer. Then the stranger and the girl started toward the jungle, where the litter-bearers awaited them. As the party was struggling through the prairie's tall grass, the man said to Koroby, "I realize from the pictures in your mind that there is no means in your city of communicating directly with my people. But it seems that there are materials which I can utilize in building a signal—" He was walking along, head erect, apparently quite at ease, while the litter bearers and Koroby could barely drag themselves with him. The girl's garment was a tattered ruin. Her skin was gritty with dust, and she was bleeding from many scratches. She tripped over tangled roots and exclaimed in pain. Then the man took one of the strange implements from his belt, pressed a knob on it, and light appeared as if by magic! He handed the stick to Koroby, but she was afraid to touch it. This was a strange light that gave no heat, nor flickered in the breeze. Finally she accepted it from him, but carried it gingerly at arm's length. She refused to believe that he had no name, and so he named himself. "Call me Robert. It is an ancient name on Terra." "Robert," she said, and, "Robert." But at last she could go no farther. She had forced herself along because she wanted to impress this indifferent man that she was not as inferior as he might think—but now she could not go on. With a little cry almost of relief, she sank to the ground and lay semi-conscious, so weary that the very pain of it seemed on the point of pleasure. Robert dipped down, scooped her up, and carried her. Lights glimmered ahead; shouts reached them. It was a searching party, Yasak in it. The litter-carriers who could still speak blurted out what had happened. "A green light—loud sounds—fire—this man there—" and then dropped into sleep. "Someone carry these men," Yasak ordered. To Robert he said, "We're not very far from the path to the City now. Shall I carry the girl?" "It makes no difference," Robert said. "You will stay with me while you are in the City, of course," Yasak said, as they walked. He eyed this handsome stranger speculatively, and then turned to shout an necessary order. "You, there, keep in line!" He glanced at Robert furtively to see if this had impressed him at all. It was day. Koroby sat up in bed and scanned her surroundings. She was in Yasak's house. The bed was very soft, the coverlets of the finest weave. The furniture was elegantly carved and painted; there were even paintings on the walls. A woman came to the bed. She was stocky and wore drab grey: the blue circles tattooed on her cheeks proclaimed her a slave. "How do you feel?" she asked. "Fairly well. How long have I been ill?" Koroby asked, sweetly weak. "You haven't been ill. They brought you in last night." "Oh," Koroby said disappointedly, and sat upright. "I feel as if I'd been lying here for weeks. Where's Yasak? Where's the strange man in armor?" "Yasak's out somewhere. The stranger man is in the room at the end of the hall." "Fetch me something to wear—that's good enough," the girl accepted the mantle offered by the slave. "Quick, some water—I must wash." In a few minutes she was lightly running down the hall; she knocked on the door of Robert's room. "May I come in?" He did not answer. She waited a little and went in. He was seated on one of the carved chairs, fussing over some scraps of metal on the table. He did not look up. "Thank you for carrying me, Robert." He did not reply. "Robert—I dreamed of you last night. I dreamed you built another round house and that we both flew away in it. Yasak had to stay behind, and he was furious. Robert! Aren't you listening?" "I hear you." "Don't you think it was an exciting dream?" He shook his head. "But why? Robert"—she laid longing hands on his shoulders—"can't you see that I'm in love with you?" He shrugged. "I believe you don't know what love is!" "I had a faint idea of it when I looked into your mind," he said. "I'm afraid I haven't any use for it. Where I come from there is no love, and there shouldn't be here, either. It's a waste of time." "Robert—I'm mad about you! I've dreamed of your coming—all my life! Don't be so cruel—so cold to me! You mock me, say that I'm nothing, that I'm not worthy of you—" She stepped back from him, clenching her hands. "Oh, I hate you—hate you! You don't care the least bit about me—and I've shamed myself in front of you—I, supposed to be Yasak's wife by now!" She began to cry, hid her face in suddenly lax fingers. She looked up fiercely. "I could kill you!" Robert stood immobile, no trace of feeling marring the perfection of his face. "I could kill you, and I will kill you!" she sprang at him. "You'll hurt yourself," he admonished kindly, and after she had pummeled his chest, bruising her fingers on his armor, she turned away. "And now if you're through playing your incomprehensible little scene," Robert said, "I hope you will excuse me. I regret that I have no emotions—I was never allowed them. But it is an esthetic regret.... I must go back to my wrecked ship now and arrange the signals there." He did not wait for her leave, but strode out of the room. Koroby huddled on a chair, sobbing. Then she dried her eyes on the backs of her hands. She went to the narrow slits that served as windows and unfastened the translucent shutter of one. Down in the City street, Robert was walking away. Her eyes hardened, and her fingers spread into ugly claws. Without bothering to pull the shutter in place she hurried out of the room, ran eagerly down the hall. She stopped at the armor-rack at the main hall on her way outside, and snatched up a siatcha —a firestone. Then she slipped outside and down the street. The City's wall was not far behind. Robert was visible in the distance, striding toward his sky-ship, a widening cloud of dust rising behind him like the spreading wake of a boat. Koroby stood on tip-toe, waving and calling after him, "Robert! Robert! Come back!" but he did not seem to hear. She watched him a little longer. Then she deliberately stooped and drew the firestone out of its sheath. She touched it to a blade of the tall grass. A little orange flame licked up, slowly quested along the blade, down to the ground and up another stem. It slipped over to another stem, and another, growing larger, hotter—Koroby stepped back from the writhing fire, her hand protectively over her face. The flames crackled at first—like the crumpling of thin paper. Then, as they widened and began climbing hand over hand up an invisible ladder, they roared. Koroby was running back toward the City now, away from the heat. The fire spread in a long line over the prairie. Above its roar came shouts from the City. The flames rose in a monstrous twisting pillar, brighter than even the dust-palled sky, lighting the buildings and the prairie. The heat was dreadful. Koroby reached the City wall, panted through the gate into a shrieking crowd. Someone grasped her roughly—she was too breathless to do more than gasp for air—and shook her violently. "You fool, you utter fool! What did you think you were doing?" Others clamored around her, reaching for her. Then she heard Yasak's voice. Face stern, he pushed through the crowd, pressed her to him. "Let her alone—Let her alone, I say!" They watched the conflagration, Yasak and Koroby, from a higher part of the wall than where the others were gathered. They could glimpse Robert now and then. He was running, trying to outrace the flames. Then they swept around him, circling him—his arms flailed frantically. The fire had passed over the horizon. The air was blue with smoke, difficult to breathe, and ashes were drifting lightly down like dove-colored snow. Yasak, watery eyed, a cloth pressed to his nose, was walking with several others over the smoking earth and still warm ashes up to his knees. In one hand he held a stick. He stopped and pointed. "He fell about here," he said, and began to probe the ashes with the stick. He struck something. "Here he is!" he cried. The others hurried to the spot and scooped ashes away, dog-fashion, until Robert's remains were laid clear. There were exclamations of amazement and perplexity from the people. It was a metal skeleton, and the fragments of complicated machinery, caked with soot. "He wasn't human at all!" Yasak marvelled. "He was some kind of a toy made to look like a man—that's why he wore armor, and his face never changed expression—" "Magic!" someone cried, and backed away. "Magic!" the others repeated, and edged back ... and that was the end of one of those robots which had been fashioned as servants for Terrestial men, made in Man's likeness to appease Man's vanity, then conquered him.

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MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE THRID BY MURRAY LEINSTER The Thrid were the wisest creatures in space—they even said so themselves! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I The real trouble was that Jorgenson saw things as a business man does. But also, and contradictorily, he saw them as right and just, or as wrong and intolerable. As a business man, he should have kept his mind on business and never bothered about Ganti. As a believer in right and wrong, it would have been wiser for him to have stayed off the planet Thriddar altogether. Thriddar was no place for him, anyhow you look at it. On this particular morning it was especially the wrong place for him to be trying to live and do business. He woke up thinking of Ganti, and in consequence he was in a bad mood right away. Most humans couldn't take the sort of thing that went on on Thriddar. Most of them wanted to use missile weapons—which the Thrid did not use—to change the local social system. Most humans got off Thriddar—fast! And boiling mad. Jorgenson had stood it longer than most because in spite of their convictions he liked the Thrid. Their minds did do outside loops, and come up with intolerable convictions. But they were intelligent enough. They had steam-power and even steam-driven atmosphere fliers, but they didn't have missile weapons and they did have a social system that humans simply couldn't accept—even though it applied only to Thrid. The ordinary Thrid, with whom Jorgenson did business, weren't bad people. It was the officials who made him grind his teeth. And though it was his business only to run the trading post of the Rim Stars Trading Corporation, sometimes he got fed up. This morning was especially beyond the limit. There was a new Grand Panjandrum—the term was Jorgenson's own for the supreme ruler over all the Thrid—and when Jorgenson finished his breakfast a high Thrid official waited in the trading-post compound. Around him clustered other Thrid, wearing the formal headgear that said they were Witnesses to an official act. Jorgenson went out, scowling, and exchanged the customary ceremonial greetings. Then the high official beamed at him and extracted a scroll from his voluminous garments. Jorgenson saw the glint of gold and was suspicious at once. The words of a current Grand Panjandrum were always written in gold. If they didn't get written in gold they didn't get written at all; but it was too bad if anybody ignored any of them. The high official unrolled the scroll. The Thrid around him, wearing Witness hats, became utterly silent. The high official made a sound equivalent to clearing his throat. The stillness became death-like. "On this day," intoned the high official, while the Witnesses listened reverently, "on this day did Glen-U the Never-Mistaken, as have been his predecessors throughout the ages;—on this day did the Never-Mistaken Glen-U speak and say and observe a truth in the presence of the governors and the rulers of the universe." Jorgenson reflected sourly that the governors and the rulers of the universe were whoever happened to be within hearing of the Grand Panjandrum. They were not imposing. They were scared. Everybody is always scared under an absolute ruler, but the Grand Panjandrum was worse than that. He couldn't make a mistake. Whatever he said had to be true, because he said it, and sometimes it had drastic results. But past Grand Panjandrums had spoken highly of the trading post. Jorgenson shouldn't have much to worry about. He waited. He thought of Ganti. He scowled. "The great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U," intoned the official again, "in the presence of the governors and the rulers of the universe, did speak and say and observe that it is the desire of the Rim Star Trading Corporation to present to him, the great and never-mistaken Glen-U, all of the present possessions of the said Rim Stars Trading Corporation, and thereafter to remit to him all moneys, goods, and benefactions to and of the said Rim Stars Trading Corporation as they shall be received. The great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U did further speak and say and observe that anyone hindering this loyal and admirable gift must, by the operation of truth, vanish from sight and nevermore be seen face to face by any rational being." The high official rolled up the scroll, while Jorgenson exploded inside. A part of this was reaction as a business man. A part was recognition of all the intolerable things that the Thrid took as a matter of course. If Jorgenson had reacted solely as a business man he'd have swallowed it, departed on the next Rim Stars trading-ship—which would not have left any trade-goods behind—and left the Grand Panjandrum to realize what he had lost when no off-planet goods arrived on Thriddar. In time he'd speak and say and observe that he, out of his generosity, gave the loot back. Then the trading could resume. But Jorgenson didn't feel only like a business man this morning. He thought of Ganti, who was a particular case of everything he disliked on Thriddar. It was not wise to be moved by such sympathetic feelings. The Grand Panjandrum could not be mistaken. It was definitely unwise to contradict him. It could even be dangerous. Jorgenson was in a nasty spot. The Witnesses murmured reverently: "We hear the words of the Never-Mistaken Glen-U." The high official tucked away the scroll and said blandly: "I will receive the moneys, goods, and benefactions it is the desire of the Rim Stars Trading Corporation to present to the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U." Jorgenson, boiling inside, nevertheless knew what he was doing. He said succinctly: "Like hell you will!" There was an idiom in Thrid speech that had exactly the meaning of the human phrase. Jorgenson used it. The high official looked at him in utter stupefaction. Nobody contradicted the Grand Panjandrum! Nobody! The Thrid had noticed long ago that they were the most intelligent race in the universe. Since that was so, obviously they must have the most perfect government. But no government could be perfect if its officials made mistakes. So no Thrid official ever made a mistake. In particular the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U could not conceivably blunder! When he said a thing, it was true! It had to be! He'd said it! And this was the fundamental fact in the culture of the Thrid. "Like hell you'll receive moneys and goods and such!" snapped Jorgenson. "Like hell you will!" The high official literally couldn't believe his ears. "But—but the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U—" "Is mistaken!" said Jorgenson bitingly. "He's wrong! The Rim Stars Trading Corporation does not want to give him anything! What he has said is not true!" This was the equivalent of treason, blasphemy and the ultimate of indecorous behavior toward a virgin Pelean princess. "I won't give him anything! I'm not even vanishing from sight! Glen-U is wrong about that, too! Now—git!" He jerked out his blaster and pulled the trigger. There was an explosive burst of flame from the ground between the official and himself. The official fled. With him fled all the Witnesses, some even losing their headgear in their haste to get away. Jorgenson stamped into the trading-post building. His eyes were stormy and his jaw was set. He snapped orders. The hired Thrid of the trading-post staff had not quite grasped the situation. They couldn't believe it. Automatically, as he commanded the iron doors and shutters of the trading post closed, they obeyed. They saw him turn on the shocker-field so that nobody could cross the compound without getting an electric shock that would discourage him. They began to believe. Then he sent for the trading-post Thrid consultant. On Earth he'd have called for a lawyer. On a hostile world there'd have been a soldier to advise him. On Thrid the specialist to be consulted wasn't exactly a theologian, but he was nearer that than anything else. Jorgenson laid the matter indignantly before him, repeating the exact phrases that said the trading company wanted—wanted!—practically to give itself to the Never-Mistaken Glen-U, who was the Grand Panjandrum of Thriddar. He waited to be told that it couldn't have happened; that anyhow it couldn't be intended. But the theologian's Thriddish ears went limp, which amounted to the same thing as a man's face turning pale. He stammered agitatedly that if the Grand Panjandrum said it, it was true. It couldn't be otherwise! If the trading company wanted to give itself to him, there was nothing to be done. It wanted to! The Grand Panjandrum had said so! "He also said," said Jorgenson irritably, "that I'm to vanish and nevermore be seen face to face by any rational being. How does that happen? Do I get speared?" The trading-post theologian quivered. Jorgenson made things much worse. "This," he raged, "this is crazy! The Grand Panjandrum's an ordinary Thrid just like you are! Of course he can make a mistake! There's nobody who can't be wrong!" The theologian put up feebly protesting, human-like hands. He begged hysterically to be allowed to go home before Jorgenson vanished, with unknown consequences for any Thrid who might be nearby. When Jorgenson opened a door to kick him out of it, the whole staff of the trading-post plunged after him. They'd been eavesdropping and they fled in pure horror. Jorgenson swore impartially at all of them and turned the shocker-field back on. He plugged in a capacity circuit which would turn on warning sirens if anything like a steam-driven copter passed or hovered over the trading-post. He put blasters in handy positions. The Thrid used only spears, knives and scimitars. Blasters would defend the post against a multitude. As a business man, he'd acted very foolishly. But he'd acted even less sensibly as a human being. He'd gotten fed up with a social system and a—call it—theology it wasn't his business to change. True, the Thrid way of life was appalling, and what had happened to Ganti was probably typical. But it wasn't Jorgenson's affair. He'd been unwise to let it disturb him. If the Thrid wanted things this way, it was their privilege. In theory, no Thrid should ever make a mistake, because he belonged to the most intelligent race in the universe. But a local governor was even more intelligent. If an ordinary Thrid challenged a local governor's least and lightest remark—why—he must be either a criminal or insane. The local governor decided—correctly, of course—which he was. If he was a criminal, he spent the rest of his life in a gang of criminals chained together and doing the most exhausting labor the Thrid could contrive. If he was mad, he was confined for life. There'd been Ganti, a Thrid of whom Jorgenson had had much hope. He believed that Ganti could learn to run the trading post without human supervision. If he could, the trading company could simply bring trade goods to Thriddar and take away other trade goods. The cost of doing business would be decreased. There could be no human-Thrid friction. Jorgenson had been training Ganti for this work. But the local Thrid governor had spoken and said and observed that Ganti's wife wanted to enter his household. He added that Ganti wanted to yield her to him. Jorgenson had fumed—but not as a business man—when the transfer took place. But Ganti had been conditioned to believe that when a governor said he wanted to do something, he did. He couldn't quite grasp the contrary idea. But he moped horribly, and Jorgenson talked sardonically to him, and he almost doubted that an official was necessarily right. When his former wife died of grief, his disbelief became positive. And immediately afterward he disappeared. Jorgenson couldn't find out what had become of him. Dour reflection on the happening had put him in the bad mood which had started things, this morning. Time passed. He had the trading-post in a position of defense. He prepared his lunch, and glowered. More time passed. He cooked his dinner, and ate. Afterward he went up on the trading-post roof to smoke and to coddle his anger. He observed the sunset. There was always some haze in the air on Thriddar, and the colorings were very beautiful. He could see the towers of the capital city of the Thrid. He could see a cumbersome but still graceful steam-driven aircraft descend heavily to the field at the city's edge. Later he saw another steam-plane rise slowly but reliably and head away somewhere else. He saw the steam helicopters go skittering above the city's buildings. He fumed because creatures intelligent enough to build steam fliers weren't intelligent enough to see what a racket their government was. Now that the new Grand Panjandrum had moved against him, Jorgenson made an angry, dogged resolution to do something permanent to make matters better. For the Thrid themselves. Here he thought not as a business man only, but as a humanitarian. As both. When a whim of the Grand Panjandrum could ruin a business, something should be done. And when Ganti and countless others had been victims of capricious tyranny.... And Jorgenson was slated to vanish from sight and never again be seen.... It definitely called for strong measures! He reflected with grim pleasure that the Grand Panjandrum would soon be in the position of a Thrid whom everybody knew was mistaken. With the trading-post denied him and Jorgenson still visible, he'd be notoriously wrong. And he couldn't be, and still be Grand Panjandrum! It would be a nice situation for Glen-U. He'd have to do something about it, and there was nothing he could do. He'd blundered, and it would soon be public knowledge. Jorgenson dozed lightly. Then more heavily. Then more heavily still. The night was not two hours old when the warning sirens made a terrific uproar. The Thrid for miles around heard the wailing, ullulating sound of the sirens that should have awakened Jorgenson. But they didn't wake him. He slept on. When he woke, he knew that he was cold. His muscles were cramped. Half awake, he tried to move and could not. Then he tried to waken fully, and he couldn't do that either. He stayed in a dream-like, frustrated state which was partly like a nightmare, while very gradually new sensations came to him. He felt a cushioned throbbing against his chest, in the very hard surface on which he lay face down. That surface swayed and rocked slightly. He tried again to move, and realized that his hands and feet were bound. He found that he shivered, and realized that his clothing had been taken from him. He was completely helpless and lying on his stomach in the cargo-space of a steam helicopter: now he could hear the sound of its machinery. Then he knew what had happened. He'd committed The unthinkable crime—or lunacy—of declaring the Grand Panjandrum mistaken. So by the operation of truth, which was really an anesthetic gas cloud drifted over the trading post, he had vanished from sight. Now it was evidently to be arranged that he would never again be seen face to face by a rational being. The Grand Panjandrum had won the argument. Within a few months a Rim Stars trading ship would land, and Jorgenson would be gone and the trading post confiscated. It would be hopeless to ask questions, and worse than hopeless to try to trade. So the ship would lift off and there'd be no more ships for at least a generation. Then there might—there might!—be another. Jorgenson swore fluently and with passion. "It will not be long," said a tranquil voice. Jorgenson changed from human-speech profanity to Thrid. He directed his words to the unseen creature who'd spoken. That Thrid listened, apparently without emotion. When Jorgenson ran out of breath, the voice said severely: "You declared the great and Never-Mistaken Glen-U mistaken. This could not be. It proved you either a criminal or insane, because no rational creature could believe him mistaken. He declared you insane, and he cannot be wrong. So soon you will arrive where you are to be confined and no rational being will ever see you face to face." Jorgenson switched back to human swearing. Then he blended both languages, using all the applicable words he knew both in human speech and Thrid. He knew a great many. The soft throbbing of the steam-driven rotors went on, and Jorgenson swore both as a business man and a humanitarian. Both were frustrated. Presently the motion of the copter changed. He knew the ship was descending. There were more violent swayings, as if from wind gusts deflected by something large and solid. Jorgenson even heard deep-bass rumblings like sea upon a rocky coast. Then there were movements near him, a rope went around his waist, a loading-bay opened and he found himself lifted and lowered through it. He dangled in midair, a couple of hundred feet above an utterly barren island on which huge ocean swells beat. The downdraft from the copter made him sway wildly, and once it had him spinning dizzily. The horizon was empty. He was being lowered swiftly to the island. And his hands and feet were still securely tied. Then he saw a figure on the island. It was a Thrid stripped of all clothing like Jorgenson and darkened by the sun. That figure came agilely toward where he was let down. It caught him. It checked his wild swingings, which could have broken bones. The rope slackened. The Thrid laid Jorgenson down. He did not cast off the rope. He seemed to essay to climb it. It was cut at the steam-copter and came tumbling down all over both of them. The Thrid waved his arms wildly and seemed to screech gibberish at the sky. There was an impact nearby, of something dropped. Jorgenson heard the throbbing sound of the copter as it lifted and swept away. Then he felt the bounds about his arms and legs being removed. Then a Thrid voice—amazingly, a familiar Thrid voice—said: "This is not good, Jorgenson. Who did you contradict?" The Thrid was Ganti, of whom Jorgenson had once had hopes as a business man, and for whose disaster he had felt indignation as something else. He loosened the last of Jorgenson's bonds and helped him sit up. Jorgenson glared around. The island was roughly one hundred feet by two. It was twisted, curdled yellow stone from one end to the other. There were stone hillocks and a miniature stony peak, and a narrow valley between two patches of higher rock. Huge seas boomed against the windward shore, throwing spray higher than the island's topmost point. There were some places where sand had gathered. There was one spot—perhaps a square yard of it—where sand had been made fertile by the droppings of flying things and where two or three starveling plants showed foliage of sorts. That was all. Jorgenson ground his teeth. "Go ahead," said Ganti grimly, "but it may be even worse than you think." He scrambled over the twisted stone of the island. He came back, carrying something. "It isn't worse," he said. "It's only as bad. They did drop food and water for both of us. I wasn't sure they would." His calmness sobered Jorgenson. As a business man, he was moved to make his situation clear. He told Ganti of the Grand Panjandrum's move to take over the Rim Stars trading post, which was bad business. He told of his own reaction, which was not a business-like one at all. Then he said dourly: "But he's still wrong. No rational being is supposed ever to see me face to face. But you do." "But I'm crazy," said Ganti calmly. "I tried to kill the governor who'd taken my wife. So he said I was crazy and that made it true. So I wasn't put in a chained group of laborers. Somebody might have seen me and thought about it. But, sent here, it's worse for me and I'm probably forgotten by now." He was calm about it. Only a Thrid would have been so calm. But they've had at least hundreds of generations in which to get used to injustice. He accepted it. But Jorgenson frowned. "You've got brains, Ganti. What's the chance of escape?" "None," said Ganti unemotionally. "You'd better get out of the sun. It'll burn you badly. Come along." He led the way over the bare, scorching rocky surface. He turned past a small pinnacle. There was shadow. Jorgenson crawled into it, and found himself in a cave. It was not a natural one. It had been hacked out, morsel by morsel. It was cool inside. It was astonishingly roomy. "How'd this happen?" demanded Jorgenson the business man. "This is a prison," Ganti explained matter-of-factly. "They let me down here and dropped food and water for a week. They went away. I found there'd been another prisoner here before me. His skeleton was in this cave. I reasoned it out. There must have been others before him. When there is a prisoner here, every so often a copter drops food and water. When the prisoner doesn't pick it up, they stop coming. When, presently, they have another prisoner they drop him off, like me, and he finds the skeleton of the previous prisoner, like me, and he dumps it overboard as I did. They'll drop food and water for me until I stop picking it up. And presently they'll do the same thing all over again." Jorgenson glowered. That was his reaction as a person. Then he gestured to the cave around him. There was a pile of dried-out seaweed for sleeping purposes. "And this?" "Somebody dug it out," said Ganti without resentment. "To keep busy. Maybe one prisoner only began it. A later one saw it started and worked on it to keep busy. Then others in their turn. It took a good many lives to make this cave." Jorgenson ground his teeth a second time. "And just because they'd contradicted somebody who couldn't be wrong! Or because they had a business an official wanted!" "Or a wife," agreed Ganti. "Here!" He offered food. Jorgenson ate, scowling. Afterward, near sundown, he went over the island. It was rock, nothing else. There was a pile of small broken stones from the excavation of the cave. There were the few starveling plants. There was the cordage with which Jorgenson had been lowered. There was the parcel containing food and water. Ganti observed that the plastic went to pieces in a week or so, so it couldn't be used for anything. There was nothing to escape with. Nothing to make anything to escape with. Even the dried seaweed bed was not comfortable. Jorgenson slept badly and waked with aching muscles. Ganti assured him unemotionally that he'd get used to it. He did. By the time the copter came to drop food and water again, Jorgenson was physically adjusted to the island. But neither as a business man or as a person could he adjust to hopelessness. He racked his brains for the most preposterous or faintest hope of deliverance. There were times when as a business man he reproached himself for staying on Thriddar after he became indignant with the way the planet was governed. It was very foolish. But much more often he felt such hatred of the manners and customs of the Thrid—which had put him here—that it seemed that something must somehow be possible if only so he could take revenge. III The copter came, it dropped food and water, and it went away. It came, dropped food and water, and went away. Once a water-bag burst when dropped. They lost nearly half a week's water supply. Before the copter came again they'd gone two days without drinking. There were other incidents, of course. The dried seaweed they slept on turned to powdery trash. They got more seaweed hauling long kelp-like strands of it ashore from where it clung to the island's submerged rocks. Ganti mentioned that they must do it right after the copter came, so there would be no sign of enterprise to be seen from aloft. The seaweed had long, flexible stems of which no use whatever could be made. When it dried, it became stiff and brittle but without strength. Once Ganti abruptly began to talk of his youth. As if he were examining something he'd never noticed before, he told of the incredible conditioning-education of the young members of his race. They learned that they must never make a mistake. Never! It did not matter if they were unskilled or inefficient. It did not matter if they accomplished nothing. There was no penalty for anything but making mistakes or differing from officials who could not make mistakes. So Thrid younglings were trained not to think; not to have any opinion about anything; only to repeat what nobody questioned; only to do what they were told by authority. It occurred to Jorgenson that on a planet with such a population, a skeptic could make a great deal of confusion. Then, another time, Jorgenson decided to make use of the weathering cord which had been cut from the copter when he was landed. He cut off a part of it with a sharp-edged fragment of stone from the pile some former prisoner on the island had made. He unravelled the twisted fibers. Then he ground fishhooks from shells attached to the island's rocky walls just below water-line. After that they fished. Sometimes they even caught something to eat. But they never fished when the copter was due. Jorgenson found that a fish-fillet, strongly squeezed and wrung like a wet cloth, would yield a drinkable liquid which was not salt and would substitute for water. And this was a reason to make a string bag in which caught fish could be let back into the sea so they were there when wanted but could not escape. They had used it for weeks when he saw Ganti, carrying it to place it where they left it overboard, swinging it idly back and forth as he walked. If Jorgenson had been only a businessman, it would have had no particular meaning. But he was also a person, filled with hatred of the Thrid who had condemned him for life to this small island. He saw the swinging of the fish. It gave him an idea. He did not speak at all during all the rest of that day. He was thinking. The matter needed much thought. Ganti left him alone. But by sunset he'd worked it out. While they watched Thrid's red sun sink below the horizon, Jorgenson said thoughtfully: "There is a way to escape, Ganti." "On what? In what?" demanded Ganti. "In the helicopter that feeds us," said Jorgenson. "It never lands," said Ganti practically. "We can make it land," said Jorgenson. Thrid weren't allowed to make mistakes; he could make it a mistake not to land. "The crew is armed," said Ganti. "There are three of them." "They've only knives and scimitars," said Jorgenson. "They don't count. We can make better weapons than they have." Ganti looked skeptical. Jorgenson explained. He had to demonstrate crudely. The whole idea was novel to Ganti, but the Thrid were smart. Presently he grasped it. He said: "I see the theory. If we can make it work, all right. But how do we make the copter land?" Jorgenson realized that they talked oddly. They spoke with leisurely lack of haste, with the lack of hope normal to prisoners to whom escape is impossible, even when they talk about escape. They could have been discussing a matter that would not affect either of them. But Jorgenson quivered inside. He hoped. "We'll try it," said Ganti detachedly, when he'd explained again. "If it fails, they'll only stop giving us food and water." That, of course, did not seem either to him or Jorgenson a reason to hesitate to try what Jorgenson had planned. It was not at all a direct and forthright scheme. It began with the untwisting of more of the rope that had lowered Jorgenson. It went on with the making of string from that fiber. They made a great deal of string. Then, very clumsily and awkwardly, they wove strips of cloth, a couple of inches wide and five or six long. They made light strong cords extend from the ends of the cloth strips. Then they practiced with these bits of cloth and the broken stones a former prisoner had piled so neatly. The copter came and dropped food and water. When it left, they practiced. When it came again they were not practicing, but when it went away they practiced. They were a naked man and a naked Thrid, left upon a morsel of rock in a boundless sea, rehearsing themselves in an art so long-forgotten that they had to reinvent the finer parts of the technique. They experimented. They tried this. They tried that. When the copter appeared, they showed themselves. They rushed upon the dropped bag containing food and water as if fiercely trying to deny each other a full share. Once they seemed to fight over the dropped bag. The copter hovered to watch. The fight seemed furious and deadly, but inconclusive. When the copter went away Jorgenson and Ganti went briskly back to their practicing.

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THE STAR-SENT KNAVES BY KEITH LAUMER Illustrated by Gaughan [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of Tomorrow June 1963 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] When the Great Galactic Union first encounters Earth ... is this what is going to happen? I Clyde W. Snithian was a bald eagle of a man, dark-eyed, pot-bellied, with the large, expressive hands of a rug merchant. Round-shouldered in a loose cloak, he blinked small reddish eyes at Dan Slane's travel-stained six foot one. "Kelly here tells me you've been demanding to see me." He nodded toward the florid man at his side. He had a high, thin voice, like something that needed oiling. "Something about important information regarding safeguarding my paintings." "That's right, Mr. Snithian," Dan said. "I believe I can be of great help to you." "Help how? If you've got ideas of bilking me...." The red eyes bored into Dan like hot pokers. "Nothing like that, sir. Now, I know you have quite a system of guards here—the papers are full of it—" "Damned busybodies! Sensation-mongers! If it wasn't for the press, I'd have no concern for my paintings today!" "Yes sir. But my point is, the one really important spot has been left unguarded." "Now, wait a minute—" Kelly started. "What's that?" Snithian cut in. "You have a hundred and fifty men guarding the house and grounds day and night—" "Two hundred and twenty-five," Kelly snapped. "—but no one at all in the vault with the paintings," Slane finished. "Of course not," Snithian shrilled. "Why should I post a man in the vault? It's under constant surveillance from the corridor outside." "The Harriman paintings were removed from a locked vault," Dan said. "There was a special seal on the door. It wasn't broken." "By the saints, he's right," Kelly exclaimed. "Maybe we ought to have a man in that vault." "Another idiotic scheme to waste my money," Snithian snapped. "I've made you responsible for security here, Kelly! Let's have no more nonsense. And throw this nincompoop out!" Snithian turned and stalked away, his cloak flapping at his knees. "I'll work cheap," Dan called after him as Kelly took his arm. "I'm an art lover." "Never mind that," Kelly said, escorting Dan along the corridor. He turned in at an office and closed the door. "Now, as the old buzzard said, I'm responsible for security here. If those pictures go, my job goes with them. Your vault idea's not bad. Just how cheap would you work?" "A hundred dollars a week," Dan said promptly. "Plus expenses," he added. Kelly nodded. "I'll fingerprint you and run a fast agency check. If you're clean, I'll put you on, starting tonight. But keep it quiet." Dan looked around at the gray walls, with shelves stacked to the low ceiling with wrapped paintings. Two three-hundred-watt bulbs shed a white glare over the tile floor, a neat white refrigerator, a bunk, an arm-chair, a bookshelf and a small table set with paper plates, plastic utensils and a portable radio—all hastily installed at Kelly's order. Dan opened the refrigerator, looked over the stock of salami, liverwurst, cheese and beer. He opened a loaf of bread, built up a well-filled sandwich, keyed open a can of beer. It wasn't fancy, but it would do. Phase one of the plan had gone off without a hitch. Basically, his idea was simple. Art collections had been disappearing from closely guarded galleries and homes all over the world. It was obvious that no one could enter a locked vault, remove a stack of large canvases and leave, unnoticed by watchful guards—and leaving the locks undamaged. Yet the paintings were gone. Someone had been in those vaults—someone who hadn't entered in the usual way. Theory failed at that point; that left the experimental method. The Snithian collection was the largest west of the Mississippi. With such a target, the thieves were bound to show up. If Dan sat in the vault—day and night—waiting—he would see for himself how they operated. He finished his sandwich, went to the shelves and pulled down one of the brown-paper bundles. Loosening the string binding the package, he slid a painting into view. It was a gaily colored view of an open-air cafe, with a group of men and women in gay-ninetyish costumes gathered at a table. He seemed to remember reading something about it in a magazine. It was a cheerful scene; Dan liked it. Still, it hardly seemed worth all the effort.... He went to the wall switch and turned off the lights. The orange glow of the filaments died, leaving only a faint illumination from the night-light over the door. When the thieves arrived, it might give him a momentary advantage if his eyes were adjusted to the dark. He groped his way to the bunk. So far, so good, he reflected, stretching out. When they showed up, he'd have to handle everything just right. If he scared them off there'd be no second chance. He would have lost his crack at—whatever his discovery might mean to him. But he was ready. Let them come. Eight hours, three sandwiches and six beers later, Dan roused suddenly from a light doze and sat up on the cot. Between him and the crowded shelving, a palely luminous framework was materializing in mid-air. The apparition was an open-work cage—about the size and shape of an out-house minus the sheathing, Dan estimated breathlessly. Two figures were visible within the structure, sitting stiffly in contoured chairs. They glowed, if anything, more brightly than the framework. A faint sound cut into the stillness—a descending whine. The cage moved jerkily, settling toward the floor. Long blue sparks jumped, crackling, to span the closing gap; with a grate of metal, the cage settled against the floor. The spectral men reached for ghostly switches.... The glow died. Dan was aware of his heart thumping painfully under his ribs. His mouth was dry. This was the moment he'd been planning for, but now that it was here— Never mind. He took a deep breath, ran over the speeches he had prepared for the occasion: Greeting, visitors from the Future.... Hopelessly corny. What about: Welcome to the Twentieth Century.... No good; it lacked spontaneity. The men were rising, their backs to Dan, stepping out of the skeletal frame. In the dim light it now looked like nothing more than a rough frame built of steel pipe, with a cluster of levers in a console before the two seats. And the thieves looked ordinary enough: Two men in gray coveralls, one slender and balding, the other shorter and round-faced. Neither of them noticed Dan, sitting rigid on the cot. The thin man placed a lantern on the table, twiddled a knob. A warm light sprang up. The visitors looked at the stacked shelves. "Looks like the old boy's been doing all right," the shorter man said. "Fathead's gonna be pleased." "A very gratifying consignment," his companion said. "However, we'd best hurry, Manny. How much time have we left on this charge?" "Plenty. Fifteen minutes anyway." The thin man opened a package, glanced at a painting. "Ah, magnificent. Almost the equal of Picasso in his puce period." Manny shuffled through the other pictures in the stack. "Like always," he grumbled. "No nood dames. I like nood dames." "Look at this, Manny! The textures alone—" Manny looked. "Yeah, nice use of values," he conceded. "But I still prefer nood dames, Fiorello." "And this!" Fiorello lifted the next painting. "Look at that gay play of rich browns!" "I seen richer browns on Thirty-third Street," Manny said. "They was popular with the sparrows." "Manny, sometimes I think your aspirations—" "Whatta ya talkin? I use a roll-on." Manny, turning to place a painting in the cage, stopped dead as he caught sight of Dan. The painting clattered to the floor. Dan stood, cleared his throat. "Uh...." "Oh-oh," Manny said. "A double-cross." "I've—ah—been expecting you gentlemen," Dan said. "I—" "I told you we couldn't trust no guy with nine fingers on each hand," Manny whispered hoarsely. He moved toward the cage. "Let's blow, Fiorello." "Wait a minute," Dan said. "Before you do anything hasty—" "Don't start nothing, Buster," Manny said cautiously. "We're plenty tough guys when aroused." "I want to talk to you," Dan insisted. "You see, these paintings—" "Paintings? Look, it was all a mistake. Like, we figured this was the gent's room—" "Never mind, Manny," Fiorello cut in. "It appears there's been a leak." Dan shook his head. "No leak. I simply deduced—" "Look, Fiorello," Manny said. "You chin if you want to; I'm doing a fast fade." "Don't act hastily, Manny. You know where you'll end." "Wait a minute!" Dan shouted. "I'd like to make a deal with you fellows." "Ah-hah!" Kelly's voice blared from somewhere. "I knew it! Slane, you crook!" Dan looked about wildly. The voice seemed to be issuing from a speaker. It appeared Kelly hedged his bets. "Mr. Kelly, I can explain everything!" Dan called. He turned back to Fiorello. "Listen, I figured out—" "Pretty clever!" Kelly's voice barked. "Inside job. But it takes more than the likes of you to out-fox an old-timer like Eddie Kelly." "Perhaps you were right, Manny," Fiorello said. "Complications are arising. We'd best depart with all deliberate haste." He edged toward the cage. "What about this ginzo?" Manny jerked a thumb toward Dan. "He's on to us." "Can't be helped." "Look—I want to go with you!" Dan shouted. "I'll bet you do!" Kelly's voice roared. "One more minute and I'll have the door open and collar the lot of you! Came up through a tunnel, did you?" "You can't go, my dear fellow," Fiorello said. "Room for two, no more." Dan whirled to the cot, grabbed up the pistol Kelly had supplied. He aimed it at Manny. "You stay here, Manny! I'm going with Fiorello in the time machine." "Are you nuts?" Manny demanded. "I'm flattered, dear boy," Fiorello said, "but—" "Let's get moving. Kelly will have that lock open in a minute." "You can't leave me here!" Manny spluttered, watching Dan crowd into the cage beside Fiorello. "We'll send for you," Dan said. "Let's go, Fiorello." The balding man snatched suddenly for the gun. Dan wrestled with him. The pistol fell, bounced on the floor of the cage, skidded into the far corner of the vault. Manny charged, reaching for Dan as he twisted aside; Fiorello's elbow caught him in the mouth. Manny staggered back into the arms of Kelly, bursting red-faced into the vault. "Manny!" Fiorello released his grip on Dan, lunged to aid his companion. Kelly passed Manny to one of three cops crowding in on his heels. Dan clung to the framework as Fiorello grappled with Kelly. A cop pushed past them, spotted Dan, moved in briskly for the pinch. Dan grabbed a lever at random and pulled. Sudden silence fell as the walls of the room glowed blue. A spectral Kelly capered before the cage, fluorescing in the blue-violet. Dan swallowed hard and nudged a second lever. The cage sank like an elevator into the floor, vivid blue washing up its sides. Hastily he reversed the control. Operating a time machine was tricky business. One little slip, and the Slane molecules would be squeezing in among brick and mortar particles.... But this was no time to be cautious. Things hadn't turned out just the way he'd planned, but after all, this was what he'd wanted—in a way. The time machine was his to command. And if he gave up now and crawled back into the vault, Kelly would gather him in and pin every art theft of the past decade on him. It couldn't be too hard. He'd take it slowly, figure out the controls.... Dan took a deep breath and tried another lever. The cage rose gently, in eerie silence. It reached the ceiling and kept going. Dan gritted his teeth as an eight-inch band of luminescence passed down the cage. Then he was emerging into a spacious kitchen. A blue-haloed cook waddled to a luminous refrigerator, caught sight of Dan rising slowly from the floor, stumbled back, mouth open. The cage rose, penetrated a second ceiling. Dan looked around at a carpeted hall. Cautiously he neutralized the control lever. The cage came to rest an inch above the floor. As far as Dan could tell, he hadn't traveled so much as a minute into the past or future. He looked over the controls. There should be one labeled "Forward" and another labeled "Back", but all the levers were plain, unadorned black. They looked, Dan decided, like ordinary circuit-breaker type knife-switches. In fact, the whole apparatus had the appearance of something thrown together hastily from common materials. Still, it worked. So far he had only found the controls for maneuvering in the usual three dimensions, but the time switch was bound to be here somewhere.... Dan looked up at a movement at the far end of the hall. A girl's head and shoulders appeared, coming up a spiral staircase. In another second she would see him, and give the alarm—and Dan needed a few moments of peace and quiet in which to figure out the controls. He moved a lever. The cage drifted smoothly sideways, sliced through the wall with a flurry of vivid blue light. Dan pushed the lever back. He was in a bedroom now, a wide chamber with flouncy curtains, a four-poster under a flowered canopy, a dressing table— The door opened and the girl stepped into the room. She was young. Not over eighteen, Dan thought—as nearly as he could tell with the blue light playing around her face. She had long hair tied with a ribbon, and long legs, neatly curved. She wore shorts and carried a tennis racquet in her left hand and an apple in her right. Her back to Dan and the cage, she tossed the racquet on a table, took a bite of the apple, and began briskly unbuttoning her shirt. Dan tried moving a lever. The cage edged toward the girl. Another; he rose gently. The girl tossed the shirt onto a chair and undid the zipper down the side of the shorts. Another lever; the cage shot toward the outer wall as the girl reached behind her back.... Dan blinked at the flash of blue and looked down. He was hovering twenty feet above a clipped lawn. He looked at the levers. Wasn't it the first one in line that moved the cage ahead? He tried it, shot forward ten feet. Below, a man stepped out on the terrace, lit a cigarette, paused, started to turn his face up— Dan jabbed at a lever. The cage shot back through the wall. He was in a plain room with a depression in the floor, a wide window with a planter filled with glowing blue plants— The door opened. Even blue, the girl looked graceful as a deer as she took a last bite of the apple and stepped into the ten-foot-square sunken tub. Dan held his breath. The girl tossed the apple core aside, seemed to suddenly become aware of eyes on her, whirled— With a sudden lurch that threw Dan against the steel bars, the cage shot through the wall into the open air and hurtled off with an acceleration that kept him pinned, helpless. He groped for the controls, hauled at a lever. There was no change. The cage rushed on, rising higher. In the distance, Dan saw the skyline of a town, approaching with frightful speed. A tall office building reared up fifteen stories high. He was headed dead for it— He covered his ears, braced himself— With an abruptness that flung him against the opposite side of the cage, the machine braked, shot through the wall and slammed to a stop. Dan sank to the floor of the cage, breathing hard. There was a loud click! and the glow faded. With a lunge, Dan scrambled out of the cage. He stood looking around at a simple brown-painted office, dimly lit by sunlight filtered through elaborate venetian blinds. There were posters on the wall, a potted plant by the door, a heap of framed paintings beside it, and at the far side of the room a desk. And behind the desk—Something. II Dan gaped at a head the size of a beachball, mounted on a torso like a hundred-gallon bag of water. Two large brown eyes blinked at him from points eight inches apart. Immense hands with too many fingers unfolded and reached to open a brown paper carton, dip in, then toss three peanuts, deliberately, one by one, into a gaping mouth that opened just above the brown eyes. "Who're you?" a bass voice demanded from somewhere near the floor. "I'm ... I'm ... Dan Slane ... your honor." "What happened to Manny and Fiorello?" "They—I—There was this cop. Kelly—" "Oh-oh." The brown eyes blinked deliberately. The many-fingered hands closed the peanut carton and tucked it into a drawer. "Well, it was a sweet racket while it lasted," the basso voice said. "A pity to terminate so happy an enterprise. Still...." A noise like an amplified Bronx cheer issued from the wide mouth. "How ... what...?" "The carrier returns here automatically when the charge drops below a critical value," the voice said. "A necessary measure to discourage big ideas on the part of wisenheimers in my employ. May I ask how you happen to be aboard the carrier, by the way?" "I just wanted—I mean, after I figured out—that is, the police ... I went for help," Dan finished lamely. "Help? Out of the picture, unfortunately. One must maintain one's anonymity, you'll appreciate. My operation here is under wraps at present. Ah, I don't suppose you brought any paintings?" Dan shook his head. He was staring at the posters. His eyes, accustoming themselves to the gloom of the office, could now make out the vividly drawn outline of a creature resembling an alligator-headed giraffe rearing up above scarlet foliage. The next poster showed a face similar to the beachball behind the desk, with red circles painted around the eyes. The next was a view of a yellow volcano spouting fire into a black sky. "Too bad." The words seemed to come from under the desk. Dan squinted, caught a glimpse of coiled purplish tentacles. He gulped and looked up to catch a brown eye upon him. Only one. The other seemed to be busily at work studying the ceiling. "I hope," the voice said, "that you ain't harboring no reactionary racial prejudices." "Gosh, no," Dan reassured the eye. "I'm crazy about—uh—" "Vorplischers," the voice said. "From Vorplisch, or Vega, as you call it." The Bronx cheer sounded again. "How I long to glimpse once more my native fens! Wherever one wanders, there's no pad like home." "That reminds me," Dan said. "I have to be running along now." He sidled toward the door. "Stick around, Dan," the voice rumbled. "How about a drink? I can offer you Chateau Neuf du Pape, '59, Romance Conte, '32, goat's milk, Pepsi—" "No, thanks." "If you don't mind, I believe I'll have a Big Orange." The Vorplischer swiveled to a small refrigerator, removed an immense bottle fitted with a nipple and turned back to Dan. "Now, I got a proposition which may be of some interest to you. The loss of Manny and Fiorello is a serious blow, but we may yet recoup the situation. You made the scene at a most opportune time. What I got in mind is, with those two clowns out of the picture, a vacancy exists on my staff, which you might well fill. How does that grab you?" "You mean you want me to take over operating the time machine?" "Time machine?" The brown eyes blinked alternately. "I fear some confusion exists. I don't quite dig the significance of the term." "That thing," Dan jabbed a thumb toward the cage. "The machine I came here in. You want me—" "Time machine," the voice repeated. "Some sort of chronometer, perhaps?" "Huh?" "I pride myself on my command of the local idiom, yet I confess the implied concept snows me." The nine-fingered hands folded on the desk. The beachball head leaned forward interestedly. "Clue me, Dan. What's a time machine?" "Well, it's what you use to travel through time." The brown eyes blinked in agitated alternation. "Apparently I've loused up my investigation of the local cultural background. I had no idea you were capable of that sort of thing." The immense head leaned back, the wide mouth opening and closing rapidly. "And to think I've been spinning my wheels collecting primitive 2-D art!" "But—don't you have a time machine? I mean, isn't that one?" "That? That's merely a carrier. Now tell me more about your time machines. A fascinating concept! My superiors will be delighted at this development—and astonished as well. They regard this planet as Endsville." "Your superiors?" Dan eyed the window; much too far to jump. Maybe he could reach the machine and try a getaway— "I hope you're not thinking of leaving suddenly," the beachball said, following Dan's glance. One of the eighteen fingers touched a six-inch yellow cylinder lying on the desk. "Until the carrier is fueled, I'm afraid it's quite useless. But, to put you in the picture, I'd best introduce myself and explain my mission here. I'm Blote, Trader Fourth Class, in the employ of the Vegan Confederation. My job is to develop new sources of novelty items for the impulse-emporiums of the entire Secondary Quadrant." "But the way Manny and Fiorello came sailing in through the wall! That has to be a time machine they were riding in. Nothing else could just materialize out of thin air like that." "You seem to have a time-machine fixation, Dan," Blote said. "You shouldn't assume, just because you people have developed time travel, that everyone has. Now—" Blote's voice sank to a bass whisper—"I'll make a deal with you, Dan. You'll secure a small time machine in good condition for me. And in return—" " I'm supposed to supply you with a time machine?" Blote waggled a stubby forefinger at Dan. "I dislike pointing it out, Dan, but you are in a rather awkward position at the moment. Illegal entry, illegal possession of property, trespass—then doubtless some embarrassment exists back at the Snithian residence. I daresay Mr. Kelly would have a warm welcome for you. And, of course, I myself would deal rather harshly with any attempt on your part to take a powder." The Vegan flexed all eighteen fingers, drummed his tentacles under the desk, and rolled one eye, bugging the other at Dan. "Whereas, on the other hand," Blote's bass voice went on, "you and me got the basis of a sweet deal. You supply the machine, and I fix you up with an abundance of the local medium of exchange. Equitable enough, I should say. What about it, Dan?" "Ah, let me see," Dan temporized. "Time machine. Time machine—" "Don't attempt to weasel on me, Dan," Blote rumbled ominously. "I'd better look in the phone book," Dan suggested. Silently, Blote produced a dog-eared directory. Dan opened it. "Time, time. Let's see...." He brightened. "Time, Incorporated; local branch office. Two twenty-one Maple Street." "A sales center?" Blote inquired. "Or a manufacturing complex?" "Both," Dan said. "I'll just nip over and—" "That won't be necessary, Dan," Blote said. "I'll accompany you." He took the directory, studied it. "Remarkable! A common commodity, openly on sale, and I failed to notice it. Still, a ripe nut can fall from a small tree as well as from a large." He went to his desk, rummaged, came up with a handful of fuel cells. "Now, off to gather in the time machine." He took his place in the carrier, patted the seat beside him with a wide hand. "Come, Dan. Get a wiggle on." Hesitantly, Dan moved to the carrier. The bluff was all right up to a point—but the point had just about been reached. He took his seat. Blote moved a lever. The familiar blue glow sprang up. "Kindly direct me, Dan," Blote demanded. "Two twenty-one Maple Street, I believe you said." "I don't know the town very well," Dan said, "but Maple's over that way." Blote worked levers. The carrier shot out into a ghostly afternoon sky. Faint outlines of buildings, like faded negatives, spread below. Dan looked around, spotted lettering on a square five-story structure. "Over there," he said. Blote directed the machine as it swooped smoothly toward the flat roof Dan indicated. "Better let me take over now," Dan suggested. "I want to be sure to get us to the right place." "Very well, Dan." Dan dropped the carrier through the roof, passed down through a dimly seen office. Blote twiddled a small knob. The scene around the cage grew even fainter. "Best we remain unnoticed," he explained. The cage descended steadily. Dan peered out, searching for identifying landmarks. He leveled off at the second floor, cruised along a barely visible corridor. Blote's eyes rolled, studying the small chambers along both sides of the passage at once. "Ah, this must be the assembly area," he exclaimed. "I see the machines employ a bar-type construction, not unlike our carriers." "That's right," Dan said, staring through the haziness. "This is where they do time...." He tugged at a lever suddenly; the machine veered left, flickered through a barred door, came to a halt. Two nebulous figures loomed beside the cage. Dan cut the switch. If he'd guessed wrong— The scene fluoresced, sparks crackling, then popped into sharp focus. Blote scrambled out, brown eyes swivelling to take in the concrete walls, the barred door and— "You!" a hoarse voice bellowed. "Grab him!" someone yelled. Blote recoiled, threshing his ambulatory members in a fruitless attempt to regain the carrier as Manny and Fiorello closed in. Dan hauled at a lever. He caught a last glimpse of three struggling, blue-lit figures as the carrier shot away through the cell wall. III Dan slumped back against the seat with a sigh. Now that he was in the clear, he would have to decide on his next move—fast. There was no telling what other resources Blote might have. He would have to hide the carrier, then— A low growling was coming from somewhere, rising in pitch and volume. Dan sat up, alarmed. This was no time for a malfunction. The sound rose higher, into a penetrating wail. There was no sign of mechanical trouble. The carrier glided on, swooping now over a nebulous landscape of trees and houses. Dan covered his ears against the deafening shriek, like all the police sirens in town blaring at once. If the carrier stopped it would be a long fall from here. Dan worked the controls, dropping toward the distant earth. The noise seemed to lessen, descending the scale. Dan slowed, brought the carrier in to the corner of a wide park. He dropped the last few inches and cut the switch. As the glow died, the siren faded into silence. Dan stepped from the carrier and looked around. Whatever the noise was, it hadn't attracted any attention from the scattered pedestrians in the park. Perhaps it was some sort of burglar alarm. But if so, why hadn't it gone into action earlier? Dan took a deep breath. Sound or no sound, he would have to get back into the carrier and transfer it to a secluded spot where he could study it at leisure. He stepped back in, reached for the controls— There was a sudden chill in the air. The bright surface of the dials before him frosted over. There was a loud pop! like a flashbulb exploding. Dan stared from the seat at an iridescent rectangle which hung suspended near the carrier. Its surface rippled, faded to blankness. In a swirl of frosty air, a tall figure dressed in a tight-fitting white uniform stepped through. Dan gaped at the small rounded head, the dark-skinned long-nosed face, the long, muscular arms, the hands, their backs tufted with curly red-brown hair, the strange long-heeled feet in soft boots. A neat pillbox cap with a short visor was strapped low over the deep-set yellowish eyes, which turned in his direction. The wide mouth opened in a smile which showed square yellowish teeth. " Alors, monsieur ," the new-comer said, bending his knees and back in a quick bow. " Vous ete une indigine, n'est ce pas? " "No compree," Dan choked out "Uh ... juh no parlay Fransay...." "My error. This is the Anglic colonial sector, isn't it? Stupid of me. Permit me to introduce myself. I'm Dzhackoon, Field Agent of Class five, Inter-dimensional Monitor Service." "That siren," Dan said. "Was that you?" Dzhackoon nodded. "For a moment, it appeared you were disinclined to stop. I'm glad you decided to be reasonable." "What outfit did you say you were with?" Dan asked. "The Inter-dimensional Monitor Service." "Inter-what?" "Dimensional. The word is imprecise, of course, but it's the best our language coder can do, using the Anglic vocabulary." "What do you want with me?"

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62085

Pied Piper of Mars By FREDERIC ARNOLD KUMMER, Jr. Elath Taen made mad music for the men of Mars. The red planet lived and would die to the soul-tearing tunes of his fiendish piping. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] In all the solar system there is no city quite like Mercis, capital of Mars. Solis, on Venus, is perhaps more beautiful, some cities of Earth certainly have more drive and dynamitism, but there is a strange inscrutable air about Mercis which even terrestials of twenty years' residence cannot explain. Outwardly a tourists' mecca, with white plastoid buildings, rich gardens, and whispering canals, it has another and darker side, ever present, ever hidden. While earthmen work and plan, building, repairing, bringing their vast energy and progress to decadent Mars, the silent little reddies go their devious ways, following ancient laws which no amount of terrestial logic can shake. Time-bound ritual, mysterious passions and hates, torturous, devious logic ... all these, like dark winding underground streams run beneath the tall fair city that brings such thrilled superlatives to the lips of the terrestial tourists. Steve Ranson, mounting the steps of the old house facing the Han canal, was in no mood for the bizarre beauties of Martian scenery. For one thing, Mercis was an old story to him; his work with Terrestial Intelligence had brought him here often in the past, on other strange cases. And for another thing, his mission concerned more vital matters. Jared Haller, as head of the state-owned Martian Broadcasting System, was next in importance to the august Governor Winship himself. As far back as the Hitlerian wars on earth it had been known that he who controls propaganda, controls the nation ... or planet. Martian Broadcasting was an important factor in controlling the fierce warlike little reddies, keeping the terrestial-imposed peace on the red planet. And when Jared Haller sent to Earth for one of the Terrestial Intelligence, that silent efficient corps of trouble-shooters, something was definitely up. The house was provided with double doors as protection against the sudden fierce sandstorms which so often, in the month of Tol, sweep in from the plains of Psidis to engulf Mercis in a red choking haze. Ranson passed the conventional electric eye and a polite robot voice asked his name. He gave it, and the inner door opened. A smiling little Martian butler met him in the hall, showed him into Haller's study. The head of M.B.C. stood at one end of the big library, the walls of which were lined with vivavox rolls and old-fashioned books. As Ranson entered, he swung about, frowning, one hand dropping to a pocket that bulged unmistakably. "Ranson, Terrestial Intelligence." The special agent offered his card. "You sent to Earth a while ago for an operator?" Jared Haller nodded. He was a big, rough-featured individual with gray leonine hair. A battering-ram of a man, one would think, who hammered his way through life by sheer force and drive. But as Ranson looked closer, he could see lines of worry, of fear, etched about the strong mouth, and a species of terror within the shaggy-browed eyes. "Yes," said Jared Haller. "I sent for an operator. You got here quickly, Mr. Ranson!" "Seven days out of earth on the express-liner Arrow ." Ranson wondered why Haller didn't come to the point. Even Terrestial Intelligence headquarters in New York hadn't known why a T.I. man was wanted on Mars ... but Haller was one of the few persons sufficiently important to have an operator sent without explanation as to why he was wanted. Ranson put it directly. "Why did you require the help of T.I., Mr. Haller?" he asked. "Because we're up against something a little too big for the Mercian police force to handle." Jared Haller's strong hands tapped nervously upon the desk. "No one has greater respect for our local authorities than myself. Captain Maxwell is a personal friend of mine. But I understood that T.I. men had the benefit of certain amazing devices, remarkable inventions, which make it easy for them to track down criminals." Ranson nodded. That was true. T.I. didn't allow its secret devices to be used by any other agency, for fear they might become known to the criminals and outlaws of the solar system. But Haller still hadn't told what crime had taken place. This time Ranson applied the spur of silence. It worked. "Mr. Ranson," Haller leaned forward, his face a gray grim mask, "someone, something, is working to gain control of the Martian Broadcasting Company! And I don't have to tell you that whoever controls M.B.C. controls Mars! Here's the set-up! Our company, although state owned, is largely free from red-tape, so long as we stress the good work we terrestials are doing on Mars and keep any revolutionary propaganda off the air-waves. Except for myself, and half a dozen other earthmen in responsible positions, our staff is largely Martian. That's in line with our policy of teaching Mars our civilization until it's ready for autonomy. Which it isn't yet, by quite some. As you know." Ranson nodded, eyes intent as the pattern unfolded. "All right." Haller snapped. "You see the situation. Remove us ... the few terrestials at the top of M.B.C ... and Martian staff would carry on until new men came out from Earth to take our places. But suppose during that period with no check on their activities, they started to dish out nationalist propaganda? One hour's program, with the old Martian war-songs being played and some rabble-rouser yelling 'down with the terrestial oppressors' and there'd be a revolution. Millions of reddies against a few police, a couple of regiments of the Foreign Legion. It'd be a cinch." "But," ... Ranson frowned ... "this is only an interesting supposition. The reddies are civilized, peaceful." "Outwardly," Haller snapped. "But what do you or any other earthmen know about what goes on in their round red heads? And the proof that some revolt is planned lies in what's been happening the past few weeks! Look here!" Haller bent forward, the lines about his mouth tighter than ever. "Three weeks ago my technical advisor, Rawlins, committed suicide. Not a care in the world, but he killed himself. A week later Harris, head of the television department, went insane. Declared a feud with the whole planet, began shooting at everyone he saw. The police rayed him in the struggle. The following week Pegram, the musical director, died of a heart attack. Died with the most terrorized expression on his face I've ever seen. Fear, causing the heart attack, his doctor said. You begin to see the set-up? Three men, each a vital power in M.B.C. gone within three weeks! And who's next? Who?" Jared Haller's eyes were bright with fear. "Suicide, insanity, heart attack." Ranson shrugged. "All perfectly normal. Coincidence that they should happen within three weeks. What makes you think there's been foul play?" For a long brittle moment Jared Haller stared out at the graceful white city, wan in the light of the twin moons. When he turned to face Ranson again, his eyes were bleak as a lunar plain. "One thing," he said slowly. "The music." "Music?" Ranson echoed. "Look here, Mr. Haller, you...." "It's all right." Jared Haller grinned crookedly. "I'm not insane. Yet. Look, Mr. Ranson! There's just one clue to these mysterious deaths! And that's the music! In each instance the servants told of hearing, very faintly, a strange melody. Music that did queer things to them, even though they could hear it only vaguely. Music like none they'd ever heard. Like the devil's pipes, playing on their souls, while.... Almighty God!" Jared Haller froze, his face gray as lead, his eyes blue horror. Ranson was like a man in a trance, bent forward, lips pressed tight until they resembled a livid scar. The room was silent as a tomb; outside, they could hear the vague rumbling of the city, with the distant swish of canal boats, the staccato roar of rockets as some earth-bound freighter leaped from the spaceport. Familiar, homey sounds, these, but beneath them, like an undercurrent of madness, ran the macabre melody. There was, there had never been, Ranson knew, any music like this. It was the pipes of Pan, the chant of robots, the crying of souls in torment. It was a cloudy purple haze that engulfed the mind, it was a silver knife plucking a cruel obligato on taut nerves, it was a thin dark snake writhing its endless coils into the room. Neither man moved. Ranson knew all the tricks of visual hypnotism, the whirling mirror, the waving hands, the pool of ink ... but this was the hypnotism of sound. Louder and clearer the music sounded, in eerie overtones, quavering sobbing minors, fierce reverberating bass. Sharp shards of sound pierced their ears, deep throbbing underrhythm shook them as a cat shakes a mouse. "God!" Haller snarled. "What ... what is it?" "Don't know." Ranson felt a queer irritation growing within him. He strode stiffly to the window, peered out. In the darkness, the broad Han canal lay placid; the stars caught in its jet meshes gently drifted toward the bank, shattered on the white marble. Along the embankment were great fragrant clumps of fayeh bushes. It was among these, he decided, that their unknown serenader lay concealed. Suddenly the elfin melody changed. Fierce, harsh, it rose, until Ranson felt as though a file were rasping his nerves. He knew that he should dash down, seize the invisible musician below ... but logic, facts and duty, all were fading from his mind. The music was a spur, goading him to wild unreasoning anger. The red mists of hate swirled through his brain, a strange unreasoning bloodlust grew with the savage beat of the wild music. Berserk rage sounded in each shivering note and Ranson felt an insane desire to run amok. To inflict pain, to see red blood flow, to kill ... kill! Blindly he whirled, groping for his gun, as the music rose in a frenzied death-wail. Turning, Ranson found himself face to face with Jared Haller. But the tall flinty magnate was now another person. Primitive, atavistic rage distorted his features, insane murder lurked in his eyes. The music was his master, and it was driving him to frenzy. "Kill!" the weird rhythm screamed, "Kill!" And Jared Haller obeyed. He snatched the flame-gun from his pocket, levelled it at Ranson. Whether it was the deadly melody outside, or the instinct of self-preservation, Ranson never knew, but he drove at Haller with grim fury. The flame-gun hissed, filling the room with a greenish glare, its beam passing so close to Ranson's hair as to singe it. Ranson came up, grinning furiously, and in a moment both men were struggling, teeth bared in animalistic grins, breath coming in choked gasps, whirling in a mad dance of death as the macabre music distilled deadly poison within their brains. The end came with startling suddenness. Ranson, twisting his opponent's arm back, felt the searing blast of the flame-gun past his hand. Jared Haller, a ghastly blackened corpse, toppled to the floor. At that moment the lethal rhythm outside changed abruptly. From the fierce maddening beat of a few minutes before, the chords took on a yearning seductive tone. A call, it seemed, irresistible, soft, with a thousand promises. This was the song the sirens sang to Ulysses, the call of the Pied Piper, the chant of the houris in paradise. It conjured up pictures in Ranson's mind ... pictures of fairyland, of exquisitely beautiful scenes, of women lovely beyond imagination. All of man's hopes, man's dreams, were in that music, and it drew Ranson as a moth is drawn to a flame. The piping of Pan, the fragile fantasies of childhood, the voices of those beyond life.... Ranson walked stiffly toward the source of the music, like a man drugged. As he approached the window the melody grew louder. The hypnotism of sound, he knew, but he didn't care. It was enthralling, irresistible. Like a sleepwalker he climbed to the sill, stood outlined in the tall window. Twenty feet to the ground, almost certain death ... but Ranson was lost in the golden world that the elfin melody conjured up. He straightened his shoulders, was about to step out. Then suddenly there was a roar of atomic motors, a flashing of lights. A police boat, flinging up clouds of spray, swept up the canal, stopped. Ranson shook himself, like a man awakening from a nightmare, saw uniformed figures leaping to the bank. From the shadow of the fayeh bushes a slight form sprang, dodged along the embankment. Flame-guns cut the gloom but the slight figure swung to the left, disappeared among the twisting narrow streets. Bathed in cold sweat, Ranson stepped back into the room, where the still, terrible form of Jared Haller lay. Ranson stared at it, as though seeing it for the first time. Outside, there were pounding feet; the canal-patrolmen raced through the house, toward the study. And then, his brain weary as if it had been cudgelled, Ranson slid limply to the floor. Headquarters of the Martian Canal-Patrol was brilliantly lighted by a dozen big astralux arcs. Captain Maxwell chewed at his gray mustache, staring curiously at Ranson. "Then you admit killing Haller?" he demanded. "Yes." Ranson nodded sombrely. "In the struggle. Self-defense. But even if it hadn't been self-defense, I probably would have fought with him. That music was madness, I tell you! Madness! Nobody's responsible when under its influence! I...." "You killed Haller," Captain Maxwell said. "And you blame it on this alleged music. I might believe you, Ranson, but how many other people would? Even members of Terrestial Intelligence aren't sacro sanct. I'll have to hold you for trial." "Hold me for trial?" Ranson leaned forward, his gaunt face intent. "While the real killer, the person playing that music, gets away? Look! Let me out of here for twelve hours! That's all I ask! And if I don't track down whoever was outside Haller's house, you can...." "Sorry." Captain Maxwell shook his head. "You know I'd like to, Ranson. But this is murder. To let a confessed murderer, even though he is a T.I. man, go free, is impossible." The captain drew a deep breath, motioned to the two gray-uniformed patrolmen. "Take Mr. Ranson." And then Steve Ranson went into action. In one blinding burst of speed, he lunged across the desk, tore Captain Maxwell's pistol from its holster. Before the captain and the two patrolmen knew what had happened, they were staring into the ugly muzzle of the flame-gun. "Sorry." Ranson said tightly. "But it had to be done. There's hell loose on Mars, the devil's melody! And it's got to be stopped before it turns this planet upside down!" "You can't get away with this, Ranson!" Captain Maxwell shook his head. "It'll only make it tougher for you when we nab you again! Be sensible! Put down that gun." "No good. Got to work fast." Ranson backed toward the door, gun in hand. "Let this mad music go unchecked and it's death to all terrestials on Mars! And I'm going to stop it! So long, captain! You can try me for murder if you want, after I've done my job here!" Ranson took the key from the massive plastic door as he backed through the entrance. Once in the hall, he slammed the door shut, locked Maxwell and his men in the room. Then, dropping the gun into his pocket, he ran swiftly down the corridor to the main entrance of headquarters. In the hall a patrolman glanced at him suspiciously, halted him, but a wave of Ranson's T.I. card put the man aside. Free of headquarters, Ranson began to run. Only a few moments, he knew, before Maxwell and his men blasted a way to freedom, set out in pursuit. Like a lean gray shadow Ranson ran, twisting, dodging, among the narrow streets, heading toward Haller's house. Mercis was a dream city in the wan light of the moons. One in either side of the heavens, they threw weird double shadows across the rippling canals, the aimless streets. Sleek canal-cabs roared along the dark waterways, throwing up clouds of spray, and on the embankments, green-eyed, bulge-headed little reddies padded, silent, inscrutable, themselves a part of the eternal mystery of Mars. Haller's house stood dark and brooding beside the canal. Captain Maxwell's men had completed their examination and the place was deserted. Ranson stepped into the shadow of the clump of fragrant fayeh bushes, where the unknown musician had stood; there was little danger, he felt, of patrolmen hunting for him at Haller's house. The captain had little faith in copybook maxims about the murderer returning to the scene of the crime. Ranson stood motionless for a moment as a canal boat swept by, then drew from his pocket a heavy black tube. He tugged, and it extended telescopically to a cane some four feet long. The cane was hollow, a tube, and the head of it was large as a man's two fists and covered with small dials, gauges. This was the T.I.'s most cherished secret, the famous "electric bloodhound," by which criminals could be tracked. Ranson touched a lever and a tiny electric motor in the head of the cane hummed, drawing air up along the tube. He tapped the bank where the unknown musician had stood, eyes on the gauges. Molecules of matter, left by the mysterious serenader, were sucked up the tube, registered on a sensitive plate, just as delicate color shades register on the plate of a color camera. Ranson tapped the cane carefully upon the ground, avoiding those places where he had stood. Few people crossed this overgrown embankment, and it was a safe bet that no one other than the strange musician had been there recently. The scent was a clear one, and the dials on the head of the cane read R-2340-B, the numerical classification of the tiny bits of matter left behind by the unknown. The theory behind it was quite simple. The T.I. scientists had reasoned that the sense of smell is merely the effect of suspended molecules in the air acting upon sensitive nerve filaments, and they knew that any normal human can follow a trail of some strong odor such as perfumes, or gasoline, while animals, possessing more sensitive perceptions, can follow less distinct trails. To duplicate this mechanically had proven more difficult than an electric eye or artificial hearing device, but in the end they had triumphed. Their efforts had resulted in the machine Ranson now carried. The trial was, at the start, clear. Ranson tapped the long tube on the ground like a blind man, eyes on the dial. Along the embankment, into a side street, he made his way. There were few abroad in this old quarter of the city; from the spaceport came the roar of freighters, the rumble of machinery, but here in the narrow winding streets there was only the faint murmur of voices behind latticed windows, the rustle of the wind, the rattle of sand from the red desert beyond the city. As Ranson plunged further into the old Martian quarter, the trail grew more and more confused, crossed by scores of other trails left by passersby. He was forced to stop, cast about like a bloodhound, tapping every square foot of the street before the R-2340-B on the dial showed that he had once more picked up the faint elusive scent. Deeper and deeper Ranson plunged into the dark slums of Mercis. Smoky gambling dens, dives full of drunken spacehands and slim red-skinned girls, maudlin singing ... even the yellow glare of the forbidden san-rays, as they filtered through drawn windows. Unsteady figures made their way along the streets. Mighty-thewed Jovian blasters, languid Venusians, boisterous earthmen ... and the little Martians padding softly along, wrapped in their loose dust-robes. At the end of an alley where the purple shadows lay like stagnant pools, Ranson paused. The alley was a cul-de-sac, which meant that the person he was trailing must have entered one of the houses. Very softly he tapped the long tube on the ground. Again with a hesitant swinging of dials, R-2340-B showed up, on the low step in front of one of the dilapidated, dome-shaped houses. Ranson's eyes narrowed. So the person who had played the mad murder melody had entered that house! Might still be there! Quickly he telescoped the "electric bloodhound," dropped it into his pocket, and drew his flame-gun. The old house was dark, with an air of morbid deadly calm about it. Ranson tried the door, found it locked. A quick spurt from his flame-gun melted the lock; he glanced about to make sure no one had observed the greenish glare, then stepped inside. The hallway was shadowy, its walls hung with ancient Martian tapestries which, from their stilted symbolic ideographs must have dated back to the days of the Canal-Builders. At the end of the hallway, however, light jetted through a half-open door. Ranson moved toward it, silent as a phantom, muscles tense. Gripping his flame-gun, he pushed the door wide ... and a sudden exclamation broke from his lips. Before him lay a gleaming laboratory, lined with vials of strange liquids, shining test-tubes, and queer apparatus. Beside a table, pouring a black fluid from a beaker into a test-tube, stood a man. Half-terrestial, half-Martian, he seemed, with the large hairless head of the red planet, and the clean features of an earthman. His eyes, behind their glasses, were like green ice, and the hand pouring the black fluid did not so much as waver at Ranson's entrance. Ranson gasped. The bizarre figure was that of Dr. Elath Taen, master-scientist, sought by the T.I. for years, in vain! Elath Taen, outlaw and renegade, whose sole desire was the extermination of all terrestials on Mars, a revival of the ancient glories of the red planet. The tales told about him were fabulous; and this was the man behind the unholy music! "Good evening, Mr. Ranson," Elath Taen smiled. "Had I known T.I. men were on Mars I should have taken infinitely more precautions. However...." As he spoke, his hand moved suddenly, as though to hurl the test tube at Ranson. Quick as he was, the T.I. man was quicker. A spurt of flame leapt from his gun, shattering the tube. The dark liquid hissed, smoking, on to the floor. "Well done, Mr. Ranson." Elath Taen nodded calmly. "Had the acid struck you, it would have rendered you blind." "That's about enough of your tricks!" Ranson grated. "Come along, Dr. Taen! We're going to headquarters!" "Since you insist." Elath Taen removed his chemist's smock, began, very deliberately, to strip off his rubber gloves. "Quit stalling!" Ranson snapped. "Get going! I...." The words faded on the T.I. man's lips. Faintly, in the distance, came the strains of soft eerie music! "Good God!" Ranson's eyes darted about the laboratory. "That ... that's the same as Haller and I...." "Exactly, Mr. Ranson." Elath Taen smiled thinly. "Listen!" The music was a caress, soft as a woman's skin. Slow, drowsy, like the hum of bees on a hot summer's afternoon. Soothing, soporific, in dreamy, crooning chords. A lullaby, that seemed to hang lead weights upon the eyelids. Audible hypnotism, as potent as some drug. Clearer with each second, the melody grew, coming nearer and nearer the laboratory. "Come ... come on," Ranson said thickly. "Got to get out of here." But his words held no force, and Elath Taen was nodding sleepily under the influence of the weird dream-music. Ranson knew he should act, swiftly, while he could; but the movement of a single muscle seemed an intolerable effort. His skin felt as though it were being rubbed with velvet, a strange purring sensation filled his brain. He tried to think, to move, but his will seemed in a padded vise. The music was dragging him down, down, into the gray mists of oblivion. Across the laboratory Elath Taen had slumped to the floor, a vague smile of triumph on his face. Ranson turned to the direction of the music, tried to raise his gun, but the weapon slipped from his fingers, he fell to his knees. Sleep ... that was all that mattered ... sleep. The music was like chloroform, its notes stroked his brain. Through half-shut eyes he saw a door at the rear of the laboratory open, saw a slim, dark, exotic girl step through into the room. Slung about her neck in the manner of an accordian, was a square box, with keys studding its top. For a long moment Ranson stared at the dark, enigmatic girl, watched her hands dance over the keys to produce the soft lulling music. About her head, he noticed, was a queer copper helmet, of a type he had never before seen. And then the girl, Elath Taen, the laboratory, all faded into a kaleidoscopic whirl. Ranson felt himself falling down into the gray mists, and consciousness disappeared.

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Castaways of Eros By NELSON S. BOND Two families fought for the title to Eros, and only one could win. One had to outsmart the other—and both had to win over the unscrupulous United Ores Corporation. It was a problem worthy of a Solomon—and it had an ending even those embittered rivals could not foresee. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Bobby couldn't help wishing Pop would stand up just a little bit straighter. Not that he was ashamed of Pop; it wasn't that at all. It was just that the Patrolman stood so straight, his shoulders broad and firm. Standing beside him made Pop look sort of thin and puny; his chest caved in like he was carrying a heavy weight on his shoulders. That was from studying things through a microscope. Anyhow, decided Bobby with a fierce loyalty, that S.S.P. man probably wouldn't even know what to look for if somebody put a microscope in front of him. Even if he was big and sturdy and broad-shouldered in his space blues. Mom said, "Bobby, what are you muttering about? Do stop fidgeting!" Bobby said, "Yessum," and glared at Moira, as if she, in some obscure way, were to blame for his having been reprimanded right out here in the middle of Long Island Spaceport, where everybody could hear and laugh at him. But Moira, studying the handsome S.S.P. man surreptitiously, did not notice. Dick was fixing something in the ship. Eleanor stood quietly beside Mom, crooning softly to The Pooch so it wouldn't be scared by the thunderous blast of rocket motors. Grampaw Moseley had buttonholed an embarrassed young ensign, was complaining to him in loud and certain terms that modern astronavigation practices were, "Rank bellywash, Mister, and a dad-ratted disgrace!" The Patrolman said, "Your name, please, Sir?" "Robert Emmet O'Brien Moseley," said Pop. "Occupation?" "Research physicist, formerly. Now about to become a land-grant settler." "Age of self and party ... former residence...." Overhead, the sky was blue and thin—clear as a bowl of skimmed milk; its vastness limned in sharp relief, to the west and north, the mighty spans and arches, the faery domes and flying buttresses of Great New York. The spacedrome fed a hundred ducts of flight; from one field lifted air locals, giddy, colored motes with gyroscopes aspin. From another, a West Coast stratoliner surged upward to lose itself in thin, dim heights. Vast cradles by the Sound were the nests to which a flock of interplanetary craft made homeward flight. Luggers and barges and cruisers. Bobby saw, with sudden excitement, the sharp, starred prow of the Solar Space Patrol man-o'-war. Here, in this field, the GSC's—the General Spacecraft Cradles. From one of which, as soon as Pop got clearance, their ship would take off. Their ship! Bobby felt an eager quickening of his pulse; his stomach was aswarm with a host of butterflies. Their ship! The space officer said, "I think that takes care of everything, Dr. Moseley. I presume you understand the land-grant laws and obligations?" "Yes, Lieutenant." "Very well, then—" Space-red hands made official motions with a hand-stamp and pen. "Your clearance. And my very best wishes, Sir." "Thank you," said Pop quietly. He turned. "That's all. Ready, Mother? Eleanor? Moira?" Bobby bounded forward. "Can I push the button, can I, Pop? When we start, can I?" Dick was waiting before the open lock of the Cuchulainn . Dick could do anything, everything at once. He took The Pooch into the circle of his left arm, helped his mother aboard, said, "Shut up, kid, you're enough to wake the dead. Watch that guard-panel, Elly. Papers all set, Pop?" And he tickled The Pooch's dimpled cheek with an oily finger. "You act just like your mama," he said irrelevantly, and the baby gurgled. Eleanor cried, "Dick—those dirty hands!" "Everything is in order, Richard," said Pop. "Good. You folks go in and strap down. I'll seal. Here comes the cradle-monkey now." Pop said, "Come along, Robert," and the others went inside. Bobby waited, though, to see the cradle-monkey, the man under whose orders spacecraft lifted gravs. The cradle-monkey was a dour man with gnarled legs and arms and temper. He looked at the Cuchulainn and sniffed; then at Dick. "Family crate, huh?" "That's right." "Well, f'r goddlemighty' sakes, don't try to blast off with y'r side jets burnin'. Take a seven-point-nineteen readin' on y'r Akka gauge, stern rockets only—" "Comets to you, butt-hoister!" grinned Dick. "I've had eight years on the spider run. I can lift this can." "Oh, a rocketeer?" There was new, grudging respect in the groundman's tone. "Well, how was I t' know? Y'ought t' see what some o' them jaloupi-jockeys do to my cradles—burn 'em black! Oh, well—" He backed away from the ship. "Clean ether!" said Dick. He closed the lock. Its seal-brace slid into place, wheezing asthmatically. Bobby's ears rang suddenly with the mild compression of air; when he swallowed, they were all right again. Dick saw him. "What are you doing here, kid? Didn't I hear Pop tell you to come below?" Bobby said, "I'm not a kid. I'm almost sixteen." "Just old enough," promised Dick, "to get your seat warmed if you don't do what you're told. Remember, you're a sailor on a spaceship now. Pop's the Skipper, and I'm First Mate. If you don't obey orders, it's mutiny, and—" "I'm obeying," said Bobby hastily. He followed his brother down the corridor, up the ramp, to the bridge. "Can I push the button when we take off, huh, Dick?" After his high expectations, it wasn't such a great thrill. Dick set the stops and dials, told him which button to press. "When I give the word, kid." Of course, he got to sit in the pilot's bucket-chair, which was something. Moira and Eleanor and Mom to lie down in acceleration hammocks while Pop and Dick sat in observation seats. He waited, all ears and nerves, as the slow seconds sloughed away. Pop set the hypos running; their faint, dull throb was a magic sound in the silence. Then there came a signal from outside. Dick's hand rose in understanding response; fell again. "Now!" Bobby jabbed the button in frantic haste. Suddenly the silence was shattered by a thunderous detonation. There was a massive hand pressing him back into the soft, yielding leather of his chair; the chair retreated on oiled channels, pneumatic compensators hissing faintly, absorbing the shock. Across the room a faulty hammock-hinge squeaked rustily. Then it was over as quickly as it had begun, and he could breathe again, and Dick was lurching across the turret on feet that wobbled queerly because up was down and top was bottom and everything was funny and mixed up. Dick cut in the artificial gravs, checked the meter dials with a hurried glance, smiled. "Dead on it! Want to check, Skipper?" But Pop was standing by the observation pane, eyeing an Earth already ball-like in the vastness of space. Earth, dwindling with each passing moment. Bobby moved to his side and watched; Moira, too, and Eleanor and Mom, and even Dick. Pop touched Mom's hand. He said, "Martha—I'm not sure this is fair to you and the children. Perhaps it isn't right that I should force my dream on all of you. The world we have known and loved lies behind us. Before us lies only uncertainty...." Mom sort of sniffed and reached for a handkerchief. She turned her back to Pop for a minute, and when she turned around again her eyes were red and angry-looking. She said, " You want to go on, don't you, Rob?" Pop nodded. "But I'm thinking of you, Martha." "Of me!" Mom snorted indignantly. "Hear him talk! I never heard such nonsense in my life. Of course I want to go on. No, never mind that! Richard, isn't there a kitchen on this boat?" "A galley, Mom. Below." "Galley ... kitchen ... what's the difference? You two girls come with me. I'll warrant these men are starving. I am!" After that, things became so normal as to be almost disappointing. From his eager reading of such magazines as Martian Tales and Cosmic Fiction Weekly , Bobby had conceived void-travel to be one long, momentous chain of adventure. A super-thrilling serial, punctuated by interludes with space-pirates, narrow brushes with meteors, sabotage, treachery—hair-raising, heroic and horrifying. There was nothing like that to disturb the calm and peaceful journey of the Cuchulainn . Oh, it was enjoyable to stare through the observation panes at the flame-dotted pall of space—until Pop tried to turn his curious interest into educational channels; it was exciting, too, to probe through the corridored recesses of their floating home—except that Dick issued strict orders that nothing must be touched, that he must not enter certain chambers, that he mustn't push his nose into things that didn't concern kids— Which offended Bobby, who was sixteen, or, anyway, fifteen and three-quarters. So they ate and they slept and they ate again. And Pop and Dick spelled each other at the control banks. Moira spent endless hours with comb and mirror, devising elaborate hair-dos which—Bobby reminded her with impudent shrewdness—were so much wasted energy, since they were settling in a place where nobody could see them. And Mom bustled about in the galley, performing miracles with flour and stuff, and in the recreation room, Eleanor minded The Pooch, and lost innumerable games of cribbage to Grampaw Moseley who cheated outrageously and groused, between hands, about the dad-blame nonsensical way Dick was handling the ship. And somehow three Earth days sped by, and they were nearing their destination. The tiny planetoid, Eros. Pop said, "You deserve a great deal of credit, son, for your fine work in rehabilitating the Cuchulainn . It has performed beautifully. You are a good spaceman." Dick flushed. "She's a good ship, Pop, even if she is thirty years old. Some of these old, hand-fashioned jobs are better than the flash junk they're turning off the belts nowadays. You've checked the declension and trajectory?" "Yes. We should come within landing radius in just a few hours. Cut drives at 19.04.22 precisely and make such minor course alterations as are necessary, set brakes." Pop smiled happily. "We're very fortunate, son. A mere fifteen million miles. It's not often Eros is so near Earth." "Don't I know it? It's almost a hundred million at perihelion. But that's not the lucky part. You sure had to pull strings to get the government land grant to Eros. What a plum! Atmosphere ... water ... vegetable life ... all on a hunk of dirt fifty-seven miles in diameter. Frankly, I don't get it! Eros must have terrific mass to have the attributes of a full-sized planet." "It does, Richard. A neutronium core." "Neutronium!" Dick gasped. "Why don't people tell me these things? Roaring craters, Pop, we're rich! Bloated plutocrats!" "Not so fast, son. Eventually, perhaps; not today. First we must establish our claims, justify our right to own Eros. That means work, plenty of hard work. After that, we might be able to consider a mining operation. What's that?" Bobby jumped. It was Mom's voice. But her cry was not one of fear, it was one of excitement. "Rob, look! Off to the—the left, or the port, or whatever you call it! Is that our new home?" Bobby did not need to hear Pop's reply to know that it was. His swift intake of breath was enough, the shine in his eyes as he peered out the observation port. "Eros!" he said. It looked all right to Bobby. A nice, clean little sphere, spinning lazily before their eyes like a top someone had set in motion, then gone away and forgotten. Silver and green and rusty brown, all still faintly blued by distance. The warm rays of old Sol reflected gaily, giddily, from seas that covered half the planetoid's surface, and mountains cut long, jagged shadows into sheltered plains beneath them. It was, thought Bobby, not a bad looking little place. But not anything to get all dewy-eyed about, like Pop was. Dick said softly, "All right, Pop. Let's check and get ready to set 'er down...." II It was not Dick's fault. It was just a tough break that no one had expected, planned for, guarded against. The planetoid was there beneath them; they would land on it. It was as simple at that. Only it wasn't. Nor did they have any warning that the problem was more complex until it was too late to change their plans, too late to halt the irrevocable movements of a grounding spaceship. Dick should have known, of course. He was a spaceman; he had served two tricks on the Earth-Venus-Mars run. But all those planets were large; Eros was just a mote. A spinning top.... Anyway, it was after the final coordinates had been plotted, the last bank control unchangeably set, the rockets cut, that they saw the curved knife-edge of black slicing up over Eros' rim. For a long moment Dick stared at it, a look of angry chagrin in his eyes. "Well, blast me for an Earth-lubbing idiot! Do you see that, Pop?" Pop looked like he had shared Dick's persimmon. "The night-line. We forgot to consider the diurnal revolution." "And now we've got to land in the dark. On strange terrain. Arragh! I should have my head examined. I've got a plugged tube somewhere!" Grampaw Moseley hobbled in, appraised the situation with his incomparable ability to detect something amiss. He snorted and rattled his cane on the floor. "They's absolutely nothin'," he informed the walls, "to this hereditation stuff. Elst why should my own son an' his son be so dag-nabbed stoopid?" "'What can't be cured,'" said Pop mildly, "'must be endured.' We have the forward search-beams, son. They will help." That was sheer optimism. As they neared the planet its gravitational attraction seized them tighter and tighter until they were completely under its compulsion. Dusk swept down upon them, the sunlight dulled, faded, grayed. Then as the ship nosed downward, suddenly all was black. The yellow beam of the search stabbed reluctant shadows, bringing rocky crags and rounded tors into swift, terrifying relief. Dick snapped, "Into your hammocks, everyone! Don't worry. This crate will stand a lot of bust-up. It's tough. A little bit of luck—" But there was perspiration on his forehead, and his fingers played over the control banks like frightened moths. There was no further need for the artificial gravs. Eros exerted, strangely, incredibly, an attractive power almost as potent as Earth's. Dick cut off the gravs, then the hypos. As the last machine-created sound died away from the cabin, Bobby heard the high scream of atmosphere, raging and tearing at the Cuchulainn with angry fingers. Through howling Bedlam they tumbled dizzily and for moments that were ages long. While Dick labored frantically at the controls, while Moira watched with bated breath. Mom said nothing, but her hand sought Pop's; Eleanor cradled The Pooch closer to her. Grampaw scowled. And then, suddenly— "Hold tight! We're grounding!" cried Dick. And instinctively Bobby braced himself for a shock. But there was only a shuddering jar, a lessening of the roar that beat upon their eardrums, a dull, flat thud. A sodden, heavy grinding and the groan of metal forward. Then a false nausea momentarily assailed him. Because for the first time in days the Cuchulainn was completely motionless. Dick grinned shakily. "Well!" he said. "Well!" Pop unbuckled his safety belt, climbed gingerly out of his hammock, moved to the port, slid back its lock-plate. Bobby said, "Can you see anything, Pop? Can you?" And Mom, who could read Pop's expressions like a book, said, "What is it, Rob?" Pop stroked his chin. He said, "Well, we've landed safely, Richard. But I'm afraid we've—er—selected a wet landing field. We seem to be under water!" His hazard was verified immediately. Indisputably. For from the crack beneath the door leading from the control turret to the prow-chambers of the ship, came a dark trickle that spread and puddled and stained and gurgled. Water! Dick cried, "Hey, this is bad! We'd better get out of here—" He leaped to his controls. Once more the plaintive hum of the hypatomics droned through the cabin, gears ground and clashed as the motors caught, something forward exploded dully, distantly. The ship rocked and trembled, but did not move. Again Dick tried to jet the fore-rockets. Again, and yet again. And on the fourth essay, there ran through the ship a violent shudder, broken metal grated shrilly from forward, and the water began bubbling and churning through the crack. Deeper and swifter. Dick cut motors and turned, his face an angry mask. "We can't get loose. The entire nose must be stove in! We're leaking like a sieve. Look, everybody—get into your bulgers. We'll get out through the airlock!" Mom cried, "But—but our supplies, Dick! What are we going to do for food, clothing, furniture—?" "We'll worry about that later. Right now we've got to think of ourselves. That-aboy, Bobby! Thanks for getting 'em out. You girls remember how to climb into 'em? Eleanor—you take that oversized one. That's right. There's room for you and The Pooch—" The water was almost ankle deep in the control room by the time they had all donned spacesuits. Bloated figures in fabricoid bulgers, they followed Dick to the airlock. It was weird, and a little bit frightening, but to Bobby it was thrilling, too. This was the sort of thing you read stories about. Escape from a flooding ship.... They had time—or took time—to gather together a few precious belongings. Eleanor packed a carrier with baby food for The Pooch, Mom a bundle of provisions hastily swept from the galley bins; Pop remembered the medical kit and the tool-box, Grampaw was laden down with blankets and clothing, Dick burdened himself and Bobby with armloads of such things as he saw and forevisioned need for. At the lock, Dick issued final instructions. "The air in the bulgers will carry you right to the surface. We'll gather there, count noses, and decide on our next move. Pop, you go first to lead the way, then Mom, and Eleanor, Grampaw—" Thus, from the heart of the doomed Cuchulainn , they fled. The airlock was small. There was room for but one at a time. The water was waist—no, breast-deep—by the time all were gone save Bobby and Dick. Bobby, whose imagination had already assigned him the command of the foundering ship, wanted to uphold the ancient traditions by being the last to leave. But Dick had other ideas. He shoved Bobby—not too gently—into the lock. Then there was water, black, solid, forbidding, about him. And the outer door opening. He stepped forward. And floated upward, feeling an uneasy, quibbly feeling in his stomach. Almost immediately a hard something clanged! against his impervite helmet; it was a lead-soled bulger boot; then he was bobbing and tossing on shallow black wavelets beside the others. Above him was a blue-black, star-gemmed sky; off to his right, not distant, was a rising smudge that must be the mainland. A dark blob popped out of the water. Dick. Moira reached for the twisted branch. Dick's voice was metallic through the audios of the space-helmet. "All here, Pop? Everybody all right? Swell! Let's strike out for the shore, there. Stick together, now. It isn't far." Pop said, "The ship, Richard?" "We'll find it again. I floated up a marking buoy. That round thing over there isn't Grampaw." Grampaw's voice was raucous, belligerent. "You bet y'r boots it ain't! I'm on my way to terry firmy. The last one ashore's a sissy!" Swimming in a bulger, Bobby found, was silly. Like paddling a big, warm, safe rubber rowboat. The stars winked at him, the soft waves explored his face-plate with curious, white fingers of spray. Pretty soon there was sand scraping his boots ... a long, smooth beach with rolling hills beyond. In the sudden scarlet of dawn, it was impossible to believe the night had even been frightening. Throughout the night, the Moseley clan huddled together there on the beach, waiting, silent, wondering. But when the sun burst over the horizon like a clamoring, brazen gong, they looked upon this land which was their new home—and found it good. The night did not last long. But Pop had told them it would not. "Eros rotates on its axis," he explained, "in about ten hours, forty minutes, Earth time measurement. Therefore we shall have 'days' and 'nights' of five hours; short dawns or twilights. This will vary somewhat, you understand, with the change of seasons." Dick asked, "Isn't that a remarkably slow rotation? For such a tiny planet, I mean? After all, Eros is only one hundred and eighty odd miles in circumference—" "Eros has many peculiarities. Some of them we have discussed before. It approaches Earth nearer than any other celestial body, excepting Luna and an occasional meteor or comet. When first discovered by Witt, in 1898, the world of science marveled at finding a true planetoid with such an uncommon orbit. At perihelion it comes far within the orbit of Mars; at aphelion it is far outside. "During its near approach in 1900-01, Eros was seen to vary in brightness at intervals of five hours and fifteen or twenty minutes. At that time, a few of the more imaginative astronomers offered the suggestion that this variation might be caused by diurnal rotation. After 1931, though, the planetoid fled from Earth. It was not until 1975, the period of its next approach, that the Ronaldson-Chenwith expedition visited it and determined the old presumption to be correct." "We're not the first men to visit Eros, then?" "Not at all. It was investigated early in the days of spaceflight. Two research foundations, the Royal Cosmographic Society and the Interplanetary Service, sent expeditions here. During the Black Douglass period of terrorism, the S.S.P. set up a brief military occupation. The Galactic Metals Corporation at one time attempted to establish mining operations here, but the Bureau refused them permission, for under the Spacecode of '08, it was agreed by the Triune that all asteroids should be settled under land-grant law. "That is why," concluded Pop, "we are here now. As long as I can remember, it has been my dream to take a land-grant colony for my very own. Long years ago I decided that Eros should be my settlement. As you have said, Richard, it necessitated the pulling of many strings. Eros is a wealthy little planet; the man who earns it wins a rich prize. More than that, though—" Pop lifted his face to the skies, now blue with hazy morning. There was something terribly bright and proud in his eyes. "More than that, there is the desire to carve a home out of the wilderness. To be able to one day say, 'Here is my home that I have molded into beauty with my own hands.' Do you know what I mean, son? In this workaday world of ours there are no more Earthly frontiers for us to dare, as did our forefathers. But still within us all stirs the deep, instinctive longing to hew a new home from virgin land—" His words dwindled into silence, and, inexplicably, Bobby felt awed. It was Grampaw Moseley who burst the queer moment into a thousand spluttering fragments. "Talkin' about hewin'," he said, "S'posen we 'hew us a few vittles? Hey?" Dick roused himself. "Right you are, Grampaw," he said. "You can remove your bulgars. I've tested the air; it's fine and warm, just as the report said. Moira, while Mom and Eleanor are fixing breakfast, suppose you lay out our blankets and spare clothing to dry? Grampaw, get a fire going. Pop and Bobby and I will get some wood." Thus Eros greeted its new masters, and the Moseleys faced morning in their new Eden. III Grampaw Moseley wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. There were no napkins, which suited him fine. "It warn't," he said, "a bad meal. But it warn't a fust-class un, neither. Them synthos an' concentrates ain't got no more flavor than—" Bobby agreed with him. Syntho ham wasn't too bad. It had a nice, meaty taste. And syntho coffee tasted pretty much like the real thing. But those syntho eggs tasted like nothing under the sun except just plain, awful syntho eggs. Four Eros days—the equivalent of forty-two Earth hours or so—had passed since their crash landing. In that short time, much had been done to make their beach camp-site comfortable. All members of the family were waiting now for Dick to return. Pop said seriously, "I'm afraid you'll have to eat them and like them for a little while, Father. We can't get fresh foods until we're settled; we can't settle until—Ah! Here comes Dick!" "I'll eat 'em," grumbled Grampaw, "but be durned if I'll like 'em. What'd you l'arn, Dicky-boy?" Dick removed his helmet, unzipped himself from his bulger, shook his head. "It looks worse every time I go back. I may not be able to get in the airlock again if the ship keeps on settling. The whole prow split wide open when we hit, the ship is full of water. The flour and sugar and things like that are ruined. I managed to get a few more things out, though. Some tools, guns, wire—stuff like that." "How about the hypatomic?" "Let him eat, Rob," said Mom. "He's hungry." "I can eat and talk at the same time, Mom. I think I can get the hypatomic out. I'd better, anyhow. If we're ever going to raise the ship, we'll need power. And atomic power is the only kind we can get in this wilderness." And he shook his head. "But we can't do it in a day or a week. It will take time." "Time," said Pop easily, "is the one commodity with which we are over-supplied." He thought for a minute. "If that's the way it is, we might as well move." "Move?" demanded Grampaw. "What's the matter with the place we're at?" "For one thing, it's too exposed. An open beach is no place for a permanent habitation. So far we've been very lucky. We've had no storms. But for a permanent camp-site, we must select a spot further inland. A fertile place, where we can start crops. A place with fresh, running water, natural shelter against cold and wind and rain—" "What'll we do?" grinned Dick. "Flip a coin?" "No. Happily, there is a spot like that within an easy walk of here. I discovered it yesterday while studying the terrain." Pop took a stick, scratched a rude drawing on the sand before him. "This is the coastline. We landed on the west coast of this inlet. The land we see across there, that low, flat land, I judge to be delta islands. Due south of us is a fine, fresh-water river, watering fertile valleys to either side. There, I think, we should build." Dick nodded. "Fish from the sea, vegetables from our own farm—is there any game, Pop?" "That I don't know. We haven't seen any. Yet." "We'll find out. Will this place you speak of be close enough to let me continue working on the Cuchulainn ? Yes? Well, that's that. When do we start?" "Why not now? There's nothing to keep us here." They packed their meager belongings while Dick finished his meal; the sun was high when they left the beach. They followed the shore line southward, the ground rising steadily before them. And before evening, they came to a rolling vale through which a sparkling river meandered lazily to the sea. Small wonders unfolded before their eyes. Marching along, they had discovered that there was game on Eros. Not quite Earthly, of course—but that was not to be expected. There was one small, furry beast about the size of a rabbit, only its color was vivid leaf-green. Once, as they passed a wooded glen, a pale, fawnlike creature stole from the glade, watched them with soft, curious eyes. Another time they all started violently as the familiar siren of a Patrol monitor screamed raucously from above them; they looked up to see an irate, orange and jade-green bird glaring down at them. And of course there were insects— "There would have to be insects," Pop said. "There could be no fruitful vegetable life without insects. Plants need bees and crawling ants—or their equivalent—to carry the pollen from one flower to another." They chose a site on the riverside, a half mile or so from, above, and overlooking the sea. They selected it because a spring of pure, bubbling water was nearby, because the woodlands dwindled away into lush fields. And Pop said, "This is it. We'll build our home on yonder knoll. And who knows—" Again there grew that strange look in his eyes. "Who knows but that it may be the shoot from which, a time hence, there may spring many cabins, then finer homes, and buildings, and mansions, until at last there is a great, brave city here on this port by the delta—" "That's it, Pop!" said Dick suddenly. "There's the name for our settlement. Delta Port!"

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61119

DANGEROUS QUARRY BY JIM HARMON One little village couldn't have a monopoly on all the bad breaks in the world. They did, though! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] They say automation makes jobs, especially if "they" are trying to keep their own job of selling automation machines. I know the Actuarvac made one purple passion of a job for me, the unpleasantly fatal results of which are still lingering with me. Thad McCain, my boss at Manhattan-Universal Insurance, beamed over the sprawling automatic brain's silver gauges and plastic toggles as proudly as if he had just personally gave birth to it. "This will simplify your job to the point of a pleasant diversion, Madison." "Are you going to keep paying me for staying with my little hobby?" I asked, suspiciously eyeing my chrome competitor. "The Actuarvac poses no threat to your career. It will merely keep you from flying off on wild-goose chases. It will unvaryingly separate from the vast body of legitimate claims the phony ones they try to spike us for. Then all that remains is for you to gather the accessory details, the evidence to jail our erring customers." "Fine," I said. I didn't bother to inform him that that was all my job had ever been. McCain shuffled his cards. They were cards for the machine, listing new individual claims on company policies. Since the two-month-old machine was literate and could read typewriting, the cards weren't coded or punched. He read the top one. "Now this, for instance. No adjuster need investigate this accident. The circumstances obviously are such that no false claim could be filed. Of course, the brain will make an unfailing analysis of all the factors involved and clear the claim automatically and officially." McCain threaded the single card into the slot for an example to me. He then flicked the switch and we stood there watching the monster ruminate thoughtfully. It finally rang a bell and spit the card back at Manhattan-Universal's top junior vice-president. He took it like a man. "That's what the machine is for," he said philosophically. "To detect human error. Hmm. What kind of a shove do you get out of this?" He handed me the rejected claim card. I took it, finding a new, neatly typed notation on it. It said: Investigate the Ozark village of Granite City. "You want me to project it in a movie theater and see how it stands it all alone in the dark?" I asked. "Just circle up the wagon train and see how the Indians fall," McCain said anxiously. "It's too general. What does the nickel-brained machine mean by investigating a whole town? I don't know if it has crooked politics, a polygamy colony or a hideout for supposedly deported gangsters. I don't care much either. It's not my business. How could a whole town be filing false life and accident claims?" "Find that out," he said. "I trust the machine. There have been cases of mass collusion before. Until you get back, we are making no more settlements with that settlement." Research. To a writer that generally means legally permissible plagiarism. For an insurance adjuster, it means earnest work. Before I headed for the hills, or the Ozark Mountains, I walked a few hundred feet down the hall and into the manual record files. The brain abstracted from empirical data but before I planed out to Granite City I had to find the basis for a few practical, nasty suspicions. Four hours of flipping switches and looking at microfilm projections while a tawny redhead in a triangular fronted uniform carried me reels to order gave me only two ideas. Neither was very original. The one that concerned business was that the whole village of Granite City must be accident-prone. I rejected that one almost immediately. While an accident-prone was in himself a statistical anomaly, the idea of a whole town of them gathered together stretched the fabric of reality to the point where even an invisible re-weaver couldn't help it. There was an explanation for the recent rise in the accident rate down there. The rock quarry there had gone into high-level operation. I knew why from the floor, walls, ceiling border, table trimmings in the records room. They were all granite. The boom in granite for interior and exterior decoration eclipsed earlier periods of oak, plastics, wrought iron and baked clay completely. The distinctive grade of granite from Granite City was being put into use all over the planet and in the Officer's Clubs on the Moon and Mars. Yet the rise in accident, compared to the rise in production, was out of all proportion. Furthermore, the work at the quarry could hardly explain the excessive accident reports we had had from the village as far back as our records went. We had paid off on most of the claims since they seemed irrefutably genuine. All were complete with eye-witness reports and authenticated circumstances. There was one odd note in the melodic scheme: We had never had a claim for any kind of automobile accident from Granite City. I shut off the projector. It may be best to keep an open mind, but I have found in practice that you have to have some kind of working theory which you must proceed to prove is either right or wrong. Tentatively, I decided that for generations the citizens of Granite City had been in an organized conspiracy to defraud Manhattan-Universal and its predecessors of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars in false accident claims. Maybe they made their whole livelihood off us before the quarry opened up. I used my pocket innercom and had my secretary get me a plane reservation and a gun. After so many profitable decades, Granite City wasn't going to take kindly to my spoil-sport interference. The Absinthe Flight to Springfield was jolly and relatively fast. Despite headwinds we managed Mach 1.6 most of the way. My particular stewardess was a blonde, majoring in Video Psychotherapy in her night courses. I didn't have much time to get acquainted or more than hear the outline of her thesis on the guilt purgings effected by The Life and Legend of Gary Cooper. The paunchy businessman in the next lounge was already nibbling the ear of his red-haired hostess. He was the type of razorback who took the girls for granted and aimed to get his money's worth. I gave Helen, the blonde, a kiss on the cheek and began flipping through the facsimiles in my briefcase as we chute-braked for a landing at the Greater Ozarks. It took me a full five minutes to find out that I couldn't take a copter to Granite City. Something about downdrafts in the mountains. Since that put me back in the days of horsepower, I trotted over to the automobile rental and hired a few hundred of them under the hood of a Rolls. That was about the only brand of car that fit me. I hadn't been able to get my legs into any other foreign car since I was fifteen, and I have steadfastly refused to enter an American model since they all sold out their birthrights as passenger cars and went over to the tractor-trailer combinations they used only for cargo trucks when I was a boy. Dragging around thirty feet of car is sheer nonsense, even for prestige. It was a tiresome fifty-mile drive, on manual all the way after I left the radar-channel area of the city. Up and down, slowing for curves, flipping into second for the hills. The whole trip hardly seemed worth it when I saw the cluster of painted frame buildings that was Granite City. They looked like a tumble of dingy building blocks tossed in front of a rolled-up indigo sports shirt. That was Granite Mountain in the near foreground. But I remembered that over the course of some forty years the people in these few little stacks of lumber had taken Manhattan-Universal for three quarters of a megabuck. I turned off onto the gravel road, spraying my fenders with a hail of a racket. Then I stepped down hard on my brakes, bracing myself to keep from going through the windscreen. I had almost sideswiped an old man sitting at the side of the road, huddled in his dusty rags. "Are you okay?" I yelled, thumbing down the window. "I've suffered no harm at your hands—or your wheels, sir. But I could use some help," the old man said. "Could I trouble you for a lift when you leave town?" I wasn't too sure about that. Most of these guys who are on the hobo circuit talking like they owned some letters to their names besides their initials belonged to some cult or other. I try to be as tolerant as I can, and some of my best friends are thugs, but I don't want to drive with them down lonely mountain roads. "We'll see what we can work out," I said. "Right now can you tell me where I can find Marshal Thompson?" "I can," he said. "But you will have to walk there." "Okay. It shouldn't be much of a walk in Granite City." "It's the house at the end of the street." "It is," I said. "Why shouldn't I drive up there? The street's open." The old man stared at me with red-shot eyes. "Marshal Thompson doesn't like people to run automobiles on the streets of Granite City." "So I'll just lock the car up and walk over there. I couldn't go getting tire tracks all over your clean streets." The old man watched as I climbed down and locked up the Rolls. "You would probably get killed if you did run the car here, you know," he said conversationally. "Well," I said, "I'll be getting along." I tried to walk sideways so I could keep an eye on him. "Come back," he said, as if he had doubts. The signs of a menacing conspiracy were growing stronger, I felt. I had my automatic inside my shirt, but I decided I might need a less lethal means of expression. Without breaking stride, I scooped up a baseball-size hunk of bluish rock from the road and slipped it into my small change pocket. I have made smarter moves in my time. As I approached the house at the end of the lane, I saw it was about the worse construction job I had seen in my life. It looked as architecturally secure as a four-year-old's drawing of his home. The angles were measurably out of line. Around every nail head were two nails bent out of shape and hammered down, and a couple of dozen welts in the siding where the hammer had missed any nail. The paint job was spotty and streaked. Half the panes in the windows were cracked. I fought down the dust in my nose, afraid of the consequences of a sneeze to the place. My toe scuffed the top porch step and I nearly crashed face first into the front door. I had been too busy looking at the house, I decided. I knocked. Moments later, the door opened. The lean-faced man who greeted me had his cheeks crisscrossed with razor nicks and his shirt on wrong side out. But his eyes were bright and sparrow alert. "Are you Mr. Marshal Thompson, the agent for Manhattan-Universal Insurance?" I put to him. "I'm the marshal, name of Thompson. But you ain't the first to take my title for my Christian name. You from the company?" "Yes," I said. "Were you expecting me?" Thompson nodded. "For forty-one years." Thompson served the coffee in the chipped cups, favoring only slightly his burned fingers. Catching the direction of my glance, he said, "Company is worth a few scalds, Mr. Madison." I accepted the steaming cup and somehow it very nearly slipped out of my hands. I made a last microsecond retrieve. The marshal nodded thoughtfully. "You're new here." "First time," I said, sipping coffee. It was awful. He must have made a mistake and put salt into it instead of sugar. "You think the claims I've been filing for my people are false?" "The home office has some suspicions of that," I admitted. "I don't blame them, but they ain't. Look, the company gambles on luck, doesn't it?" "No. It works on percentages calculated from past experience." "But I mean it knows that there will be, say, a hundred fatal car crashes in a day. But it doesn't know if maybe ninety of them will be in Iowa and only ten in the rest of the country." "There's something to that. We call it probability, not luck." "Well, probability says that more accidents are going to occur in Granite City than anywhere else in the country, per capita." I shook my head at Thompson. "That's not probability. Theoretically, anything can happen but I don't—I can't—believe that in this town everybody has chanced to be an accident prone. Some other factor is operating. You are all deliberately faking these falls and fires—" "We're not," Thompson snapped. "Or else something is causing you to have this trouble. Maybe the whole town is a bunch of dope addicts. Maybe you grow your own mescalin or marijuana; it's happened before." Thompson laughed. "Whatever is going on, I'm going to find it out. I don't care what you do, but if I can find a greater risk here and prove it, the Commission will let us up our rates for this town. Probably beyond the capacity of these people, I'm afraid." "That would be a real tragedy, Mr. Madison. Insurance is vital to this town. Nobody could survive a year here without insurance. People pay me for their premiums before they pay their grocery bills." I shrugged, sorrier than I could let on. "I won't be able to pay for my own groceries, marshal, if I don't do the kind of job the company expects. I'm going to snoop around." "All right," he said grudgingly, "but you'll have to do it on foot." "Yes, I understood you didn't like cars on your streets. At least not the cars of outsiders." "That doesn't have anything to do with it. Nobody in Granite City owns a car. It would be suicide for anybody to drive a car, same as it would be to have a gas or oil stove, instead of coal, or to own a bathtub." I took a deep breath. "Showers," Thompson said. "With nonskid mats and handrails." I shook hands with him. "You've been a great help." "Four o'clock," he said. "Roads are treacherous at night." "There's always a dawn." Thompson met my eyes. "That's not quite how we look at it here." II The quarry was a mess. I couldn't see any in the way they sliced the granite out of the mountain. The idea of a four-year-old—a four-year-old moron—going after a mound of raspberry ice cream kept turning up in my mind as I walked around. The workmen were gone; it was after five local time. But here and there I saw traces of them. Some of them were sandwich wrappers and cigarette stubs, but most of the traces were smears of blood. Blood streaked across sharp rocks, blood oozing from beneath heavy rocks, blood smeared on the handles and working surfaces of sledge hammers and tools. The place was as gory as a battlefield. "What are you looking for, bud?" The low, level snarl had come from a burly character in a syn-leather jacket and narrow-brimmed Stetson. "The reason you have so many accidents here," I said frankly. "I'm from the insurance company. Name's Madison." "Yeah, I know." I had supposed he would. "I'm Kelvin, the foreman here," the big man told me, extending a ham of a fist to be shook. "Outside, doing my Army time, I noticed that most people don't have as many slipups as we do here. Never could figure it out." "This rock is part of it—" "What do you mean by that!" Kelvin demanded savagely. "I mean the way you work it. No system to it. No stratification, no plateau work..." "Listen, Madison, don't talk about what you don't know anything about. The stuff in these walls isn't just rock; it isn't even plain granite. Granite City exports some of the finest grade of the stone in the world. And it's used all over the world. We aren't just a bunch of meatheaded ditch diggers—we are craftsmen. We have to figure a different way of getting out every piece of stone." "It's too bad." "What's too bad?" "That you chose the wrong way so often," I said. Kelvin breathed a virile grade of tobacco into my face. "Listen, Madison, we have been working this quarry for generations, sometimes more of us working than other times. Today most of us are working getting the stone out. That's the way we like it. We don't want any outsider coming in and interfering with that." "If this quarry has anything to do with defrauding Manhattan-Universal, I can tell you that I will do something about that!" As soon as my teeth clicked back together, the sickening feeling hit me that I shouldn't have said that. The general store was called a supermarket, but it wasn't particularly superior. I took a seat at the soda fountain and took a beer, politely declining the teen-age clerk's offer of a shot of white lightning from the Pepsi-Cola fountain syrup jug for a quarter. Behind me were three restaurant tables and one solitary red-upholstered booth. Two men somewhere between forty and sixty sat at the nearest table playing twenty-one. Over the foam of my stein I saw the old man I had almost run down in the road. He marched through the two-thirds of the building composed of rows of can goods and approached the fat man at the cash register. "Hello, Professor," the fat man said. "What can we do for you?" "I'd like to mail a letter," he said in an urgent voice. "Sure, Professor, I'll send it right off on the facsimile machine as soon as I get a free moment." "You're sure you can send it? Right away?" "Positive. Ten cents, Professor." The professor fumbled in his pants' pocket and fished out a dime. He fingered it thoughtfully. "I suppose the letter can wait," he said resignedly. "I believe I will buy a pair of doughnuts, Mr. Haskel." "Why not get a hamburger, Professor? Special sale today. Only a dime. And since you're such a good customer I'll throw in a cup of coffee and the two sinkers for nothing." "That's—kind of you," the old man said awkwardly. Haskel shrugged. "A man has to eat." The man called "the professor" came over and sat down two stools away, ignoring me. The clerk dialed his hamburger and served it. I stayed with my beer and my thoughts. More and more, I was coming to believe that Granite City wasn't a job for an investigative adjuster like myself but a psychological adjuster. Crime is a structural flaw in a community, yes. But when the whole society is criminal, distorted, you can't isolate the flaw. The whole village was meat for a sociologist; let him figure out why otherwise decent citizens felt secure in conspiracy to defraud an honored corporation. I didn't feel that I was licked or that the trip had been a failure. I had merely established to my intuitive satisfaction that the job was not in my field. I glanced at the old man. The proprietor of the store knew him and evidently thought him harmless enough to feed. "I think I can make it down the mountain before dark, Old Timer," I called over to him. "You can come along if you like." The acne-faced kid behind the counter stared at me. I looked over and caught the bright little eyes of Haskel, the proprietor, too. Finally, the old professor turned on his stool, his face pale and his eyes sad and resigned. "I doubt very much if either of us will be leaving, Mr. Madison," he said. "Now." I took my beer and the professor his coffee over to the single booth. We looked at each other across the shiny table and our beverage containers. "I am Doctor Arnold Parnell of Duke University," the professor said. "I left on my sabbatical five months ago. I have been here ever since." I looked at his clothes. "You must not have been very well fixed for a year's vacation, Professor." "I," he said, "have enough traveler's checks with me to paper a washroom. Nobody in this town will cash them for me." "I can understand why you want to go somewhere where people are more trusting in that case." "They know the checks are good. It's me they refuse to trust to leave this place. They think they can't let me go." "I don't see any shackles on you," I remarked. "Just because you can't see them," he growled, "doesn't mean they aren't there. Marshal Thompson has the only telephone in the village. He has politely refused to let me use it. I'm a suspicious and undesirable character; he's under no obligation to give me telephone privileges, he says. Haskel has the Post Office concession—the Telefax outfit behind the money box over there. He takes my letters but I never see him send them off. And I never get a reply." "Unfriendly of them," I said conservatively. "But how can they stop you from packing your dental floss and cutting out?" "Haskel has the only motor vehicle in town—a half-ton pick-up, a minuscule contrivance less than the size of a passenger car. He makes about one trip a week down into the city for supplies and package mail. He's been the only one in or out of Granite City for five months." It seemed incredible—more than that, unlikely, to me. "How about the granite itself? How do they ship it out?" "It's an artificial demand product, like diamonds," Professor Parnell said. "They stockpile it and once a year the executive offices for the company back in Nashville runs in a portable monorail railroad up the side of the mountain to take it out. That won't be for another four months, as nearly as I can find out. I may not last that long." "How are you living?" I asked. "If they won't take your checks—" "I do odd jobs for people. They feed me, give me a little money sometimes." "I can see why you want to ride out with me," I said. "Haven't you ever thought of just walking out?" "Fifty miles down a steep mountain road? I'm an old man, Mr. Madison, and I've gotten even older since I came to Granite City." I nodded. "You have any papers, any identification, to back this up?" Wordlessly, he handed over his billfold, letters, enough identification to have satisfied Allen Pinkerton or John Edgar Hoover. "Okay," I drawled. "I'll accept your story for the moment. Now answer me the big query: Why are the good people of Granite City doing this to you? By any chance, you wouldn't happen to know of a mass fraud they are perpetrating on Manhattan-Universal?" "I know nothing of their ethical standards," Parnell said, "but I do know that they are absolutely subhuman !" "I admit I have met likelier groups of human beings in my time." "No, understand me. These people are literally subhuman—they are inferior to other human beings." "Look, I know the Klan is a growing organization but I can't go along with you." "Madison, understand me, I insist. Ethnologically speaking, it is well known that certain tribes suffer certain deficiencies due to diet, climate, et cetera. Some can't run, sing, use mathematics. The people of Granite City have the most unusual deficency on record, I admit. Their psionic senses have been impaired. They are completely devoid of any use of telepathy, precognition, telekinesis." "Because they aren't supermen, that doesn't mean that they are submen," I protested. "I don't have any psionic abilities either." "But you do!" Parnell said earnestly. "Everybody has some psionics ability, but we don't realize it. We don't have the fabulous abilities of a few recorded cases of supermen, but we have some, a trace. Granite City citizens have no psionic ability whatsoever, not even the little that you and I and the rest of the world have!" "You said you were Duke University, didn't you?" I mused. "Maybe you know what you are talking about; I've never been sure. But these people can't suffer very much from their lack of what you call psi ability." "I tell you they do," he said hoarsely. "We never realize it but we all have some power of precognition. If we didn't, we would have a hundred accidents a day—just as these people do . They can't foresee the bump in the road the way we can, or that that particular match will flare a little higher and burn their fingers. There are other things, as well. You'll find it is almost impossible to carry on a lengthy conversation with any of them—they have no telepathic ability, no matter how slight, to see through the semantic barrier. None of them can play ball. They don't have the unconscious psionic ability to influence the ball in flight. All of us can do that, even if the case of a 'Poltergeist' who can lift objects is rare." "Professor, you mean these people are holding you here simply so you won't go out and tell the rest of the world that they are submen?" "They don't want the world to know why they are psionically subnormal," he said crisply. "It's the granite ! I don't understand why myself. I'm not a physicist or a biologist. But for some reason the heavy concentration and particular pattern of the radioactive radiation in its matrix is responsible for both inhibiting the genes that transmit psi powers from generation to generation and affecting those abilities in the present generation. A kind of psionic sterility." "How do you know this?" "We haven't the time for all that. But think about it. What else could it be? It's that granite that they are shipping all over the world, spreading the contamination. I want to stop that contamination. To the people of Granite City that means ruining their only industry, putting them all out of work. They are used to this psionic sterility; they don't see anything so bad about it. Besides, like everybody else, they have some doubts that there really are such things as telepathy and the rest to be affected." "Frankly," I said, hedging only a little, "I don't know what to make of your story. This is something to be decided by somebody infallible—like the Pope or the President or Board Chairman of Manhattan-Universal. But the first thing to do is get you out of here. We had better get back to my car. I've got good lights to get down the mountain." Parnell jumped up eagerly, and brushed over his china mug, staining the tabletop with brown caffeine. "Sorry," he said. "I should have been precognizant of that. I try to stay away from the rock as much as possible, but it's getting to me." I should have remembered something then. But, naturally, I didn't.

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HAGERTY'S ENZYMES By A. L. HALEY There's a place for every man and a man for every place, but on robot-harried Mars the situation was just a little different. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Harper Breen sank down gingerly into the new Relaxo-Lounge. He placed twitching hands on the arm-rests and laid his head back stiffly. He closed his fluttering eyelids and clamped his mouth to keep the corner from jumping. "Just lie back, Harp," droned his sister soothingly. "Just give in and let go of everything." Harper tried to let go of everything. He gave in to the chair. And gently the chair went to work. It rocked rhythmically, it vibrated tenderly. With velvety cushions it massaged his back and arms and legs. For all of five minutes Harper stood it. Then with a frenzied lunge he escaped the embrace of the Relaxo-Lounge and fled to a gloriously stationary sofa. "Harp!" His sister, Bella, was ready to weep with exasperation. "Dr. Franz said it would be just the thing for you! Why won't you give it a trial?" Harper glared at the preposterous chair. "Franz!" he snarled. "That prize fathead! I've paid him a fortune in fees. I haven't slept for weeks. I can't eat anything but soup. My nerves are jangling like a four-alarm fire. And what does he prescribe? A blasted jiggling baby carriage! Why, I ought to send him the bill for it!" Completely outraged, he lay back on the couch and closed his eyes. "Now, Harp, you know you've never obeyed his orders. He told you last year that you'd have to ease up. Why do you have to try to run the whole world? It's the strain of all your business worries that's causing your trouble. He told you to take a long vacation or you'd crack up. Don't blame him for your own stubbornness." Harper snorted. His large nose developed the sound magnificently. "Vacation!" he snorted. "Batting a silly ball around or dragging a hook after a stupid fish! Fine activities for an intelligent middle-aged man! And let me correct you. It isn't business worries that are driving me to a crack-up. It's the strain of trying to get some sensible, reasonable coöperation from the nincompoops I have to hire! It's the idiocy of the human race that's got me whipped! It's the—" "Hey, Harp, old man!" His brother-in-law, turning the pages of the new colorama magazine, INTERPLANETARY, had paused at a double-spread. "Didn't you have a finger in those Martian equatorial wells they sunk twenty years ago?" Harper's hands twitched violently. "Don't mention that fiasco!" he rasped. "That deal nearly cost me my shirt! Water, hell! Those wells spewed up the craziest conglomeration of liquids ever tapped!" Scribney, whose large, phlegmatic person and calm professorial brain were the complete antithesis of Harper's picked-crow physique and scheming financier's wits, looked severely over his glasses. Harp's nervous tribulations were beginning to bore him, as well as interfere with the harmony of his home. "You're away behind the times, Harp," he declared. "Don't you know that those have proved to be the most astoundingly curative springs ever discovered anywhere? Don't you know that a syndicate has built the largest extra-terrestial hotel of the solar system there and that people are flocking to it to get cured of whatever ails 'em? Old man, you missed a bet!" Leaping from the sofa, Harper rudely snatched the magazine from Scribney's hands. He glared at the spread which depicted a star-shaped structure of bottle-green glass resting jewel-like on the rufous rock of Mars. The main portion of the building consisted of a circular skyscraper with a glass-domed roof. Between its star-shaped annexes, other domes covered landscaped gardens and noxious pools which in the drawing looked lovely and enticing. "Why, I remember now!" exclaimed Bella. "That's where the Durants went two years ago! He was about dead and she looked like a hag. They came back in wonderful shape. Don't you remember, Scrib?" Dutifully Scribney remembered and commented on the change the Martian springs had effected in the Durants. "It's the very thing for you, Harp," he advised. "You'd get a good rest on the way out. This gas they use in the rockets nowadays is as good as a rest-cure; it sort of floats you along the time-track in a pleasant daze, they tell me. And you can finish the cure at the hotel while looking it over. And not only that." Confidentially he leaned toward his insignificant looking brother-in-law. "The chemists over at Dade McCann have just isolated an enzyme from one species of Martian fungus that breaks down crude oil into its components without the need for chemical processing. There's a fortune waiting for the man who corners that fungus market and learns to process the stuff!" Scribney had gauged his victim's mental processes accurately. The magazine sagged in Harp's hands, and his sharp eyes became shrewd and calculating. He even forgot to twitch. "Maybe you're right, Scrib," he acknowledged. "Combine a rest-cure with business, eh?" Raising the magazine, he began reading the advertisement. And that was when he saw the line about the robots. "—the only hotel staffed entirely with robot servants—" "Robots!" he shrilled. "You mean they've developed the things to that point? Why hasn't somebody told me? I'll have Jackson's hide! I'll disfranchise him! I'll—" "Harp!" exploded Bella. "Stop it! Maybe Jackson doesn't know a thing about it, whatever it is! If it's something at the Emerald Star Hotel, why don't you just go and find out for yourself instead of throwing a tantrum? That's the only sensible way!" "You're right, Bella," agreed Harper incisively. "I'll go and find out for myself. Immediately!" Scooping up his hat, he left at his usual lope. "Well!" remarked his sister. "All I can say is that they'd better turn that happy-gas on extra strong for Harp's trip out!" The trip out did Harper a world of good. Under the influence of the soporific gas that permeated the rocket, he really relaxed for the first time in years, sinking with the other passengers into a hazy lethargy with little sense of passing time and almost no memory of the interval. It seemed hardly more than a handful of hours until they were strapping themselves into deceleration hammocks for the landing. And then Harper was waking with lassitude still heavy in his veins. He struggled out of the hammock, made his way to the airlock, and found himself whisked by pneumatic tube directly into the lobby of the Emerald Star Hotel. Appreciatively he gazed around at the half-acre of moss-gray carpeting, green-tinted by the light sifting through the walls of Martian copper-glass, and at the vistas of beautiful domed gardens framed by a dozen arches. But most of all, the robots won his delighted approval. He could see at once that they had been developed to an amazingly high state of perfection. How, he wondered again, had this been done without his knowledge? Was Scrib right? Was he slipping? Gnawing at the doubt, he watched the robots moving efficiently about, pushing patients in wheelchairs, carrying trays, guiding newcomers, performing janitorial duties tirelessly, promptly, and best of all, silently. Harper was enthralled. He'd staff his offices with them. Hang the expense! There'd be no more of that obnoxious personal friction and proneness to error that was always deviling the most carefully trained office staffs! He'd investigate and find out the exact potentialities of these robots while here, and then go home and introduce them into the field of business. He'd show them whether he was slipping! Briskly he went over to the desk. He was immediately confronted with a sample of that human obstinacy that was slowly driving him mad. Machines, he sighed to himself. Wonderful silent machines! For a woman was arguing stridently with the desk clerk who, poor man, was a high strung fellow human instead of a robot. Harper watched him shrinking and turning pale lavender in the stress of the argument. "A nurse!" shouted the woman. "I want a nurse! A real woman! For what you charge, you should be able to give me a television star if I want one! I won't have another of those damnable robots in my room, do you hear?" No one within the confines of the huge lobby could have helped hearing. The clerk flinched visibly. "Now, Mrs. Jacobsen," he soothed. "You know the hotel is staffed entirely with robots. They're much more expensive, really, than human employees, but so much more efficient, you know. Admit it, they give excellent service, don't they, now?" Toothily he smiled at the enraged woman. "That's just it!" Mrs. Jacobsen glared. "The service is too good. I might just as well have a set of push buttons in the room. I want someone to hear what I say! I want to be able to change my mind once in awhile!" Harper snorted. "Wants someone she can devil," he diagnosed. "Someone she can get a kick out of ordering around." With vast contempt he stepped to the desk beside her and peremptorily rapped for the clerk. "One moment, sir," begged that harassed individual. "Just one moment, please." He turned back to the woman. But she had turned her glare on Harper. "You could at least be civil enough to wait your turn!" Harper smirked. "My good woman, I'm not a robot. Robots, of course, are always civil. But you should know by now that civility isn't a normal human trait." Leaving her temporarily quashed, he beckoned authoritatively to the clerk. "I've just arrived and want to get settled. I'm here merely for a rest-cure, no treatments. You can assign my quarters before continuing your—ah—discussion with the lady." The clerk sputtered. Mrs. Jacobsen sputtered. But not for nothing was Harper one of the leading business executives of the earth. Harper's implacable stare won his point. Wiping beads of moisture from his forehead, the clerk fumbled for a card, typed it out, and was about to deposit it in the punch box when a fist hit the desk a resounding blow and another voice, male, roared out at Harper's elbow. "This is a helluva joint!" roared the voice. "Man could rot away to the knees while he's waitin' for accommodations. Service!" Again his fist banged the counter. The clerk jumped. He dropped Harper's card and had to stoop for it. Absently holding it, he straightened up to face Mrs. Jacobsen and the irate newcomer. Hastily he pushed a tagged key at Harper. "Here you are, Mr. Breen. I'm sure you'll find it comfortable." With a pallid smile he pressed a button and consigned Harper to the care of a silent and efficient robot. The room was more than comfortable. It was beautiful. Its bank of clear windows set in the green glass wall framed startling rubicund views of the Martian hinterland where, Harper affectionately thought, fungi were busy producing enzymes that were going to be worth millions for him and his associates. There remained only the small detail of discovering how to extract them economically and to process them on this more than arid and almost airless planet. Details for his bright young laboratory men; mere details.... Leaving his luggage to be unpacked by the robot attendant, he went up to the domed roof restaurant. Lunching boldly on broiled halibut with consomme, salad and a bland custard, he stared out at the dark blue sky of Mars, with Deimos hanging in the east in three-quarter phase while Phobos raced up from the west like a meteor behind schedule. Leaning back in his cushioned chair, he even more boldly lit a slim cigar—his first in months—and inhaled happily. For once old Scribney had certainly been right, he reflected. Yes sir, Scrib had rung the bell, and he wasn't the man to forget it. With a wonderful sense of well-being he returned to his room and prepared to relax. Harper opened his eyes. Two robots were bending over him. He saw that they were dressed in white, like hospital attendants. But he had no further opportunity to examine them. With brisk, well-co-ordinated movements they wheeled a stretcher along-side his couch, stuck a hypo into his arm, bundled him onto the stretcher and started wheeling him out. Harper's tongue finally functioned. "What's all this?" he demanded. "There's nothing wrong with me. Let me go!" He struggled to rise, but a metal hand pushed him firmly on the chest. Inexorably it pushed him flat. "You've got the wrong room!" yelled Harp. "Let me go!" But the hypo began to take effect. His yells became weaker and drowsier. Hazily, as he drifted off, he thought of Mrs. Jacobsen. Maybe she had something, at that. There was a tentative knock on the door. "Come in," called Harper bleakly. As soon as the door opened he regretted his invitation, for the opening framed the large untidy man who had noisily pounded on the desk demanding service while he, Harp, was being registered. "Say, pardner," he said hoarsely, "you haven't seen any of them robots around here, have you?" Harper scowled. "Oh, haven't I?" he grated. "Robots! Do you know what they did to me." Indignation lit fires in his pale eyes. "Came in here while I was lying down peacefully digesting the first meal I've enjoyed in months, dragged me off to the surgery, and pumped it all out! The only meal I've enjoyed in months!" Blackly he sank his chin onto his fist and contemplated the outrage. "Why didn't you stop 'em?" reasonably asked the visitor. "Stop a robot?" Harper glared pityingly. "How? You can't reason with the blasted things. And as for using force—it's man against metal. You try it!" He ground his teeth together in futile rage. "And to think I had the insane notion that robots were the last word! Why, I was ready to staff my offices with the things!" The big man placed his large hands on his own capacious stomach and groaned. "I'm sure sorry it was you and not me, pardner. I could use some of that treatment right now. Musta been that steak and onions I ate after all that tundra dope I've been livin' on." "Tundra?" A faint spark of alertness lightened Harper's dull rage. "You mean you work out here on the tundra?" "That's right. How'd you think I got in such a helluva shape? I'm superintendent of one of the fungus plants. I'm Jake Ellis of Hagerty's Enzymes. There's good money in it, but man, what a job! No air worth mentionin'. Temperature always freezin' or below. Pressure suits. Huts. Factory. Processed food. Nothin' else. Just nothin'. That's where they could use some robots. It sure ain't no job for a real live man. And in fact, there ain't many men left there. If old man Hagerty only knew it, he's about out of business." Harper sat up as if he'd been needled. He opened his mouth to speak. But just then the door opened briskly and two robots entered. With a horrified stare, Harper clutched his maltreated stomach. He saw a third robot enter, wheeling a chair. "A wheel chair!" squeaked the victim. "I tell you, there's nothing wrong with me! Take it away! I'm only here for a rest-cure! Believe me! Take it away!" The robots ignored him. For the first time in his spectacular and ruthless career Harper was up against creatures that he could neither bribe, persuade nor browbeat, inveigle nor ignore. It shattered his ebbing self-confidence. He began waving his hands helplessly. The robots not only ignored Harper. They paid no attention at all to Jake Ellis, who was plucking at their metallic arms pleading, "Take me, boys. I need the treatment bad, whatever it is. I need all the treatment I can get. Take me! I'm just a wreck, fellers—" Stolidly they picked Harper up, plunked him into the chair, strapped him down and marched out with him. Dejectedly Ellis returned to his own room. Again he lifted the receiver of the room phone; but as usual a robot voice answered sweetly, mechanically, and meaninglessly. He hung up and went miserably to bed. There was something nagging at Harper's mind. Something he should do. Something that concerned robots. But he was too exhausted to think it out. For five days now his pet robots had put him through an ordeal that made him flinch every time he thought about it. Which wasn't often, since he was almost past thinking. They plunked him into stinking mud-baths and held him there until he was well-done to the bone, he was sure. They soaked him in foul, steaming irradiated waters until he gagged. They brought him weird concoctions to eat and drink and then stood over him until he consumed them. They purged and massaged and exercised him. Whenever they let him alone, he simply collapsed into bed and slept. There was nothing else to do anyway. They'd taken his clothes; and the phone, after an announcement that he would have no more service for two weeks, gave him nothing but a busy signal. "Persecution, that's what it is!" he moaned desperately. And he turned his back to the mirror, which showed him that he was beginning to look flesh-colored instead of the parchment yellow to which he had become accustomed. He closed his mind to the fact that he was sleeping for hours on end like the proverbial baby, and that he was getting such an appetite that he could almost relish even that detestable mush they sent him for breakfast. He was determined to be furious. As soon as he could wake up enough to be. He hadn't been awake long this time before Jake Ellis was there again, still moaning about his lack of treatments. "Nothin' yet," he gloomily informed Harp. "They haven't been near me. I just can't understand it. After I signed up for the works and paid 'em in advance! And I can't find any way out of this section. The other two rooms are empty and the elevator hasn't got any button. The robots just have to come and get a man or he's stuck." "Stuck!" snarled Harp. "I'm never stuck! And I'm damned if I'll wait any longer to break out of this—this jail! Listen, Jake. I've been thinking. Or trying to, with what's left of me. You came in just when that assinine clerk was registering me. I'll bet that clerk got rattled and gave me the wrong key. I'll bet you're supposed to have this room and I'm getting your treatments. Why don't we switch rooms and see what happens?" "Say, maybe you're right!" Jake's eyes gleamed at last with hope. "I'll get my clothes." Harp's eyebrows rose. "You mean they left you your clothes?" "Why, sure. You mean they took yours?" Harp nodded. An idea began to formulate. "Leave your things, will you? I'm desperate! I'm going to see the manager of this madhouse if I have to go down dressed in a sheet. Your clothes would be better than that." Jake, looking over Harper's skimpy frame, grunted doubtfully. "Maybe you could tie 'em on so they wouldn't slip. And roll up the cuffs. It's okay with me, but just don't lose something when you're down there in that fancy lobby." Harper looked at his watch. "Time to go. Relax, old man. The robots will be along any minute now. If you're the only man in the room, I'm sure they'll take you. They aren't equipped to figure it out. And don't worry about me. I'll anchor your duds all right." Harper had guessed right. Gleefully from the doorway of his new room he watched the robots wheel away his equally delighted neighbor for his first treatment. Then he closed the door and began to don Jake's clothing. The result was unique. He looked like a small boy in his father's clothes, except for the remarkably aged and gnome-like head sticking up on a skinny neck from a collar three sizes too big. And he was shoeless. He was completely unable to navigate in Jake's number twelves. But Harper was a determined man. He didn't even flinch from his image in the mirror. Firmly he stepped over to Jake's telephone. "This is room 618," he said authoritatively. "Send up the elevator for me. I want to go down to the lobby." He'd guessed right again. "It will be right up, sir," responded the robot operator. Hopefully he stepped out into the hall and shuffled to the elevator. Only the robots were immune to Harper Breen's progress across the huge suave lobby. He was a blot on its rich beauty, a grotesque enigma that rooted the other visitors into paralyzed staring groups. Stepping out of the elevator, he had laid a course for the desk which loomed like an island in a moss-gray lake, and now he strode manfully toward it, ignoring the oversize trousers slapping around his stocking feet. Only the robots shared his self control. The clerk was the first to recover from the collective stupor. Frantically he pushed the button that would summon the robot guard. With a gasp of relief he saw the two massive manlike machines moving inexorably forward. He pointed to Harper. "Get that patient!" he ordered. "Take him to the—to the mud-baths!" "No you don't!" yelled Harper. "I want to see the manager!" Nimbly he circled the guard and leaped behind the desk. He began to throw things at the robots. Things like inkwells and typewriters and card indexes. Especially, card indexes. "Stop it!" begged the clerk. "You'll wreck the system! We'll never get it straight again! Stop it!" "Call them off!" snarled Harper. "Call them off or I'll ruin your switchboard!" He put a shoulder against it and prepared to heave. With one last appalled glare at the madman, the clerk picked up an electric finger and pointed it at the approaching robots. They became oddly inanimate. "That's better!" Harper straightened up and meticulously smoothed the collar of his flapping coat. "Now—the manager, please." "This—this way, sir." With shrinking steps the clerk led Harper across the width of the lobby among the fascinated guests. He was beyond speech. Opening the inconspicuous door, he waved Harper inside and returned doggedly to his desk, where he began to pick up things and at the same time phrase his resignation in his mind. Brushing aside the startled secretary in the outer cubicle, Harper flapped and shuffled straight into the inner sanctum. The manager, who was busy chewing a cigar to shreds behind his fortress of gun metal desk, jerked hastily upright and glared at the intruder. "My good man—" he began. "Don't 'my-good-man' me!" snapped Harper. He glared back at the manager. Reaching as far across the expanse of desktop as he could stretch, he shook his puny fist. "Do you know who I am? I'm Harper S. Breen, of Breen and Helgart, Incorporated! And do you know why I haven't even a card to prove it? Do you know why I have to make my way downstairs in garb that makes a laughing stock of me? Do you know why? Because that assinine clerk of yours put me in the wrong room and those damnable robots of yours then proceeded to make a prisoner of me! Me, Harper S. Breen! Why, I'll sue you until you'll be lucky if you have a sheet of writing-paper left in this idiot's retreat!" Hayes, the manager, blanched. Then he began to mottle in an apoplectic pattern. And suddenly with a gusty sigh, he collapsed into his chair. With a shaking hand he mopped his forehead. " My robots!" he muttered. "As if I invented the damned things!" Despondently he looked at Harper. "Go ahead and sue, Mr. Breen. If you don't, somebody else will. And if nobody sues, we'll go broke anyway, at the rate our guest list is declining. I'm ready to hand in my resignation." Again he sighed. "The trouble," he explained, "is that those fool robots are completely logical, and people aren't. There's no way to mix the two. It's dynamite. Maybe people can gradually learn to live with robots, but they haven't yet. Only we had to find it out the hard way. We—" he grimaced disgustedly—"had to pioneer in the use of robots. And it cost us so much that we can't afford to reconvert to human help. So—Operation Robot is about to bankrupt the syndicate." Listening, an amazing calm settled on Harper. Thoughtfully now he hooked a chair to the desk with his stockinged foot, sat down and reached for the cigar that Hayes automatically offered him. "Oh, I don't know," he said mildly. Hayes leaned forward like a drowning man sighting a liferaft. "What do you mean, you don't know? You're threatening to take our shirts, aren't you?" Meticulously Harper clipped and lit his cigar. "It seems to me that these robots might be useful in quite another capacity. I might even make a deal with your syndicate to take them off your hands—at a reasonable price, of course—and forget the outrages I've suffered at your establishment." Hayes leaned toward him incredulous. "You mean you want these robots after what you've seen and experienced?" Placidly Harper puffed a smoke ring. "Of course, you'd have to take into consideration that it would be an experiment for me, too. And there's the suit I'm clearly justified in instituting. However, I'm willing to discuss the matter with your superiors." With hope burgeoning for the first time in weeks, Hayes lifted his head. "My dear Mr. Breen, to get rid of these pestiferous robots, I'll back you to the hilt! I'll notify the owners at once. At once, Mr. Breen! And while we wait for them, allow me to put you up as a guest of the hotel." Coming around to Harper, he effusively shook Harp's scrawny hand, and then personally escorted him not merely to the door but across the lobby to the elevator. Harper gazed out at the stunned audience. This was more like the treatment he was accustomed to! Haughtily he squared his bony shoulders inside the immense jacket and stepped into the elevator. He was ready for the second step of his private Operation Robot. Back on Earth it was a warm, misty spring day—the kind of day unknown to the planet Mars. Bella and Scribney, superb in new spring outfits, waited restlessly while the rocket cooled and the passengers recovered from deceleration. "Look, Scrib!" Bella clutched Scribney's substantial arm. "It's finally opening." They watched the airlock open and the platform wheel into place. They watched the passengers descend, looking a trifle dazed. "There he is!" cried Bella. "Why, doesn't he look wonderful! Scrib, it's amazing! Look at him! And indeed, Harper was stepping briskly downward, looking spry and fit and years younger. He came across to them actually beaming. It was the first pleasant expression they had seen on his face in years. "Well, you old dog!" exclaimed Scribney affectionately. "So you did it again!" Harper smirked. "Yep, I turned a neat little deal. I bought out Hagerty's Enzymes and staffed the plant with the hotel's robots. Got both of 'em dirt cheap. Both concerns going bankrupt because they didn't have sense enough to swap their workers. Feel I owe you a bit for that tip about enzymes, Scrib, so I made out a block of stock to you. All right?" "All right?" Scribney gulped. Why, the dried-up little turnip was human after all. "All right! Yes, sir! But aren't you going to use some of those robots for office help? Aren't they efficient and all that?" Harper's smile vanished. "Don't even mention such a thing!" he yelped. "You don't know what you're saying! I lived with those things for weeks. I wouldn't have one around! Keep 'em in the factory where they belong!" He glimpsed the composed, wonderfully human face of his secretary, waiting patiently in the background. "Oh there you are, Smythe." He turned to his relatives. "Busy day ahead. See you later, folks—" "Same old Harp," observed Scribney. Then he thought of the block of stock. "What say we celebrate our rise to a position in the syndicate, honey?" "Wonderful!" She squeezed his arm, and smiling at each other, they left the port.

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MUCK MAN BY FREMONT DODGE The work wasn't hard, but there were some sacrifices. You had to give up hope and freedom—and being human! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, November 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I The girl with the Slider egg glittering in her hair watched the bailiff lead Asa Graybar out of the courtroom. He recognized her as old Hazeltyne's daughter Harriet, no doubt come to see justice done. She didn't have the hothouse-flower look Asa would have expected in a girl whose father owned the most valuable of the planetary franchises. She was not afraid to meet his eye, the eye of a judicially certified criminal. There was, perhaps, a crease of puzzlement in her brow, as if she had thought crimes were committed by shriveled, rat-faced types, and not by young biological engineers who still affected crewcuts. Tom Dorr, Hazeltyne's general manager, was her escort. Asa felt certain, without proof, that Dorr was the man who had framed him for the charge of grand theft by secreting a fresh Slider egg in his laboratory. The older man stared at Asa coldly as he was led out of the courtroom and down the corridor back to jail. Jumpy, Asa's cellmate, took one look at his face as he was put back behind bars. "Guilty," Jumpy said. Asa glared at him. "I know, I know," Jumpy said hastily. "You were framed. But what's the rap?" "Five or one." "Take the five," Jumpy advised. "Learn basket-weaving in a nice air-conditioned rehab clinic. A year on a changeling deal will seem a lot longer, even if you're lucky enough to live through it." Asa took four steps to the far wall of the cell, stood there briefly with his head bent and turned to face Jumpy. "Nope," Asa said softly. "I'm going into a conversion tank. I'm going to be a muck man, Jumpy. I'm going out to Jordan's Planet and hunt Slider eggs." "Smuggling? It won't work." Asa didn't answer. The Hazeltyne company had gone after him because he had been working on a method of keeping Slider eggs alive. The Hazeltyne company would be happy to see him mark time for five years of so-called social reorientation. But if he could get out to Jordan's Planet, with his physiology adapted to the environment of that wretched world, he could study the eggs under conditions no laboratory could duplicate. He might even be able to cause trouble for Hazeltyne. His only problem would be staying alive for a year. An interview with a doctor from the Conversion Corps was required for all persons who elected changeling status. The law stated that potential changelings must be fully informed of the rights and hazards of altered shape before they signed a release. The requirement held whether or not the individual, like Asa, was already experienced. By the time humanity traveled to the stars, medical biology had made it possible to regenerate damaged or deficient organs of the body. Regeneration was limited only by advanced age. Sometime after a man's two hundredth year his body lost the ability to be coaxed into growing new cells. A fifth set of teeth was usually one's last. As long as senescence could be staved off, however, any man could have bulging biceps and a pencil waist, if he could pay for the treatment. Until the medical associations declared such treatments unethical there was even a short fad of deliberate deformities, with horns at the temples particularly popular. From regeneration it was a short step to specialized regrowth. The techniques were perfected to adapt humans to the dozen barely habitable worlds man had discovered. Even on Mars, the only planet outside Earth in the solar system where the human anatomy was remotely suitable, a man could work more efficiently with redesigned lungs and temperature controls than he could inside a pressure suit. On more bizarre planets a few light-years away the advantages of changeling bodies were greater. Unfortunately for planetary development companies, hardly anyone wanted to become a changeling. High pay lured few. So a law was passed permitting a convicted criminal to earn his freedom by putting in one year as a changeling for every five years he would otherwise have had to spend in rehabilitation. "What types of changelings do you have orders for right now, doctor?" Asa asked the man assigned to his case. It would look suspicious if he asked for Jordan's Planet without some preliminary questions. "Four," answered the doctor. "Squiffs for New Arcady. Adapted for climbing the skycraper trees and with the arm structure modified into pseudo-wings or gliding. Then we need spiderinos for Von Neumann Two. If you want the nearest thing we have to Earth, there's Caesar's Moon, where we'd just have to double your tolerance for carbon monoxide and make you a bigger and better gorilla than the natives. Last, of course, there's always a need for muck men on Jordan's Planet." The doctor shrugged, as if naturally no one could be expected to choose Jordan's Planet. Asa frowned in apparent consideration of the alternatives. "What's the pay range?" he asked. "Ten dollars a day on Caesar's Moon. Fifteen on New Arcady or Von Neumann Two. Twenty-five on Jordan's." Asa raised his eyebrows. "Why such a difference? Everyone knows about muck men living in the mud while they hunt Slider eggs. But don't your conversions make the changeling comfortable in his new environment?" "Sure they do," said the doctor. "We can make you think mud feels better than chinchilla fur and we can have you jumping like a grasshopper despite the double gravity. But we can't make you like the sight of yourself. And we can't guarantee that a Slider won't kill you." "Still," Asa mused aloud, "it would mean a nice bankroll waiting at the end of the year." He leaned forward to fill in the necessary form. Since it was cheaper to transport a normal human than to rig special environments in a spaceship, every planet operated its own conversion chambers. On the space freighter that carried him from Earth Asa Graybar was confined to a small cabin that was opened only for a guard to bring meals and take out dirty dishes. He was still a prisoner. Sometimes he could hear voices in the passageway outside, and once one of them sounded like a woman's. But since women neither served on spaceships nor worked in the dome settlements on harsher worlds, he decided it was his imagination. He might have been dead cargo for all he learned about space travel. Nevertheless his time was not wasted. He had as a companion, or cellmate, another convict who had elected conversion to muck man. More important, his companion had done time on Jordan's Planet before and had wanted to return. "It's the Slider eggs," explained Kershaw, the two-time loser. "The ones you see on Earth knock your eyes out, but they've already begun to die. There's nothing like a fresh one. And I'm not the first to go crazy over them. When I was reconverted and got home I had nine thousand dollars waiting for me. That'll buy a two-year-old egg that flashes maybe four times a day. So I stole a new one and got caught." Asa had held a Slider egg in his hand as he gazed into it. He could understand. The shell was clear as crystal, taut but elastic, while the albumen was just as clear around the sparkling network of organic filaments that served as a yolk. Along these interior threads played tiny flashes of lightning, part of some unexplained process of life. Electrical instruments picked up static discharges from the egg, but the phenomenon remained a mystery. Hardly anyone faced with the beauty of a Slider's egg bothered to question its workings. For a few expectant moments there would be only random, fitful gleamings, and then there would be a wild coruscation of light, dancing from one filament to the next in a frenzy of brilliance. It took about four years for a Slider egg to die. Beauty, rarity and fading value made the eggs a luxury item like nothing the world had ever seen. If Asa had found a means of keeping them alive it would have made him wealthy at the expense of the Hazeltyne monopoly. "You know what I think?" Kershaw asked. "I think those flashes are the egg calling its momma. They sparkle like a million diamonds when you scoop one out of the muck, and right away a Slider always comes swooping out of nowhere at you." "I've been meaning to ask you," Asa said. "How do you handle the Sliders?" Kershaw grinned. "First you try to catch it with a rocket. If you miss you start leaping for home. All this time you're broadcasting for help, you understand. When the Slider catches you, you leap up while it buries its jaws in the mud where you were just standing. You dig your claws in its back and hang on while it rolls around in the mud. Finally, if the 'copter comes—and if they don't shoot off your head by mistake—you live to tell the tale." II Asa Graybar kept his normal form on Jordan's Planet just long enough to learn the discomfort of double gravity. He was told he needed another physical examination and was taken right in to a doctor. His heart was pounding to keep his blood circulating on this massive world, but the doctor had apparently learned to make allowances. "Swallow this," said the doctor after making a series of tests. Asa swallowed the capsule. Two minutes later he felt himself beginning to lose consciousness. "This is it!" he thought in panic. He felt someone ease him back down onto a wheeled stretcher. Before consciousness faded completely he realized that no one got a chance to back out of becoming a changeling, that he was on his way to the conversion tank right now. When he finally awoke he felt well rested and very comfortable. But for a long time he was afraid to open his eyes. "Come on, Graybar," said a deep, booming voice. "Let's test our wings." It was not Kershaw's voice, but it had to be Kershaw. Asa opened his eyes. Everyone had seen pictures of muck men. It was different having one stand beside you. Kershaw looked much like an enormous frog except that his head was still mostly human. He was sitting on webbed feet, his lower legs bent double under huge thighs, and his trunk tilted forward so that his arms dangled to the ground. The arms were as thick around as an ordinary man's legs. The hands had become efficient scoops, with broad fingers webbed to the first joint and tipped with spade-like claws. The skin was still pinkish but had become scaly. Not a thread of hair showed anywhere on the body, not even on the head. This, Asa realized, was what he looked like himself. It would have been more bearable if the head had not retained strong traces of humanity. The nostrils flared wide and the jaws hardly emerged from the neck, but the ears were human ears and the eyes, under those horny ridges, were human eyes. Asa felt sure that the eyes could still weep. He started to walk forward and tipped over on his side. Kershaw laughed. "Come to daddy, babykins," Kershaw said, holding out his hands. "Only try hopping this time. And take it easy." Asa pushed himself upright with one arm and tried a small hop. Nerve and muscle coordination was perfect. He found himself leaping as high as Kershaw's head. "That's the way," Kershaw said approvingly. "Now get this on and we'll go outside." Asa snapped on a belt and breech cloth combination that had flaps of fabric dangling from the belt in front and behind. He followed as Kershaw pushed open a sliding door to lead the way out of the room where they had been left to revive from conversion. They went into a courtyard partly covered by a roof projecting from the Hazeltyne company's dome settlement. The far half of the courtyard was open to the gray drizzle that fell almost ceaselessly from the sky of Jordan's Planet and turned most of its surface into marsh and mud flats. A high wall enclosed the far portion of the courtyard. Ranged along the wall were thirty stalls for muck men. From fifty yards across the courtyard a muck man bounded over to them in two leaps. Attached to a harness across his shoulders and chest were a gun and a long knife. "Names?" he growled. He was a foot taller than Graybar and big everywhere in proportion. "Kershaw. I'm back, Furston." "I'm Graybar." "Kershaw again? Just start in where you left off, sucker. Come on, you." He pointed to Asa and leaped to the open portion of the courtyard. "Do what he says," Kershaw whispered to Graybar. "He's sort of a trusty and warden and parole officer rolled into one." Asa was put through a series of exercises to get him used to his distorted body, to teach him how to leap and how to dig. He was shown how to operate the radio he would carry and how to fire the pencil-slim rockets of this gun. Finally he was told to eat a few berries from a native vine. He did so and immediately vomited. Furston laughed. "That's to remind you you're still a man," Furston said, grinning. "Everything that grows on this planet is poison. So if you got any ideas of hiding out till your term is up, forget 'em. Right here is where you eat." Asa turned without a word and hopped feebly away from Furston. He lifted his head to breathe deeply and saw two humans watching him from an observation tower on the roof. He leaped twenty feet into the air for a closer look. Gazing at him with repugnance, after witnessing the end of his session with Furston, were Harriet Hazeltyne and general manager Tom Dorr. The girl's presence merely puzzled Asa, but Dorr's being here worried him. Dorr had tried to get rid of him once and was now in an excellent position to make the riddance permanent. At supper that night, squatting on the ground beside a low table with the dozen other muck men operating from the dome, Asa asked what the two were doing out here. "The girl will inherit this racket some day, won't she?" asked one of the others. "She wants to see what kind of suckers are making her rich." "Maybe that guy Dorr brought her along to show her what a big wheel he is," said one of the others. "Just hope he doesn't take over the operations." III Next morning Furston passed out guns, knives, radios, and pouches to carry any eggs the muck men found. He gave each man a compass and assigned the sectors to be worked during the day. Finally he called Graybar aside. "In case you don't like it here," Furston said, "you can get a week knocked off your sentence for every egg you bring in. Now get out there and work that muck." Furston sent Graybar and Kershaw out together so that the veteran could show Asa the ropes. Asa had already learned that the wall around the courtyard was to keep Sliders out, not muck men in. He leaped over it and hopped along after Kershaw. Feet slapping against the mud, they went about five miles from the Hazeltyne station, swimming easily across ponds too broad to jump. The mud, if not precisely as pleasant to the touch as chinchilla fur, was not at all uncomfortable, and the dripping air caressed their skins like a summer breeze back on Earth. Tiny, slippery creatures skidded and splashed out of their way. Finally Kershaw stopped. His experienced eye had seen a trail of swamp weeds crushed low into the mud. "Keep your eyes open," Kershaw said. "There's a Slider been around here lately. If you see something like an express train headed our way, start shooting." At each leap along the trail they peered quickly around. They saw no Sliders, but this meant little, for the beasts lived under the mud as much as on top of it. Kershaw halted again when they came to a roughly circular area some ten yards in diameter where the weeds had been torn out and lay rotting in the muck. "We're in luck," he said as Asa skidded to a stop at his side. "An egg was laid somewhere here within the last week. These places are hard to spot when the new weeds start growing." Kershaw took a long look around. "No trouble in sight. We dig." They started at the center of the cleared area, shoveling up great gobs of mud with their hands and flinging them out of the clearing. Usually a muck man dug in a spiral out from the center, but Graybar and Kershaw dug in gradually widening semi-circles opposite each other. They had to dig four feet deep, and it was slow going until they had a pit big enough to stand in. Each handful of mud had to be squeezed gently before it was thrown away, to make sure it didn't conceal an egg. As he worked, Asa kept thinking what an inefficient system it was. Everything about the operation was wrong. "Got it!" Kershaw shouted. He leaped out of the pit and started wiping slime off a round object the size of a baseball. Asa jumped out to watch. "A big one," Kershaw said. He held it, still smeared with traces of mud, lovingly to his cheek, and then lifted it to eye level. "Just look at it." A SLIDER EGG The egg was flashing with a mad radiance, like a thousand diamonds being splintered under a brilliant sun. Static crackled in Asa's earphones and he thought of what Kershaw had said, that the scintillation of an egg was an effect of its calls to a mother Slider for help. Asa looked around. "Jump!" he shouted. At the edge of the clearing a segmented length of greenish black scales, some two feet thick and six feet high, had reared up out of the weeds. The top segment was almost all mouth, already opened to show row upon row of teeth. Before Asa could draw his gun the Slider lowered its head to the ground, dug two front flippers into the mud and shot forward. Asa leaped with all his strength, sailing far out of the clearing. While he was still in the air he snapped the mouthpiece of his radio down from where it was hinged over his head. As he landed he turned instantly, his gun in his hand. "Calling the 'copter!" he spoke rapidly into the mouthpiece. "Kershaw and Graybar, sector eight, five miles out. Hurry!" "Graybar?" asked a voice in his earphone. "What's up?" "We've got an egg but a Slider wants it back." "On the way." Asa hopped back to the clearing. Kershaw must have been bowled over by the Slider's first rush, for he was trying to hop on one leg as if the other had been broken. The egg lay flickering on top of the mud where Kershaw had dropped it. The Slider, eight flippers on each side working madly, was twisting its thirty feet of wormlike body around for another charge. Aiming hastily, Asa fired a rocket at the monster's middle segment. The rocket smashed through hard scales and exploded in a fountain of gray flesh. The Slider writhed, coating its wound in mud, and twisted toward Asa. He leaped to one side, firing from the air and missing, and saw the Slider turn toward the patch of weeds where he would land. His legs were tensed to leap again the moment he hit the mud, but he saw the Slider would be on top of him before he could escape. As he landed he thrust his gun forward almost into the mouth of the creature and fired again. Even as he was knocked aside into the muck, Asa's body was showered with shreds of alien flesh scattered by the rocket's explosion. Desperately pushing himself to his feet, he saw the long headless body shiver and lie still. Asa took a deep breath and looked around. "Kershaw!" he called. "Where are you?" "Over here." Kershaw stood briefly above the weeds and fell back again. Asa leaped over to him. "Thanks," Kershaw said. "Muck men stick together. You'll make a good one. I wouldn't have had a chance. My leg's busted." "The helicopter ought to be here pretty soon," Asa said. He looked over at the dead Slider and shook his head. "Tell me, what are the odds on getting killed doing this?" "Last time I was here there was about one mucker killed for every six eggs brought out. Of course you're not supposed to stand there admiring the eggs like I did while a Slider comes up on you." Asa hopped over to the egg, which was still full of a dancing radiance where it rested on the mud. He scooped a hole in the muck and buried the egg. "Just in case there are any more Sliders around," he explained. "Makes no difference," said Kershaw, pointing upward. "Here comes the 'copter, late as usual." The big machine circled them, hovered to inspect the dead Slider, and settled down on broad skids. Through the transparent nose Asa could see Tom Dorr and Harriet Hazeltyne. The company manager swung the door open and leaned out. "I see you took care of the Slider," he said. "Hand over the egg." "Kershaw has a broken leg," Asa said. "I'll help him in and then I'll get the egg." While Kershaw grabbed the door frame to help pull himself into the helicopter, Asa got under his companion's belly and lifted him by the waist. He hadn't realized before just how strong his new body was. Kershaw, as a muck man, would have weighed close to three hundred pounds on Earth, close to six hundred here. Dorr made no move to help, but the girl reached under Kershaw's shoulder and strained to get him in. Once he was inside, Asa saw, the cabin was crowded. "Are you going to have room for me too?" he asked. "Not this trip," Dorr answered. "Now give me the egg." Asa didn't hesitate. "The egg stays with me," he said softly. "You do what I tell you, mucker," said Dorr. "Nope. I want to make sure you come back." Asa turned his head to Harriet. "You see, Miss Hazeltyne, I don't trust your friend. You might ask him to tell you about it." Dorr stared at him with narrowed eyes. Suddenly he smiled in a way that worried Asa. "Whatever you say, Graybar," Dorr said. He turned to the controls. In another minute the helicopter was in the sky. A round trip for the helicopter should have taken no more than twenty minutes, allowing time for Kershaw to be taken out at the settlement. After an hour passed Asa began to worry. He was sure Dorr would return for the egg. Finally he realized that Dorr could locate the egg approximately by the body of the dead Slider. Dorr could return for the egg any time with some other muck man to dig for it. Asa pulled down the mouthpiece of his radio. "This is Graybar, calling the helicopter," he said. "When are you coming?" There was no answer except the hum of carrier wave. If he tried to carry the egg back, Asa knew, Sliders would attack him all along the way. A man had no chance of getting five miles with an egg by himself. He could leave the egg here, of course. Even so he would be lucky if he got back, following a hazy compass course from which he and Kershaw had certainly deviated on their outward trip. There were no landmarks in this wilderness of bog to help him find his way. The workers were supposed to home in on radio signals, if they lost their bearings, but Dorr would deny him that help. What was the night like on Jordan's Planet? Maybe Sliders slept at night. If he could stay awake, and if he didn't faint from hunger in this strange new body, and if the Sliders left him alone.... A whirring noise made Asa jump in alarm. Then he smiled in relief, for it was the helicopter, the blessed helicopter, coming in over the swamp. But what if it was Dorr, coming back alone to dispose of him without any witnesses? Asa leaped for the carcass of the dead Slider and took shelter behind it. No machine-gun blast of rockets came from the helicopter. The big machine swooped low dizzily, tilted back in an inexpert attempt to hover, thumped down upon the mud and slid forward. As Asa jumped aside, the landing skids caught against the Slider's body and the helicopter flipped forward on its nose, one of the rotor blades plunging deep into the mud. Asa leaped forward in consternation. Not only was his chance of safe passage back to the settlement wrecked, but now he would have the extra burden of taking care of the pilot. When he reached the nose of the helicopter he saw that the pilot, untangling herself from the controls to get up, was Harriet Hazeltyne. IV "Are you hurt?" Asa asked her. She reached for his shoulder to steady herself as she climbed out of the machine. "I guess not," she said. "But taking a fall in this gravity is no fun. From the way my face feels I ought to be getting a black eye pretty soon." "What happened?" "I made a fool of myself." She made a face back in the direction of the settlement. "Dorr wasn't going to come after you. He said anyone who talked back to him should try arguing with the Sliders." She looked up at the machine-gun on the helicopter. "They feed at night, you know. And they eat their own kind," she said. "The Slider you killed would draw them like ants to jam." Asa glanced around quickly to make sure no Sliders had already come. He eyed the helicopter with distaste at the thought of what a flimsy fort it would make. "Anyway," Harriet said, "I told him he couldn't just leave you here and we started arguing. I lost my temper. He thought he had brought me to Jordan's Planet on a fancy tour. I told him the real reason I was here was to check up for my father on the way he was running things and there seemed to be a lot wrong. So he told me very politely I could run things to suit myself and he walked off." She shrugged, as if to indicate that she had made a mess of things. "And you took the helicopter by yourself," Asa said, as if he could hardly believe it yet. "Oh, back on Earth I can make a helicopter do stunts. But I wasn't used to this gravity. I don't suppose you could make this machine stand up straight?" Asa tugged at the body of the Slider until he got it off the skids of the plane. He pulled with all his strength at the rotor blade sunk in the mud, but the weight of the helicopter was upon it and the mud held it with a suction of its own. After a few minutes he had to give up. "We fight off the Sliders, then," she said, as matter of factly as if that problem was settled. "If it's any comfort, I know how to handle the machine-gun." "Nope. In this drizzle, at night, the Sliders would be on us before we could see them. We've got to try to get back." He stood in thought while she stared at him patiently. "What happened to the other muck men who went out today?" he asked. "They were called in when the 'copter came out the first time. Some of them may not have got back yet."

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THE STAR-SENT KNAVES BY KEITH LAUMER Illustrated by Gaughan [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of Tomorrow June 1963 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] When the Great Galactic Union first encounters Earth ... is this what is going to happen? I Clyde W. Snithian was a bald eagle of a man, dark-eyed, pot-bellied, with the large, expressive hands of a rug merchant. Round-shouldered in a loose cloak, he blinked small reddish eyes at Dan Slane's travel-stained six foot one. "Kelly here tells me you've been demanding to see me." He nodded toward the florid man at his side. He had a high, thin voice, like something that needed oiling. "Something about important information regarding safeguarding my paintings." "That's right, Mr. Snithian," Dan said. "I believe I can be of great help to you." "Help how? If you've got ideas of bilking me...." The red eyes bored into Dan like hot pokers. "Nothing like that, sir. Now, I know you have quite a system of guards here—the papers are full of it—" "Damned busybodies! Sensation-mongers! If it wasn't for the press, I'd have no concern for my paintings today!" "Yes sir. But my point is, the one really important spot has been left unguarded." "Now, wait a minute—" Kelly started. "What's that?" Snithian cut in. "You have a hundred and fifty men guarding the house and grounds day and night—" "Two hundred and twenty-five," Kelly snapped. "—but no one at all in the vault with the paintings," Slane finished. "Of course not," Snithian shrilled. "Why should I post a man in the vault? It's under constant surveillance from the corridor outside." "The Harriman paintings were removed from a locked vault," Dan said. "There was a special seal on the door. It wasn't broken." "By the saints, he's right," Kelly exclaimed. "Maybe we ought to have a man in that vault." "Another idiotic scheme to waste my money," Snithian snapped. "I've made you responsible for security here, Kelly! Let's have no more nonsense. And throw this nincompoop out!" Snithian turned and stalked away, his cloak flapping at his knees. "I'll work cheap," Dan called after him as Kelly took his arm. "I'm an art lover." "Never mind that," Kelly said, escorting Dan along the corridor. He turned in at an office and closed the door. "Now, as the old buzzard said, I'm responsible for security here. If those pictures go, my job goes with them. Your vault idea's not bad. Just how cheap would you work?" "A hundred dollars a week," Dan said promptly. "Plus expenses," he added. Kelly nodded. "I'll fingerprint you and run a fast agency check. If you're clean, I'll put you on, starting tonight. But keep it quiet." Dan looked around at the gray walls, with shelves stacked to the low ceiling with wrapped paintings. Two three-hundred-watt bulbs shed a white glare over the tile floor, a neat white refrigerator, a bunk, an arm-chair, a bookshelf and a small table set with paper plates, plastic utensils and a portable radio—all hastily installed at Kelly's order. Dan opened the refrigerator, looked over the stock of salami, liverwurst, cheese and beer. He opened a loaf of bread, built up a well-filled sandwich, keyed open a can of beer. It wasn't fancy, but it would do. Phase one of the plan had gone off without a hitch. Basically, his idea was simple. Art collections had been disappearing from closely guarded galleries and homes all over the world. It was obvious that no one could enter a locked vault, remove a stack of large canvases and leave, unnoticed by watchful guards—and leaving the locks undamaged. Yet the paintings were gone. Someone had been in those vaults—someone who hadn't entered in the usual way. Theory failed at that point; that left the experimental method. The Snithian collection was the largest west of the Mississippi. With such a target, the thieves were bound to show up. If Dan sat in the vault—day and night—waiting—he would see for himself how they operated. He finished his sandwich, went to the shelves and pulled down one of the brown-paper bundles. Loosening the string binding the package, he slid a painting into view. It was a gaily colored view of an open-air cafe, with a group of men and women in gay-ninetyish costumes gathered at a table. He seemed to remember reading something about it in a magazine. It was a cheerful scene; Dan liked it. Still, it hardly seemed worth all the effort.... He went to the wall switch and turned off the lights. The orange glow of the filaments died, leaving only a faint illumination from the night-light over the door. When the thieves arrived, it might give him a momentary advantage if his eyes were adjusted to the dark. He groped his way to the bunk. So far, so good, he reflected, stretching out. When they showed up, he'd have to handle everything just right. If he scared them off there'd be no second chance. He would have lost his crack at—whatever his discovery might mean to him. But he was ready. Let them come. Eight hours, three sandwiches and six beers later, Dan roused suddenly from a light doze and sat up on the cot. Between him and the crowded shelving, a palely luminous framework was materializing in mid-air. The apparition was an open-work cage—about the size and shape of an out-house minus the sheathing, Dan estimated breathlessly. Two figures were visible within the structure, sitting stiffly in contoured chairs. They glowed, if anything, more brightly than the framework. A faint sound cut into the stillness—a descending whine. The cage moved jerkily, settling toward the floor. Long blue sparks jumped, crackling, to span the closing gap; with a grate of metal, the cage settled against the floor. The spectral men reached for ghostly switches.... The glow died. Dan was aware of his heart thumping painfully under his ribs. His mouth was dry. This was the moment he'd been planning for, but now that it was here— Never mind. He took a deep breath, ran over the speeches he had prepared for the occasion: Greeting, visitors from the Future.... Hopelessly corny. What about: Welcome to the Twentieth Century.... No good; it lacked spontaneity. The men were rising, their backs to Dan, stepping out of the skeletal frame. In the dim light it now looked like nothing more than a rough frame built of steel pipe, with a cluster of levers in a console before the two seats. And the thieves looked ordinary enough: Two men in gray coveralls, one slender and balding, the other shorter and round-faced. Neither of them noticed Dan, sitting rigid on the cot. The thin man placed a lantern on the table, twiddled a knob. A warm light sprang up. The visitors looked at the stacked shelves. "Looks like the old boy's been doing all right," the shorter man said. "Fathead's gonna be pleased." "A very gratifying consignment," his companion said. "However, we'd best hurry, Manny. How much time have we left on this charge?" "Plenty. Fifteen minutes anyway." The thin man opened a package, glanced at a painting. "Ah, magnificent. Almost the equal of Picasso in his puce period." Manny shuffled through the other pictures in the stack. "Like always," he grumbled. "No nood dames. I like nood dames." "Look at this, Manny! The textures alone—" Manny looked. "Yeah, nice use of values," he conceded. "But I still prefer nood dames, Fiorello." "And this!" Fiorello lifted the next painting. "Look at that gay play of rich browns!" "I seen richer browns on Thirty-third Street," Manny said. "They was popular with the sparrows." "Manny, sometimes I think your aspirations—" "Whatta ya talkin? I use a roll-on." Manny, turning to place a painting in the cage, stopped dead as he caught sight of Dan. The painting clattered to the floor. Dan stood, cleared his throat. "Uh...." "Oh-oh," Manny said. "A double-cross." "I've—ah—been expecting you gentlemen," Dan said. "I—" "I told you we couldn't trust no guy with nine fingers on each hand," Manny whispered hoarsely. He moved toward the cage. "Let's blow, Fiorello." "Wait a minute," Dan said. "Before you do anything hasty—" "Don't start nothing, Buster," Manny said cautiously. "We're plenty tough guys when aroused." "I want to talk to you," Dan insisted. "You see, these paintings—" "Paintings? Look, it was all a mistake. Like, we figured this was the gent's room—" "Never mind, Manny," Fiorello cut in. "It appears there's been a leak." Dan shook his head. "No leak. I simply deduced—" "Look, Fiorello," Manny said. "You chin if you want to; I'm doing a fast fade." "Don't act hastily, Manny. You know where you'll end." "Wait a minute!" Dan shouted. "I'd like to make a deal with you fellows." "Ah-hah!" Kelly's voice blared from somewhere. "I knew it! Slane, you crook!" Dan looked about wildly. The voice seemed to be issuing from a speaker. It appeared Kelly hedged his bets. "Mr. Kelly, I can explain everything!" Dan called. He turned back to Fiorello. "Listen, I figured out—" "Pretty clever!" Kelly's voice barked. "Inside job. But it takes more than the likes of you to out-fox an old-timer like Eddie Kelly." "Perhaps you were right, Manny," Fiorello said. "Complications are arising. We'd best depart with all deliberate haste." He edged toward the cage. "What about this ginzo?" Manny jerked a thumb toward Dan. "He's on to us." "Can't be helped." "Look—I want to go with you!" Dan shouted. "I'll bet you do!" Kelly's voice roared. "One more minute and I'll have the door open and collar the lot of you! Came up through a tunnel, did you?" "You can't go, my dear fellow," Fiorello said. "Room for two, no more." Dan whirled to the cot, grabbed up the pistol Kelly had supplied. He aimed it at Manny. "You stay here, Manny! I'm going with Fiorello in the time machine." "Are you nuts?" Manny demanded. "I'm flattered, dear boy," Fiorello said, "but—" "Let's get moving. Kelly will have that lock open in a minute." "You can't leave me here!" Manny spluttered, watching Dan crowd into the cage beside Fiorello. "We'll send for you," Dan said. "Let's go, Fiorello." The balding man snatched suddenly for the gun. Dan wrestled with him. The pistol fell, bounced on the floor of the cage, skidded into the far corner of the vault. Manny charged, reaching for Dan as he twisted aside; Fiorello's elbow caught him in the mouth. Manny staggered back into the arms of Kelly, bursting red-faced into the vault. "Manny!" Fiorello released his grip on Dan, lunged to aid his companion. Kelly passed Manny to one of three cops crowding in on his heels. Dan clung to the framework as Fiorello grappled with Kelly. A cop pushed past them, spotted Dan, moved in briskly for the pinch. Dan grabbed a lever at random and pulled. Sudden silence fell as the walls of the room glowed blue. A spectral Kelly capered before the cage, fluorescing in the blue-violet. Dan swallowed hard and nudged a second lever. The cage sank like an elevator into the floor, vivid blue washing up its sides. Hastily he reversed the control. Operating a time machine was tricky business. One little slip, and the Slane molecules would be squeezing in among brick and mortar particles.... But this was no time to be cautious. Things hadn't turned out just the way he'd planned, but after all, this was what he'd wanted—in a way. The time machine was his to command. And if he gave up now and crawled back into the vault, Kelly would gather him in and pin every art theft of the past decade on him. It couldn't be too hard. He'd take it slowly, figure out the controls.... Dan took a deep breath and tried another lever. The cage rose gently, in eerie silence. It reached the ceiling and kept going. Dan gritted his teeth as an eight-inch band of luminescence passed down the cage. Then he was emerging into a spacious kitchen. A blue-haloed cook waddled to a luminous refrigerator, caught sight of Dan rising slowly from the floor, stumbled back, mouth open. The cage rose, penetrated a second ceiling. Dan looked around at a carpeted hall. Cautiously he neutralized the control lever. The cage came to rest an inch above the floor. As far as Dan could tell, he hadn't traveled so much as a minute into the past or future. He looked over the controls. There should be one labeled "Forward" and another labeled "Back", but all the levers were plain, unadorned black. They looked, Dan decided, like ordinary circuit-breaker type knife-switches. In fact, the whole apparatus had the appearance of something thrown together hastily from common materials. Still, it worked. So far he had only found the controls for maneuvering in the usual three dimensions, but the time switch was bound to be here somewhere.... Dan looked up at a movement at the far end of the hall. A girl's head and shoulders appeared, coming up a spiral staircase. In another second she would see him, and give the alarm—and Dan needed a few moments of peace and quiet in which to figure out the controls. He moved a lever. The cage drifted smoothly sideways, sliced through the wall with a flurry of vivid blue light. Dan pushed the lever back. He was in a bedroom now, a wide chamber with flouncy curtains, a four-poster under a flowered canopy, a dressing table— The door opened and the girl stepped into the room. She was young. Not over eighteen, Dan thought—as nearly as he could tell with the blue light playing around her face. She had long hair tied with a ribbon, and long legs, neatly curved. She wore shorts and carried a tennis racquet in her left hand and an apple in her right. Her back to Dan and the cage, she tossed the racquet on a table, took a bite of the apple, and began briskly unbuttoning her shirt. Dan tried moving a lever. The cage edged toward the girl. Another; he rose gently. The girl tossed the shirt onto a chair and undid the zipper down the side of the shorts. Another lever; the cage shot toward the outer wall as the girl reached behind her back.... Dan blinked at the flash of blue and looked down. He was hovering twenty feet above a clipped lawn. He looked at the levers. Wasn't it the first one in line that moved the cage ahead? He tried it, shot forward ten feet. Below, a man stepped out on the terrace, lit a cigarette, paused, started to turn his face up— Dan jabbed at a lever. The cage shot back through the wall. He was in a plain room with a depression in the floor, a wide window with a planter filled with glowing blue plants— The door opened. Even blue, the girl looked graceful as a deer as she took a last bite of the apple and stepped into the ten-foot-square sunken tub. Dan held his breath. The girl tossed the apple core aside, seemed to suddenly become aware of eyes on her, whirled— With a sudden lurch that threw Dan against the steel bars, the cage shot through the wall into the open air and hurtled off with an acceleration that kept him pinned, helpless. He groped for the controls, hauled at a lever. There was no change. The cage rushed on, rising higher. In the distance, Dan saw the skyline of a town, approaching with frightful speed. A tall office building reared up fifteen stories high. He was headed dead for it— He covered his ears, braced himself— With an abruptness that flung him against the opposite side of the cage, the machine braked, shot through the wall and slammed to a stop. Dan sank to the floor of the cage, breathing hard. There was a loud click! and the glow faded. With a lunge, Dan scrambled out of the cage. He stood looking around at a simple brown-painted office, dimly lit by sunlight filtered through elaborate venetian blinds. There were posters on the wall, a potted plant by the door, a heap of framed paintings beside it, and at the far side of the room a desk. And behind the desk—Something. II Dan gaped at a head the size of a beachball, mounted on a torso like a hundred-gallon bag of water. Two large brown eyes blinked at him from points eight inches apart. Immense hands with too many fingers unfolded and reached to open a brown paper carton, dip in, then toss three peanuts, deliberately, one by one, into a gaping mouth that opened just above the brown eyes. "Who're you?" a bass voice demanded from somewhere near the floor. "I'm ... I'm ... Dan Slane ... your honor." "What happened to Manny and Fiorello?" "They—I—There was this cop. Kelly—" "Oh-oh." The brown eyes blinked deliberately. The many-fingered hands closed the peanut carton and tucked it into a drawer. "Well, it was a sweet racket while it lasted," the basso voice said. "A pity to terminate so happy an enterprise. Still...." A noise like an amplified Bronx cheer issued from the wide mouth. "How ... what...?" "The carrier returns here automatically when the charge drops below a critical value," the voice said. "A necessary measure to discourage big ideas on the part of wisenheimers in my employ. May I ask how you happen to be aboard the carrier, by the way?" "I just wanted—I mean, after I figured out—that is, the police ... I went for help," Dan finished lamely. "Help? Out of the picture, unfortunately. One must maintain one's anonymity, you'll appreciate. My operation here is under wraps at present. Ah, I don't suppose you brought any paintings?" Dan shook his head. He was staring at the posters. His eyes, accustoming themselves to the gloom of the office, could now make out the vividly drawn outline of a creature resembling an alligator-headed giraffe rearing up above scarlet foliage. The next poster showed a face similar to the beachball behind the desk, with red circles painted around the eyes. The next was a view of a yellow volcano spouting fire into a black sky. "Too bad." The words seemed to come from under the desk. Dan squinted, caught a glimpse of coiled purplish tentacles. He gulped and looked up to catch a brown eye upon him. Only one. The other seemed to be busily at work studying the ceiling. "I hope," the voice said, "that you ain't harboring no reactionary racial prejudices." "Gosh, no," Dan reassured the eye. "I'm crazy about—uh—" "Vorplischers," the voice said. "From Vorplisch, or Vega, as you call it." The Bronx cheer sounded again. "How I long to glimpse once more my native fens! Wherever one wanders, there's no pad like home." "That reminds me," Dan said. "I have to be running along now." He sidled toward the door. "Stick around, Dan," the voice rumbled. "How about a drink? I can offer you Chateau Neuf du Pape, '59, Romance Conte, '32, goat's milk, Pepsi—" "No, thanks." "If you don't mind, I believe I'll have a Big Orange." The Vorplischer swiveled to a small refrigerator, removed an immense bottle fitted with a nipple and turned back to Dan. "Now, I got a proposition which may be of some interest to you. The loss of Manny and Fiorello is a serious blow, but we may yet recoup the situation. You made the scene at a most opportune time. What I got in mind is, with those two clowns out of the picture, a vacancy exists on my staff, which you might well fill. How does that grab you?" "You mean you want me to take over operating the time machine?" "Time machine?" The brown eyes blinked alternately. "I fear some confusion exists. I don't quite dig the significance of the term." "That thing," Dan jabbed a thumb toward the cage. "The machine I came here in. You want me—" "Time machine," the voice repeated. "Some sort of chronometer, perhaps?" "Huh?" "I pride myself on my command of the local idiom, yet I confess the implied concept snows me." The nine-fingered hands folded on the desk. The beachball head leaned forward interestedly. "Clue me, Dan. What's a time machine?" "Well, it's what you use to travel through time." The brown eyes blinked in agitated alternation. "Apparently I've loused up my investigation of the local cultural background. I had no idea you were capable of that sort of thing." The immense head leaned back, the wide mouth opening and closing rapidly. "And to think I've been spinning my wheels collecting primitive 2-D art!" "But—don't you have a time machine? I mean, isn't that one?" "That? That's merely a carrier. Now tell me more about your time machines. A fascinating concept! My superiors will be delighted at this development—and astonished as well. They regard this planet as Endsville." "Your superiors?" Dan eyed the window; much too far to jump. Maybe he could reach the machine and try a getaway— "I hope you're not thinking of leaving suddenly," the beachball said, following Dan's glance. One of the eighteen fingers touched a six-inch yellow cylinder lying on the desk. "Until the carrier is fueled, I'm afraid it's quite useless. But, to put you in the picture, I'd best introduce myself and explain my mission here. I'm Blote, Trader Fourth Class, in the employ of the Vegan Confederation. My job is to develop new sources of novelty items for the impulse-emporiums of the entire Secondary Quadrant." "But the way Manny and Fiorello came sailing in through the wall! That has to be a time machine they were riding in. Nothing else could just materialize out of thin air like that." "You seem to have a time-machine fixation, Dan," Blote said. "You shouldn't assume, just because you people have developed time travel, that everyone has. Now—" Blote's voice sank to a bass whisper—"I'll make a deal with you, Dan. You'll secure a small time machine in good condition for me. And in return—" " I'm supposed to supply you with a time machine?" Blote waggled a stubby forefinger at Dan. "I dislike pointing it out, Dan, but you are in a rather awkward position at the moment. Illegal entry, illegal possession of property, trespass—then doubtless some embarrassment exists back at the Snithian residence. I daresay Mr. Kelly would have a warm welcome for you. And, of course, I myself would deal rather harshly with any attempt on your part to take a powder." The Vegan flexed all eighteen fingers, drummed his tentacles under the desk, and rolled one eye, bugging the other at Dan. "Whereas, on the other hand," Blote's bass voice went on, "you and me got the basis of a sweet deal. You supply the machine, and I fix you up with an abundance of the local medium of exchange. Equitable enough, I should say. What about it, Dan?" "Ah, let me see," Dan temporized. "Time machine. Time machine—" "Don't attempt to weasel on me, Dan," Blote rumbled ominously. "I'd better look in the phone book," Dan suggested. Silently, Blote produced a dog-eared directory. Dan opened it. "Time, time. Let's see...." He brightened. "Time, Incorporated; local branch office. Two twenty-one Maple Street." "A sales center?" Blote inquired. "Or a manufacturing complex?" "Both," Dan said. "I'll just nip over and—" "That won't be necessary, Dan," Blote said. "I'll accompany you." He took the directory, studied it. "Remarkable! A common commodity, openly on sale, and I failed to notice it. Still, a ripe nut can fall from a small tree as well as from a large." He went to his desk, rummaged, came up with a handful of fuel cells. "Now, off to gather in the time machine." He took his place in the carrier, patted the seat beside him with a wide hand. "Come, Dan. Get a wiggle on." Hesitantly, Dan moved to the carrier. The bluff was all right up to a point—but the point had just about been reached. He took his seat. Blote moved a lever. The familiar blue glow sprang up. "Kindly direct me, Dan," Blote demanded. "Two twenty-one Maple Street, I believe you said." "I don't know the town very well," Dan said, "but Maple's over that way." Blote worked levers. The carrier shot out into a ghostly afternoon sky. Faint outlines of buildings, like faded negatives, spread below. Dan looked around, spotted lettering on a square five-story structure. "Over there," he said. Blote directed the machine as it swooped smoothly toward the flat roof Dan indicated. "Better let me take over now," Dan suggested. "I want to be sure to get us to the right place." "Very well, Dan." Dan dropped the carrier through the roof, passed down through a dimly seen office. Blote twiddled a small knob. The scene around the cage grew even fainter. "Best we remain unnoticed," he explained. The cage descended steadily. Dan peered out, searching for identifying landmarks. He leveled off at the second floor, cruised along a barely visible corridor. Blote's eyes rolled, studying the small chambers along both sides of the passage at once. "Ah, this must be the assembly area," he exclaimed. "I see the machines employ a bar-type construction, not unlike our carriers." "That's right," Dan said, staring through the haziness. "This is where they do time...." He tugged at a lever suddenly; the machine veered left, flickered through a barred door, came to a halt. Two nebulous figures loomed beside the cage. Dan cut the switch. If he'd guessed wrong— The scene fluoresced, sparks crackling, then popped into sharp focus. Blote scrambled out, brown eyes swivelling to take in the concrete walls, the barred door and— "You!" a hoarse voice bellowed. "Grab him!" someone yelled. Blote recoiled, threshing his ambulatory members in a fruitless attempt to regain the carrier as Manny and Fiorello closed in. Dan hauled at a lever. He caught a last glimpse of three struggling, blue-lit figures as the carrier shot away through the cell wall. III Dan slumped back against the seat with a sigh. Now that he was in the clear, he would have to decide on his next move—fast. There was no telling what other resources Blote might have. He would have to hide the carrier, then— A low growling was coming from somewhere, rising in pitch and volume. Dan sat up, alarmed. This was no time for a malfunction. The sound rose higher, into a penetrating wail. There was no sign of mechanical trouble. The carrier glided on, swooping now over a nebulous landscape of trees and houses. Dan covered his ears against the deafening shriek, like all the police sirens in town blaring at once. If the carrier stopped it would be a long fall from here. Dan worked the controls, dropping toward the distant earth. The noise seemed to lessen, descending the scale. Dan slowed, brought the carrier in to the corner of a wide park. He dropped the last few inches and cut the switch. As the glow died, the siren faded into silence. Dan stepped from the carrier and looked around. Whatever the noise was, it hadn't attracted any attention from the scattered pedestrians in the park. Perhaps it was some sort of burglar alarm. But if so, why hadn't it gone into action earlier? Dan took a deep breath. Sound or no sound, he would have to get back into the carrier and transfer it to a secluded spot where he could study it at leisure. He stepped back in, reached for the controls— There was a sudden chill in the air. The bright surface of the dials before him frosted over. There was a loud pop! like a flashbulb exploding. Dan stared from the seat at an iridescent rectangle which hung suspended near the carrier. Its surface rippled, faded to blankness. In a swirl of frosty air, a tall figure dressed in a tight-fitting white uniform stepped through. Dan gaped at the small rounded head, the dark-skinned long-nosed face, the long, muscular arms, the hands, their backs tufted with curly red-brown hair, the strange long-heeled feet in soft boots. A neat pillbox cap with a short visor was strapped low over the deep-set yellowish eyes, which turned in his direction. The wide mouth opened in a smile which showed square yellowish teeth. " Alors, monsieur ," the new-comer said, bending his knees and back in a quick bow. " Vous ete une indigine, n'est ce pas? " "No compree," Dan choked out "Uh ... juh no parlay Fransay...." "My error. This is the Anglic colonial sector, isn't it? Stupid of me. Permit me to introduce myself. I'm Dzhackoon, Field Agent of Class five, Inter-dimensional Monitor Service." "That siren," Dan said. "Was that you?" Dzhackoon nodded. "For a moment, it appeared you were disinclined to stop. I'm glad you decided to be reasonable." "What outfit did you say you were with?" Dan asked. "The Inter-dimensional Monitor Service." "Inter-what?" "Dimensional. The word is imprecise, of course, but it's the best our language coder can do, using the Anglic vocabulary." "What do you want with me?"

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62085

Pied Piper of Mars By FREDERIC ARNOLD KUMMER, Jr. Elath Taen made mad music for the men of Mars. The red planet lived and would die to the soul-tearing tunes of his fiendish piping. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] In all the solar system there is no city quite like Mercis, capital of Mars. Solis, on Venus, is perhaps more beautiful, some cities of Earth certainly have more drive and dynamitism, but there is a strange inscrutable air about Mercis which even terrestials of twenty years' residence cannot explain. Outwardly a tourists' mecca, with white plastoid buildings, rich gardens, and whispering canals, it has another and darker side, ever present, ever hidden. While earthmen work and plan, building, repairing, bringing their vast energy and progress to decadent Mars, the silent little reddies go their devious ways, following ancient laws which no amount of terrestial logic can shake. Time-bound ritual, mysterious passions and hates, torturous, devious logic ... all these, like dark winding underground streams run beneath the tall fair city that brings such thrilled superlatives to the lips of the terrestial tourists. Steve Ranson, mounting the steps of the old house facing the Han canal, was in no mood for the bizarre beauties of Martian scenery. For one thing, Mercis was an old story to him; his work with Terrestial Intelligence had brought him here often in the past, on other strange cases. And for another thing, his mission concerned more vital matters. Jared Haller, as head of the state-owned Martian Broadcasting System, was next in importance to the august Governor Winship himself. As far back as the Hitlerian wars on earth it had been known that he who controls propaganda, controls the nation ... or planet. Martian Broadcasting was an important factor in controlling the fierce warlike little reddies, keeping the terrestial-imposed peace on the red planet. And when Jared Haller sent to Earth for one of the Terrestial Intelligence, that silent efficient corps of trouble-shooters, something was definitely up. The house was provided with double doors as protection against the sudden fierce sandstorms which so often, in the month of Tol, sweep in from the plains of Psidis to engulf Mercis in a red choking haze. Ranson passed the conventional electric eye and a polite robot voice asked his name. He gave it, and the inner door opened. A smiling little Martian butler met him in the hall, showed him into Haller's study. The head of M.B.C. stood at one end of the big library, the walls of which were lined with vivavox rolls and old-fashioned books. As Ranson entered, he swung about, frowning, one hand dropping to a pocket that bulged unmistakably. "Ranson, Terrestial Intelligence." The special agent offered his card. "You sent to Earth a while ago for an operator?" Jared Haller nodded. He was a big, rough-featured individual with gray leonine hair. A battering-ram of a man, one would think, who hammered his way through life by sheer force and drive. But as Ranson looked closer, he could see lines of worry, of fear, etched about the strong mouth, and a species of terror within the shaggy-browed eyes. "Yes," said Jared Haller. "I sent for an operator. You got here quickly, Mr. Ranson!" "Seven days out of earth on the express-liner Arrow ." Ranson wondered why Haller didn't come to the point. Even Terrestial Intelligence headquarters in New York hadn't known why a T.I. man was wanted on Mars ... but Haller was one of the few persons sufficiently important to have an operator sent without explanation as to why he was wanted. Ranson put it directly. "Why did you require the help of T.I., Mr. Haller?" he asked. "Because we're up against something a little too big for the Mercian police force to handle." Jared Haller's strong hands tapped nervously upon the desk. "No one has greater respect for our local authorities than myself. Captain Maxwell is a personal friend of mine. But I understood that T.I. men had the benefit of certain amazing devices, remarkable inventions, which make it easy for them to track down criminals." Ranson nodded. That was true. T.I. didn't allow its secret devices to be used by any other agency, for fear they might become known to the criminals and outlaws of the solar system. But Haller still hadn't told what crime had taken place. This time Ranson applied the spur of silence. It worked. "Mr. Ranson," Haller leaned forward, his face a gray grim mask, "someone, something, is working to gain control of the Martian Broadcasting Company! And I don't have to tell you that whoever controls M.B.C. controls Mars! Here's the set-up! Our company, although state owned, is largely free from red-tape, so long as we stress the good work we terrestials are doing on Mars and keep any revolutionary propaganda off the air-waves. Except for myself, and half a dozen other earthmen in responsible positions, our staff is largely Martian. That's in line with our policy of teaching Mars our civilization until it's ready for autonomy. Which it isn't yet, by quite some. As you know." Ranson nodded, eyes intent as the pattern unfolded. "All right." Haller snapped. "You see the situation. Remove us ... the few terrestials at the top of M.B.C ... and Martian staff would carry on until new men came out from Earth to take our places. But suppose during that period with no check on their activities, they started to dish out nationalist propaganda? One hour's program, with the old Martian war-songs being played and some rabble-rouser yelling 'down with the terrestial oppressors' and there'd be a revolution. Millions of reddies against a few police, a couple of regiments of the Foreign Legion. It'd be a cinch." "But," ... Ranson frowned ... "this is only an interesting supposition. The reddies are civilized, peaceful." "Outwardly," Haller snapped. "But what do you or any other earthmen know about what goes on in their round red heads? And the proof that some revolt is planned lies in what's been happening the past few weeks! Look here!" Haller bent forward, the lines about his mouth tighter than ever. "Three weeks ago my technical advisor, Rawlins, committed suicide. Not a care in the world, but he killed himself. A week later Harris, head of the television department, went insane. Declared a feud with the whole planet, began shooting at everyone he saw. The police rayed him in the struggle. The following week Pegram, the musical director, died of a heart attack. Died with the most terrorized expression on his face I've ever seen. Fear, causing the heart attack, his doctor said. You begin to see the set-up? Three men, each a vital power in M.B.C. gone within three weeks! And who's next? Who?" Jared Haller's eyes were bright with fear. "Suicide, insanity, heart attack." Ranson shrugged. "All perfectly normal. Coincidence that they should happen within three weeks. What makes you think there's been foul play?" For a long brittle moment Jared Haller stared out at the graceful white city, wan in the light of the twin moons. When he turned to face Ranson again, his eyes were bleak as a lunar plain. "One thing," he said slowly. "The music." "Music?" Ranson echoed. "Look here, Mr. Haller, you...." "It's all right." Jared Haller grinned crookedly. "I'm not insane. Yet. Look, Mr. Ranson! There's just one clue to these mysterious deaths! And that's the music! In each instance the servants told of hearing, very faintly, a strange melody. Music that did queer things to them, even though they could hear it only vaguely. Music like none they'd ever heard. Like the devil's pipes, playing on their souls, while.... Almighty God!" Jared Haller froze, his face gray as lead, his eyes blue horror. Ranson was like a man in a trance, bent forward, lips pressed tight until they resembled a livid scar. The room was silent as a tomb; outside, they could hear the vague rumbling of the city, with the distant swish of canal boats, the staccato roar of rockets as some earth-bound freighter leaped from the spaceport. Familiar, homey sounds, these, but beneath them, like an undercurrent of madness, ran the macabre melody. There was, there had never been, Ranson knew, any music like this. It was the pipes of Pan, the chant of robots, the crying of souls in torment. It was a cloudy purple haze that engulfed the mind, it was a silver knife plucking a cruel obligato on taut nerves, it was a thin dark snake writhing its endless coils into the room. Neither man moved. Ranson knew all the tricks of visual hypnotism, the whirling mirror, the waving hands, the pool of ink ... but this was the hypnotism of sound. Louder and clearer the music sounded, in eerie overtones, quavering sobbing minors, fierce reverberating bass. Sharp shards of sound pierced their ears, deep throbbing underrhythm shook them as a cat shakes a mouse. "God!" Haller snarled. "What ... what is it?" "Don't know." Ranson felt a queer irritation growing within him. He strode stiffly to the window, peered out. In the darkness, the broad Han canal lay placid; the stars caught in its jet meshes gently drifted toward the bank, shattered on the white marble. Along the embankment were great fragrant clumps of fayeh bushes. It was among these, he decided, that their unknown serenader lay concealed. Suddenly the elfin melody changed. Fierce, harsh, it rose, until Ranson felt as though a file were rasping his nerves. He knew that he should dash down, seize the invisible musician below ... but logic, facts and duty, all were fading from his mind. The music was a spur, goading him to wild unreasoning anger. The red mists of hate swirled through his brain, a strange unreasoning bloodlust grew with the savage beat of the wild music. Berserk rage sounded in each shivering note and Ranson felt an insane desire to run amok. To inflict pain, to see red blood flow, to kill ... kill! Blindly he whirled, groping for his gun, as the music rose in a frenzied death-wail. Turning, Ranson found himself face to face with Jared Haller. But the tall flinty magnate was now another person. Primitive, atavistic rage distorted his features, insane murder lurked in his eyes. The music was his master, and it was driving him to frenzy. "Kill!" the weird rhythm screamed, "Kill!" And Jared Haller obeyed. He snatched the flame-gun from his pocket, levelled it at Ranson. Whether it was the deadly melody outside, or the instinct of self-preservation, Ranson never knew, but he drove at Haller with grim fury. The flame-gun hissed, filling the room with a greenish glare, its beam passing so close to Ranson's hair as to singe it. Ranson came up, grinning furiously, and in a moment both men were struggling, teeth bared in animalistic grins, breath coming in choked gasps, whirling in a mad dance of death as the macabre music distilled deadly poison within their brains. The end came with startling suddenness. Ranson, twisting his opponent's arm back, felt the searing blast of the flame-gun past his hand. Jared Haller, a ghastly blackened corpse, toppled to the floor. At that moment the lethal rhythm outside changed abruptly. From the fierce maddening beat of a few minutes before, the chords took on a yearning seductive tone. A call, it seemed, irresistible, soft, with a thousand promises. This was the song the sirens sang to Ulysses, the call of the Pied Piper, the chant of the houris in paradise. It conjured up pictures in Ranson's mind ... pictures of fairyland, of exquisitely beautiful scenes, of women lovely beyond imagination. All of man's hopes, man's dreams, were in that music, and it drew Ranson as a moth is drawn to a flame. The piping of Pan, the fragile fantasies of childhood, the voices of those beyond life.... Ranson walked stiffly toward the source of the music, like a man drugged. As he approached the window the melody grew louder. The hypnotism of sound, he knew, but he didn't care. It was enthralling, irresistible. Like a sleepwalker he climbed to the sill, stood outlined in the tall window. Twenty feet to the ground, almost certain death ... but Ranson was lost in the golden world that the elfin melody conjured up. He straightened his shoulders, was about to step out. Then suddenly there was a roar of atomic motors, a flashing of lights. A police boat, flinging up clouds of spray, swept up the canal, stopped. Ranson shook himself, like a man awakening from a nightmare, saw uniformed figures leaping to the bank. From the shadow of the fayeh bushes a slight form sprang, dodged along the embankment. Flame-guns cut the gloom but the slight figure swung to the left, disappeared among the twisting narrow streets. Bathed in cold sweat, Ranson stepped back into the room, where the still, terrible form of Jared Haller lay. Ranson stared at it, as though seeing it for the first time. Outside, there were pounding feet; the canal-patrolmen raced through the house, toward the study. And then, his brain weary as if it had been cudgelled, Ranson slid limply to the floor. Headquarters of the Martian Canal-Patrol was brilliantly lighted by a dozen big astralux arcs. Captain Maxwell chewed at his gray mustache, staring curiously at Ranson. "Then you admit killing Haller?" he demanded. "Yes." Ranson nodded sombrely. "In the struggle. Self-defense. But even if it hadn't been self-defense, I probably would have fought with him. That music was madness, I tell you! Madness! Nobody's responsible when under its influence! I...." "You killed Haller," Captain Maxwell said. "And you blame it on this alleged music. I might believe you, Ranson, but how many other people would? Even members of Terrestial Intelligence aren't sacro sanct. I'll have to hold you for trial." "Hold me for trial?" Ranson leaned forward, his gaunt face intent. "While the real killer, the person playing that music, gets away? Look! Let me out of here for twelve hours! That's all I ask! And if I don't track down whoever was outside Haller's house, you can...." "Sorry." Captain Maxwell shook his head. "You know I'd like to, Ranson. But this is murder. To let a confessed murderer, even though he is a T.I. man, go free, is impossible." The captain drew a deep breath, motioned to the two gray-uniformed patrolmen. "Take Mr. Ranson." And then Steve Ranson went into action. In one blinding burst of speed, he lunged across the desk, tore Captain Maxwell's pistol from its holster. Before the captain and the two patrolmen knew what had happened, they were staring into the ugly muzzle of the flame-gun. "Sorry." Ranson said tightly. "But it had to be done. There's hell loose on Mars, the devil's melody! And it's got to be stopped before it turns this planet upside down!" "You can't get away with this, Ranson!" Captain Maxwell shook his head. "It'll only make it tougher for you when we nab you again! Be sensible! Put down that gun." "No good. Got to work fast." Ranson backed toward the door, gun in hand. "Let this mad music go unchecked and it's death to all terrestials on Mars! And I'm going to stop it! So long, captain! You can try me for murder if you want, after I've done my job here!" Ranson took the key from the massive plastic door as he backed through the entrance. Once in the hall, he slammed the door shut, locked Maxwell and his men in the room. Then, dropping the gun into his pocket, he ran swiftly down the corridor to the main entrance of headquarters. In the hall a patrolman glanced at him suspiciously, halted him, but a wave of Ranson's T.I. card put the man aside. Free of headquarters, Ranson began to run. Only a few moments, he knew, before Maxwell and his men blasted a way to freedom, set out in pursuit. Like a lean gray shadow Ranson ran, twisting, dodging, among the narrow streets, heading toward Haller's house. Mercis was a dream city in the wan light of the moons. One in either side of the heavens, they threw weird double shadows across the rippling canals, the aimless streets. Sleek canal-cabs roared along the dark waterways, throwing up clouds of spray, and on the embankments, green-eyed, bulge-headed little reddies padded, silent, inscrutable, themselves a part of the eternal mystery of Mars. Haller's house stood dark and brooding beside the canal. Captain Maxwell's men had completed their examination and the place was deserted. Ranson stepped into the shadow of the clump of fragrant fayeh bushes, where the unknown musician had stood; there was little danger, he felt, of patrolmen hunting for him at Haller's house. The captain had little faith in copybook maxims about the murderer returning to the scene of the crime. Ranson stood motionless for a moment as a canal boat swept by, then drew from his pocket a heavy black tube. He tugged, and it extended telescopically to a cane some four feet long. The cane was hollow, a tube, and the head of it was large as a man's two fists and covered with small dials, gauges. This was the T.I.'s most cherished secret, the famous "electric bloodhound," by which criminals could be tracked. Ranson touched a lever and a tiny electric motor in the head of the cane hummed, drawing air up along the tube. He tapped the bank where the unknown musician had stood, eyes on the gauges. Molecules of matter, left by the mysterious serenader, were sucked up the tube, registered on a sensitive plate, just as delicate color shades register on the plate of a color camera. Ranson tapped the cane carefully upon the ground, avoiding those places where he had stood. Few people crossed this overgrown embankment, and it was a safe bet that no one other than the strange musician had been there recently. The scent was a clear one, and the dials on the head of the cane read R-2340-B, the numerical classification of the tiny bits of matter left behind by the unknown. The theory behind it was quite simple. The T.I. scientists had reasoned that the sense of smell is merely the effect of suspended molecules in the air acting upon sensitive nerve filaments, and they knew that any normal human can follow a trail of some strong odor such as perfumes, or gasoline, while animals, possessing more sensitive perceptions, can follow less distinct trails. To duplicate this mechanically had proven more difficult than an electric eye or artificial hearing device, but in the end they had triumphed. Their efforts had resulted in the machine Ranson now carried. The trial was, at the start, clear. Ranson tapped the long tube on the ground like a blind man, eyes on the dial. Along the embankment, into a side street, he made his way. There were few abroad in this old quarter of the city; from the spaceport came the roar of freighters, the rumble of machinery, but here in the narrow winding streets there was only the faint murmur of voices behind latticed windows, the rustle of the wind, the rattle of sand from the red desert beyond the city. As Ranson plunged further into the old Martian quarter, the trail grew more and more confused, crossed by scores of other trails left by passersby. He was forced to stop, cast about like a bloodhound, tapping every square foot of the street before the R-2340-B on the dial showed that he had once more picked up the faint elusive scent. Deeper and deeper Ranson plunged into the dark slums of Mercis. Smoky gambling dens, dives full of drunken spacehands and slim red-skinned girls, maudlin singing ... even the yellow glare of the forbidden san-rays, as they filtered through drawn windows. Unsteady figures made their way along the streets. Mighty-thewed Jovian blasters, languid Venusians, boisterous earthmen ... and the little Martians padding softly along, wrapped in their loose dust-robes. At the end of an alley where the purple shadows lay like stagnant pools, Ranson paused. The alley was a cul-de-sac, which meant that the person he was trailing must have entered one of the houses. Very softly he tapped the long tube on the ground. Again with a hesitant swinging of dials, R-2340-B showed up, on the low step in front of one of the dilapidated, dome-shaped houses. Ranson's eyes narrowed. So the person who had played the mad murder melody had entered that house! Might still be there! Quickly he telescoped the "electric bloodhound," dropped it into his pocket, and drew his flame-gun. The old house was dark, with an air of morbid deadly calm about it. Ranson tried the door, found it locked. A quick spurt from his flame-gun melted the lock; he glanced about to make sure no one had observed the greenish glare, then stepped inside. The hallway was shadowy, its walls hung with ancient Martian tapestries which, from their stilted symbolic ideographs must have dated back to the days of the Canal-Builders. At the end of the hallway, however, light jetted through a half-open door. Ranson moved toward it, silent as a phantom, muscles tense. Gripping his flame-gun, he pushed the door wide ... and a sudden exclamation broke from his lips. Before him lay a gleaming laboratory, lined with vials of strange liquids, shining test-tubes, and queer apparatus. Beside a table, pouring a black fluid from a beaker into a test-tube, stood a man. Half-terrestial, half-Martian, he seemed, with the large hairless head of the red planet, and the clean features of an earthman. His eyes, behind their glasses, were like green ice, and the hand pouring the black fluid did not so much as waver at Ranson's entrance. Ranson gasped. The bizarre figure was that of Dr. Elath Taen, master-scientist, sought by the T.I. for years, in vain! Elath Taen, outlaw and renegade, whose sole desire was the extermination of all terrestials on Mars, a revival of the ancient glories of the red planet. The tales told about him were fabulous; and this was the man behind the unholy music! "Good evening, Mr. Ranson," Elath Taen smiled. "Had I known T.I. men were on Mars I should have taken infinitely more precautions. However...." As he spoke, his hand moved suddenly, as though to hurl the test tube at Ranson. Quick as he was, the T.I. man was quicker. A spurt of flame leapt from his gun, shattering the tube. The dark liquid hissed, smoking, on to the floor. "Well done, Mr. Ranson." Elath Taen nodded calmly. "Had the acid struck you, it would have rendered you blind." "That's about enough of your tricks!" Ranson grated. "Come along, Dr. Taen! We're going to headquarters!" "Since you insist." Elath Taen removed his chemist's smock, began, very deliberately, to strip off his rubber gloves. "Quit stalling!" Ranson snapped. "Get going! I...." The words faded on the T.I. man's lips. Faintly, in the distance, came the strains of soft eerie music! "Good God!" Ranson's eyes darted about the laboratory. "That ... that's the same as Haller and I...." "Exactly, Mr. Ranson." Elath Taen smiled thinly. "Listen!" The music was a caress, soft as a woman's skin. Slow, drowsy, like the hum of bees on a hot summer's afternoon. Soothing, soporific, in dreamy, crooning chords. A lullaby, that seemed to hang lead weights upon the eyelids. Audible hypnotism, as potent as some drug. Clearer with each second, the melody grew, coming nearer and nearer the laboratory. "Come ... come on," Ranson said thickly. "Got to get out of here." But his words held no force, and Elath Taen was nodding sleepily under the influence of the weird dream-music. Ranson knew he should act, swiftly, while he could; but the movement of a single muscle seemed an intolerable effort. His skin felt as though it were being rubbed with velvet, a strange purring sensation filled his brain. He tried to think, to move, but his will seemed in a padded vise. The music was dragging him down, down, into the gray mists of oblivion. Across the laboratory Elath Taen had slumped to the floor, a vague smile of triumph on his face. Ranson turned to the direction of the music, tried to raise his gun, but the weapon slipped from his fingers, he fell to his knees. Sleep ... that was all that mattered ... sleep. The music was like chloroform, its notes stroked his brain. Through half-shut eyes he saw a door at the rear of the laboratory open, saw a slim, dark, exotic girl step through into the room. Slung about her neck in the manner of an accordian, was a square box, with keys studding its top. For a long moment Ranson stared at the dark, enigmatic girl, watched her hands dance over the keys to produce the soft lulling music. About her head, he noticed, was a queer copper helmet, of a type he had never before seen. And then the girl, Elath Taen, the laboratory, all faded into a kaleidoscopic whirl. Ranson felt himself falling down into the gray mists, and consciousness disappeared.

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Castaways of Eros By NELSON S. BOND Two families fought for the title to Eros, and only one could win. One had to outsmart the other—and both had to win over the unscrupulous United Ores Corporation. It was a problem worthy of a Solomon—and it had an ending even those embittered rivals could not foresee. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Bobby couldn't help wishing Pop would stand up just a little bit straighter. Not that he was ashamed of Pop; it wasn't that at all. It was just that the Patrolman stood so straight, his shoulders broad and firm. Standing beside him made Pop look sort of thin and puny; his chest caved in like he was carrying a heavy weight on his shoulders. That was from studying things through a microscope. Anyhow, decided Bobby with a fierce loyalty, that S.S.P. man probably wouldn't even know what to look for if somebody put a microscope in front of him. Even if he was big and sturdy and broad-shouldered in his space blues. Mom said, "Bobby, what are you muttering about? Do stop fidgeting!" Bobby said, "Yessum," and glared at Moira, as if she, in some obscure way, were to blame for his having been reprimanded right out here in the middle of Long Island Spaceport, where everybody could hear and laugh at him. But Moira, studying the handsome S.S.P. man surreptitiously, did not notice. Dick was fixing something in the ship. Eleanor stood quietly beside Mom, crooning softly to The Pooch so it wouldn't be scared by the thunderous blast of rocket motors. Grampaw Moseley had buttonholed an embarrassed young ensign, was complaining to him in loud and certain terms that modern astronavigation practices were, "Rank bellywash, Mister, and a dad-ratted disgrace!" The Patrolman said, "Your name, please, Sir?" "Robert Emmet O'Brien Moseley," said Pop. "Occupation?" "Research physicist, formerly. Now about to become a land-grant settler." "Age of self and party ... former residence...." Overhead, the sky was blue and thin—clear as a bowl of skimmed milk; its vastness limned in sharp relief, to the west and north, the mighty spans and arches, the faery domes and flying buttresses of Great New York. The spacedrome fed a hundred ducts of flight; from one field lifted air locals, giddy, colored motes with gyroscopes aspin. From another, a West Coast stratoliner surged upward to lose itself in thin, dim heights. Vast cradles by the Sound were the nests to which a flock of interplanetary craft made homeward flight. Luggers and barges and cruisers. Bobby saw, with sudden excitement, the sharp, starred prow of the Solar Space Patrol man-o'-war. Here, in this field, the GSC's—the General Spacecraft Cradles. From one of which, as soon as Pop got clearance, their ship would take off. Their ship! Bobby felt an eager quickening of his pulse; his stomach was aswarm with a host of butterflies. Their ship! The space officer said, "I think that takes care of everything, Dr. Moseley. I presume you understand the land-grant laws and obligations?" "Yes, Lieutenant." "Very well, then—" Space-red hands made official motions with a hand-stamp and pen. "Your clearance. And my very best wishes, Sir." "Thank you," said Pop quietly. He turned. "That's all. Ready, Mother? Eleanor? Moira?" Bobby bounded forward. "Can I push the button, can I, Pop? When we start, can I?" Dick was waiting before the open lock of the Cuchulainn . Dick could do anything, everything at once. He took The Pooch into the circle of his left arm, helped his mother aboard, said, "Shut up, kid, you're enough to wake the dead. Watch that guard-panel, Elly. Papers all set, Pop?" And he tickled The Pooch's dimpled cheek with an oily finger. "You act just like your mama," he said irrelevantly, and the baby gurgled. Eleanor cried, "Dick—those dirty hands!" "Everything is in order, Richard," said Pop. "Good. You folks go in and strap down. I'll seal. Here comes the cradle-monkey now." Pop said, "Come along, Robert," and the others went inside. Bobby waited, though, to see the cradle-monkey, the man under whose orders spacecraft lifted gravs. The cradle-monkey was a dour man with gnarled legs and arms and temper. He looked at the Cuchulainn and sniffed; then at Dick. "Family crate, huh?" "That's right." "Well, f'r goddlemighty' sakes, don't try to blast off with y'r side jets burnin'. Take a seven-point-nineteen readin' on y'r Akka gauge, stern rockets only—" "Comets to you, butt-hoister!" grinned Dick. "I've had eight years on the spider run. I can lift this can." "Oh, a rocketeer?" There was new, grudging respect in the groundman's tone. "Well, how was I t' know? Y'ought t' see what some o' them jaloupi-jockeys do to my cradles—burn 'em black! Oh, well—" He backed away from the ship. "Clean ether!" said Dick. He closed the lock. Its seal-brace slid into place, wheezing asthmatically. Bobby's ears rang suddenly with the mild compression of air; when he swallowed, they were all right again. Dick saw him. "What are you doing here, kid? Didn't I hear Pop tell you to come below?" Bobby said, "I'm not a kid. I'm almost sixteen." "Just old enough," promised Dick, "to get your seat warmed if you don't do what you're told. Remember, you're a sailor on a spaceship now. Pop's the Skipper, and I'm First Mate. If you don't obey orders, it's mutiny, and—" "I'm obeying," said Bobby hastily. He followed his brother down the corridor, up the ramp, to the bridge. "Can I push the button when we take off, huh, Dick?" After his high expectations, it wasn't such a great thrill. Dick set the stops and dials, told him which button to press. "When I give the word, kid." Of course, he got to sit in the pilot's bucket-chair, which was something. Moira and Eleanor and Mom to lie down in acceleration hammocks while Pop and Dick sat in observation seats. He waited, all ears and nerves, as the slow seconds sloughed away. Pop set the hypos running; their faint, dull throb was a magic sound in the silence. Then there came a signal from outside. Dick's hand rose in understanding response; fell again. "Now!" Bobby jabbed the button in frantic haste. Suddenly the silence was shattered by a thunderous detonation. There was a massive hand pressing him back into the soft, yielding leather of his chair; the chair retreated on oiled channels, pneumatic compensators hissing faintly, absorbing the shock. Across the room a faulty hammock-hinge squeaked rustily. Then it was over as quickly as it had begun, and he could breathe again, and Dick was lurching across the turret on feet that wobbled queerly because up was down and top was bottom and everything was funny and mixed up. Dick cut in the artificial gravs, checked the meter dials with a hurried glance, smiled. "Dead on it! Want to check, Skipper?" But Pop was standing by the observation pane, eyeing an Earth already ball-like in the vastness of space. Earth, dwindling with each passing moment. Bobby moved to his side and watched; Moira, too, and Eleanor and Mom, and even Dick. Pop touched Mom's hand. He said, "Martha—I'm not sure this is fair to you and the children. Perhaps it isn't right that I should force my dream on all of you. The world we have known and loved lies behind us. Before us lies only uncertainty...." Mom sort of sniffed and reached for a handkerchief. She turned her back to Pop for a minute, and when she turned around again her eyes were red and angry-looking. She said, " You want to go on, don't you, Rob?" Pop nodded. "But I'm thinking of you, Martha." "Of me!" Mom snorted indignantly. "Hear him talk! I never heard such nonsense in my life. Of course I want to go on. No, never mind that! Richard, isn't there a kitchen on this boat?" "A galley, Mom. Below." "Galley ... kitchen ... what's the difference? You two girls come with me. I'll warrant these men are starving. I am!" After that, things became so normal as to be almost disappointing. From his eager reading of such magazines as Martian Tales and Cosmic Fiction Weekly , Bobby had conceived void-travel to be one long, momentous chain of adventure. A super-thrilling serial, punctuated by interludes with space-pirates, narrow brushes with meteors, sabotage, treachery—hair-raising, heroic and horrifying. There was nothing like that to disturb the calm and peaceful journey of the Cuchulainn . Oh, it was enjoyable to stare through the observation panes at the flame-dotted pall of space—until Pop tried to turn his curious interest into educational channels; it was exciting, too, to probe through the corridored recesses of their floating home—except that Dick issued strict orders that nothing must be touched, that he must not enter certain chambers, that he mustn't push his nose into things that didn't concern kids— Which offended Bobby, who was sixteen, or, anyway, fifteen and three-quarters. So they ate and they slept and they ate again. And Pop and Dick spelled each other at the control banks. Moira spent endless hours with comb and mirror, devising elaborate hair-dos which—Bobby reminded her with impudent shrewdness—were so much wasted energy, since they were settling in a place where nobody could see them. And Mom bustled about in the galley, performing miracles with flour and stuff, and in the recreation room, Eleanor minded The Pooch, and lost innumerable games of cribbage to Grampaw Moseley who cheated outrageously and groused, between hands, about the dad-blame nonsensical way Dick was handling the ship. And somehow three Earth days sped by, and they were nearing their destination. The tiny planetoid, Eros. Pop said, "You deserve a great deal of credit, son, for your fine work in rehabilitating the Cuchulainn . It has performed beautifully. You are a good spaceman." Dick flushed. "She's a good ship, Pop, even if she is thirty years old. Some of these old, hand-fashioned jobs are better than the flash junk they're turning off the belts nowadays. You've checked the declension and trajectory?" "Yes. We should come within landing radius in just a few hours. Cut drives at 19.04.22 precisely and make such minor course alterations as are necessary, set brakes." Pop smiled happily. "We're very fortunate, son. A mere fifteen million miles. It's not often Eros is so near Earth." "Don't I know it? It's almost a hundred million at perihelion. But that's not the lucky part. You sure had to pull strings to get the government land grant to Eros. What a plum! Atmosphere ... water ... vegetable life ... all on a hunk of dirt fifty-seven miles in diameter. Frankly, I don't get it! Eros must have terrific mass to have the attributes of a full-sized planet." "It does, Richard. A neutronium core." "Neutronium!" Dick gasped. "Why don't people tell me these things? Roaring craters, Pop, we're rich! Bloated plutocrats!" "Not so fast, son. Eventually, perhaps; not today. First we must establish our claims, justify our right to own Eros. That means work, plenty of hard work. After that, we might be able to consider a mining operation. What's that?" Bobby jumped. It was Mom's voice. But her cry was not one of fear, it was one of excitement. "Rob, look! Off to the—the left, or the port, or whatever you call it! Is that our new home?" Bobby did not need to hear Pop's reply to know that it was. His swift intake of breath was enough, the shine in his eyes as he peered out the observation port. "Eros!" he said. It looked all right to Bobby. A nice, clean little sphere, spinning lazily before their eyes like a top someone had set in motion, then gone away and forgotten. Silver and green and rusty brown, all still faintly blued by distance. The warm rays of old Sol reflected gaily, giddily, from seas that covered half the planetoid's surface, and mountains cut long, jagged shadows into sheltered plains beneath them. It was, thought Bobby, not a bad looking little place. But not anything to get all dewy-eyed about, like Pop was. Dick said softly, "All right, Pop. Let's check and get ready to set 'er down...." II It was not Dick's fault. It was just a tough break that no one had expected, planned for, guarded against. The planetoid was there beneath them; they would land on it. It was as simple at that. Only it wasn't. Nor did they have any warning that the problem was more complex until it was too late to change their plans, too late to halt the irrevocable movements of a grounding spaceship. Dick should have known, of course. He was a spaceman; he had served two tricks on the Earth-Venus-Mars run. But all those planets were large; Eros was just a mote. A spinning top.... Anyway, it was after the final coordinates had been plotted, the last bank control unchangeably set, the rockets cut, that they saw the curved knife-edge of black slicing up over Eros' rim. For a long moment Dick stared at it, a look of angry chagrin in his eyes. "Well, blast me for an Earth-lubbing idiot! Do you see that, Pop?" Pop looked like he had shared Dick's persimmon. "The night-line. We forgot to consider the diurnal revolution." "And now we've got to land in the dark. On strange terrain. Arragh! I should have my head examined. I've got a plugged tube somewhere!" Grampaw Moseley hobbled in, appraised the situation with his incomparable ability to detect something amiss. He snorted and rattled his cane on the floor. "They's absolutely nothin'," he informed the walls, "to this hereditation stuff. Elst why should my own son an' his son be so dag-nabbed stoopid?" "'What can't be cured,'" said Pop mildly, "'must be endured.' We have the forward search-beams, son. They will help." That was sheer optimism. As they neared the planet its gravitational attraction seized them tighter and tighter until they were completely under its compulsion. Dusk swept down upon them, the sunlight dulled, faded, grayed. Then as the ship nosed downward, suddenly all was black. The yellow beam of the search stabbed reluctant shadows, bringing rocky crags and rounded tors into swift, terrifying relief. Dick snapped, "Into your hammocks, everyone! Don't worry. This crate will stand a lot of bust-up. It's tough. A little bit of luck—" But there was perspiration on his forehead, and his fingers played over the control banks like frightened moths. There was no further need for the artificial gravs. Eros exerted, strangely, incredibly, an attractive power almost as potent as Earth's. Dick cut off the gravs, then the hypos. As the last machine-created sound died away from the cabin, Bobby heard the high scream of atmosphere, raging and tearing at the Cuchulainn with angry fingers. Through howling Bedlam they tumbled dizzily and for moments that were ages long. While Dick labored frantically at the controls, while Moira watched with bated breath. Mom said nothing, but her hand sought Pop's; Eleanor cradled The Pooch closer to her. Grampaw scowled. And then, suddenly— "Hold tight! We're grounding!" cried Dick. And instinctively Bobby braced himself for a shock. But there was only a shuddering jar, a lessening of the roar that beat upon their eardrums, a dull, flat thud. A sodden, heavy grinding and the groan of metal forward. Then a false nausea momentarily assailed him. Because for the first time in days the Cuchulainn was completely motionless. Dick grinned shakily. "Well!" he said. "Well!" Pop unbuckled his safety belt, climbed gingerly out of his hammock, moved to the port, slid back its lock-plate. Bobby said, "Can you see anything, Pop? Can you?" And Mom, who could read Pop's expressions like a book, said, "What is it, Rob?" Pop stroked his chin. He said, "Well, we've landed safely, Richard. But I'm afraid we've—er—selected a wet landing field. We seem to be under water!" His hazard was verified immediately. Indisputably. For from the crack beneath the door leading from the control turret to the prow-chambers of the ship, came a dark trickle that spread and puddled and stained and gurgled. Water! Dick cried, "Hey, this is bad! We'd better get out of here—" He leaped to his controls. Once more the plaintive hum of the hypatomics droned through the cabin, gears ground and clashed as the motors caught, something forward exploded dully, distantly. The ship rocked and trembled, but did not move. Again Dick tried to jet the fore-rockets. Again, and yet again. And on the fourth essay, there ran through the ship a violent shudder, broken metal grated shrilly from forward, and the water began bubbling and churning through the crack. Deeper and swifter. Dick cut motors and turned, his face an angry mask. "We can't get loose. The entire nose must be stove in! We're leaking like a sieve. Look, everybody—get into your bulgers. We'll get out through the airlock!" Mom cried, "But—but our supplies, Dick! What are we going to do for food, clothing, furniture—?" "We'll worry about that later. Right now we've got to think of ourselves. That-aboy, Bobby! Thanks for getting 'em out. You girls remember how to climb into 'em? Eleanor—you take that oversized one. That's right. There's room for you and The Pooch—" The water was almost ankle deep in the control room by the time they had all donned spacesuits. Bloated figures in fabricoid bulgers, they followed Dick to the airlock. It was weird, and a little bit frightening, but to Bobby it was thrilling, too. This was the sort of thing you read stories about. Escape from a flooding ship.... They had time—or took time—to gather together a few precious belongings. Eleanor packed a carrier with baby food for The Pooch, Mom a bundle of provisions hastily swept from the galley bins; Pop remembered the medical kit and the tool-box, Grampaw was laden down with blankets and clothing, Dick burdened himself and Bobby with armloads of such things as he saw and forevisioned need for. At the lock, Dick issued final instructions. "The air in the bulgers will carry you right to the surface. We'll gather there, count noses, and decide on our next move. Pop, you go first to lead the way, then Mom, and Eleanor, Grampaw—" Thus, from the heart of the doomed Cuchulainn , they fled. The airlock was small. There was room for but one at a time. The water was waist—no, breast-deep—by the time all were gone save Bobby and Dick. Bobby, whose imagination had already assigned him the command of the foundering ship, wanted to uphold the ancient traditions by being the last to leave. But Dick had other ideas. He shoved Bobby—not too gently—into the lock. Then there was water, black, solid, forbidding, about him. And the outer door opening. He stepped forward. And floated upward, feeling an uneasy, quibbly feeling in his stomach. Almost immediately a hard something clanged! against his impervite helmet; it was a lead-soled bulger boot; then he was bobbing and tossing on shallow black wavelets beside the others. Above him was a blue-black, star-gemmed sky; off to his right, not distant, was a rising smudge that must be the mainland. A dark blob popped out of the water. Dick. Moira reached for the twisted branch. Dick's voice was metallic through the audios of the space-helmet. "All here, Pop? Everybody all right? Swell! Let's strike out for the shore, there. Stick together, now. It isn't far." Pop said, "The ship, Richard?" "We'll find it again. I floated up a marking buoy. That round thing over there isn't Grampaw." Grampaw's voice was raucous, belligerent. "You bet y'r boots it ain't! I'm on my way to terry firmy. The last one ashore's a sissy!" Swimming in a bulger, Bobby found, was silly. Like paddling a big, warm, safe rubber rowboat. The stars winked at him, the soft waves explored his face-plate with curious, white fingers of spray. Pretty soon there was sand scraping his boots ... a long, smooth beach with rolling hills beyond. In the sudden scarlet of dawn, it was impossible to believe the night had even been frightening. Throughout the night, the Moseley clan huddled together there on the beach, waiting, silent, wondering. But when the sun burst over the horizon like a clamoring, brazen gong, they looked upon this land which was their new home—and found it good. The night did not last long. But Pop had told them it would not. "Eros rotates on its axis," he explained, "in about ten hours, forty minutes, Earth time measurement. Therefore we shall have 'days' and 'nights' of five hours; short dawns or twilights. This will vary somewhat, you understand, with the change of seasons." Dick asked, "Isn't that a remarkably slow rotation? For such a tiny planet, I mean? After all, Eros is only one hundred and eighty odd miles in circumference—" "Eros has many peculiarities. Some of them we have discussed before. It approaches Earth nearer than any other celestial body, excepting Luna and an occasional meteor or comet. When first discovered by Witt, in 1898, the world of science marveled at finding a true planetoid with such an uncommon orbit. At perihelion it comes far within the orbit of Mars; at aphelion it is far outside. "During its near approach in 1900-01, Eros was seen to vary in brightness at intervals of five hours and fifteen or twenty minutes. At that time, a few of the more imaginative astronomers offered the suggestion that this variation might be caused by diurnal rotation. After 1931, though, the planetoid fled from Earth. It was not until 1975, the period of its next approach, that the Ronaldson-Chenwith expedition visited it and determined the old presumption to be correct." "We're not the first men to visit Eros, then?" "Not at all. It was investigated early in the days of spaceflight. Two research foundations, the Royal Cosmographic Society and the Interplanetary Service, sent expeditions here. During the Black Douglass period of terrorism, the S.S.P. set up a brief military occupation. The Galactic Metals Corporation at one time attempted to establish mining operations here, but the Bureau refused them permission, for under the Spacecode of '08, it was agreed by the Triune that all asteroids should be settled under land-grant law. "That is why," concluded Pop, "we are here now. As long as I can remember, it has been my dream to take a land-grant colony for my very own. Long years ago I decided that Eros should be my settlement. As you have said, Richard, it necessitated the pulling of many strings. Eros is a wealthy little planet; the man who earns it wins a rich prize. More than that, though—" Pop lifted his face to the skies, now blue with hazy morning. There was something terribly bright and proud in his eyes. "More than that, there is the desire to carve a home out of the wilderness. To be able to one day say, 'Here is my home that I have molded into beauty with my own hands.' Do you know what I mean, son? In this workaday world of ours there are no more Earthly frontiers for us to dare, as did our forefathers. But still within us all stirs the deep, instinctive longing to hew a new home from virgin land—" His words dwindled into silence, and, inexplicably, Bobby felt awed. It was Grampaw Moseley who burst the queer moment into a thousand spluttering fragments. "Talkin' about hewin'," he said, "S'posen we 'hew us a few vittles? Hey?" Dick roused himself. "Right you are, Grampaw," he said. "You can remove your bulgars. I've tested the air; it's fine and warm, just as the report said. Moira, while Mom and Eleanor are fixing breakfast, suppose you lay out our blankets and spare clothing to dry? Grampaw, get a fire going. Pop and Bobby and I will get some wood." Thus Eros greeted its new masters, and the Moseleys faced morning in their new Eden. III Grampaw Moseley wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. There were no napkins, which suited him fine. "It warn't," he said, "a bad meal. But it warn't a fust-class un, neither. Them synthos an' concentrates ain't got no more flavor than—" Bobby agreed with him. Syntho ham wasn't too bad. It had a nice, meaty taste. And syntho coffee tasted pretty much like the real thing. But those syntho eggs tasted like nothing under the sun except just plain, awful syntho eggs. Four Eros days—the equivalent of forty-two Earth hours or so—had passed since their crash landing. In that short time, much had been done to make their beach camp-site comfortable. All members of the family were waiting now for Dick to return. Pop said seriously, "I'm afraid you'll have to eat them and like them for a little while, Father. We can't get fresh foods until we're settled; we can't settle until—Ah! Here comes Dick!" "I'll eat 'em," grumbled Grampaw, "but be durned if I'll like 'em. What'd you l'arn, Dicky-boy?" Dick removed his helmet, unzipped himself from his bulger, shook his head. "It looks worse every time I go back. I may not be able to get in the airlock again if the ship keeps on settling. The whole prow split wide open when we hit, the ship is full of water. The flour and sugar and things like that are ruined. I managed to get a few more things out, though. Some tools, guns, wire—stuff like that." "How about the hypatomic?" "Let him eat, Rob," said Mom. "He's hungry." "I can eat and talk at the same time, Mom. I think I can get the hypatomic out. I'd better, anyhow. If we're ever going to raise the ship, we'll need power. And atomic power is the only kind we can get in this wilderness." And he shook his head. "But we can't do it in a day or a week. It will take time." "Time," said Pop easily, "is the one commodity with which we are over-supplied." He thought for a minute. "If that's the way it is, we might as well move." "Move?" demanded Grampaw. "What's the matter with the place we're at?" "For one thing, it's too exposed. An open beach is no place for a permanent habitation. So far we've been very lucky. We've had no storms. But for a permanent camp-site, we must select a spot further inland. A fertile place, where we can start crops. A place with fresh, running water, natural shelter against cold and wind and rain—" "What'll we do?" grinned Dick. "Flip a coin?" "No. Happily, there is a spot like that within an easy walk of here. I discovered it yesterday while studying the terrain." Pop took a stick, scratched a rude drawing on the sand before him. "This is the coastline. We landed on the west coast of this inlet. The land we see across there, that low, flat land, I judge to be delta islands. Due south of us is a fine, fresh-water river, watering fertile valleys to either side. There, I think, we should build." Dick nodded. "Fish from the sea, vegetables from our own farm—is there any game, Pop?" "That I don't know. We haven't seen any. Yet." "We'll find out. Will this place you speak of be close enough to let me continue working on the Cuchulainn ? Yes? Well, that's that. When do we start?" "Why not now? There's nothing to keep us here." They packed their meager belongings while Dick finished his meal; the sun was high when they left the beach. They followed the shore line southward, the ground rising steadily before them. And before evening, they came to a rolling vale through which a sparkling river meandered lazily to the sea. Small wonders unfolded before their eyes. Marching along, they had discovered that there was game on Eros. Not quite Earthly, of course—but that was not to be expected. There was one small, furry beast about the size of a rabbit, only its color was vivid leaf-green. Once, as they passed a wooded glen, a pale, fawnlike creature stole from the glade, watched them with soft, curious eyes. Another time they all started violently as the familiar siren of a Patrol monitor screamed raucously from above them; they looked up to see an irate, orange and jade-green bird glaring down at them. And of course there were insects— "There would have to be insects," Pop said. "There could be no fruitful vegetable life without insects. Plants need bees and crawling ants—or their equivalent—to carry the pollen from one flower to another." They chose a site on the riverside, a half mile or so from, above, and overlooking the sea. They selected it because a spring of pure, bubbling water was nearby, because the woodlands dwindled away into lush fields. And Pop said, "This is it. We'll build our home on yonder knoll. And who knows—" Again there grew that strange look in his eyes. "Who knows but that it may be the shoot from which, a time hence, there may spring many cabins, then finer homes, and buildings, and mansions, until at last there is a great, brave city here on this port by the delta—" "That's it, Pop!" said Dick suddenly. "There's the name for our settlement. Delta Port!"

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DANGEROUS QUARRY BY JIM HARMON One little village couldn't have a monopoly on all the bad breaks in the world. They did, though! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] They say automation makes jobs, especially if "they" are trying to keep their own job of selling automation machines. I know the Actuarvac made one purple passion of a job for me, the unpleasantly fatal results of which are still lingering with me. Thad McCain, my boss at Manhattan-Universal Insurance, beamed over the sprawling automatic brain's silver gauges and plastic toggles as proudly as if he had just personally gave birth to it. "This will simplify your job to the point of a pleasant diversion, Madison." "Are you going to keep paying me for staying with my little hobby?" I asked, suspiciously eyeing my chrome competitor. "The Actuarvac poses no threat to your career. It will merely keep you from flying off on wild-goose chases. It will unvaryingly separate from the vast body of legitimate claims the phony ones they try to spike us for. Then all that remains is for you to gather the accessory details, the evidence to jail our erring customers." "Fine," I said. I didn't bother to inform him that that was all my job had ever been. McCain shuffled his cards. They were cards for the machine, listing new individual claims on company policies. Since the two-month-old machine was literate and could read typewriting, the cards weren't coded or punched. He read the top one. "Now this, for instance. No adjuster need investigate this accident. The circumstances obviously are such that no false claim could be filed. Of course, the brain will make an unfailing analysis of all the factors involved and clear the claim automatically and officially." McCain threaded the single card into the slot for an example to me. He then flicked the switch and we stood there watching the monster ruminate thoughtfully. It finally rang a bell and spit the card back at Manhattan-Universal's top junior vice-president. He took it like a man. "That's what the machine is for," he said philosophically. "To detect human error. Hmm. What kind of a shove do you get out of this?" He handed me the rejected claim card. I took it, finding a new, neatly typed notation on it. It said: Investigate the Ozark village of Granite City. "You want me to project it in a movie theater and see how it stands it all alone in the dark?" I asked. "Just circle up the wagon train and see how the Indians fall," McCain said anxiously. "It's too general. What does the nickel-brained machine mean by investigating a whole town? I don't know if it has crooked politics, a polygamy colony or a hideout for supposedly deported gangsters. I don't care much either. It's not my business. How could a whole town be filing false life and accident claims?" "Find that out," he said. "I trust the machine. There have been cases of mass collusion before. Until you get back, we are making no more settlements with that settlement." Research. To a writer that generally means legally permissible plagiarism. For an insurance adjuster, it means earnest work. Before I headed for the hills, or the Ozark Mountains, I walked a few hundred feet down the hall and into the manual record files. The brain abstracted from empirical data but before I planed out to Granite City I had to find the basis for a few practical, nasty suspicions. Four hours of flipping switches and looking at microfilm projections while a tawny redhead in a triangular fronted uniform carried me reels to order gave me only two ideas. Neither was very original. The one that concerned business was that the whole village of Granite City must be accident-prone. I rejected that one almost immediately. While an accident-prone was in himself a statistical anomaly, the idea of a whole town of them gathered together stretched the fabric of reality to the point where even an invisible re-weaver couldn't help it. There was an explanation for the recent rise in the accident rate down there. The rock quarry there had gone into high-level operation. I knew why from the floor, walls, ceiling border, table trimmings in the records room. They were all granite. The boom in granite for interior and exterior decoration eclipsed earlier periods of oak, plastics, wrought iron and baked clay completely. The distinctive grade of granite from Granite City was being put into use all over the planet and in the Officer's Clubs on the Moon and Mars. Yet the rise in accident, compared to the rise in production, was out of all proportion. Furthermore, the work at the quarry could hardly explain the excessive accident reports we had had from the village as far back as our records went. We had paid off on most of the claims since they seemed irrefutably genuine. All were complete with eye-witness reports and authenticated circumstances. There was one odd note in the melodic scheme: We had never had a claim for any kind of automobile accident from Granite City. I shut off the projector. It may be best to keep an open mind, but I have found in practice that you have to have some kind of working theory which you must proceed to prove is either right or wrong. Tentatively, I decided that for generations the citizens of Granite City had been in an organized conspiracy to defraud Manhattan-Universal and its predecessors of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars in false accident claims. Maybe they made their whole livelihood off us before the quarry opened up. I used my pocket innercom and had my secretary get me a plane reservation and a gun. After so many profitable decades, Granite City wasn't going to take kindly to my spoil-sport interference. The Absinthe Flight to Springfield was jolly and relatively fast. Despite headwinds we managed Mach 1.6 most of the way. My particular stewardess was a blonde, majoring in Video Psychotherapy in her night courses. I didn't have much time to get acquainted or more than hear the outline of her thesis on the guilt purgings effected by The Life and Legend of Gary Cooper. The paunchy businessman in the next lounge was already nibbling the ear of his red-haired hostess. He was the type of razorback who took the girls for granted and aimed to get his money's worth. I gave Helen, the blonde, a kiss on the cheek and began flipping through the facsimiles in my briefcase as we chute-braked for a landing at the Greater Ozarks. It took me a full five minutes to find out that I couldn't take a copter to Granite City. Something about downdrafts in the mountains. Since that put me back in the days of horsepower, I trotted over to the automobile rental and hired a few hundred of them under the hood of a Rolls. That was about the only brand of car that fit me. I hadn't been able to get my legs into any other foreign car since I was fifteen, and I have steadfastly refused to enter an American model since they all sold out their birthrights as passenger cars and went over to the tractor-trailer combinations they used only for cargo trucks when I was a boy. Dragging around thirty feet of car is sheer nonsense, even for prestige. It was a tiresome fifty-mile drive, on manual all the way after I left the radar-channel area of the city. Up and down, slowing for curves, flipping into second for the hills. The whole trip hardly seemed worth it when I saw the cluster of painted frame buildings that was Granite City. They looked like a tumble of dingy building blocks tossed in front of a rolled-up indigo sports shirt. That was Granite Mountain in the near foreground. But I remembered that over the course of some forty years the people in these few little stacks of lumber had taken Manhattan-Universal for three quarters of a megabuck. I turned off onto the gravel road, spraying my fenders with a hail of a racket. Then I stepped down hard on my brakes, bracing myself to keep from going through the windscreen. I had almost sideswiped an old man sitting at the side of the road, huddled in his dusty rags. "Are you okay?" I yelled, thumbing down the window. "I've suffered no harm at your hands—or your wheels, sir. But I could use some help," the old man said. "Could I trouble you for a lift when you leave town?" I wasn't too sure about that. Most of these guys who are on the hobo circuit talking like they owned some letters to their names besides their initials belonged to some cult or other. I try to be as tolerant as I can, and some of my best friends are thugs, but I don't want to drive with them down lonely mountain roads. "We'll see what we can work out," I said. "Right now can you tell me where I can find Marshal Thompson?" "I can," he said. "But you will have to walk there." "Okay. It shouldn't be much of a walk in Granite City." "It's the house at the end of the street." "It is," I said. "Why shouldn't I drive up there? The street's open." The old man stared at me with red-shot eyes. "Marshal Thompson doesn't like people to run automobiles on the streets of Granite City." "So I'll just lock the car up and walk over there. I couldn't go getting tire tracks all over your clean streets." The old man watched as I climbed down and locked up the Rolls. "You would probably get killed if you did run the car here, you know," he said conversationally. "Well," I said, "I'll be getting along." I tried to walk sideways so I could keep an eye on him. "Come back," he said, as if he had doubts. The signs of a menacing conspiracy were growing stronger, I felt. I had my automatic inside my shirt, but I decided I might need a less lethal means of expression. Without breaking stride, I scooped up a baseball-size hunk of bluish rock from the road and slipped it into my small change pocket. I have made smarter moves in my time. As I approached the house at the end of the lane, I saw it was about the worse construction job I had seen in my life. It looked as architecturally secure as a four-year-old's drawing of his home. The angles were measurably out of line. Around every nail head were two nails bent out of shape and hammered down, and a couple of dozen welts in the siding where the hammer had missed any nail. The paint job was spotty and streaked. Half the panes in the windows were cracked. I fought down the dust in my nose, afraid of the consequences of a sneeze to the place. My toe scuffed the top porch step and I nearly crashed face first into the front door. I had been too busy looking at the house, I decided. I knocked. Moments later, the door opened. The lean-faced man who greeted me had his cheeks crisscrossed with razor nicks and his shirt on wrong side out. But his eyes were bright and sparrow alert. "Are you Mr. Marshal Thompson, the agent for Manhattan-Universal Insurance?" I put to him. "I'm the marshal, name of Thompson. But you ain't the first to take my title for my Christian name. You from the company?" "Yes," I said. "Were you expecting me?" Thompson nodded. "For forty-one years." Thompson served the coffee in the chipped cups, favoring only slightly his burned fingers. Catching the direction of my glance, he said, "Company is worth a few scalds, Mr. Madison." I accepted the steaming cup and somehow it very nearly slipped out of my hands. I made a last microsecond retrieve. The marshal nodded thoughtfully. "You're new here." "First time," I said, sipping coffee. It was awful. He must have made a mistake and put salt into it instead of sugar. "You think the claims I've been filing for my people are false?" "The home office has some suspicions of that," I admitted. "I don't blame them, but they ain't. Look, the company gambles on luck, doesn't it?" "No. It works on percentages calculated from past experience." "But I mean it knows that there will be, say, a hundred fatal car crashes in a day. But it doesn't know if maybe ninety of them will be in Iowa and only ten in the rest of the country." "There's something to that. We call it probability, not luck." "Well, probability says that more accidents are going to occur in Granite City than anywhere else in the country, per capita." I shook my head at Thompson. "That's not probability. Theoretically, anything can happen but I don't—I can't—believe that in this town everybody has chanced to be an accident prone. Some other factor is operating. You are all deliberately faking these falls and fires—" "We're not," Thompson snapped. "Or else something is causing you to have this trouble. Maybe the whole town is a bunch of dope addicts. Maybe you grow your own mescalin or marijuana; it's happened before." Thompson laughed. "Whatever is going on, I'm going to find it out. I don't care what you do, but if I can find a greater risk here and prove it, the Commission will let us up our rates for this town. Probably beyond the capacity of these people, I'm afraid." "That would be a real tragedy, Mr. Madison. Insurance is vital to this town. Nobody could survive a year here without insurance. People pay me for their premiums before they pay their grocery bills." I shrugged, sorrier than I could let on. "I won't be able to pay for my own groceries, marshal, if I don't do the kind of job the company expects. I'm going to snoop around." "All right," he said grudgingly, "but you'll have to do it on foot." "Yes, I understood you didn't like cars on your streets. At least not the cars of outsiders." "That doesn't have anything to do with it. Nobody in Granite City owns a car. It would be suicide for anybody to drive a car, same as it would be to have a gas or oil stove, instead of coal, or to own a bathtub." I took a deep breath. "Showers," Thompson said. "With nonskid mats and handrails." I shook hands with him. "You've been a great help." "Four o'clock," he said. "Roads are treacherous at night." "There's always a dawn." Thompson met my eyes. "That's not quite how we look at it here." II The quarry was a mess. I couldn't see any in the way they sliced the granite out of the mountain. The idea of a four-year-old—a four-year-old moron—going after a mound of raspberry ice cream kept turning up in my mind as I walked around. The workmen were gone; it was after five local time. But here and there I saw traces of them. Some of them were sandwich wrappers and cigarette stubs, but most of the traces were smears of blood. Blood streaked across sharp rocks, blood oozing from beneath heavy rocks, blood smeared on the handles and working surfaces of sledge hammers and tools. The place was as gory as a battlefield. "What are you looking for, bud?" The low, level snarl had come from a burly character in a syn-leather jacket and narrow-brimmed Stetson. "The reason you have so many accidents here," I said frankly. "I'm from the insurance company. Name's Madison." "Yeah, I know." I had supposed he would. "I'm Kelvin, the foreman here," the big man told me, extending a ham of a fist to be shook. "Outside, doing my Army time, I noticed that most people don't have as many slipups as we do here. Never could figure it out." "This rock is part of it—" "What do you mean by that!" Kelvin demanded savagely. "I mean the way you work it. No system to it. No stratification, no plateau work..." "Listen, Madison, don't talk about what you don't know anything about. The stuff in these walls isn't just rock; it isn't even plain granite. Granite City exports some of the finest grade of the stone in the world. And it's used all over the world. We aren't just a bunch of meatheaded ditch diggers—we are craftsmen. We have to figure a different way of getting out every piece of stone." "It's too bad." "What's too bad?" "That you chose the wrong way so often," I said. Kelvin breathed a virile grade of tobacco into my face. "Listen, Madison, we have been working this quarry for generations, sometimes more of us working than other times. Today most of us are working getting the stone out. That's the way we like it. We don't want any outsider coming in and interfering with that." "If this quarry has anything to do with defrauding Manhattan-Universal, I can tell you that I will do something about that!" As soon as my teeth clicked back together, the sickening feeling hit me that I shouldn't have said that. The general store was called a supermarket, but it wasn't particularly superior. I took a seat at the soda fountain and took a beer, politely declining the teen-age clerk's offer of a shot of white lightning from the Pepsi-Cola fountain syrup jug for a quarter. Behind me were three restaurant tables and one solitary red-upholstered booth. Two men somewhere between forty and sixty sat at the nearest table playing twenty-one. Over the foam of my stein I saw the old man I had almost run down in the road. He marched through the two-thirds of the building composed of rows of can goods and approached the fat man at the cash register. "Hello, Professor," the fat man said. "What can we do for you?" "I'd like to mail a letter," he said in an urgent voice. "Sure, Professor, I'll send it right off on the facsimile machine as soon as I get a free moment." "You're sure you can send it? Right away?" "Positive. Ten cents, Professor." The professor fumbled in his pants' pocket and fished out a dime. He fingered it thoughtfully. "I suppose the letter can wait," he said resignedly. "I believe I will buy a pair of doughnuts, Mr. Haskel." "Why not get a hamburger, Professor? Special sale today. Only a dime. And since you're such a good customer I'll throw in a cup of coffee and the two sinkers for nothing." "That's—kind of you," the old man said awkwardly. Haskel shrugged. "A man has to eat." The man called "the professor" came over and sat down two stools away, ignoring me. The clerk dialed his hamburger and served it. I stayed with my beer and my thoughts. More and more, I was coming to believe that Granite City wasn't a job for an investigative adjuster like myself but a psychological adjuster. Crime is a structural flaw in a community, yes. But when the whole society is criminal, distorted, you can't isolate the flaw. The whole village was meat for a sociologist; let him figure out why otherwise decent citizens felt secure in conspiracy to defraud an honored corporation. I didn't feel that I was licked or that the trip had been a failure. I had merely established to my intuitive satisfaction that the job was not in my field. I glanced at the old man. The proprietor of the store knew him and evidently thought him harmless enough to feed. "I think I can make it down the mountain before dark, Old Timer," I called over to him. "You can come along if you like." The acne-faced kid behind the counter stared at me. I looked over and caught the bright little eyes of Haskel, the proprietor, too. Finally, the old professor turned on his stool, his face pale and his eyes sad and resigned. "I doubt very much if either of us will be leaving, Mr. Madison," he said. "Now." I took my beer and the professor his coffee over to the single booth. We looked at each other across the shiny table and our beverage containers. "I am Doctor Arnold Parnell of Duke University," the professor said. "I left on my sabbatical five months ago. I have been here ever since." I looked at his clothes. "You must not have been very well fixed for a year's vacation, Professor." "I," he said, "have enough traveler's checks with me to paper a washroom. Nobody in this town will cash them for me." "I can understand why you want to go somewhere where people are more trusting in that case." "They know the checks are good. It's me they refuse to trust to leave this place. They think they can't let me go." "I don't see any shackles on you," I remarked. "Just because you can't see them," he growled, "doesn't mean they aren't there. Marshal Thompson has the only telephone in the village. He has politely refused to let me use it. I'm a suspicious and undesirable character; he's under no obligation to give me telephone privileges, he says. Haskel has the Post Office concession—the Telefax outfit behind the money box over there. He takes my letters but I never see him send them off. And I never get a reply." "Unfriendly of them," I said conservatively. "But how can they stop you from packing your dental floss and cutting out?" "Haskel has the only motor vehicle in town—a half-ton pick-up, a minuscule contrivance less than the size of a passenger car. He makes about one trip a week down into the city for supplies and package mail. He's been the only one in or out of Granite City for five months." It seemed incredible—more than that, unlikely, to me. "How about the granite itself? How do they ship it out?" "It's an artificial demand product, like diamonds," Professor Parnell said. "They stockpile it and once a year the executive offices for the company back in Nashville runs in a portable monorail railroad up the side of the mountain to take it out. That won't be for another four months, as nearly as I can find out. I may not last that long." "How are you living?" I asked. "If they won't take your checks—" "I do odd jobs for people. They feed me, give me a little money sometimes." "I can see why you want to ride out with me," I said. "Haven't you ever thought of just walking out?" "Fifty miles down a steep mountain road? I'm an old man, Mr. Madison, and I've gotten even older since I came to Granite City." I nodded. "You have any papers, any identification, to back this up?" Wordlessly, he handed over his billfold, letters, enough identification to have satisfied Allen Pinkerton or John Edgar Hoover. "Okay," I drawled. "I'll accept your story for the moment. Now answer me the big query: Why are the good people of Granite City doing this to you? By any chance, you wouldn't happen to know of a mass fraud they are perpetrating on Manhattan-Universal?" "I know nothing of their ethical standards," Parnell said, "but I do know that they are absolutely subhuman !" "I admit I have met likelier groups of human beings in my time." "No, understand me. These people are literally subhuman—they are inferior to other human beings." "Look, I know the Klan is a growing organization but I can't go along with you." "Madison, understand me, I insist. Ethnologically speaking, it is well known that certain tribes suffer certain deficiencies due to diet, climate, et cetera. Some can't run, sing, use mathematics. The people of Granite City have the most unusual deficency on record, I admit. Their psionic senses have been impaired. They are completely devoid of any use of telepathy, precognition, telekinesis." "Because they aren't supermen, that doesn't mean that they are submen," I protested. "I don't have any psionic abilities either." "But you do!" Parnell said earnestly. "Everybody has some psionics ability, but we don't realize it. We don't have the fabulous abilities of a few recorded cases of supermen, but we have some, a trace. Granite City citizens have no psionic ability whatsoever, not even the little that you and I and the rest of the world have!" "You said you were Duke University, didn't you?" I mused. "Maybe you know what you are talking about; I've never been sure. But these people can't suffer very much from their lack of what you call psi ability." "I tell you they do," he said hoarsely. "We never realize it but we all have some power of precognition. If we didn't, we would have a hundred accidents a day—just as these people do . They can't foresee the bump in the road the way we can, or that that particular match will flare a little higher and burn their fingers. There are other things, as well. You'll find it is almost impossible to carry on a lengthy conversation with any of them—they have no telepathic ability, no matter how slight, to see through the semantic barrier. None of them can play ball. They don't have the unconscious psionic ability to influence the ball in flight. All of us can do that, even if the case of a 'Poltergeist' who can lift objects is rare." "Professor, you mean these people are holding you here simply so you won't go out and tell the rest of the world that they are submen?" "They don't want the world to know why they are psionically subnormal," he said crisply. "It's the granite ! I don't understand why myself. I'm not a physicist or a biologist. But for some reason the heavy concentration and particular pattern of the radioactive radiation in its matrix is responsible for both inhibiting the genes that transmit psi powers from generation to generation and affecting those abilities in the present generation. A kind of psionic sterility." "How do you know this?" "We haven't the time for all that. But think about it. What else could it be? It's that granite that they are shipping all over the world, spreading the contamination. I want to stop that contamination. To the people of Granite City that means ruining their only industry, putting them all out of work. They are used to this psionic sterility; they don't see anything so bad about it. Besides, like everybody else, they have some doubts that there really are such things as telepathy and the rest to be affected." "Frankly," I said, hedging only a little, "I don't know what to make of your story. This is something to be decided by somebody infallible—like the Pope or the President or Board Chairman of Manhattan-Universal. But the first thing to do is get you out of here. We had better get back to my car. I've got good lights to get down the mountain." Parnell jumped up eagerly, and brushed over his china mug, staining the tabletop with brown caffeine. "Sorry," he said. "I should have been precognizant of that. I try to stay away from the rock as much as possible, but it's getting to me." I should have remembered something then. But, naturally, I didn't.

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HAGERTY'S ENZYMES By A. L. HALEY There's a place for every man and a man for every place, but on robot-harried Mars the situation was just a little different. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Harper Breen sank down gingerly into the new Relaxo-Lounge. He placed twitching hands on the arm-rests and laid his head back stiffly. He closed his fluttering eyelids and clamped his mouth to keep the corner from jumping. "Just lie back, Harp," droned his sister soothingly. "Just give in and let go of everything." Harper tried to let go of everything. He gave in to the chair. And gently the chair went to work. It rocked rhythmically, it vibrated tenderly. With velvety cushions it massaged his back and arms and legs. For all of five minutes Harper stood it. Then with a frenzied lunge he escaped the embrace of the Relaxo-Lounge and fled to a gloriously stationary sofa. "Harp!" His sister, Bella, was ready to weep with exasperation. "Dr. Franz said it would be just the thing for you! Why won't you give it a trial?" Harper glared at the preposterous chair. "Franz!" he snarled. "That prize fathead! I've paid him a fortune in fees. I haven't slept for weeks. I can't eat anything but soup. My nerves are jangling like a four-alarm fire. And what does he prescribe? A blasted jiggling baby carriage! Why, I ought to send him the bill for it!" Completely outraged, he lay back on the couch and closed his eyes. "Now, Harp, you know you've never obeyed his orders. He told you last year that you'd have to ease up. Why do you have to try to run the whole world? It's the strain of all your business worries that's causing your trouble. He told you to take a long vacation or you'd crack up. Don't blame him for your own stubbornness." Harper snorted. His large nose developed the sound magnificently. "Vacation!" he snorted. "Batting a silly ball around or dragging a hook after a stupid fish! Fine activities for an intelligent middle-aged man! And let me correct you. It isn't business worries that are driving me to a crack-up. It's the strain of trying to get some sensible, reasonable coöperation from the nincompoops I have to hire! It's the idiocy of the human race that's got me whipped! It's the—" "Hey, Harp, old man!" His brother-in-law, turning the pages of the new colorama magazine, INTERPLANETARY, had paused at a double-spread. "Didn't you have a finger in those Martian equatorial wells they sunk twenty years ago?" Harper's hands twitched violently. "Don't mention that fiasco!" he rasped. "That deal nearly cost me my shirt! Water, hell! Those wells spewed up the craziest conglomeration of liquids ever tapped!" Scribney, whose large, phlegmatic person and calm professorial brain were the complete antithesis of Harper's picked-crow physique and scheming financier's wits, looked severely over his glasses. Harp's nervous tribulations were beginning to bore him, as well as interfere with the harmony of his home. "You're away behind the times, Harp," he declared. "Don't you know that those have proved to be the most astoundingly curative springs ever discovered anywhere? Don't you know that a syndicate has built the largest extra-terrestial hotel of the solar system there and that people are flocking to it to get cured of whatever ails 'em? Old man, you missed a bet!" Leaping from the sofa, Harper rudely snatched the magazine from Scribney's hands. He glared at the spread which depicted a star-shaped structure of bottle-green glass resting jewel-like on the rufous rock of Mars. The main portion of the building consisted of a circular skyscraper with a glass-domed roof. Between its star-shaped annexes, other domes covered landscaped gardens and noxious pools which in the drawing looked lovely and enticing. "Why, I remember now!" exclaimed Bella. "That's where the Durants went two years ago! He was about dead and she looked like a hag. They came back in wonderful shape. Don't you remember, Scrib?" Dutifully Scribney remembered and commented on the change the Martian springs had effected in the Durants. "It's the very thing for you, Harp," he advised. "You'd get a good rest on the way out. This gas they use in the rockets nowadays is as good as a rest-cure; it sort of floats you along the time-track in a pleasant daze, they tell me. And you can finish the cure at the hotel while looking it over. And not only that." Confidentially he leaned toward his insignificant looking brother-in-law. "The chemists over at Dade McCann have just isolated an enzyme from one species of Martian fungus that breaks down crude oil into its components without the need for chemical processing. There's a fortune waiting for the man who corners that fungus market and learns to process the stuff!" Scribney had gauged his victim's mental processes accurately. The magazine sagged in Harp's hands, and his sharp eyes became shrewd and calculating. He even forgot to twitch. "Maybe you're right, Scrib," he acknowledged. "Combine a rest-cure with business, eh?" Raising the magazine, he began reading the advertisement. And that was when he saw the line about the robots. "—the only hotel staffed entirely with robot servants—" "Robots!" he shrilled. "You mean they've developed the things to that point? Why hasn't somebody told me? I'll have Jackson's hide! I'll disfranchise him! I'll—" "Harp!" exploded Bella. "Stop it! Maybe Jackson doesn't know a thing about it, whatever it is! If it's something at the Emerald Star Hotel, why don't you just go and find out for yourself instead of throwing a tantrum? That's the only sensible way!" "You're right, Bella," agreed Harper incisively. "I'll go and find out for myself. Immediately!" Scooping up his hat, he left at his usual lope. "Well!" remarked his sister. "All I can say is that they'd better turn that happy-gas on extra strong for Harp's trip out!" The trip out did Harper a world of good. Under the influence of the soporific gas that permeated the rocket, he really relaxed for the first time in years, sinking with the other passengers into a hazy lethargy with little sense of passing time and almost no memory of the interval. It seemed hardly more than a handful of hours until they were strapping themselves into deceleration hammocks for the landing. And then Harper was waking with lassitude still heavy in his veins. He struggled out of the hammock, made his way to the airlock, and found himself whisked by pneumatic tube directly into the lobby of the Emerald Star Hotel. Appreciatively he gazed around at the half-acre of moss-gray carpeting, green-tinted by the light sifting through the walls of Martian copper-glass, and at the vistas of beautiful domed gardens framed by a dozen arches. But most of all, the robots won his delighted approval. He could see at once that they had been developed to an amazingly high state of perfection. How, he wondered again, had this been done without his knowledge? Was Scrib right? Was he slipping? Gnawing at the doubt, he watched the robots moving efficiently about, pushing patients in wheelchairs, carrying trays, guiding newcomers, performing janitorial duties tirelessly, promptly, and best of all, silently. Harper was enthralled. He'd staff his offices with them. Hang the expense! There'd be no more of that obnoxious personal friction and proneness to error that was always deviling the most carefully trained office staffs! He'd investigate and find out the exact potentialities of these robots while here, and then go home and introduce them into the field of business. He'd show them whether he was slipping! Briskly he went over to the desk. He was immediately confronted with a sample of that human obstinacy that was slowly driving him mad. Machines, he sighed to himself. Wonderful silent machines! For a woman was arguing stridently with the desk clerk who, poor man, was a high strung fellow human instead of a robot. Harper watched him shrinking and turning pale lavender in the stress of the argument. "A nurse!" shouted the woman. "I want a nurse! A real woman! For what you charge, you should be able to give me a television star if I want one! I won't have another of those damnable robots in my room, do you hear?" No one within the confines of the huge lobby could have helped hearing. The clerk flinched visibly. "Now, Mrs. Jacobsen," he soothed. "You know the hotel is staffed entirely with robots. They're much more expensive, really, than human employees, but so much more efficient, you know. Admit it, they give excellent service, don't they, now?" Toothily he smiled at the enraged woman. "That's just it!" Mrs. Jacobsen glared. "The service is too good. I might just as well have a set of push buttons in the room. I want someone to hear what I say! I want to be able to change my mind once in awhile!" Harper snorted. "Wants someone she can devil," he diagnosed. "Someone she can get a kick out of ordering around." With vast contempt he stepped to the desk beside her and peremptorily rapped for the clerk. "One moment, sir," begged that harassed individual. "Just one moment, please." He turned back to the woman. But she had turned her glare on Harper. "You could at least be civil enough to wait your turn!" Harper smirked. "My good woman, I'm not a robot. Robots, of course, are always civil. But you should know by now that civility isn't a normal human trait." Leaving her temporarily quashed, he beckoned authoritatively to the clerk. "I've just arrived and want to get settled. I'm here merely for a rest-cure, no treatments. You can assign my quarters before continuing your—ah—discussion with the lady." The clerk sputtered. Mrs. Jacobsen sputtered. But not for nothing was Harper one of the leading business executives of the earth. Harper's implacable stare won his point. Wiping beads of moisture from his forehead, the clerk fumbled for a card, typed it out, and was about to deposit it in the punch box when a fist hit the desk a resounding blow and another voice, male, roared out at Harper's elbow. "This is a helluva joint!" roared the voice. "Man could rot away to the knees while he's waitin' for accommodations. Service!" Again his fist banged the counter. The clerk jumped. He dropped Harper's card and had to stoop for it. Absently holding it, he straightened up to face Mrs. Jacobsen and the irate newcomer. Hastily he pushed a tagged key at Harper. "Here you are, Mr. Breen. I'm sure you'll find it comfortable." With a pallid smile he pressed a button and consigned Harper to the care of a silent and efficient robot. The room was more than comfortable. It was beautiful. Its bank of clear windows set in the green glass wall framed startling rubicund views of the Martian hinterland where, Harper affectionately thought, fungi were busy producing enzymes that were going to be worth millions for him and his associates. There remained only the small detail of discovering how to extract them economically and to process them on this more than arid and almost airless planet. Details for his bright young laboratory men; mere details.... Leaving his luggage to be unpacked by the robot attendant, he went up to the domed roof restaurant. Lunching boldly on broiled halibut with consomme, salad and a bland custard, he stared out at the dark blue sky of Mars, with Deimos hanging in the east in three-quarter phase while Phobos raced up from the west like a meteor behind schedule. Leaning back in his cushioned chair, he even more boldly lit a slim cigar—his first in months—and inhaled happily. For once old Scribney had certainly been right, he reflected. Yes sir, Scrib had rung the bell, and he wasn't the man to forget it. With a wonderful sense of well-being he returned to his room and prepared to relax. Harper opened his eyes. Two robots were bending over him. He saw that they were dressed in white, like hospital attendants. But he had no further opportunity to examine them. With brisk, well-co-ordinated movements they wheeled a stretcher along-side his couch, stuck a hypo into his arm, bundled him onto the stretcher and started wheeling him out. Harper's tongue finally functioned. "What's all this?" he demanded. "There's nothing wrong with me. Let me go!" He struggled to rise, but a metal hand pushed him firmly on the chest. Inexorably it pushed him flat. "You've got the wrong room!" yelled Harp. "Let me go!" But the hypo began to take effect. His yells became weaker and drowsier. Hazily, as he drifted off, he thought of Mrs. Jacobsen. Maybe she had something, at that. There was a tentative knock on the door. "Come in," called Harper bleakly. As soon as the door opened he regretted his invitation, for the opening framed the large untidy man who had noisily pounded on the desk demanding service while he, Harp, was being registered. "Say, pardner," he said hoarsely, "you haven't seen any of them robots around here, have you?" Harper scowled. "Oh, haven't I?" he grated. "Robots! Do you know what they did to me." Indignation lit fires in his pale eyes. "Came in here while I was lying down peacefully digesting the first meal I've enjoyed in months, dragged me off to the surgery, and pumped it all out! The only meal I've enjoyed in months!" Blackly he sank his chin onto his fist and contemplated the outrage. "Why didn't you stop 'em?" reasonably asked the visitor. "Stop a robot?" Harper glared pityingly. "How? You can't reason with the blasted things. And as for using force—it's man against metal. You try it!" He ground his teeth together in futile rage. "And to think I had the insane notion that robots were the last word! Why, I was ready to staff my offices with the things!" The big man placed his large hands on his own capacious stomach and groaned. "I'm sure sorry it was you and not me, pardner. I could use some of that treatment right now. Musta been that steak and onions I ate after all that tundra dope I've been livin' on." "Tundra?" A faint spark of alertness lightened Harper's dull rage. "You mean you work out here on the tundra?" "That's right. How'd you think I got in such a helluva shape? I'm superintendent of one of the fungus plants. I'm Jake Ellis of Hagerty's Enzymes. There's good money in it, but man, what a job! No air worth mentionin'. Temperature always freezin' or below. Pressure suits. Huts. Factory. Processed food. Nothin' else. Just nothin'. That's where they could use some robots. It sure ain't no job for a real live man. And in fact, there ain't many men left there. If old man Hagerty only knew it, he's about out of business." Harper sat up as if he'd been needled. He opened his mouth to speak. But just then the door opened briskly and two robots entered. With a horrified stare, Harper clutched his maltreated stomach. He saw a third robot enter, wheeling a chair. "A wheel chair!" squeaked the victim. "I tell you, there's nothing wrong with me! Take it away! I'm only here for a rest-cure! Believe me! Take it away!" The robots ignored him. For the first time in his spectacular and ruthless career Harper was up against creatures that he could neither bribe, persuade nor browbeat, inveigle nor ignore. It shattered his ebbing self-confidence. He began waving his hands helplessly. The robots not only ignored Harper. They paid no attention at all to Jake Ellis, who was plucking at their metallic arms pleading, "Take me, boys. I need the treatment bad, whatever it is. I need all the treatment I can get. Take me! I'm just a wreck, fellers—" Stolidly they picked Harper up, plunked him into the chair, strapped him down and marched out with him. Dejectedly Ellis returned to his own room. Again he lifted the receiver of the room phone; but as usual a robot voice answered sweetly, mechanically, and meaninglessly. He hung up and went miserably to bed. There was something nagging at Harper's mind. Something he should do. Something that concerned robots. But he was too exhausted to think it out. For five days now his pet robots had put him through an ordeal that made him flinch every time he thought about it. Which wasn't often, since he was almost past thinking. They plunked him into stinking mud-baths and held him there until he was well-done to the bone, he was sure. They soaked him in foul, steaming irradiated waters until he gagged. They brought him weird concoctions to eat and drink and then stood over him until he consumed them. They purged and massaged and exercised him. Whenever they let him alone, he simply collapsed into bed and slept. There was nothing else to do anyway. They'd taken his clothes; and the phone, after an announcement that he would have no more service for two weeks, gave him nothing but a busy signal. "Persecution, that's what it is!" he moaned desperately. And he turned his back to the mirror, which showed him that he was beginning to look flesh-colored instead of the parchment yellow to which he had become accustomed. He closed his mind to the fact that he was sleeping for hours on end like the proverbial baby, and that he was getting such an appetite that he could almost relish even that detestable mush they sent him for breakfast. He was determined to be furious. As soon as he could wake up enough to be. He hadn't been awake long this time before Jake Ellis was there again, still moaning about his lack of treatments. "Nothin' yet," he gloomily informed Harp. "They haven't been near me. I just can't understand it. After I signed up for the works and paid 'em in advance! And I can't find any way out of this section. The other two rooms are empty and the elevator hasn't got any button. The robots just have to come and get a man or he's stuck." "Stuck!" snarled Harp. "I'm never stuck! And I'm damned if I'll wait any longer to break out of this—this jail! Listen, Jake. I've been thinking. Or trying to, with what's left of me. You came in just when that assinine clerk was registering me. I'll bet that clerk got rattled and gave me the wrong key. I'll bet you're supposed to have this room and I'm getting your treatments. Why don't we switch rooms and see what happens?" "Say, maybe you're right!" Jake's eyes gleamed at last with hope. "I'll get my clothes." Harp's eyebrows rose. "You mean they left you your clothes?" "Why, sure. You mean they took yours?" Harp nodded. An idea began to formulate. "Leave your things, will you? I'm desperate! I'm going to see the manager of this madhouse if I have to go down dressed in a sheet. Your clothes would be better than that." Jake, looking over Harper's skimpy frame, grunted doubtfully. "Maybe you could tie 'em on so they wouldn't slip. And roll up the cuffs. It's okay with me, but just don't lose something when you're down there in that fancy lobby." Harper looked at his watch. "Time to go. Relax, old man. The robots will be along any minute now. If you're the only man in the room, I'm sure they'll take you. They aren't equipped to figure it out. And don't worry about me. I'll anchor your duds all right." Harper had guessed right. Gleefully from the doorway of his new room he watched the robots wheel away his equally delighted neighbor for his first treatment. Then he closed the door and began to don Jake's clothing. The result was unique. He looked like a small boy in his father's clothes, except for the remarkably aged and gnome-like head sticking up on a skinny neck from a collar three sizes too big. And he was shoeless. He was completely unable to navigate in Jake's number twelves. But Harper was a determined man. He didn't even flinch from his image in the mirror. Firmly he stepped over to Jake's telephone. "This is room 618," he said authoritatively. "Send up the elevator for me. I want to go down to the lobby." He'd guessed right again. "It will be right up, sir," responded the robot operator. Hopefully he stepped out into the hall and shuffled to the elevator. Only the robots were immune to Harper Breen's progress across the huge suave lobby. He was a blot on its rich beauty, a grotesque enigma that rooted the other visitors into paralyzed staring groups. Stepping out of the elevator, he had laid a course for the desk which loomed like an island in a moss-gray lake, and now he strode manfully toward it, ignoring the oversize trousers slapping around his stocking feet. Only the robots shared his self control. The clerk was the first to recover from the collective stupor. Frantically he pushed the button that would summon the robot guard. With a gasp of relief he saw the two massive manlike machines moving inexorably forward. He pointed to Harper. "Get that patient!" he ordered. "Take him to the—to the mud-baths!" "No you don't!" yelled Harper. "I want to see the manager!" Nimbly he circled the guard and leaped behind the desk. He began to throw things at the robots. Things like inkwells and typewriters and card indexes. Especially, card indexes. "Stop it!" begged the clerk. "You'll wreck the system! We'll never get it straight again! Stop it!" "Call them off!" snarled Harper. "Call them off or I'll ruin your switchboard!" He put a shoulder against it and prepared to heave. With one last appalled glare at the madman, the clerk picked up an electric finger and pointed it at the approaching robots. They became oddly inanimate. "That's better!" Harper straightened up and meticulously smoothed the collar of his flapping coat. "Now—the manager, please." "This—this way, sir." With shrinking steps the clerk led Harper across the width of the lobby among the fascinated guests. He was beyond speech. Opening the inconspicuous door, he waved Harper inside and returned doggedly to his desk, where he began to pick up things and at the same time phrase his resignation in his mind. Brushing aside the startled secretary in the outer cubicle, Harper flapped and shuffled straight into the inner sanctum. The manager, who was busy chewing a cigar to shreds behind his fortress of gun metal desk, jerked hastily upright and glared at the intruder. "My good man—" he began. "Don't 'my-good-man' me!" snapped Harper. He glared back at the manager. Reaching as far across the expanse of desktop as he could stretch, he shook his puny fist. "Do you know who I am? I'm Harper S. Breen, of Breen and Helgart, Incorporated! And do you know why I haven't even a card to prove it? Do you know why I have to make my way downstairs in garb that makes a laughing stock of me? Do you know why? Because that assinine clerk of yours put me in the wrong room and those damnable robots of yours then proceeded to make a prisoner of me! Me, Harper S. Breen! Why, I'll sue you until you'll be lucky if you have a sheet of writing-paper left in this idiot's retreat!" Hayes, the manager, blanched. Then he began to mottle in an apoplectic pattern. And suddenly with a gusty sigh, he collapsed into his chair. With a shaking hand he mopped his forehead. " My robots!" he muttered. "As if I invented the damned things!" Despondently he looked at Harper. "Go ahead and sue, Mr. Breen. If you don't, somebody else will. And if nobody sues, we'll go broke anyway, at the rate our guest list is declining. I'm ready to hand in my resignation." Again he sighed. "The trouble," he explained, "is that those fool robots are completely logical, and people aren't. There's no way to mix the two. It's dynamite. Maybe people can gradually learn to live with robots, but they haven't yet. Only we had to find it out the hard way. We—" he grimaced disgustedly—"had to pioneer in the use of robots. And it cost us so much that we can't afford to reconvert to human help. So—Operation Robot is about to bankrupt the syndicate." Listening, an amazing calm settled on Harper. Thoughtfully now he hooked a chair to the desk with his stockinged foot, sat down and reached for the cigar that Hayes automatically offered him. "Oh, I don't know," he said mildly. Hayes leaned forward like a drowning man sighting a liferaft. "What do you mean, you don't know? You're threatening to take our shirts, aren't you?" Meticulously Harper clipped and lit his cigar. "It seems to me that these robots might be useful in quite another capacity. I might even make a deal with your syndicate to take them off your hands—at a reasonable price, of course—and forget the outrages I've suffered at your establishment." Hayes leaned toward him incredulous. "You mean you want these robots after what you've seen and experienced?" Placidly Harper puffed a smoke ring. "Of course, you'd have to take into consideration that it would be an experiment for me, too. And there's the suit I'm clearly justified in instituting. However, I'm willing to discuss the matter with your superiors." With hope burgeoning for the first time in weeks, Hayes lifted his head. "My dear Mr. Breen, to get rid of these pestiferous robots, I'll back you to the hilt! I'll notify the owners at once. At once, Mr. Breen! And while we wait for them, allow me to put you up as a guest of the hotel." Coming around to Harper, he effusively shook Harp's scrawny hand, and then personally escorted him not merely to the door but across the lobby to the elevator. Harper gazed out at the stunned audience. This was more like the treatment he was accustomed to! Haughtily he squared his bony shoulders inside the immense jacket and stepped into the elevator. He was ready for the second step of his private Operation Robot. Back on Earth it was a warm, misty spring day—the kind of day unknown to the planet Mars. Bella and Scribney, superb in new spring outfits, waited restlessly while the rocket cooled and the passengers recovered from deceleration. "Look, Scrib!" Bella clutched Scribney's substantial arm. "It's finally opening." They watched the airlock open and the platform wheel into place. They watched the passengers descend, looking a trifle dazed. "There he is!" cried Bella. "Why, doesn't he look wonderful! Scrib, it's amazing! Look at him! And indeed, Harper was stepping briskly downward, looking spry and fit and years younger. He came across to them actually beaming. It was the first pleasant expression they had seen on his face in years. "Well, you old dog!" exclaimed Scribney affectionately. "So you did it again!" Harper smirked. "Yep, I turned a neat little deal. I bought out Hagerty's Enzymes and staffed the plant with the hotel's robots. Got both of 'em dirt cheap. Both concerns going bankrupt because they didn't have sense enough to swap their workers. Feel I owe you a bit for that tip about enzymes, Scrib, so I made out a block of stock to you. All right?" "All right?" Scribney gulped. Why, the dried-up little turnip was human after all. "All right! Yes, sir! But aren't you going to use some of those robots for office help? Aren't they efficient and all that?" Harper's smile vanished. "Don't even mention such a thing!" he yelped. "You don't know what you're saying! I lived with those things for weeks. I wouldn't have one around! Keep 'em in the factory where they belong!" He glimpsed the composed, wonderfully human face of his secretary, waiting patiently in the background. "Oh there you are, Smythe." He turned to his relatives. "Busy day ahead. See you later, folks—" "Same old Harp," observed Scribney. Then he thought of the block of stock. "What say we celebrate our rise to a position in the syndicate, honey?" "Wonderful!" She squeezed his arm, and smiling at each other, they left the port.

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MUCK MAN BY FREMONT DODGE The work wasn't hard, but there were some sacrifices. You had to give up hope and freedom—and being human! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, November 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I The girl with the Slider egg glittering in her hair watched the bailiff lead Asa Graybar out of the courtroom. He recognized her as old Hazeltyne's daughter Harriet, no doubt come to see justice done. She didn't have the hothouse-flower look Asa would have expected in a girl whose father owned the most valuable of the planetary franchises. She was not afraid to meet his eye, the eye of a judicially certified criminal. There was, perhaps, a crease of puzzlement in her brow, as if she had thought crimes were committed by shriveled, rat-faced types, and not by young biological engineers who still affected crewcuts. Tom Dorr, Hazeltyne's general manager, was her escort. Asa felt certain, without proof, that Dorr was the man who had framed him for the charge of grand theft by secreting a fresh Slider egg in his laboratory. The older man stared at Asa coldly as he was led out of the courtroom and down the corridor back to jail. Jumpy, Asa's cellmate, took one look at his face as he was put back behind bars. "Guilty," Jumpy said. Asa glared at him. "I know, I know," Jumpy said hastily. "You were framed. But what's the rap?" "Five or one." "Take the five," Jumpy advised. "Learn basket-weaving in a nice air-conditioned rehab clinic. A year on a changeling deal will seem a lot longer, even if you're lucky enough to live through it." Asa took four steps to the far wall of the cell, stood there briefly with his head bent and turned to face Jumpy. "Nope," Asa said softly. "I'm going into a conversion tank. I'm going to be a muck man, Jumpy. I'm going out to Jordan's Planet and hunt Slider eggs." "Smuggling? It won't work." Asa didn't answer. The Hazeltyne company had gone after him because he had been working on a method of keeping Slider eggs alive. The Hazeltyne company would be happy to see him mark time for five years of so-called social reorientation. But if he could get out to Jordan's Planet, with his physiology adapted to the environment of that wretched world, he could study the eggs under conditions no laboratory could duplicate. He might even be able to cause trouble for Hazeltyne. His only problem would be staying alive for a year. An interview with a doctor from the Conversion Corps was required for all persons who elected changeling status. The law stated that potential changelings must be fully informed of the rights and hazards of altered shape before they signed a release. The requirement held whether or not the individual, like Asa, was already experienced. By the time humanity traveled to the stars, medical biology had made it possible to regenerate damaged or deficient organs of the body. Regeneration was limited only by advanced age. Sometime after a man's two hundredth year his body lost the ability to be coaxed into growing new cells. A fifth set of teeth was usually one's last. As long as senescence could be staved off, however, any man could have bulging biceps and a pencil waist, if he could pay for the treatment. Until the medical associations declared such treatments unethical there was even a short fad of deliberate deformities, with horns at the temples particularly popular. From regeneration it was a short step to specialized regrowth. The techniques were perfected to adapt humans to the dozen barely habitable worlds man had discovered. Even on Mars, the only planet outside Earth in the solar system where the human anatomy was remotely suitable, a man could work more efficiently with redesigned lungs and temperature controls than he could inside a pressure suit. On more bizarre planets a few light-years away the advantages of changeling bodies were greater. Unfortunately for planetary development companies, hardly anyone wanted to become a changeling. High pay lured few. So a law was passed permitting a convicted criminal to earn his freedom by putting in one year as a changeling for every five years he would otherwise have had to spend in rehabilitation. "What types of changelings do you have orders for right now, doctor?" Asa asked the man assigned to his case. It would look suspicious if he asked for Jordan's Planet without some preliminary questions. "Four," answered the doctor. "Squiffs for New Arcady. Adapted for climbing the skycraper trees and with the arm structure modified into pseudo-wings or gliding. Then we need spiderinos for Von Neumann Two. If you want the nearest thing we have to Earth, there's Caesar's Moon, where we'd just have to double your tolerance for carbon monoxide and make you a bigger and better gorilla than the natives. Last, of course, there's always a need for muck men on Jordan's Planet." The doctor shrugged, as if naturally no one could be expected to choose Jordan's Planet. Asa frowned in apparent consideration of the alternatives. "What's the pay range?" he asked. "Ten dollars a day on Caesar's Moon. Fifteen on New Arcady or Von Neumann Two. Twenty-five on Jordan's." Asa raised his eyebrows. "Why such a difference? Everyone knows about muck men living in the mud while they hunt Slider eggs. But don't your conversions make the changeling comfortable in his new environment?" "Sure they do," said the doctor. "We can make you think mud feels better than chinchilla fur and we can have you jumping like a grasshopper despite the double gravity. But we can't make you like the sight of yourself. And we can't guarantee that a Slider won't kill you." "Still," Asa mused aloud, "it would mean a nice bankroll waiting at the end of the year." He leaned forward to fill in the necessary form. Since it was cheaper to transport a normal human than to rig special environments in a spaceship, every planet operated its own conversion chambers. On the space freighter that carried him from Earth Asa Graybar was confined to a small cabin that was opened only for a guard to bring meals and take out dirty dishes. He was still a prisoner. Sometimes he could hear voices in the passageway outside, and once one of them sounded like a woman's. But since women neither served on spaceships nor worked in the dome settlements on harsher worlds, he decided it was his imagination. He might have been dead cargo for all he learned about space travel. Nevertheless his time was not wasted. He had as a companion, or cellmate, another convict who had elected conversion to muck man. More important, his companion had done time on Jordan's Planet before and had wanted to return. "It's the Slider eggs," explained Kershaw, the two-time loser. "The ones you see on Earth knock your eyes out, but they've already begun to die. There's nothing like a fresh one. And I'm not the first to go crazy over them. When I was reconverted and got home I had nine thousand dollars waiting for me. That'll buy a two-year-old egg that flashes maybe four times a day. So I stole a new one and got caught." Asa had held a Slider egg in his hand as he gazed into it. He could understand. The shell was clear as crystal, taut but elastic, while the albumen was just as clear around the sparkling network of organic filaments that served as a yolk. Along these interior threads played tiny flashes of lightning, part of some unexplained process of life. Electrical instruments picked up static discharges from the egg, but the phenomenon remained a mystery. Hardly anyone faced with the beauty of a Slider's egg bothered to question its workings. For a few expectant moments there would be only random, fitful gleamings, and then there would be a wild coruscation of light, dancing from one filament to the next in a frenzy of brilliance. It took about four years for a Slider egg to die. Beauty, rarity and fading value made the eggs a luxury item like nothing the world had ever seen. If Asa had found a means of keeping them alive it would have made him wealthy at the expense of the Hazeltyne monopoly. "You know what I think?" Kershaw asked. "I think those flashes are the egg calling its momma. They sparkle like a million diamonds when you scoop one out of the muck, and right away a Slider always comes swooping out of nowhere at you." "I've been meaning to ask you," Asa said. "How do you handle the Sliders?" Kershaw grinned. "First you try to catch it with a rocket. If you miss you start leaping for home. All this time you're broadcasting for help, you understand. When the Slider catches you, you leap up while it buries its jaws in the mud where you were just standing. You dig your claws in its back and hang on while it rolls around in the mud. Finally, if the 'copter comes—and if they don't shoot off your head by mistake—you live to tell the tale." II Asa Graybar kept his normal form on Jordan's Planet just long enough to learn the discomfort of double gravity. He was told he needed another physical examination and was taken right in to a doctor. His heart was pounding to keep his blood circulating on this massive world, but the doctor had apparently learned to make allowances. "Swallow this," said the doctor after making a series of tests. Asa swallowed the capsule. Two minutes later he felt himself beginning to lose consciousness. "This is it!" he thought in panic. He felt someone ease him back down onto a wheeled stretcher. Before consciousness faded completely he realized that no one got a chance to back out of becoming a changeling, that he was on his way to the conversion tank right now. When he finally awoke he felt well rested and very comfortable. But for a long time he was afraid to open his eyes. "Come on, Graybar," said a deep, booming voice. "Let's test our wings." It was not Kershaw's voice, but it had to be Kershaw. Asa opened his eyes. Everyone had seen pictures of muck men. It was different having one stand beside you. Kershaw looked much like an enormous frog except that his head was still mostly human. He was sitting on webbed feet, his lower legs bent double under huge thighs, and his trunk tilted forward so that his arms dangled to the ground. The arms were as thick around as an ordinary man's legs. The hands had become efficient scoops, with broad fingers webbed to the first joint and tipped with spade-like claws. The skin was still pinkish but had become scaly. Not a thread of hair showed anywhere on the body, not even on the head. This, Asa realized, was what he looked like himself. It would have been more bearable if the head had not retained strong traces of humanity. The nostrils flared wide and the jaws hardly emerged from the neck, but the ears were human ears and the eyes, under those horny ridges, were human eyes. Asa felt sure that the eyes could still weep. He started to walk forward and tipped over on his side. Kershaw laughed. "Come to daddy, babykins," Kershaw said, holding out his hands. "Only try hopping this time. And take it easy." Asa pushed himself upright with one arm and tried a small hop. Nerve and muscle coordination was perfect. He found himself leaping as high as Kershaw's head. "That's the way," Kershaw said approvingly. "Now get this on and we'll go outside." Asa snapped on a belt and breech cloth combination that had flaps of fabric dangling from the belt in front and behind. He followed as Kershaw pushed open a sliding door to lead the way out of the room where they had been left to revive from conversion. They went into a courtyard partly covered by a roof projecting from the Hazeltyne company's dome settlement. The far half of the courtyard was open to the gray drizzle that fell almost ceaselessly from the sky of Jordan's Planet and turned most of its surface into marsh and mud flats. A high wall enclosed the far portion of the courtyard. Ranged along the wall were thirty stalls for muck men. From fifty yards across the courtyard a muck man bounded over to them in two leaps. Attached to a harness across his shoulders and chest were a gun and a long knife. "Names?" he growled. He was a foot taller than Graybar and big everywhere in proportion. "Kershaw. I'm back, Furston." "I'm Graybar." "Kershaw again? Just start in where you left off, sucker. Come on, you." He pointed to Asa and leaped to the open portion of the courtyard. "Do what he says," Kershaw whispered to Graybar. "He's sort of a trusty and warden and parole officer rolled into one." Asa was put through a series of exercises to get him used to his distorted body, to teach him how to leap and how to dig. He was shown how to operate the radio he would carry and how to fire the pencil-slim rockets of this gun. Finally he was told to eat a few berries from a native vine. He did so and immediately vomited. Furston laughed. "That's to remind you you're still a man," Furston said, grinning. "Everything that grows on this planet is poison. So if you got any ideas of hiding out till your term is up, forget 'em. Right here is where you eat." Asa turned without a word and hopped feebly away from Furston. He lifted his head to breathe deeply and saw two humans watching him from an observation tower on the roof. He leaped twenty feet into the air for a closer look. Gazing at him with repugnance, after witnessing the end of his session with Furston, were Harriet Hazeltyne and general manager Tom Dorr. The girl's presence merely puzzled Asa, but Dorr's being here worried him. Dorr had tried to get rid of him once and was now in an excellent position to make the riddance permanent. At supper that night, squatting on the ground beside a low table with the dozen other muck men operating from the dome, Asa asked what the two were doing out here. "The girl will inherit this racket some day, won't she?" asked one of the others. "She wants to see what kind of suckers are making her rich." "Maybe that guy Dorr brought her along to show her what a big wheel he is," said one of the others. "Just hope he doesn't take over the operations." III Next morning Furston passed out guns, knives, radios, and pouches to carry any eggs the muck men found. He gave each man a compass and assigned the sectors to be worked during the day. Finally he called Graybar aside. "In case you don't like it here," Furston said, "you can get a week knocked off your sentence for every egg you bring in. Now get out there and work that muck." Furston sent Graybar and Kershaw out together so that the veteran could show Asa the ropes. Asa had already learned that the wall around the courtyard was to keep Sliders out, not muck men in. He leaped over it and hopped along after Kershaw. Feet slapping against the mud, they went about five miles from the Hazeltyne station, swimming easily across ponds too broad to jump. The mud, if not precisely as pleasant to the touch as chinchilla fur, was not at all uncomfortable, and the dripping air caressed their skins like a summer breeze back on Earth. Tiny, slippery creatures skidded and splashed out of their way. Finally Kershaw stopped. His experienced eye had seen a trail of swamp weeds crushed low into the mud. "Keep your eyes open," Kershaw said. "There's a Slider been around here lately. If you see something like an express train headed our way, start shooting." At each leap along the trail they peered quickly around. They saw no Sliders, but this meant little, for the beasts lived under the mud as much as on top of it. Kershaw halted again when they came to a roughly circular area some ten yards in diameter where the weeds had been torn out and lay rotting in the muck. "We're in luck," he said as Asa skidded to a stop at his side. "An egg was laid somewhere here within the last week. These places are hard to spot when the new weeds start growing." Kershaw took a long look around. "No trouble in sight. We dig." They started at the center of the cleared area, shoveling up great gobs of mud with their hands and flinging them out of the clearing. Usually a muck man dug in a spiral out from the center, but Graybar and Kershaw dug in gradually widening semi-circles opposite each other. They had to dig four feet deep, and it was slow going until they had a pit big enough to stand in. Each handful of mud had to be squeezed gently before it was thrown away, to make sure it didn't conceal an egg. As he worked, Asa kept thinking what an inefficient system it was. Everything about the operation was wrong. "Got it!" Kershaw shouted. He leaped out of the pit and started wiping slime off a round object the size of a baseball. Asa jumped out to watch. "A big one," Kershaw said. He held it, still smeared with traces of mud, lovingly to his cheek, and then lifted it to eye level. "Just look at it." A SLIDER EGG The egg was flashing with a mad radiance, like a thousand diamonds being splintered under a brilliant sun. Static crackled in Asa's earphones and he thought of what Kershaw had said, that the scintillation of an egg was an effect of its calls to a mother Slider for help. Asa looked around. "Jump!" he shouted. At the edge of the clearing a segmented length of greenish black scales, some two feet thick and six feet high, had reared up out of the weeds. The top segment was almost all mouth, already opened to show row upon row of teeth. Before Asa could draw his gun the Slider lowered its head to the ground, dug two front flippers into the mud and shot forward. Asa leaped with all his strength, sailing far out of the clearing. While he was still in the air he snapped the mouthpiece of his radio down from where it was hinged over his head. As he landed he turned instantly, his gun in his hand. "Calling the 'copter!" he spoke rapidly into the mouthpiece. "Kershaw and Graybar, sector eight, five miles out. Hurry!" "Graybar?" asked a voice in his earphone. "What's up?" "We've got an egg but a Slider wants it back." "On the way." Asa hopped back to the clearing. Kershaw must have been bowled over by the Slider's first rush, for he was trying to hop on one leg as if the other had been broken. The egg lay flickering on top of the mud where Kershaw had dropped it. The Slider, eight flippers on each side working madly, was twisting its thirty feet of wormlike body around for another charge. Aiming hastily, Asa fired a rocket at the monster's middle segment. The rocket smashed through hard scales and exploded in a fountain of gray flesh. The Slider writhed, coating its wound in mud, and twisted toward Asa. He leaped to one side, firing from the air and missing, and saw the Slider turn toward the patch of weeds where he would land. His legs were tensed to leap again the moment he hit the mud, but he saw the Slider would be on top of him before he could escape. As he landed he thrust his gun forward almost into the mouth of the creature and fired again. Even as he was knocked aside into the muck, Asa's body was showered with shreds of alien flesh scattered by the rocket's explosion. Desperately pushing himself to his feet, he saw the long headless body shiver and lie still. Asa took a deep breath and looked around. "Kershaw!" he called. "Where are you?" "Over here." Kershaw stood briefly above the weeds and fell back again. Asa leaped over to him. "Thanks," Kershaw said. "Muck men stick together. You'll make a good one. I wouldn't have had a chance. My leg's busted." "The helicopter ought to be here pretty soon," Asa said. He looked over at the dead Slider and shook his head. "Tell me, what are the odds on getting killed doing this?" "Last time I was here there was about one mucker killed for every six eggs brought out. Of course you're not supposed to stand there admiring the eggs like I did while a Slider comes up on you." Asa hopped over to the egg, which was still full of a dancing radiance where it rested on the mud. He scooped a hole in the muck and buried the egg. "Just in case there are any more Sliders around," he explained. "Makes no difference," said Kershaw, pointing upward. "Here comes the 'copter, late as usual." The big machine circled them, hovered to inspect the dead Slider, and settled down on broad skids. Through the transparent nose Asa could see Tom Dorr and Harriet Hazeltyne. The company manager swung the door open and leaned out. "I see you took care of the Slider," he said. "Hand over the egg." "Kershaw has a broken leg," Asa said. "I'll help him in and then I'll get the egg." While Kershaw grabbed the door frame to help pull himself into the helicopter, Asa got under his companion's belly and lifted him by the waist. He hadn't realized before just how strong his new body was. Kershaw, as a muck man, would have weighed close to three hundred pounds on Earth, close to six hundred here. Dorr made no move to help, but the girl reached under Kershaw's shoulder and strained to get him in. Once he was inside, Asa saw, the cabin was crowded. "Are you going to have room for me too?" he asked. "Not this trip," Dorr answered. "Now give me the egg." Asa didn't hesitate. "The egg stays with me," he said softly. "You do what I tell you, mucker," said Dorr. "Nope. I want to make sure you come back." Asa turned his head to Harriet. "You see, Miss Hazeltyne, I don't trust your friend. You might ask him to tell you about it." Dorr stared at him with narrowed eyes. Suddenly he smiled in a way that worried Asa. "Whatever you say, Graybar," Dorr said. He turned to the controls. In another minute the helicopter was in the sky. A round trip for the helicopter should have taken no more than twenty minutes, allowing time for Kershaw to be taken out at the settlement. After an hour passed Asa began to worry. He was sure Dorr would return for the egg. Finally he realized that Dorr could locate the egg approximately by the body of the dead Slider. Dorr could return for the egg any time with some other muck man to dig for it. Asa pulled down the mouthpiece of his radio. "This is Graybar, calling the helicopter," he said. "When are you coming?" There was no answer except the hum of carrier wave. If he tried to carry the egg back, Asa knew, Sliders would attack him all along the way. A man had no chance of getting five miles with an egg by himself. He could leave the egg here, of course. Even so he would be lucky if he got back, following a hazy compass course from which he and Kershaw had certainly deviated on their outward trip. There were no landmarks in this wilderness of bog to help him find his way. The workers were supposed to home in on radio signals, if they lost their bearings, but Dorr would deny him that help. What was the night like on Jordan's Planet? Maybe Sliders slept at night. If he could stay awake, and if he didn't faint from hunger in this strange new body, and if the Sliders left him alone.... A whirring noise made Asa jump in alarm. Then he smiled in relief, for it was the helicopter, the blessed helicopter, coming in over the swamp. But what if it was Dorr, coming back alone to dispose of him without any witnesses? Asa leaped for the carcass of the dead Slider and took shelter behind it. No machine-gun blast of rockets came from the helicopter. The big machine swooped low dizzily, tilted back in an inexpert attempt to hover, thumped down upon the mud and slid forward. As Asa jumped aside, the landing skids caught against the Slider's body and the helicopter flipped forward on its nose, one of the rotor blades plunging deep into the mud. Asa leaped forward in consternation. Not only was his chance of safe passage back to the settlement wrecked, but now he would have the extra burden of taking care of the pilot. When he reached the nose of the helicopter he saw that the pilot, untangling herself from the controls to get up, was Harriet Hazeltyne. IV "Are you hurt?" Asa asked her. She reached for his shoulder to steady herself as she climbed out of the machine. "I guess not," she said. "But taking a fall in this gravity is no fun. From the way my face feels I ought to be getting a black eye pretty soon." "What happened?" "I made a fool of myself." She made a face back in the direction of the settlement. "Dorr wasn't going to come after you. He said anyone who talked back to him should try arguing with the Sliders." She looked up at the machine-gun on the helicopter. "They feed at night, you know. And they eat their own kind," she said. "The Slider you killed would draw them like ants to jam." Asa glanced around quickly to make sure no Sliders had already come. He eyed the helicopter with distaste at the thought of what a flimsy fort it would make. "Anyway," Harriet said, "I told him he couldn't just leave you here and we started arguing. I lost my temper. He thought he had brought me to Jordan's Planet on a fancy tour. I told him the real reason I was here was to check up for my father on the way he was running things and there seemed to be a lot wrong. So he told me very politely I could run things to suit myself and he walked off." She shrugged, as if to indicate that she had made a mess of things. "And you took the helicopter by yourself," Asa said, as if he could hardly believe it yet. "Oh, back on Earth I can make a helicopter do stunts. But I wasn't used to this gravity. I don't suppose you could make this machine stand up straight?" Asa tugged at the body of the Slider until he got it off the skids of the plane. He pulled with all his strength at the rotor blade sunk in the mud, but the weight of the helicopter was upon it and the mud held it with a suction of its own. After a few minutes he had to give up. "We fight off the Sliders, then," she said, as matter of factly as if that problem was settled. "If it's any comfort, I know how to handle the machine-gun." "Nope. In this drizzle, at night, the Sliders would be on us before we could see them. We've got to try to get back." He stood in thought while she stared at him patiently. "What happened to the other muck men who went out today?" he asked. "They were called in when the 'copter came out the first time. Some of them may not have got back yet."

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R X BY ALAN E. NOURSE The tenth son of a tenth son was very sick, but it was written that he would never die. Of course, it was up to the Earth doctor to see that he didn't! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] They didn't realize they were in trouble until it was too late to stop it. The call from Morua II came in quite innocently, relayed to the ship from HQ in Standard GPP Contract code for crash priority, which meant Top Grade Planetary Emergency, and don't argue about it, fellows, just get there, fast. Red Doctor Sam Jenkins took one look at the flashing blinker and slammed the controls into automatic; gyros hummed, bearings were computed and checked, and the General Practice Patrol ship Lancet spun in its tracks, so to speak, and began homing on the call-source like a hound on a fox. The fact that Morua II was a Class VI planet didn't quite register with anybody, just then. Ten minutes later the Red Doctor reached for the results of the Initial Information Survey on Morua II, and let out a howl of alarm. A single card sat in the slot with a wide black stripe across it. Jenkins snapped on the intercom. "Wally," he yelped. "Better get up here fast." "Trouble?" said the squawk-box, sleepily. "Oh, brother," said Jenkins. "Somebody's cracked the Contract Code or something." A moment later a tall sleepy man in green undershorts appeared at the control room, rubbing his eyes. "What happened?" he said. "We've changed course." "Yeah. Ever hear of Morua II?" Green Doctor Wally Stone frowned and scratched his whiskered chin. "Sounds familiar, but I can't quite tune in. Crash call?" His eye caught the black-striped card. "Class VI planet ... a plague spot! How can we get a crash-call from this ?" "You tell me," said Jenkins. "Wait a minute. Seems to me there was some sort of nasty business—" Jenkins nodded heavily. "There sure was. Five successive attempts to establish a Contract with them, and five times we got thrown out bodily. The last time an Earth ship landed there half the crew was summarily shot and the others came home with their ears cut off. Seems the folks on Morua II didn't want a Contract with Hospital Earth. And they're still in the jungle, as far as their medicine goes. Witch doctors and spells." He tossed the Info-card down the chute with a growl. "So now we have an emergency call from them in a Contract code they couldn't possibly know." The surgeon in the green undershorts chewed his lip. "Looks like somebody in that last crew spilled the beans before they shot him." "Obviously." "Well, what are we doing on automatics? We're not going there, are we?" "What else? You know the law. Instantaneous response to any crash-priority call, regardless of circumstances—" "Law be damned," Stone cried. "File a protest with HQ. Cancel the course bearings and thumb our noses at them!" "And spend the next twenty years scrubbing test tubes." Jenkins shook his head. "Sorry, it took me too long to get aboard one of these tubs. We don't do that in the General Practice Patrol, remember? I don't know how Morua II got the code, but they got it, and that's all the farther we're supposed to think. We answer the call, and beef about it later. If we still happen to be around later, that is." It had always been that way. Since the first formal Medical Service Contract had been signed with Deneb III centuries before, Hospital Earth had laboriously built its reputation on that single foundation stone: immediate medical assistance, without question or hesitation, whenever and wherever it was required, on any planet bound by Contract. That was the law, for Hospital Earth could not afford to jeopardize a Contract. In the early days of galactic exploration, of course, Medical Services was only a minor factor in an expanding commercial network that drew multitudes of planets into social and economic interdependence; but in any growing civilization division of labor inevitably occurs. Other planets outstripped Earth in technology, in communications, in transport, and in production techniques—but Earth stood unrivaled in its development of the biological sciences. Wherever an Earth ship landed, the crew was soon rendering Medical Services of one sort or another, whether they had planned it that way or not. On Deneb III the Medical Service Contract was formalized, and Hospital Earth came into being. Into all known corners of the galaxy ships of the General Practice Patrol were dispatched—"Galactic Pill Peddlers" forging a chain of Contracts from Aldebaran to Zarn, accepting calls, diagnosing ills, arranging for proper disposition of whatever medical problems they came across. Serious problems were shuttled back to Hospital Earth without delay; more frequently the GPP crews—doctors of the Red and Green services, representing the ancient Earthly arts of medicine and surgery—were able to handle the problems on the spot and by themselves. It was a rugged service for a single planet to provide, and it was costly. Many planets studied the terms of Contract and declined, pleasantly but firmly—and were assured nevertheless that GPP ships would answer an emergency call if one was received. There would be a fee, of course, but the call would be answered. And then there were other planets—places such as Morua II.... The Lancet homed on the dismal grey planet with an escort of eight ugly fighter ships which had swarmed up like hornets to greet her. They triangled her in, grappled her, and dropped her with a bone-jarring crash into a landing slot on the edge of the city. As Sam Jenkins and Wally Stone picked themselves off the bulkheads, trying to rearrange the scarlet and green uniforms of their respective services, the main entrance lock burst open with a squeal of tortured metal. At least a dozen Moruans poured into the control room—huge bearlike creatures with heavy grey fur ruffing out around their faces like thick hairy dog collars. The one in command strode forward arrogantly, one huge paw leveling a placer-gun with a distinct air of business about it. "Well, you took long enough!" he roared, baring a set of yellow fangs that sent shivers up Jenkins' spine. "Fourteen hours! Do you call that speed?" Jenkins twisted down the volume on his Translator with a grimace. "You're lucky we came at all," he said peevishly. "Where's your Contract? Where did you get the Code?" "Bother the Contract," the Moruan snarled. "You're supposed to be physicians, eh?" He eyed them up and down as though he disapproved of everything that he saw. "You make sick people well?" "That's the general idea." "All right." He poked a hairy finger at a shuttle car perched outside. "In there." They were herded into the car with three guards in front and three behind. A tunnel gulped them into darkness as the car careened madly into the city. For an endless period they pitched and churned through blackness—then suddenly emerged into a high, gilded hall with pale sunlight filtering down. From the number of decorated guards, and the scraping and groveling that went on as they were hurried through embattled corridors, it seemed likely they were nearing the seat of government. Finally a pair of steel doors opened to admit them to a long, arched hallway. Their leader, who was called Aguar by his flunkies, halted them with a snarl and walked across to the tall figure guarding the far door. The guard did not seem pleased; he wore a long purple cap with a gold ball on the end which twitched wildly as their whispered conference devolved into growling and snarling. Finally Aguar motioned them to follow, and they entered the far chamber, with Purple-Hat glaring at them malignantly as they passed. Aguar halted them at the door-way. "His Eminence will see you," he growled. "Who is His Eminence?" Jenkins asked. "The Lord High Emperor of All Morua and Creator of the Galaxies," Aguar rumbled. "He is the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son, and it is written that he can never die. When you enter, bow," he added. The Tenth Son of a Tenth Son couldn't have cared less whether they bowed or not. The room was dark and rank with the smell of sickness. On a pallet in the center lay a huge Moruan, panting and groaning. He was wrapped like a mummy in bedclothes of scarlet interwoven with gold; on either side of the bed braziers flickered with sickly greenish light. His Eminence looked up at them from bloodshot eyes and greeted them with a groan of anguish that seemed to roll up from the soles of his feet. "Go away," he moaned, closing his eyes again and rolling over with his back toward them. The Red Doctor blinked at his companion, then turned to Aguar. "What illness is this?" he whispered. "He is afflicted with a Pox, as any fool can see. All others it kills—but His Eminence is the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son, and it is written—" "Yes, yes, I know. He can never die." Sam gave Wally a sour look. "What happens, though, if he just up and does?" Aguar's paw came down with a clatter on the hilt of his sword. " He does not die. We have you here now. You are doctors, you say. Cure him." They walked to the bedside and lifted back the covers. Jenkins took a limp paw in his hand. He finally found a palpable pulse just below the second elbow joint. It was fast and thready. The creature's skin bagged loosely from his arm. "Looks like His Eminence can't read," Wally muttered. "He's going fast, Doc." Jenkins nodded grimly. "What does it look like to you?" "How should I know? I've never seen a healthy Moruan before, to say nothing of a sick one. It looks like a pox all right." "Probably a viremia of some sort." Jenkins went over the great groaning hulk with inquiring fingers. "If it's a viremia, we're cooked," Stone whispered. "None of the drugs cross over—and we won't have time to culture the stuff and grow any new ones—" Jenkins turned to Aguar. "How long has this gone on?" "For days," the Moruan growled. "He can't speak. He grows hot and cannot eat. He moans until the Palace trembles." "What about your own doctors?" Aguar spat angrily on the floor. "They are jealous as cats until trouble comes. Then they hide in the caves like chickens. See the green flames? Death flames. They leave him here to die. But now that is all over. We have heard about you wizards from Hospital Earth. You cure all, the stories say. You are very wise, they say. You balance the humors and drive forth the spirits of the Pox like devils." He gave them a terrible grin and tightened his hand on the gold-encrusted sword. "Now we see." "We can't promise," Jenkins began. "Sometimes we're called too late—but perhaps not in this case," he added hastily when he saw the Moruan's face. "Tenth Son and all that. But you'll have to give us freedom to work." "What kind of freedom?" "We'll need supplies and information from our ship. We'll have to consult your physicians. We'll need healthy Moruans to examine—" "But you will cure him," Aguar said. Jenkins took a deep breath and gripped his red tunic around his throat tightly. "Sure, sure," he said weakly. "You just watch us." "But what do you think we're going to do?" the surgeon wailed, back in the control room of the Lancet . "Sam, we can't touch him. If he didn't die naturally we'd kill him for sure! We can't go near him without a Bio-survey—look what happened on Baron when they tried it! Half the planetary population wiped out before they realized that the antibiotic was more deadly to the race than the virus was...." "Might not be such a bad idea for Morua," the Red Doctor muttered grimly. "Well, what did you expect me to do—politely refuse? And have our throats slit right on the spot?" He grabbed a pad and began scribbling. "We've got to do something just to keep alive for a while." "Yeah," said Wally. "What, for instance?" "Well, we've got a little to go on just from looking at them. They're oxygen-breathers, which means they manage internal combustion of carbohydrates, somehow. From the grey skin color I'd guess at a cuprous or stannous heme-protein carrying system. They're carnivores, but god knows what their protein metabolism is like—Let's get going on some of these specimens Aguar has rounded up for us." They dug in frantically. Under normal conditions a GPP ship would send in a full crew of technicians to a newly-Contracted planet to make the initial Bio-survey of the indigenous races. Bio-chemists, physiologists, anatomists, microbiologists, radiologists—survey workers from every Service would examine and study the new clients, take them apart cell by cell to see what made them tick. Certain basic principles were always the same, a fact which accelerated the program considerably. Humanoid or not, all forms of life had basic qualities in common. Biochemical reactions were biochemical reactions, whether they happened to occur in a wing-creature of Wolf IV or a doctor from Sol III. Anatomy was a broad determinant: a jelly-blob from Deneb I with its fine skein of pulsating nerve fibrils was still just a jelly-blob, and would never rise above the level of amoeboid yes-no response because of its utter lack of organization. But a creature with an organized central nervous system and a functional division of work among organ systems could be categorized, tested, studied, and compared, and the information used in combating native disease. Given no major setbacks, and full cooperation of the natives, the job only took about six months to do— For the crew of the Lancet six hours was seven hours too long. They herded cringing Moruan "volunteers" into the little ship's lab. Jenkins handled external examinations and blood and tissue chemistries; Stone ran the X-ray and pan-endoscopic examinations. After four grueling hours the Red Doctor groaned and scowled at the growing pile of data. "Okay. It seems that they're vaguely humanoid. And that's about all we can say for sure. I think we're wasting time. What say we tackle the Wizards for a while?" Aguar's guards urged the tall Moruan with the purple cap into the control room at gunpoint, along with a couple of minor medical potentates. Purple-hat's name was Kiz, and it seemed that he wasn't having any that day. "Look," said Jenkins intensely. "You've seen this illness before. We haven't. So you can at least get us started. What kind of course does it run?" Silence. "All right then, what causes it? Do you know? Bacteria? Virus? Degeneration?" Silence. Jenkins' face was pale. "Look, boys—your Boss out there is going to cool before long if something doesn't happen fast—" His eyes narrowed on Kiz. "Of course, that might be right up your alley—how about that? His Eminence bows out, somebody has to bow in, right? Maybe you, huh?" Kiz began sputtering indignantly; the Red Doctor cut him off. "It adds up," he said heatedly. "You've got the power, you've got your magic and all. Maybe you were the boys that turned thumbs down so violently on the idea of a Hospital Earth Contract, eh? Couldn't risk having outsiders cutting in on your trade." Jenkins rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "But somehow it seems to me you'd have a whale of a lot more power if you learned how to control this Pox." Kiz stopped sputtering quite abruptly. He blinked at his confederates for a long moment. Then: "You're an idiot. It can't be done." "Suppose it could." "The Spirit of the Pox is too strong. Our most powerful spells make him laugh. He eats our powders and drinks our potions. Even the Iron Circle won't drive him out." "Won't it, now! Well, we have iron needles and potions that eat the bottoms out of their jars. Suppose they drive him out?" The Moruan was visibly shaken. He held a whispered conference with his henchmen. "You'll show us these things?" he asked suspiciously. "I'll make a bargain," said Jenkins. "You give us a Contract, we give you the power—fair enough?" More whispers. Wally Stone tugged at Sam's sleeve. "What do you think you're doing?" he choked. "These boys will cut your throat quicker than Aguar will—" "Maybe not," said Sam. "Look, I've got an idea—risky, but it might work if you'll play along. We can't lose much." The whispers stopped and Kiz nodded to the Red Doctor. "All right, we bargain," he said. " After you show us." "Now or never." Jenkins threw open the door and nodded to the guards. "I'll be in the sickroom in a very short while. If you're with me, I'll see you there. If not—" He fingered his throat suggestively. As soon as they had gone Jenkins dived into the storeroom and began throwing flasks and bottles into a black bag. Wally Stone watched him in bewilderment. "You're going to kill him," he moaned. "Prayers, promises, pills and post-mortems. That's the Medical service for you." Sam grinned. "Maybe you should operate on him. That would open their eyes all right." "No thanks, not me. This is a medical case and it's all yours. What do you want me to do?" "Stay here and try your damnedest to get through to HQ," said Sam grimly. "Tell them to send an armada, because we're liable to need one in the next few hours—" If the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son had looked bad before, three hours had witnessed no improvement. The potentate's skin had turned from grey to a pasty green as he lay panting on the bed. He seemed to have lost strength enough even to groan, and his eyes were glazed. Outside the royal chambers Jenkins found a group of green-clad mourners, wailing like banshees and tearing out their fur in great grey chunks. They stood about a flaming brazier; as Jenkins entered the sickroom the wails rose ten decibels and took on a howling-dog quality. Aguar met him at the door. "He's dying," he roared angrily. "Why don't you do something? Every hour he sinks more rapidly, and all you do is poke holes in the healthy ones! And then you send in this bag of bones again—" He glowered at the tall purple-capped figure bending over the bed. Jenkins looked sharply at Kiz, and the wizard nodded his head slowly. "Try being quiet for a while," Jenkins said to Aguar. "We're going to cure the Boss here." Solemnly he slipped off his scarlet tunic and cap and laid them on a bench, then set his black bag carefully on the floor and threw it open. "First off, get rid of those things." He pointed to the braziers at the bedside. "They're enough to give anybody a headache. And tell those people outside to stop the racket. How can they expect the Spirit of the Pox to come out of His Eminence when they're raising a din like that?" Aguar's eyes widened for a moment as he hesitated; then he threw open the door and screamed a command. The wailing stopped as though a switch had been thrown. As a couple of cowering guards crept in to remove the braziers, Red Doctor Jenkins drew the wizard aside. "Tell me what spells you've already used." Hurriedly, Kiz began enumerating, ticking off items on hairy fingers. As he talked Jenkins dug into the black bag and started assembling a liter flask, tubing and needles. "First we brewed witches' root for seven hours and poured it over his belly. When the Pox appeared in spite of this we lit three red candles at the foot of the bed and beat His Eminence steadily for one hour out of four, with new rawhide. When His Eminence protested this, we were certain the Spirit had possessed him, so we beat him one hour out of two—" Jenkins winced as the accounting of cabalistic clap-trap continued. His Eminence, he reflected, must have had the constitution of an ox. He glanced over at the panting figure on the bed. "But doesn't anybody ever recover from this?" "Oh, yes—if the Spirit that afflicts them is very small. Those are the fortunate ones. They grow hot and sick, but they still can eat and drink—" The wizard broke off to stare at the bottle-and-tube arrangement Jenkins had prepared. "What's that?" "I told you about the iron needles, didn't I? Hold this a moment." Jenkins handed him the liter flask. "Hold it high." He began searching for a vein on the patient's baggy arm. The Moruan equivalent of blood flowed back greenishly in the tube for an instant as he placed the needle; then the flask began to drip slowly. Aguar let out a horrified scream and raced from the room; in a moment he was back with a detachment of guards, all armed to the teeth, and three other Moruan physicians with their retinues of apprentices. Sam Jenkins held up his hand for silence. He allowed the first intravenous flask to pour in rapidly; the second he adjusted to a steady drip-drip-drip. Next he pulled two large bunsen burners and a gas tank from the bag. These he set up at the foot of the bed, adjusting the blue flames to high spear-tips. On the bedside table he set up a third with a flask above it; into this he poured some water and a few crystals from a dark bottle. In a moment the fluid in the flask was churning and boiling, an ominous purple color. Kiz watched goggle-eyed. "Now!" said Jenkins, pulling out a long thin rubber tube. "This should annoy the Spirit of the Pox something fierce." He popped the tube into the patient's mouth. His Eminence rose up with a gasp, choking and fighting, but the tube went down. The Red Doctor ground three white pills into powder, mixed in some water, and poured it down the tube. Then he stepped back to view the scene, wiping cold perspiration from his forehead. He motioned to Kiz. "You see what I'm doing, of course?" he said loudly enough for Aguar and the guards to hear. "Oh, yes—yes! Indeed, indeed," said Kiz. "Fine. Now this is most important." Jenkins searched in the bag until he found a large mortar which he set down on the floor. Squatting behind it, he began tapping it slowly with the pestle, in perfect rhythm with the intravenous drip ... and waited. The room was deathly still except for a heavy snuffling sound from His Eminence and the plink-plink of the pestle on the mortar. The flask of purple stuff gurgled quietly. An hour passed, and another. Suddenly Jenkins motioned to Kiz. "His pulse—quickly!" Kiz scampered gratefully over to the bedside. "A hundred and eighty," he whispered. Jenkins' face darkened. He peered at the sick man intently. "It's a bad sign," he said. "The Spirit is furious at the intrusion of an outsider." He motioned toward the mortar. "Can you do this?" Without breaking the rhythm he transferred the plinking-job to Kiz. He changed the dwindling intravenous bottle. "Call me when the bottle is empty—or if there is any change. Whatever you do, don't touch anything ." With that he tiptoed from the room. Four murderous-looking guards caught Aguar's eye and followed him out, swords bared. Jenkins sank down on a bench in the hall and fell asleep in an instant. They woke him once, hours later, to change the intravenous solution, and he found Kiz still intently pounding on the mortar. Jenkins administered more of the white powder in water down the tube, and went back to his bench. He had barely fallen asleep again when they were rousing him with frightened voices. "Quickly!" Aguar cried. "There's been a terrible change!" In the sickroom His Eminence was drenched with sweat, his face glistening in the light of the bunsen burners. He rolled from side to side, groaning hoarsely. " Faster! " Jenkins shouted to Kiz at the mortar, and began stripping off the sodden bedclothes. "Blankets, now—plenty of them." The plink-plink rose to a frantic staccato as Jenkins checked the patient's vital signs, wiped more sweat from his furry brow. Quite suddenly His Eminence opened bleary eyes, stared about him, let out a monumental groan and buried his head in the blankets. In two minutes he was snoring softly. His face was cool now, his heart-beat slow and regular. Jenkins snatched the mortar from Kiz, and with a wild flourish smashed it on the stone floor. Then he grabbed the wizard's paw, raising it high. "You've done well!" he cried to the bewildered physician. "It's over now—the Spirit has departed. His Eminence will recover." They escorted him in triumphal procession back to the Lancet , where Wally Stone stared in disbelief as Jenkins and Kiz bowed and hugged each other like long-lost brothers at a sad farewell. "I finally got through to somebody at HQ," he said as the Red Doctor climbed aboard. "It'll take them twenty days at least, to get help, considering that Morua is not a Contract planet and we're not supposed to be here in the first place, but that's the best they can do...." "Tell them to forget the armada," said Jenkins, grinning. "And anyway, they've got things all wrong back at HQ." He brandished a huge roll of parchment, stricken through with the colors of the seven Medical Services of Hospital Earth. "Take a look, my boy—the juiciest Medical Services Contract that's been written in three centuries—" He tossed the Contract in the dry-storage locker with a sigh. "Old Kiz just finished his first lesson, and he's still wondering what went on—" "So am I," said the Green Doctor suspiciously. "It was simple. We cured His Eminence of the Pox." "With what? Incantations?" "Oh, the incantations were for the doctors ," said Jenkins. "They expected them, obviously, since that was the only level of medicine they could understand. And incidentally, the only level that could possibly get us a Contract. Anyway, I couldn't do very much else, under the circumstances, except for a little supportive therapy. Without a Bio-survey we were hamstrung. But whatever the Pox is, it obviously involves fever, starvation and dehydration. I knew that His Eminence could assimilate carbohydrates, and I took a long gamble that an antipyretic wouldn't hurt him too much—" Wally Stone's jaw sagged. "So you treated him with sugar-water and aspirin," he said weakly. "And on that you risked our necks." "Not quite," said the Red Doctor. "You're forgetting that I had one other prescription to use—the oldest, most trustworthy healer-of-all-ills known to medicine, just as potent now as it was a thousand years ago. Without it, Hospital Earth might just as well pack up her little black bag and go home." He smiled into the mirror as he adjusted the scarlet band of the Red Service across his shoulders. "We call it Tincture of Time," he said.

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THE STARBUSTERS By ALFRED COPPEL, JR. A bunch of kids in bright new uniforms, transiting the constellations in a disreputable old bucket of a space-ship—why should the leathery-tentacled, chlorine-breathing Eridans take them seriously? [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] HQ TELWING CSN 30 JAN 27 TO CMDR DAVID FARRAGUT STRYKALSKI VII CO TRS CLEOPATRA FLEET BASE CANALOPOLIS MARS STOP SUBJECT ORDERS STOP ROUTE LUNA PHOBOS SYRTIS MAJOR TRANSSENDERS PRIORITY AAA STOP MESSAGE FOLLOWS STOP TRS CLEOPATRA AND ALL ATTACHED AND OR ASSIGNED PERSONNEL HEREBY RELIEVED ASSIGNMENT AND DUTY INNER PLANET PATROL GROUP STOP ASSIGNED TEMP DUTY BUREAU RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT STOP SUBJECT VESSEL WILL PROCEED WITHOUT DELAY FLEET EXPERIMENTAL SUBSTATION PROVING GROUNDS TETHYS SATURNIAN GROUP STOP CO WILL REPORT UPON ARRIVAL TO CAPT IVY HENDRICKS ENGINEERING OFFICER PROJECT WARP STOP SIGNED H. GORMAN SPACE ADMIRAL COMMANDING STOP END MESSAGE END MESSAGE END MESSAGE. "Amen! Amen! Amen! Stop." Commander Strykalski smoothed out the wrinkled flimsy by spreading it carefully on the wet bar. Coburn Whitley, the T.R.S. Cleopatra's Executive, set down his Martini and leaned over very slowly to give the paper a microscopic examination in the mellow light. "Maybe," he began hopefully, "It could be a forgery?" Strike shook his head. Lieutenant Whitley looked crestfallen. "Then perhaps old Brass-bottom Gorman means some other guy named Strykalski?" To Cob, eight Martinis made anything possible. "Could there be two Strykalskis?" demanded the owner of the name under discussion. "No." Whitley sighed unhappily. "And there's only one Tellurian Rocket Ship Cleopatra in the Combined Solarian Navies, bless her little iron rump! Gorman means us. And I think we've been had, that's what I think!" "Tethys isn't so bad," protested Strike. Cob raised a hand to his eyes as though to blot out the sight of that distant moonlet. "Not so bad, he says! All you care about is seeing Ivy Hendricks again, I know you! Tethys!" Strike made a passing effort to look stern and failed. "You mean Captain Hendricks, don't you, Mister Whitley? Captain Hendricks of Project Warp?" Cob made a sour face. "Project Warp, yet! Sounds like a dog barking!" He growled deep in his throat and barked once or twice experimentally. The officer's club was silent, and a silver-braided Commodore sitting nearby scowled at Whitley. The Lieutenant subsided with a final small, "Warp!" An imported Venusian quartet began to play softly. Strike ordered another round of drinks from the red-skinned Martian tending bar and turned on his stool to survey the small dance floor. The music and the subdued lights made him think of Ivy Hendricks. He really wanted to see her again. It had been a long time since that memorable flight when they had worked together to pull Admiral Gorman's flagship Atropos out of a tight spot on a perihelion run. Ivy was good to work with ... good to be around. But there was apparently more to this transfer than just Ivy pulling wires to see him again. Things were tense in the System since Probe Fleet skeeterboats had discovered a race of group-minded, non-human intelligences on the planets of 40 Eridani C. They lived in frozen worlds that were untenable for humans. And they were apparently all parts of a single entity that never left the home globe ... a thing no human had seen. The group-mind. They were rabidly isolationist and they had refused any commerce with the Solar Combine. Only CSN Intelligence knew that the Eridans were warlike ... and that they were strongly suspected of having interstellar flight.... So, reflected Strike, the transfer of the Cleopatra to Tethys for work under the Bureau of Research and Development meant innovations and tests. And Commander Strykalski was concerned. The beloved Old Aphrodisiac didn't take kindly to innovations. At least she never had before, and Strike could see no reason to suppose the cantankerous monitor would have changed her disposition. "There's Celia!" Cob Whitley was waving toward the dance floor. Celia Graham, trim in her Ensign's greys, was making her way through the crowd of dancers. Celia was the Cleopatra's Radar Officer, and like all the rest, bound with chains of affection to the cranky old warship. The Cleopatra's crew was a unit ... a team in the true sense of the word. They served in her because they wanted to ... would serve in no other. That's the way Strike ran his crew, and that's the way the crew ran Lover-Girl. Old Aphrodisiac's family was a select community. There was a handsome Martian Naval Lieutenant with Celia, but when she saw the thoughtful expression on her Captain's face, she dismissed him peremptorily. Here was something, apparently, of a family matter. "Well, I can't see anything to worry about, Skipper," she said when he had explained. "I should think you'd be glad of a chance to see Ivy again." Cob Whitley leaned precariously forward on his bar-stool to wag a finger under Celia's pretty nose. "But he doesn't know what Captain Hendricks has cooked up for Lover-Girl, and you know the old carp likes to be treated with respect." He affected a very knowing expression. "Besides, we shouldn't be gallivanting around testing Ivy's electronic eyelash-curlers when the Eridans are likely to be swooshing around old Sol any day!" "Cob, you're drunk!" snapped Celia. "I am at that," mused Whitley with a foolish grin. "And I'd better enjoy it. There'll be no Martinis on Tethys, that's for sure! This cruise is going to interfere with my research on ancient twentieth century potables..." Strike heaved his lanky frame upright. "Well, I suppose we'd better call the crew in." He turned to Cob. "Who is Officer of the Deck tonight?" "Bayne." "Celia, you'd better go relieve him. He'll have to work all night to get us an orbit plotted." "Will do, Skipper," Celia Graham left. "Cob, you'd better turn in. Get some sleep. But have the NPs round up the crew. If any of them are in the brig, let me know. I'll be on the bridge." "What time do you want to lift ship?" "0900 hours." "Right." Cob took a last loving look around the comfortable officer's club and heaved a heavy sigh. "Tethys, here comes Lover-Girl. It's going to be a long, long cruise, Captain." How long, he couldn't have known ... then. The flight out was uneventful. Uneventful, that is for the T.R.S. Cleopatra . Only one tube-liner burned through, and only six hours wasted in nauseous free-fall. Lover-Girl wormed her way through the asteroid belt, passed within a million miles of Jupiter and settled comfortably down on the airless field next to the glass-steel dome of the Experimental Substation on Tethys. But her satisfied repose was interrupted almost before it was begun. Swarms of techmen seemed to burst from the dome and take her over. Welders and physicists, naval architects and shipfitters, all armed with voluminous blueprints and atomic torches set to work on her even before her tubes had cooled. Power lines were crossed and re-crossed, shunted and spliced. Weird screen-like appendages were welded to her bow and stern. Workmen and engineers stomped through her companionways, bawling incomprehensible orders. And her crew watched in mute dismay. They had nothing to say about it... Ivy Hendricks rose from her desk as Strike came into her Engineering Office. There was a smile on her face as she extended her hand. "It's good to see you again, Strike." Strykalski studied her. Yes, she hadn't changed. She was still the Ivy Hendricks he remembered. She was still calm, still lovely, and still very, very competent. "I've missed you, Ivy." Strike wasn't just being polite, either. Then he grinned. "Lover-Girl's missed you, too. There never has been an Engineering Officer that could get the performance out of her cranky hulk the way you used to!" "It's a good thing," returned Ivy, still smiling, "that I'll be back at my old job for a while, then." Strykalski raised his eyebrows inquisitively. Before Ivy could explain, Cob and Celia Graham burst noisily into the room and the greetings began again. Ivy, as a former member of the Cleopatra's crew, was one of the family. "Now, what I would like to know," Cob demanded when the small talk had been disposed of, "is what's with this 'Project Warp'? What are you planning for Lover-Girl? Your techmen are tearing into her like she was a twenty-day leave!" "And why was the Cleopatra chosen?" added Celia curiously. "Well, I'll make it short," Ivy said. "We're going to make a hyper-ship out of her." "Hyper-ship?" Cob was perplexed. Ivy Hendricks nodded. "We've stumbled on a laboratory effect that warps space. We plan to reproduce it in portable form on the Cleopatra ... king size. She'll be able to take us through the hyper-spatial barrier." "Golly!" Celia Graham was wide-eyed. "I always thought of hyperspace as a ... well, sort of an abstraction." "That's been the view up to now. We all shared it here, too, until we set up this screen system and things began to disappear when they got into the warped field. Then we rigged a remote control and set up telecameras in the warp...." Ivy's face sobered. "We got plates of star-fields ... star-fields that were utterly different and ... and alien . It seems that there's at least one other space interlocked and co-existent with ours. When we realized that we decided to send a ship through. I sent a UV teletype to Admiral Gorman at Luna Base ... and here you are." "Why us?" Cob asked thoughtfully. "I'll answer that," offered Strike, "Lover-Girl's a surge circuit monitor, and it's a safe bet this operation takes plenty of power." He looked over to Ivy. "Am I right?" "Right on the nose, Strike," she returned. Then she broke into a wide smile. "Besides, I wouldn't want to enter an alien cosmos with anyone but Lover-Girl's family. It wouldn't be right." "Golly!" said Celia Graham again. "Alien cosmos ... it sounds so creepy when you say it that way." "You could call it other things, if you should happen to prefer them," Ivy Hendricks said, "Subspace ... another plane of existence. I...." She never finished her sentence. The door burst open and a Communications yeoman came breathlessly into the office. From the ante-room came the sound of an Ultra Wave teletype clattering imperiously ... almost frantically. "Captain Hendricks!" cried the man excitedly, "A message is coming through from the Proxima transsender ... they're under attack!" Strykalski was on his feet. "Attack!" "The nonhumans from Eridanus have launched a major invasion of the solar Combine! All the colonies in Centaurus are being invaded!" Strike felt the bottom dropping out of his stomach, and he knew that all the others felt the same. If this was a war, they were the ones who would have to fight it. And the Eridans! Awful leathery creatures with tentacles ... chlorine breathers! They would make a formidable enemy, welded as they were into one fighting unit by the functioning of the group-mind.... He heard himself saying sharply into Ivy's communicator: "See to it that my ship is fueled and armed for space within three hours!" "Hold on, Strike!" Ivy Hendricks intervened, "What about the tests?" "I'm temporarily under Research and Development command, Ivy, but Regulations say that fighting ships cannot be held inactive during wartime! The Cleopatra's a warship and there's a war on now. If you can have your gear jerry-rigged in three hours, you can come along and test it when we have the chance. Otherwise the hell with it!" Strykalski's face was dead set. "I mean it, Ivy." "All right, Strike. I'll be ready," Ivy Hendricks said coolly. Exactly three hours and five minutes later, the newly created hyper-ship that was still Old Aphrodisiac lifted from the ramp outside the Substation dome. She rose slowly at first, the radioactive flame from her tubes splashing with sun-bright coruscations over the loading pits and revetments. For a fleeting instant she was outlined against the swollen orb of Saturn that filled a quarter of Tethys' sky, and then she was gone into the galactic night. Aboard, all hands stood at GQ. On the flying bridge Strykalski and Coburn Whitley worked steadily to set the ship into the proper position in response to the steady flood of equations that streamed into their station from Bayne in the dorsal astrogation blister. An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus. When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral Gorman had no great affection for either the Cleopatra or her crew. Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman had been as unfortunate as any of the others. "I was afraid you'd say that," grumbled Cob, "I was just hoping you wouldn't." The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch. "Bridge." "Communications here. Message from Luna Base, Captain." "Here it is," Strykalski told Cob. "Right on time." "Speak of the devil," muttered the Executive. "From the Admiral, sir," the voice in the interphone said, "Shall I read it?" "Just give me the dope," ordered Strike. "The Admiral orders us to quote make a diversionary attack on the planet of 40 Eridani C II unquote," said the squawk-box flatly. "Acknowledge," ordered Strykalski. "Wilco. Communications out." Strike made an I-told-you-so gesture to his Executive. Then he turned toward the enlisted man at the helm. "Quarter-master?" The man looked up from his auto-pilot check. "Sir." "Steady as she goes." "Yes, sir." "And that," shrugged Ivy Hendricks, "Is that." Three weeks passed in the timeless limbo of second-order flight. Blast tubes silent, the Cleopatra rode the curvature of space toward Eridanus. At eight and a half light years from Sol, the second-order was cut so that Bayne could get a star sight. As the lights of the celestial globe slowly retreated from their unnatural grouping ahead and astern, brilliant Sirius and its dwarf companion showed definite disks in the starboard ports. At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from the Dog Star, its fourteen heavy-gravity planets were plainly visible through the electron telescope. Strykalski and Ivy Hendricks stood beside Bayne in the dorsal blister while the astrogator sighted Altair through his polytant. His long, horse face bore a look of complete self-approbation when he had completed his last shot. "A perfect check with the plotted course! How's that for fancy dead reckoning?" he exclaimed. He was destined never to know the accolade, for at that moment the communicator began to flash angrily over the chart table. Bayne cut it in with an expression of disgust. "Is the Captain there?" demanded Celia Graham's voice excitedly. Strike took over the squawk-box. "Right here, Celia. What is it?" "Radar contact, sir! The screen is crazy with blips!" "Could it be window?" "No, sir. The density index indicates spacecraft. High value in the chlorine lines...." "Eridans!" cried Ivy. "What's the range, Celia?" demanded Strike. "And how many of them are there?" The sound of the calculator came through the grill. Then Celia replied: "Range 170,000 miles, and there are more than fifty and less than two hundred. That's the best I can do from this far away. They seem to have some sort of radiation net out and they are moving into spread formation." Strike cursed. "They've spotted us and they want to scoop us in with that force net! Damn that group-mind of theirs ... it makes for uncanny co-ordination!" He turned back to the communicator. "Cob! Are you on?" "Right here, Captain," came Cob Whitley's voice from the bridge. "Shift into second-order! We'll have to try and run their net!" "Yes, sir," Whitley snapped. "Communications!" called Strike. "Communications here." "Notify Luna Base we have made contact. Give their numbers, course, and speed!" Ivy could feel her heart pounding under her blouse. Her face was deadly pale, mouth pinched and drawn. This was the first time in battle for any of them ... and she dug her fingernails into her palms trying not to be afraid. Strykalski was rapping out his orders with machine-gun rapidity, making ready to fight his ship if need be ... and against lop-sided odds. But years of training were guiding him now. "Gun deck!" A feminine voice replied. "Check your accumulators. We may have to fight. Have the gun-pointers get the plots from Radar. And load fish into all tubes." "Yes, sir!" the woman rapped out. "Radar!" "Right here, Skipper!" "We're going into second-order, Celia. Use UV Radar and keep tabs on them." "Yes, Captain." Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. "Let's get back to the bridge, Ivy. It's going to be a hell of a rough half hour!" As they turned to go, all the pin-points of light that were the stars vanished, only to reappear in distorted groups ahead and behind the ship. They were in second-order flight again, and traveling above light speed. Within seconds, contact would be made with the advance units of the alien fleet. Old Aphrodisiac readied herself for war. Like a maddened bull terrier, the old monitor charged at the Eridan horde. Within the black hulls strange, tentacled creatures watched her in scanners that were activated by infrared light. The chlorine atmosphere grew tense as the Tellurian warship drove full at the pulsating net of interlocked force lines. Parsecs away, on a frozen world were a dull red shrunken sun shone dimly through fetid air, the thing that was the group-mind of the Eridans guided the thousand leathery tentacles that controlled the hundred and fifty black spaceships. The soft quivering bulk of it throbbed with excitement as it prepared to kill the tiny Tellurian thing that dared to threaten its right to conquest. Old Lover-Girl tried gallantly to pierce the strange trap. She failed. The alien weapons were too strange, too different from anything her builders could have imagined or prepared her to face. The net sucked the life from her second-order generators, and she slowed, like the victim of a nightmare. Now rays of heat reached out for her, grazing her flanks as she turned and twisted. One touched her atmospheric fins and melted them into slowly congealing globes of steel glowing with a white heat. She fought back with whorls of atomic fire that sped from her rifles to wreak havoc among her attackers. Being non-entities in themselves, and only limbs of the single mentality that rested secure on its home world, the Eridans lacked the vicious will to live that drove the Tellurian warship and her crew. But their numbers wore her down, cutting her strength with each blow that chanced to connect. Torpedoes from the tubes that circled her beam found marks out in space and leathery aliens died, their black ships burst asunder by the violence of new atoms being created from old. But there were too many. They hemmed her in, heat rays ever slashing, wounding her. Strykalski fought her controls, cursing her, coaxing her. Damage reports were flowing into the flying bridge from every point in the monitor's body. Lover-Girl was being hurt ... hurt badly. The second-order drive was damaged, not beyond repair, but out of commission for at least six hours. And they couldn't last six hours. They couldn't last another ten minutes. It was only the practiced hands of her Captain and crew that kept the Cleopatra alive.... "We're caught, Ivy!" Strike shouted to the girl over the noises of battle. "She can't stand much more of this!" Cob was screaming at the gun-pointers through the open communicator circuit, his blood heated by the turbulent cacophony of crackling rays and exploding torpedoes. "Hit 'em! Damn it! Damn it, hit 'em now! Dead ahead! Hit 'em again!..." Ivy stumbled across the throbbing deck to stand at Strykalski's side. "The hyper drive!" she yelled, "The hyper drive!" It was a chance. It was the only chance ... for Lover-Girl and Ivy and Cob and Celia ... for all of them. He had to chance it. "Ivy!" he called over his shoulder, "Check with Engineering! See if the thing's hooked into the surge circuit!" She struggled out of the flying bridge and down the ramp toward the engine deck. Strike and Cob stayed and sweated and cursed and fought. It seemed that she would never report. At last the communicator began to flash red. Strike opened the circuit with his free hand. "All right?" he demanded with his heart in his throat. " Try it! " Ivy shouted back. Strykalski lurched from his chair as another ray caught the ship for an instant and heated a spot on the wall to a cherry red. Gods! he prayed fervently. Let it work! A movement of the ship threw him to the deck. He struggled to his feet and across to the jerry-rigged switchboard that controlled the hyper drive's warp field. With a prayer on his lips, he slapped at the switches with wild abandon.... The sudden silence was like a physical blow. Strike staggered to the port and looked out. No alien ships filled the void with crisscrossing rays. No torpedoes flashed. The Cleopatra was alone, floating in star-flecked emptiness. There were no familiar constellations. The stars were spread evenly across the ebony bowl of the sky, and they looked back at him with an alien, icy disdain. The realization that he stood with a tiny shell, an infinitesimal human island lost in the vastness of a completely foreign cosmos broke with an almost mind-shattering intensity over his brain! He was conscious of Cob standing beside him, looking out into this unknown universe and whispering in awe: " We're the aliens here...." Ivy Hendricks came into the bridge then, a haggard look around her eyes. "I came up through the ventral blister," she said, "Bayne is down there and he's having fits. There isn't a star in sight he recognizes and the whole hull of the ship is glowing !" Cob and Strykalski rushed back to the port, straining to see the back-curving plates of the hull. Ivy was right. The metal, and to a lesser extent, even the leaded glassteel of the port was covered with a dim, dancing witchfire. It was as though the ship were being bombarded by a continuous shower of microscopic fire bombs. Whitley found refuge in his favorite expression. "Ye gods and little catfish!" Strike turned to Ivy. "What do you think it is?" "I ... I don't know. Matter itself might be different ... here." Strykalski found himself at the port again, looking out into the vast stretch of alien void. Terror was seeping like dampness through him, stretching cold fingers into his heart and mind. He realized that everyone on board must feel the same way. It was the old human devil rising from the pit of the primeval past. Fear of the unknown, of the strange. And there was loneliness. From the dark corners of his mind, the terrible loneliness came stealing forth. Never had a group of human beings been so frighteningly apart from their kind. He felt rejected, scorned and lost. The others felt it, too. Ivy and Cob drew closer, until all three stood touching each other; as though they could dispel the loneliness of the unnatural environment by the warmth of human, animal contact. Celia came into the bridge softly ... just to be near her friends. It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a reassurance he did not feel. Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The Cleopatra demanded attention and service, and her demanding saved them. "Cob," Strike directed with forced briskness, "Take over Damage Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive." Cob pulled himself together, smiling as all the accustomed pieces of his life began to fit together again. It didn't matter that they were in an unknown cosmos. Damage Control was something he knew and understood. He smiled thankfully and left the bridge. "Maintain a continuous radar-watch, Celia. We can't tell what we may encounter here." "Yes, Captain," replied Celia gratefully. Strykalski reached for the squawk-box and called Bayne. "Astrogation here," came the shaky reply. In the exposed blisters the agoraphobia must be more acute, reasoned Strike, and Bayne must have been subconsciously stirred up by the disappearance of the familiar stars that were his stock-in-trade. "Plot us a course to 40 Eridani C, Bayne," Strykalski directed. "On gyro-headings." "What?" The astrogator sounded as though he thought Strike had lost his mind. "Through this space?" "Certainly," Strykalski insisted quietly. "You're so proud of your dead-reckoning. Here's a chance for you to do a real job. Get me an orbit." "I ... all right, Captain," grumbled Bayne. Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. "Well, Captain Hendricks, this is some gadget you have dreamed up out of your Project Warp," he breathed shakily. "At least the fat's out of the fire for the time being...." Ivy looked out of the port and back with a shudder. "I hope so, Strike. I hope so." They fell silent, seeking comfort in each other's presence. The second-order drive repaired, Old Aphrodisiac moved out through the alien space toward the spot where 40 Eridani C existed on the other side of the barrier. The ship's tactical astrophysicist brought in some disturbing reports on the stars that shone brightly all around her. They fitted the accepted classifications in all particulars ... except one. And that one had the scientist tearing his hair. The mass of every observable body except the ship herself was practically non-existent. Even the two planetary systems discovered by the electron telescope flouted their impossible lack of mass. Ivy suggested that since the Cleopatra and her crew were no part of this alien cosmos, no prime-space instruments could detect the errant mass. Like a microscopic bull in a gargantuan china shop, the Tellurian warship existed under a completely different set of physical laws than did the heavenly bodies of this strange space. It was pure conjecture, but it seemed well supported by the observable facts. The hull continued to glow with its unnatural witchfire, and soon disturbing reports were coming in from the Damage Control section that the thickness of the outer hull was actually being reduced. The rate was slow, and there was no immediate danger, but it was nevertheless unnerving to realize that Lover-Girl was being dissolved by something . Also, the outside Geigs recorded a phenomenal amount of short radiation emanating from the ship herself . The insulation kept most of it from penetrating, but tests showed that the strange radiation's source was the glow that clung stubbornly to the spacer's skin. A tense week passed and then the ship neared the spot where a change over to prime-space could be effected. According to Bayne's calculations, 40 Eridani C would be within 40,000,000 miles of them when the ship emerged from hyper space. And then the Radar section picked up the planetoids. Millions of them, large and small, lay in a globular cluster dead ahead. They spread out in all directions for more than half a parsec ... dull, rocky little worlds without a gram of detectable mass. All that waited for the Cleopatra in her own cosmos was a hot reception at the hands of the defenders of 40 Eridani C II, while here was mystery at close range. Mystery that was not cosmic in scope ... just a swarm of innocuous seeming planetoids ... the first explorable worlds that they had neared in this universe. Strike decided to heave to and examine their find. Ivy wanted samples and though no one said it in so many words ... no one was anxious for another encounter with the rapacious Eridans. With typically human adaptiveness they had sublimated their fear of the unknown space in which they found themselves. Curiosity took the place of fear and here was something close at hand to probe. Anthropoid inquisitiveness prevailed.

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OUT OF THE IRON WOMB! By POUL ANDERSON Behind a pale Venusian mask lay hidden the arch-humanist, the anti-tech killer ... one of those who needlessly had strewn Malone blood across the heavens from Saturn to the sun. Now—on distant Trojan asteroids—the rendezvous for death was plainly marked. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The most dangerous is not the outlawed murderer, who only slays men, but the rebellious philosopher: for he destroys worlds. Darkness and the chill glitter of stars. Bo Jonsson crouched on a whirling speck of stone and waited for the man who was coming to kill him. There was no horizon. The flying mountain on which he stood was too small. At his back rose a cliff of jagged rock, losing its own blackness in the loom of shadows; its teeth ate raggedly across the Milky Way. Before him, a tumbled igneous wilderness slanted crazily off, with one long thin crag sticking into the sky like a grotesque bowsprit. There was no sound except the thudding of his own heart, the harsh rasp of his own breath, locked inside the stinking metal skin of his suit. Otherwise ... no air, no heat, no water or life or work of man, only a granite nakedness spinning through space out beyond Mars. Stooping, awkward in the clumsy armor, he put the transparent plastic of his helmet to the ground. Its cold bit at him even through the insulating material. He might be able to hear the footsteps of his murderer conducted through the ground. Stillness answered him. He gulped a heavy lungful of tainted air and rose. The other might be miles away yet, or perhaps very close, catfooting too softly to set up vibrations. A man could do that when gravity was feeble enough. The stars blazed with a cruel wintry brilliance, over him, around him, light-years to fall through emptiness before he reached one. He had been alone among them before; he had almost thought them friends. Sometimes, on a long watch, a man found himself talking to Vega or Spica or dear old Beetle Juice, murmuring what was in him as if the remote sun could understand. But they didn't care, he saw that now. To them, he did not exist, and they would shine carelessly long after he was gone into night. He had never felt so alone as now, when another man was on the asteroid with him, hunting him down. Bo Jonsson looked at the wrench in his hand. It was long and massive, it would have been heavy on Earth, but it was hardly enough to unscrew the stars and reset the machinery of a universe gone awry. He smiled stiffly at the thought. He wanted to laugh too, but checked himself for fear he wouldn't be able to stop. Let's face it , he told himself. You're scared. You're scared sweatless. He wondered if he had spoken it aloud. There was plenty of room on the asteroid. At least two hundred square miles, probably more if you allowed for the rough surface. He could skulk around, hide ... and suffocate when his tanked air gave out. He had to be a hunter, too, and track down the other man, before he died. And if he found his enemy, he would probably die anyway. He looked about him. Nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing but the streaming of the constellations as the asteroid spun. Nothing had ever moved here, since the beginning of time when moltenness congealed into death. Not till men came and hunted each other. Slowly he forced himself to move. The thrust of his foot sent him up, looping over the cliff to drift down like a dead leaf in Earth's October. Suit, equipment, and his own body, all together, weighed only a couple of pounds here. It was ghostly, this soundless progress over fields which had never known life. It was like being dead already. Bo Jonsson's tongue was dry and thick in his mouth. He wanted to find his enemy and give up, buy existence at whatever price it would command. But he couldn't do that. Even if the other man let him do it, which was doubtful, he couldn't. Johnny Malone was dead. Maybe that was what had started it all—the death of Johnny Malone. There are numerous reasons for basing on the Trojan asteroids, but the main one can be given in a single word: stability. They stay put in Jupiter's orbit, about sixty degrees ahead and behind, with only minor oscillations; spaceships need not waste fuel coming up to a body which has been perturbed a goodly distance from where it was supposed to be. The trailing group is the jumping-off place for trans-Jovian planets, the leading group for the inner worlds—that way, their own revolution about the sun gives the departing ship a welcome boost, while minimizing the effects of Jupiter's drag. Moreover, being dense clusters, they have attracted swarms of miners, so that Achilles among the leaders and Patroclus in the trailers have a permanent boom town atmosphere. Even though a spaceship and equipment represent a large investment, this is one of the last strongholds of genuinely private enterprise: the prospector, the mine owner, the rockhound dreaming of the day when his stake is big enough for him to start out on his own—a race of individualists, rough and noisy and jealous, but living under iron rules of hospitality and rescue. The Last Chance on Achilles has another name, which simply sticks an "r" in the official one; even for that planetoid, it is a rowdy bar where Guardsmen come in trios. But Johnny Malone liked it, and talked Bo Jonsson into going there for a final spree before checkoff and departure. "Nothing to compare," he insisted. "Every place else is getting too fantangling civilized, except Venus, and I don't enjoy Venus." Johnny was from Luna City himself: a small, dark man with the quick nervous movements and dipped accent of that roaring commercial metropolis. He affected the latest styles, brilliant colors in the flowing tunic and slacks, a beret cocked on his sleek head. But somehow he didn't grate on Bo, they had been partners for several years now. They pushed through a milling crowd at the bar, rockhounds who watched one of Achilles' three live ecdysiasts with hungry eyes, and by some miracle found an empty booth. Bo squeezed his bulk into one side of the cubicle while Johnny, squinting through a reeking smoke-haze, dialed drinks. Bo was larger and heavier than most spacemen—he'd never have gotten his certificate before the ion drive came in—and was usually content to let others talk while he listened. A placid blond giant, with amiable blue eyes in a battered brown face, he did not consider himself bright, and always wanted to learn. Johnny gulped his drink and winced. "Whiskey, they call it yet! Water, synthetic alcohol, and a dash of caramel they have the gall to label whiskey and charge for!" "Everything's expensive here," said Bo mildly. "That's why so few rockhounds get rich. They make a lot of money, but they have to spend it just as fast to stay alive." "Yeh ... yeh ... wish they'd spend some of it on us." Johnny grinned and fed the dispenser another coin. It muttered to itself and slid forth a tray with a glass. "C'mon, drink up, man. It's a long way home, and we've got to fortify ourselves for the trip. A bottle, a battle, and a wench is what I need. Most especially the wench, because I don't think the eminent Dr. McKittrick is gonna be interested in sociability, and it's close quarters aboard the Dog ." Bo kept on sipping slowly. "Johnny," he said, raising his voice to cut through the din, "you're an educated man. I never could figure out why you want to talk like a jumper." "Because I am one at heart. Look, Bo, why don't you get over that inferiority complex of yours? A man can't run a spaceship without knowing more math and physical science than the average professor on Earth. So you had to work your way through the Academy and never had a chance to fan yourself with a lily white hand while somebody tootled Mozart through a horn. So what?" Johnny's head darted around, birdlike. "If we want some women we'd better make our reservations now." "I don't, Johnny," said Bo. "I'll just nurse a beer." It wasn't morals so much as fastidiousness; he'd wait till they hit Luna. "Suit yourself. If you don't want to uphold the honor of the Sirius Transportation Company—" Bo chuckled. The Company consisted of (a) the Sirius ; (b) her crew, himself and Johnny; (c) a warehouse, berth, and three other part owners back in Luna City. Not exactly a tramp ship, because you can't normally stop in the middle of an interplanetary voyage and head for somewhere else; but she went wherever there was cargo or people to be moved. Her margin of profit was not great in spite of the charges, for a space trip is expensive; but in a few more years they'd be able to buy another ship or two, and eventually Fireball and Triplanetary would be getting some competition. Even the public lines might have to worry a little. Johnny put away another couple of shots and rose. Alcohol cost plenty, but it was also more effective in low-gee. "'Scuse me," he said. "I see a target. Sure you don't want me to ask if she has a friend?" Bo shook his head and watched his partner move off, swift in the puny gravity—the Last Chance didn't centrifuge like some of the tommicker places downtown. It was hard to push through the crowd without weight to help, but Johnny faded along and edged up to the girl with his highest-powered smile. There were several other men standing around her, but Johnny had The Touch. He'd be bringing her back here in a few minutes. Bo sighed, feeling a bit lonesome. If he wasn't going to make a night of it, there was no point in drinking heavily. He had to make the final inspection of the ship tomorrow, and grudged the cost of anti-hangover tablets. Besides what he was putting back into the business, he was trying to build a private hoard; some day, he'd retire and get married and build a house. He already had the site picked out, on Kullen overlooking the Sound, back on Earth. Man, but it was a long time since he'd been on Earth! A sharp noise slashed through the haze of talk and music Bo looked up. There was a tall black haired man, Venusian to judge by his kilts, arguing with Johnny. His face was ugly with anger. Johnny made some reply. Bo heaved up his form and strode toward the discussion, casually picking up anyone in the way and setting him aside. Johnny liked a fight, but this Venusian was big. As he neared, he caught words: "—my girl, dammit." "Like hell I am!" said the girl. "I never saw you before—" "Run along and play, son," said Johnny. "Or do you want me to change that diaper of yours?" That was when it happened. Bo saw the little needler spit from the Venusian's fingers. Johnny stood there a moment, looking foolishly at the dart in his stomach. Then his knees buckled and he fell with a nightmare slowness. The Venusian was already on the move. He sprang straight up, slammed a kick at the wall, and arced out the door into the dome corridor beyond. A spaceman, that. Knows how to handle himself in low-gee. It was the only clear thought which ran in the sudden storm of Bo's head. The girl screamed. A man cursed and tried to follow the Venusian. He tangled with another. "Get outta my way!" A roar lifted, someone slugged, someone else coolly smashed a bottle against the bar and lifted the jagged end. There was the noise of a fist meeting flesh. Bo had seen death before. That needle wasn't anesthetic, it was poison. He knelt in the riot with Johnny's body in his arms. II Suddenly the world came to an end. There was a sheer drop-off onto the next face of the rough cube which was the asteroid. Bo lay on his belly and peered down the cliff, it ran for a couple of miles and beyond it were the deeps of space and the cold stars. He could dimly see the tortured swirl of crystallization patterns in the smooth bareness. No place to hide; his enemy was not there. He turned the thought over in a mind which seemed stiff and slow. By crossing that little plain he was exposing himself to a shot from one of its edges. On the other hand, he could just as well be bushwhacked from a ravine as he jumped over. And this route was the fastest for completing his search scheme. The Great Bear slid into sight, down under the world as it turned. He had often stood on winter nights, back in Sweden, and seen its immense sprawl across the weird flicker of aurora; but even then he wanted the spaceman's experience of seeing it from above. Well, now he had his wish, and much good it had done him. He went over the edge of the cliff, cautiously, for it wouldn't take much of an impetus to throw him off this rock entirely. Then his helpless and soon frozen body would be just another meteor for the next million years. The vague downward sensation of gravity shifted insanely as he moved; he had the feeling that the world was tilting around him. Now it was the precipice which was a scarred black plain underfoot, reaching to a saw-toothed bluff at its farther edge. He moved with flat low-gee bounds. Besides the danger of springing off the asteroid entirely, there was its low acceleration to keep a man near the ground; jump up a few feet and it would take you a while to fall back. It was utterly silent around him. He had never thought there could be so much stillness. He was halfway across when the bullet came. He saw no flash, heard no crack, but suddenly the fissured land before him exploded in a soundless shower of chips. The bullet ricocheted flatly, heading off for outer space. No meteor gravel, that! Bo stood unmoving an instant, fighting the impulse to leap away. He was a spaceman, not a rockhound; he wasn't used to this environment, and if he jumped high he could be riddled as he fell slowly down again. Sweat was cold on his body. He squinted, trying to see where the shot had come from. Suddenly he was zigzagging off across the plain toward the nearest edge. Another bullet pocked the ground near him. The sun rose, a tiny heatless dazzle blinding in his eyes. Fire crashed at his back. Thunder and darkness exploded before him. He lurched forward, driven by the impact. Something was roaring, echoes clamorous in his helmet. He grew dimly aware that it was himself. Then he was falling, whirling down into the black between the stars. There was a knife in his back, it was white-hot and twisting between the ribs. He stumbled over the edge of the plain and fell, waking when his armor bounced a little against stone. Breath rattled in his throat as he turned his head. There was a white plume standing over his shoulder, air streaming out through the hole and freezing its moisture. The knife in him was not hot, it was cold with an ultimate cold. Around him, world and stars rippled as if seen through heat, through fever. He hung on the edge of creation by his fingertips, while chaos shouted beneath. Theoretically, one man can run a spaceship, but in practice two or three are required for non-military craft. This is not only an emergency reserve, but a preventive of emergencies, for one man alone might get too tired at the critical moments. Bo knew he wouldn't be allowed to leave Achilles without a certified partner, and unemployed spacemen available for immediate hiring are found once in a Venusian snowfall. Bo didn't care the first day. He had taken Johnny out to Helmet Hill and laid him in the barren ground to wait, unchanging now, till Judgement Day. He felt empty then, drained of grief and hope alike, his main thought a dull dread of having to tell Johnny's father when he reached Luna. He was too slow and clumsy with words; his comforting hand would only break the old man's back. Old Malone had given six sons to space, Johnny was the last; from Saturn to the sun, his blood was strewn for nothing. It hardly seemed to matter that the Guards office reported itself unable to find the murderer. A single Venusian should have been easy to trace on Achilles, but he seemed to have vanished completely. Bo returned to the transient quarters and dialed Valeria McKittrick. She looked impatiently at him out of the screen. "Well," she said, "what's the matter? I thought we were blasting today." "Hadn't you heard?" asked Bo. He found it hard to believe she could be ignorant, here where everybody's life was known to everybody else. "Johnny's dead. We can't leave." "Oh ... I'm sorry. He was such a nice little man—I've been in the lab all the time, packing my things, and didn't know." A frown crossed her clear brow. "But you've got to get me back. I've engaged passage to Luna with you." "Your ticket will be refunded, of course," said Bo heavily. "But you aren't certified, and the Sirius is licensed for no less than two operators." "Well ... damn! There won't be another berth for weeks, and I've got to get home. Can't you find somebody?" Bo shrugged, not caring much. "I'll circulate an ad if you want, but—" "Do so, please. Let me know." She switched off. Bo sat for a moment thinking about her. Valeria McKittrick was worth considering. She wasn't beautiful in any conventional sense but she was tall and well built; there were good lines in the strong high boned face, and her hair was a cataract of spectacular red. And brains, too ... you didn't get to be a physicist with the Union's radiation labs for nothing. He knew she was still young, and that she had been on Achilles for about a year working on some special project and was now ready to go home. She was human enough, had been to most of the officers' parties and danced and laughed and flirted mildly, but even the dullest rockhound gossip knew she was too lost in her work to do more. Out here a woman was rare, and a virtuous woman unheard-of; as a result, unknown to herself, Dr. McKittrick's fame had spread through more thousands of people and millions of miles than her professional achievements were ever likely to reach. Since coming here, on commission from the Lunar lab, to bring her home, Bo Jonsson had given her an occasional wistful thought. He liked intelligent women, and he was getting tired of rootlessness. But of course it would be a catastrophe if he fell in love with her because she wouldn't look twice at a big dumb slob like him. He had sweated out a couple of similar affairs in the past and didn't want to go through another. He placed his ad on the radinews circuit and then went out to get drunk. It was all he could do for Johnny now, drink him a final wassail. Already his friend was cold under the stars. In the course of the evening he found himself weeping. He woke up many hours later. Achilles ran on Earth time but did not rotate on it; officially, it was late at night, actually the shrunken sun was high over the domes. The man in the upper bunk said there was a message for him; he was to call one Einar Lundgard at the Comet Hotel soonest. The Comet! Anyone who could afford a room to himself here, rather than a kip in the public barracks, was well fueled. Bo swallowed a tablet and made his way to the visi and dialed. The robo-clerk summoned Lundgard down to the desk. It was a lean, muscular face under close cropped brown hair which appeared in the screen. Lundgard was a tall and supple man, somehow neat even without clothes. "Jonsson," said Bo. "Sorry to get you up, but I understood—" "Oh, yes. Are you looking for a spaceman? I heard your ad and I'm available." Bo felt his mouth gape open. "Huh? I never thought—" "We're both lucky, I guess." Lundgard chuckled. His English had only the slightest trace of accent, less than Bo's. "I thought I was stashed here too for the next several months." "How does a qualified spaceman happen to be marooned?" "I'm with Fireball, was on the Drake —heard of what happened to her?" Bo nodded, for every spaceman knows exactly what every spaceship is doing at any given time. The Drake had come to Achilles to pick up a cargo of refined thorium for Earth; while she lay in orbit, she had somehow lost a few hundred pounds of reaction-mass water from a cracked gasket. Why the accident should have occurred, nobody knew ... spacemen were not careless about inspections, and what reason would anyone have for sabotage? The event had taken place about a month ago, when the Sirius was already enroute here; Bo had heard of it in the course of shop talk. "I thought she went back anyway," he said. Lundgard nodded. "She did. It was the usual question of economics. You know what refined fuel water costs in the Belt; also, the delay while we got it would have carried Earth and Achilles past optimum position, which'd make the trip home that much more expensive. Since we had one more man aboard than really required, it was cheaper to leave him behind; the difference in mass would make up for the fuel loss. I volunteered, even suggested the idea, because ... well, it happened during my watch, and even if nobody blamed me I couldn't help feeling guilty." Bo understood that kind of loyalty. You couldn't travel space without men who had it. "The Company beamed a message: I'd stay here till their schedule permitted an undermanned ship to come by, but that wouldn't be for maybe months," went on Lundgard. "I can't see sitting on this lump that long without so much as a chance at planetfall bonus. If you'll take me on, I'm sure the Company will agree; I'll get a message to them on the beam right away." "Take us a while to get back," warned Bo. "We're going to stop off at another asteroid to pick up some automatic equipment, and won't go into hyperbolic orbit till after that. About six weeks from here to Earth, all told." "Against six months here?" Lundgard laughed; it emphasized the bright charm of his manner. "Sunblaze. I'll work for free." "No need to. Bring your papers over tomorrow, huh?" The certificate and record were perfectly in order, showing Einar Lundgard to be a Spacetech 1/cl with eight years' experience, qualified as engineer, astronaut, pilot, and any other of the thousand professions which have run into one. They registered articles and shook hands on it. "Call me Bo. It really is my name ... Swedish." "Another squarehead, eh?" grinned Lundgard. "I'm from South America myself." "Notice a year's gap here," said Bo, pointing to the service record. "On Venus." "Oh, yes. I had some fool idea about settling but soon learned better. I tried to farm, but when you have to carve your own land out of howling desert—Well, let's start some math, shall we?" They were lucky, not having to wait their turn at the station computer; no other ship was leaving immediately. They fed it the data and requirements, and got back columns of numbers: fuel requirements, acceleration times, orbital elements. The figures always had to be modified, no trip ever turned out just as predicted, but that could be done when needed with a slipstick and the little ship's calculator. Bo went at his share of the job doggedly, checking and re-checking before giving the problem to the machine; Lundgard breezed through it and spent his time while waiting for Bo in swapping dirty limericks with the tech. He had some good ones. The Sirius was loaded, inspected, and cleared. A "scooter" brought her three passengers up to her orbit, they embarked, settled down, and waited. At the proper time, acceleration jammed them back in a thunder of rockets. Bo relaxed against the thrust, thinking of Achilles falling away behind them. "So long," he whispered. "So long, Johnny." III In another minute, he would be knotted and screaming from the bends, and a couple of minutes later he would be dead. Bo clamped his teeth together, as if he would grip consciousness in his jaws. His hands felt cold and heavy, the hands of a stranger, as he fumbled for the supply pouch. It seemed to recede from him, down a hollow infinite corridor where echoes talked in a language he did not know. "Damn," he gasped. "Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn." He got the pouch open somehow. The stars wheeled around him. There were stars buzzing in his head, like cold white fireflies, buzzing and buzzing in the enormous ringing emptiness of his skull. Pain jagged through him, he felt his eardrums popping as pressure dropped. The plastic patch stuck to his metal gauntlet. He peeled it off, trying not to howl with the fury ripping in his nerves. His body was slow, inert, a thing to fight. There was no more feeling in his back, was he dead already? Redness flamed before his eyes, red like Valeria's hair blowing across the stars. It was sheer reflex which brought his arm around to slap the patch over the hole in his suit. The adhesive gripped, drying fast in the sucking vacuum. The patch bellied out from internal air pressure, straining to break loose and kill him. Bo's mind wavered back toward life. He opened the valves wide on his tanks, and his thermostatic capacitors pumped heat back into him. For a long time he lay there, only lungs and heart had motion. His throat felt withered and flayed, but the rasp of air through it was like being born again. Born, spewed out of an iron womb into a hollowness of stars and cold, to lie on naked rock while the enemy hunted him. Bo shuddered and wanted to scream again. Slowly he groped back toward awareness. His frostbitten back tingled as it warmed up again, soon it would be afire. He could feel a hot trickling of blood, but it was along his right side. The bullet must have spent most of its force punching through the armor, caromed off the inside, scratched his ribs, and fallen dead. Next time he probably wouldn't be so lucky. A magnetic-driven .30 slug would go through a helmet, splashing brains as it passed. He turned his head, feeling a great weariness, and looked at the gauges. This had cost him a lot of air. There was only about three hours worth left. Lundgard could kill him simply by waiting. It would be easy to die. He lay on his back, staring up at the stars and the spilling cloudy glory of the Milky Way. A warmth was creeping back into numbed hands and feet; soon he would be warm all over, and sleepy. His eyelids felt heavy, strange that they should be so heavy on an asteroid. He wanted terribly to sleep.

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DUST UNTO DUST By LYMAN D. HINCKLEY It was alien but was it dead, this towering, sinister city of metal that glittered malignantly before the cautious advance of three awed space-scouters. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Martin set the lifeboat down carefully, with all the attention one usually exercises in a situation where the totally unexpected has occurred, and he and his two companions sat and stared in awed silence at the city a quarter-mile away. He saw the dull, black walls of buildings shouldering grimly into the twilight sky, saw the sheared edge where the metal city ended and the barren earth began ... and he remembered observing, even before they landed, the too-strict geometry imposed on the entire construction. He frowned. The first impression was ... malignant. Wass, blond and slight, with enough nose for three or four men, unbuckled his safety belt and stood up. "Shall we, gentlemen?" and with a graceful movement of hand and arm he indicated the waiting city. Martin led Wass, and the gangling, scarecrow-like Rodney, through the stillness overlaying the barren ground. There was only the twilight sky, and harsh and black against it, the convoluted earth. And the city. Malignant. He wondered, again, what beings would choose to build a city—even a city like this one—in such surroundings. The men from the ship knew only the surface facts about this waiting geometric discovery. Theirs was the eleventh inter-planetary flight, and the previous ten, in the time allowed them for exploration while this planet was still close enough to their own to permit a safe return in their ships, had not spotted the city. But the eleventh expedition had, an hour ago, with just thirteen hours left during which a return flight could be safely started. So far as was known, this was the only city on the planet—the planet without any life at all, save tiny mosses, for a million years or more. And no matter which direction from the city a man moved, he would always be going north. "Hey, Martin!" Rodney called through his helmet radio. Martin paused. "Wind," Rodney said, coming abreast of him. He glanced toward the black pile, as if sharing Martin's thoughts. "That's all we need, isn't it?" Martin looked at the semi-transparent figures of wind and dust cavorting in the distance, moving toward them. He grinned a little, adjusting his radio. "Worried?" Rodney's bony face was without expression. "Gives me the creeps, kind of. I wonder what they were like?" Wass murmured, "Let us hope they aren't immortal." Three feet from the edge of the city Martin stopped and stubbed at the sand with the toe of his boot, clearing earth from part of a shining metal band. Wass watched him, and then shoved aside more sand, several feet away. "It's here, too." Martin stood up. "Let's try farther on. Rodney, radio the ship, tell them we're going in." Rodney nodded. After a time, Wass said, "Here, too. How far do you think it goes?" Martin shrugged. "Clear around the city? I'd like to know what it is—was—for." "Defense," Rodney, several yards behind, suggested. "Could be," Martin said. "Let's go in." The three crossed the metal band and walked abreast down a street, their broad soft soled boots making no sound on the dull metal. They passed doors and arches and windows and separate buildings. They moved cautiously across five intersections. And they stood in a square surrounded by the tallest buildings in the city. Rodney broke the silence, hesitantly. "Not—not very big. Is it?" Wass looked at him shrewdly. "Neither were the—well, shall we call them, people? Have you noticed how low everything is?" Rodney's laughter rose, too. Then, sobering—"Maybe they crawled." A nebulous image, product of childhood's vivid imagination, moved slowly across Martin's mind. "All right!" he rapped out—and the image faded. "Sorry," Rodney murmured, his throat working beneath his lantern jaw. Then—"I wonder what it's like here in the winter when there's no light at all?" "I imagine they had illumination of some sort," Martin answered, dryly. "If we don't hurry up and get through this place and back to the ship, we're very likely to find out." Rodney said quickly, "I mean outside." "Out there, too, Rodney, they must have had illumination." Martin looked back along the straight, metal street they'd walked on, and past that out over the bleak, furrowed slopes where the ship's lifeboat lay ... and he thought everything outside the city seemed, somehow, from here, a little dim, a little hazy. He straightened his shoulders. The city was alien, of course, and that explained most of it ... most of it. But he felt the black city was something familiar, yet twisted and distorted. "Well," Wass said, his nose wrinkling a bit, "now that we're here...." "Pictures," Martin decided. "We have twelve hours. We'll start here. What's the matter, Wass?" The blond man grinned ruefully. "I left the camera in the lifeboat." There was a pause. Then Wass, defensively—"It's almost as if the city didn't want to be photographed." Martin ignored the remark. "Go get it. Rodney and I will be somewhere along this street." Wass turned away. Martin and Rodney started slowly down the wide metal street, at right angles to their path of entrance. Again Martin felt a tug of twisted, distorted familiarity. It was almost as if ... they were human up to a certain point, the point being, perhaps, some part of their minds.... Alien things, dark and subtle, things no man could ever comprehend. Parallel evolution on two inner planets of the same system? Somewhere, sometime, a common ancestor? Martin noted the shoulder-high doors, the heavier gravity, remembered the inhabitants of the city vanished before the thing that was to become man ever emerged from the slime, and he decided to grin at himself, at his own imagination. Rodney jerked his scarecrow length about quickly, and a chill sped up Martin's spine. "What's the matter?" The bony face was white, the gray eyes were wide. "I saw—I thought I saw—something—moving—" Anger rose in Martin. "You didn't," he said flatly, gripping the other's shoulder cruelly. "You couldn't have. Get hold of yourself, man!" Rodney stared. "The wind. Remember? There isn't any, here." "... How could there be? The buildings protect us now. It was blowing from the other direction." Rodney wrenched free of Martin's grip. He gestured wildly. "That—" "Martin!" Wass' voice came through the receivers in both their radios. "Martin, I can't get out!" Rodney mumbled something, and Martin told him to shut up. Wass said, more quietly, "Remember that metal band? It's all clear now, and glittering, as far as I can see. I can't get across it; it's like a glass wall." "We're trapped, we're trapped, they are—" "Shut up, Rodney! Wass, I'm only two sections from the edge. I'll check here." Martin clapped a hand on Rodney's shoulder again, starting him moving, toward the city's edge, past the black, silent buildings. The glittering band was here, too, like a halo around a silhouette. "No go," Martin said to Wass. He bit at his lower lip. "I think it must be all around us." He was silent for a time, exploring the consequences of this. Then—"We'll meet you in the middle of the city, where we separated." Walking with Rodney, Martin heard Wass' voice, flat and metallic through the radio receiver against his ear. "What do you suppose caused this?" He shook his head angrily, saying, "Judging by reports of the rest of the planet, it must have been horribly radioactive at one time. All of it." "Man-made radiation, you mean." Martin grinned faintly. Wass, too, had an active imagination. "Well, alien-made, anyhow. Perhaps they had a war." Wass' voice sounded startled. "Anti-radiation screen?" Rodney interrupted, "There hasn't been enough radiation around here for hundreds of thousands of years to activate such a screen." Wass said coldly, "He's right, Martin." Martin crossed an intersection, Rodney slightly behind him. "You're both wrong," he said. "We landed here today." Rodney stopped in the middle of the metal street and stared down at Martin. "The wind—?" "Why not?" "That would explain why it stopped so suddenly, then." Rodney stood straighter. When he walked again, his steps were firmer. They reached the center of the city, ahead of the small, slight Wass, and stood watching him labor along the metal toward them. Wass' face, Martin saw, was sober. "I tried to call the ship. No luck." "The shield?" Wass nodded. "What else?" "I don't know—" "If we went to the roof of the tallest building," Rodney offered, "we might—" Martin shook his head. "No. To be effective, the shield would have to cover the city." Wass stared down at the metal street, as if he could look through it. "I wonder where it gets its power?" "Down below, probably. If there is a down below." Martin hesitated. "We may have to...." "What?" Rodney prompted. Martin shrugged. "Let's look." He led the way through a shoulder-high arch in one of the tall buildings surrounding the square. The corridor inside was dim and plain, and he switched on his flashlight, the other two immediately following his example. The walls and the rounded ceiling of the corridor were of the same dull metal as the buildings' facades, and the streets. There were a multitude of doors and arches set into either side of the corridor. It was rather like ... entering a gigantic metal beehive. Martin chose an arch, with beyond it a metal ramp, which tilted downward, gleaming in the pale circle of his torch. A call from Rodney halted him. "Back here," the tall man repeated. "It looks like a switchboard." The three advanced to the end of the central corridor, pausing before a great arch, outlined in the too-careful geometrical figures Martin had come to associate with the city builders. The three torches, shining through the arch, picked out a bank of buttons, handles ... and a thick rope of cables which ran upward to vanish unexpectedly in the metal roof. "Is this it," Wass murmured, "or an auxiliary?" Martin shrugged. "The whole city's no more than a machine, apparently." "Another assumption," Wass said. "We have done nothing but make assumptions ever since we got here." "What would you suggest, instead?" Martin asked calmly. Rodney furtively, extended one hand toward a switch. "No!" Martin said, sharply. That was one assumption they dared not make. Rodney turned. "But—" "No. Wass, how much time have we?" "The ship leaves in eleven hours." "Eleven hours," Rodney repeated. "Eleven hours!" He reached out for the switch again. Martin swore, stepped forward, pulled him back roughly. He directed his flashlight at Rodney's thin, pale face. "What do you think you're doing?" "We have to find out what all this stuff's for!" "Going at it blindly, we'd probably execute ourselves." "We've got to—" "No!" Then, more quietly—"We still have eleven hours to find a way out." "Ten hours and forty-five minutes," Wass disagreed softly. "Minus the time it takes us to get to the lifeboat, fly to the ship, land, stow it, get ourselves aboard, and get the big ship away from the planet. And Captain Morgan can't wait for us, Martin." "You too, Wass?" "Up to the point of accuracy, yes." Martin said, "Not necessarily. You go the way the wind does, always thinking of your own tender hide, of course." Rodney cursed. "And every second we stand here doing nothing gives us that much less time to find a way out. Martin—" "Make one move toward that switchboard and I'll stop you where you stand!" Wass moved silently through the darkness beyond the torches. "We all have guns, Martin." "I'm holding mine." Martin waited. After a moment, Wass switched his flashlight back on. He said quietly, "He's right, Rodney. It would be sure death to monkey around in here." "Well...." Rodney turned quickly toward the black arch. "Let's get out of here, then!" Martin hung back waiting for the others to go ahead of him down the metal hall. At the other arch, where the ramp led downward, he called a halt. "If the dome, or whatever it is, is a radiation screen there must be at least half-a-dozen emergency exits around the city." Rodney said, "To search every building next to the dome clean around the city would take years." Martin nodded. "But there must be central roads beneath this main level leading to them. Up here there are too many roads." Wass laughed rudely. "Have you a better idea?" Wass ignored that, as Martin hoped he would. He said slowly, "That leads to another idea. If the band around the city is responsible for the dome, does it project down into the ground as well?" "You mean dig out?" Martin asked. "Sure. Why not?" "We're wearing heavy suits and bulky breathing units. We have no equipment." "That shouldn't be hard to come by." Martin smiled, banishing Wass' idea. Rodney said, "They may have had their digging equipment built right in to themselves." "Anyway," Martin decided, "we can take a look down below." "In the pitch dark," Wass added. Martin adjusted his torch, began to lead the way down the metal ramp. The incline was gentle, apparently constructed for legs shorter, feet perhaps less broad than their own. The metal, without mark of any sort, gleamed under the combined light of the torches, unrolling out of the darkness before the men. At length the incline melted smoothly into the next level of the city. Martin shined his light upward, and the others followed his example. Metal as smooth and featureless as that on which they stood shone down on them. Wass turned his light parallel with the floor, and then moved slowly in a circle. "No supports. No supports anywhere. What keeps all that up there?" "I don't know. I have no idea." Martin gestured toward the ramp with his light. "Does all this, this whole place, look at all familiar to you?" Rodney's gulp was clearly audible through the radio receivers. "Here?" "No, no," Martin answered impatiently, "not just here. I mean the whole city." "Yes," Wass said dryly, "it does. I'm sure this is where all my nightmares stay when they're not on shift." Martin turned on his heel and started down a metal avenue which, he thought, paralleled the street above. And Rodney and Wass followed him silently. They moved along the metal, past unfamiliar shapes made more so by gloom and moving shadows, past doors dancing grotesquely in the three lights, past openings in the occasional high metal partitions, past something which was perhaps a conveyor belt, past another something which could have been anything at all. The metal street ended eventually in a blank metal wall. The edge of the city—the city which was a dome of force above and a bowl of metal below. After a long time, Wass sighed. "Well, skipper...?" "We go back, I guess," Martin said. Rodney turned swiftly to face him. Martin thought the tall man was holding his gun. "To the switchboard, Martin?" "Unless someone has a better idea," Martin conceded. He waited. But Rodney was holding the gun ... and Wass was.... Then—"I can't think of anything else." They began to retrace their steps along the metal street, back past the same dancing shapes of metal, the partitions, the odd windows, all looking different now in the new angles of illumination. Martin was in the lead. Wass followed him silently. Rodney, tall, matchstick thin, even in his cumbersome suit, swayed with jaunty triumph in the rear. Martin looked at the metal street lined with its metal objects and he sighed. He remembered how the dark buildings of the city looked at surface level, how the city itself looked when they were landing, and then when they were walking toward it. The dream was gone again for now. Idealism died in him, again and again, yet it was always reborn. But—The only city, so far as anyone knew, on the first planet they'd ever explored. And it had to be like this. Nightmares, Wass said, and Martin thought perhaps the city was built by a race of beings who at some point twisted away from their evolutionary spiral, plagued by a sort of racial insanity. No, Martin thought, shaking his head. No, that couldn't be. Viewpoint ... his viewpoint. It was the haunting sense of familiarity, a faint strain through all this broad jumble, the junkpile of alien metal, which was making him theorize so wildly. Then Wass touched his elbow. "Look there, Martin. Left of the ramp." Light from their torches was reflected, as from glass. "All right," Rodney said belligerently into his radio. "What's holding up the procession?" Martin was silent. Wass undertook to explain. Why not, after all? Martin asked himself. It was in Wass' own interest. In a moment, all three were standing before a bank of glass cases which stretched off into the distance as far as the combined light of their torches would reach. "Seeds!" Wass exclaimed, his faceplate pressed against the glass. Martin blinked. He thought how little time they had. He wet his lips. Wass' gloved hands fumbled awkwardly at a catch in the nearest section of the bank. Martin thought of the dark, convoluted land outside the city. If they wouldn't grow there.... Or had they, once? "Don't, Wass!" Torchlight reflected from Wass' faceplate as he turned his head. "Why not?" They were like children.... "We don't know, released, what they'll do." "Skipper," Wass said carefully, "if we don't get out of this place by the deadline we may be eating these." Martin raised his arm tensely. "Opening a seed bank doesn't help us find a way out of here." He started up the ramp. "Besides, we've no water." Rodney came last up the ramp, less jaunty now, but still holding the gun. His mind, too, was taken up with childhood's imaginings. "For a plant to grow in this environment, it wouldn't need much water. Maybe—" he had a vision of evil plants attacking them, growing with super-swiftness at the air valves and joints of their suits "—only the little moisture in the atmosphere." They stood before the switchboard again. Martin and Wass side by side, Rodney, still holding his gun, slightly to the rear. Rodney moved forward a little toward the switches. His breathing was loud and rather uneven in the radio receivers. Martin made a final effort. "Rodney, it's still almost nine hours to take off. Let's search awhile first. Let this be a last resort." Rodney jerked his head negatively. "No. Now, I know you, Martin. Postpone and postpone until it's too late, and the ship leaves without us and we're stranded here to eat seeds and gradually dehydrate ourselves and God only knows what else and—" He reached out convulsively and yanked a switch. Martin leaped, knocking him to the floor. Rodney's gun skittered away silently, like a live thing, out of the range of the torches. The radio receivers impersonally recorded the grating sounds of Rodney's sobs. "Sorry," Martin said, without feeling. He turned quickly. "Wass?" The slight, blond man stood unmoving. "I'm with you, Martin, but, as a last resort it might be better to be blown sky high than to die gradually—" Martin was watching Rodney, struggling to get up. "I agree. As a last resort. We still have a little time." Rodney's tall, spare figure looked bowed and tired in the torchlight, now that he was up again. "Martin, I—" Martin turned his back. "Skip it, Rodney," he said gently. "Water," Wass said thoughtfully. "There must be reservoirs under this city somewhere." Rodney said, "How does water help us get out?" Martin glanced at Wass, then started out of the switchboard room, not looking back. "It got in and out of the city some way. Perhaps we can leave the same way." Down the ramp again. "There's another ramp," Wass murmured. Rodney looked down it. "I wonder how many there are, all told." Martin placed one foot on the metal incline. He angled his torch down, picking out shadowy, geometrical shapes, duplicates of the ones on the present level. "We'll find out," he said, "how many there are." Eleven levels later Rodney asked, "How much time have we now?" "Seven hours," Wass said quietly, "until take-off." "One more level," Martin said, ignoring the reference to time. "I ... think it's the last." They walked down the ramp and stood together, silent in a dim pool of artificial light on the bottom level of the alien city. Rodney played his torch about the metal figures carefully placed about the floor. "Martin, what if there are no reservoirs? What if there are cemeteries instead? Or cold storage units? Maybe the switch I pulled—" "Rodney! Stop it!" Rodney swallowed audibly. "This place scares me...." "The first time I was ever in a rocket, it scared me. I was thirteen." "This is different," Wass said. "Built-in traps—" "They had a war," Martin said. Wass agreed. "And the survivors retired here. Why?" Martin said, "They wanted to rebuild. Or maybe this was already built before the war as a retreat." He turned impatiently. "How should I know?" Wass turned, too, persistent. "But the planet was through with them." "In a minute," Martin said, too irritably, "we'll have a sentient planet." From the corner of his eye he saw Rodney start at that. "Knock it off, Wass. We're looking for reservoirs, you know." They moved slowly down the metal avenue, between the twisted shadow shapes, looking carefully about them. Rodney paused. "We might not recognize one." Martin urged him on. "You know what a man-hole cover looks like." He added dryly, "Use your imagination." They reached the metal wall at the end of the avenue and paused again, uncertain. Martin swung his flashlight, illuminating the distorted metal shapes. Wass said, "All this had a purpose, once...." "We'll disperse and search carefully," Martin said. "I wonder what the pattern was." "... The reservoirs, Wass. The pattern will still be here for later expeditions to study. So will we if we don't find a way to get out." Their radios recorded Rodney's gasp. Then—"Martin! Martin! I think I've found something!" Martin began to run. After a moment's hesitation, Wass swung in behind him. "Here," Rodney said, as they came up to him, out of breath. "Here. See? Right here." Three flashlights centered on a dark, metal disk raised a foot or more from the floor. "Well, they had hands." With his torch Wass indicated a small wheel of the same metal as everything else in the city, set beside the disk. From its design Martin assumed that the disk was meant to be grasped and turned. He wondered what precisely they were standing over. "Well, Skipper, are you going to do the honors?" Martin kneeled, grasped the wheel. It turned easily—almost too easily—rotating the disk as it turned. Suddenly, without a sound, the disk rose, like a hatch, on a concealed hinge. The three men, clad in their suits and helmets, grouped around the six-foot opening, shining their torches down into the thing that drifted and eddied directly beneath them. Rodney's sudden grip on Martin's wrist nearly shattered the bone. "Martin! It's all alive! It's moving!" Martin hesitated long enough for a coil to move sinuously up toward the opening. Then he spun the wheel and the hatch slammed down. He was shaking. After a time he said, "Rodney, Wass, it's dust, down there. Remember the wind? Air currents are moving it." Rodney sat down on the metal flooring. For a long time he said nothing. Then—"It wasn't.... Why did you close the hatch then?" Martin did not say he thought the other two would have shot him, otherwise. He said merely, "At first I wasn't sure myself." Rodney stood up, backing away from the closed hatch. He held his gun loosely, and his hand shook. "Then prove it. Open it again." Martin went to the wheel. He noticed Wass was standing behind Rodney and he, too, had drawn his gun. The hatch rose again at Martin's direction. He stood beside it, outlined in the light of two torches. For a little while he was alone. Then—causing a gasp from Wass, a harsh expletive from Rodney—a tenuous, questing alien limb edged through the hatch, curling about Martin, sparkling in ten thousand separate particles in the torchlight, obscuring the dimly seen backdrop of geometrical processions of strange objects. Martin raised an arm, and the particles swirled in stately, shimmering spirals. Rodney leaned forward and looked over the edge of the hatch. He said nothing. He eyed the sparkling particles swirling about Martin, and now, himself. "How deep," Wass said, from his safe distance. "We'll have to lower a flashlight," Martin answered. Rodney, all eagerness to be of assistance now, lowered a rope with a torch swinging wildly on the end of it. The torch came to rest about thirty feet down. It shone on gently rolling mounds of fine, white stuff. Martin anchored the rope soundly, and paused, half across the lip of the hatch to stare coldly at Wass. "You'd rather monkey with the switches and blow yourself to smithereens?" Wass sighed and refused to meet Martin's gaze. Martin looked at him disgustedly, and then began to descend the rope, slowly, peering into the infinite, sparkling darkness pressing around him. At the bottom of the rope he sank to his knees in dust, and then was held even. He stamped his feet, and then, as well as he was able, did a standing jump. He sank no farther than his knees. He sighted a path parallel with the avenue above, toward the nearest edge of the city. "I think we'll be all right," he called out, "as long as we avoid the drifts." Rodney began the descent. Looking up, Martin saw Wass above Rodney. "All right, Wass," Martin said quietly, as Rodney released the rope and sank into the dust. "Not me," the answer came back quickly. "You two fools go your way, I'll go mine." "Wass!" There was no answer. The light faded swiftly away from the opening. The going was hard. The dust clung like honey to their feet, and eddied and swirled about them until the purifying systems in their suits were hard-pressed to remove the fine stuff working in at joints and valves. "Are we going straight?" Rodney asked. "Of course," Martin growled. There was silence again, the silence of almost-exhausted determination. The two men lifted their feet out of the dust, and then laboriously plunged forward, to sink again to the knees, repeated the act, times without number. Then Wass broke his silence, taunting. "The ship leaves in two hours, Martin. Two hours. Hear me, Rodney?" Martin pulled his left foot from the sand and growled deep in his throat. Ahead, through the confusing patterns of the sparkling dust, his flashlight gleamed against metal. He grabbed Rodney's arm, pointed. A grate. Rodney stared. "Wass!" he shouted. "We've found a way out!" Their radios recorded Wass' laughter. "I'm at the switchboard now, Martin. I—" There was a tinkle of breaking glass, breaking faceplate. The grate groaned upward and stopped. Wass babbled incoherently into the radio for a moment, and then he began to scream. Martin switched off his radio, sick. He turned it on again when they reached the opening in the metal wall. "Well?" "I've been trying to get you," Rodney said, frantically. "Why didn't you answer?" "We couldn't do anything for him." Rodney's face was white and drawn. "But he did this for us." "So he did," Martin said, very quietly. Rodney said nothing. Then Martin said, "Did you listen until the end?" Rodney nodded, jerkily. "He pulled three more switches. I couldn't understand it all. But—Martin, dying alone like that in a place like this—!" Martin crawled into the circular pipe behind the grate. It tilted up toward the surface. "Come on, Rodney. Last lap." An hour later they surfaced about two hundred yards away from the edge of the city. Behind them the black pile rose, the dome of force shimmering, almost invisible, about it. Ahead of them were the other two scoutships from the mother ship. Martin called out faintly, pulling Rodney out of the pipe. Crew members standing by the scoutships, and at the edge of the city, began to run toward them. "Radio picked you up as soon as you entered the pipe," someone said. It was the last thing Martin heard before he collapsed.

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MIGHTIEST QORN BY KEITH LAUMER Sly, brave and truculent, the Qornt held all humans in contempt—except one! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I Ambassador Nitworth glowered across his mirror-polished, nine-foot platinum desk at his assembled staff. "Gentlemen, are any of you familiar with a race known as the Qornt?" There was a moment of profound silence. Nitworth leaned forward, looking solemn. "They were a warlike race known in this sector back in Concordiat times, perhaps two hundred years ago. They vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. There was no record of where they went." He paused for effect. "They have now reappeared—occupying the inner planet of this system!" "But, sir," Second Secretary Magnan offered. "That's uninhabited Terrestrial territory...." "Indeed, Mr. Magnan?" Nitworth smiled icily. "It appears the Qornt do not share that opinion." He plucked a heavy parchment from a folder before him, harrumphed and read aloud: His Supreme Excellency The Qorn, Regent of Qornt, Over-Lord of the Galactic Destiny, Greets the Terrestrials and, with reference to the presence in mandated territory of Terrestrial squatters, has the honor to advise that he will require the use of his outer world on the thirtieth day. Then will the Qornt come with steel and fire. Receive, Terrestrials, renewed assurances of my awareness of your existence, and let Those who dare gird for the contest. "Frankly, I wouldn't call it conciliatory," Magnan said. Nitworth tapped the paper with a finger. "We have been served, gentlemen, with nothing less than an Ultimatum!" "Well, we'll soon straighten these fellows out—" the Military Attache began. "There happens to be more to this piece of truculence than appears on the surface," the Ambassador cut in. He paused, waiting for interested frowns to settle into place. "Note, gentlemen, that these invaders have appeared on terrestrial controlled soil—and without so much as a flicker from the instruments of the Navigational Monitor Service!" The Military Attache blinked. "That's absurd," he said flatly. Nitworth slapped the table. "We're up against something new, gentlemen! I've considered every hypothesis from cloaks of invisibility to time travel! The fact is—the Qornt fleets are indetectible!" The Military Attache pulled at his lower lip. "In that case, we can't try conclusions with these fellows until we have an indetectible drive of our own. I recommend a crash project. In the meantime—" "I'll have my boys start in to crack this thing," the Chief of the Confidential Terrestrial Source Section spoke up. "I'll fit out a couple of volunteers with plastic beaks—" "No cloak and dagger work, gentlemen! Long range policy will be worked out by Deep-Think teams back at the Department. Our role will be a holding action. Now I want suggestions for a comprehensive, well rounded and decisive course for meeting this threat. Any recommendation?" The Political Officer placed his fingertips together. "What about a stiff Note demanding an extra week's time?" "No! No begging," the Economic Officer objected. "I'd say a calm, dignified, aggressive withdrawal—as soon as possible." "We don't want to give them the idea we spook easily," the Military Attache said. "Let's delay the withdrawal—say, until tomorrow." "Early tomorrow," Magnan said. "Or maybe later today." "Well, I see you're of a mind with me," Nitworth nodded. "Our plan of action is clear, but it remains to be implemented. We have a population of over fifteen million individuals to relocate." He eyed the Political Officer. "I want five proposals for resettlement on my desk by oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow." Nitworth rapped out instructions. Harried-looking staff members arose and hurried from the room. Magnan eased toward the door. "Where are you going, Magnan?" Nitworth snapped. "Since you're so busy, I thought I'd just slip back down to Com Inq. It was a most interesting orientation lecture, Mr. Ambassador. Be sure to let us know how it works out." "Kindly return to your chair," Nitworth said coldly. "A number of chores remain to be assigned. I think you, Magnan, need a little field experience. I want you to get over to Roolit I and take a look at these Qornt personally." Magnan's mouth opened and closed soundlessly. "Not afraid of a few Qornt, are you, Magnan?" "Afraid? Good lord, no, ha ha. It's just that I'm afraid I may lose my head and do something rash if I go." "Nonsense! A diplomat is immune to heroic impulses. Take Retief along. No dawdling, now! I want you on the way in two hours. Notify the transport pool at once. Now get going!" Magnan nodded unhappily and went into the hall. "Oh, Retief," Nitworth said. Retief turned. "Try to restrain Mr. Magnan from any impulsive moves—in any direction." II Retief and Magnan topped a ridge and looked down across a slope of towering tree-shrubs and glossy violet-stemmed palms set among flamboyant blossoms of yellow and red, reaching down to a strip of white beach with the blue sea beyond. "A delightful vista," Magnan said, mopping at his face. "A pity we couldn't locate the Qornt. We'll go back now and report—" "I'm pretty sure the settlement is off to the right," Retief said. "Why don't you head back for the boat, while I ease over and see what I can observe." "Retief, we're engaged in a serious mission. This is not a time to think of sightseeing." "I'd like to take a good look at what we're giving away." "See here, Retief! One might almost receive the impression that you're questioning Corps policy!" "One might, at that. The Qornt have made their play, but I think it might be valuable to take a look at their cards before we fold. If I'm not back at the boat in an hour, lift without me." "You expect me to make my way back alone?" "It's directly down-slope—" Retief broke off, listening. Magnan clutched at his arm. There was a sound of crackling foliage. Twenty feet ahead, a leafy branch swung aside. An eight-foot biped stepped into view, long, thin, green-clad legs with back-bending knees moving in quick, bird-like steps. A pair of immense black-lensed goggles covered staring eyes set among bushy green hair above a great bone-white beak. The crest bobbed as the creature cocked its head, listening. Magnan gulped audibly. The Qornt froze, head tilted, beak aimed directly at the spot where the Terrestrials stood in the deep shade of a giant trunk. "I'll go for help," Magnan squeaked. He whirled and took three leaps into the brush. A second great green-clad figure rose up to block his way. He spun, darted to the left. The first Qornt pounced, grappled Magnan to its narrow chest. Magnan yelled, threshing and kicking, broke free, turned—and collided with the eight-foot alien, coming in fast from the right. All three went down in a tangle of limbs. Retief jumped forward, hauled Magnan free, thrust him aside and stopped, right fist cocked. The two Qornt lay groaning feebly. "Nice piece of work, Mr. Magnan," Retief said. "You nailed both of them." "Those undoubtedly are the most bloodthirsty, aggressive, merciless countenances it has ever been my misfortune to encounter," Magnan said. "It hardly seems fair. Eight feet tall and faces like that!" The smaller of the two captive Qornt ran long, slender fingers over a bony shin, from which he had turned back the tight-fitting green trousers. "It's not broken," he whistled nasally in passable Terrestrial, eyeing Magnan through the heavy goggles, now badly cracked. "Small thanks to you." Magnan smiled loftily. "I daresay you'll think twice before interfering with peaceable diplomats in future." "Diplomats? Surely you jest." "Never mind us," Retief said. "It's you fellows we'd like to talk about. How many of you are there?" "Only Zubb and myself." "I mean altogether. How many Qornt?" The alien whistled shrilly. "Here, no signalling!" Magnan snapped, looking around. "That was merely an expression of amusement." "You find the situation amusing? I assure you, sir, you are in perilous straits at the moment. I may fly into another rage, you know." "Please, restrain yourself. I was merely somewhat astonished—" a small whistle escaped—"at being taken for a Qornt." "Aren't you a Qornt?" "I? Great snail trails, no!" More stifled whistles of amusement escaped the beaked face. "Both Zubb and I are Verpp. Naturalists, as it happens." "You certainly look like Qornt." "Oh, not at all—except perhaps to a Terrestrial. The Qornt are sturdily built rascals, all over ten feet in height. And, of course, they do nothing but quarrel. A drone caste, actually." "A caste? You mean they're biologically the same as you?" "Not at all! A Verpp wouldn't think of fertilizing a Qornt." "I mean to say, you are of the same basic stock—descended from a common ancestor, perhaps." "We are all Pud's creatures." "What are the differences between you, then?" "Why, the Qornt are argumentive, boastful, lacking in appreciation for the finer things of life. One dreads to contemplate descending to their level." "Do you know anything about a Note passed to the Terrestrial Ambassador at Smorbrod?" Retief asked. The beak twitched. "Smorbrod? I know of no place called Smorbrod." "The outer planet of this system." "Oh, yes. We call it Guzzum. I had heard that some sort of creatures had established a settlement there, but I confess I pay little note to such matters." "We're wasting time, Retief," Magnan said. "We must truss these chaps up, hurry back to the boat and make our escape. You heard what they said." "Are there any Qornt down there at the harbor, where the boats are?" Retief asked. "At Tarroon, you mean? Oh, yes. Planning some adventure." "That would be the invasion of Smorbrod," Magnan said. "And unless we hurry, Retief, we're likely to be caught there with the last of the evacuees!" "How many Qornt would you say there are at Tarroon?" "Oh, a very large number. Perhaps fifteen or twenty." "Fifteen or twenty what?" Magnan looked perplexed. "Fifteen or twenty Qornt." "You mean that there are only fifteen or twenty individual Qornt in all?" Another whistle. "Not at all. I was referring to the local Qornt only. There are more at the other Centers, of course." "And the Qornt are responsible for the ultimatum—unilaterally?" "I suppose so; it sounds like them. A truculent group, you know. And interplanetary relations are rather a hobby of theirs." Zubb moaned and stirred. He sat up slowly, rubbing his head. He spoke to his companion in a shrill alien clatter of consonants. "What did he say?" "Poor Zubb. He blames me for his bruises, since it was my idea to gather you as specimens." "You should have known better than to tackle that fierce-looking creature," Zubb said, pointing his beak at Magnan. "How does it happen that you speak Terrestrial?" Retief asked. "Oh, one picks up all sorts of dialects." "It's quite charming, really," Magnan said. "Such a quaint, archaic accent." "Suppose we went down to Tarroon," Retief asked. "What kind of reception would we get?" "That depends. I wouldn't recommend interfering with the Gwil or the Rheuk; it's their nest-mending time, you know. The Boog will be busy mating—such a tedious business—and of course the Qornt are tied up with their ceremonial feasting. I'm afraid no one will take any notice of you." "Do you mean to say," Magnan demanded, "that these ferocious Qornt, who have issued an ultimatum to the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne—who openly avow their occupied world—would ignore Terrestrials in their midst?" "If at all possible." Retief got to his feet. "I think our course is clear, Mr. Magnan. It's up to us to go down and attract a little attention." III "I'm not at all sure we're going about this in the right way," Magnan puffed, trotting at Retief's side. "These fellows Zubb and Slun—Oh, they seem affable enough, but how can we be sure we're not being led into a trap?" "We can't." Magnan stopped short. "Let's go back." "All right," Retief said. "Of course there may be an ambush—" Magnan moved off. "Let's keep going." The party emerged from the undergrowth at the edge of a great brush-grown mound. Slun took the lead, rounded the flank of the hillock, halted at a rectangular opening cut into the slope. "You can find your way easily enough from here," he said. "You'll excuse us, I hope—" "Nonsense, Slun!" Zubb pushed forward. "I'll escort our guests to Qornt Hall." He twittered briefly to his fellow Verpp. Slun twittered back. "I don't like it, Retief," Magnan whispered. "Those fellows are plotting mischief." "Threaten them with violence, Mr Magnan. They're scared of you." "That's true. And the drubbing they received was well-deserved. I'm a patient man, but there are occasions—" "Come along, please," Zubb called. "Another ten minutes' walk—" "See here, we have no interest in investigating this barrow," Magnan announced. "We wish you to take us direct to Tarroon to interview your military leaders regarding the ultimatum!" "Yes, yes, of course. Qornt Hall lies here inside the village." "This is Tarroon?" "A modest civic center, sir, but there are those who love it." "No wonder we didn't observe their works from the air," Magnan muttered. "Camouflaged." He moved hesitantly through the opening. The party moved along a wide, deserted tunnel which sloped down steeply, then leveled off and branched. Zubb took the center branch, ducking slightly under the nine-foot ceiling lit at intervals with what appeared to be primitive incandescent panels. "Few signs of an advanced technology here," Magnan whispered. "These creatures must devote all their talents to warlike enterprise." Ahead, Zubb slowed. A distant susurration was audible, a sustained high-pitched screeching. "Softly, now. We approach Qornt Hall. They can be an irascible lot when disturbed at their feasting." "When will the feast be over?" Magnan called hoarsely. "In another few weeks, I should imagine, if, as you say, they've scheduled an invasion for next month." "Look here, Zubb." Magnan shook a finger at the tall alien. "How is it that these Qornt are allowed to embark on piratical ventures of this sort without reference to the wishes of the majority?" "Oh, the majority of the Qornt favor the move, I imagine." "These few hotheads are permitted to embroil the planet in war?" "Oh, they don't embroil the planet in war. They merely—" "Retief, this is fantastic! I've heard of iron-fisted military cliques before, but this is madness!" "Come softly, now." Zubb beckoned, moving toward a bend in the yellow-lit corridor. Retief and Magnan moved forward. The corridor debouched through a high double door into a vast oval chamber, high-domed, gloomy, paneled in dark wood and hung with tattered banners, scarred halberds, pikes, rusted longswords, crossed spears over patinaed hauberks, pitted radiation armor, corroded power rifles, the immense mummified heads of horned and fanged animals. Great guttering torches in wall brackets and in stands along the length of the long table shed a smoky light that reflected from the mirror polish of the red granite floor, gleamed on polished silver bowls and paper-thin glass, shone jewel-red and gold through dark bottles—and cast long flickering shadows behind the fifteen trolls at the board. Lesser trolls—beaked, bush-haired, great-eyed—trotted briskly, bird-kneed, bearing steaming platters, stood in groups of three strumming slender bottle-shaped lutes, or pranced an intricate-patterned dance, unnoticed in the shrill uproar as each of the magnificently draped, belted, feathered and jeweled Qornt carried on a shouted conversation with an equally noisy fellow. "A most interesting display of barbaric splendor," Magnan breathed. "Now we'd better be getting back." "Ah, a moment," Zubb said. "Observe the Qornt—the tallest of the feasters—he with the head-dress of crimson, purple, silver and pink." "Twelve feet if he's an inch," Magnan estimated. "And now we really must hurry along—" "That one is chief among these rowdies. I'm sure you'll want a word with him. He controls not only the Tarroonian vessels but those from the other Centers as well." "What kind of vessels? Warships?" "Certainly. What other kind would the Qornt bother with?" "I don't suppose," Magnan said casually, "that you'd know the type, tonnage, armament and manning of these vessels? And how many units comprise the fleet? And where they're based at present?" "They're fully automated twenty-thousand-ton all-purpose dreadnaughts. They mount a variety of weapons. The Qornt are fond of that sort of thing. Each of the Qornt has his own, of course. They're virtually identical, except for the personal touches each individual has given his ship." "Great heavens, Retief!" Magnan exclaimed in a whisper. "It sounds as though these brutes employ a battle armada as simpler souls might a set of toy sailboats!" Retief stepped past Magnan and Zubb to study the feasting hall. "I can see that their votes would carry all the necessary weight." "And now an interview with the Qorn himself," Zubb shrilled. "If you'll kindly step along, gentlemen...." "That won't be necessary," Magnan said hastily, "I've decided to refer the matter to committee." "After having come so far," Zubb said, "it would be a pity to miss having a cosy chat." There was a pause. "Ah ... Retief," Magnan said. "Zubb has just presented a most compelling argument...." Retief turned. Zubb stood gripping an ornately decorated power pistol in one bony hand, a slim needler in the other. Both were pointed at Magnan's chest. "I suspected you had hidden qualities, Zubb," Retief commented. "See here, Zubb! We're diplomats!" Magnan started. "Careful, Mr. Magnan; you may goad him to a frenzy." "By no means," Zubb whistled. "I much prefer to observe the frenzy of the Qornt when presented with the news that two peaceful Verpp have been assaulted and kidnapped by bullying interlopers. If there's anything that annoys the Qornt, it's Qornt-like behavior in others. Now step along, please." "Rest assured, this will be reported!" "I doubt it." "You'll face the wrath of Enlightened Galactic Opinion!" "Oh? How big a navy does Enlightened Galactic Opinion have?" "Stop scaring him, Mr. Magnan. He may get nervous and shoot." Retief stepped into the banquet hall, headed for the resplendent figure at the head of the table. A trio of flute-players broke off in mid-bleat, staring. An inverted pyramid of tumblers blinked as Retief swung past, followed by Magnan and the tall Verpp. The shrill chatter at the table faded. Qorn turned as Retief came up, blinking three-inch eyes. Zubb stepped forward, gibbered, waving his arms excitedly. Qorn pushed back his chair—a low, heavily padded stool—and stared unwinking at Retief, moving his head to bring first one great round eye, then the other, to bear. There were small blue veins in the immense fleshy beak. The bushy hair, springing out in a giant halo around the grayish, porous-skinned face, was wiry, stiff, moss-green, with tufts of chartreuse fuzz surrounding what appeared to be tympanic membranes. The tall head-dress of scarlet silk and purple feathers was slightly askew, and a loop of pink pearls had slipped down above one eye. Zubb finished his speech and fell silent, breathing hard. Qorn looked Retief over in silence, then belched. "Not bad," Retief said admiringly. "Maybe we could get up a match between you and Ambassador Sternwheeler. You've got the volume on him, but he's got timbre." "So," Qorn hooted in a resonant tenor. "You come from Guzzum, eh? Or Smorbrod, as I think you call it. What is it you're after? More time? A compromise? Negotiations? Peace?" He slammed a bony hand against the table. "The answer is no !" Zubb twittered. Qorn cocked an eye, motioned to a servant. "Chain that one." He indicated Magnan. His eyes went to Retief. "This one's bigger; you'd best chain him, too." "Why, your Excellency—" Magnan started, stepping forward. "Stay back!" Qorn hooted. "Stand over there where I can keep an eye on you." "Your Excellency, I'm empowered—" "Not here, you're not!" Qorn trumpeted. "Want peace, do you? Well, I don't want peace! I've had a surfeit of peace these last two centuries! I want action! Loot! Adventure! Glory!" He turned to look down the table. "How about it, fellows? It's war to the knife, eh?" There was a momentary silence from all sides. "I guess so," grunted a giant Qornt in iridescent blue with flame-colored plumes. Qorn's eyes bulged. He half rose. "We've been all over this," he bassooned. He clamped bony fingers on the hilt of a light rapier. "I thought I'd made my point!" "Oh, sure, Qorn." "You bet." "I'm convinced." Qorn rumbled and resumed his seat. "All for one and one for all, that's us." "And you're the one, eh, Qorn?" Retief commented. Magnan cleared his throat. "I sense that some of you gentlemen are not convinced of the wisdom of this move," he piped, looking along the table at the silks, jewels, beaks, feather-decked crests and staring eyes. "Silence!" Qorn hooted. "No use your talking to my loyal lieutenants anyway," he added. "They do whatever I convince them they ought to do." "But I'm sure that on more mature consideration—" "I can lick any Qornt in the house." Qorn said. "That's why I'm Qorn." He belched again. A servant came up staggering under a weight of chain, dropped it with a crash at Magnan's feet. Zubb aimed the guns while the servant wrapped three loops around Magnan's wrists, snapped a lock in place. "You next!" The guns pointed at Retief's chest. He held out his arms. Four loops of silvery-gray chain in half-inch links dropped around them. The servant cinched them up tight, squeezed a lock through the ends and closed it. "Now," Qorn said, lolling back in his chair, glass in hand. "There's a bit of sport to be had here, lads. What shall we do with them?" "Let them go," the blue and flame Qornt said glumly. "You can do better than that," Qorn hooted. "Now here's a suggestion: we carve them up a little—lop off the external labiae and pinnae, say—and ship them back." "Good lord! Retief, he's talking about cutting off our ears and sending us home mutilated! What a barbaric proposal!" "It wouldn't be the first time a Terrestrial diplomat got a trimming," Retief commented. "It should have the effect of stimulating the Terries to put up a reasonable scrap," Qorn said judiciously. "I have a feeling that they're thinking of giving up without a struggle." "Oh, I doubt that," the blue-and-flame Qornt said. "Why should they?" Qorn rolled an eye at Retief and another at Magnan. "Take these two," he hooted. "I'll wager they came here to negotiate a surrender!" "Well," Magnan started. "Hold it, Mr. Magnan," Retief said. "I'll tell him." "What's your proposal?" Qorn whistled, taking a gulp from his goblet. "A fifty-fifty split? Monetary reparations? Alternate territory? I can assure you, it's useless. We Qornt like to fight." "I'm afraid you've gotten the wrong impression, your Excellency," Retief said blandly. "We didn't come to negotiate. We came to deliver an Ultimatum." "What?" Qorn trumpeted. Behind Retief, Magnan spluttered. "We plan to use this planet for target practice," Retief said. "A new type hell bomb we've worked out. Have all your people off of it in seventy-two hours, or suffer the consequences." IV "You have the gall," Qorn stormed, "to stand here in the center of Qornt Hall—uninvited, at that—and in chains—" "Oh, these," Retief said. He tensed his arms. The soft aluminum links stretched and broke. He shook the light metal free. "We diplomats like to go along with colorful local customs, but I wouldn't want to mislead you. Now, as to the evacuation of Roolit I—" Zubb screeched, waved the guns. The Qornt were jabbering. "I told you they were brutes," Zubb shrilled. Qorn slammed his fist down on the table. "I don't care what they are!" he honked. "Evacuate, hell! I can field eighty-five combat-ready ships!" "And we can englobe every one of them with a thousand Peace Enforcers with a hundred megatons/second firepower each." "Retief." Magnan tugged at his sleeve. "Don't forget their superdrive." "That's all right. They don't have one." "But—" "We'll take you on!" Qorn French-horned. "We're the Qorn! We glory in battle! We live in fame or go down in—" "Hogwash," the flame-and-blue Qorn cut in. "If it wasn't for you, Qorn, we could sit around and feast and brag and enjoy life without having to prove anything." "Qorn, you seem to be the fire-brand here," Retief said. "I think the rest of the boys would listen to reason—" "Over my dead body!" "My idea exactly," Retief said. "You claim you can lick any man in the house. Unwind yourself from your ribbons and step out here on the floor, and we'll see how good you are at backing up your conversation." Magnan hovered at Retief's side. "Twelve feet tall," he moaned. "And did you notice the size of those hands?" Retief watched as Qorn's aides helped him out of his formal trappings. "I wouldn't worry too much, Mr. Magnan. This is a light-Gee world. I doubt if old Qorn would weigh up at more than two-fifty standard pounds here." "But that phenomenal reach—" "I'll peck away at him at knee level. When he bends over to swat me, I'll get a crack at him." Across the cleared floor, Qorn shook off his helpers with a snort. "Enough! Let me at the upstart!" Retief moved out to meet him, watching the upraised backward-jointed arms. Qorn stalked forward, long lean legs bent, long horny feet clacking against the polished floor. The other aliens—both servitors and bejeweled Qornt—formed a wide circle, all eyes unwaveringly on the combatants. Qorn struck suddenly, a long arm flashing down in a vicious cut at Retief, who leaned aside, caught one lean shank below the knee. Qorn bent to haul Retief from his leg—and staggered back as a haymaker took him just below the beak. A screech went up from the crowd as Retief leaped clear. Qorn hissed and charged. Retief whirled aside, then struck the alien's off-leg in a flying tackle. Qorn leaned, arms windmilling, crashed to the floor. Retief whirled, dived for the left arm, whipped it behind the narrow back, seized Qorn's neck in a stranglehold and threw his weight backward. Qorn fell on his back, his legs squatted out at an awkward angle. He squawked and beat his free arm on the floor, reaching in vain for Retief. Zubb stepped forward, pistols ready. Magnan stepped before him. "Need I remind you, sir," he said icily, "that this is an official diplomatic function? I can brook no interference from disinterested parties." Zubb hesitated. Magnan held out a hand. "I must ask you to hand me your weapons, Zubb." "Look here," Zubb began. "I may lose my temper," Magnan hinted. Zubb lowered the guns, passed them to Magnan. He thrust them into his belt with a sour smile, turned back to watch the encounter. Retief had thrown a turn of violet silk around Qorn's left wrist, bound it to the alien's neck. Another wisp of stuff floated from Qorn's shoulder. Retief, still holding Qorn in an awkward sprawl, wrapped it around one outflung leg, trussed ankle and thigh together. Qorn flopped, hooting. At each movement, the constricting loop around his neck, jerked his head back, the green crest tossing wildly. "If I were you, I'd relax," Retief said, rising and releasing his grip. Qorn got a leg under him; Retief kicked it. Qorn's chin hit the floor with a hollow clack. He wilted, an ungainly tangle of over-long limbs and gay silks. Retief turned to the watching crowd. "Next?" he called. The blue and flame Qornt stepped forward. "Maybe this would be a good time to elect a new leader," he said. "Now, my qualifications—" "Sit down," Retief said loudly. He stepped to the head of the table, seated himself in Qorn's vacated chair. "A couple of you finish trussing Qorn up for me." "But we must select a leader!" "That won't be necessary, boys. I'm your new leader." "As I see it," Retief said, dribbling cigar ashes into an empty wine glass, "you Qornt like to be warriors, but you don't particularly like to fight." "We don't mind a little fighting—within reason. And, of course, as Qornt, we're expected to die in battle. But what I say is, why rush things?" "I have a suggestion," Magnan said. "Why not turn the reins of government over to the Verpp? They seem a level-headed group." "What good would that do? Qornt are Qornt. It seems there's always one among us who's a slave to instinct—and, naturally, we have to follow him." "Why?" "Because that's the way it's done." "Why not do it another way?" Magnan offered. "Now, I'd like to suggest community singing—" "If we gave up fighting, we might live too long. Then what would happen?" "Live too long?" Magnan looked puzzled. "When estivating time comes there'd be no burrows for us. Anyway, with the new Qornt stepping on our heels—" "I've lost the thread," Magnan said. "Who are the new Qornt?" "After estivating, the Verpp moult, and then they're Qornt, of course. The Gwil become Boog, the Boog become Rheuk, the Rheuk metamorphosize into Verpp—" "You mean Slun and Zubb—the mild-natured naturalists—will become warmongers like Qorn?" "Very likely. 'The milder the Verpp, the wilder the Qorn,' as the old saying goes." "What do Qornt turn into?" Retief asked. "Hmmmm. That's a good question. So far, none have survived Qornthood." "Have you thought of forsaking your warlike ways?" Magnan asked. "What about taking up sheepherding and regular church attendance?" "Don't mistake me. We Qornt like a military life. It's great sport to sit around roaring fires and drink and tell lies and then go dashing off to enjoy a brisk affray and some leisurely looting afterward. But we prefer a nice numerical advantage. Not this business of tackling you Terrestrials over on Guzzum—that was a mad notion. We had no idea what your strength was." "But now that's all off, of course," Magnan chirped. "Now that we've had diplomatic relations and all—" "Oh, by no means. The fleet lifts in thirty days. After all, we're Qornt; we have to satisfy our drive to action." "But Mr. Retief is your leader now. He won't let you!" "Only a dead Qornt stays home when Attack day comes. And even if he orders us all to cut our own throats, there are still the other Centers—all with their own leaders. No, gentlemen, the Invasion is definitely on." "Why don't you go invade somebody else?" Magnan suggested. "I could name some very attractive prospects—outside my sector, of course." "Hold everything," Retief said. "I think we've got the basis of a deal here...."

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THE SOUL EATERS By WILLIAM CONOVER Firebrand Dennis Brooke had one final chance to redeem himself by capturing Koerber whose ships were the scourge of the Void. But his luck had run its course, and now he was marooned on a rogue planet—fighting to save himself from a menace weapons could not kill. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] " And so, my dear ," Dennis detected a faint irony in the phrase, " I'm afraid I can offer no competition to the beauties of five planets—or is it six? With regret I bow myself out, and knowing me as you do, you'll understand the futility of trying to convince me again. Anyway, there will be no temptation, for I'm sailing on a new assignment I've accepted. I did love you.... Good-by. " Dennis Brooke had lost count of the times he'd read Marla's last letter, but every time he came to these final, poignant lines, they never failed to conjure a vision of her tawny loveliness, slender as the palms of Venus, and of the blue ecstasy of her eyes, wide with a perpetual wonder—limpid as a child's. The barbaric rhythms of the Congahua , were a background of annoyance in Dennis' mind; he frowned slightly as the maneuvers of the Mercurian dancer, who writhed among the guests of the notorious pleasure palace, began to leave no doubt as to her intentions. The girl was beautiful, in a sultry, almost incandescent sort of way, but her open promise left him cold. He wanted solitude, somewhere to coordinate his thoughts in silence and salvage something out of the wreck of his heart, not to speak of his career. But Venus, in the throes of a gigantic boom upon the discovery of radio-active fields, could offer only one solitude—the fatal one of her swamps and virgin forests. Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending. When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded. True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers that almost surrounded the space pirate. A night in the Jovian Chamber, was to be emperor for one night. Every dream of a man's desire was marvelously induced through the skilful use of hypnotics; the rarest viands and most delectable drinks appeared as if by magic; the unearthly peace of an Olympus descended on a man's soul, and beauty ... beauty such as men dreamed of was a warm reality under the ineffable illumination of the Chamber. It cost a young fortune. But to pleasure mad, boom-ridden Venus, a fortune was a bagatelle. Only it had cost Dennis Brooke far more than a sheaf of credits—it had cost him the severe rebuff of the I.S.P., and most of his heart in Marla. Dennis sighed, he tilted his red, curly head and drank deeply of the insidious Verbena , fragrant as a mint garden, in the tall frosty glass of Martian Bacca-glas , and as he did so, his brilliant hazel eyes found themselves gazing into the unwinking, violet stare of a young Martian at the next table. There was a smouldering hatred in those eyes, and something else ... envy, perhaps, or was it jealousy? Dennis couldn't tell. But his senses became instantly alert. Danger brought a faint vibration which his superbly trained faculties could instantly denote. His steady, bronzed hand lowered the drink, and his eyes narrowed slightly. Absorbed in trying to puzzle the sudden enmity of this Martian stranger, he was unaware of the Mercurian Dancer. The latter had edged closer, whirling in prismatic flashes from the myriad semi-precious stones that studded her brief gauze skirt. And now, in a final bid for the spacer's favor she flung herself in his lap and tilted back invitingly. Some of the guests laughed, others stared in plain envy at the handsome, red-haired spacer, but from the table across, came the tinkling sound of a fragile glass being crushed in a powerful hand, and a muffled Martian curse. Without warning, the Martian was on his feet with the speed of an Hellacorium, the table went crashing to one side as he leaped with deadly intent on the sprawled figure of Dennis Brooke. A high-pitched scream brought instant silence as a Terran girl cried out. Then the Martian's hand reached out hungrily. But Dennis was not there. Leaping to one side, impervious to the fall of the dancer, he avoided the murderous rush of the Martian youth, then he wheeled swiftly and planted a sledge-hammer blow in that most vulnerable spot of all Martians, the spot just below their narrow, wasp-like waist, and as the Martian half-doubled over, he lefted him with a short jab to the chin that staggered and all but dropped him. The Martian's violet eyes were black with fury now. He staggered back and sucked in air, his face contorted with excruciating pain. But he was not through. His powerful right shot like a blast straight for Dennis' chest, striking like a piston just below the heart. Dennis took it, flat-footed, without flinching; then he let his right ride over with all the force at his command. It caught the Martian on the jaw and spun him like a top, the pale, imperious face went crimson as he slowly sagged to his knees and rolled to the impeccable mosaics of the floor. Dennis, breathing heavily, stood over him until the international police arrived, and then he had the surprise of his life. Upon search, the police found a tiny, but fatal silvery tube holstered under his left arm-pit—an atomic-disintegrator, forbidden throughout the interplanetary League. Only major criminals and space pirates still without the law were known to possess them. "Looks like your brawl has turned out to be a piece of fool's luck, Brooke!" The Police Lieutenant favored Dennis with a wry smile. "If I'm not mistaken this chap's a member of Bren Koerber's pirate crew. Who else could afford to risk his neck at the International, and have in his possession a disintegrator? Pity we have no complete records on that devil's crew! Anyway, we'll radio the I.S.P., perhaps they have details on this dandy!" He eyed admiringly the priceless Martian embroideries on the unconscious Martian's tunic, the costly border of red, ocelandian fur, and the magnificent black acerine on his finger. Dennis Brooke shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that would have put to shame the Athenian statues of another age. A faint, bitter smile curved his generous mouth. "I'm grounded, Gillian, it'd take the capture of Koerber himself to set me right with the I.S.P. again—you don't know Bertram! To him an infraction of rules is a major crime. Damn Venus!" He reached for his glass of Verbena but the table had turned over during the struggle, and the glass was a shattered mass of gleaming Bacca-glas shards. He laughed shortly as he became conscious of the venomous stare of the Mercurian Dancer, of the excited voices of the guests and the emphatic disapproval of the Venusian proprietor who was shocked at having a brawl in his ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive Palace. "Better come to Headquarters with me, Dennis," the lieutenant said gently. "We'll say you captured him, and if he's Koerber's, the credit's yours. A trip to Terra's what you need, Venus for you is a hoodoo!" The stern, white haired I.S.P. Commander behind the immense Aluminil desk, frowned slightly as Dennis Brooke entered. He eyed the six foot four frame of the Captain before him with a mixture of feelings, as if uncertain how to begin. Finally, he sighed as if, having come to a decision, he were forcing himself to speak: "Sit down, Dennis. I've sent for you, despite your grounding, for two reasons. The first one you already know—your capture of one of Koerber's henchmen—has given us a line as to his present orbit of piracy, and the means of a check on his activities. But that's not really why I've brought you here." He frowned again as if what he had to say were difficult indeed. "Marla Starland, your fiancee, accepted an assignment we offered her—a delicate piece of work here on Terra that only a very beautiful, and very clever young lady could perform. And," he paused, grimacing, "somewhere between Venus and Terra, the interplanetary spacer bringing her and several other passengers, began to send distress signals. Finally, we couldn't contact the ship any more. It is three days overdue. All passengers, a cargo of radium from Venus worth untold millions, the spacer itself—seem to have vanished." Dennis Brooke's space-tanned features had gone pale. His large hazel eyes, fringed with auburn lashes, too long for a man, were bright slits that smouldered. He stood silent, his hands clenched at his sides, while something cold and sharp seemed to dig at his heart with cruel precision. "Marla!" He breathed at last. The thought of Marla in the power of Koerber sent a wave of anguish that seared through him like an atom-blast. "Commander," Dennis said, and his rich baritone voice had depths of emotion so great that they startled Commander Bertram himself—and that grizzled veteran of the I.S.P., had at one time or another known every change of torture that could possibly be wrung on a human soul. "Commander, give me one ... one chance at that spawn of unthinkable begetting! Let me try, and I promise you ..." in his torture, Dennis was unconsciously banging a knotted fist on the chaste, satiny surface of the priceless desk, "I promise you that I will either bring you Koerber, or forfeit my life!" Commander Bertram nodded his head. "I brought you here for that purpose, son. We have reached a point in our war with Koerber, where the last stakes must be played ... and the last stake is death!" He reached over and flipped up the activator on a small telecast set on his desk; instantly the viso-screen lighted up. "You'll now see a visual record of all we know about the passenger spacer that left Venus with passengers and cargo, as far as we could contact the vessel in space. This, Dennis," the Commander emphasized his words, "is your chance to redeem yourself!" He fell silent, while the viso-screen began to show a crowded space port on Venus, and a gigantic passenger spacer up-tilted in its cradle. They watched the parabola it made in its trajectory as it flashed into space and then fell into orbit there beyond the planetary attraction of Venus. On the three-dimensional viso-screen it was uncannily real. A flight that had taken many hours to accomplish, was shortened on the viso-screen to a matter of minutes. They saw the great, proud interplanetary transport speeding majestically through the starry void, and suddenly, they saw her swerve in a great arc; again she swerved as if avoiding something deadly in space, and point upwards gaining altitude. It was zig-zagging now, desperately maneuvering in an erratic course, and as if by magic, a tiny spot appeared on the transport's side. Tiny on the viso-screen, the fatal spots must have been huge in actuality. To the Commander of the I.S.P., and to Captain Brooke, it was an old story. Atom-blasts were pitting the spacer's hull with deadly Genton shells. The great transport trembled under the impact of the barrage, and suddenly, the screen went blank. Commander Bertram turned slowly to face the young I.S.P. captain, whose features were a mask devoid of all expression now, save for the pallor and the burning fire in his eyes. "And that's the sixth one in a month. Sometimes the survivors reach Terra in emergency spacers, or are picked up in space by other transports ... and sometimes son ... well, as you know, sometimes they're never seen again." "When do I leave, Commander!" Dennis Brooke's voice was like a javelin of ice. "Right now, if you wish. We have a new cruiser armored in beryloid with double hull—a new design against Genton shells, but it's the speed of the thing that you'll want to know about. It just about surpasses anything ever invented. Get the figures and data from the coordination room, son; it's serviced and fueled and the crew's aboard." He extended his hand. "You're the best spacer we have—aside from your recklessness—and on your success depends far more than the capture of an outlaw." Bertram smiled thinly. "Happy landing!" II Their nerves were ragged. Days and days of fruitless search for a phantom ship that seemed to have vanished from space, and an equally elusive pirate whose whereabouts were hidden in the depths of fathomless space. To all but Captain Brooke, this was a new adventure, their first assignment to duty in a search that went beyond the realm of the inner planets, where men spent sleepless nights in eternal vigilance against stray asteroids and outlaw crews of ruthless vandal ships. Even their cruiser was a new experience, the long, tapering fighter lacked the luxurious offices and appointments of the regular I.S.P. Patrol spacers. It placed a maximum on speed, and all available space was hoarded for fuel. The lightning fast tiger of the space-lanes, was a thing of beauty, but of grim, sleek beauty instinct with power, not the comfortable luxury that they knew. Day after day they went through their drills, donning space suits, manning battle stations; aiming deadly atom-cannon at empty space, and eternally scanning the vast empty reaches by means of the telecast. And suddenly, out of the void, as they had all but given up the search as a wild goose chase, a speck was limned in the lighted surface of the viso-screen in the control room. Instantly the I.S.P. cruiser came to life. In a burst of magnificent speed, the cruiser literally devoured the space leagues, until the spacer became a flashing streak. On the viso-screen, the speck grew larger, took on contours, growing and becoming slowly the drifting shell of what had been a transport. Presently they were within reaching distance, and Captain Brooke commanded through the teleradio from the control room: "Prepare to board!" Every member of the crew wanted to be among the boarding party, for all but George Randall, the junior member of the crew had served his apprenticeship among the inner planets, Mars, Venus and Terra. He felt nauseated at the very thought of going out there in that vast abyss of space. His young, beardless face, with the candid blue eyes went pale when the order was given. But presently, Captain Brooke named those who were to go beside himself: "You, Tom and Scotty, take one emergency plane, and Dallas!" "Yes, Captain!" Dallas Bernan, the immense third lieutenant boomed in his basso-profundo voice. "You and I'll take a second emergency!" There was a pause in the voice of the Captain from the control room, then: "Test space suits. Test oxygen helmets! Atom-blasts only, ready in five minutes!" George Randall breathed a sigh of relief. He watched them bridge the space to the drifting wreck, then saw them enter what had once been a proud interplanetary liner, now soon to be but drifting dust, and he turned away with a look of shame. Inside the liner, Captain Dennis Brooke had finished making a detailed survey. "No doubt about it," he spoke through the radio in his helmet. "Cargo missing. No survivors. No indication that the repulsion fields were out of order. And finally, those Genton shells could only have been fired by Koerber!" He tried to maintain a calm exterior, but inwardly he seethed in a cold fury more deadly than any he had ever experienced. Somehow he had expected to find at least one compartment unharmed, where life might have endured, but now, all hope was gone. Only a great resolve to deal with Koerber once and for all remained to him. Dennis tried not to think of Marla, too great an ache was involved in thinking of her and all he had lost. When he finally spoke, his voice was harsh, laconic: "Prepare to return!" Scotty Byrnes, the cruiser's nurse, who could take his motors through a major battle, or hell and high water and back again, for that matter, shifted the Venusian weed that made a perpetual bulge on his cheek and gazed curiously at Captain Brooke. They all knew the story in various versions, and with special additions. But they were spacemen, implicit in their loyalty, and with Dennis Brooke they could and did feel safe. Tom Jeffery, the tall, angular and red-faced Navigator, whose slow, easygoing movements belied the feral persistence of a tiger, and the swiftness of a striking cobra in a fight, led the small procession of men toward the emergency planes. Behind him came Dallas Bernan, third lieutenant, looming like a young asteroid in his space suit, followed by Scotty, and finally Captain Brooke himself. All left in silence, as if the tragedy that had occurred aboard the wrecked liner, had touched them intimately. Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser, a surprise awaited them. It was young George Randall, whose excited face met them as soon as they had entered the airlocks and removed the space suits. "Captain Brooke ... Captain, recordings are showing on the new 'Jet Analyzers' must be the trail of some spacer. Can't be far!" He was fairly dancing in his excitement, as if the marvelous work of the new invention that detected the disturbance of atomic jets at great distance were his own achievement. Dennis Brooke smiled. His own heart was hammering, and inwardly he prayed that it were Koerber. It had to be! No interplanetary passenger spacer could possibly be out here at the intersection of angles Kp 39 degrees, 12 minutes, Fp 67 degrees of Ceres elliptic plane. None but a pirate crew with swift battle cruisers could dare! This was the dangerous asteroid belt, where even planetoids drifted in eccentric uncharted orbits. Dennis, Tom Jeffery and Scotty Byrnes raced to the control room, followed by the ponderous Dallas to whom hurry in any form was anathema. There could be no doubt now! The "Jet Analyzer" recorded powerful disturbance, atomic—could be nothing else. Instantly Captain Brooke was at the inter-communication speaker: "Crew, battle stations! Engine room, full speed!" Scotty Byrnes was already dashing to the engine room, where his beloved motors purred with an ascending hum. Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser each member of the crew raced to his assigned task without delay. Action impended, and after days and nights of inertia, it was a blessed relief. Smiles appeared on haggard faces, and the banter of men suddenly galvanized by a powerful incentive was bandied back and forth. All but George Randall. Now that action was imminent. Something gripped his throat until he could hardly stand the tight collar of his I.S.P. uniform. A growing nausea gripped his bowels, and although he strove to keep calm, his hands trembled beyond control. In the compact, super-armored control room, Captain Brooke watched the telecast's viso-screen, with hungry eyes that were golden with anticipation. It seemed to him as if an eternity passed before at last, a black speck danced on the illuminated screen, until it finally reached the center of the viso-screen and remained there. It grew by leaps and bounds as the terrific speed of the cruiser minimized the distance long before the quarry was aware of pursuit. But at last, when the enemy cruiser showed on the viso-screen, unmistakably for what it was—a pirate craft, it showed by its sudden maneuver that it had detected the I.S.P. cruiser. For it had described a parabola in space and headed for the dangerous asteroid belt. As if navigated by a masterly hand that knew each and every orbit of the asteroids, it plunged directly into the asteroid drift, hoping to lose the I.S.P. cruiser with such a maneuver. Ordinarily, it would have succeeded, no I.S.P. patrol ship would have dared to venture into such a trap without specific orders. But to Dennis Brooke, directing the chase from the control room, even certain death was welcome, if only he could take Koerber with him. Weaving through the deadly belt for several hours, Dennis saw his quarry slow down. Instantly he seized the chance and ordered a salvo from starboard. Koerber's powerful spacer reeled, dived and came up spewing Genton-shells. The battle was on at last. From the banked atom-cannon of the I.S.P. Cruiser, a deadly curtain of atomic fire blazed at the pirate craft. A ragged rent back toward midship showed on Koerber's Cruiser which trembled as if it had been mortally wounded. Then Dennis maneuvered his cruiser into a power dive as a rain of Genton-shells swept the space lane above him, but as he came up, a lone shell struck. At such close range, super-armor was ripped, second armor penetrated and the magnificent vessel shook under the detonating impact. It was then that Dennis Brooke saw the immense dark shadow looming immediately behind Koerber's ship. He saw the pirate cruiser zoom desperately in an effort to break the gravity trap of the looming mass, but too late. It struggled like a fly caught in a spider-web to no avail. It was then that Koerber played his last card. Sensing he was doomed, he tried to draw the I.S.P. Cruiser down with him. A powerful magnetic beam lashed out to spear the I.S.P. Cruiser. With a wrenching turn that almost threw them out of control, Dennis maneuvered to avoid the beam. Again Koerber's beam lashed out, as he sank lower into the looming mass, and again Dennis anticipating the maneuver avoided it. "George Randall!" He shouted desperately into the speaker. "Cut all jets in the rocket room! Hurry, man!" He banked again and then zoomed out of the increasing gravity trap. "Randall! I've got to use the magnetic repulsion plates.... Cut all the jets!" But there was no response. Randall's screen remained blank. Then Koerber's lashing magnetic beam touched and the I.S.P. ship was caught, forced to follow the pirate ship's plunge like the weight at the end of a whiplash. Koerber's gunners sent one parting shot, an atom-blast that shook the trapped cruiser like a leaf. Beneath them, growing larger by the second, a small world rushed up to meet them. The readings in the Planetograph seemed to have gone crazy. It showed diameter 1200 miles; composition mineral and radio-active. Gravity seven-eighths of Terra. It couldn't be! Unless perhaps this unknown planetoid was the legendary core of the world that at one time was supposed to have existed between Jupiter and Mars. Only that could possibly explain the incredible gravity. And then began another type of battle. Hearing the Captain's orders to Randall, and noting that no result had been obtained, Scotty Byrnes himself cut the jets. The Magnetic Repulsion Plates went into action, too late to save them from being drawn, but at least they could prevent a crash. Far in the distance they could see Koerber's ship preceding them in a free fall, then the Planetoid was rushing up to engulf them. III The atmosphere was somewhat tenuous, but it was breathable, provided a man didn't exert himself. To the silent crew of the I.S.P. Cruiser, the strange world to which Koerber's magnetic Beam had drawn them, was anything but reassuring. Towering crags jutted raggedly against the sky, and the iridescent soil of the narrow valley that walled in the cruiser, had a poisonous, deadly look. As far as their eyes could reach, the desolate, denuded vista stretched to the horizon. "Pretty much of a mess!" Dennis Brooke's face was impassive as he turned to Scotty Byrnes. "What's your opinion? Think we can patch her up, or are we stuck here indefinitely?" Scotty eyed the damage. The atom-blast had penetrated the hull into the forward fuel chambers and the armor had blossomed out like flower petals. The crash-landing had not helped either. "Well, there's a few beryloid plates in the storage locker, Captain, but," he scratched his head ruminatively and shifted his precious cud. "But what? Speak up man!" It was Tom Jeffery, his nerves on edge, his ordinarily gentle voice like a lash. "But, you may as well know it," Scotty replied quietly. "That parting shot of Koerber's severed our main rocket feed. I had to use the emergency tank to make it down here!" For a long moment the four men looked at each other in silence. Dennis Brooke's face was still impassive but for the flaming hazel eyes. Tom tugged at the torn sleeve of his I.S.P. uniform, while Scotty gazed mournfully at the damaged ship. Dallas Bernan looked at the long, ragged line of cliffs. "I think we got Koerber, though," he said at last. "While Tom was doing a job of navigation, I had one last glimpse of him coming down fast and out of control somewhere behind those crags over there!" "To hell with Koerber!" Tom Jeffery exploded. "You mean we're stuck in this hellish rock-pile?" "Easy, Tom!" Captain Brooke's tones were like ice. On his pale, impassive face, his eyes were like flaming topaz. "Where's Randall?" "Probably hiding his head under a bunk!" Dallas laughed with scorn. His contemptuous remark voiced the feelings of the entire crew. A man who failed to be at his battle-station in time of emergency, had no place in the I.S.P. "Considering the gravity of this planetoid," Dennis Brooke said thoughtfully, "it's going to take some blast to get us off!" "Maybe we can locate a deposit of anerioum or uranium or something for our atom-busters to chew on!" Scotty said hopefully. He was an eternal optimist. "Better break out those repair plates," Dennis said to Scotty. "Tom, you get the welders ready. I've got a few entries to make in the log book, and then we'll decide on a party to explore the terrain and try to find out what happened to Koerber's ship. I must know," he said in a low voice, but with such passion that the others were startled. A figure appeared in the slanting doorway of the ship in time to hear the last words. It was George Randall, adjusting a bandaged forehead bumped during the crash landing. "Captain ... I ... I wanted ..." he paused unable to continue. "You wanted what?" Captain Brooke's voice was terse. "Perhaps you wanted to explain why you weren't at your battle station?" "Sir, I wanted to know if ... if I might help Scotty with the welding job...." That wasn't at all what he'd intended to say. But somehow the words had stuck in his throat and his face flushed deep scarlet. His candid blue eyes were suspiciously brilliant, and the white bandage with its crimson stains made an appealing, boyish figure. It softened the anger in Brooke's heart. Thinking it over calmly, Dennis realized this was the youngster's first trip into the outer orbits, and better men than he had cracked in those vast reaches of space. But there had been an instant when he'd found Randall cowering in the rocket-room, in the grip of paralyzing hysteria, when he could cheerfully have wrung his neck! "Certainly, Randall," he replied in a much more kindly tone. "We'll need all hands now." "Thank you, sir!" Randall seemed to hesitate for a moment, opened his mouth to speak further, but feeling the other's calculating gaze upon him, he whirled and re-entered the ship. "But for him we wouldn't be here!" Dallas exclaimed. "Aagh!" He shook his head in disgust until the several folds of flesh under his chin shook like gelatin. "Cowards are hell!" He spat. "Easy, Dallas, Randall's a kid, give 'im a chance." Dennis observed. "You Captain ... you're defending 'im? Why you had a greater stake in this than we, and he's spoiled it for you!" "Yep," Dennis nodded. "But I'm still keeping my senses clear. No feuds on my ship. Get it!" The last two words cut like a scimitar. Dallas nodded and lowered his eyes. Scotty shifted his cud and spat a thin stream of juice over the iridescent ground. One by one they re-entered the cruiser.

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The Last Monster By GARDNER F. FOX Irgi was the last of his monster race, guardian of a dead planet, master of the secret of immortality. It was he whom the four men from Earth had to conquer to gain that secret—a tentacled monstrosity whom Earthly weapons could not touch. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Irgi was the last of his race. There was no one else, now; there had been no others for hundreds and hundreds of years. Irgi had lost count of time dwelling alone amid the marble halls of the eon-ancient city, but he knew that much. There were no others. Only Irgi, alone. He moved now along the ebony flooring, past the white marble walls hung with golden drapes that never withered or shed their aurate luster in the opalescent mists that bathed the city in shimmering whiteness. They hung low, those wispy tendrils of mist, clasping everything in their clinging shelter, destroying dust and germs. Irgi had discovered the mist many years ago, when it was too late to save his kind. He had flung a vast globe of transparent metal above this greatest of the cities of the Urg and filled it with the mist, and in it he had stored the treasures of his people. From Bar Nomala, from Faryl, and from the far-off jungle city of Kreed had he brought the riches of the Urg and set them up. Irgi enjoyed beauty, and he enjoyed work. It was the combination of both that kept him sane. Toward a mighty bronze doorway he went, and as his body passed an invisible beam, the bronze portals slid apart, noiselessly, opening to reveal a vast circular chamber that hummed and throbbed, and was filled with a pale blue luminescence that glimmered upon metal rods and bars and ten tall cones of steelite. In the doorway, Irgi paused and ran his eyes about the chamber, sighing. This was his life work, this blue hum and throb. Those ten cones lifting their disced tips toward a circular roof bathed in, and drew their power from, a huge block of radiant white matter that hung suspended between the cones, in midair. All power did the cones and the block possess. There was nothing they could not do, if Irgi so willed. It was another discovery that came too late to save the Urg. Irgi moved across the room. He pressed glittering jewels inset in a control panel on the wall, one after another, in proper sequence. The blue opalescence deepened, grew dark and vivid. The hum broadened into a hoarse roar. And standing out, startlingly white against the blue, was the queer block of shining metal, shimmering and pulsing. Irgi drew himself upwards, slowly turning, laving in the quivering bands of cobalt that sped outward from the cones. He preened his body in their patterns of color, watching it splash and spread over his chest and torso. Where it touched, a faint tingle lingered; then spread outwards, all over his huge form. Irgi was immortal, and the blue light made him so. "There, it is done," he whispered to himself. "Now for another oval I can roam all Urg as I will, for the life spark in me has been cleansed and nourished." He touched the jeweled controls, shutting the power to a low murmur. He turned to the bronze doors, passed through and into the misty halls. "I must speak," Irgi said as he moved along the corridor. "I have not spoken for many weeks. I must exercise my voice, or lose it. That is the law of nature. It would atrophy, otherwise. "Yes, I will use my voice tonight, and I will go out under the dome and look up at the stars and the other planets that swing near Urg, and I will talk to them and tell them how lonely Irgi is." He turned and went along a hall that opened into a broad balcony which stood forth directly beneath a segment of the mighty dome. He stared upwards, craning all his eyes to see through the darkness pressing down upon him. "Stars," he whispered, "listen to me once again. I am lonely, stars, and the name and fame of Irgi means nothing to the walls of my city, nor to the Chamber of the Cones, nor even—at times—to Irgi himself." He paused and his eyes widened, staring upwards. "By the Block," he said to the silence about him. "There is something up there that is not a star, nor a planet, nor yet a meteor." It was a spaceship. Emerson took his hands from the controls of the gigantic ship that hurtled through space, and wiped his sweaty palms on his thighs. His grey eyes bored like a steel awl downward at the mighty globe swinging in the void. "The last planet in our course," he breathed. "Maybe it has the radium!" "Yes," whispered the man beside him, wetting his lips with his tongue. "No use to think of failure. If it hasn't, we'll die ourselves, down there." Radium. And the Plague. It had come on Earth suddenly, had the Plague, back in the first days of space travel, after Quigg, the American research scientist at Cal Tech, discovered a way to lift a rocket ship off the Earth, and propel it to the Moon. They had been slow, lumbering vessels, those first spaceships; not at all like the sleek craft that plied the voids today. But it had been a beginning. And no one had thought anything of it when Quigg, who had made the first flight through space, died of cancer. As the years passed to a decade, and the ships of Earth rode to Mars and Venus, it began to be apparent that a lifetime of space travel meant a hideous death. Scientists attributed it to the cosmic rays, for out in space there was no blanketing layer of atmosphere to protect the fleshy tissues of man from their piercing power. It had long been a theory that cosmic rays were related to the birth of new life in the cosmos; perhaps they were, said some, the direct cause of life. Thus by causing the unorderly growth of new cells that man called cancer, the cosmic rays were destroying the life they had created. It meant death to travel in space, and only the stupendous fees paid to the young men who believed in a short life and a merry one, kept the ships plying between Mars and Earth and Venus. Lead kept out the cosmic rays, but lead would not stand the terrific speed required to lift a craft free of planetary gravity; and an inner coating of lead brought men into port raving with lead poisoning illusions. Cancer cases increased on Earth. It was learned that the virulent form of space cancer, as it was called, was in some peculiar manner, contagious to a certain extent. The alarm spread. Men who voyaged in space were segregated, but the damage had been done. The Plague spread, and ravaged the peoples of three planets. Hospitals were set up, and precious radium used for the fight. But the radium was hard to come by. There was just not enough for the job. A ship was built, the fastest vessel ever made by man. It was designed for speed. It made the swiftest interplanetary craft seem a lumbering barge by comparison. And mankind gave it to Valentine Emerson to take it out among the stars to find the precious radium in sufficient quantities to halt the Plague. It had not been easy to find a crew. The three worlds knew the men were going to their doom. It would be a miracle if ever they reached a single planet, if they did not perish of space cancer before their first goal. Carson Nichols, whose wife and children were dying of the Plague, begged him for a chance. A murderer convicted to the Martian salt mines, Karl Mussdorf, grudgingly agreed to go along on the promise that he won a pardon if he ever came back. With Mussdorf went a little, wry-faced man named Tilford Gunn, who knew radio, cookery, and the fine art of pocket-picking. The two seemed inseparable. Now Emerson was breathing softly, "Yes, it had better be there, or else we die." He ran quivering fingers over his forearm, felt the strange lumps that heralded cancer. Involuntarily, he shuddered. Steps clanged on the metal runway beneath them. Mussdorf pushed up through the trap and got to his feet. He was as big as Emerson, bulky where Emerson was lithe, granite where Emerson was chiseled steel. His hair was black, and his brows shaggy. A stubborn jaw shot out under thin, hard lips. "There it is, Karl," said Nichols. "Start hoping." Mussdorf scowled darkly, and spat. "A hell of a way to spend my last days," he growled. "I'm dying on my feet, and I've got to be a martyr to a billion people who don't know I'm alive." "You know a better way to die, of course," replied Emerson. "You bet I do. There's a sweet little redhead in New Mars. She'd make dying a pleasure. In fact," he chuckled softly, "that's just the way I'd let her kill me." Emerson snorted, glancing down at the controls. Beneath his steady fingers, the ship sideslipped into the gravity tug of the looming orb, shuddered a moment, then eased downward. "Tell Gunn to come up," ordered Emerson. "No need for him to be below." Mussdorf dropped to the floor, lowered his shaggy head through the open trap, and bellowed. A hail from the depths of the ship answered him. A moment later, Gunn stood with the others: a little man with a wry smile twisting his features to a hard mask. "Think she's got the stuff, skipper?" he asked Emerson. "The spectroscope'll tell us. Break it out." "You bet." The ship rocked gently as Emerson set it down on a flat, rocky plain between two high, craggy mountains that rose abruptly from the tiny valley. It was just lighting as the faint rays of the suns that served this planet nosed their way above the peaks. Like a silver needle on a floor of black rock, the spacecraft bounced once, twice; then lay still. Within her gleaming walls, four men bent with hard faces over gleaming bands of color on a spectroscopic screen. With quivering fingers, Emerson twisted dials and switches. "Hell!" exploded Mussdorf. "I might have known it. Not a trace." Emerson touched his forearm gently, and shuddered. Nichols bit his lips, and thought of Marge and the kids; Gunn licked his lips with a dry tongue and kept looking at Emerson. With one sweep of his brawny arm, Mussdorf sent the apparatus flying against the far wall to shatter in shards. No one said a word. Something whispered in the ship. They jerked their heads up, stood listening. The faint susurration swept all about them, questioning, curious. It came again, imperative; suddenly demanding. "Gawd," whispered Gunn. "Wot is it, guv'nor?" Emerson shook his head, frowning, suddenly glad that the others had heard it, too. "Maybe somebody trying to speak to us," stated Nichols. The whispers grew louder and harsher. Angry. "Take it easy," yelled Mussdorf savagely. "We don't know what you're talking about. How can we answer you, you stupid lug?" Gunn giggled hysterically, "We can't even 'alf talk 'is bloomin' language." The rustle ceased. The silence hung eerily in the ship. The men looked at one another, curious; somehow, a little nervous. "What a radio he must have," said Emerson softly. "The metal of our hull is his loudspeaker. That's why we heard him in all directions." Mussdorf nodded, shaggy brows knotted. "We'll see what his next move is," he muttered. "If he gets too fresh, we'll try a sun-blaster out on him." The ship began to glow softly, flushing a soft, delicate green. The light bathed the interior, turning the men a ghastly hue. Gunn shivered and looked at Emerson, who went to the port window; stood staring out, gasping. "Wot's happenin' now?" choked Gunn. "We're off the ground! Whatever it is, it's lifting us." The others crowded about him, looking out. Here the green was more vivid, intense. They could feel its surging power tingling on their skins. Beneath them, the jagged peak of the mountain almost grazed the hull. Spread out under their eyes was the panorama of a dead planet. Great rocks lay split and tumbled over one another in a black desolation. Sunlight glinting on their jagged edges, made harsh shadows. Far to the north a mountain range shrugged its snow-topped peaks to a sullen sky. To the south, beyond the rocks, lay a white waste of desert. To the west— "A city," yelled Nichols, "the place is inhabited. Thank God, thank God—" Mussdorf erupted laughter. "For what? How do we know what they're like? An inhabited planet doesn't mean men. We found that out—several times." "We can hope," said Emerson sharply. "Maybe they have some radium, stored so that our spectroscope couldn't pick it up." The mighty globe that hung over the city glimmered in the morning suns. Beneath it, the white towers and spires of the city reared in alien loveliness above graceful buildings and rounded roofs. A faint mist seemed to hang in the city streets. "It's empty," said Nichols heavily. "Deserted." "Something's alive," protested Emerson. "Something that spoke to us, that is controlling this green beam." A section of the globe slid back, and the spaceship moved through the opening. The globe slipped back and locked after it. "They have us now," grunted Mussdorf. He slid his fingers along the transparent window, pressing hard, the skin showing white as his knuckles lifted. He said swiftly, "You guys can stay here if you want, but I'm getting myself a sun-blaster. Two of them. I'm not going to be caught short when the time for action comes." He swung through the trap and out of sight. They heard him running below; heard the slam of opened doors, the withdrawal of the guns. They could imagine him belting them about his waist. "Bring us some," cried Emerson suddenly, and turned again to look out the window. The spaceship settled down on the white flagging of an immense square. The green beam was gone, suddenly. The uncanny silence of the place pressed in on them. "Think it's safe to go out?" asked Nichols. "Try the atmospheric recorder," said Emerson. "If the air's okay, I'd like to stretch my own legs." Nichols twisted chrome wheels, staring at a red line that wavered on a plastic screen, then straightened abruptly, rigid. "Hey," yelled Nichols excitedly. "It's pure. I mean actually pure. No germs. No dust. Just clean air!" Emerson leaped to his side, staring, frowning. "No germs. No dust. Why—that means there's no disease in this place! No disease." He began to laugh, then caught himself. "No disease," he whispered, "and every one of us is going to die of cancer." Mussdorf came up through the trap and passed out the sun-blasters. They buckled them around their waists while Mussdorf swung the bolts of the door. He threw it open, and clean air, and faint tendrils of whitish mist came swirling into the ship. Nichols took a deep breath and his boyish face split with a grin. "I feel like a kid again on a Spring day back on Earth. You know, with a ball and a glove under your arm, with the sun beating down on you, swinging a bat and whistling. You felt good. You were young. Young! I feel like that now." They grinned and went through the door, dropping to the street. They turned. It was coming across the square, flowing along on vast black tentacles towering over twenty feet high, with a great torso seemingly sculpted out of living black marble. A head that held ten staring eyes looked down at them. Six arms thrust out of the torso, moving like tentacles, fringed with cilia thick as fingers. "Lord," whispered Mussdorf. "What is it?" "Don't know," said Emerson. "Maybe it's friendly—" "Friendly?" queried Mussdorf harshly. " That doesn't know the meaning of the word! I'm going to let it taste a blast—" His hand dove for the sun-blaster in his holster; yanked it free and upward, firing brilliant yellow jets as he jerked the trigger. "Look out !" yelled Emerson. The thing twisted sideways with an eerie grace, dodging the amber beams of solar power that sizzled past its bulbous head. As it moved, its tentacled arms and legs slithered out with unthinkable rapidity, fell and wrapped around Mussdorf. The big Earthman was lifted high into the air, squeezed until his lungs nearly collapsed. He hung limp in a gigantic tentacle as Emerson ran to one side, trying for a shot without hitting Mussdorf. But the thing was diabolically clever. It held Mussdorf aloft, between itself and Emerson, while its other arms stabbed out at Gunn and Nichols, catching them up and shaking them as a terrier shakes a rat. "Hold on," called Emerson, dodging and twisting, gun in hand, seeking a spot to fire at. The thing dropped the Earthmen suddenly; its legs gathered beneath it and launched it full at Emerson. Caught off guard, the Earthman lifted his sun-blaster—felt it ripped from his fingers, knew a hard blackness thrashing down at him. He went backwards, sickened.... Irgi stared at the things that lay on the white flagging. Queer beings they were, unlike anything Irgi had ever conceived. Only two legs, only two arms. And such weak little limbs! Why, an Urgian cat would make short work of them if an Urgian cat existed any more, and Irgi had never rated cats very highly. He looked at the spaceship, ran exploring feelers over it. He cast a glance back at the creatures again, and shook his head. Strange beings they might be, but they had mastered interplanetary travel. Well, he'd always maintained that life would be different on other worlds. Life here on Urg took different patterns. Irgi bent to wrap long arms about the queer beings, lifting them. His eyes were caught suddenly by the lumps protruding from their arms and legs, from face and chest. The growth disease! That was bad, but Irgi knew a way to cure it. Irgi knew a way to cure anything. He slid swiftly across the square and onto a flat, glittering ramp that stretched upward toward an arched doorway set like a jewel of light in a long, low building next to the vast, round Chamber of the Cones. He carried these creatures easily, without trouble. The ease of his passage gave him time to think. He had been glad to find these creatures. They were someone to converse with after centuries of loneliness. But as he approached them there in the square, calling out gladly to them, they could not hear him. His voice was pitched eight vibrations to the second. He wondered idly if that was beyond the hearing range of these two-legged things. He ought to check that, to be sure. Still, they had heard him on their ship. He had caught a confused, angry murmur on the radiation recorder. Perhaps the metal of the hull had in some manner made his voice audible to them, speeded up the vibrations to twelve or fifteen a second. Then there was the matter of the growth disease. He could eliminate that easily enough, in the Chamber of the Cones. But first they would have to be prepared. And the preparation—hurt. Well, better a few moments of agony than a death through a worse. And if he could not speak to them, they could speak to him, through their minds. Once unconscious, he could tap their memories with an electrigraph screen. That should be absorbing. It made Irgi happy, reflecting upon it, and Irgi had not known happiness for a long time. From the passage he hurried into a large white room, fitted with glass vials and ovules and glittering metal instruments, so many in number that the room seemed a jungle of metal. Down on flat, smooth tables Irgi dropped his burdens. With quick tendrils he adjusted straps to them, bound them securely. From a small, wheeled vehicle he took a metal rod and touched it to their foreheads. As it met the flesh, it hummed once faintly. "It's short-circulated their nervous systems for a while, absorbed the electric charges all intelligent beings cast," Irgi said aloud, glad at this chance to exercise his voice. "They won't be able to feel for some time. When the worst pain will have passed, they will recover. And now to examine their minds—" He fitted metal clamps over their heads and screwed them tight. He wheeled forward a glassy screen; plugged in the cords that dangled from its frame to the metal clamps. "I wonder if they've perfected this," Irgi mused. "They must be aware that the brain gives off electrical waves. Perhaps they can chart those waves on graphs. But do they know that each curve and bend of those waves represents a picture? I can translate those waves into pictures—but can they?" He slouched a little on his tentacles, squatting, gazing at the screen as he flipped over a lever. A picture quivered on the screen; grew nebulous, then cleared. Irgi found himself staring at a city far vaster than Urg. Grim white towers peaked high into the air, and broad, flat ramps circled them, interwoven like ribbons in the sunlight. On the tallest and largest buildings were great fields of metal painted a dull luster, where queerly wrought flying ships landed and took off. The scene changed suddenly. He looked into a hospital room and watched a pretty young woman smiling up at him. She too, had the growth disease. Now he beheld the mighty salt mines where naked men swung huge picks at the crusted crystals, sweating and dying under a strange sun. Even these remnants of humanity festered with the growth. A tall, lean man in white looked out at him. His lips moved, and Irgi read their meaning. This man spoke to one named Emerson, commissioning him with a spaceship, reciting the need of radium, the dread of the plague. The thoughts of this Emerson were coming in clearer, as Irgi in sudden interest, flipped over different dials. The unspoken thoughts pouring into his brain through the screen continued. The words he did not understand, but the necessity for radium, and the danger of the growth disease he did. The pictures jumbled, grew chameleonesque— Irgi stared upward at a colossal figure graven in lucent white marble. He made out the letters chiseled into the base: GEORGE WASHINGTON. He wondered idly what this Washington had done, to merit such undying fame. He must have created a nation, or saved it. He wished there were Urgians alive to build a statue to him . He rose suddenly, standing upright on his tentacles, swaying gently. Why, he had the power to make himself immortal! These creatures would gladly build statues to him! True, he could not create a nation— but he could save it ! Irgi unfastened clamps, and rolled the screen aside. He reached to a series of black knobs inset in the wall, and turned them carefully. Turning, he saw the figures of the four men stiffen to rigidity as a red aura drifted upward from the tabletop, passing through them as if they were mist, rising upwards to dissipate in the air near the ceiling. "That will prepare their bodies for the Chamber of the Cones," he said. "When they realize that I am their friend, they will gladly hear my counsels!" Opening the laboratory door, Irgi passed out and closed it behind him. It was the sweat of agony trickling down his forehead and over his eyes and cheeks that woke Emerson. He opened his eyes, then clamped them shut as his body writhed in pain. "Oh, Lord!" he whimpered, bloodying his mouth where his teeth sank into his lips. In every fibre of his body sharp lancets cut and dug. In arms and legs and chest and belly they twisted and tore. Into the tissues beneath his skin, all along the muscles and the bone, the fiery torment played. He could not stand it; he could not— He flipped his head to right, to left; saw the others stretched out and strapped even as he. They were unconscious. What right had they to ignore this agony? Why didn't they share it with him? He opened his lips to shriek; then bit down again, hard. Nichols screamed suddenly, his body aching. It woke the others. They too, bellowed and screamed and sobbed, and their arms and legs writhed like wild things in a trap. "Got to get free," Emerson panted, straining against the wristbands. The hard muscles of his arms ridged with effort, but the straps held. He dropped back, sobbing. "That fiend," yelled Mussdorf. "That ten-eyed, octopus-legged, black-hearted spawn of a mismated monster did this to us. Damn him! Damn him! If I ever get loose I'll cut his heart out and make him eat it." "Maybe—maybe he's vivisecting us," moaned Nichols. "With rays or—or something—aagh! I can't stand it!" "Hang on, kid," gritted Emerson, fighting the straps. "I think it's lessening. Yeah, yeah—it is. It doesn't hurt so much now." Mussdorf grunted astonishment. "You're right. It is lessening. And—hey, one of my arm buckles is coming loose. It's torn a little. Maybe I can work it free." They turned their heads to watch, biting their lips, the sweat standing in colorless beads on their pale foreheads. Mussdorf's thick arm bulged its muscles as he wrenched and tugged, panting. A buckle swung outward, clanging against the tabletop as it ripped loose. Mussdorf held his arm aloft and laughed harsh triumph. "I'll have you all loose in a second," he grunted, ripping straps from his body. He leaped from the table and stretched. He grinned into their faces. "You know, it's funny—but I feel great. Huh, I must've sweated all the aches out of me. Here, Gunn—you first." "Thanks, Karl. We're still pals, aren't we?" When Gunn was free, Mussdorf came to stand over Emerson, looking down at him. His eyes narrowed suddenly. He grinned a little, twisting his lips. "Maybe you fellows ought to stay tied up," he said. "In case that—that thing comes back. He won't blame us all for the break we're making." "Not on your life," said Emerson. But Mussdorf shook his head, and his lips tightened. "No. No, I think it's better the way I say." "Don't be a fool, Mussdorf," snapped Emerson savagely. "It isn't your place to think, anyhow. That's mine. I'm commander of this force. What I say is an order." Mussdorf grinned dryly. Into his eyes came a glint of hot, sullen anger. "You were our commander—out there, in space. We're on a planet now. Things are different. I want to learn the secret of those mists, Emerson. Something tells me I'd get a fortune for it, on Earth." Emerson squirmed helplessly, cursing him, saying, "What's gotten into you?" "Nothing new. Remember me, Karl Mussdorf? I'm a convict, I am. A salt mine convict. I'd have done anything to get out of that boiling hell. I volunteered to go with you for the radium. Me and Gunn. Nichols doesn't count. He came on account of his wife and kids. We were the only two who'd come. Convicts, both of us."

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RETIEF OF THE RED-TAPE MOUNTAIN by KEITH LAUMER Retief knew the importance of sealed orders—and the need to keep them that way! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "It's true," Consul Passwyn said, "I requested assignment as principal officer at a small post. But I had in mind one of those charming resort worlds, with only an occasional visa problem, or perhaps a distressed spaceman or two a year. Instead, I'm zoo-keeper to these confounded settlers. And not for one world, mind you, but eight!" He stared glumly at Vice-Consul Retief. "Still," Retief said, "it gives an opportunity to travel—" "Travel!" the consul barked. "I hate travel. Here in this backwater system particularly—" He paused, blinked at Retief and cleared his throat. "Not that a bit of travel isn't an excellent thing for a junior officer. Marvelous experience." He turned to the wall-screen and pressed a button. A system triagram appeared: eight luminous green dots arranged around a larger disk representing the primary. He picked up a pointer, indicating the innermost planet. "The situation on Adobe is nearing crisis. The confounded settlers—a mere handful of them—have managed, as usual, to stir up trouble with an intelligent indigenous life form, the Jaq. I can't think why they bother, merely for a few oases among the endless deserts. However I have, at last, received authorization from Sector Headquarters to take certain action." He swung back to face Retief. "I'm sending you in to handle the situation, Retief—under sealed orders." He picked up a fat buff envelope. "A pity they didn't see fit to order the Terrestrial settlers out weeks ago, as I suggested. Now it is too late. I'm expected to produce a miracle—a rapprochement between Terrestrial and Adoban and a division of territory. It's idiotic. However, failure would look very bad in my record, so I shall expect results." He passed the buff envelope across to Retief. "I understood that Adobe was uninhabited," Retief said, "until the Terrestrial settlers arrived." "Apparently, that was an erroneous impression." Passwyn fixed Retief with a watery eye. "You'll follow your instructions to the letter. In a delicate situation such as this, there must be no impulsive, impromptu element introduced. This approach has been worked out in detail at Sector. You need merely implement it. Is that entirely clear?" "Has anyone at Headquarters ever visited Adobe?" "Of course not. They all hate travel. If there are no other questions, you'd best be on your way. The mail run departs the dome in less than an hour." "What's this native life form like?" Retief asked, getting to his feet. "When you get back," said Passwyn, "you tell me." The mail pilot, a leathery veteran with quarter-inch whiskers, spat toward a stained corner of the compartment, leaned close to the screen. "They's shootin' goin' on down there," he said. "See them white puffs over the edge of the desert?" "I'm supposed to be preventing the war," said Retief. "It looks like I'm a little late." The pilot's head snapped around. "War?" he yelped. "Nobody told me they was a war goin' on on 'Dobe. If that's what that is, I'm gettin' out of here." "Hold on," said Retief. "I've got to get down. They won't shoot at you." "They shore won't, sonny. I ain't givin' 'em the chance." He started punching keys on the console. Retief reached out, caught his wrist. "Maybe you didn't hear me. I said I've got to get down." The pilot plunged against the restraint, swung a punch that Retief blocked casually. "Are you nuts?" the pilot screeched. "They's plenty shootin' goin' on fer me to see it fifty miles out." "The mail must go through, you know." "Okay! You're so dead set on gettin' killed, you take the skiff. I'll tell 'em to pick up the remains next trip." "You're a pal. I'll take your offer." The pilot jumped to the lifeboat hatch and cycled it open. "Get in. We're closin' fast. Them birds might take it into their heads to lob one this way...." Retief crawled into the narrow cockpit of the skiff, glanced over the controls. The pilot ducked out of sight, came back, handed Retief a heavy old-fashioned power pistol. "Long as you're goin' in, might as well take this." "Thanks." Retief shoved the pistol in his belt. "I hope you're wrong." "I'll see they pick you up when the shootin's over—one way or another." The hatch clanked shut. A moment later there was a jar as the skiff dropped away, followed by heavy buffeting in the backwash from the departing mail boat. Retief watched the tiny screen, hands on the manual controls. He was dropping rapidly: forty miles, thirty-nine.... A crimson blip showed on the screen, moving out. Retief felt sweat pop out on his forehead. The red blip meant heavy radiation from a warhead. Somebody was playing around with an outlawed but by no means unheard of fission weapon. But maybe it was just on a high trajectory and had no connection with the skiff.... Retief altered course to the south. The blip followed. He checked instrument readings, gripped the controls, watching. This was going to be tricky. The missile bored closer. At five miles Retief threw the light skiff into maximum acceleration, straight toward the oncoming bomb. Crushed back in the padded seat, he watched the screen, correcting course minutely. The proximity fuse should be set for no more than 1000 yards. At a combined speed of two miles per second, the skiff flashed past the missile, and Retief was slammed violently against the restraining harness in the concussion of the explosion ... a mile astern, and harmless. Then the planetary surface was rushing up with frightening speed. Retief shook his head, kicked in the emergency retro-drive. Points of light arced up from the planet face below. If they were ordinary chemical warheads the skiff's meteor screens should handle them. The screen flashed brilliant white, then went dark. The skiff flipped on its back. Smoke filled the tiny compartment. There was a series of shocks, a final bone-shaking concussion, then stillness, broken by the ping of hot metal contracting. Coughing, Retief disengaged himself from the shock-webbing. He beat out sparks in his lap, groped underfoot for the hatch and wrenched it open. A wave of hot jungle air struck him. He lowered himself to a bed of shattered foliage, got to his feet ... and dropped flat as a bullet whined past his ear. He lay listening. Stealthy movements were audible from the left. He inched his way to the shelter of a broad-boled dwarf tree. Somewhere a song lizard burbled. Whining insects circled, scented alien life, buzzed off. There was another rustle of foliage from the underbrush five yards away. A bush quivered, then a low bough dipped. Retief edged back around the trunk, eased down behind a fallen log. A stocky man in grimy leather shirt and shorts appeared, moving cautiously, a pistol in his hand. As he passed, Retief rose, leaped the log and tackled him. They went down together. The stranger gave one short yell, then struggled in silence. Retief flipped him onto his back, raised a fist— "Hey!" the settler yelled. "You're as human as I am!" "Maybe I'll look better after a shave," said Retief. "What's the idea of shooting at me?" "Lemme up. My name's Potter. Sorry 'bout that. I figured it was a Flap-jack boat; looks just like 'em. I took a shot when I saw something move. Didn't know it was a Terrestrial. Who are you? What you doin' here? We're pretty close to the edge of the oases. That's Flap-jack country over there." He waved a hand toward the north, where the desert lay. "I'm glad you're a poor shot. That missile was too close for comfort." "Missile, eh? Must be Flap-jack artillery. We got nothing like that." "I heard there was a full-fledged war brewing," said Retief. "I didn't expect—" "Good!" Potter said. "We figured a few of you boys from Ivory would be joining up when you heard. You are from Ivory?" "Yes. I'm—" "Hey, you must be Lemuel's cousin. Good night! I pretty near made a bad mistake. Lemuel's a tough man to explain something to." "I'm—" "Keep your head down. These damn Flap-jacks have got some wicked hand weapons. Come on...." He moved off silently on all fours. Retief followed. They crossed two hundred yards of rough country before Potter got to his feet, took out a soggy bandana and mopped his face. "You move good for a city man. I thought you folks on Ivory just sat under those domes and read dials. But I guess bein' Lemuel's cousin you was raised different." "As a matter of fact—" "Have to get you some real clothes, though. Those city duds don't stand up on 'Dobe." Retief looked down at the charred, torn and sweat-soaked powder-blue blazer and slacks. "This outfit seemed pretty rough-and-ready back home," he said. "But I guess leather has its points." "Let's get on back to camp. We'll just about make it by sundown. And, look. Don't say anything to Lemuel about me thinking you were a Flap-jack." "I won't, but—" Potter was on his way, loping off up a gentle slope. Retief pulled off the sodden blazer, dropped it over a bush, added his string tie and followed Potter. II "We're damn glad you're here, mister," said a fat man with two revolvers belted across his paunch. "We can use every hand. We're in bad shape. We ran into the Flap-jacks three months ago and we haven't made a smart move since. First, we thought they were a native form we hadn't run into before. Fact is, one of the boys shot one, thinkin' it was fair game. I guess that was the start of it." He stirred the fire, added a stick. "And then a bunch of 'em hit Swazey's farm here," Potter said. "Killed two of his cattle, and pulled back." "I figure they thought the cows were people," said Swazey. "They were out for revenge." "How could anybody think a cow was folks?" another man put in. "They don't look nothin' like—" "Don't be so dumb, Bert," said Swazey. "They'd never seen Terries before. They know better now." Bert chuckled. "Sure do. We showed 'em the next time, didn't we, Potter? Got four." "They walked right up to my place a couple days after the first time," Swazey said. "We were ready for 'em. Peppered 'em good. They cut and run." "Flopped, you mean. Ugliest lookin' critters you ever saw. Look just like a old piece of dirty blanket humpin' around." "It's been goin' on this way ever since. They raid and then we raid. But lately they've been bringing some big stuff into it. They've got some kind of pint-sized airships and automatic rifles. We've lost four men now and a dozen more in the freezer, waiting for the med ship. We can't afford it. The colony's got less than three hundred able-bodied men." "But we're hanging onto our farms," said Potter. "All these oases are old sea-beds—a mile deep, solid topsoil. And there's a couple of hundred others we haven't touched yet. The Flap-jacks won't get 'em while there's a man alive." "The whole system needs the food we can raise," Bert said. "These farms we're trying to start won't be enough but they'll help." "We been yellin' for help to the CDT, over on Ivory," said Potter. "But you know these Embassy stooges." "We heard they were sending some kind of bureaucrat in here to tell us to get out and give the oases to the Flap-jacks," said Swazey. He tightened his mouth. "We're waitin' for him...." "Meanwhile we got reinforcements comin' up, eh, boys?" Bert winked at Retief. "We put out the word back home. We all got relatives on Ivory and Verde." "Shut up, you damn fool!" a deep voice grated. "Lemuel!" Potter said. "Nobody else could sneak up on us like that." "If I'd a been a Flap-jack; I'd of et you alive," the newcomer said, moving into the ring of fire, a tall, broad-faced man in grimy leather. He eyed Retief. "Who's that?" "What do ya mean?" Potter spoke in the silence. "He's your cousin...." "He ain't no cousin of mine," Lemuel said slowly. He stepped to Retief. "Who you spyin' for, stranger?" he rasped. Retief got to his feet. "I think I should explain—" A short-nosed automatic appeared in Lemuel's hand, a clashing note against his fringed buckskins. "Skip the talk. I know a fink when I see one." "Just for a change, I'd like to finish a sentence," said Retief. "And I suggest you put your courage back in your pocket before it bites you." "You talk too damned fancy to suit me." "Maybe. But I'm talking to suit me. Now, for the last time, put it away." Lemuel stared at Retief. "You givin' me orders...?" Retief's left fist shot out, smacked Lemuel's face dead center. He stumbled back, blood starting from his nose; the pistol fired into the dirt as he dropped it. He caught himself, jumped for Retief ... and met a straight right that snapped him onto his back: out cold. "Wow!" said Potter. "The stranger took Lem ... in two punches!" "One," said Swazey. "That first one was just a love tap." Bert froze. "Hark, boys," he whispered. In the sudden silence a night lizard called. Retief strained, heard nothing. He narrowed his eyes, peered past the fire— With a swift lunge he seized up the bucket of drinking water, dashed it over the fire, threw himself flat. He heard the others hit the dirt a split second behind him. "You move fast for a city man," breathed Swazey beside him. "You see pretty good too. We'll split and take 'em from two sides. You and Bert from the left, me and Potter from the right." "No," said Retief. "You wait here. I'm going out alone." "What's the idea...?" "Later. Sit tight and keep your eyes open." Retief took a bearing on a treetop faintly visible against the sky and started forward. Five minutes' stealthy progress brought him to a slight rise of ground. With infinite caution he raised himself, risking a glance over an out-cropping of rock. The stunted trees ended just ahead. Beyond, he could make out the dim contour of rolling desert. Flap-jack country. He got to his feet, clambered over the stone—still hot after a day of tropical heat—and moved forward twenty yards. Around him he saw nothing but drifted sand, palely visible in the starlight, and the occasional shadow of jutting shale slabs. Behind him the jungle was still. He sat down on the ground to wait. It was ten minutes before a movement caught his eye. Something had separated itself from a dark mass of stone, glided across a few yards of open ground to another shelter. Retief watched. Minutes passed. The shape moved again, slipped into a shadow ten feet distant. Retief felt the butt of the power pistol with his elbow. His guess had better be right this time.... There was a sudden rasp, like leather against concrete, and a flurry of sand as the Flap-jack charged. Retief rolled aside, then lunged, threw his weight on the flopping Flap-jack—a yard square, three inches thick at the center and all muscle. The ray-like creature heaved up, curled backward, its edge rippling, to stand on the flattened rim of its encircling sphincter. It scrabbled with prehensile fringe-tentacles for a grip on Retief's shoulders. He wrapped his arms around the alien and struggled to his feet. The thing was heavy. A hundred pounds at least. Fighting as it was, it seemed more like five hundred. The Flap-jack reversed its tactics, went limp. Retief grabbed, felt a thumb slip into an orifice— The alien went wild. Retief hung on, dug the thumb in deeper. "Sorry, fellow," he muttered between clenched teeth. "Eye-gouging isn't gentlemanly, but it's effective...." The Flap-jack fell still, only its fringes rippling slowly. Retief relaxed the pressure of his thumb; the alien gave a tentative jerk; the thumb dug in. The alien went limp again, waiting. "Now we understand each other," said Retief. "Take me to your leader." Twenty minutes' walk into the desert brought Retief to a low rampart of thorn branches: the Flap-jacks' outer defensive line against Terry forays. It would be as good a place as any to wait for the move by the Flap-jacks. He sat down and eased the weight of his captive off his back, but kept a firm thumb in place. If his analysis of the situation was correct, a Flap-jack picket should be along before too long.... A penetrating beam of red light struck Retief in the face, blinked off. He got to his feet. The captive Flap-jack rippled its fringe in an agitated way. Retief tensed his thumb in the eye-socket. "Sit tight," he said. "Don't try to do anything hasty...." His remarks were falling on deaf ears—or no ears at all—but the thumb spoke as loudly as words. There was a slither of sand. Another. He became aware of a ring of presences drawing closer. Retief tightened his grip on the alien. He could see a dark shape now, looming up almost to his own six-three. It looked like the Flap-jacks came in all sizes. A low rumble sounded, like a deep-throated growl. It strummed on, faded out. Retief cocked his head, frowning. "Try it two octaves higher," he said. "Awwrrp! Sorry. Is that better?" a clear voice came from the darkness. "That's fine," Retief said. "I'm here to arrange a prisoner exchange." "Prisoners? But we have no prisoners." "Sure you have. Me. Is it a deal?" "Ah, yes, of course. Quite equitable. What guarantees do you require?" "The word of a gentleman is sufficient." Retief released the alien. It flopped once, disappeared into the darkness. "If you'd care to accompany me to our headquarters," the voice said, "we can discuss our mutual concerns in comfort." "Delighted." Red lights blinked briefly. Retief glimpsed a gap in the thorny barrier, stepped through it. He followed dim shapes across warm sand to a low cave-like entry, faintly lit with a reddish glow. "I must apologize for the awkward design of our comfort-dome," said the voice. "Had we known we would be honored by a visit—" "Think nothing of it," Retief said. "We diplomats are trained to crawl." Inside, with knees bent and head ducked under the five-foot ceiling, Retief looked around at the walls of pink-toned nacre, a floor like burgundy-colored glass spread with silken rugs and a low table of polished red granite that stretched down the center of the spacious room, set out with silver dishes and rose-crystal drinking-tubes. III "Let me congratulate you," the voice said. Retief turned. An immense Flap-jack, hung with crimson trappings, rippled at his side. The voice issued from a disk strapped to its back. "You fight well. I think we will find in each other worthy adversaries." "Thanks. I'm sure the test would be interesting, but I'm hoping we can avoid it." "Avoid it?" Retief heard a low humming coming from the speaker in the silence. "Well, let us dine," the mighty Flap-jack said at last. "We can resolve these matters later. I am called Hoshick of the Mosaic of the Two Dawns." "I'm Retief." Hoshick waited expectantly, "... of the Mountain of Red Tape," Retief added. "Take place, Retief," said Hoshick. "I hope you won't find our rude couches uncomfortable." Two other large Flap-jacks came into the room, communed silently with Hoshick. "Pray forgive our lack of translating devices," he said to Retief. "Permit me to introduce my colleagues...." A small Flap-jack rippled the chamber bearing on its back a silver tray laden with aromatic food. The waiter served the four diners, filled the drinking tubes with yellow wine. It smelled good. "I trust you'll find these dishes palatable," said Hoshick. "Our metabolisms are much alike, I believe." Retief tried the food. It had a delicious nut-like flavor. The wine was indistinguishable from Chateau d'Yquem. "It was an unexpected pleasure to encounter your party here," said Hoshick. "I confess at first we took you for an indigenous earth-grubbing form, but we were soon disabused of that notion." He raised a tube, manipulating it deftly with his fringe tentacles. Retief returned the salute and drank. "Of course," Hoshick continued, "as soon as we realized that you were sportsmen like ourselves, we attempted to make amends by providing a bit of activity for you. We've ordered out our heavier equipment and a few trained skirmishers and soon we'll be able to give you an adequate show. Or so I hope." "Additional skirmishers?" said Retief. "How many, if you don't mind my asking?" "For the moment, perhaps only a few hundred. There-after ... well, I'm sure we can arrange that between us. Personally I would prefer a contest of limited scope. No nuclear or radiation-effect weapons. Such a bore, screening the spawn for deviations. Though I confess we've come upon some remarkably useful sports. The rangerform such as you made captive, for example. Simple-minded, of course, but a fantastically keen tracker." "Oh, by all means," Retief said. "No atomics. As you pointed out, spawn-sorting is a nuisance, and then too, it's wasteful of troops." "Ah, well, they are after all expendable. But we agree: no atomics. Have you tried the ground-gwack eggs? Rather a specialty of my Mosaic...." "Delicious," said Retief. "I wonder. Have you considered eliminating weapons altogether?" A scratchy sound issued from the disk. "Pardon my laughter," Hoshick said, "but surely you jest?" "As a matter of fact," said Retief, "we ourselves seldom use weapons." "I seem to recall that our first contact of skirmishforms involved the use of a weapon by one of your units." "My apologies," said Retief. "The—ah—the skirmishform failed to recognize that he was dealing with a sportsman." "Still, now that we have commenced so merrily with weapons...." Hoshick signaled and the servant refilled tubes. "There is an aspect I haven't yet mentioned," Retief went on. "I hope you won't take this personally, but the fact is, our skirmishforms think of weapons as something one employs only in dealing with certain specific life-forms." "Oh? Curious. What forms are those?" "Vermin. Or 'varmints' as some call them. Deadly antagonists, but lacking in caste. I don't want our skirmishforms thinking of such worthy adversaries as yourself as varmints." "Dear me! I hadn't realized, of course. Most considerate of you to point it out." Hoshick clucked in dismay. "I see that skirmishforms are much the same among you as with us: lacking in perception." He laughed scratchily. "Imagine considering us as—what was the word?—varmints." "Which brings us to the crux of the matter. You see, we're up against a serious problem with regard to skirmishforms. A low birth rate. Therefore we've reluctantly taken to substitutes for the mass actions so dear to the heart of the sportsman. We've attempted to put an end to these contests altogether...." Hoshick coughed explosively, sending a spray of wine into the air. "What are you saying?" he gasped. "Are you proposing that Hoshick of the Mosaic of the Two Dawns abandon honor....?" "Sir!" said Retief sternly. "You forget yourself. I, Retief of the Red Tape Mountain, make an alternate proposal more in keeping with the newest sporting principles." "New?" cried Hoshick. "My dear Retief, what a pleasant surprise! I'm enthralled with novel modes. One gets so out of touch. Do elaborate." "It's quite simple, really. Each side selects a representative and the two individuals settle the issue between them." "I ... um ... fear I don't understand. What possible significance could one attach to the activities of a couple of random skirmishforms?" "I haven't made myself clear," said Retief. He took a sip of wine. "We don't involve the skirmishforms at all. That's quite passe." "You don't mean...?" "That's right. You and me." Outside on the starlit sand Retief tossed aside the power pistol, followed it with the leather shirt Swazey had lent him. By the faint light he could just make out the towering figure of the Flap-jack rearing up before him, his trappings gone. A silent rank of Flap-jack retainers were grouped behind him. "I fear I must lay aside the translator now, Retief," said Hoshick. He sighed and rippled his fringe tentacles. "My spawn-fellows will never credit this. Such a curious turn fashion has taken. How much more pleasant it is to observe the action of the skirmishforms from a distance." "I suggest we use Tennessee rules," said Retief. "They're very liberal. Biting, gouging, stomping, kneeing and of course choking, as well as the usual punching, shoving and kicking." "Hmmm. These gambits seem geared to forms employing rigid endo-skeletons; I fear I shall be at a disadvantage." "Of course," Retief said, "if you'd prefer a more plebeian type of contest...." "By no means. But perhaps we could rule out tentacle-twisting, just to even it." "Very well. Shall we begin?" With a rush Hoshick threw himself at Retief, who ducked, whirled, and leaped on the Flap-jack's back ... and felt himself flipped clear by a mighty ripple of the alien's slab-like body. Retief rolled aside as Hoshick turned on him; he jumped to his feet and threw a right hay-maker to Hoshick's mid-section. The alien whipped his left fringe around in an arc that connected with Retief's jaw, sent him spinning onto his back ... and Hoshick's weight struck him. Retief twisted, tried to roll. The flat body of the alien blanketed him. He worked an arm free, drumming blows on the leathery back. Hoshick nestled closer. Retief's air was running out. He heaved up against the smothering weight. Nothing budged. It was like burial under a dump-truck-load of concrete. He remembered the rangerform he had captured. The sensitive orifice had been placed ventrally, in what would be the thoracic area.... He groped, felt tough hide set with horny granules. He would be missing skin tomorrow ... if there was a tomorrow. His thumb found the orifice and probed. The Flap-jack recoiled. Retief held fast, probed deeper, groping with the other hand. If the alien were bilaterally symmetrical there would be a set of ready made hand-holds.... There were. Retief dug in and the Flap-jack writhed, pulled away. Retief held on, scrambled to his feet, threw his weight against the alien and fell on top of him, still gouging. Hoshick rippled his fringe wildly, flopped in terror, then went limp. Retief relaxed, released his hold and got to his feet, breathing hard. Hoshick humped himself over onto his ventral side, lifted and moved gingerly over to the sidelines. His retainers came forward, assisted him into his trappings, strapped on the translator. He sighed heavily, adjusted the volume. "There is much to be said for the old system," he said. "What a burden one's sportsmanship places on one at times." "Great sport, wasn't it?" said Retief. "Now, I know you'll be eager to continue. If you'll just wait while I run back and fetch some of our gougerforms—" "May hide-ticks devour the gougerforms!" Hoshick bellowed. "You've given me such a sprong-ache as I'll remember each spawning-time for a year." "Speaking of hide-ticks," said Retief, "we've developed a biterform—" "Enough!" Hoshick roared, so loudly that the translator bounced on his hide. "Suddenly I yearn for the crowded yellow sands of Jaq. I had hoped...." He broke off, drew a rasping breath. "I had hoped, Retief," he said, speaking sadly now, "to find a new land here where I might plan my own Mosaic, till these alien sands and bring forth such a crop of paradise-lichen as should glut the markets of a hundred worlds. But my spirit is not equal to the prospect of biterforms and gougerforms without end. I am shamed before you...." "To tell you the truth, I'm old-fashioned myself. I'd rather watch the action from a distance too." "But surely your spawn-fellows would never condone such an attitude." "My spawn-fellows aren't here. And besides, didn't I mention it? No one who's really in the know would think of engaging in competition by mere combat if there were any other way. Now, you mentioned tilling the sand, raising lichens—things like that—" "That on which we dined but now," said Hoshick, "and from which the wine is made." "The big news in fashionable diplomacy today is farming competition. Now, if you'd like to take these deserts and raise lichen, we'll promise to stick to the oases and vegetables." Hoshick curled his back in attention. "Retief, you're quite serious? You would leave all the fair sand hills to us?" "The whole works, Hoshick. I'll take the oases." Hoshick rippled his fringes ecstatically. "Once again you have outdone me, Retief," he cried. "This time, in generosity." "We'll talk over the details later. I'm sure we can establish a set of rules that will satisfy all parties. Now I've got to get back. I think some of the gougerforms are waiting to see me."

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STRANGE EXODUS By ROBERT ABERNATHY Gigantic, mindless, the Monsters had come out of interstellar space to devour Earth. They gnawed at her soil, drank deep of her seas. Where, on this gutted cosmic carcass, could humanity flee? [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Westover got a shock when he stumbled onto the monster, for all that he knew one had been through here. He had been following the high ground toward the hills, alternately splashing through waist-deep water and climbing onto comparatively dry knolls. To right and left of him was the sullen noise of the river in flood, and behind him, too, the rising water he had barely escaped. The night was overcast, the moon a faint disk of glow that left river and hills and even the mud underfoot invisible. He had not sought in his mind for the flood's cause, but had merely taken it numbly as part of the fury and confusion of a world in ruin. Anyway, he was dead tired out on his feet. He sensed more than saw the looming wall before him, but he thought it the bare ledge-rock of a stripped hillside until he stepped into a small pot-hole and lurched forward, and his outflung hands sank into the slime that covered a surface faintly, horrifyingly resilient. He recoiled as if seared, and retreated, slithering in the muck. For moments his mind was full of dark formless panic; then he took a firm hold on himself and tried to comprehend the situation. Nothing was distinguishable beyond a few yards, but his mind's eye could see the rest—the immense slug-like shape that extended in ponderous repose across the river valley, its head and tail spilling over the hills on either side, five miles apart. The beast was quiescent until morning—sleeping, if such things slept. And that explained the flood; the monster's body had formed an unbreakable dam behind which the river had been steadily piling up in those first hours of night; if it did not move until dawn, the level would be far higher then. Westover stood motionless in the blackness; how long, he did not know. He was hardly aware of the water that covered his feet, crept over his ankles, and swirled halfway to his knees. Only the emergence of the moon through a rift of the cloud blanket brought him awake; its dim light gleamed all around on a great sheet of water, unbroken save for scattered black hummocks—crests of knolls like that on which he stood, all soon to be hidden by the rising flood. For a moment he knew despair. The way back was impassable, and the way ahead was blocked by the titanic enemy. Then the impersonal will that had driven him implacably two days and nights without stopping came to his rescue. Westover plodded forward, pressed his shrinking body against the slimy, faintly warm surface of the monster's foot, and sought above him with upstretched hands—found holds, and began to climb with a strength he had not known was left in him. The moonlight's fading again was merciful as he climbed the sheer, slippery face of the foot; but he could hear the wash and chuckle of the flood below. His tired brain told him treacherously: "I'm already asleep—this is a nightmare." Once, listening to that insidious voice, he slipped and for instants hung dizzily by his hands, and for some minutes after he had found a new foothold merely clung panting with pounding heart. Some time after he had found courage to resume the climb, he dragged himself, gasping and quivering, to comparative safety on the broad shelf that marked the rim of the foot. Above him lay the great black steep that rose to the summit of the monster's humped back, a mountain to be climbed. Westover felt poignantly that his exhausted body could not make that ascent and face the long and dangerous descent beyond, which he had to make before dawn ... but not now ... not now.... He lay in a state between waking and dreaming, high on the monster's side; and it seemed that the colossal body moved, swelling and sighing—but he knew they did not breathe as backboned animals do. Westover had been one of the men who, in the days when humanity was still fighting, had accumulated quite a store of knowledge about the enemy—the enemy that was brainless and toolless, but that was simply too vast for human intelligence and weapons to defeat.... Westover no longer saw the murky moonlight, the far faint glitter of the flood or the slope of the living mountain. He saw, as he had seen from a circling jet plane, an immense tree of smoke that rose and expanded under the noonday sun, creamy white above and black and oily below, and beneath the black cloud something that writhed and flowed sluggishly in a cyclopean death agony. That picture dissolved, and was replaced by the face of a man—one who might now be alive or dead, elsewhere in the chaos of a desolated planet. It was an ordinary face, roundish, spectacled, but etched now by tragedy; the voice that went with it was flat, unemotional, pedantic. "There are so many of them, and we've destroyed so few—and to kill those few took our mightiest weapons. Examination of the ones that have been killed discloses the reason why ordinary projectiles and bombs and poisons are ineffective against them—apart, that is, from the chief reason of sheer size. The creatures are so loosely organized that a local injury hardly affects the whole. In a sense, each one of them is a single cell—like the slime molds, the Earthly life forms that most resemble them. "That striking resemblance, together with the fact that they chose Earth to attack out of all the planets of the Solar System, shows they must have originated on a world much like this. But while on Earth the slime molds are the highest reticular organisms, and the dominant life is all multicellular, on the monsters' home world conditions must have favored unicellular growth. Probably as a result of this unspecialized structure, the monsters have attained their great size and perhaps for the same reason they have achieved what even intelligent cellular life so far hasn't—liberation from existence bound to one world's surface, the conquest of space. They accomplished it not by invention but by adaptation, as brainless life once crawled out of the sea to conquer the dry land. "The monsters who have descended on Earth must represent the end result of a long evolution completed in space itself. They are evidently deep-space beings, able to propel themselves from planet to planet and from star to star in search of food, guided by instinct to suns and worlds like ours. Descending on such a planet, they move across its surface systematically ingesting all edible material—all life not mobile enough to avoid their march. They are like caterpillars that overrun a planet and strip it of its leaves, before moving on to the next. "Man is a highly mobile species, so our direct casualties of this invasion have been very light and will continue to be. But when the monsters have finished with Earth, there will be no vegetation left for man's food, no houses, no cities, none of the fixed installations of civilization, and the end will be far more terrible than if we were all devoured by the monsters." Westover awoke, feeling himself bathed by the cold sweat of nightmare—then he realized that a misty rain had wetted his face and sogged his clothes. That, and the sleep he had had, refreshed him and made his mind clearer than it had been for days, and he remembered that he could not sleep but had to go on, searching with a hope that would not die for some miraculously spared refuge where civilization and science might yet exist, where there would be the means to realize his idea for stopping the monsters. He sat up, eyes searching the sky for a sign to tell him how long he had slept. Low on the western horizon he found the faint glow that told of the moon's setting; and in the east a stronger light was already struggling through the clouds and mist, becoming every moment less tenuous and illusory, more the bitter reality of the breaking day. Even as Westover began frantically climbing, out of that lightening sky the hopelessness of his effort pressed down on him. With dawn the monster would begin to move, to crawl eastward impelled by the same dim phototropic urge which must guide these things out of the interstellar depths to Sun-type stars. All of them had crept endlessly eastward around the Earth, gutting the continents and churning the sea bottoms, and by now whatever was left of human civilization must be starving beyond the Arctic circle, or aboard ships at sea. The hordes that still lived and wandered over the once populous fertile lands, like this—would not live long. For a man like Westover, who had been a scientist, it was not the prospect of death that was most crushing, but the death blow to his human pride, the star-storming pride of mind and will—defeated by sheer bulk and mindless hunger. Near the crest of the monster's back, he stumbled and fell hands and knees on the shagreen-roughness of the skin; at first he thought only that an attack of dizziness had made him fall, then he realized that the surface beneath him had shifted. Unmistakably even in the misty dawn-light, the hills and valleys of the rugose back were changing shape, as the vast protoplasmic mass below crawled, flowed beneath its integument. In slow peristaltic motion the waves marched eastward, toward the monster's head. He could stay where he was unharmed, of course. On the monster's back, of all places, he had nothing to fear from it or from others of its kind. But he knew with desperate clarity that by nightfall, when the beast became still once more, exhaustion and growing hunger would have made him unable to descend. As he lay where he had fallen, he felt that weakness creeping over him, no longer held in check by the will that had kept him doggedly plodding forward. Again he lay half conscious, in a lethargy that unchecked must grow steadily deeper until death. Isolated thoughts floated through his head. It occurred to him that he was now ideally located to conduct the experiments necessary to prove his theory of how to destroy the monsters—if only someone had had the foresight to build a biological laboratory on the monster's back. Of course the rolling motion would create special problems of technique.... Idiocy.... Once more he seemed to glimpse Sutton's face, as the biologist calmly made that grisly report to the President's Committee on Extermination.... Sutton's prediction had been a hundred percent correct. The monsters' hunger knew no halt until they had absorbed into themselves all the organic material on the world which was their prey.... And men must starve, as he was starving now.... With a struggle Westover roused himself, first sitting up, then swaying to his feet, frowning with the effort to look sanely at the terrible inspiration that had come to him. The cloud blanket was breaking up, the sun already high, beating down on the naked moving plateau on which the man stood. The idea born in him seemed to stand that light, even to expand into hope. Fingers shaking, he unhitched the light ax from his belt and began to hack with feverish industry at the monster's crusted hide. The scaly, weathered epidermis seemed immeasurably thick. But at last he had chopped through it, reached the softer protoplasm beneath. Clawing and hewing in the hole he had made, he tore out heavy slabs of the monster's flesh. A ripple that did not belong to the crawling motion ran over the thing's surface round about. Westover laughed wildly with a sudden sense of power. He, the insignificant human mite, had made the miles-long beast twitch like a flea-bitten dog. The analogy was pat; like a flea, he had lodged on a larger animal and was about to nourish himself from it. The slabs of flesh he had cut off were gray and unappetizing, but he knew from the studies he had helped Sutton make that the monsters, extraterrestrial though they were, were in the basic chemistry of proteins, fats and carbohydrates one with man or the amoeba, and therefore might be—food. His matches were dry in their water-proof case; he made a smoldering fire from the loose fibrous scale of the monster's back, and half an hour later was replete. Either the long fast, or involuntary revulsion, or perhaps merely the motion of the creature brought on nausea, but he fought it sternly back and succeeded in keeping his strange meal down. Then he was tormented by thirst. It was some time, though, before he could bring himself to drink the colorless fluid that had collected in the wound he had inflicted on the monster. Thus began for him a weird existence—the life of a parasite, of a flea on a dog. The monster crawled by day and rested by night; strengthened, the man could have left it then, but somehow night after night he did not. It wasn't, he argued with himself sometimes in the days when he lay torpidly drowsing, lulled by the long sway, arms over his head to protect him from the sun's baking, merely that he was chained to the only source of food he knew in all the world—not just that he was developing a flea's psychology. He was a man and a scientist, and he was conducting an experiment.... His life on the monster's back was proving something, something of vast importance for man, the extinct animal—but for increasingly longer periods of time he could not remember what it was.... There came a morning, though, when he remembered. Thus began for him a weird existence—the life of a parasite, of a flea on a dog. He woke with the sun's warmth on his body and the realization of something amiss trickling through his head. It was a little while before he recognized the wrongness, and when he did he sat bolt upright. The sun was already up, and the monster should have begun once more its steady, ravenous march to the east. But there was no motion; the great living expanse lay still around him. He wondered wildly if it was dead. Presently, though, he felt a faint shuddering and lift beneath his feet, and heard far stifled mutterings and sighs. Westover's mind was beginning to function again; it was as though the cessation of the rock and sway had exorcised the lethargy that had lain upon him. He knew now that he had been almost insane for the time he had passed here, touched by the madness that takes hermits and men lost in deserts or oceans. And his was a stranger solitude than any of those. Now he listened strainingly to the portentous sounds of change in the monster's vitals, and in a flash of insight knew them for what they were. The scientists had found, in the burst bodies of the Titans that had been killed by atomic bombs, the answer to the riddle of these creatures' crossing of space: great vacuoles, pockets of gas that in the living animal could be under exceedingly high pressures, and that could be expelled to drive the monster in flight like a reaction engine. Rocket propulsion, of course, was nothing new to zoology; it was developed ages before man, by the squids and by those odd degenerate relatives of the vertebrates that are called tunicates because of their gaudy cellulose-plastic armor.... The monster on which Westover had been living as a parasite was generating gases within itself, preparing to leave the ravished Earth. That was the meaning of its gargantuan belly rumblings. And they meant further that he must finally leave it—now or never—or be borne aloft to die gasping in the stratosphere. Hurriedly the man scrambled to the highest eminence of the back and stood looking about; and what he saw brought him to the brink of despair. For all around lay blue water, waves dancing and glinting in the fresh breeze; and sniffing the air he recognized the salt tang of the sea. While he slept the monster had crept beyond the coast line, and lay now in what to it was shallow water—fifty or a hundred fathoms. Back the way it had come, a headland was visible, mockingly, hopelessly distant. Of course—the great beast would crawl into the sea, which would float its bloated bulk and enable it to accelerate and take flight. It would never have been able to lift itself into the air from the dry land. He should have foreseen that and made his escape in time. Now that he had solved the problem of human survival.... But the bright ocean laughed at him, sparkling away wave beyond rolling wave, and beyond that blue headland could be only a land made desert, where men become beasts fought crazily over the last morsels of food. He had lost track of the days he had been on the monster's back, but the rape of Earth must be finished now. He had no doubt that the things would depart as they had come into the Solar System—in that close, seemingly one-willed swarm that Earth's astronomers had at first taken for a comet. If this one was leaving, the rest no doubt were too. Westover sat for a space with head in hands, hearing the faint continuing murmurs from below. And he remembered the voices. He had been hearing them again as he awoke—the distant muffled voices whose words he could not make out, not the small close ones that sometimes in the hot middays had spoken clearly in his ear and even called his name. The latter had to be, as he had vaguely accepted them even then, illusions—but the others—with his new clarity he was suddenly sure that they had been real. And a wild, white light of hope blazed in him, and he flung himself flat on the rough surface, beat on it with bare fists and shouted: "Help! Here I am! Help!" He paused to listen with fierce intentness, and heard nothing but the faint eructations deep inside the monster. Then he sprang to his feet, gripping his hand-ax, and ran panting to the place where he had dug for food. His excavations tended to close and heal overnight; now he went to work with vicious strokes enlarging the latest one, hacking and tearing it deeper and deeper. He was almost hidden in the cavity when a shadow fell across him from behind. He whirled, for there could be no shadows on the monster's back. A man stood watching him calmly—an elderly man in rusty black clothing, leaning on a stick. The staff, the snowy beard, and something that smoldered behind the benign eyes, gave him the look of an ancient prophet. "Who are you?" asked Westover, breathlessly but almost without surprise. "I am the Preacher," the old man said. "The Lord hath sent me to save you. Arise, my son, and follow me." Westover hesitated. "I'm not just imagining you?" he appealed. "Somebody else has really found the answer?" The Preacher's brows knitted faintly, but then his look turned to benevolent understanding. "You have been alone too long here. Come with me—I will take you to the Doctor." Westover was still not sure that the other was more than one of the powerful specters of childhood—the Preacher, the Doctor, no doubt the Teacher next—risen to rob him of his last shreds of sanity. But he nodded in childlike obedience, and followed. When, a few hundred yards nearer the monster's head, the other halted at a black rent in the rugose hide, the mouth of a burrow descending into utter blackness—Westover knew that both the Preacher and his own wild hope were real. "Down here. Into the belly of Leviathan," said the old man solemnly, and Westover nodded this time with alacrity. The crawling descent through the twisting, Stygian burrow had much that ought to belong to a journey into Hell.... More than that, no demonologist's imagination could have conceived without experiencing the sheer horror of the yielding beslimed walls that seemed every moment squeezing in to trap them unspeakably. The air was warm and rank with the familiar heavy sweetish odor of the monster's colorless blood.... Then, as he knew it must, a light glimmered ahead, the sinus widened, and Westover climbed to his feet and stood, weak-kneed still, staring at a chamber carved in the veritable belly of Leviathan. The floor underfoot was firm, as was the wall his shaking fingers tested. Dazzled, he saw tools leaning against the walls, spades, crowbars, axes, and a half-dozen people, men and women in rough grimy clothing, who stood watching him with lively interest. The Preacher stood beside him, breathing hard and mopping his forehead. But he brushed aside the deferential offers of the others: "No—I will take him to the Doctor myself. All of you must hurry now to close the shaft." There was another tunnel to be crawled through, but that one was firm-walled as the room they left behind. They emerged into a larger cavern, that like the first was lit—only now did the miracle of it obtrude itself in his dazed mind—by fluorescent tubes, and filled with equipment that gleamed glass and metal. Over an apparatus with many fluid-dripping trays, like an air-conditioning device, bent a lone man. "Is it working?" inquired the Preacher. "It's working," the other answered without looking up from the adjustment he was making. Bubbles were rising in the fluid that filled the trays, rising and bursting, rising and bursting with a curiously fascinating monotony. The subtly tense attitudes of the two initiates told Westover better than words that there was something hugely important in the success of whatever magic was producing those bubbles. The thaumaturge straightened, wiping his hands on his trousers as he turned with a satisfied grin on his round, spectacled face—then both he and Westover froze in dumbfounded recognition. Sutton was first to recover. He said quietly, "Welcome aboard the ark, Bill. You're just in time—I think we're about to hoist anchor." His quick eyes studied Westover's face, and he gestured toward a packing box against the wall opposite his apparatus. "Sit down. You've been through the mill." "That's right," Westover sat down dizzily. "I've been aboard your ark for some time now, though. Only as an ectoparasite." "It's high time you joined the endoparasites. Lucky you scratched around enough up there to create repercussions we could feel down here. You got the same idea, then?" "I stumbled onto it," Westover admitted. "I was wandering across country—my plane crashed on the way back from that South American bug hunt dreamed up by somebody who'd been reading Wells' War of the Worlds . I think my pilot went nuts; you could see too much of the destruction from up there.... But I got out in one piece and started walking—looking for some place with people and facilities that could try out my method of killing the monsters. I thought—I still think—I had a sure-fire way to do that—but I didn't realize then that it was too late to think of killing them off." Sutton nodded thoughtfully. "It was too late—or too early, perhaps. We'll have to talk that over." Westover finished the brief account of his coming to dwell on the monster's back. The other grinned happily. "You began with the practice, where I worked out the theory first." "I haven't got so far with the theory," said Westover, "but I think I've got the main outlines. Until the monsters came, man was a parasite on the face of the Earth. Fundamentally, parasitism—on the green plants and their by-products—was our way of life, as of all animals from the beginning. But the monsters absorbed into themselves all the plant food and even the organic material in the soil. So we have only one way out—to transfer our parasitism to the only remaining food source—the monsters themselves. "The monsters almost defeated us, because of their two special adaptations of extreme size and ability to cross space. But man has always won the battle of adaptations before, because he could improvise new ones as the need arose. The greatest crisis humanity ever faced called for the most radical innovation in our way of life." "Very well put," approved Sutton. "Except that you make it sound easy. By the time I'd worked it out like that, things were already in such a turmoil that putting it into effect was the devil's own job. About the only ones I could find to help me were the Preacher and his people. They have the faith that moves mountains, that has made this self-moving mountain inhabitable." "It is inhabitable?" Westover's question reflected no doubt. Sutton gestured at the bubbling device behind him. "That thing is making air now, which we're going to need when the monster's in space. It was when we were still trying to find a poison for the beasts that I hit on the catalyst that makes their blood give up its oxygen—that's its blood flowing through the filters. We've got an electric generator running by tapping the monster's internal gas pressure. There are problems left before we'll be fully self-sufficient here—but the monster is so much like us in fundamental makeup that its body contains all the elements human life needs too." "Then," Westover glanced appreciatively around, "it looks like the main hazard is claustrophobia." "Don't worry about a cave-in. We're surrounded by solid cystoid tissue. But," Sutton's voice took on a graver note, "there may be other psychological dangers. I don't think all our people—there are fifty-one, fifty-two of us now—realize yet that this colony isn't just a temporary expedient. Human history hasn't had such a turning-point since men first started chipping stone. Spengler's Mensch als Raubtier —if he ever existed—has to be replaced by the Mensch als Schmarotzer , and the adjustment may come hard. We've got to plan for the rest of our lives—and our children's and our children's children's—as parasites inside this monster and whatever others we can manage to—infect—when they're clustered again in space." "For the future," put in the Preacher, who had watched benignly the biologists' reunion, "the Lord will provide, even as He did unto Jonah when he cried to Him out of the belly of the fish." "Amen," agreed Sutton. But the gaze he fixed on Westover was oddly troubled. "Speaking of the future brings up the question of the idea you mentioned—your monster-killing scheme." Westover flexed his hands involuntarily, like one who has been too long enforcedly idle. In terse eager sentences he outlined for Sutton the plan that had burned in him during his bitter wandering over the face of the ruined land. It would be very easy to accomplish from an endoparasite's point of vantage, merely by isolating from the creature's blood over a long period enough of some potent secretion—hormone, enzyme or the like—to kill when suddenly reintroduced into the system. "Originally I thought we could accomplish the same thing by synthesis—but this way will be simpler." "Beautifully simple." Sutton smiled wryly. "So much so that I wish you'd never thought of it." Westover stared. "Why?" "Describing your plan, you sounded almost ready to put it into effect on the spot." "No! Of course I realize—Well, I see what you mean—I think." Westover was crestfallen. Sutton smiled faintly. "I think you do, Bill. To survive, we've got to be good parasites. That means before all, for the coming generations, that we keep our numbers down. A good parasite doesn't destroy or even overtax its host. We don't want to follow the sorry example of such unsuccessful species as the bugs of bubonic plague or typhoid; we'll do better to model ourselves on the humble tapeworm. "Your idea is dangerous for the same reason. The monsters probably spend thousands of years in interstellar space; during that time they'll be living exclusively on their fat—the fuel they stored on Earth, and so will we. We've got a whole new history of man ahead of us, under such changed conditions that we can't begin to predict what turns it may take. There's a very great danger that men will proliferate until they kill their hosts. But imagine a struggle for Lebensraum when all the living space there is is a few thousand monsters capable of supporting a very limited number of people each—with your method giving an easy way to destroy these little worlds our descendants will inhabit. It's too much dynamite to have around the house." Westover bowed his head, but he had caught a curiously expectant glint in Sutton's eyes as he spoke. He thought, and his face lightened. "Suppose we work out a way to record my idea, one that can't be deciphered by anyone unintelligent enough to be likely to misuse it. A riddle for our descendants—who should have use for it some day." At last Sutton smiled. "That's better. You've thought it through to the end, I see.... This phase of our history won't last forever. Eventually, the monsters will come to another planet not too unlike Earth, because it's on such worlds they prey. A tapeworm can cross the Sahara desert in the intestine of a camel—" His voice was drowned in a vast hissing roar. An irresistible pressure distorted the walls of the chamber and scythed its occupants from their feet. Sutton staggered drunkenly almost erect, fought his way across the tilting floor to make sure of his precious apparatus. He turned back toward the others, bracing himself and shouting something; then, knowing his words lost in the thunder, gestured toward the Earth they were leaving, a half-regretful, half-triumphant farewell.

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20007

The logistics of presidential adultery. The Washington Times could hardly contain its excitement: "A former FBI agent assigned to the White House describes in a new book how President Clinton slips past his Secret Service detail in the dead of night, hides under a blanket in the back of a dark-colored sedan, and trysts with a woman, possibly a celebrity, at the JW Marriott Hotel in downtown Washington." For Clinton-haters, Gary Aldrich's tale sounded too good to be true. And it was. The not-so-Secret-Service agent's "source" turned out to be a thirdhand rumor passed on by Clinton scandalmonger David Brock. Those who know about White House security--Clinton staffers, the Secret Service, former aides to Presidents Reagan and Bush--demolished Aldrich's claims. Clinton couldn't give his Secret Service agents the slip (they shadow him when he walks around the White House), couldn't arrange a private visit without tipping off hotel staff, and couldn't re-enter the White House without getting nabbed. (Guards check all cars at the gate--especially those that arrive at 4 a.m.) Even so, the image resonates. For some Americans, it is an article of faith: Bill Clinton cheated on his wife when he was governor, and he cheats on her as president. But can he? Is it possible for the president of the United States to commit adultery and get away with it? Maybe, but it's tougher than you think. Historically, presidential adultery is common. Warren Harding cavorted with Nan Britton and Carrie Phillips. Franklin Roosevelt "entertained" Lucy Rutherford at the White House when Eleanor was away. America was none the wiser, even if White House reporters were. Those who know Clinton is cheating often point to the model of John F. Kennedy, who turned presidential hanky-panky into a science. Kennedy invited mistresses to the White House for afternoon (and evening, and overnight) liaisons. Kennedy seduced women on the White House staff (including, it seems, Jackie's own press secretary). Kennedy made assignations outside the White House, then escaped his Secret Service detail by scaling walls and ducking out back doors. If Kennedy did it, so can Clinton. Well, no. Though Clinton slavishly emulates JFK in every other way, he'd be a fool to steal Kennedy's MO d'amour . Here's why: 1) Too many people would know. Kennedy hardly bothered to hide his conquests. According to Kennedy mistress (and mob moll) Judith Campbell's autobiography, those who knew about their affair included: Kennedy's personal aides and secretary (who pandered for him), White House drivers, White House gate guards, White House Secret Service agents, White House domestic staff, most of Campbell's friends, a lot of Kennedy's friends, and several Kennedy family members. Such broad circulation would be disastrous today because: 2) The press would report it. Kennedy conducted his affairs brazenly because he trusted reporters not to write about them. White House journalists knew about, or at least strongly suspected, Kennedy's infidelity, but never published a story about it. Ask Gary Hart if reporters would exercise the same restraint today. Clinton must worry about this more than most presidents. Not only are newspapers and magazines willing to publish an adultery story about him, but many are pursuing it. For the same reason, Clinton would find it difficult to hire a mistress. A lovely young secretary would set off alarm bells in any reporter investigating presidential misbehavior. Says a former Clinton aide, "There has been a real tendency to have no good-looking women on the staff in order to protect him." 3) Clinton cannot avoid Secret Service protection. During the Kennedy era, the Secret Service employed fewer than 500 people and had an annual budget of about $4 million. Then came Lee Harvey Oswald, Squeaky Fromme, and John Hinckley. Now the Secret Service payroll tops 4,500 (most of them agents), and the annual budget exceeds $500 million (up 300 percent just since 1980). At any given time, more than 100 agents guard the president in the White House. Top aides from recent administrations are adamant: The Secret Service never lets the president escape its protection. So what's a randy president to do? Any modern presidential affair would need to meet stringent demands. Only a tiny number of trusted aides and Secret Service agents could know of it. They would need to maintain complete silence about it. And no reporters could catch wind of it. Such an affair is improbable, but--take heart, Clinton-haters--it's not impossible. Based on scuttlebutt and speculation from insiders at the Clinton, Bush, Reagan, and Ford White Houses, here are the four likeliest scenarios for presidential adultery. 1) The White House Sneak. This is a discreet variation of the old Kennedy/Campbell liaison. It's late at night. The president's personal aides have gone home. The family is away. He is alone in the private quarters. The private quarters, a k a "the residence," occupy the second and third floors of the White House. Secret Service agents guard the residence's entrances on the first floor and ground floors, but the first family has privacy in the quarters themselves. Maids and butlers serve the family there, but the president and first lady ask them to leave when they want to be alone. The president dials a "friend" on his private line. (Most presidents placed all their calls through the White House operators, who kept a record of each one; the Clintons installed a direct-dial line in the private quarters.) The president invites the friend over for a cozy evening at the White House. After he hangs up with the friend, he phones the guard at the East Executive Avenue gate and tells him to admit a visitor. He also notifies the Secret Service agent and the usher on duty downstairs that they should send her up to the residence. A taxi drops the woman near the East gate. She identifies herself to the guard, who examines her ID, runs her name through a computer (to check for outstanding warrants), and logs her in a database. A White House usher escorts her into the East Wing of the White House. They walk through the East Wing and pass the Secret Service guard post by the White House movie theater. The agent on duty waves them on. The usher takes her to the private elevator, where another Secret Service agent is posted. She takes the elevator to the second floor. The president opens the door and welcomes her. Under no circumstances could she enter the living quarters without first encountering Secret Service agents. Let us pause for a moment to demolish two of the splashier rumors about White House fornication. First, the residence is the only place in the White House where the president can have safe (i.e. uninterrupted) sex. He can be intruded upon or observed everywhere else--except, perhaps, the Oval Office bathroom. Unless the president is an exhibitionist or a lunatic, liaisons in the Oval Office, bowling alley, or East Wing are unimaginable. Second, the much-touted tunnel between the White House and the Treasury Department is all-but-useless to the presidential adulterer. It is too well-guarded. The president could smuggle a mistress through it, but it would attract far more attention from White House staff than a straightforward gate entry would. Meanwhile, back in the private quarters, the president and friend get comfortable in one of the 14 bedrooms (or, perhaps, the billiard room). After a pleasant 15 minutes (or two hours?), she says goodbye. Depending on how long she stays, she may pass a different shift of Secret Service agents as she departs. She exits the White House grounds, unescorted and unbothered, at the East gate. The Risks : A gate guard, an usher, and a handful of Secret Service agents see her. All of them have a very good idea of why she was there. The White House maid who changes the sheets sees other suspicious evidence. And the woman's--real--name is entered in a Secret Service computer. None of this endangers the president too much. The computer record of her visit is private, at least for several decades after he leaves office. No personal aides know about the visit. Unless they were staking out the East gate, no journalists do either. The Secret Service agents, the guard, the steward, and the maid owe their jobs to their discretion. Leaks get them fired. That said, the current president has every reason not to trust his Secret Service detail. No one seriously compares Secret Service agents (who are pros) to Arkansas state troopers (who aren't). But Clinton might not trust any security guards after the beating he took from his Arkansas posse. Also, if other Secret Service agents are anything like Aldrich, they may dislike this president. One Secret Service leak--the lamp-throwing story--already damaged Clinton. Agents could tattle again. 2) The "Off-the-Record" Visit. Late at night, after his personal aides and the press have gone home, the president tells his Secret Service detail that he needs to take an "off-the-record" trip. He wants to leave the White House without his motorcade and without informing the press. He requests two agents and an unobtrusive sedan. The Secret Service shift leader grumbles, but accepts the conditions. Theoretically, the president could refuse all Secret Service protection, but it would be far more trouble than it's worth. He would have to inform the head of the Secret Service and the secretary of the Treasury. The president and the two agents drive the unmarked car to a woman friend's house. Ideally, she has a covered garage. (An apartment building or a hotel would raise considerably the risk of getting caught.) The agents guard the outside of the house while the president and his friend do their thing. Then the agents chauffeur the president back to the White House, re-entering through the Southwest or Southeast gate, away from the press station. The Risks : Only two Secret Service agents and their immediate supervisor know about the visit. It is recorded in the Secret Service log, which is not made public during the administration's tenure. Gate guards may suspect something fishy when they see the car. A reporter or passer-by could spy the president--even through tinted windows--as the car enters and exits the White House. The friend's neighbors might spot him, or they might notice the agents lurking outside her house. A neighbor might call the police to report the suspicious visitors. All in all, a risky, though not unthinkable, venture. 3. The Camp David Assignation. A bucolic, safer version of the White House Sneak. The president invites a group of friends and staffers--including his paramour but not his wife--to spend the weekend at Camp David. The girlfriend is assigned the cabin next to the president's lodge. Late at night, after the Hearts game has ended and everyone has retired to their cabins, she strolls next door. There is a Secret Service command post outside the cabin. The agents on duty (probably three of them) let her enter. A few hours later, she slips back to her own cabin. The Risks : Only a few Secret Service agents know about the liaison. Even though the guest list is not public, all the Navy and Marine personnel at Camp David, as well as the other guests, would know that the presidential entourage included an attractive woman, but not the first lady. That would raise eyebrows if it got back to the White House press room. 4. The Hotel Shuffle. The cleverest strategy, and the only one that cuts out the Secret Service. The president is traveling without his family. The Secret Service secures an entire hotel floor, reserving elevators and guarding the entrance to the president's suite. The president's personal aide (a man in his late 20s) takes the room adjoining the president's. An internal door connects the two rooms, so the aide can enter the president's room without alerting the agents in the hall. This is standard practice. Late in the evening, the aide escorts a comely young woman back to the hotel. The Secret Service checks her, then waves her into the aide's room. She emerges three hours later, slightly disheveled. She kisses the aide in the hall as she leaves. Someone got lucky--but who? The Risks : The posted Secret Service agents might see through the charade. More awkwardly, the aide would be forced to play the seamy role of procurer. (He would probably do it. Kennedy's assistants performed this task dutifully.) In short, presidential adultery is just barely possible in 1996. But it would be extremely inconvenient, extremely risky, and potentially disastrous. It seems, in fact, a lot more trouble than it's worth. A president these days might be wiser to imitate Jimmy Carter, not Jack Kennedy, and only lust in his heart.

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20008

The Olympic Gene Pool Why the human race keeps getting faster. By Andrew Berry ( 2,168 words; posted Thursday, July 4; to be composted Thursday, July 11 ) On May 6, 1954, at Oxford University's Iffley Road track, Roger Bannister became, by just half a second, the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes. The Holy Grail of middle-distance running was his. Forty-two years later, however, that achievement seems less significant. Four-minute miles are commonplace; the current record, held by Algerian Noureddine Morceli, is 3:44 , more than 5 percent faster than Bannister's speed. What Iffley Road witnessed was just another step along the road to an ever quicker mile, part of the inexorable improvement of athletic performance that we usually take for granted, particularly when the Olympics roll around. If you stop to think about it, though, such constant progress is remarkable. After all, as biomechanical machines with a standard set of parts, humans should be subject to the same limitations we see in, say, automobiles. How come they aren't? A lot of entrepreneurs and technophiles would like us to think that the answer has to do with discoveries in the world of sports technology. A new Nike shoe is trumpeted as something that will shave at least one-thousandth of a second off your 100-meter time. Trainers measure the rate of buildup of lactic acid in your muscles, then claim that their programs will control it. Nutritionists fine-tune athletes' diets. Even the old sexual-abstinence-before-the-race dogma is being re-evaluated under the all-seeing eye of science. But I consider all this little more than tinkering. Sports records would continue to tumble even if training methods or athletic clothing or sexual practices were exactly the same today as they were in 1896, when the first modern Olympics took place. These minor miracles are the product neither of technology nor of training but of demographic patterns that affect us all. Over the past century, the human race has been affected by a slew of what demographers call "secular" trends. (In this context, "secular" does not refer to a trend's lack of spirituality but to its longevity: Secular trends are long-term modifications, not just brief fluctuations.) One such trend is an increase in average size. You have to stoop to get through the doorways of a Tudor cottage in England because its inhabitants were smaller than you are, not because they had a penchant for crouching. Another trend is in life expectancy. People are living longer. Life expectancy in Africa increased over the past 20 years from 46 to 53 years. Over the same period in Europe, where things were already pretty comfortable to begin with, life expectancy increased from 71 to 75 years. The global average was an increase from 58 to 65 years. Probably the most striking change, though, is how much more quickly children are maturing. A 12-year-old child in 1990 who was in what the World Health Organization calls "average economic circumstances" was about 9 inches taller than his or her 1900 counterpart. This is not solely the product of the first trend--the increase in average size--but also due to the fact that children develop faster. Girls menstruate earlier than they used to. The age of menarche (the onset of menstruation) has decreased by three or four months per decade in average sections of Western European populations for the past 150 years. There is a good chance that our 1990 12-year-old already had started to menstruate. Her 1900 counterpart would still have had three years to wait. What do such trends have to do with athletic performance? Well, if we're living longer and growing up faster, that must mean we're producing bigger, better bodies. Better bodies imply faster miles. We run faster and faster for the same reason it is now common for 11-year-old girls to menstruate. But why are these things happening? Demographers have offered a variety of explanations, but the main one is that our diet is improving. A 12-year-old ate better in 1990 than she would have in the Victorian era. This conclusion is supported by studies of the social elite: Because its members were well-nourished even in the early years of this century, this group has experienced relatively little change, over the past 100 years, in the age girls first menstruate. Another explanation is that health care is getting better. In 1991, according to the WHO, more than 75 percent of all 1-year-olds worldwide were immunized against a range of common diseases. Smallpox, that scourge of previous generations, now is effectively extinct. Probably the best measure of how much healthier we are is the rate of infant mortality, which measures both the health of the mother (a sickly mother is more likely to produce a sickly baby) and the health of the baby. In the past 20 years, infant mortality around the world has dropped from 92 deaths per 1000 live births to just 62. A lot of this can be chalked up to primary-heath-care programs in the developing world--the African average, for instance, has dropped from 135 deaths per 1000 births to 95. But there are also significant improvements in the developed world, with infant deaths dropping in Europe over the same 20-year period from 24 per 1000 live births to just 10. Better health care affects athletic ability directly. This is true in the trivial case in which, say, antibiotics cure a runner's fever before the big race, but it may also be true in a more significant way. Diseases contracted in early infancy can have a lifetime impact on health--not necessarily a big one, but an impact nevertheless. Previous generations bore scars from all sorts of non-life-threatening diseases, the stuff everyone picked up as a baby. Nowadays, though, more and more people grow up with no history of disease. Since top athletes inevitably are drawn from the healthiest sector of the population, a generally superior system of health care means a bigger pool of people to draw from. You are much more likely to find someone who can run a mile in 3:30 in a sample of several million superbly healthy people than you are in a sample of 10,000. The pool of potential athletes has expanded in other ways, too. First, the population has exploded. Second, we are coming ever closer to a worldwide middle class, the class from which athletes typically are drawn. Whether, in an age of multinational capitalism, we may talk reasonably about a post-colonial era is way beyond the scope of this article. The fact remains, however, that the developing world is doing just that--developing. Even Mozambique, which ranks at, or near, the bottom of national per capita gross national product tables, has shown an increase of some 20 percent in adult literacy rates over the past 20 years. Literacy rates are merely an index of education, which itself is another way of talking about a global move away from a hand-to-mouth lifestyle. The decline of empire has its Olympic corollaries. Britain won, on average, 17 gold medals per Olympics in the five official games held in its imperial heyday before World War I. That average has dropped to only five medals per Olympics in the 17 held since. This is not a reflection of declining athletic standards in Britain, however; it's a function of how much more competitive other nations have become. The Olympics originally were the preserve of the socioeconomic elite of the socioeconomic elite among nations. Consider this: Only 13 nations participated in 1896, but there were 172 in 1992. Black Africans didn't take part until the third modern games, held in St. Louis in 1908. Even this was accidental: Lentauw and Yamasami, Zulu tribesmen, entered the marathon because they happened to be in St. Louis as part of an exhibit about the Boer war. Lentauw finished ninth despite being chased into a cornfield by dogs. Since all these are changes in how we live, not anything innate, we have to conclude that what we are describing here are effects of environment, not genes. Let us assume that our 1900 and 1990 12-year-olds are identical twins magically born 90 years apart. The 1990 girl still will grow up faster, end up bigger, menstruate earlier, and live longer than the 1900 girl. Perhaps way, way back in human history, when our forebears were still fleeing saber-toothed tigers, natural selection for athletic prowess came into play. But all that ended long ago. Indeed, the laws of natural selection probably work against athletes these days: Given the rigors of training schedules, it is possible that today's top athletes have fewer children than average. Just because nurture has a more significant effect on athletic performance doesn't mean that nature lies dormant, though. Genetic variation exists for just about any trait you choose to study, and the ability to run quickly would be no exception. To take a trivial case, we know that the inheritance of extra fingers or toes is determined genetically. It is quite possible that the possession of an extra toe would hinder an aspiring miler--their genes have affected their athletic performance. One genetic factor that may be influencing performance trends is what is known as "hybrid vigor." Cattle breeders have known about this for a long time: Take two inbred lines of cattle, cross them, and what you have is "better" (say, larger) than any single individual in either of the two parental lines. This does not require natural selection; it is the accidental byproduct of combining two previously isolated stocks. There are a number of theories to account for this at the genetic level, but it has proved difficult to discriminate among them. It is possible that modern humans exhibit some form of hybrid vigor simply because migration and admixture of populations are now occurring at unprecedented rates. Perhaps, just perhaps, such hybridization is being translated into enhanced performance. That doesn't mean, however, that genetic differences in athletic ability can be correlated automatically with race. That is a claim that is impossible to test, because you cannot control, in an experimental sense, environmental differences among the study groups. Sure, you will find more Africans or descendants of Africans standing on the podiums at the end of Olympic track events. And you will find far fewer Asians on those same podiums. But can you, therefore, conclude that Africans have better genes for running than Asians do? No. Environmental differences between the two groups could account for differing levels of athletic success. It is scarcely surprising that Ethiopian or Kenyan distance runners do better than everyone else, since they are in the habit of running immense distances to and from primary school, middle school, and high school. The training is what's crucial, not the blackness. The Chinese sports establishment also has carried out an enormous, and effective, experiment to help dispel the myth that race has a direct relation to athletic ability. Until recently, a quick glance at the medals table confirmed every stereotype people held about Asians and sports. Then the Chinese decided to produce record-breaking female distance runners (and swimmers), and, boy, did they ever. In 1992, China ranked fourth in the Olympic-medal haul. You can bring a single generation up to speed through training, but the trends we're dealing with transcend individual generations. Which brings us to another question: Will there come a time when the human machine will hit some sort of natural limit and an Olympic Games pass without a single record tumbling? In principle, yes. There are some barriers that simply cannot be broken. We will never run a mile at the same speed at which we now run 100 meters, for instance. The laws of oxygen exchange will not permit it. Race horses seem already to have hit that outer limit. For years, they were as good as human athletes at pushing back speed records, but then they simply stopped getting faster. Take the prestigious British Derby. From 1850 to 1930, winning times dropped from 2:55 to 2:39. But from 1986 to 1996, the average time has been--2:39. Unlike people, race horses are specifically bred and reared to run. Generations of careful genetic selection have ensured that today's race horse has every possible speed-enhancing characteristic. Training techniques, too, are tremendously sophisticated. But you can go only so far. You can only breed horses with ultralight thin bones to a certain point; the bones will break under stress if they get any lighter. Human improvement, like race-horse improvement, must eventually bow to the basic constraints of biomechanics. The age of menarche cannot keep on falling forever. On the other hand, it is clear from the remarkable demographic changes of just the past 20 years that these long-term trends are with us still. They may be slowing down in some more developed societies, but they roar along in others. And these trends will continue to fuel the improvement in athletic performance. Several new records will be set in Atlanta. And in Sydney in 2000, and wherever the Olympics are held in 2044. We will continue running faster and jumping further for a good long while to come.

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The Flytrap Blame Game One of the few truths universally acknowledged about Flytrap is that presidential secretary Betty Currie deserves our sympathy: an honest, loyal civil servant dragooned into a scandal she had nothing to do with. But does Currie deserve such sanctification? After all, she knew Clinton's history when she took her job then enabled Clinton's sleaziness anyway. She stood by while Clinton cuckolded his wife and perhaps even helped him commit obstruction of justice. And did she protest? Not as far as we have heard. Did she quit on principle? No. Currie may not be Flytrap's chief malefactor, but nor is she the saintly innocent that the American public believes her to be. The Currie case suggests that Flytrap needs a moral recalibration. Monica Lewinsky, for example, has fantastically low approval ratings, much lower than Clinton's. One poll I saw pegged her favorability rating at 5 percent (even Newt Gingrich manages at least 25 percent). Now, Monica certainly isn't the heroine of Flytrap. She did seduce a married man, damage the presidency for the sake of casual sex, lie frequently and insouciantly, and blab her "secret" affair to anyone who'd listen. But she was also sexually exploited by her older, sleazy boss; had her reputation smeared by Clinton's lackeys; and was betrayed by her "friend" Linda Tripp. She hardly deserves such universal contempt. Others besides Currie have benefited from the public's excessive generosity. George Stephanopoulos has become a white knight of Flytrap, the former Clinton aide who had the courage to turn on his boss. And bravo to George for chastising Clinton! But it smacks of hypocrisy for Stephanopoulos to "discover" in 1998 that Clinton is a lying, womanizing dog. He has, after all known this since 1992. Back then Stephanopoulos himself helped quell bimbo eruptions and parroted Clinton's lying denials. He has never shouldered blame for those deceptions. (Mickey Kaus first noted Stephanopoulos' unbearable sanctimony in this "Chatterbox" item in January.) And while loyalty isn't a universal good, it was opportunistic for Stephanopoulos to betray Clinton just at the moment Clinton's stock was about to plunge. (Sometimes, of course, the public's rating is dead on target. Linda Tripp's allies--a group that includes her lawyers, Kenneth Starr, the Goldberg family, and absolutely no one else as far as I can tell--have tried repeatedly to improve her sorry public image. Jonah Goldberg tried right here in Slate. No sale.) Below is Slate 's entire scorecard, which ranks 31 of Flytrap's key players: The scale runs from -10 to +10. Anything less than zero means the player is a net miscreant. Anything above zero rates a sympathy card. (This is not, of course, an exact science. How, for example, do we judge Ann Lewis compared to other last ditch Clinton defenders? Lewis is said to be more outraged by Clinton's misbehavior than The Guys in the White House. Yet Lewis didn't quit in disgust. Is her outrage a plus or a minus if she doesn't act on it? You decide.) The Scorecard Bill Clinton (The public's rating: -6 ) Minuses: To recapitulate a) Had an adulterous affair with a young intern. b) Lied about it to everyone . c) Probably perjured himself. d) Perhaps obstructed justice. e) Entangled allies and aides in his web of deceit. f) Humiliated his wife and daughter. g) Did not have the grace to apologize to Lewinsky. h)Tried to shift the blame for his failures onto his accusers. Pluses: a) Had his private life exposed to the world in a way no one's should be. b) Has been persecuted by enemies who won't be satisfied until he is destroyed. Slate rating-- He never asked for our sympathy, and he doesn't deserve it: -9 Dick Morris (The public's rating: -6 ) Minuses: a) Encouraged Clinton's most deplorable habits: lying and polling. (When Clinton revealed his adultery to Morris, the political consultant immediately took a poll to see how America would respond to a Clinton admission. When the results suggested Americans would be angry if Clinton had perjured himself, Morris encouraged Clinton to deny the affair.) b) Further sullied the Clintons with a revolting comment suggesting that Clinton cheats because Hillary is a lesbian. c) Not even loyal enough to keep his mouth shut. Pluses: I cannot think of any. Slate rating: -7 Linda Tripp (The public's rating: -7 ) Minuses: a) Betrayed her "friend." b) Obsessively nosed into the private lives of others. c) Tried to score a book deal off sex gossip and other people's distress. d) Tattletale. Pluses: a) Whistleblower (see d under Minuses): risked humiliation to expose something she believed was wrong. b) Smeared mercilessly by Clinton allies, the media. Slate rating: -7 James Carville (The public's rating: -1 ) Minuses: a) Has known about Clinton's woman problem since 1992. b) Happily parroted Clinton's denial despite knowing that Clinton was a deceitful womanizer. c) Has not expressed the slightest chagrin or disappointment since Clinton's apology. d) Has not retreated from vicious attacks on Starr, despite evidence of Clinton's lies. Pluses: a) Perfectly loyal. b) Consistent in attacks against Starr. Slate rating: -5 Bruce Lindsey (The public's rating : To be determined ) Minuses: a) Not yet known what he did to protect Clinton from the Lewinsky affair. Early signs suggest he knew a lot and helped clean it up. Pluses: a) Unquestionably loyal to his boss. b) Silent. Slate rating-- Not enough information to make a clean guess: Approx -5 Vernon Jordan (The public's rating: +3 ) Minuses: a) May have known and must have suspected that Lewinsky was a mistress (given that he and Clinton are confidants, it's hard to believe that Jordan was totally in the dark about her). b) Protected too readily by Washington establishment. Pluses: a) May have helped Lewinsky simply because he's bighearted and generous not because she was the president's lover. Slate rating: -4 Sidney Blumenthal (The public's rating: -3 ) Minuses: a) Spun the president's denial for months without bothering to check if it was true. b) Pushed for Clinton to be aggressive rather than contrite during his speech. c) Trumpeted Clinton's denial but has not expressed chagrin now that Clinton has admitted his lies. Pluses: a) Consistent in belief that Starr is an ideologue and that the sex charges are political. b) Loyal. Slate rating: -3 Lanny Davis (The public's rating: -1 ) Minuses: a) Spun the president's denial for months without bothering to check if it was true. b) Said for seven months that we'd have to "wait and see." Then, when Clinton finally admitted his lies, Davis was hardly embarrassed or critical of the president. Pluses: a) Loyalty to old boss. Slate rating: -3 George Stephanopoulos (The public's rating: +4 ) Minuses: a) Hypocritical for him to "discover" in 1998 that Clinton is a lying dog. After all, he knew that Clinton was a lech in 1992 and helped cover it up. Yet he has never shouldered responsibility for the lies Clinton told then. b) Disloyal to turn on old boss as viciously as he has in past few weeks. Pluses: a) Had courage to turn on old boss and criticize his moral lapses. b) Urged Clinton to be fully contrite. Slate rating: -2 Betty Currie (The public's rating: +8 ) Minuses: a) Abetted adulterous affair. b) May have abetted obstruction of justice. c) Knew what she was getting into when she took the job so can't be excused on grounds of naiveté. d) Did not quit on principle. Pluses: a) Reputation for honesty. b) Probably dragooned into cover-up against her will. Slate rating: -2 Paul Begala (The public's rating: 0 ) Minuses: a) Spun the president's denial for months without bothering to check if it was true. b) Did not quit on principle after Clinton admitted lies. Pluses: a) Urged president to be contrite and wrote excellent, sufficiently apologetic speech. b) Loyal. Slate rating: -2 Rahm Emanuel (The public's rating: -1 ) Minuses and Pluses: Same as Begala (except Emanuel didn't write the speech). Slate rating: -2 Ann Lewis (The public's rating: -1 ) Minuses and Pluses: Same as Emanuel, except Lewis seems more morally outraged with Clinton than other White House aides. Slate rating: -2 Monica Lewinsky (The public's rating: -9 ) Minuses: a) Seduced a married man. b) Damaged and endangered the presidency for the sake of casual sex. c) Has lied frequently. d) Is a capable adult, not--as her advocates claim--a naive child, defenseless against the president's wiles. e) Protected herself with immunity when she needed to, even though her testimony would do enormous harm to Clinton and the nation. f) Blabbed her "secret" affair to lots of people. (So, while she was dragged into the scandal against her will, it was her own loquaciousness that made the dragging possible.) Pluses: a) Sexually exploited by her older boss. b) Had her reputation smeared by Clintonistas and the media. c) Betrayed by Linda Tripp. d) Dragged into the scandal against her will. Slate rating: -2 Mike McCurry (The public's rating: +2 ) Minuses: a) Spun and spun and spun the president's denial for months without bothering to check if it was true. Pluses: a) Was clearly dismayed by the entire scandal and his role in it. b) Is quitting the administration (though not, apparently, on principle). c) Loyal. Slate rating: -1 David Kendall (The public's rating: 0 ) Minuses: a) Relied on iffy legalisms to help Clinton escape trouble. Pluses: a) Relying on iffy legalisms to help Clinton escape trouble is his job. He's a lawyer. b) Admirably reticent, compared to Robert Bennett. Slate rating: -1 The Rev. Jesse Jackson (The public's rating: +2 ) Minuses: a) Revealed Clinton family troubles immediately after his pastoral visit. b) Parlayed pastoral visit into a week of self-promotion. Pluses: a) Graciously counseled a political rival in time of need. b) Did not demand any political compensation in exchange. Slate rating: -1 Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga. (The public's rating: -5 ) Minuses: a) Unapologetically vicious, partisan, and unforgiving in his impeachment quest. Pluses: a) Consistent throughout the scandal: He has been pushing impeachment since before Monica materialized in January. Slate rating: 0 Kenneth Starr (The public's rating: -9 ) Minuses: a) Seems merciless toward Clinton. b) Has pursued investigation into Clinton's private life with more zeal than seems appropriate. c) Is too willing to provoke constitutional standoffs for the sake of his investigation, seems indifferent to the dignity of the presidency. Pluses: a) Was right about Clinton and Lewinsky. b) Is compelled by law to investigate diligently and forcefully. c) Has been patient with the stonewalling, deceiving Clinton. Slate rating: +1 Paula Jones (The public's rating: -5 ) Minuses: a) Brought a legally dubious, gold-digging lawsuit. b) Resisted a settlement that would have saved the nation much embarrassment. c) Happily became a tool for Clinton's enemies. Pluses: a) Is vindicated because Clinton probably did it. b) Forced Clinton's lechery out in the open. c) Persisted in the face of ridicule and humiliation. Slate rating: +1 The American People (The public's rating: +7 ) Minuses: a) Hypocritically claim to despise scandal, follow it breathlessly, then blame the media for obsessing over it. b) Are secretly fascinated by the sleaziness of it. Pluses: a) Magnanimous toward the president. Slate rating: +1 The Media (The public's rating: -8 ) Minuses: a) No sense of proportionality. Coverage is wretchedly excessive even when it shouldn't be. b) Endlessly self-involved. How many stories have you seen about the media and the scandal? c) Unforgiving. The media want the scandal to continue, hence won't ever be satisfied that Clinton has suffered enough. Pluses: a) Worked hard to break a very important story and investigated the hell out of it. b) Unfairly savaged by hypocritical American people (see above). Slate rating: +1 Leon Panetta (The public's rating: +1 ) Minuses: a) Slightly disloyal to old boss. b) May have known about Clinton's extracurricular activities, yet turned a blind eye. c) On television too much. Pluses: a) Urged Clinton early on to come clean. b) Had good sense to leave the White House before corrupting himself. Slate rating: +1 Hillary Clinton (The public's rating: +4 ) Minuses: a) Knew what a lech he was, yet always protected him. b) May have always known truth about Lewinsky, yet still lied to protect Bill. c) Chose aggressive, political strategy over contrition. Pluses: a) Lied to, betrayed, and cuckolded by husband. b) Personally humiliated. c) May have disgraced her own good name by echoing his denials on the Today show. Slate rating-- She made a Faustian bargain, but you still feel sorry for Faust: +2 Al Gore (The public's rating: +3 ) Minuses: a) Did not (apparently) urge the president to come clean with American people. Pluses: a) Stayed loyal. b) Did not take advantage of scandal to burnish his own image. Slate rating: +2 Kathleen Willey (The public's rating: 0 ) Minuses: a) Was in it for the money (told her story partly in order to land a book contract). Pluses: a) Seems to have told story honestly and forthrightly. b) Reluctantly dragged into scandal. c) Was victimized by Clinton. Slate rating: +2 The Clinton Cabinet (The public's rating: +2 ) Minuses: a) Spun his denials without digging for the truth. b) Did not quit on principle. Pluses: a) Were conscripted unwillingly into scandal defense. (Unlike political aides such as Begala, who are expected to do political dirty work, the Cabinet members are public servants who should be kept away from such sleaze.) b) Were lied to by Clinton. c) Loyal. Slate rating: +3 Erskine Bowles (The public's rating: Doesn't care ) Minuses: a) Refused to involve himself in the critical issue of the presidency. b) Stood aside while White House was shanghaied by lawyers. Pluses: a) Stayed utterly silent about the scandal, clearly disgusted by it all. b) Kept the rest of the administration focused on policy, thus preventing total executive paralysis. c) Did not lie or spin for the president. Slate rating: +4 Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill. (The public's rating: +4 ) Minuses: There are none yet. Pluses: a) (Mostly) kept his mouth shut and prevented the House Judiciary Committee from jumping the gun on impeachment. Slate rating: +4 Secret Service (The public's rating: +8 ) Minuses: a) Fought Starr subpoena too hard because it considers itself the Praetorian Guard. Pluses: a) Dragged unwillingly into scandal by Clinton (unlike Currie or his political aides, the Secret Service agents have no choice about being near the president). b) Testified honestly but unwillingly, as they should. c) Did not leak. Slate rating: +5 Chelsea Clinton (The public's rating: +10 ) Minuses: There are none. Pluses: a) Humiliated and embarrassed by her father's misbehavior. b) Had family problems paraded before the world in a way they should not be. c) Has been endlessly psychologized by the media. d) Had her summer vacation ruined. Slate rating: +10 More Flytrap ...

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THRALLS of the ENDLESS NIGHT By LEIGH BRACKETT The Ship held an ancient secret that meant life to the dying cast-aways of the void. Then Wes Kirk revealed the secret to his people's enemies—and found that his betrayal meant the death of the girl he loved. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Wes Kirk shut his teeth together, hard. He turned his back on Ma Kirk and the five younger ones huddled around the box of heat-stones and went to the doorway, padding soft and tight with the anger in him. He shoved the curtain of little skins aside and crouched there with his thick shoulders fitted into the angle of the jamb, staring out, cold wind threading in across his splayed and naked feet. The hackles rose golden and stiff across Kirk's back. He said carefully, "I would like to kill the Captain and the First Officer and the Second Officer and all the little Officers, and the Engineers, and all their families." His voice carried inside on the wind eddies. Ma Kirk yelled, "Wes! You come here and let that curtain down! You want us all to freeze?" Her dark-furred shoulders moved rhythmically over the rocking child. She added sharply, "Besides, that's fool's talk, Jakk Randl's talk, and only gets the sucking-plant." "Who's to hear it?" Kirk raised his heavy overlids and let his pupils widen, huge liquid drops spreading black across his eyeballs, sucking the dim grey light into themselves, forcing line and shape out of blurred nothingness. He made no move to drop the curtain. The same landscape he had stared at since he was able to crawl by himself away from the box of heat-stones. Flat grey plain running right and left to the little curve of the horizon. Rocks on it, and edible moss. Wind-made gullies with grey shrubs thick in their bottoms, guarding their sour white berries with thorns and sacs of poisoned dust that burst when touched. Between the fields and the gullies there were huts like his own, sunk into the earth and sodded tight. A lot of huts, but not as many as there had been, the old ones said. The Hans died, and the huts were empty, and the wind and the earth took them back again. Kirk raised his shaggy head. The light of the yellow star they called Sun caught in the huge luminous blackness of his eyes. Beyond the Hansquarter, just where the flat plain began to rise, were the Engineers. Not many of them any more. You could see the dusty lumps where the huts had been, the tumbled heaps of metal that might have meant something once, a longer time ago than anyone could remember. But there were still plenty of huts standing. Two hands and one hand and a thumb of them, full of Engineers who said how the furrows should be laid for the planting but did nothing about the tilling of them. And beyond the Engineers—the Officers. The baby cried. Ma Kirk shrilled at her son, and two of the younger ones fought over a bone with no meat on it, rolling and snapping on the dirt floor. Kirk shifted his head forward to shut out the sound of them and followed the line of the plain upward with sullen, glowing eyes. The huts of the Engineers were larger than those in the Hansquarter. The huts of the Officers were not much larger than the Engineers', but there were more of them and they climbed higher up the grey slope. Five, nearly six hands of them, with the Captain's metal-roofed place highest of all. Highest and nearest, right under the titanic shape lifting jagged against the icy stars from the crest of the ridge. The Ship. Kirk's voice was soft in his thick throat. "I would like to kill them," he said. "I would like to kill them all." "Yah!" cried a shrill voice over his shoulder. "All but the Captain's yellow daughter!" Kirk spun angrily around. Lil, next below himself, danced back out of reach, her kilt of little skins flying around her thin hips. "Yah!" she said again, and wrinkled her flat nose. "I've seen you looking at her. All yellow from head to foot and beautiful pink lids to her eyes. You wouldn't kill her , I bet!" "I bet I'll half kill you if you don't shut up!" Lil stuck out her tongue. Kirk aimed a cuff at her. She danced behind his arm and jerked the curtain down and shot away again, making two jumps over the brawling young ones and the box of heat-stones. She squatted demurely beside Ma Kirk and said, as though nothing had happened, "Ma says will you please not let so much heat out." Kirk didn't say anything. He started to walk around the heat box. Lil yelled, "Ma!" The young ones stopped fighting, scuttling out of reach and watching with bright moist eyes, grinning. The baby had reached the hiccoughing stage. Ma Kirk said, "Sit down, or go pick on somebody your own size." Kirk stopped. "Aw, I wasn't going to hurt her. She has to be so smart!" He leaned forward to glare at Lil. "And I would so kill the Captain's daughter!" The baby was quiet. Ma Kirk laid it down in a nest of skins put close to the heat and said wearily: "You men, always talking about killing! Haven't we enough trouble without that?" Kirk looked at the little box of heat-stones, his pupils shrinking. "Maybe there'd be less trouble for us." Lil poked her shock of black hair around Ma Kirk's knee. Her big eyes glowed in the feeble light. She said, "You men! He's no man, Ma. He's just a little boy who has to stay behind and shoo the beetles out of the fields." The young ones giggled, well out of reach. Lil's thin body was strung tight, quivering to move. "Besides," she demanded, "what have the Officers and the Engineers ever done to you that you should want to kill them—all but the Captain's yellow daughter?" Kirk's big heavy chest swelled. "Ma," he said, "you make that brat shut up or I'll whale her, anyhow." Ma Kirk looked at him. "Your Pa's still big enough to whale you, young man! Now you stop it, both of you." "All right," said Kirk sullenly. He squatted down, holding his hands over the heat. His back twitched with the cold, but it was nice to have his belly warm, even if it was empty. "Wish Pa'd hurry up. I'm hungry. Hope they killed meat." Ma Kirk sighed. "Seems like meat gets scarcer all the time, like the heat-stones." "Maybe," said Kirk heavily, "it all goes to the same place." Lil snorted. "And where's that, Smarty?" His anger forced out the forbidden words. "Where everybody says, stupid! Into the Ship." There was suddenly a lot of silence in the room. The word "Ship" hung there, awesome and accusing. Ma Kirk's eyes flicked to the curtain over the door and back to her son. "Don't you say things like that, Wes! You don't know." "It's what everybody says. Why else would they guard the Ship the way they do? We can't even get near the outside of it." Lil tossed her head. "Well neither do they." "Not when we can see 'em, no. Of course not. But how do we know they haven't got ways of getting into the Ship that don't show from the plain? Jakk says a lot goes on that we don't know about." He got up, forcing his belief at them with his big square hands. "There must be something in the Ship that they don't want us to have. Something valuable, something they want to keep for themselves. What else could it be but heat-stones and maybe dried meat?" "We don't know, Wes! The Ship is—well, we shouldn't talk about it. And the Officers wouldn't do that. If they wanted us killed off they'd let the Piruts in on us, or the shags, and let 'em finish us quick. Freezing and starving would take too long. There'd be too many of us if we found out, or got mad." Kirk snorted. "You women know so much. If they let the shags or the Piruts in on us, how could they stop 'em before they killed everybody, including the Officers? As for slow death—well, they think we're dumb. They've kept us away from the Ship ever since the Crash , and nobody knows how long ago that was. They think they can go on doing it. They think we'd never suspect." "Yah!" said Lil sharply. "You just like to talk. Why should the Officers want us killed off anyhow?" Kirk looked at the thin fuzzy baby curled tight in the skins. "There aren't enough heat-stones to go around any more. Why should they let their young ones cry with the cold?" There was silence in the room again. Kirk felt it, thick and choky. His heart kicked against his ribs. He was scared, suddenly. He'd never talked that much before. It was the baby, crying in the cold, that set him off. Suppose someone had heard him. Suppose he was reported for a mutineer. That meant the sucking-plant.... "Listen!" said Ma Kirk. Nerves crackled icily all over Kirk's skin. But there wasn't any need to listen. The noise rolled in over them. It hit rock faces polished by the wind, and the drifts of crystalline pebbles, and it splintered into a tangle of echoes that came from everywhere at once, but there was no mistaking it. No need even to use sensitive earcups to locate its source. The great alarm gong by the Captain's hut. Kirk began to move, very swiftly and quietly. Before the third gong stroke hit them he had his spear and his sling and was already lifting aside the door curtain. Ma Kirk said stiffly, "Which way are they coming?" Kirk's ears twitched. He sorted the gong sounds, and the wind, and found a whisper underneath them, rushing up out of the gullied plain. Kirk pointed. "From the west. Piruts, I think." Ma Kirk sucked in her breath. Her voice had no tone in it. "Your Pa went hunting that way." "Yeah," said Kirk. "I'll watch out for him." He glanced back just before he let the curtain drop. The pale glow of the heat-stones picked dots of luminous blackness out of the gloom, where the still breathless faces were, watching him. He saw the blurred shapes of clay cooking pots, of low bed frames, of huddled bodies. The baby began to whimper again. Kirk shivered in the cold wind. "Lil," he said. "I would, too, kill the Captain's yellow daughter." "Yah," said Lil. "Go chase the beetles away." There was no conviction in her voice. The wind was freezing on Kirk's bare feet. He dropped the curtain and went across the plain. Men and youths like himself, old enough to fight, were spilling out of low doorways and forming companies on the flat ground. Kirk spotted Jakk Randl and fell in beside him. They stood with their backs to the wind, stamping and shivering, their head-hair and scant fur clouts blown straight out. Randl nudged Kirk's elbow. "Look at 'em," he said, and coughed. He was always coughing, jerking his thin sharp face back and forth. Kirk could have broken his brittle light-furred body in two. All Randl's strength was in his eyes. The pupils were always spread, always hot with some bitter force, always probing. He wasn't much older than Kirk. Kirk looked up the hill. Officers were running from the huts below the gaunt, dead Ship. They didn't look so different from the Hans, only they were built a little taller and lighter, less bowed and bunchy in the shoulders, quicker on their feet. Kirk stepped behind Randl to shield him from the wind. His voice was only a whisper, but it had a hard edge. The baby's thin, terrible wail was still in his ears. "Is it true, Jakk? Do you know? Because if they are...." Randl laughed and shuddered with a secret, ugly triumph. "I crawled up on the peak during the last darkness. The guards were cold and the wind made them blind and deaf. I lay in the rocks and watched. And I saw...." He coughed. The Officers' voices rang sharp through the wind. Compact groups of men began to run, off toward the west. The whisper of sound had grown louder in Kirk's ears. He could hear men yelling and the ringing of metal on stone. He started to run, holding Randl's elbow. Grey dust blew under their feet. The drifts of crystal stones sent their sound shivering back at them in splinters. Kirk said fiercely: "What did you see?" They were passing under the hill now. Randl jerked his head. "Up there, Wes." Kirk looked up. Someone was standing at the doorway of the Captain's hut. Someone tall and slender and the color of the Sunstar from head to foot. "I saw her," said Randl hoarsely. "She was carrying heat-stones into the Ship." Kirk's pupils shrank to points no warmer nor softer than the tip of his knife. He smiled, almost gently, looking up the hill. The captain's yellow daughter, taking life into the Ship. It was a big raid. Kirk saw that when he scrambled up out of the last gully, half-carrying the wheezing Randl. The Piruts had come up the tongue of rock between two deep cuts and tackled the guards' pillbox head on. They hadn't taken it, not yet. But they were still trying, piling up their dead on the swept grey stone. They were using shags again. They drove the lumbering beasts on into the hail of stones and thrown spears from the pillbox, keeping low behind them, and then climbing on the round hairy bodies. It took courage, because sometimes the shags turned and clawed the men who drove them, and sometimes the dead ones weren't quite dead and it was too bad for the man who climbed on them. It looked to Kirk as though the pillbox was pretty far gone. He ran down the slope with the others, slipping in the crystal drifts. Randl was spent. Kirk kept him going, thinking of the huts back there on the plain, and Ma and Lil and the little ones, and the baby. You had to fight the Piruts, no matter what you thought about the Officers. You had to keep them from getting onto the plain. He wondered about Pa. Hunting shags in the outer gullies was mean work any time, but when the Piruts were raiding.... No time to think about that. Wite, the second son of the First Officer, was signalling for double time. Kirk ran faster, his ears twitching furiously as they sifted the flying echoes into some kind of order. Pa hadn't been alone, of course. Frank and Russ went with him. The three of them would have sense enough to keep safe. Maybe they were in the pillbox. A big raid. More Piruts than he'd ever seen before. He wondered why. He wondered how so many of them had been able to get so close to the pillbox all at once, walking two or three abreast on the narrow tongue of rock under the spears and slingstones. They poured in through the gates of the stone-walled building, scattering up onto the parapet. There were slits in the rooms below and rusty metal things crouching behind them, but they weren't any good for fighting. A man needed shoulder room for spear and sling. It was pretty hot up there. The wall of bodies had built up so high, mostly with shags, that the Piruts were coming right over the wall. Kirk's nose wrinkled at the smell of blood. He avoided the biggest puddles and found a place to stand between the dead. Randl went down on his knees. He was coughing horribly, but his hot black eyes saw everything. He tried three times to lift his sling and gave it up. "I'll cover you," said Kirk. He began taking crystal pebbles out of a big pile that was kept there and hurling them at the Piruts. They made a singing noise in the air, and they didn't stop going when they hit. They were heavy for their size, very heavy, with sharp edges. Randl said, "Something funny, Wes. Too many Piruts. They couldn't risk 'em on an ordinary raid." Kirk grunted. A Pirut with red hair standing straight in the wind came over the wall. Kirk speared him left-handed in the belly, dodged the downstroke of his loaded sap, and kicked the body out of the way. He said, "Wonder how they got so close, so fast?" "Some trick." Randl laughed suddenly. "Funny their wanting the Ship as much as you and I do." "Think they could know what's in it?" Randl's narrow shoulders twitched. "Near as we know, their legend is the same as ours. Something holy in the Ship, sacred and tabu. Only difference is they want to get it for themselves, and we want to keep it." He coughed and spat in sudden angry disgust. "And we've swallowed that stuff. We've let the Officers hoard heat and food so they can live no matter what happens to us. We're fools, Wes! A lot of bloody fools!" He got up and began jabbing with his spear at heads that poked up over the wall. The Piruts began to slack off. Stones still whistled past Kirk's head—a couple of them had grazed him by now—and spears showered down, but they weren't climbing the walls any more. Randl grounded his spear, gasping. "That's that. Pretty soon they'll break, and then we can start thinking about...." He stopped. Kirk put a stone accurately through the back of a Pirut's head and said grimly: "Yeah. About what we're going to do." Randl didn't answer. He sat down suddenly, doubled over. Kirk grinned. "Take it easy," he said softly. "I'll cover you." Randl whispered, "Wes. Wes!" He held up one thin hand. Kirk let his own drop, looking at it. There was blood on it, running clear to the elbow. He went down beside Randl, putting his arms around him, trying to see. Randl shook him off. "Don't move me, you fool! Just listen." His voice was harsh and rapid. He was holding both hands over the left side of his neck, where it joined the shoulder. Kirk could see the bright blood beating up through his fingers. He said, "Jakk, I'll get the sawbones...." Hot black eyes turned to his. Burnt-out fires in a face with the young beard hardly full on its sharp jaw. "Sit down, Wes, quick, and listen. Sawbones is no good—and why would I want to go on living anyway?" He smiled. Kirk had never seen him smile like that, without bitterness or pain. He sat down, crouched on the body of a man who lived only two huts away from him. The blood made little red fountains between Randl's fingers. "It's up to you, Wes. You're the only one that really knows about the Ship. You'll do better than I would, anyhow. You're a fighter. You carry it on, so the Hans can live. Promise." Kirk nodded. He couldn't say anything. The heat was dying in Randl's eyes. "Listen, Wes. I saw the secret way into Ship. Bend closer, and listen...." Kirk bent. He didn't move for a long time. After a while Randl's voice stopped, and then the blood wasn't pumping any more, just oozing. Randl's hands slid away, so that Kirk could see the hole the stone had made. Everything seemed to be very quiet. Kirk sat there, holding Randl in his arms. Presently someone came up and shook Kirk's shoulder and said, "Hey, kid, are you deaf? We been yelling for you." He stopped, and then said more gently, "Oh. Jakk got it, did he?" Kirk laid the body carefully on the stones and got up. "Yeah." "Kind of a pal of yours, wasn't he?" "He wasn't very strong. He needed someone to cover him." "Too bad." The man shook his head, and then shrugged. "Maybe it's better, at that. He was headed for trouble, that one. Kinda leading you that way, too, I heard. Always talking." He looked at Kirk's face and shut up suddenly. He turned away and grunted over his shoulders, "The O.D.'s looking for you." Kirk followed. The wind was cold, howling up from the outer gullies. The Officer of the Day was waiting at the north end of the wall. There was a ladder dropped over it now, and men were climbing up and down with bodies and sheaves of recovered spears. More were busy down below, rolling the dead Piruts and the shags down into the deep gullies for the scavenger rats and the living shags who didn't mind turning cannibal. That ladder made Kirk think of Pa. It was the only way for a man to get into the outer gullies from the west escarpment of the colony. He shook some of the queer heaviness out of his head, touched his forelock and said: "I'm Wes Kirk, sir. You wanted me?" "Yes." The O.D. was also the Third Officer. Taller than Kirk, thinner, with the hair going grey on his body and exhausted eyes sunk deep under his horny overlids. He said quietly: "I'm sorry to have to tell you this...." Kirk knew. The knowledge leaped through him. It was strange, to feel a spear-stab where there was no spear. He said, "Pa." The Officer nodded. He seemed very tired, and he didn't look at Kirk. He hadn't, after the first glance. "Your father, and his two friends." Kirk shivered. The horny lids dropped over his eyes. "I wish I'd known," he whispered. "I'd have killed more of them." The Officer put his hands flat on the top of the wall and looked at them as if they were strange things and no part of him. "Kirk," he said, "this is going to be hard to explain. I've never done anything as hard. The Piruts didn't kill them. They were responsible, but they didn't actually kill them." Wes raised his head slowly. "I don't understand." "We saw them coming up the tongue of rock. The Piruts were behind them, but not far. Not far enough. One of the three, it wasn't your father, called to us to put the ladder down. We waited...." A muscle began to twitch under Kirk's eye. That, too, was something that had never happened before, like the stab of pain with no spear behind it. He licked his lips and repeated hoarsely: "I don't understand." The Officer tightened suddenly and made one hand into a fist and beat it slowly on the wall, up and down. "I didn't want to give the order. God knows I didn't want to! But there was nothing else to do." A man came up over the top of the ladder. He was carrying a body over his shoulder, and breathing hard. "Here's Kirk," he said. "Where'll I put him?" There was a clear space off to the right. Kirk pointed to it. "Over there, Charley. I'll help." It was hard to move. He'd never been tired like this before. He'd never been afraid like this, either. He didn't know what he was afraid of. Something in the Officer's voice. He helped to lay his father down. He'd seen bodies before. He'd handled them, fighting on the pillbox walls. But never one he'd known so long, one he'd eaten and slept and wrestled with. The thick arm that hauled him out of bed this morning, the big hands that warmed the baby against the barrel chest. You saw it lying lax and cold, but you didn't believe it. You saw it. You saw the spear shaft sticking out clean from the heart.... You saw it.... "That's one of our spears!" He screamed it, like a woman. "One of our own—from the front!" "I let them get as close as I dared," said the Officer tonelessly. "I tried to find a way. But there wasn't any way but the ladder, and that was what the Piruts wanted. That's why they made them come." Kirk's voice wasn't a voice at all. "You killed them. You killed my father." "Three lives, against all those back on the plain. We held our fire too long as it was, hoping. The Piruts nearly broke through. Try to understand! I had to do it." Kirk's spear made a flat clatter on the stone. He started forward. Men moved in and held him, without rancor, looking at their own feet. "Please try to understand," whispered the Officer. "I had to do it." The Officer, the bloody wall, the stars and the cold grey gullies all went away. There was nothing but darkness, and wind, a long way off. Kirk thought of Pa coming up under the wall, close to safety, close enough to touch it, and no way through. Pa and Frank and Russ, standing under the wall, looking up, and no way through. Looking up, calling to the men they knew, asking for help and getting a spear through the heart. After that, even the wind was gone, and the darkness had turned red. There was a voice, a long way off. It said, "God, he's strong!" Over and over. It got louder. There were weights on his arms and legs, and he couldn't throw them off. He was pressed against something. It was the wall. He saw that after a while. The wall where the Officer had been standing. There were six men holding him, three on each side. The Officer was gone. Kirk relaxed. He was shivering and covered with rime from body sweat. Somebody whistled. "Six men! Didn't know the kid had it in him." The Officer's voice said dully, "No discipline. Better take him home." Kirk tried to turn. The six men swung with him. Kirk said, "You better discipline me. You better kill me, because, if you don't, I'll kill you." "I don't blame you, boy. Go and rest. You'll understand." "I'll understand, all right." Kirk's voice was a hoarse, harsh whisper that came out by itself and wouldn't be stopped. "I'll understand about Pa, and the Ship with the heat-stones in it, and the Captain's yellow daughter getting fat and warm while my sisters freeze and go hungry. I'll understand, and I'll make everybody else understand, too!" The Officer's eyes held a quick fire. "Boy! Do you know what you're saying?" "You bet I know!" "That's mutiny. For God's sake, don't make things worse!" "Worse for us, or for you?" Kirk was shouting, holding his head up in the wind. "Listen, you men! Do you know what the Officers are doing up there in the Ship they won't let us touch?" There was an uneasy stirring among the Hans, a slipping aside of luminous black eyes. The Officer shut his jaw tight. He stepped in close to Kirk. "Shut up," he said urgently. "Don't make me punish you, not now. You're talking rot, but it's dangerous." Kirk's eyes were hot and not quite sane. He couldn't have stopped if he'd wanted to. "Rot, is it? Jakk Randl knew. He saw with his own eyes and he told me while he was dying. The Captain's yellow daughter, sneaking heat-stones into...." The Officer hit him on the jaw, carefully and without heat. Kirk sagged down. The Officer stepped back, looking as though he had a pain in him that he didn't want to show. He said quietly, but so that everyone could hear him, "Discipline, for not longer than it takes to clear the rock below." Two of the men nodded and took Kirk away down a flight of stone steps. One of the four who were left looked over the wall and spat. "Rock's pretty near clean," he said, "but even so...." He shook himself like a dog. "That Jakk Randl, he was always talking." One of the others flicked a quick look around and whispered, "Yeah. And maybe he knew what he was talking about!"

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STALEMATE IN SPACE *** Stalemate In Space By CHARLES L. HARNESS Two mighty metal globes clung in a murderous death-struggle, lashing out with flames of poison. Yet deep in their twisted, radioactive wreckage the main battle raged—where a girl swayed sensuously before her conqueror's mocking eyes. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] At first there was only the voice, a monotonous murmur in her ears. " Die now—die now—die now —" Evelyn Kane awoke, breathing slowly and painfully. The top of the cubicle was bulging inward on her chest, and it seemed likely that a rib or two was broken. How long ago? Years? Minutes? She had no way of knowing. Her slender right hand found the oxygen valve and turned it. For a long while she lay, hurting and breathing helplessly. " Die now—die now—die now —" The votron had awakened her with its heart-breaking code message, and it was her duty to carry out its command. Nine years after the great battle globes had crunched together the mentors had sealed her in this tiny cell, dormant, unwaking, to be livened only when it was certain her countrymen had either definitely won—or lost. The votron's telepathic dirge chronicled the latter fact. She had expected nothing else. She had only to find the relay beside her cot, press the key that would set in motion gigantic prime movers in the heart of the great globe, and the conquerors would join the conquered in the wide and nameless grave of space. But life, now doled out by the second, was too delicious to abandon immediately. Her mind, like that of a drowning person, raced hungrily over the memories of her past. For twenty years, in company with her great father, she had watched The Defender grow from a vast metal skeleton into a planet-sized battle globe. But it had not grown fast enough, for when the Scythian globe, The Invader , sprang out of black space to enslave the budding Terran Confederacy, The Defender was unfinished, half-equipped, and undermanned. The Terrans could only fight for time and hope for a miracle. The Defender , commanded by her father, Gordon, Lord Kane, hurled itself from its orbit around Procyon and met The Invader with giant fission torpedoes. And then, in an intergalactic proton storm beyond the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, the globes lost their bearings and collided. Hordes of brute-men poured through the crushed outer armor of the stricken Defender . The prone woman stirred uneasily. Here the images became unreal and terrible, with the recurrent vision of death. It had taken the Scythians nine years to conquer The Defender's outer shell. Then had come that final interview with her father. "In half an hour our last space port will be captured," he had telepathed curtly. "Only one more messenger ship can leave The Defender . Be on it." "No. I shall die here." His fine tired eyes had studied her face in enigmatic appraisal. "Then die usefully. The mentors are trying to develop a force that will destroy both globes in the moment of our inevitable defeat. If they are successful, you will have the task of pressing the final button of the battle." "There's an off-chance you may survive," countered a mentor. "We're also working on a means for your escape—not only because you are Gordon's daughter, but because this great proton storm will prevent radio contact with Terra for years, and we want someone to escape with our secret if and when our experiments prove successful." "But you must expect to die," her father had warned with gentle finality. She clenched her fingernails vehemently into her palms and wrenched herself back to the present. That time had come. With some effort she worked herself out of the crumpled bed and lay on the floor of her little cubicle, panting and holding her chest with both hands. The metal floor was very cold. Evidently the enemy torpedo fissionables had finally broken through to the center portions of the ship, letting in the icy breath of space. Small matter. Not by freezing would she die. She reached out her hand, felt for the all-important key, and gasped in dismay. The mahogany box containing the key had burst its metal bonds and was lying on its side. The explosion that had crushed her cubicle had been terrific. With a gurgle of horror she snapped on her wrist luminar and examined the interior of the box. It was a shattered ruin. Once the fact was clear, she composed herself and lay there, breathing hard and thinking. She had no means to construct another key. At best, finding the rare tools and parts would take months, and during the interval the invaders would be cutting loose from the dead hulk that clutched their conquering battle globe in a metallic rigor mortis. She gave herself six weeks to accomplish this stalemate in space. Within that time she must know whether the prime movers were still intact, and whether she could safely enter the pile room herself, set the movers in motion, and draw the moderator columns. If it were unsafe, she must secure the unwitting assistance of her Scythian enemies. Still prone, she found the first-aid kit and taped her chest expertly. The cold was beginning to make itself felt, so she flicked on the chaudiere she wore as an under-garment to her Scythian woman's uniform. Then she crawled on her elbows and stomach to the tiny door, spun the sealing gear, and was soon outside. Ignoring the pain and pulling on the side of the imitation rock that contained her cell, she got slowly to her feet. The air was thin indeed, and frigid. She turned the valve of her portable oxygen bottle almost subconsciously, while exploring the surrounding blackened forest as far as she could see. Mentally she was alert for roving alien minds. She had left her weapons inside the cubicle, except for the three things in the little leather bag dangling from her waist, for she knew that her greatest weapon in the struggle to come would be her apparent harmlessness. Four hundred yards behind her she detected the mind of a low-born Scythe, of the Tharn sun group. Very quickly she established it as that of a tired, brutish corporal, taking a mop-up squad through the black stumps and forlorn branches of the small forest that for years had supplied oxygen to the defenders of this sector. The corporal could not see her green Scythian uniform clearly, and evidently took her for a Terran woman. In his mind was the question: Should he shoot immediately, or should he capture her? It had been two months since he had seen a woman. But then, his orders were to shoot. Yes, he would shoot. Evelyn turned in profile to the beam-gun and stretched luxuriously, hoping that her grimace of pain could not be detected. With satisfaction, she sensed a sudden change of determination in the mind of the Tharn. The gun was lowered, and the man was circling to creep up behind her. He did not bother to notify his men. He wanted her first. He had seen her uniform, but that deterred him not a whit. Afterwards, he would call up the squad. Finally, they would kill her and move on. Women auxiliaries had no business here, anyway. Hips dipping, Evelyn sauntered into the shattered copse. The man moved faster, though still trying to approach quietly. Most of the radions in the mile-high ceiling had been destroyed, and the light was poor. He was not surprised when he lost track of his quarry. He tip-toed rapidly onward, picking his way through the charred and fallen branches, thinking that she must turn up again soon. He had not gone twenty yards in this manner when a howl of unbearable fury sounded in his mind, and the dull light in his brain went out. She fought for her life under that mile-high ceiling. Breathing deeply from her mental effort, the woman stepped from behind a great black tree trunk and hurried to the unconscious man. For I.Q.'s of 100 and less, telepathic cortical paralysis was quite effective. With cool efficiency and no trace of distaste she stripped the odorous uniform from the man, then took his weapon, turned the beam power down very low, and needled a neat slash across his throat. While he bled to death, she slipped deftly into the baggy suit, clasped the beam gun by the handle, and started up the sooty slope. For a time, at least, it would be safer to pass as a Tharn soldier than as any kind of a woman. II The inquisitor leaned forward, frowning at the girl before him. "Name?" "Evelyn Kane." The eyes of the inquisitor widened. "So you admit to a Terran name. Well, Terran, you are charged with having stolen passage on a supply lorry, and you also seem to be wearing the uniform of an infantry corporal as well as that of a Scythian woman auxiliary. Incidentally, where is the corporal? Did you kill him?" He was prepared for a last-ditch denial. He would cut it short, have the guards remove her, and execution would follow immediately. In a way, it was unfortunate. The woman was obviously of a high Terran class. No—he couldn't consider that. His slender means couldn't afford another woman in his quarters, and besides, he wouldn't feel safe with this cool murderess. "Do you not understand the master tongue? Why did you kill the corporal?" He leaned impatiently over his desk. The woman stared frankly back at him with her clear blue eyes. The guards on either side of her dug their nails into her arms, as was their custom with recalcitrant prisoners, but she took no notice. She had analyzed the minds of the three men. She could handle the inquisitor alone or the two guards alone, but not all three. "If you aren't afraid of me, perhaps you'd be so kind as to send the guards out for a few minutes," she said, placing a hand on her hip. "I have interesting information." So that was it. Buy her freedom by betraying fugitive Terrans. Well, he could take the information and then kill her. He nodded curtly to the guards, and they walked out of the hut, exchanging sly winks with one another. Evelyn Kane crossed her arms across her chest and felt her broken rib gingerly. The inquisitor stared up at her in sadistic admiration. He would certainly be on hand for the execution. His anticipation was cut short with a horrible realization. Under the paralyzing force of a mind greater than his own, he reached beneath the desk and switched off the recorder. "Who is the Occupational Commandant for this Sector," she asked tersely. This must be done swiftly before the guards returned. "Perat, Viscount of Tharn," replied the man mechanically. "What is the extent of his jurisdiction?" "From the center of the Terran globe, outward four hundred miles radius." "Good. Prepare for me the usual visa that a woman clerk needs for passage to the offices of the Occupational Commandant." The inquisitor filled in blanks in a stiff sheet of paper and stamped a seal at its bottom. "You will add in the portion reserved for 'comments', the following: 'Capable clerk. Others will follow as they are found available.'" The man's pen scratched away obediently. Evelyn Kane smiled gently at the impotent, inwardly raging inquisitor. She took the paper, folded it, and placed it in a pocket in her blouse. "Call the guards," she ordered. He pressed the button on his desk, and the guards re-entered. "This person is no longer a prisoner," said the inquisitor woodenly. "She is to take the next transport to the Occupational Commandant of Zone One." When the transport had left, neither inquisitor nor guards had any memory of the woman. However, in the due course of events, the recording was gathered up with many others like it, boxed carefully, and sent to the Office of the Occupational Commandant, Zone One, for auditing. Evelyn was extremely careful with her mental probe as she descended from the transport. The Occupational Commandant would undoubtedly be high-born and telepathic. He must not have occasion to suspect a similar ability in a mere clerk. Fighting had passed this way, too, and recently. Many of the buildings were still smoking, and many of the radions high above were either shot out or obscured by slowly drifting dust clouds. The acrid odor of radiation-remover was everywhere. She caught the sound of spasmodic small-arm fire. "What is that?" she asked the transport attendant. "The Commandant is shooting prisoners," he replied laconically. "Oh." "Where did you want to go?" "To the personnel office." "That way." He pointed to the largest building of the group—two stories high, reasonably intact. She walked off down the gravel path, which was stained here and there with dark sticky red. She gave her visa to the guard at the door and was admitted to an improvised waiting room, where another guard eyed her stonily. The firing was much nearer. She recognized the obscene coughs of a Faeg pistol and began to feel sick. A woman in the green uniform of the Scythe auxiliary came in, whispered something to the guard, and then told Evelyn to follow her. In the anteroom a grey cat looked her over curiously, and Evelyn frowned. She might have to get rid of the cat if she stayed here. Under certain circumstances the animal could prove her deadliest enemy. The next room held a foppish little man, evidently a supervisor of some sort, who was studying her visa. "I'm very happy to have you here, S'ria—ah—"—he looked at the visa suspiciously—"S'ria Lyn. Do sit down. But, as I was just remarking to S'ria Gerek, here"—he nodded to the other woman, who smiled back—"I wish the field officers would make up their august minds as to whether they want you or don't want you. Just why did they transfer you to H.Q.?" She thought quickly. This pompous little ass would have to be given some answer that would keep him from checking with the inquisitor. It would have to be something personal. She looked at the false black in his eyebrows and sideburns, and the artificial way in which he had combed hair over his bald spot. She crossed her knees slowly, ignoring the narrowing eyes of S'ria Gerek, and smoothed the back of her braided yellow hair. He was studying her covertly. "The men in the fighting zones are uncouth, S'ria Gorph," she said simply. "I was told that you , that is, I mean—" "Yes?" he was the soul of graciousness. S'ria Gerek began to dictate loudly into her mechanical transcriber. Evelyn cleared her throat, averted her eyes, and with some effort, managed a delicate flush. "I meant to say, I thought I would be happier working for—working here. So I asked for a transfer." S'ria Gorph beamed. "Splendid. But the occupation isn't over, yet, you know. There'll be hard work here for several weeks yet, before we cut loose from the enemy globe. But you do your work well"—winking artfully—"and I'll see that—" He stopped, and his face took on a hunted look of mingled fear and anxiety. He appeared to listen. Evelyn tensed her mind to receive and deceive a mental probe. She was certain now that the Zone Commandant was high-born and telepathic. The chances were only fifty-fifty that she could delude him for any length of time if he became interested in her. He must be avoided if at all possible. It should not be too difficult. He undoubtedly had a dozen personal secretaries and/or concubines and would take small interest in the lowly employees that amused Gorph. Gorph looked at her uncertainly. "Perat, Viscount of the Tharn Suns, sends you his compliments and wishes to see you on the balcony." He pointed to a hallway. "All the way through there, across to the other wing." As she left, she heard all sound in the room stop. The transcribing and calculating machines trailed off into a watchful silence, and she could feel the eyes of the men and women on her back. She noticed then that the Faeg had ceased firing. Her heart was beating faster as she walked down the hall. She felt a very strong probe flooding over her brain casually, palping with mild interest the artificial memories she supplied: Escapades with officers in the combat areas. Reprimands. Demotion and transfer. Her deception of Gorph. Her anticipation of meeting a real Viscount and hoping he would let her dance for him. The questing probe withdrew as idly as it had come, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She could not hope to deceive a suspicious telepath for long. Perat was merely amused at her "lie" to his under-supervisor. He had accepted her at her own face value, as supplied by her false memories. She opened the door to the balcony and saw a man leaning moodily on the balustrade. He gave no immediate notice of her presence. The five hundred and sixth heir of Tharn was of uncertain age, as were most of the men of both globes. Only the left side of his face could be seen. It was gaunt and leathery, and a deep thin scar lifted the corner of his mouth into a satanic smile. A faint paunch was gathering at his abdomen, as befitted a warrior turned to boring paper work. His closely cut black hair and the two sparkling red-gemmed rings—apparently identical—on his right hand seemed to denote a certain fastidiousness and unconscious superiority. To Evelyn the jeweled fingers bespoke an unnatural contrast to the past history of the man and were symptomatic of a personality that could find stimulation only in strange and cruel pleasures. In alarm she suddenly realized that she had inadvertently let her appraisal penetrate her uncovered conscious mind, and that this probe was there awaiting it. "You are right," he said coldly, still staring into the court below. "Now that the long battle is over, there is little left to divert me." He pushed the Faeg across the coping toward her. "Take this." He had not as yet looked at her. She crossed the balcony, simultaneously grasping the pistol he offered her and looking down into the courtyard. There seemed to be nearly twenty Terrans lying about, in pools of their own blood. Only one man, a Terran officer of very high rank—was left standing. His arms were folded somberly across his chest, and he studied the killer above him almost casually. But when the woman came out, their eyes met, and he started imperceptibly. Evelyn Kane felt a horrid chill creeping over her. The man's hair was white, now, and his proud face lined with deep furrows, but there could be no mistake. It was Gordon, Lord Kane. Her father. The sweat continued to grow on her forehead, and she felt for a moment that she needed only to wish hard enough, and this would be a dream. A dream of a big, kind, dark-haired man with laugh-wrinkles about his eyes, who sat her on his knee when she was a little girl and read bedtime stories to her from a great book with many pictures. An icy, amused voice came through: "Our orders are to kill all prisoners. It is entertaining to shoot down helpless men, isn't it? It warms me to know that I am cruel and wanton, and worthy of my trust." Even in the midst of her horror, a cold, analytical part of her was explaining why the Commandant had called her to the balcony. Because all captured Terrans had to be killed, he hated his superiors, his own men, and especially the prisoners. A task so revolting he could not relegate to his own officers. He must do it himself, but he wanted his underlings to know he loathed them for it. She was merely a symbol of that contempt. His next words did not surprise her. "It is even more stimulating to require a shuddering female to kill them. You are shuddering you know?" She nodded dumbly. Her palm was so wet that a drop of sweat dropped from it to the floor. She was thinking hard. She could kill the Commandant and save her father for a little while. But then the problem of detonating the pile remained, and it would not be solved more quickly by killing the man who controlled the pile area. On the contrary if she could get him interested in her— "So far as our records indicate," murmured Perat, "the man down there is the last living Terran within The Defender . It occurred to me that our newest clerk would like to start off her duties with a bang. The Faeg is adjusted to a needle-beam. If you put a bolt between the man's eyes, you may dance for me tonight, and perhaps there will be other nights—" The woman seemed lost in thought for a long time. Slowly, she lifted the ugly little weapon. The doomed Terran looked up at her peacefully, without expression. She lowered the Faeg, her arm trembling. Gordon, Lord Kane, frowned faintly, then closed his eyes. She raised the gun again, drew cross hairs with a nerveless wrist, and squeezed the trigger. There was a loud, hollow cough, but no recoil. The Terran officer, his eyes still closed and arms folded, sank to the ground, face up. Blood was running from a tiny hole in his forehead. The man leaning on the balustrade turned and looked at Evelyn, at first with amused contempt, then with narrowing, questioning eyes. "Come here," he ordered. The Faeg dropped from her hand. With a titanic effort she activated her legs and walked toward him. He was studying her face very carefully. She felt that she was going to be sick. Her knees were so weak that she had to lean on the coping. With a forefinger he lifted up the mass of golden curls that hung over her right forehead and examined the scar hidden there, where the mentors had cut into her frontal lobe. The tiny doll they had created for her writhed uneasily in her waist-purse, but Perat seemed to be thinking of something else, and missed the significance of the scar completely. He dropped his hand. "I'm sorry," he said with a quiet weariness. "I shouldn't have asked you to kill the Terran. It was a sorry joke." Then: "Have you ever seen me before?" "No," she whispered hoarsely. His mind was in hers, verifying the fact. "Have you ever met my father, Phaen, the old Count of Tharn?" "No." "Do you have a son?" "No." His mind was out of hers again, and he had turned moodily back, surveying the courtyard and the dead. "Gorph will be wondering what happened to you. Come to my quarters at the eighth metron tonight." Apparently he suspected nothing. Father. Father. I had to do it. But we'll all join you, soon. Soon. III Perat lay on his couch, sipping cold purple terif and following the thinly-clad dancer with narrowed eyes. Music, soft and subtle, floated from his communications box, illegally tuned to an officer's club somewhere. Evelyn made the rhythm part of her as she swayed slowly on tiptoe. For the last thirty "nights"—the hours allotted to rest and sleep—it had been thus. By "day" she probed furtively into the minds of the office staff, memorizing area designations, channels for official messages, and the names and authorizations of occupational field crews. By night she danced for Perat, who never took his eyes from her, nor his probe from her mind. While she danced it was not too difficult to elude the probe. There was an odd autohypnosis in dancing that blotted out memory and knowledge. "Enough for now," he ordered. "Careful of your rib." When he had first seen the bandages on her bare chest, that first night, she had been ready with a memory of dancing on a freshly waxed floor, and of falling. Perat seemed to be debating with himself as she sat down on her own couch to rest. He got up, unlocked his desk, and drew out a tiny reel of metal wire, which Evelyn recognized as being feed for an amateur stereop projector. He placed the reel in a projector that had been installed in the wall, flicked off the table luminar, and both of them waited in the dark, breathing rather loudly. Suddenly the center of the room was bright with a ball of light some two feet in diameter, and inside the luminous sphere were an old man, a woman, and a little boy of about four years. They were walking through a luxurious garden, and then they stopped, looked up, and waved gaily. Evelyn studied the trio with growing wonder. The old man and the boy were complete strangers. But the woman—! "That is Phaen, my father," said Perat quietly. "He stayed at home because he hated war. And that is a path in our country estate on Tharn-R-VII. The little boy I fail to recognize, beyond a general resemblance to the Tharn line. "But— can you deny that you are the woman ?" The stereop snapped off, and she sat wordless in the dark. "There seemed to be some similarity—" she admitted. Her throat was suddenly dry. Yet, why should she be alarmed? She really didn't know the woman. The table luminar was on now, and Perat was prowling hungrily about the room, his scar twisting his otherwise handsome face into a snarling scowl. "Similarity! Bah! That loop of hair over her right forehead hid a scar identical to yours. I have had the individual frames analyzed!" Evelyn's hands knotted unconsciously. She forced her body to relax, but her mind was racing. This introduced another variable to be controlled in her plan for destruction. She must make it a known quantity. "Did your father send it to you?" she asked. "The day before you arrived here. It had been en route for months, of course." "What did he say about it?" "He said, 'Your widow and son send greetings. Be of good cheer, and accept our love.' What nonsense! He knows very well I'm not married and that—well, if I have ever fathered any children, I don't know about them." "Is that all he said?" "That's all, except that he included this ring." He pulled one of the duplicate jewels from his right middle finger and tossed it to her. "It's identical to the one he had made for me when I entered on my majority. For a long time it was thought that it was the only stone of its kind on all the planets of the Tharn suns, a mineralogical freak, but I guess he found another. But why should I want two of them?" Evelyn crossed the room and returned the ring. "Existence is so full of mysteries, isn't it?" murmured Perat. "Sometimes it seems unfortunate that we must pass through a sentient phase on our way to death. This foolish, foolish war. Maybe the old count was right." "You could be courtmartialed for that." "Speaking of courtmartials, I've got to attend one tonight—an appeal from a death sentence." He arose, smoothed his hair and clothes, and poured another glass of terif . "Some fool inquisitor can't show proper disposition of a woman prisoner." Evelyn's heart skipped a beat. "Indeed?" "The wretch insists that he could remember if we would just let him alone. I suppose he took a bribe. You'll find one now and then who tries for a little extra profit." She must absolutely not be seen by the condemned inquisitor. The stimulus would almost certainly make him remember. "I'll wait for you," she said indifferently, thrusting her arms out in a languorous yawn. "Very well." Perat stepped to the door, then turned and looked back at her. "On the other hand, I may need a clerk. It's way after hours, and the others have gone." Beneath a gesture of wry protest, she swallowed rapidly. "Perhaps you'd better come," insisted Perat. She stood up, unloosed her waist-purse, checked its contents swiftly, and then followed him out. This might be a very close thing. From the purse she took a bottle of perfume and rubbed her ear lobes casually. "Odd smell," commented Perat, wrinkling his nose. "Odd scent," corrected Evelyn cryptically. She was thinking about the earnest faces of the mentors as they instructed her carefully in the use of the "perfume." The adrenalin glands, they had explained, provided a useful and powerful stimulant to a man in danger. Adrenalin slowed the heart and digestion, increased the systole and blood pressure, and increased perspiration to cool the skin. But there could be too much of a good thing. An overdose of adrenalin, they had pointed out, caused almost immediate edema. The lungs filled rapidly with the serum and the victim ... drowned. The perfume she possessed over-stimulated, in some unknown way, the adrenals of frightened persons. It had no effect on inactive adrenals. The question remained—who would be the more frightened, she or the condemned inquisitor? She was perspiring freely, and the blonde hair on her arms and neck was standing stiffly when Perat opened the door for her and they entered the Zone Provost's chambers.

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TIME and the WOMAN By Dewey, G. Gordon [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Orbit volume 1 number 2, 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] HER ONLY PASSION WAS BEAUTY—BEAUTY WHICH WOULD LAST FOREVER. AND FOR IT—SHE'D DO ANYTHING! Ninon stretched. And purred, almost. There was something lazily catlike in her flexing; languid, yet ferally alert. The silken softness of her couch yielded to her body as she rubbed against it in sensual delight. There was almost the litheness of youth in her movements. It was true that some of her joints seemed to have a hint of stiffness in them, but only she knew it. And if some of the muscles beneath her polished skin did not respond with quite the resilience of the youth they once had, only she knew that, too. But they would again , she told herself fiercely. She caught herself. She had let down her guard for an instant, and a frown had started. She banished it imperiously. Frowns—just one frown—could start a wrinkle! And nothing was as stubborn as a wrinkle. One soft, round, white, long-nailed finger touched here, and here, and there—the corners of her eyes, the corners of her mouth, smoothing them. Wrinkles acknowledged only one master, the bio-knife of the facial surgeons. But the bio-knife could not thrust deep enough to excise the stiffness in a joint; was not clever enough to remold the outlines of a figure where they were beginning to blur and—sag. No one else could see it—yet. But Ninon could! Again the frown almost came, and again she scourged it fiercely into the back of her mind. Time was her enemy. But she had had other enemies, and destroyed them, one way or another, cleverly or ruthlessly as circumstances demanded. Time, too, could be destroyed. Or enslaved. Ninon sorted through her meagre store of remembered reading. Some old philosopher had said, "If you can't whip 'em, join 'em!" Crude, but apt. Ninon wanted to smile. But smiles made wrinkles, too. She was content to feel that sureness of power in her grasp—the certain knowledge that she, first of all people, would turn Time on itself and destroy it. She would be youthful again. She would thread through the ages to come, like a silver needle drawing a golden filament through the layer on layer of the cloth of years that would engarment her eternal youth. Ninon knew how. Her shining, gray-green eyes strayed to the one door in her apartment through which no man had ever gone. There the exercising machines; the lotions; the unguents; the diets; the radioactive drugs; the records of endocrine transplantations, of blood transfusions. She dismissed them contemptuously. Toys! The mirages of a pseudo-youth. She would leave them here for someone else to use in masking the downhill years. There, on the floor beside her, was the answer she had sought so long. A book. "Time in Relation to Time." The name of the author, his academic record in theoretical physics, the cautious, scientific wording of his postulates, meant nothing to her. The one thing that had meaning for her was that Time could be manipulated. And she would manipulate it. For Ninon! The door chimes tinkled intimately. Ninon glanced at her watch—Robert was on time. She arose from the couch, made sure that the light was behind her at just the right angle so he could see the outlines of her figure through the sheerness of her gown, then went to the door and opened it. A young man stood there. Young, handsome, strong, his eyes aglow with the desire he felt, Ninon knew, when he saw her. He took one quick step forward to clasp her in his strong young arms. "Ninon, my darling," he whispered huskily. Ninon did not have to make her voice throaty any more, and that annoyed her too. Once she had had to do it deliberately. But now, through the years, it had deepened. "Not yet, Robert," she whispered. She let him feel the slight but firm resistance so nicely calculated to breach his own; watched the deepening flush of his cheeks with the clinical sureness that a thousand such experiences with men had given her. Then, "Come in, Robert," she said, moving back a step. "I've been waiting for you." She noted, approvingly, that Robert was in his spaceman's uniform, ready for the morrow's flight, as he went past her to the couch. She pushed the button which closed and locked the door, then seated herself beside the young spaceman on the silken couch. His hands rested on her shoulders and he turned her until they faced each other. "Ninon," he said, "you are so beautiful. Let me look at you for a long time—to carry your image with me through all of time and space." Again Ninon let him feel just a hint of resistance, and risked a tiny pout. "If you could just take me with you, Robert...." Robert's face clouded. "If I only could!" he said wistfully. "If there were only room. But this is an experimental flight—no more than two can go." Again his arms went around her and he leaned closer. "Wait!" Ninon said, pushing him back. "Wait? Wait for what?" Robert glanced at his watch. "Time is running out. I have to be at the spaceport by dawn—three hours from now." Ninon said, "But that's three hours, Robert." "But I haven't slept yet tonight. There's been so much to do. I should rest a little." "I'll be more than rest for you." "Yes, Ninon.... Oh, yes." "Not yet, darling." Again her hands were between them. "First, tell me about the flight tomorrow." The young spaceman's eyes were puzzled, hurt. "But Ninon, I've told you before ... there is so much of you that I want to remember ... so little time left ... and you'll be gone when I get back...." Ninon let her gray-green eyes narrow ever so slightly as she leaned away from him. But he blundered on. "... or very old, no longer the Ninon I know ... oh, all right. But you know all this already. We've had space flight for years, but only rocket-powered, restricting us to our own system. Now we have a new kind of drive. Theoretically we can travel faster than light—how many times faster we don't know yet. I'll start finding out tomorrow, with the first test flight of the ship in which the new drive is installed. If it works, the universe is ours—we can go anywhere." "Will it work?" Ninon could not keep the avid greediness out of her voice. Robert said, hesitantly, "We think it will. I'll know better by this time tomorrow." "What of you—of me—. What does this mean to us—to people?" Again the young spaceman hesitated. "We ... we don't know, yet. We think that time won't have the same meaning to everyone...." "... When you travel faster than light. Is that it?" "Well ... yes. Something like that." "And I'll be—old—or dead, when you get back? If you get back?" Robert leaned forward and buried his face in the silvery-blonde hair which swept down over Ninon's shoulders. "Don't say it, darling," he murmured. This time Ninon permitted herself a wrinkling smile. If she was right, and she knew she was, it could make no difference now. There would be no wrinkles—there would be only the soft flexible skin, naturally soft and flexible, of real youth. She reached behind her, over the end of the couch, and pushed three buttons. The light, already soft, dimmed slowly to the faintest of glows; a suave, perfumed dusk as precisely calculated as was the exact rate at which she let all resistance ebb from her body. Robert's voice was muffled through her hair. "What were those clicks?" he asked. Ninon's arms stole around his neck. "The lights," she whispered, "and a little automatic warning to tell you when it's time to go...." The boy did not seem to remember about the third click. Ninon was not quite ready to tell him, yet. But she would.... Two hours later a golden-voiced bell chimed, softly, musically. The lights slowly brightened to no more than the lambent glow which was all that Ninon permitted. She ran her fingers through the young spaceman's tousled hair and shook him gently. "It's time to go, Robert," she said. Robert fought back from the stubborn grasp of sleep. "So soon?" he mumbled. "And I'm going with you," Ninon said. This brought him fully awake. "I'm sorry, Ninon. You can't!" He sat up and yawned, stretched, the healthy stretch of resilient youth. Then he reached for the jacket he had tossed over on a chair. Ninon watched him with envious eyes, waiting until he was fully alert. "Robert!" she said, and the youth paused at the sharpness of her voice. "How old are you?" "I've told you before, darling—twenty-four." "How old do you think I am?" He gazed at her in silent curiosity for a moment, then said, "Come to think of it, you've never told me. About twenty-two or -three, I'd say." "Tomorrow is my birthday. I'll be fifty-two." He stared at her in shocked amazement. Then, as his gaze went over the smooth lines of her body, the amazement gave way to disbelief, and he chuckled. "The way you said it, Ninon, almost had me believing you. You can't possibly be that old, or anywhere near it. You're joking." Ninon's voice was cold. She repeated it: "I am fifty-two years old. I knew your father, before you were born." This time she could see that he believed it. The horror he felt was easy to read on his face while he struggled to speak. "Then ... God help me ... I've been making love to ... an old woman!" His voice was low, bitter, accusing. Ninon slapped him. He swayed slightly, then his features froze as the red marks of her fingers traced across his left cheek. At last he bowed, mockingly, and said, "Your pardon, Madame. I forgot myself. My father taught me to be respectful to my elders." For that Ninon could have killed him. As he turned to leave, her hand sought the tiny, feather-light beta-gun cunningly concealed in the folds of her gown. But the driving force of her desire made her stay her hand. "Robert!" she said in peremptory tones. The youth paused at the door and glanced back, making no effort to conceal the loathing she had aroused in him. "What do you want?" Ninon said, "You'll never make that flight without me.... Watch!" Swiftly she pushed buttons again. The room darkened, as before. Curtains at one end divided and rustled back, and a glowing screen sprang to life on the wall revealed behind them. And there, in life and movement and color and sound and dimension, she—and Robert—projected themselves, together on the couch, beginning at the moment Ninon had pressed the three buttons earlier. Robert's arms were around her, his face buried in the hair falling over her shoulders.... The spaceman's voice was doubly bitter in the darkened room. "So that's it," he said. "A recording! Another one for your collection, I suppose. But of what use is it to you? I have neither money nor power. I'll be gone from this Earth in an hour. And you'll be gone from it, permanently—at your age—before I get back. I have nothing to lose, and you have nothing to gain." Venomous with triumph, Ninon's voice was harsh even to her ears. "On the contrary, my proud and impetuous young spaceman, I have much to gain, more than you could ever understand. When it was announced that you were to be trained to command this experimental flight I made it my business to find out everything possible about you. One other man is going. He too has had the same training, and could take over in your place. A third man has also been trained, to stand by in reserve. You are supposed to have rested and slept the entire night. If the Commandant of Space Research knew that you had not...." "I see. That's why you recorded my visit tonight. But I leave in less than an hour. You'd never be able to tell Commander Pritchard in time to make any difference, and he'd never come here to see...." Ninon laughed mirthlessly, and pressed buttons again. The screen changed, went blank for a moment, then figures appeared again. On the couch were she and a man, middle-aged, dignified in appearance, uniformed. Blane Pritchard, Commandant of Space Research. His arms were around her, and his face was buried in her hair. She let the recording run for a moment, then shut it off and turned up the lights. To Robert, she said, "I think Commander Pritchard would be here in five minutes if I called and told him that I have information which seriously affects the success of the flight." The young spaceman's face was white and stricken as he stared for long moments, wordless, at Ninon. Then in defeated tones he said, "You scheming witch! What do you want?" There was no time to gloat over her victory. That would come later. Right now minutes counted. She snatched up a cloak, pushed Robert out through the door and hurried him along the hall and out into the street where his car waited. "We must hurry," she said breathlessly. "We can get to the spaceship ahead of schedule, before your flight partner arrives, and be gone from Earth before anyone knows what is happening. I'll be with you, in his place." Robert did not offer to help her into the car, but got in first and waited until she closed the door behind her, then sped away from the curb and through the streets to the spaceport. Ninon said, "Tell me, Robert, isn't it true that if a clock recedes from Earth at the speed of light, and if we could watch it as it did so, it would still be running but it would never show later time?" The young man said gruffly, "Roughly so, according to theory." "And if the clock went away from Earth faster than the speed of light, wouldn't it run backwards?" The answer was curtly cautious. "It might appear to." "Then if people travel at the speed of light they won't get any older?" Robert flicked a curious glance at her. "If you could watch them from Earth they appear not to. But it's a matter of relativity...." Ninon rushed on. She had studied that book carefully. "And if people travel faster than light, a lot faster, they'll grow younger, won't they?" Robert said, "So that's what's in your mind." He busied himself with parking the car at the spaceport, then went on: "You want to go back in the past thirty years, and be a girl again. While I grow younger, too, into a boy, then a child, a baby, at last nothing...." "I'll try to be sorry for you, Robert." Ninon felt again for her beta-gun as he stared at her for a long minute, his gaze a curious mixture of amusement and pity. Then, "Come on," he said flatly, turning to lead the way to the gleaming space ship which poised, towering like a spire, in the center of the blast-off basin. And added, "I think I shall enjoy this trip, Madame, more than you will." The young man's words seemed to imply a secret knowledge that Ninon did not possess. A sudden chill of apprehension rippled through her, and almost she turned back. But no ... there was the ship! There was youth; and beauty; and the admiration of men, real admiration. Suppleness in her muscles and joints again. No more diets. No more transfusions. No more transplantations. No more the bio-knife. She could smile again, or frown again. And after a few years she could make the trip again ... and again.... The space ship stood on fiery tiptoes and leaped from Earth, high into the heavens, and out and away. Past rusted Mars. Past the busy asteroids. Past the sleeping giants, Jupiter and Saturn. Past pale Uranus and Neptune; and frigid, shivering Pluto. Past a senseless, flaming comet rushing inward towards its rendezvous with the Sun. And on out of the System into the steely blackness of space where the stars were hard, burnished points of light, unwinking, motionless; eyes—eyes staring at the ship, staring through the ports at Ninon where she lay, stiff and bruised and sore, in the contoured acceleration sling. The yammering rockets cut off, and the ship seemed to poise on the ebon lip of a vast Stygian abyss. Joints creaking, muscles protesting, Ninon pushed herself up and out of the sling against the artificial gravity of the ship. Robert was already seated at the controls. "How fast are we going?" she asked; and her voice was rusty and harsh. "Barely crawling, astronomically," he said shortly. "About forty-six thousand miles a minute." "Is that as fast as the speed of light?" "Hardly, Madame," he said, with a condescending chuckle. "Then make it go faster!" she screamed. "And faster and faster—hurry! What are we waiting for?" The young spaceman swivelled about in his seat. He looked haggard and drawn from the strain of the long acceleration. Despite herself, Ninon could feel the sagging in her own face; the sunkenness of her eyes. She felt tired, hating herself for it—hating having this young man see her. He said, "The ship is on automatic control throughout. The course is plotted in advance; all operations are plotted. There is nothing we can do but wait. The light drive will cut in at the planned time." "Time! Wait! That's all I hear!" Ninon shrieked. "Do something!" Then she heard it. A low moan, starting from below the limit of audibility, then climbing, up and up and up and up, until it was a nerve-plucking whine that tore into her brain like a white-hot tuning fork. And still it climbed, up beyond the range of hearing, and up and up still more, till it could no longer be felt. But Ninon, as she stumbled back into the acceleration sling, sick and shaken, knew it was still there. The light drive! She watched through the ports. The motionless, silent stars were moving now, coming toward them, faster and faster, as the ship swept out of the galaxy, shooting into her face like blazing pebbles from a giant slingshot. She asked, "How fast are we going now?" Robert's voice sounded far off as he replied, "We are approaching the speed of light." "Make it go faster!" she cried. "Faster! Faster!" She looked out the ports again; looked back behind them—and saw shining specks of glittering blackness falling away to melt into the sootiness of space. She shuddered, and knew without asking that these were stars dropping behind at a rate greater than light speed. "Now how fast are we going?" she asked. She was sure that her voice was stronger; that strength was flowing back into her muscles and bones. "Nearly twice light speed." "Faster!" she cried. "We must go much faster! I must be young again. Youthful, and gay, and alive and happy.... Tell me, Robert, do you feel younger yet?" He did not answer. Ninon lay in the acceleration sling, gaining strength, and—she knew—youth. Her lost youth, coming back, to be spent all over again. How wonderful! No woman in all of time and history had ever done it. She would be immortal; forever young and lovely. She hardly noticed the stiffness in her joints when she got to her feet again—it was just from lying in the sling so long. She made her voice light and gay. "Are we not going very, very fast, now, Robert?" He answered without turning. "Yes. Many times the speed of light." "I knew it ... I knew it! Already I feel much younger. Don't you feel it too?" He did not answer, and Ninon kept on talking. "How long have we been going, Robert?" He said, "I don't know ... depends on where you are." "It must be hours ... days ... weeks. I should be hungry. Yes, I think I am hungry. I'll need food, lots of food. Young people have good appetites, don't they, Robert?" He pointed to the provisions locker, and she got food out and made it ready. But she could eat but a few mouthfuls. It's the excitement , she told herself. After all, no other woman, ever, had gone back through the years to be young again.... Long hours she rested in the sling, gaining more strength for the day when they would land back on Earth and she could step out in all the springy vitality of a girl of twenty. And then as she watched through the ingenious ports she saw the stars of the far galaxies beginning to wheel about through space, and she knew that the ship had reached the halfway point and was turning to speed back through space to Earth, uncounted light-years behind them—or before them. And she would still continue to grow younger and younger.... She gazed at the slightly-blurred figure of the young spaceman on the far side of the compartment, focussing her eyes with effort. "You are looking much younger, Robert," she said. "Yes, I think you are becoming quite boyish, almost childish, in appearance." He nodded slightly. "You may be right," he said. "I must have a mirror," she cried. "I must see for myself how much younger I have become. I'll hardly recognize myself...." "There is no mirror," he told her. "No mirror? But how can I see...." "Non-essentials were not included in the supplies on this ship. Mirrors are not essential—to men." The mocking gravity in his voice infuriated her. "Then you shall be my mirror," she said. "Tell me, Robert, am I not now much younger? Am I not becoming more and more beautiful? Am I not in truth the most desirable of women?... But I forget. After all, you are only a boy, by now." He said, "I'm afraid our scientists will have some new and interesting data on the effects of time in relation to time. Before long we'll begin to decelerate. It won't be easy or pleasant. I'll try to make you as comfortable as possible." Ninon felt her face go white and stiff with rage. "What do you mean?" Robert said, coldly brutal, "You're looking your age, Ninon. Every year of your fifty-two!" Ninon snatched out the little beta-gun, then, leveled it and fired. And watched without remorse as the hungry electrons streamed forth to strike the young spaceman, turning him into a motionless, glowing figure which rapidly became misty and wraith-like, at last to disappear, leaving only a swirl of sparkling haze where he had stood. This too disappeared as its separate particles drifted to the metallite walls of the space ship, discharged their energy and ceased to sparkle, leaving only a thin film of dust over all. After a while Ninon got up again from the sling and made her way to the wall. She polished the dust away from a small area of it, trying to make the spot gleam enough so that she could use it for a mirror. She polished a long time, until at last she could see a ghostly reflection of her face in the rubbed spot. Yes, unquestionably she was younger, more beautiful. Unquestionably Time was being kind to her, giving her back her youth. She was not sorry that Robert was gone—there would be many young men, men her own age, when she got back to Earth. And that would be soon. She must rest more, and be ready. The light drive cut off, and the great ship slowly decelerated as it found its way back into the galaxy from which it had started. Found its way back into the System which had borne it. Ninon watched through the port as it slid in past the outer planets. Had they changed? No, she could not see that they had—only she had changed—until Saturn loomed up through the port, so close by, it looked, that she might touch it. But Saturn had no rings. Here was change. She puzzled over it a moment, frowning then forgot it when she recognized Jupiter again as Saturn fell behind. Next would be Mars.... But what was this? Not Mars! Not any planet she knew, or had seen before. Yet there, ahead, was Mars! A new planet, where the asteroids had been when she left! Was this the same system? Had there been a mistake in the calculations of the scientists and engineers who had plotted the course of the ship? Was something wrong? But no matter—she was still Ninon. She was young and beautiful. And wherever she landed there would be excitement and rushing about as she told her story. And men would flock to her. Young, handsome men! She tottered back to the sling, sank gratefully into the comfort of it, closed her eyes, and waited. The ship landed automatically, lowering itself to the land on a pillar of rushing flame, needing no help from its passenger. Then the flame died away—and the ship—and Ninon—rested, quietly, serenely, while the rocket tubes crackled and cooled. The people outside gathered at a safe distance from it, waiting until they could come closer and greet the brave passengers who had voyaged through space from no one knew where. There was shouting and laughing and talking, and much speculation. "The ship is from Maris, the red planet," someone said. And another: "No, no! It is not of this system. See how the hull is pitted—it has traveled from afar." An old man cried: "It is a demon ship. It has come to destroy us all." A murmur went through the crowd, and some moved farther back for safety, watching with alert curiosity. Then an engineer ventured close, and said, "The workmanship is similar to that in the space ship we are building, yet not the same. It is obviously not of our Aerth." And a savant said, "Yes, not of this Aerth. But perhaps it is from a parallel time stream, where there is a system with planets and peoples like us." Then a hatch opened in the towering flank of the ship, and a ramp slid forth and slanted to the ground. The mingled voices of the crowd attended it. The fearful ones backed farther away. Some stood their ground. And the braver ones moved closer. But no one appeared in the open hatch; no one came down the ramp. At last the crowd surged forward again. Among them were a youth and a girl who stood, hand in hand, at the foot of the ramp, gazing at it and the ship with shining eyes, then at each other. She said, "I wonder, Robin, what it would be like to travel through far space on such a ship as that." He squeezed her hand and said, "We'll find out, Nina. Space travel will come, in our time, they've always said—and there is the proof of it." The girl rested her head against the young man's shoulder. "You'll be one of the first, won't you, Robin? And you'll take me with you?" He slipped an arm around her. "Of course. You know, Nina, our scientists say that if one could travel faster than the speed of light one could live in reverse. So when we get old we'll go out in space, very, very fast, and we'll grow young again, together!" Then a shout went up from the two men who had gone up the ramp into the ship to greet whoever was aboard. They came hurrying down, and Robin and Nina crowded forward to hear what they had to report. They were puffing from the rush of their excitement. "There is no one alive on the ship," they cried. "Only an old, withered, white-haired lady, lying dead ... and alone. She must have fared long and far to have lived so long, to be so old in death. Space travel must be pleasant, indeed. It made her very happy, very, very happy—for there is a smile on her face."

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The Anglers of Arz By Roger Dee Illustrated by BOB MARTIN [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction January 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] There were two pinkish, bipedal fishermen on the tiny islet. In order to make Izaak Walton's sport complete, there must be an angler, a fish, and some bait. All three existed on Arz but there was a question as to which was which. The third night of the Marco Four's landfall on the moonless Altarian planet was a repetition of the two before it, a nine-hour intermission of drowsy, pastoral peace. Navigator Arthur Farrell—it was his turn to stand watch—was sitting at an open-side port with a magnoscanner ready; but in spite of his vigilance he had not exposed a film when the inevitable pre-dawn rainbow began to shimmer over the eastern ocean. Sunrise brought him alert with a jerk, frowning at sight of two pinkish, bipedal Arzian fishermen posted on the tiny coral islet a quarter-mile offshore, their blank triangular faces turned stolidly toward the beach. "They're at it again," Farrell called, and dropped to the mossy turf outside. "Roll out on the double! I'm going to magnofilm this!" Stryker and Gibson came out of their sleeping cubicles reluctantly, belting on the loose shorts which all three wore in the balmy Arzian climate. Stryker blinked and yawned as he let himself through the port, his fringe of white hair tousled and his naked paunch sweating. He looked, Farrell thought for the thousandth time, more like a retired cook than like the veteran commander of a Terran Colonies expedition. Gibson followed, stretching his powerfully-muscled body like a wrestler to throw off the effects of sleep. Gibson was linguist-ethnologist of the crew, a blocky man in his early thirties with thick black hair and heavy brows that shaded a square, humorless face. "Any sign of the squids yet?" he asked. "They won't show up until the dragons come," Farrell said. He adjusted the light filter of the magnoscanner and scowled at Stryker. "Lee, I wish you'd let me break up the show this time with a dis-beam. This butchery gets on my nerves." Stryker shielded his eyes with his hands against the glare of sun on water. "You know I can't do that, Arthur. These Arzians may turn out to be Fifth Order beings or higher, and under Terran Regulations our tampering with what may be a basic culture-pattern would amount to armed invasion. We'll have to crack that cackle-and-grunt language of theirs and learn something of their mores before we can interfere." Farrell turned an irritable stare on the incurious group of Arzians gathering, nets and fishing spears in hand, at the edge of the sheltering bramble forest. "What stumps me is their motivation," he said. "Why do the fools go out to that islet every night, when they must know damned well what will happen next morning?" Gibson answered him with an older problem, his square face puzzled. "For that matter, what became of the city I saw when we came in through the stratosphere? It must be a tremendous thing, yet we've searched the entire globe in the scouter and found nothing but water and a scattering of little islands like this one, all covered with bramble. It wasn't a city these pink fishers could have built, either. The architecture was beyond them by a million years." Stryker and Farrell traded baffled looks. The city had become something of a fixation with Gibson, and his dogged insistence—coupled with an irritating habit of being right—had worn their patience thin. "There never was a city here, Gib," Stryker said. "You dozed off while we were making planetfall, that's all." Gibson stiffened resentfully, but Farrell's voice cut his protest short. "Get set! Here they come!" Out of the morning rainbow dropped a swarm of winged lizards, twenty feet in length and a glistening chlorophyll green in the early light. They stooped like hawks upon the islet offshore, burying the two Arzian fishers instantly under their snapping, threshing bodies. Then around the outcrop the sea boiled whitely, churned to foam by a sudden uprushing of black, octopoid shapes. "The squids," Stryker grunted. "Right on schedule. Two seconds too late, as usual, to stop the slaughter." A barrage of barbed tentacles lashed out of the foam and drove into the melee of winged lizards. The lizards took the air at once, leaving behind three of their number who disappeared under the surface like harpooned seals. No trace remained of the two Arzian natives. "A neat example of dog eat dog," Farrell said, snapping off the magnoscanner. "Do any of those beauties look like city-builders, Gib?" Chattering pink natives straggled past from the shelter of the thorn forest, ignoring the Earthmen, and lined the casting ledges along the beach to begin their day's fishing. "Nothing we've seen yet could have built that city," Gibson said stubbornly. "But it's here somewhere, and I'm going to find it. Will either of you be using the scouter today?" Stryker threw up his hands. "I've a mountain of data to collate, and Arthur is off duty after standing watch last night. Help yourself, but you won't find anything." The scouter was a speeding dot on the horizon when Farrell crawled into his sleeping cubicle a short time later, leaving Stryker to mutter over his litter of notes. Sleep did not come to him at once; a vague sense of something overlooked prodded irritatingly at the back of his consciousness, but it was not until drowsiness had finally overtaken him that the discrepancy assumed definite form. He recalled then that on the first day of the Marco's planetfall one of the pink fishers had fallen from a casting ledge into the water, and had all but drowned before his fellows pulled him out with extended spear-shafts. Which meant that the fishers could not swim, else some would surely have gone in after him. And the Marco's crew had explored Arz exhaustively without finding any slightest trace of boats or of boat landings. The train of association completed itself with automatic logic, almost rousing Farrell out of his doze. "I'll be damned," he muttered. "No boats, and they don't swim. Then how the devil do they get out to that islet? " He fell asleep with the paradox unresolved. Stryker was still humped over his records when Farrell came out of his cubicle and broke a packaged meal from the food locker. The visicom over the control board hummed softly, its screen blank on open channel. "Gibson found his lost city yet?" Farrell asked, and grinned when Stryker snorted. "He's scouring the daylight side now," Stryker said. "Arthur, I'm going to ground Gib tomorrow, much as I dislike giving him a direct order. He's got that phantom city on the brain, and he lacks the imagination to understand how dangerous to our assignment an obsession of that sort can be." Farrell shrugged. "I'd agree with you offhand if it weren't for Gib's bullheaded habit of being right. I hope he finds it soon, if it's here. I'll probably be standing his watch until he's satisfied." Stryker looked relieved. "Would you mind taking it tonight? I'm completely bushed after today's logging." Farrell waved a hand and took up his magnoscanner. It was dark outside already, the close, soft night of a moonless tropical world whose moist atmosphere absorbed even starlight. He dragged a chair to the open port and packed his pipe, settling himself comfortably while Stryker mixed a nightcap before turning in. Later he remembered that Stryker dissolved a tablet in his glass, but at the moment it meant nothing. In a matter of minutes the older man's snoring drifted to him, a sound faintly irritating against the velvety hush outside. Farrell lit his pipe and turned to the inconsistencies he had uncovered. The Arzians did not swim, and without boats.... It occurred to him then that there had been two of the pink fishers on the islet each morning, and the coincidence made him sit up suddenly, startled. Why two? Why not three or four, or only one? He stepped out through the open lock and paced restlessly up and down on the springy turf, feeling the ocean breeze soft on his face. Three days of dull routine logwork had built up a need for physical action that chafed his temper; he was intrigued and at the same time annoyed by the enigmatic relation that linked the Arzian fishers to the dragons and squids, and his desire to understand that relation was aggravated by the knowledge that Arz could be a perfect world for Terran colonization. That is, he thought wryly, if Terran colonists could stomach the weird custom pursued by its natives of committing suicide in pairs. He went over again the improbable drama of the past three mornings, and found it not too unnatural until he came to the motivation and the means of transportation that placed the Arzians in pairs on the islet, when his whole fabric of speculation fell into a tangled snarl of inconsistencies. He gave it up finally; how could any Earthman rationalize the outlandish compulsions that actuated so alien a race? He went inside again, and the sound of Stryker's muffled snoring fanned his restlessness. He made his decision abruptly, laying aside the magnoscanner for a hand-flash and a pocket-sized audicom unit which he clipped to the belt of his shorts. He did not choose a weapon because he saw no need for one. The torch would show him how the natives reached the outcrop, and if he should need help the audicom would summon Stryker. Investigating without Stryker's sanction was, strictly speaking, a breach of Terran Regulations, but— "Damn Terran Regulations," he muttered. "I've got to know ." Farrell snapped on the torch at the edge of the thorn forest and entered briskly, eager for action now that he had begun. Just inside the edge of the bramble he came upon a pair of Arzians curled up together on the mossy ground, sleeping soundly, their triangular faces wholly blank and unrevealing. He worked deeper into the underbrush and found other sleeping couples, but nothing else. There were no humming insects, no twittering night-birds or scurrying rodents. He had worked his way close to the center of the island without further discovery and was on the point of turning back, disgusted, when something bulky and powerful seized him from behind. A sharp sting burned his shoulder, wasp-like, and a sudden overwhelming lassitude swept him into a darkness deeper than the Arzian night. His last conscious thought was not of his own danger, but of Stryker—asleep and unprotected behind the Marco's open port.... He was standing erect when he woke, his back to the open sea and a prismatic glimmer of early-dawn rainbow shining on the water before him. For a moment he was totally disoriented; then from the corner of an eye he caught the pinkish blur of an Arzian fisher standing beside him, and cried out hoarsely in sudden panic when he tried to turn his head and could not. He was on the coral outcropping offshore, and except for the involuntary muscles of balance and respiration his body was paralyzed. The first red glow of sunrise blurred the reflected rainbow at his feet, but for some seconds his shuttling mind was too busy to consider the danger of predicament. Whatever brought me here anesthetized me first , he thought. That sting in my shoulder was like a hypo needle. Panic seized him again when he remembered the green flying-lizards; more seconds passed before he gained control of himself, sweating with the effort. He had to get help. If he could switch on the audicom at his belt and call Stryker.... He bent every ounce of his will toward raising his right hand, and failed. His arm was like a limb of lead, its inertia too great to budge. He relaxed the effort with a groan, sweating again when he saw a fiery half-disk of sun on the water, edges blurred and distorted by tiny surface ripples. On shore he could see the Marco Four resting between thorn forest and beach, its silvered sides glistening with dew. The port was still open, and the empty carrier rack in the bow told him that Gibson had not yet returned with the scouter. He grew aware then that sensation was returning to him slowly, that the cold surface of the audicom unit at his hip—unfelt before—was pressing against the inner curve of his elbow. He bent his will again toward motion; this time the arm tensed a little, enough to send hope flaring through him. If he could put pressure enough against the stud.... The tiny click of its engaging sent him faint with relief. "Stryker!" he yelled. "Lee, roll out— Stryker !" The audicom hummed gently, without answer. He gathered himself for another shout, and recalled with a chill of horror the tablet Stryker had mixed into his nightcap the night before. Worn out by his work, Stryker had made certain that he would not be easily disturbed. The flattened sun-disk on the water brightened and grew rounder. Above its reflected glare he caught a flicker of movement, a restless suggestion of flapping wings. He tried again. "Stryker, help me! I'm on the islet!" The audicom crackled. The voice that answered was not Stryker's, but Gibson's. "Farrell! What the devil are you doing on that butcher's block?" Farrell fought down an insane desire to laugh. "Never mind that—get here fast, Gib! The flying-lizards—" He broke off, seeing for the first time the octopods that ringed the outcrop just under the surface of the water, waiting with barbed tentacles spread and yellow eyes studying him glassily. He heard the unmistakable flapping of wings behind and above him then, and thought with shock-born lucidity: I wanted a backstage look at this show, and now I'm one of the cast . The scouter roared in from the west across the thorn forest, flashing so close above his head that he felt the wind of its passage. Almost instantly he heard the shrilling blast of its emergency bow jets as Gibson met the lizard swarm head on. Gibson's voice came tinnily from the audicom. "Scattered them for the moment, Arthur—blinded the whole crew with the exhaust, I think. Stand fast, now. I'm going to pick you up." The scouter settled on the outcrop beside Farrell, so close that the hot wash of its exhaust gases scorched his bare legs. Gibson put out thick brown arms and hauled him inside like a straw man, ignoring the native. The scouter darted for shore with Farrell lying across Gibson's knees in the cockpit, his head hanging half overside. Farrell had a last dizzy glimpse of the islet against the rush of green water below, and felt his shaky laugh of relief stick in his throat. Two of the octopods were swimming strongly for shore, holding the rigid Arzian native carefully above water between them. "Gib," Farrell croaked. "Gib, can you risk a look back? I think I've gone mad." The scouter swerved briefly as Gibson looked back. "You're all right, Arthur. Just hang on tight. I'll explain everything when we get you safe in the Marco ." Farrell forced himself to relax, more relieved than alarmed by the painful pricking of returning sensation. "I might have known it, damn you," he said. "You found your lost city, didn't you?" Gibson sounded a little disgusted, as if he were still angry with himself over some private stupidity. "I'd have found it sooner if I'd had any brains. It was under water, of course." In the Marco Four , Gibson routed Stryker out of his cubicle and mixed drinks around, leaving Farrell comfortably relaxed in the padded control chair. The paralysis was still wearing off slowly, easing Farrell's fear of being permanently disabled. "We never saw the city from the scouter because we didn't go high enough," Gibson said. "I realized that finally, remembering how they used high-altitude blimps during the First Wars to spot submarines, and when I took the scouter up far enough there it was, at the ocean bottom—a city to compare with anything men ever built." Stryker stared. "A marine city? What use would sea-creatures have for buildings?" "None," Gibson said. "I think the city must have been built ages ago—by men or by a manlike race, judging from the architecture—and was submerged later by a sinking of land masses that killed off the original builders and left Arz nothing but an oversized archipelago. The squids took over then, and from all appearances they've developed a culture of their own." "I don't see it," Stryker complained, shaking his head. "The pink fishers—" "Are cattle, or less," Gibson finished. "The octopods are the dominant race, and they're so far above Fifth Order that we're completely out of bounds here. Under Terran Regulations we can't colonize Arz. It would be armed invasion." "Invasion of a squid world?" Farrell protested, baffled. "Why should surface colonization conflict with an undersea culture, Gib? Why couldn't we share the planet?" "Because the octopods own the islands too, and keep them policed," Gibson said patiently. "They even own the pink fishers. It was one of the squid-people, making a dry-land canvass of his preserve here to pick a couple of victims for this morning's show, that carried you off last night." "Behold a familiar pattern shaping up," Stryker said. He laughed suddenly, a great irrepressible bellow of sound. "Arz is a squid's world, Arthur, don't you see? And like most civilized peoples, they're sportsmen. The flying-lizards are the game they hunt, and they raise the pink fishers for—" Farrell swore in astonishment. "Then those poor devils are put out there deliberately, like worms on a hook—angling in reverse! No wonder I couldn't spot their motivation!" Gibson got up and sealed the port, shutting out the soft morning breeze. "Colonization being out of the question, we may as well move on before the octopods get curious enough about us to make trouble. Do you feel up to the acceleration, Arthur?" Farrell and Stryker looked at each other, grinning. Farrell said: "You don't think I want to stick here and be used for bait again, do you?" He and Stryker were still grinning over it when Gibson, unamused, blasted the Marco Four free of Arz.

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PEGGY PLAYS OFF-BROADWAY I Cast Call “First casting calls are so difficult,” Peggy Lane said, looking ruefully at the fifty or more actresses and actors who milled about nervously, chatting with one another, or sat on the few folding chairs trying to read. “With only nine roles to be filled,” she continued, “it doesn’t matter how good these people are; most of them just haven’t got a chance. I can’t help feeling sorry for them—for all of us, I mean. After all, I’m trying for a part, too.” Peggy’s friend and housemate, Amy Preston, smiled in agreement and said, “It’s not an easy business, honey, is it? But the ones I feel sorriest for right now are Mal and Randy. After all, they have the unpleasant job of choosing and refusing, and a lot of these folks are their friends. I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes.” 2 Peggy nodded thoughtfully, and reflected that it must, indeed, be more wearing on the boys. Mallory Seton, director of the new play, had been an upper-class student at the Academy when Peggy had started there, and he was a good friend of hers. She had worked with him before, as a general assistant, when they had discovered a theater. It would not be easy for him to consider Peggy for an acting role, and to do so completely without bias. It would not be a question of playing favorites, Peggy knew, but quite the reverse. Mal’s sense of fair play would make him bend over backward to keep from giving favors to his friends. If she was to get a role in this new production, she would really have to work for it. And if it was difficult for Mal, she thought, it was more so for Randy Brewster, the author of the play, for her friendship with him was of a different sort than with Mal. Mal was just a friend—a good one, to be sure—but with Randy Brewster, somehow, things were different. There was nothing “serious,” she assured herself, but they had gone on dates together with a regularity that was a little more than casual and, whatever his feelings were for her, she was sure that they were more complicated than Mal’s. “Do you think they’ll ever get through all these people?” Amy asked, interrupting her thoughts. “How can they hope to hear so many actors read for them in just one afternoon?” “Oh, they won’t be doing readings today,” Peggy replied, glad to turn her attention from what was becoming a difficult subject for thought. “This is just a first cast call. All they want to do today is pick people for type. They’ll select all the possible ones, send the impossible ones away, and then go into elimination readings later.” 3 “But what if the people they pick for looks can’t act?” Amy asked. “And what if some of the rejects are wonderful actors?” “They won’t go back to the rejects,” Peggy explained, “because they both have a pretty good idea of what the characters in the play should look like. And if the people they pick aren’t good enough actors, then they hold another cast call and try again. Mal says that sometimes certain parts are so hard to cast that they have to go through a dozen calls just to find one actor.” “It seems kind of unfair, doesn’t it, to be eliminated just because you’re not the right physical type,” Amy said, “but I can understand it. They have to start somewhere, and I guess that’s as good a place as any.” Then she smiled and added, “I guess I’m just feeling sorry for myself, because Mal told me there was no sense in my trying out at all, because I didn’t look or sound right for any part in the play. If I don’t get rid of this Southern accent of mine, I may never get a part at all, except in a Tennessee Williams play!” Peggy nodded sympathetically. “But it wasn’t just your accent, Amy,” she said. “It’s your looks, too. At least for this play. Mal and Randy told you that you’re just too pretty for any of the parts that fit your age, and that’s nothing to feel bad about. If anybody ought to feel insulted, it’s me, because they asked me to try out!” 4 “Oh, they were just sweet-talking me,” Amy replied. “And as for you, you know you don’t have to worry about your looks. You have a wonderful face! You can look beautiful, or comic, or pathetic, or cute or anything. I’m stuck with just being a South’n Belle, blond and helpless, po’ li’l ol’ me, lookin’ sad and sweet through those ol’ magnolia blossoms!” She broadened her slight, soft accent until it sounded like something you could spread on hot cornbread, and both girls broke into laughter that sounded odd in the strained atmosphere of the bare rehearsal studio. It was at this point that Mal and Randy came in, with pleasant, if somewhat brisk, nods to the assembled actors and actresses, and a special smile for Amy and Peggy. In a businesslike manner, they settled themselves at a table near the windows, spread out scripts and pads and pencils, and prepared for the chore that faced them. Amy, who was there to help the boys by acting as secretary for the occasion, wished Peggy good luck, and joined the boys at the table. Her job was to take names and addresses, and to jot down any facts about each actor that Randy and Mal wanted to be sure to remember. Mal started the proceedings by introducing himself and Randy. Then, estimating the crowd, he said, “Since there are fewer men here, and also fewer male roles to cast, we’re going to do them first. I hope that you ladies won’t mind. We won’t keep you waiting long, but if we worked with you first, we’d have these gentlemen waiting most of the day. Shall we get started?” After a brief glance at his notes, he called out, “First, I’d like to see businessman types, young forties. How many have we?” 5 Four men separated themselves from the crowd and approached the table. Peggy watched with interest as Mal and Randy looked them over, murmured to Amy to take notes, and asked questions. After a few minutes, the men left, two of them looking happy, two resigned. Then Mal stood and called for leading man types, late twenties or early thirties, tall and athletic. As six tall, athletic, handsome young men came forward, Peggy felt that she just couldn’t stand watching the casting interviews any longer. It reminded her too much of the livestock shows she had attended as a youngster in her home town of Rockport, Wisconsin. Necessary though it was, she felt it was hardly a way to have to deal with human beings. Slipping back through the crowd of waiting actors, she joined the actresses in the rear of the room, and found an empty seat next to a young girl. “Hi,” she said. “What’s the matter, can’t you watch it either?” The girl smiled in understanding. “It always upsets me,” she replied, “but it’s something we simply have to learn to live with. At least until we get well-known, or get agents to do this sort of thing for us.” “It sounds as if you’ve been in a few of these before,” Peggy said. “I have. But not here in the East,” the girl replied. “I’m from California, and I’ve been in a few little-theater things there, but nobody seems to pay much attention to them. I heard that off-Broadway theater in New York attracts a lot of critics, and I thought that I’d do better here. Have you had any luck?” “Oh, I’m just beginning,” Peggy said. “I’m still studying at the New York Dramatic Academy. I hope I can get some kind of supporting role in this play, but I don’t think I’m ready for anything big yet. By the way, my name is Peggy Lane. What’s yours?” 6 “I’m Paula Andrews,” the girl answered, “and maybe I’m shooting too high, but I’m trying out for the female lead. I hope I have a chance for it.” Peggy looked carefully at her new friend, at the somewhat uncertain smile that played about her well-formed, generous mouth and the intelligence that shone from her large, widely placed green eyes. Her rather long face was saved from severity by a soft halo of red-brown hair, the whole effect being an appealing combination of strength and feminine softness. “I think you do have a chance,” Peggy said. “In fact, if you can act, I bet you’ll get the part. I’ve read the play, and I know the author and director, and unless I’m way off, you look just the way the lead should look. In fact, it’s almost uncanny. You look as if you just walked out of the script!” “Oh, I hope you’re right!” Paula said with animation. “And I hope you get a part, too. I have a feeling that you’re going to bring me good luck!” “The one who needs luck is me, I’m afraid,” Peggy said. “Being friendly with Randy and Mal isn’t going to help me in the least, and I’m going to have to be awfully good to get the part. And it’s really important to me, too, because I’m getting near the end of my trial year.” “Trial year?” Paula asked curiously. 7 “Uh-huh. My parents agreed to let me come to New York to study acting and try for parts for a year, and I agreed that if I didn’t show signs of success before the year was up, I’d come home and go back to college. I’ve been here for eight months now, and I haven’t got anything to show my parents yet. The part I’m trying for now isn’t a big one, but it’s a good supporting role, and what’s more, we get paid. If I can show my mother and father that I can earn some money by acting, I’m sure that they’ll let me go on trying.” “But do you expect to make enough to live on right away?” Paula asked. “Oh, no! I’m not that naïve! But when my year is over at the Academy, I can always take a job as a typist or a secretary somewhere, while I look for parts. If you can type and take shorthand, you never have to worry about making a living.” “I wish that I could do those things,” Paula said wistfully. “The only way I’ve been able to make ends meet is by working in department stores as a salesgirl, and that doesn’t pay much. Besides, the work is so unsteady.” “My parents are very practical people,” Peggy said with a smile, “and they made sure that I learned routine office skills before they would let me think about other and more glamorous kinds of careers. Daddy owns the newspaper in our small town in Wisconsin, and I’ve worked with him as a typist and a reporter of sorts and as a proofreader, too. I’ll always be grateful that he made me learn all those things. I don’t think he has much faith in the acting business, but he’s been wonderful about giving me a chance. What do your parents think of your wanting to be an actress?” Instead of answering, Paula suddenly stood up. “Let’s go see how they’re coming with the actors,” she said. “I think they’re almost finished.” 8 Not wanting to press Paula further, and feeling that perhaps she had asked too personal a question on such short acquaintance, Peggy reluctantly stood too, and joined Paula to watch the last of what she now could only think of as the livestock show. As she drew closer to the table, she heard Mal saying, “I’m really sorry, Mr. Lang, but you’re just not the right type for the role. Perhaps some other....” and his voice trailed off in embarrassment. Lang, a short, thin, unhappy young man, answered almost tearfully, “But, Mr. Seton, looks aren’t everything. I’m really a funny comedian. Honestly! If you would only give me a chance to read for you, I know that I could make you change your mind about the way this character should look!” “I don’t doubt that you could,” Mal said gently, “but if you did, the play would suffer. I’m afraid the comedian we need for this must be a large, rather bluff-looking person, like these three gentlemen whom I have chosen to hear. The part calls for it. I’m sorry.” Mr. Lang nodded sadly, mumbled, “I understand,” and walked off, his head hanging and his hands thrust deep in his pockets, looking less like a comedian than any man in the world. Peggy watched him go, not knowing whether to feel sorrier for him or for Mal. “All right, gentlemen,” Mal called out. “That takes care of the male roles. All of you who are left will be given copies of the play to study, marked at the passages I want to hear. Be sure to read the whole play carefully, so that you understand the workings of the characters you have been selected to read. You have three days to look it over. We’ll meet at ten o’clock on Saturday morning at the Penthouse Theater to hear you. Thank you. And now for the ladies.” 9 The men left, after being given their scripts, and though they chatted amiably with one another, Peggy was sure that each was casting rather hostile looks toward others who were trying for the same parts. Keeping friendships in the theater was not an easy thing, she thought, particularly for people of similar physical types! Mal’s first concern in reviewing the actresses was, of course, for the leading role. And, of course, it was for this role that he had the most applicants. More than twenty girls came forward when the announcement was made, and Peggy thought that she had never seen so many striking and beautiful faces and figures. It was not going to be easy for Mal to make a choice. As Paula, her new friend, went forward to join the others, Peggy whispered a word of encouragement, then stood to one side to watch. Mal went down the line, regretfully dismissing one after the other of the girls, and occasionally asking one to step aside to try for another role. His tough-looking expression hardly varied as he spoke to each one, but Peggy thought she saw the ghost of a smile cross his face when he spoke to Paula Andrews. Another review of the remaining girls eliminated a few more. Finally, there were only four left, Paula among them. Mal thanked them, distributed scripts, and asked them to be at the Penthouse Theater on Saturday at noon. Paula returned to Peggy with eyes shining. “Oh, Peggy! I think you were right! I just know I’m going to get the part! I know it!” 10 “Don’t count too much on it,” Peggy cautioned, “or you may be too bitterly disappointed if you don’t get it. But,” she added, enthusiastically violating her own rule of caution, “I’m sure, too! I’ll see you Saturday. Even if I don’t get a script, I’ll be there just to hear you read!” Then, with a smile of farewell, Peggy turned her attention to the “career woman, early thirties” classification that Mal had called for next. Once that was out of the way, she knew it would be her turn. This time, there were not so many applicants and Peggy remembered Randy telling her that this would be one of their most difficult roles to cast. Only four actresses came forward, and Mal, with difficulty, reviewed them all. Unable to eliminate by type, he gave them all scripts and asked them to come to the theater. Then he called for “character ingénues” and Peggy joined seven other girls in the “livestock show.” Mal reviewed them carefully, managing to look at Peggy with complete lack of recognition. He gently eliminated three of them on the basis of hair coloring, height or general type. Another, curiously enough, was eliminated, like Amy, for a Southern accent, and a fifth, also like Amy, was too beautiful. “The part calls for a pretty girl,” Mal said with a rare smile, “but not for a girl so pretty that she’ll dominate the stage! It was a pleasure to look at you, but I’m afraid you’re not quite right for the part.” When he was done, Peggy and two others were given scripts and told to come to the theater on Saturday. Feeling lightheaded and giddy, Peggy settled herself on one of the folding chairs that lined the back wall, and waited for Mal, Randy, and Amy to finish so she could join them for coffee. 11 Scarcely noticing the rest of the proceedings, she thought only about the coming readings. She was so familiar with the play that she knew she had an advantage, perhaps unfairly, over the other two girls. She had watched the script grow from its first rough draft to the finished text now in her hands, and had discussed it with Randy through each revision. She knew she could play the part; in fact, she suspected secretly that Randy had written it for her, and the thought made her blush. Still, it would not be easy, she knew. Mal’s sense of fairness and his absolute devotion to the play above everything else would keep him from making up his mind in advance. But despite this knowledge, she could not help looking ahead—all the way ahead—to the restless stir of the opening-night audience out front, the last-minute preparations backstage, the bright, hot lights and the smell of make-up and scenery paint as she waited to go on in Act One, Scene One of Come Closer , Randy Brewster’s brilliant new play in which Peggy Lane would be discovered! 12 II The Hopefuls The audience consisted of a handful of actors and actresses, and Randy Brewster and Mallory Seton. The stage lighting was a cold splash produced by two floodlights without color gels to soften them. The scenery was the brick back wall of the stage, two ladders, a table and two straight-backed chairs. Only the front row of house lights was on, and the back of the theater was dark, empty and gloomy, a shadowy wasteland of empty rows of seats like tombstones. On the stage, a “businessman type” was reading his lines. Peggy knew, after the first few words, that he would not do. He had somehow completely missed the character of the man he was portraying, and was heavily overplaying. Mal, being perhaps more patient than Peggy, listened and watched with great care. Amy, who was acting as Mal’s assistant for the production, sat in a chair by the proscenium, reading her script by the light of a small lamp and feeding the actor cue lines. Mal followed the whole sequence with no visible sign of impatience and, when the actor was through, said, “Thank you. We’ll let you know our decision in a day or two.” 13 The next “businessman type” was better, but still not quite on target, Peggy thought. He seemed to be playing the part for laughs, and although there were some comic values to be extracted from the role, it was really far more a straight dramatic character. Still, he was clearly a better actor than the first, and with direction might do well. Following his reading, Mal again repeated his polite, invariable formula, “Thank you. We’ll let you know our decision in a day or two,” and called for the next reading. Peggy watched the remaining actors try for the role, and made mental notes of which ones were possible, which probable, and which stood no chance at all. The same process was then followed for the leading men, and the same wide range of talent and understanding of the part was displayed. Some seemed to have no idea at all about the play or its meaning, and Peggy was sure that these men had read only the parts marked for them. Others had a clear understanding of the kind of character they were playing, and tried to create him in the brief time they had on stage. Others still were actors who had one rather inflexible way of playing, and used it for all kinds of parts. Their performances were uniform imitations of each other, and all were imitations of the early acting style of Marlon Brando. They seemed to forget, Peggy thought, that Brando’s style developed from the roles he had to play, and that as he got other roles, he showed other facets of a rounded talent. It made her angry that some actors thought they could get ahead in a creative field by being imitative. 14 Each actor, no matter how good or how bad, was treated with impersonal courtesy by Mal, and each left looking sure that the part was his. Peggy was glad that she would not have to see their faces when they learned that they had not been selected. “The pity of it,” she whispered to Randy, “isn’t that there are so many bad ones, but that there are so many good ones, and that only one can be selected for each role. I wish there were some way of telling the good ones you can’t take that they were really good, but that you just couldn’t take everyone!” “You can’t let yourself worry about that,” Randy replied. “The good ones know they’re good, and they’re not going to be discouraged by the loss of a role. And the bad ones think they’re good, too, and most of them have tremendous egos to protect them from ever finding out—or even thinking—otherwise!” The door at the back of the theater opened quietly, and Peggy, turning around in her seat, saw a few of the actresses entering. They quietly found seats in the rear and settled down to await their turn. “I think I’ll go back there with the girls,” Peggy whispered. “I’m looking for a girl I met at the casting call, and I’d like to chat with her for a few minutes when she comes. Do you mind if I don’t look at all this?” Randy grinned. “Go ahead. I’d get out of here, too, if I could without getting Mal mad at me. This kind of thing always breaks my heart, too!” 15 As she went up the aisle as unobtrusively as possible, Peggy glanced at the actresses who had just come in. She recognized a few of their faces from the casting call of three days ago, but did not see her new friend among them. She decided to go out to the lobby to wait for her there. A new group of girls entered the theater as Peggy was leaving and, as she passed, one reached out and grabbed her arm. Peggy turned in surprise to find herself greeted with a broad grin and a quick companionable kiss. “Greta!” she cried. “What are you doing here?” “Come on out to the lobby, and I’ll tell you,” Greta Larsen said, with a toss of her head that made her thick blond braid spin around and settle over her shoulder. “But I thought you were in New Haven, getting ready to open Over the Hill ,” Peggy said, when they had reached the lobby. “What on earth are you doing here?” “I’m afraid you don’t read your Variety very carefully,” Greta said. “ Over the Hill opened in New Haven to such bad notices that the producer decided to close out of town. At first we thought he’d call in a play doctor to try to fix things up, but he finally decided, and very sensibly, that it would be easier to just throw the whole thing out. I’m afraid he lost a lot of money, and he didn’t have any more left.” “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Peggy said. “And it was a real chance for you, wasn’t it?” 16 “Not really,” Greta said. “The part wasn’t too good, and I’d just as soon not be in a disaster. Anyway, it gave me a chance to work for a few weeks, and an agent saw me and said he thought I was good, so maybe I’m not any the worse for the experience.” At that moment, Peggy saw Paula Andrews enter the lobby, and she motioned to her to join them. “Greta, this is Paula Andrews. She’s reading for the lead today, and I hope she gets it. Paula, I want you to meet Greta Larsen, one of my housemates.” “Housemates?” Paula questioned, a little puzzled. “Yes. There are about a dozen of us, more or less. We live in a place called the Gramercy Arms—a wonderful place—and we live like one big noisy family. The Arms is run just for young actresses, so we all have a lot in common. I haven’t seen Greta for weeks—she’s been out of town with a play—and I’m just getting over being stunned at seeing her now.” “Peggy tactfully neglected to mention that the play flopped,” Greta laughed, “and now I’m back in town without a job. In fact, that’s why I’m here.” “You mean you’re going to read for Mal?” Peggy asked excitedly. “Uh-huh. I met him on the street an hour or so ago, and he told me he had a part he thought I should try out for, and that he was thinking of me for it all along, but assumed that I wouldn’t be available. Well, you can’t be more available than I am, so here I am!” “Have you read the play?” Paula asked. “I’m lucky there,” Greta replied. “I’ve seen it in three different drafts since it started. Peggy’s friendly with Randy Brewster, the boy who wrote it, and each time she brought a draft home, I got to read it. So I’m not at a disadvantage.” 17 “What do you think of Come Closer , Paula?” asked Peggy. “I think it’s wonderful! I hope more than ever that I get the part! Do you really think I have a chance?” Greta nodded decisively. “If you can act, you’re made for it,” she said. “That’s just what Peggy said!” Peggy stole a glance through the doors to the theater. “I think we’re about ready to find out whether or not you can act,” she said. “They seem to be about through with the actors, and that means you’re on next!” Wishing each other good luck, they entered the darkened part of the house and prepared for what Peggy could only think of as their ordeal. Afterward, as Peggy, Amy, Paula, and Greta sat at a table in a nearby coffeehouse waiting for Mal and Randy to join them, each was sure that she had been terrible. “Oh, no!” Peggy said. “You two were just marvelous! But I couldn’t have been worse. I know I read the part wrong. I thought I had the character clear in my mind, but I’m sure that the way it came out was a mile off!” “You have a lot more talent than judgment,” Greta said mournfully. “You were perfect. And so was Paula. As for me....” Her voice trailed off in despair. “I don’t know how you can say that, Greta,” Paula put in. “I know you were the best in your part, and nobody even came close to Peggy. But I’ve never felt so off in my life as I did reading that part. It’s a wonder any of you even want to be seen with me!” 18 Only when Amy started to laugh did the three others realize how much alike they had sounded. Then they joined in the laughter and couldn’t seem to stop. When they seemed at the point of dissolving helplessly into a permanent attack of the giggles, Randy and Mal joined them. “If you’re laughing at the play,” Randy said gloomily, “I can hardly blame you. You never know just how badly you’ve written until someone gets up and starts to read your lines.” All at the same time, the girls started to reassure him and tell him how good the play was, and how badly the actors, including themselves, had handled the lines, but this was so much like their last exchange of conversation that once more they broke up in helpless laughter. When they got their breath back, and when coffee and pastry had been ordered, they tried to explain the cause of their hilarity to the boys. “... so, you see,” Peggy concluded, “we were each explaining how good the others were and how bad we were, and when Randy started telling us how bad he had been as a writer, we just couldn’t stand it!” It was Mal who got them back to sane ground. With his tough face, like a movie gangster’s or private detective’s, and his gentle, cultured English voice and assured manner, he calmly gave his opinion of the afternoon’s auditions.

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GRANDMA PERKINS AND THE SPACE PIRATES By JAMES McCONNELL Raven-haired, seductive Darling Toujours' smoke-and-flame eyes kindled sparks in hearts all over the universe. But it took sweet old Grandma Perkins, of the pirate ship Dirty Shame, to set the Jupiter moons on fire . [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "I can always get along with a man if he remembers who he is," said Darling Toujours, the raven-haired, creamy-skinned televideo actress whose smoke-and-flame eyes lit fires in hearts all over the solar system. She was credited with being the most beautiful woman alive and there were few who dared to contradict her when she mentioned it. "And I can always get along with a woman if she remembers who I am," replied Carlton E. Carlton, the acid-tongued author whose biting novels had won him universal fame. He leaned his thin, bony body back into the comfort of an overstuffed chair and favored the actress with a wicked smile. The two of them were sitting in the finest lounge of the luxury space ship Kismet , enjoying postprandial cocktails with Captain Homer Fogarty, the Kismet's rotund commanding officer. The Kismet was blasting through space at close to the speed of light, bound from Callisto, one of Jupiter's moons, back to Earth. But none of the two hundred Earthbound passengers were conscious of the speed at all. Darling Toujours waved a long cigarette holder at the author. "Don't pay any attention to him, Captain. You know how writers are—always putting words in other people's mouths, and not very good ones at that." "Do you mean not very good words or not very good mouths, my dear?" Carlton asked. The solar system's most famous actress clamped her scarlet lips shut with rage. It would take someone like Carlton E. Carlton, she knew, to point out the one minor blemish in an otherwise perfect body—her slightly over-sized mouth. She began to wish that she had never left Callisto, that she had cancelled her passage on the Kismet when she learned that Carlton was to be a fellow passenger. But her studio had wired her to return to Earth immediately to make a new series of three dimensional video films. And the Kismet was the only first class space ship flying to Earth for two weeks. So she had kept her ticket in spite of Carlton. "I must say that I think Miss Toujours has the prettiest mouth I've ever seen," boomed Captain Fogarty, his voice sounding something like a cross between a foghorn and a steam whistle. And he was not merely being gallant, for many a lonely night as he flew the darkness between Earth and the many planets, he had dreamed of caressing those lips. "And I think you are definitely a man of discriminating taste," said Darling demurely, crossing her legs and arranging her dress to expose a little more of the Toujours charms to the Captain's eye. Carlton smiled casually at the exposed flesh. "It's all very pretty, my dear," he said smugly. "But we've seen it all before and in space you're supposed to act like a lady, if you can act that well." Darling Toujours drew back her hand to smack Carlton one in a very unlady-like manner when she suddenly realized that they were not alone. Her hand froze, poised elegantly in mid-air, as she turned to see a newcomer standing at the door. The witness to the impending slap was a withered little lady, scarcely five feet tall, with silvered hair, eyes that twinkled like a March wind, and a friendly rash of wrinkles that gave her face the kindly, weathered appearance of an old stone idol. Her slight figure was lost in volumes of black cloth draped on her in a manner that had gone out of style at least fifty years before. The little woman coughed politely. "I beg your pardon," she told them in a sweet, high little voice. "I hope I didn't interrupt anything. If you would like to hit the gentleman, Miss Toujours, I'll be glad to come back later." Darling Toujours opened her violet eyes wide in surprise. "Why, I was ... I was ... I—" The actress uttered a small, gulping sound as she recovered her poise. "Why, I was just going to pat him on the cheek for being such a nice boy. You are a nice boy, aren't you, Carlton?" She leaned forward to stroke him gently on the face. Carlton roared with laughter and the good Captain colored deeply. "Oh," said the little old woman, "I'm sorry. I didn't know that he was your son." Carlton choked suddenly and Darling suffered from a brief fit of hysteria. The Captain took command. "Now, look here, Madam," he sputtered. "What is it you want?" "I really wanted to see you, Captain," she told him, her battered old shoes bringing her fully into the room with little mincing steps. "The Purser says I have to sign a contract of some kind with you, and I wanted to know how to write my name. I'm Mrs. Omar K. Perkins, but you see, I'm really Mrs. Matilda Perkins because my Omar died a few years ago. But I haven't signed my name very much since then and I'm not at all sure of which is legal." She put one bird-like little hand to her throat and clasped the cameo there almost as if it could give her support. She looked so small and so frail that Fogarty forgave her the intrusion. "It really doesn't make much difference how you sign the thing, just so long as you sign it," he blustered. "Just a mere formality anyway. You just sign it any way you like." He paused, hoping that she would leave now that she had her information. "Oh, I'm so glad to hear that," she said, but made no move whatsoever to leave. Captain Fogarty gave her his hardened stare of the type which withered most people where they stood. Mrs. Perkins just smiled sweetly at him. His rage getting out of hand, he finally blurted, "And now, Mrs. Perkins, I think you'd better be getting back to your quarters. As you know, this is a private lounge for the first class passengers." Mrs. Perkins continued to smile at him. "Yes, I know. It's lovely, isn't it? I'll just go out this way." And before anyone could stop her, she had moved to the door to Darling Toujours' suite and had opened it, stepping inside. "That's my room, not the door out," Darling said loudly. "So I see," said Mrs. Perkins, staring at the opulent furnishings with avid pleasure. "It's such a pretty thing, all done up with mother-of-pearl like that, isn't it? And what a pretty lace nightie lying on the bed." Mrs. Perkins picked up the sheer, gossamer garment to examine it. "You do wear something under it, don't you?" Darling screeched and darted for the door. She snatched the nightie away from Mrs. Perkins and rudely propelled the older woman out the door, closing it behind her. "Captain, this woman must GO!" "I was just leaving, Miss Toujours. I hope you and your son have a very happy voyage. Good day, Captain Fogarty," she called over her shoulder as she exited. Carlton E. Carlton's shrill laughter followed her down the companionway. Mrs. Perkins had been lying in her berth reading for less than an hour when the knock sounded at her door. She would have preferred to sit up and read, but her cabin was so small that there was no room for any other furniture besides the bed. "Come in," she called in a small voice. Johnny Weaver, steward for the cheaper cabins, poked his youthful, freckled face through the door. "Howdy, Mrs. Perkins. I wondered if I could do anything for you? It's about ten minutes before we eat." "Well, you can pull that big box down from the top shelf there, if you don't mind. And, I wonder, would you mind calling me Grandma? All my children do it and I miss it so." She gave him a wrinkled smile that was at once wistful and petulant. Johnny laughed in an easy, infectious manner. "Sure thing, Grandma." He stretched his long arms up to bring down the heavy bag and found himself wondering just how it had gotten up there in the first place. He didn't remember ever putting it there for her and Grandma Perkins was obviously too frail a woman to have handled such a heavy box by herself. He put it on the floor. As she stooped over and extracted a pair of low-heeled, black and battered shoes from the box, she asked him, "Johnny, what was that paper I signed this afternoon?" "Oh, that? Why that was just a contract for passage, Grandma. You guaranteed to pay them so much for the flight, which you've already done, and they guaranteed that you wouldn't be put off against your will until you reached your destination." "But why do we have to have a contract?" Johnny leaned back, relaxing against the door. "Well, STAR—that's Stellar Transportation and Atomic Research, you know—is one of the thirteen monopolies in this part of the solar system. The "Big Thirteen," we call them. STAR charters every space flight in this neck of the woods. Well, back in the old days, when space flights were scarce, it used to be that you'd pay for a ticket from Saturn to Earth, say, and you'd get to Mars and they'd stop for fuel. Maybe somebody on Mars would offer a lot of money for your cabin. So STAR would just bump you off, refund part of your money and leave you stranded there. In order to get the monopoly, they had to promise to stop all that. And the Solar Congress makes them sign contracts guaranteeing you that they won't put you off against your wishes. Of course, they don't dare do it anymore anyway, but that's the law." Grandma Perkins sighed. "It's such a small cabin I don't think anybody else would want it. But it's all that I could afford," she said, smoothing out the wrinkles in her dress with both hands. "Anything else I can do for you, Grandma?" "No, thank you, Johnny. I think I can make it up the steps to the dining room by myself." A little while later when Johnny looked into her room to see if she had gone, the cabin was empty and the heavy box was back in place in the top cabinet. The food that evening was not the very best, Grandma Perkins thought to herself, but that was mostly due to her seat. By the time the waiter got around to her little cranny most of it was cold. But she didn't complain. She enjoyed watching the people with the more expensive cabins parade their clothes and their manners at the Captain's table. And, it must be admitted, she was more than a trifle envious of them. Her acquaintances of the afternoon, Miss Toujours and Mr. Carlton, were seated there, Miss Toujours having the place of honor to the Captain's right. Grandma watched them as they finished up their food and then she moved from her little table over to one of the very comfortable sofas in the main lounge. In reality she wasn't supposed to be sitting there, but she hoped that she could get away with it. The divans were so much more comfortable than her hard, narrow bed that she felt like sitting there for a long time, by herself, just thinking. But her hopes met with disappointment. For shortly after she sat down, Darling Toujours and Carlton E. Carlton strolled over and sat down across from her, not recognizing her at first. Then Carlton spied her. "Darling! There's that priceless little woman we met this afternoon." "The little hag, you mean," Miss Toujours muttered under her breath, but loudly enough for Grandma Perkins to hear. "Why, hello, Miss Toujours. And Mr. Carlton too. I hope you'll forgive me for this afternoon. I've found out who you were, you see." "Of course we forgive you, Mrs. Jerkins," Darling said throatily, baring her teeth like a feline. "My name is Perkins," Grandma smiled. "I hope you don't mind, Toujours, but you know, you remind me a great deal of my grandniece, Agatha. She was undoubtedly the most lovely child I've ever seen." "Why, thank you, Mrs. Perkins," Darling purred, starting to preen just a bit. Anything could be forgiven someone who complimented her. "Of course, Agatha never was quite bright," Grandma said as she turned her head aside as if in sorrow. "They were all set to put her in an institution when she ran off and married the lizard man in a carnival. I believe she's still appearing in the show as the bearded lady. A pity. She was so pretty, just like you." Darling Toujours muttered a few choice words under her breath. "But we must all make the best of things as they come. That's what Omar, my husband, used to say." Grandma paused to wipe away a small tear that had gotten lodged in one of her eyes. "That reminds me," she said finally, "I've got a three dimensional picture of Omar right here. And pictures of all my children, my ten lovely children. I brought them with me specially tonight because I thought you might want to look at them. Now, where did I put them?" Grandma opened her purse and began rummaging around in its voluminous confines. Darling and Carlton exchanged horrified glances and then rose silently and tip-toed out of the lounge. Grandma looked up from her search. "Oh, my, they seem to have gone." Johnny Weaver, who had been clearing one of the nearby tables, put down a stack of dirty dishes and came over to her. "I'd like to see the pictures, Grandma." "Oh, that's very nice of you, Johnny, but—" she said quickly. "Really I would, Grandma. Where are they?" "I—" She stopped and the devilment showed in her eyes. Her withered little face pursed itself into a smile. "There aren't any pictures, Johnny. I don't carry any. I know their faces all so well I don't have to. But any time I want to get rid of somebody I just offer to show them pictures of my family. You'd be surprised how effective it is." Johnny laughed. "Why are you going to Earth, anyway, Grandma?" The old woman sighed. "It's a long story, Johnny, but you just sit down and I'll tell it to you." "I can't sit down in the lounge, but I'll be glad to stand up and listen." "Then I'll make it a short story. You see, Johnny, I'm an old woman. I'll be 152 this year. And ever since Omar, my husband, died a few years ago, I've lived from pillar to post. First with one child and then with another. They've all been married for decades now of course, with children and grandchildren of their own. And I guess that I just get in their way. There just isn't much left in life for a feeble old woman like me." She sniffled a moment or two as if to cry. Johnny, remembering the heavy box in her cabin that got moved up and down without his help, suppressed a smile on the word "feeble." "There aren't many friends my age left around any more. So I'm being sent to Earth to a home full of dear, sweet old ladies my age, the money for which is being provided by my dear, sweet children—all ten of them." Grandma dabbed a bit of a handkerchief at her eyes. "The rats," she muttered under her breath. When she saw her companion was smiling she dropped her pretense of crying. "To be truthful, Johnny, they've grown old and stodgy, all of them. And I'm sure they think I've lost most of my marbles. Everything I did embarrassed them, so I guess it's for the best, but—" Grandma Perkins never finished the sentence, for interrupting her came the horrendous clang of the Kismet's general alarm, and on its heels, charging through the main salon like a rhinoceros in heat, came Captain Fogarty. "PIRATES! PIRATES! We're being attacked by space pirates! You there!" he shouted at Johnny. "Man your station! And you, Madam, to your quarters at once! PIRATES!" he shouted again and barged through the door again and bellowed down the hall to the main bridge. Johnny was off like a startled rabbit, but Grandma moved with serene calmness to the door. Maybe, she thought, we're going to have a little excitement after all. At the door to the steps leading to her downstairs cabin she paused to think. "If I go down and hide, I'll miss all the fun. Of course, it's safer, and an old woman like me shouldn't be up and about when pirates are around, but—" A delicious smile spread over her face as she took her scruples firmly in hand and turned to follow the bellowing Captain towards the bridge. II The Starship Kismet was the pride and joy of Stellar Transportation and Atomic Research. It was outfitted with every known safety device and the control room was masterfully planned for maximum efficiency. But the astral architect who designed her never anticipated the situation facing her at the present. The Kismet's bridge was a welter of confusion. The Senior Watch Officer was shouting at his assistant, the Navigator was cursing out the Pilot and the Gunnery Officer, whose job had been a sinecure until now, was bellowing at them all. Above the hubbub, suddenly, came the raucous voice of Captain Fogarty as he stalked onto the bridge. "What in great space has happened to the motors? Why are we losing speed?" The Senior Watch Officer saluted and shouted, "Engine Room reports the engines have all stopped, Sir. Don't know why. We're operating the lights and vents on emergency power." The Communications Officer spoke up. "The pirate ship reports that they're responsible, Sir. They say they've got a new device that will leave us without atomic power for as long as they like." As if to confirm this, over the loudspeaker came a voice. "Ahoy, STAR Kismet . Stand by for boarders. If you don't open up to us, we'll blast you off the map." "Pirates! Attacking us! Incredible!" cried the Captain. "There are no pirates any more. What have we got a Space Patrol for? Where in blazes is the Space Patrol anyway?" The Communications Officer gulped. "Er, ah, we got in contact with Commodore Trumble. He says his ship can get here in ten hours anyway, and for us to wait for him." Captain Fogarty snorted. "Fat lot of good he'll do us. Wait for him, eh? Well, we'll just blow that pirate out of the sky right now. Stand by the guns!" "The guns are useless," whined the Gunnery Officer. "The atomics that run them won't operate at all. What will we do?" "Ahoy, STAR Kismet . Open up your hatches when we arrive and let us in, or we won't spare a man of you," boomed the loudspeaker. "Pirates going to board us. How nice," muttered Grandma to herself as she eavesdropped just outside the door to the bridge. "They'll never get through the hatches alive. At least our small arms still work. We'll kill 'em all!" cried Captain Fogarty. "We only want one of you. All the rest of you will be spared if you open up the hatches and don't try to make no trouble," came the voice over the radio. "Tell them I'd rather all of us be killed than to let one dirty pirate on board my ship," the Captain shouted to the Communications Officer. "Oh, my goodness. That doesn't sound very smart," Grandma said half aloud. And turning from the doorway, she crept back through the deserted passageway. The main passenger hatch was not too far from the bridge. Grandma found it with ease, and in less than three minutes she had zipped herself into one of the emergency-use space suits stowed away beside the port. She felt awfully awkward climbing into the monstrous steel and plastic contraption, and her small body didn't quite fit the proportions of the metallic covering. But once she had maneuvered herself into it, she felt quite at ease. Opening the inner door to the airlock, she clanked into the little room. As the door shut behind her, she pressed the cycling button and evacuated the air from the lock. A minute or so later she heard poundings outside the airlock and quite calmly she reached out a mailed fist and turned a switch plainly marked: EMERGENCY LOCK DO NOT OPERATE IN FLIGHT The outer hatch opened almost immediately. The radio in Grandma's suit crackled with static. "What are you doing here?" demanded a voice over the suit radio. "Pirates! I'm hiding from the pirates. They'll never find me here!" she told them in a voice she hoped sounded full of panic. "What's your name?" asked the voice. "Darling Toujours, famous television actress," she lied quite calmly. "That's the one, boys," said another voice. "Let's go." Catching hold of Grandma's arm, they led her out into the emptiness of free space. Half an hour later, after the pirate ship had blasted far enough away from the Kismet , the men in the control room relaxed and began to take off their space suits. One of the men who Grandma soon learned was Lamps O'Toole, the nominal leader of the pirates, stretched his brawny body to ease the crinks out of it and then rubbed his hands together. Grandma noticed that he carried a week's beard on his face, as did most of the other men. "Well, that was a good one, eh, Snake?" said Lamps. Snake Simpson was a wiry little man whose tough exterior in no way suggested a reptile, except, perhaps, for his eyes which sat too close to one another. "You bet, Skipper. We're full fledged pirates now, just like old Captain Blackbrood." "You mean Blackbeard, Snake," said Lamps. "Sure. He used to sit around broodin' up trouble all the time." One of the other men piped up. "And to think we get the pleasurable company of the sweetest doll in the whole solar system for free besides the money." "Aw, women are no dern good—all of them," said Snake. "Now, Snake, that's no way to talk in front of company. You just apologize to the lady," Lamps told him. Lamps was six inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than Snake. Snake apologized. "That's better. And now, Miss Toujours, maybe you'd be more comfortable without that space suit on," he said. "Oh, no, thank you. I feel much better with it on," a small voice said over the suit's loudspeaker system. Lamps grinned. "Oh, come now, Miss Toujours. We ain't going to hurt you. I guarantee nobody will lay a finger to you." "But I feel much—much safer, if you know what I mean," said the voice. "Heck. With one of them things on, you can't eat, can't sleep, can't—Well, there's lots of things you can't do with one of them things on. Besides, we all want to take a little look at you, if you don't mind. Snake, you and Willie help the little lady out of her attire." As the men approached her, Grandma sensed the game was up. "Okay," she told them. "I give up. I can make it by myself." She started to take the bulky covering off. She had gotten no more than the headpiece off when the truth dawned on her companions. "Holy Smoke (or something like that)," said one of the men. "Nippin' Nebulae," said another. "It ain't Darling Toujours at all!" cried Lamps. "It ain't even no woman!" cried Snake. "I beg your pardon," said Grandma, and quite nonchalantly shed the rest of the suit and sat down in a comfortable chair. "I am Mrs. Matilda Perkins." When he could recover his powers of speech, Lamps sputtered, "I think you owe us a sort of an explanation, lady. If you know what I mean." "Certainly. I know exactly what you mean. It's all quite simple. When I overheard that you intended to board the Kismet , searching for only one person, I decided that one person had to be Darling Toujours. I guessed right off that she was the only one on board worth kidnapping and holding for ransom, so I simply let you believe that I was she and you took me. That's easy to understand, isn't it?" "Lady, I don't know what your game is, but it better be good. Now, just why did you do this to us?" Lamps was restraining himself nobly. "You never would have gotten inside the Kismet without my assistance. And even if you had, you'd never have gotten back out alive. "Captain Fogarty's men would have cut you to ribbons. So I opened the hatch to let you in, planted myself in the way, and you got out with me before they could muster their defenses. So, you see, I saved your lives." Grandma Perkins paused in her narrative and looked up at her audience, giving them a withered little smile. "And if you want to know why, well ... I was bored on the Kismet , and I thought how nice it would be to run away and join a gang of cutthroat pirates." "She's batty," moaned Snake. "She's lost her marbles," muttered another. "Let's toss her overboard right now," said still another. Lamps O'Toole took the floor. "Now, wait a minute. We can't do that," he said loudly. "We got enough trouble as is. You know what would happen to us if the Space Patrol added murder to the list. They'd put the whole fleet in after us and track us and our families down to the last kid." Then he turned to the little old lady to explain. "Look, lady—" "My name is Mrs. Matilda Perkins. You may call me Grandma." "Okay, Grandma, look. You really fixed us good. To begin with, we ain't really pirates. We used to operate this tub as a freighter between the Jupiter moons. But STAR got a monopoly on all space flights, including freight, and they just froze us out. We can't operate nowhere in the solar system, unless we get their permission. And they just ain't giving permission to nobody these days." Lamps flopped into one of the control seats and lit a cigarette. "So, when us good, honest men couldn't find any work because of STAR, and we didn't want to give up working in space, we just ups and decides to become pirates. This was our first job, and we sure did need the money we could have gotten out of Darling Toujours' studios for ransom." Lamps sighed. "Now, we got you instead, no chance of getting the ransom money, and to top it all off, we'll be wanted for piracy by the Space Patrol." "Well, it doesn't seem to me that you're ever going to be good pirates at this rate," Grandma told him. "You should have known better than to take a woman at her word." "I don't suppose you got any rich relatives what would pay to get you back?" suggested Snake hopefully. "I haven't got any rich relatives period," she said pertly. Then she added, "But my ten children might scrape up a little cash for you if you promised you wouldn't bring me back at all." "I figured as much," Lamps said dolefully. "Lookit, Grandma, the best thing we can do is to put you off safely at the next place we stop. Unless we get you back in one piece the Space Patrol will be on our necks forever. So don't go getting any ideas about joining up with us." "Well, the very least you could do for a poor old lady is to feed her," Grandma told him, her lower lip sticking out in a most petulant manner. "They like to have starved me to death on that Kismet ." "We ain't got much fancy in the line of grub...." Lamps began. "Just show me the way to the kitchen," said Grandma.

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Doorway to Kal-Jmar By Stuart Fleming Two men had died before Syme Rector's guns to give him the key to the ancient city of Kal-Jmar—a city of untold wealth, and of robots that made desires instant commands. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The tall man loitered a moment before a garish window display, his eyes impassive in his space-burned face, as the Lillis patrolman passed. Then he turned, burying his long chin in the folds of his sand cape, and took up the pursuit of the dark figure ahead once more. Above, the city's multicolored lights were reflected from the translucent Dome—a distant, subtly distorted Lillis, through which the stars shone dimly. Getting through that dome had been his first urgent problem, but now he had another, and a more pressing one. It had been simple enough to pass himself off as an itinerant prospector and gain entrance to the city, after his ship had crashed in the Mare Cimmerium. But the rest would not be so simple. He had to acquire a spaceman's identity card, and he had to do it fast. It was only a matter of time until the Triplanet Patrol gave up the misleading trail he had made into the hill country, and concluded that he must have reached Lillis. After that, his only safety lay in shipping out on a freighter as soon as possible. He had to get off Mars, because his trail was warm, and the Patrol thorough. They knew, of course, that he was an outlaw—the very fact of the crashed, illegally-armed ship would have told them that. But they didn't know that he was Syme Rector, the most-wanted and most-feared raider in the System. In that was his only advantage. He walked a little faster, as his quarry turned up a side street and then boarded a moving ramp to an upper level. He watched until the short, wide-shouldered figure in spaceman's harness disappeared over the top of the ramp, and then followed. The man was waiting for him at the mouth of the ascending tunnel. Syme looked at him casually, without a flicker of expression, and started to walk on, but the other stepped into his path. He was quite young, Syme saw, with a fighter's shoulders under the white leather, and a hard, determined thrust to his firm jaw. "All right," the boy said quietly. "What is it?" "I don't understand," Syme said. "The game, the angle. You've been following me. Do you want trouble?" "Why, no," Syme told him bewilderedly. "I haven't been following you. I—" The boy knuckled his chin reflectively. "You could be lying," he said finally. "But maybe I've made a mistake." Then—"Okay, citizen, you can clear—but don't let me catch you on my tail again." Syme murmured something and turned away, feeling the spaceman's eyes on the small of his back until he turned the corner. At the next street he took a ramp up, crossed over and came down on the other side a block away. He waited until he saw the boy's broad figure pass the intersection, and then followed again more cautiously. It was risky, but there was no other way. The signatures, the data, even the photograph on the card could be forged once Syme got his hands on it, but the identity card itself—that oblong of dark diamondite, glowing with the tiny fires of radioactivity—that could not be imitated, and the only way to get it was to kill. Up ahead was the Founders' Tower, the tallest building in Lillis. The boy strode into the entrance lobby, bought a ticket for the observation platform, and took the elevator. As soon as his car was out of sight in the transparent tube, Syme followed. He put a half-credit slug into the machine, took the punctured slip of plastic that came out. The ticket went into a scanning slot in the wall of the car, and the elevator whisked him up. The tower was high, more than a hundred meters above the highest level of the city, and the curved dome that kept air in Lillis was close overhead. Syme looked up, after his first appraising glance about the platform, and saw the bright-blue pinpoint of Earth. The sight stirred a touch of nostalgia in him, as it always did, but he put it aside. The boy was hunched over the circular balustrade a little distance away. Except for him, the platform was empty. Syme loosened his slim, deadly energy pistol in its holster and padded catlike toward the silent figure. It was over in a minute. The boy whirled as he came up, warned by some slight sound, or by the breath of Syme's passage in the still air. He opened his mouth to shout, and brought up his arm in a swift, instinctive gesture. But the blow never landed. Syme's pistol spat its silent white pencil of flame, and the boy crumpled to the floor with a minute, charred hole in the white leather over his chest. Syme stooped over him swiftly, found a thick wallet and thrust it into his pocket without a second glance. Then he raised the body in his arms and thrust it over the parapet. It fell, and in the same instant Syme felt a violent tug at his wrist. Before he could move to stop himself, he was over the edge. Too late, he realized what had happened—one of the hooks on the dead spaceman's harness had caught the heavy wristband of his chronometer. He was falling, linked to the body of his victim! Hardly knowing what he did, he lashed out wildly with his other arm, felt his fingertips catch and bite into the edge of the balustrade. His body hit the wall of the tower with a thump, and, a second later, the corpse below him hit the wall. Then they both hung there, swaying a little and Syme's fingers slipped a little with each motion. Gritting his teeth, he brought the magnificent muscles of his arm into play, raising the forearm against the dead weight of the dangling body. Fraction by slow fraction of an inch, it came up. Syme could feel the sweat pouring from his brow, running saltily into his eyes. His arms felt as if they were being torn from their sockets. Then the hook slipped free, and the tearing, unbearable weight vanished. The reaction swung Syme against the building again, and he almost lost his slippery hold on the balustrade. After a moment he heard the spaceman's body strike with a squashy thud, somewhere below. He swung up his other arm, got a better grip on the balustrade. He tried cautiously to get a leg up, but the motion loosened his hold on the smooth surface again. He relaxed, thinking furiously. He could hold on for another minute at most; then it was the final blast-off. He heard running footsteps, and then a pale face peered over the ledge at him. He realized suddenly that the whole incident could have taken only a few seconds. He croaked, "Get me up." Wordlessly, the man clasped thin fingers around his wrist. The other pulled, with much puffing and panting, and with his help Syme managed to get a leg over the edge and hoist his trembling body to safety. "Are you all right?" Syme looked at the man, nursing the tortured muscles of his arms. His rescuer was tall and thin, of indeterminate age. He had light, sandy hair, a sharp nose, and—oddly conflicting—pale, serious eyes and a humorous wide mouth. He was still panting. "I'm not hurt," Syme said. He grinned, his white teeth flashing in his dark, lean face. "Thanks for giving me a hand." "You scared hell out of me," said the man. "I heard a thud. I thought—you'd gone over." He looked at Syme questioningly. "That was my bag," the outlaw said quickly. "It slipped out of my hand, and I overbalanced myself when I grabbed for it." The man sighed. "I need a drink. You need a drink. Come on." He picked up a small black suitcase from the floor and started for the elevator, then stopped. "Oh—your bag. Shouldn't we do something about that?" "Never mind," said Syme, taking his arm. "The shock must have busted it wide open. My laundry is probably all over Lillis by now." They got off at the amusement level, three tiers down, and found a cafe around the corner. Syme wasn't worried about the man he had just killed. He had heard no second thud, so the body must have stayed on the first outcropping of the tower it struck. It probably wouldn't be found until morning. And he had the wallet. When he paid for the first round of culcha , he took it out and stole a glance at the identification card inside. There it was—his ticket to freedom. He began feeling expansive, and even friendly toward the slender, mouse-like man across the table. It was the culcha , of course. He knew it, and didn't care. In the morning he'd find a freighter berth—in as big a spaceport as Lillis, there were always jobs open. Meanwhile, he might as well enjoy himself, and it was safer to be seen with a companion than to be alone. He listened lazily to what the other was saying, leaning his tall, graceful body back into the softly-cushioned seat. "Lissen," said Harold Tate. He leaned forward on one elbow, slipped, caught himself, and looked at the elbow reproachfully. "Lissen," he said again, "I trust you, Jones. You're obvi-obviously an adventurer, but you have an honest face. I can't see it very well at the moment, but I hic!—pardon—seem to recall it as an honest face. I'm going to tell you something, because I need your help!—help." He paused. "I need a guide. D'you know this part of Mars well?" "Sure," said Syme absently. Out in the center of the floor, an AG plate had been turned on. Five Venusian girls were diving and twisting in its influence, propelling themselves by the motion of their delicately-webbed feet and trailing long gauzy streamers of synthesilk after them. Syme watched them through narrowed lids, feeling the glow of culcha inside him. "I wanta go to Kal-Jmar," said Tate. Syme snapped to attention, every nerve tingling. An indefinable sense, a hunch that had served him well before, told him that something big was coming—something that promised adventure and loot for Syme Rector. "Why?" he asked softly. "Why to Kal-Jmar?" Harold Tate told him, and later, when Syme had taken him to his rooms, he showed him what was in his little black suitcase. Syme had been right; it was big. Kal-Jmar was the riddle of the Solar System. It was the only remaining city of the ancient Martian race—the race that, legends said, had risen to greater heights than any other Solar culture. The machines, the artifacts, the records of the Martians were all there, perfectly preserved inside the city's bubble-like dome, after God knew how many thousands of years. But they couldn't be reached. For Kal-Jmar's dome was not the thing of steelite that protected Lillis: it was a tenuous, globular field of force that defied analysis as it defied explosives and diamond drills. The field extended both above and below the ground, and tunneling was of no avail. No one knew what had happened to the Martians, whether they were the ancestors of the present decadent Martian race, or a different species. No one knew anything about them or about Kal-Jmar. In the early days, when the conquest of Mars was just beginning, Earth scientists had been wild to get into the city. They had observed it from every angle, taken photographs of its architecture and the robots that still patrolled its fantastically winding streets, and then they had tried everything they knew to pierce the wall. Later, however, when every unsuccessful attempt had precipitated a bloody uprising of the present-day Martians—resulting in a rapid dwindling of the number of Martians—the Mars Protectorate had stepped in and forbidden any further experiments; forbidden, in fact, any Earthman to go near the place. Thus matter had stood for over a hundred years, until Harold Tate. Tate, a physicist, had stumbled on a field that seemed to be identical in properties to the Kal-Jmar dome; and what is more, he had found a force that would break it down. And so he had made his first trip to Mars, and within twenty-four hours, by the blindest of chances, blurted out his secret to Syme Rector, the scourge of the spaceways, the man with a thousand credits on his sleek, tigerish head. Syme's smile was not tigerish now; it was carefully, studiedly mild. For Tate was no longer drunk, and it was important that it should not occur to him that he had been indiscreet. "This is native territory we're coming to, Harold," he said. "Better strap on your gun." "Why. Are they really dangerous?" "They're unpredictable," Syme told him. "They're built differently, and they think differently. They breathe like us, down in their caverns where there's air, but they also eat sand, and get their oxygen that way." "Yes, I've heard about that," Tate said. "Iron oxide—very interesting metabolism." He got his energy pistol out of the compartment and strapped it on absently. Syme turned the little sand car up a gentle rise towards the tortuous hill country in the distance. "Not only that," he continued. "They eat the damndest stuff. Lichens and fungi and tumble-grass off the deserts—all full of deadly poisons, from arsenic up the line to xopite. They seem intelligent enough—in their own way—but they never come near our cities and they either can't or won't learn Terrestrial. When the first colonists came here, they had to learn their crazy language. Every word of it can mean any one of a dozen different things, depending on the inflection you give it. I can speak it some, but not much. Nobody can. We don't think the same." "So you think they might attack us?" Tate asked again, nervously. "They might do anything," Syme said curtly. "Don't worry about it." The hills were much closer than they had seemed, because of Mars' deceptively low horizon. In half an hour they were in the midst of a wilderness of fantastically eroded dunes and channels, laboring on sliding treads up the sides of steep hills only to slither down again on the other side. Syme stopped the car abruptly as a deep, winding channel appeared across their path. "Gully," he announced. "Shall we cross it, or follow it?" Tate peered through the steelite nose of the car. "Follow, I guess," he offered. "It seems to go more or less where we're going, and if we cross it we'll only come to a couple dozen more." Syme nodded and moved the sand car up to the edge of the gully. Then he pressed a stud on the control board; a metal arm extruded from the tail of the car and a heavy spike slowly unscrewed from it, driving deep into the sand. A light on the board flashed, indicating that the spike was in and would bear the car's weight, and Syme started the car over the edge. As the little car nosed down into the gully, the metal arm left behind revealed itself to be attached to a length of thick, very strong wire cable, with a control cord inside. They inched down the almost vertical incline, unreeling the cable behind them, and starting minor landslides as they descended. Finally they touched bottom. Syme pressed another stud, and above, the metal spike that had supported them screwed itself out of the ground again and the cable reeled in. Tate had been watching with interest. "Very ingenious," he said. "But how do we get up again?" "Most of these gullies peter out gradually," said Syme, "but if we want or have to climb out where it's deep, we have a little harpoon gun that shoots the anchor up on top." "Good. I shouldn't like to stay down here for the rest of my natural life. Depressing view." He looked up at the narrow strip of almost-black sky visible from the floor of the gully, and shook his head. Neither Syme nor Tate ever had a chance to test the efficiency of their harpoon gun. They had traveled no more than five hundred meters, and the gully was as deep as ever, when Tate, looking up, saw a deeper blackness blot out part of the black sky directly overhead. He shouted, "Look out!" and grabbed for the nearest steering lever. The car wheeled around in a half circle and ran into the wall of the gully. Syme was saying, "What—?" when there was a thunderous crash that shook the sturdy walls of the car, as a huge boulder smashed into the ground immediately to their left. When the smoky red dust had cleared away, they saw that the left tread of the sand car was crushed beyond all recognition. Syme was cursing slowly and steadily with a deep, seething anger. Tate said, "I guess we walk from here on." Then he looked up again and caught a glimpse of the horde of beasts that were rushing up the gully toward them. "My God!" he said. "What are those?" Syme looked. "Those," he said bitterly, "are Martians." The natives, like all Martian fauna, were multi-legged. Also like all Martian fauna, they moved so fast that you couldn't see how many legs they did have. Actually, however, the natives had six legs apiece—or, more properly, four legs and two arms. Their lungs were not as large as they appeared, being collapsed at the moment. What caused the bulge that made their torsos look like sausages was a huge air bladder, with a valve arrangement from the stomach and feeding directly into the bloodstream. Their faces were vaguely canine, but the foreheads were high, and the lips were not split. They did resemble dogs, in that their thick black fur was splotched with irregulate patches of white. These patches of white were subject to muscular control and could be spread out fanwise; or, conversely, the black could be expanded to cover the white, which helped to take care of the extremes of Martian temperature. Right now they were mostly black. The natives slowed down and spread out to surround the wrecked sand car, and it could be seen that most of them were armed with spears, although some had the slim Benson energy guns—strictly forbidden to Martians. Syme stopped cursing and watched tensely. Tate said nothing, but he swallowed audibly. One Martian, who looked exactly like all the rest, stepped forward and motioned unmistakably for the two to come out. He waited a moment and then gestured with his energy gun. That gun, Syme knew from experience, could burn through a small thickness of steelite if held on the same spot long enough. "Come on," Syme said grimly. He rose and reached for a pressure suit, and Tate followed him. "What do you think they'll—" he began, and then stopped himself. "I know. They're unpredictable." "Yeah," said Syme, and opened the door. The air in the car whooshed into the near-vacuum outside, and he and Tate stepped out. The Martian leader looked at them enigmatically, then turned and started off. The other natives closed in on them, and they all bounded along under the weak gravity. They bounded along for what Syme figured as a good kilometer and a half, and they then reached a branch in the gully and turned down it, going lower all the time. Under the light of their helmet lamps, they could see the walls of the gully—a tunnel, now—getting darker and more solid. Finally, when Syme estimated they were about nine kilometers down, there was even a suggestion of moisture. The tunnel debouched at last into a large cavern. There was a phosphorescent gleam from fungus along the walls, but Syme couldn't decide how far away the far wall was. He noticed something else, though. "There's air here," he said to Tate. "I can see dust motes in it." He switched his helmet microphone from radio over to the audio membrane on the outside of the helmet. " Kalis methra ," he began haltingly, " seltin guna getal. " "Yes, there is air here," said the Martian leader, startlingly. "Not enough for your use, however, so do not open your helmets." Syme swore amazedly. "I thought you said they didn't speak Terrestrial," Tate said. Syme ignored him. "We had our reasons for not doing so," the Martian said. "But how—?" "We are telepaths, of course. On a planet which is nearly airless on its surface, we have to be. A tendency of the Terrestrial mind is to ignore the obvious. We have not had a spoken language of our own for several thousand years." He darted a glance at Syme's darkly scowling face. His own hairy face was expressionless, but Syme sensed that he was amused. "Yes, you're right," he said. "The language you and your fellows struggled to learn is a fraud, a hodge-podge concocted to deceive you." Tate looked interested. "But why this—this gigantic masquerade?" "You had nothing to give us," the Martian said simply. Tate frowned, then flushed. "You mean you avoided revealing yourselves because you—had nothing to gain from mental intercourse with us?" "Yes." Tate thought again. "But—" "No," the Martian interrupted him, "revealing the extent of our civilization would have spared us nothing at your people's hands. Yours is an imperialist culture, and you would have had Mars, whether you thought you were taking it from equals or not." "Never mind that," Syme broke in impatiently. "What do you want with us?" The Martian looked at him appraisingly. "You already suspect. Unfortunately, you must die." It was a weird situation, Syme thought. His mind was racing, but as yet he could see no way out. He began to wonder, if he did, could he keep the Martians from knowing about it? Then he realized that the Martian must have received that thought, too, and he was enraged. He stood, holding himself in check with an effort. "Will you tell us why?" Tate asked. "You were brought here for that purpose. It is part of our conception of justice. I will tell you and your—friend—anything you wish to know." Syme noticed that the other Martians had retired to the farther side of the cavern. Some were munching the glowing fungus. That left only the leader, who was standing alertly on all fours a short distance away from them, holding the Benson gun trained on them. Syme tried not to think about the gun, especially about making a grab for it. It was like trying not to think of the word "hippopotamus." Tate squatted down comfortably on the floor of the cavern, apparently unconcerned, but his hands were trembling slightly. "First why—" he began. "There are many secrets in Kal-Jmar," the Martian said, "among them a very simple catalyzing agent which could within fifty years transform Mars to a planet with Terrestrially-thick atmosphere." "I think I see," Tate said thoughtfully. "That's been the ultimate aim all along, but so far the problem has us licked. If we solved it, then we'd have all of Mars, not just the cities. Your people would die out. You couldn't have that, of course." He sighed deeply. He spread his gloved hands before him and looked at them with a queer intentness. "Well—how about the Martians—the Kal-Jmar Martians, I mean? I'd dearly love to know the answer to that one." "Neither of the alternatives in your mind is correct. They were not a separate species, although they were unlike us. But they were not our ancestors, either. They were the contemporaries of our ancestors." "Several thousand years ago Mars' loss of atmosphere began to make itself felt. There were two ways out. Some chose to seal themselves into cities like Kal-Jmar; our ancestors chose to adapt their bodies to the new conditions. Thus the race split. Their answer to the problem was an evasion; they remained static. Our answer was the true one, for we progressed. We progressed beyond the need of science; they remained its slaves. They died of a plague—and other causes. "You see," he finished gently, "our deception has caused a natural confusion in your minds. They were the degenerates, not we." "And yet," Tate mused, "you are being destroyed by contact with an—inferior—culture." "We hope to win yet," the Martian said. Tate stood up, his face very white. "Tell me one thing," he begged. "Will our two races ever live together in amity?" The Martian lowered his head. "That is for unborn generations." He looked at Tate again and aimed the energy gun. "You are a brave man," he said. "I am sorry." Syme saw all his hopes of treasure and glory go glimmering down the sights of the Martian's Benson gun, and suddenly the pent-up rage in him exploded. Too swiftly for his intention to be telegraphed, before he knew himself what he meant to do, he hurled himself bodily into the Martian. It was like tangling with a draft horse. The Martian was astonishingly strong. Syme scrambled desperately for the gun, got it, but couldn't tear it out of the Martian's fingers. And all the time he could almost feel the Martian's telepathic call for help surging out. He heard the swift pad of his followers coming across the cavern. He put everything he had into one mighty, murderous effort. Every muscle fiber in his superbly trained body crackled and surged with power. He roared his fury. And the gun twisted out of the Martian's iron grip! He clubbed the prostrate leader with it instantly, then reversed the weapon and snapped a shot at the nearest Martian. The creature dropped his lance and fell without a sound. The next instant a ray blinked at him, and he rolled out of the way barely in time. The searing ray cut a swath over the leader's body and swerved to cut down on him. Still rolling, he fired at the holder of the weapon. The gun dropped and winked out on the floor. Syme jumped to his feet and faced his enemies, snarling like the trapped tiger he was. Another ray slashed at him, and he bent lithely to let it whistle over his head. Another, lower this time. He flipped his body into the air and landed upright, his gun still blazing. His right leg burned fiercely from a ray-graze, but he ignored it. And all the while he was mowing down the massed natives in great swaths, seeking out the ones armed with Bensons in swift, terrible slashes, dodging spears and other missiles in midair, and roaring at the top of his powerful lungs. At last there were none with guns left to oppose him. He scythed down the rest in two terrible, lightning sweeps of his ray, then dropped the weapon from blistered fingers. He was gasping for breath, and realized that he was losing air from the seared-open right leg of his suit. He reached for the emergency kit at his side, drawing in great, gasping breaths, and fumbled out a tube of sealing liquid. He spread the stuff on liberally, smearing it impartially over flesh and fabric. It felt like liquid hell on the burned, bleeding leg, but he kept on until the quick-drying fluid formed an airtight patch. Only then did he turn, to see Tate flattened against the wall behind him, his hands empty at his sides. "I'm sorry," Tate said miserably. "I could have grabbed a spear or something, but—I just couldn't, not even to save my own life. I—I halfway hoped they'd kill both of us." Syme glared at him and spat, too enraged to think of diplomacy. He turned and strode out of the cavern, carrying his right leg stiffly, but with his feral, tigerish head held high. He led the way, wordlessly, back to the wrecked sand car. Tate followed him with a hangdog, beaten air, as though he had just found something that shattered all his previous concepts of the verities in life, and didn't know what to do about it. Still silently, Syme refilled his oxygen tank, watched Tate do the same, and then picked up two spare tanks and the precious black suitcase and handed one of the tanks to Tate. Then he stumped around to the back of the car and inspected the damage. The cable reel, which might have drawn them out of the gully, was hopelessly smashed. That was that.

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Mr. Meek Plays Polo By CLIFFORD D. SIMAK Mr. Meek was having his troubles. First, the educated bugs worried him; then the welfare worker tried to stop the Ring Rats' feud by enlisting his aid. And now, he was a drafted space-polo player—a fortune bet on his ability at a game he had never played in his cloistered life. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The sign read: Atomic Motors Repaired. Busted Plates Patched Up. Rocket Tubes Relined. Wheeze In, Whiz Out! It added, as an afterthought, in shaky, inexpert lettering: We Fix Anything. Mr. Oliver Meek stared owlishly at the sign, which hung from an arm attached to a metal standard sunk in solid rock. A second sign was wired to the standard just below the metal arm, but its legend was faint, almost illegible. Meek blinked at it through thick-lensed spectacles, finally deciphered its scrawl: Ask About Educated Bugs. A bit bewildered, but determined not to show it, Meek swung away from the sign-post and gravely regarded the settlement. On the chart it was indicated by a fairly sizeable dot, but that was merely a matter of comparison. Out Saturn-way even the tiniest outpost assumes importance far beyond its size. The slab of rock was no more than five miles across, perhaps even less. Here in its approximate center, were two buildings, both of almost identical construction, semi-spherical and metal. Out here, Meek realized, shelter was the thing. Architecture merely for architecture's sake was still a long way off. One of the buildings was the repair shop which the sign advertised. The other, according to the crudely painted legend smeared above its entrance lock, was the Saturn Inn . The rest of the rock was landing field, pure and simple. Blasters had leveled off the humps and irregularities so spaceships could sit down. Two ships now were on the field, pulled up close against the repair shop. One, Meek noticed, belonged to the Solar Health and Welfare Department, the other to the Galactic Pharmaceutical Corporation. The Galactic ship was a freighter, ponderous and slow. It was here, Meek knew, to take on a cargo of radiation moss. But the other was a puzzler. Meek wrinkled his brow and blinked his eyes, trying to figure out what a welfare ship would be doing in this remote corner of the Solar System. Slowly and carefully, Meek clumped toward the squat repair shop. Once or twice he stumbled, hoping fervently he wouldn't get the feet of his cumbersome spacesuit all tangled up. The gravity was slight, next to non-existent, and one who wasn't used to it had to take things easy and remember where he was. Behind him Saturn filled a tenth of the sky, a yellow, lemon-tinged ball, streaked here and there with faint crimson lines and blotched with angry, bright green patches. To right and left glinted the whirling, twisting, tumbling rocks that made up the Inner Ring, while arcing above the horizon opposed to Saturn were the spangled glistening rainbows of the other rings. "Like dewdrops in the black of space," Meek mumbled to himself. But he immediately felt ashamed of himself for growing poetic. This sector of space, he knew, was not in the least poetic. It was hard and savage and as he thought about that, he hitched up his gun belt and struck out with a firmer tread that almost upset him. After that, he tried to think of nothing except keeping his two feet under him. Reaching the repair shop's entrance lock, he braced himself solidly to keep his balance, reached out and pressed a buzzer. Swiftly the lock spun outward and a moment later Meek had passed through the entrance vault and stepped into the office. A dungareed mechanic sat tilted in a chair against a wall, feet on the desk, a greasy cap pushed back on his head. Meek stamped his feet gratefully, pleased at feeling Earth gravity under him again. He lifted the hinged helmet of his suit back on his shoulders. "You are the gentleman who can fix things?" he asked the mechanic. The mechanic stared. Here was no hell-for-leather freighter pilot, no be-whiskered roamer of the outer orbits. Meek's hair was white and stuck out in uncombed tufts in a dozen directions. His skin was pale. His blue eyes looked watery behind the thick lenses that rode his nose. Even the bulky spacesuit failed to hide his stooped shoulders and slight frame. The mechanic said nothing. Meek tried again. "I saw the sign. It said you could fix anything. So I...." The mechanic shook himself. "Sure," he agreed, still slightly dazed. "Sure I can fix you up. What you got?" He swung his feet off the desk. "I ran into a swarm of pebbles," Meek confessed. "Not much more than dust, really, but the screen couldn't stop it all." He fumbled his hands self-consciously. "Awkward of me," he said. "It happens to the best of them," the mechanic consoled. "Saturn sweeps in clouds of the stuff. Thicker than hell when you reach the Rings. Lots of ships pull in with punctures. Won't take no time." Meek cleared his throat uneasily. "I'm afraid it's more than a puncture. A pebble got into the instruments. Washed out some of them." The mechanic clucked sympathetically. "You're lucky. Tough job to bring in a ship without all the instruments. Must have a honey of a navigator." "I haven't got a navigator," Meek said, quietly. The mechanic stared at him, eyes popping. "You mean you brought it in alone? No one with you?" Meek gulped and nodded. "Dead reckoning," he said. The mechanic glowed with sudden admiration. "I don't know who you are, mister," he declared, "but whoever you are, you're the best damn pilot that ever took to space." "Really I'm not," said Meek. "I haven't done much piloting, you see. Up until just a while ago, I never had left Earth. Bookkeeper for Lunar Exports." "Bookkeeper!" yelped the mechanic. "How come a bookkeeper can handle a ship like that?" "I learned it," said Meek. "You learned it?" "Sure, from a book. I saved my money and I studied. I always wanted to see the Solar System and here I am." Dazedly, the mechanic took off his greasy cap, laid it carefully on the desk, reached out for a spacesuit that hung from a wall hook. "Afraid this job might take a while," he said. "Especially if we have to wait for parts. Have to get them in from Titan City. Why don't you go over to the Inn . Tell Moe I sent you. They'll treat you right." "Thank you," said Meek, "but there's something else I'm wondering about. There was another sign out there. Something about educated bugs." "Oh, them," said the mechanic. "They belong to Gus Hamilton. Maybe belong ain't the right word because they were on the rock before Gus took over. Anyhow, Gus is mighty proud of them, although at times they sure run him ragged. First year they almost drove him loopy trying to figure out what kind of game they were playing." "Game?" asked Meek, wondering if he was being hoaxed. "Sure, game. Like checkers. Only it ain't. Not chess, neither. Even worse than that. Bugs dig themselves a batch of holes, then choose up sides and play for hours. About the time Gus would think he had it figured out, they'd change the rules and throw him off again." "That doesn't make sense," protested Meek. "Stranger," declared the mechanic, solemnly, "there ain't nothing about them bugs that make sense. Gus' rock is the only one they're on. Gus thinks maybe the rock don't even belong to the Solar system. Thinks maybe it's a hunk of stone from some other solar system. Figures maybe it crossed space somehow and was captured by Saturn, sucked into the Ring. That would explain why it's the only one that has the bugs. They come along with it, see." "This Gus Hamilton," said Meek. "I'd like to see him. Where could I find him?" "Go over to the Inn and wait around," advised the mechanic. "He'll come in sooner or later. Drops around regular, except when his rheumatism bothers him, to pick up a bundle of papers. Subscribes to a daily paper, he does. Only man out here that does any reading. But all he reads is the sports section. Nuts about sports, Gus is." II Moe, bartender at Saturn Inn, leaned his elbow on the bar and braced his chin in an outspread palm. His face wore a melancholy, hang-dog look. Moe liked things fairly peaceable, but now he saw trouble coming in big batches. "Lady," he declared mournfully, "you sure picked yourself a job. The boys around here don't take to being uplifted and improved. They ain't worth it, either. Just ring-rats, that's all they are." Henrietta Perkins, representative for the public health and welfare department of the Solar government, shuddered at his suggestion of anything so low it didn't yearn for betterment. "But those terrible feuds," she protested. "Fighting just because they live in different parts of the Ring. It's natural they might feel some rivalry, but all this killing! Surely they don't enjoy getting killed." "Sure they enjoy it," declared Moe. "Not being killed, maybe ... although they're willing to take a chance on that. Not many of them get killed, in fact. Just a few that get sort of careless. But even if some of them are killed, you can't go messing around with that feud of theirs. If them boys out in sectors Twenty-Three and Thirty-Seven didn't have their feud they'd plain die of boredom. They just got to have somebody to fight with. They been fighting, off and on, for years." "But they could fight with something besides guns," said the welfare lady, a-smirk with righteousness. "That's why I'm here. To try to get them to turn their natural feelings of rivalry into less deadly and disturbing channels. Direct their energies into other activities." "Like what?" asked Moe, fearing the worst. "Athletic events," said Miss Perkins. "Tin shinny, maybe," suggested Moe, trying to be sarcastic. She missed the sarcasm. "Or spelling contests," she said. "Them fellow can't spell," insisted Moe. "Games of some sort, then. Competitive games." "Now you're talking," Moe enthused. "They take to games. Seven-toed Pete with the deuces wild." The inner door of the entrance lock grated open and a spacesuited figure limped into the room. The spacesuit visor snapped up and a brush of grey whiskers spouted into view. It was Gus Hamilton. He glared at Moe. "What in tarnation is all this foolishness?" he demanded. "Got your message, I did, and here I am. But it better be important." He hobbled to the bar. Moe reached for a bottle and shoved it toward him, keeping out of reach. "Have some trouble?" he asked, trying to be casual. "Trouble! Hell, yes!" blustered Gus. "But I ain't the only one that's going to have trouble. Somebody sneaked over and stole the injector out of my space crate. Had to borrow Hank's to get over here. But I know who it was. There ain't but one other ring-rat got a rocket my injector will fit." "Bud Craney," said Moe. It was no secret. Every man in the two sectors of the Ring knew just exactly what kind of spacecraft the other had. "That's right," said Gus, "and I'm fixing to go over into Thirty-seven and yank Bud up by the roots." He took a jolt of liquor. "Yes, sir, I sure aim to crucify him." His eyes lighted on Miss Henrietta Perkins. "Visitor?" he asked. "She's from the government," said Moe. "Revenuer?" "Nope. From the welfare outfit. Aims to help you fellows out. Says there ain't no sense in you boys in Twenty-three all the time fighting with the gang from Thirty-seven." Gus stared in disbelief. Moe tried to be helpful. "She wants you to play games." Gus strangled on his drink, clawed for air, wiped his eyes. "So that's why you asked me over here. Another of your danged peace parleys. Come and talk things over, you said. So I came." "There's something in what she says," defended Moe. "You ring-rats been ripping up space for a long time now. Time you growed up and settled down. You're aiming on going over right now and pulverizing Bud. It won't do you any good." "I'll get a heap of satisfaction out of it," insisted Gus. "And, besides, I'll get my injector back. Might even take a few things off Bud's ship. Some of the parts on mine are wearing kind of thin." Gus took another drink, glowering at Miss Perkins. "So the government sent you out to make us respectable," he said. "Merely to help you, Mr. Hamilton," she declared. "To turn your hatreds into healthy competition." "Games, eh?" said Gus. "Maybe you got something, after all. Maybe we could fix up some kind of game...." "Forget it, Gus," warned Moe. "If you're thinking of energy guns at fifty paces, it's out. Miss Perkins won't stand for anything like that." Gus wiped his whiskers and looked hurt. "Nothing of the sort," he denied. "Dang it, you must think I ain't got no sportsmanship at all. I was thinking of a real sport. A game they play back on Earth and Mars. Read about it in my papers. Follow the teams, I do. Always wanted to see a game, but never did." Miss Perkins beamed. "What game is it, Mr. Hamilton?" "Space polo," said Gus. "Why, how wonderful," simpered Miss Perkins. "And you boys have the spaceships to play it with." Moe looked alarmed. "Miss Perkins," he warned, "don't let him talk you into it." "You shut your trap," snapped Gus. "She wants us to play games, don't she. Well, polo is a game. A nice, respectable game. Played in the best society." "It wouldn't be no nice, respectable game the way you fellows would play it," predicted Moe. "It would turn into mass murder. Wouldn't be one of you who wouldn't be planning on getting even with someone else, once you got him in the open." Miss Perkins gasped. "Why, I'm sure they wouldn't!" "Of course we wouldn't," declared Gus, solemn as an owl. "And that ain't all," said Moe, warming to the subject. "Those crates you guys got wouldn't last out the first chukker. Most of them would just naturally fall apart the first sharp turn they made. You can't play polo in ships tied up with haywire. Those broomsticks you ring-rats ride around on are so used to second rate fuel they'd split wide open first squirt of high test stuff you gave them." The inner locks grated open and a man stepped through into the room. "You're prejudiced," Gus told Moe. "You just don't like space polo, that is all. You ain't got no blueblood in you. We'll leave it up to this man here. We'll ask his opinion of it." The man flipped back his helmet, revealing a head thatched by white hair and dominated by a pair of outsize spectacles. "My opinion, sir," said Oliver Meek, "seldom amounts to much." "All we want to know," Gus told him, "is what you think of space polo." "Space polo," declared Meek, "is a noble game. It requires expert piloting, a fine sense of timing and...." "There, you see!" whooped Gus, triumphantly. "I saw a game once," Meek volunteered. "Swell," bellowed Gus. "We'll have you coach our team." "But," protested Meek, "but ... but." "Oh, Mr. Hamilton," exulted Miss Perkins, "you are so wonderful. You think of everything." "Hamilton!" squeaked Meek. "Sure," said Gus. "Old Gus Hamilton. Grow the finest dog-gone radiation moss you ever clapped your eyes on." "Then you're the gentleman who has bugs," said Meek. "Now, look here," warned Gus, "you watch what you say or I'll hang one on you." "He means your rock bugs," Moe explained, hastily. "Oh, them," said Gus. "Yes," said Meek, "I'm interested in them. I'd like to see them." "See them," said Gus. "Mister, you can have them if you want them. Drove me out of house and home, they did. They're dippy over metal. Any kind of metal, but alloys especially. Eat the stuff. They'll tromp you to death heading for a spaceship. Got so I had to move over to another rock to live. Tried to fight it out with them, but they whipped me pure and simple. Moved out and let them have the place after they started to eat my shack right out from underneath my feet." Meek looked crestfallen. "Can't get near them, then," he said. "Sure you can," said Gus. "Why not?" "Well, a spacesuit's metal and...." "Got that all fixed up," said Gus. "You come back with me and I'll let you have a pair of stilts." "Stilts?" "Yeah. Wooden stilts. Them danged fool bugs don't know what wood is. Seem to be scared of it, sort of. You can walk right among them if you want to, long as you're walking on the stilts." Meek gulped. He could imagine what stilt walking would be like in a place where gravity was no more than the faintest whisper. III The bugs had dug a new set of holes, much after the manner of a Chinese checker board, and now were settling down into their respective places preparatory to the start of another game. For a mile or more across the flat surface of the rock that was Gus Hamilton's moss garden, ran a string of such game-boards, each one different, each one having served as the scene of a now-completed game. Oliver Meek cautiously wedged his stilts into two pitted pockets of rock, eased himself slowly and warily against the face of a knob of stone that jutted from the surface. Even in his youth, Meek remembered, he never had been any great shakes on stilts. Here, on this bucking, weaving rock, with slick surfaces and practically no gravity, a man had to be an expert to handle them. Meek knew now he was no expert. A half-dozen dents in his space armor was ample proof of that. Comfortably braced against the upjutting of stone, Meek dug into the pouch of his space gear, brought out a notebook and stylus. Flipping the pages, he stared, frowning, at the diagrams that covered them. None of the diagrams made sense. They showed the patterns of three other boards and the moves that had been made by the bugs in playing out the game. Apparently, in each case, the game had been finished. Which, Meek knew, should have meant that some solution had been reached, some point won, some advantage gained. But so far as Meek could see from study of the diagrams there was not even a purpose or a problem, let alone a solution or a point. The whole thing was squirrely. But, Meek told himself, it fitted in. The whole Saturnian system was wacky. The rings, for example. Debris of a moon smashed up by Saturn's pull? Sweepings of space? No one knew. Saturn itself, for that matter. A planet that kept Man at bay with deadly radiations. But radiations that, while they kept Man at a distance, at the same time served Man. For here, on the Inner Ring, where they had become so diluted that ordinary space armor filtered them out, they made possible the medical magic of the famous radiation moss. One of the few forms of plant life found in the cold of space, the moss was nurtured by those mysterious radiations. Planted elsewhere, on kindlier worlds, it wilted and refused to grow. The radiations had been analyzed, Meek knew, and reproduced under laboratory conditions, but there still was something missing, some vital, elusive factor that could not be analyzed. Under the artificial radiation, the moss still wilted and died. And because Earth needed the moss to cure a dozen maladies and because it would grow nowhere else but here on the Inner Ring, men squatted on the crazy swirl of spacial boulders that made up the ring. Men like Hamilton, living on rocks that bucked and heaved along their orbits like chips riding the crest of a raging flood. Men who endured loneliness, dared death when crunching orbits intersected or, when rickety spacecraft flared, who went mad with nothing to do, with the mockery of space before them. Meek shrugged his shoulders, almost upsetting himself. The bugs had started the game and Meek craned forward cautiously, watching eagerly, stylus poised above the notebook. Crawling clumsily, the tiny insect-like creatures moved about, solemnly popping in and out of holes. If there were opposing sides ... and if it were a game, there'd have to be ... they didn't seem to alternate the moves. Although, Meek admitted, certain rules and conditions which he had failed to note or recognize, might determine the number and order of moves allowed each side. Suddenly there was confusion on the board. For a moment a half-dozen of the bugs raced madly about, as if seeking the proper hole to occupy. Then, as suddenly, all movement had ceased. And in another moment, they were on the move again, orderly again, but retracing their movements, going back several plays beyond the point of confusion. Just as one would do when one made a mistake working a mathematical problem ... going back to the point of error and going on again from there. "Well, I'll be...." Mr. Meek said. Meek stiffened and the stylus floated out of his hand, settled softly on the rock below. A mathematical problem! His breath gurgled in his throat. He knew it now! He should have known it all the time. But the mechanic had talked about the bugs playing games and so had Hamilton. That had thrown him off. Games! Those bugs weren't playing any game. They were solving mathematical equations! Meek leaned forward to watch, forgetting where he was. One of the stilts slipped out of position and Meek felt himself start to fall. He dropped the notebook and frantically clawed at empty space. The other stilt went, then, and Meek found himself floating slowly downward, gravity weak but inexorable. His struggle to retain his balance had flung him forward, away from the face of the rock and he was falling directly over the board on which the bugs were arrayed. He pawed and kicked at space, but still floated down, course unchanged. He struck and bounced, struck and bounced again. On the fourth bounce he managed to hook his fingers around a tiny projection of the surface. Fighting desperately, he regained his feet. Something scurried across the face of his helmet and he lifted his hand before him. It was covered with the bugs. Fumbling desperately, he snapped on the rocket motor of his suit, shot out into space, heading for the rock where the lights from the ports of Hamilton's shack blinked with the weaving of the rock. Oliver Meek shut his eyes and groaned. "Gus will give me hell for this," he told himself. Gus shook the small wooden box thoughtfully, listening to the frantic scurrying within it. "By rights," he declared, judiciously, "I should take this over and dump it in Bud's ship. Get even with him for swiping my injector." "But you got the injector back," Meek pointed out. "Oh, sure, I got it back," admitted Gus. "But it wasn't orthodox, it wasn't. Just getting your property back ain't getting even. I never did have a chance to smack Bud in the snoot the way I should of smacked him. Moe talked me into it. He was the one that had the idea the welfare lady should go over and talk to Bud. She must of laid it on thick, too, about how we should settle down and behave ourselves and all that. Otherwise Bud never would have given her that injector." He shook his head dolefully. "This here Ring ain't ever going to be the same again. If we don't watch out, we'll find ourselves being polite to one another." "That would be awful," agreed Meek. "Wouldn't it, though," declared Gus. Meek squinted his eyes and pounced on the floor, scrabbling on hands and knees after a scurrying thing that twinkled in the lamplight. "Got him," yelped Meek, scooping the shining mote up in his hand. Gus inched the lid of the wooden box open. Meek rose and popped the bug inside. "That makes twenty-eight of them," said Meek. "I told you," Gus accused him, "that we hadn't got them all. You better take another good look at your suit. The danged things burrow right into solid metal and pull the hole in after them, seems like. Sneakiest cusses in the whole dang system. Just like chiggers back on Earth." "Chiggers," Meek told him, "burrow into a person to lay eggs." "Maybe these things do, too," Gus contended. The radio on the mantel blared a warning signal, automatically tuning in on one of the regular newscasts from Titan City out on Saturn's biggest moon. The syrupy, chamber of commerce voice of the announcer was shaky with excitement and pride. "Next week," he said, "the annual Martian-Earth football game will be played at Greater New York on Earth. But in the Earth's newspapers tonight another story has pushed even that famous classic of the sporting world down into secondary place." He paused and took a deep breath and his voice practically yodeled with delight. "The sporting event, ladies and gentlemen, that is being talked up and down the streets of Earth tonight, is one that will be played here in our own Saturnian system. A space polo game. To be played by two unknown, pick-up, amateur teams down in the Inner Ring. Most of the men have never played polo before. Few if any of them have even seen a game. There may have been some of them who didn't, at first, know what it was. "But they're going to play it. The men who ride those bucking rocks that make up the Inner Ring will go out into space in their rickety ships and fight it out. And ladies and gentlemen, when I say fight it out, I really mean fight it out. For the game, it seems, will be a sort of tournament, the final battle in a feud that has been going on in the Ring for years. No one knows what started the feud. It has gotten so it really doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is that when men from sector Twenty-three meet those from sector Thirty-seven, the feud is taken up again. But that is at an end now. In a few days the feud will be played out to its bitter end when the ships from the Inner Ring go out into space to play that most dangerous of all sports, space polo. For the outcome of that game will decide, forever, the supremacy of one of the two sectors."

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The CONJURER of VENUS By CONAN T. TROY A world-famed Earth scientist had disappeared on Venus. When Johnson found him, he found too the secret to that globe-shaking mystery—the fabulous Room of The Dreaming. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories November 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The city dripped with rain. Crossing the street toward the dive, Johnson got rain in his eyes, his nose, and his ears. That was the way with the rain here. It came at you from all directions. There had been occasions when Johnson had thought the rain was falling straight up. Otherwise, how had the insides of his pants gotten wet? On Venus, everything came at you from all directions, it seemed to Johnson. Opening the door of the joint, it was noise instead of rain that came at him, the wild frantic beat of a Venusian rhumba, the notes pounding and jumping through the smoke and perfume clouded room. Feeling states came at him, intangible, but to his trained senses, perceptible emotional nuances of hate, love, fear, and rage. But mostly love. Since this place had been designed to excite the senses of both humans and Venusians, the love feelings were heavily tinged with straight sex. He sniffed at them, feeling them somewhere inside of him, aware of them but aware also that here was apprehension, and plain fear. Caldwell, sitting in a booth next to the door, glanced up as Johnson entered but neither Caldwell's facial expression or his eyes revealed that he had ever seen this human before. Nor did Johnson seem to recognize Caldwell. "Is the mighty human wanting liquor, a woman or dreams?" His voice was all soft syllables of liquid sound. The Venusian equivalent of a headwaiter was bowing to him. "I'll have a tarmur to start," Johnson said. "How are the dreams tonight?" "Ze vill be the most wonserful of all sonight. The great Unger hisself will be here to do ze dreaming. There is no ozzer one who has quite his touch at dreaming, mighty one." The headwaiter spread his hands in a gesture indicating ecstasy. "It is my great regret that I must do ze work tonight instead of being wiz ze dreamers. Ah, ze great Unger hisself!" The headwaiter kissed the tips of his fingers. "Um," Johnson said. "The great Unger!" His voice expressed surprise, just the right amount of it. "I'll have a tarmur to start but when does the dreaming commence?" "In one zonar or maybe less. Shall I make ze reservations for ze mighty one?" As he was speaking, the headwaiter was deftly conducting Johnson to the bar. "Not just yet," Johnson said. "See me a little later." "But certainly." The headwaiter was gone into the throng. Johnson was at the bar. Behind it, a Venusian was bowing to him. "Tarmur," Johnson said. The green drink was set before him. He held it up to the light, admiring the slow rise of the tiny golden bubbles in it. To him, watching the bubbles rise was perhaps more important than drinking itself. "Beautiful, aren't they?" a soft voice said. He glanced to his right. A girl had slid into the stool beside him. She wore a green dress cut very low at the throat. Her skin had the pleasant tan recently on Earth. Her hair was a shade of abundant brown and her eyes were blue, the color of the skies of Earth. A necklace circled her throat and below the necklace ... Johnson felt his pulse quicken, for two reasons. Women such as this one had been quickening the pulse of men since the days of Adam. The second reason concerned her presence here in this place where no woman in her right mind ever came unescorted. Her eyes smiled up at him unafraid. Didn't she know there were men present here in this space port city who would snatch her bodily from the bar stool and carry her away for sleeping purposes? And Venusians were here who would cut her pretty throat for the sake of the necklace that circled it? "They are beautiful," he said, smiling. "Thank you." "I was referring to the bubbles." "You were talking about my eyes," she answered, unperturbed. "How did you know? I mean...." "I am very knowing," the girl said, smiling. "Are you sufficiently knowing to be here?" For an instant, as if doubt crossed her mind, the smile flickered. Then it came again, stronger. "Aren't you here?" Johnson choked as bubbles from the tarmur seemed to go suddenly up his nose. "My dear child ..." he sputtered. "I am not a child," she answered with a firm sureness that left no doubt in his mind that she knew what she was saying. "And my name is Vee Vee." "Vee Vee? Um. That is...." "Don't you think it's a nice name?" "I certainly do. Probably the rest of it is even nicer." "There is no more of it. Just Vee Vee. Like Topsy, I just grew." "What the devil are you doing here on Venus and here in this place?" "Growing." The blue eyes were unafraid. Sombrely, Johnson regarded her. What was she doing here? Was she in the employ of the Venusians? If she was being planted on him, then his purpose here was suspected. He shrugged the thought aside. If his purpose here was suspected, there would be no point in planting a woman on him. There would only be the minor matter of slipping a knife into his back. In this city, as on all of Venus, humans died easily. No one questioned the motives of the killer. "You look as if you were considering some very grave matter," Vee Vee said. "Not any longer," he laughed. "You have decided them?" "Yes." "Every last one of them?" "Oh, there might be one or two matters undecided somewhere, say out on the periphery of the galaxy. But we will solve them when we get to them." He waved vaguely toward the roof and the sky of space hidden behind the clouds that lay over the roof, glanced around as a man eased himself into an empty stool on his left. The man was Caldwell. "Zlock!" Caldwell said, to the bartender. "Make it snappy. Gotta have zlock. Finest damn drink in the solar system." Caldwell's voice was thick, his tongue heavy. Johnson's eyes went back to the girl but out of the corner of them he watched Caldwell's hand lying on the bar. The fingers were beating a quick nervous tattoo on the yellow wood. "I haven't seen him," Caldwell's fingers beat out their tattoo. "But I think he is, or was, here." "Um," Johnson said, his eyes on Vee Vee. "How—" "Because that girl was asking for him," Caldwell's fingers answered. "Watch that girl!" Picking up the zlock, he lurched away from the bar. "Your friend is not as drunk as he seems," Vee Vee said, watching Caldwell. "My friend? Do you mean that drunk? I never saw him—" "Lying is one of the deadly sins." Her eyes twinkled at him. Under the merriment that danced in them there was ice. Johnson felt cold. "The reservations for ze dreaming, great one?" The headwaiter was bowing and scraping in front of him. "The great one has decided, yes?" "The dreaming!" Vee Vee looked suddenly alert. "Of course. We must see the dreaming. Everyone wants to see the dreaming. We will go, won't we darling?" She hooked her hand into Johnson's elbow. "Certainly," Johnson said. The decision was made on the spur of the moment. That there was danger in it, he did not doubt. But there might be something else. And he might be there. "Oh. But very good. Ze great Unger, you will love him!" The headwaiter clutched the gold coins that Johnson extended, bowed himself out of sight. "Say, I want to know more—" Johnson began. His words were drowned in a blast of trumpets. The band that had been playing went into sudden silence. Waves of perfume began to flow into the place. The perfumes were blended, but one aroma was prominent among them, the sweet, cloying, soul-stirring perfume of the Dreamer. In the suddenly hushed place little sounds began to appear as Venusians and humans began to shift their feet and their bodies in anticipation of what was to happen. The trumpets flared again. On one side of the place, a big door began to swing slowly open. From beyond that slowly opening door came music, soft, muted strains that sounded like lutes from heaven. Vee Vee, her hand on Johnson's elbow, rose. Johnson stood up with her. He got the surprise of his life as her fingers clenched, digging into his muscles. Pain shot through his arm, paralyzing it and almost paralyzing him. He knew instantly that she was using the Karmer nerve block paralysis on him. His left hand moved with lightning speed, the tips of his fingers striking savagely against her shoulder. She gasped, her face whitened as pain shot through her in response to the thrust of his finger tips. Her hand that had been digging into his elbow lost its grip, dropped away and hung limp at her side. Grabbing it, she began to massage it. "You—you—" Hot anger and shock were in her voice. "You're the first man I ever knew who could break the Karmer nerve paralysis." "And you're the first woman who ever tried it on me." "But—" "Shall we go watch the dreaming?" He took the arm that still hung limp at her side and tucked it into his elbow. "If you try to use the Karmer grip on me again I'll break your arm," he said. His voice was low but there was a wealth of meaning in it. "I won't do it again," the girl said stoutly. "I never make the same mistake twice." "Good," Johnson said. "The second time we break our victim's neck," Vee Vee said. "What a sweet, charming child you—" "I told you before, I'm not a child." "Child vampire," Johnson said. "Let me finish my sentences before you interrupt." She was silent. A smile, struggling to appear on her face, seemed to say she held no malice. Her fingers tightened on Johnson's arm. He tensed, expecting the nerve block grip again. Instead with the tips of her fingers she gently patted his arm. "There, there, darling, relax," she said. "I know a better way to get you than by using the Karmer grip." "What way?" Her eyes sparkled. "Eve's way," she answered. "Um!" Surprise sounded in his grunt. "But apples don't grow on Venus." "Eve's daughters don't use apples any more, darling. Come along." Moving toward the open door that led to the Room of the Dreaming, Johnson saw that Caldwell had risen and was following them. Caldwell's face was writhing in apprehensive agony and he was making warning signs. Johnson ignored them. With Vee Vee's fingers lightly patting his arm, they moved into the Room of the Dreaming. II It was a huge, semi-illumined room, with tier on tier of circling ramps rising up from an open space at the bottom. There ought to have been a stage there at the bottom, but there wasn't. Instead there was an open space, a mat, and a head rest. Up at the top of the circling ramps the room was in darkness, a fit hiding place for ghosts or Venusian werewolves. Pillows and a thick rug covered the circling ramps. The soul-quickening Perfume of the Dreamer was stronger here. The throbbing of the lutes was louder. It was Venusian music the lutes were playing. Human ears found it inharmonious at first, but as they became accustomed to it, they began to detect rhythms and melodies that human minds had not known existed. The room was pleasantly cool but it had the feel of dampness. A world that was rarely without pelting rain would have the feel of dampness in its dreaming rooms. The music playing strange harmonies in his ears, the perfume sending tingling feelings through his nose, Johnson entered the Room of the Dreamer. He suspected that other forces, unknown to him, were catching hold of his senses. He had been in dreaming rooms many times before but he had not grown accustomed to them. He wondered if any human ever did. A touch of chill always came over him as he crossed the threshold. In entering these places, it was as if some unknown nerve center inside the human organism was touched by something, some force, some radiation, some subtlety, that quite escaped radiation. He felt the coldness now. Vee Vee's fingers left off patting his arm. "Do you feel it, darling?" "Yes." "What is it?" "How would I know?" "Please!" Her voice grew sharp. "I think Johnny Johnson ought to know." "Johnny! How do you know my name?" "Shouldn't I recognize one of Earth's foremost scientists, even if he is incognito on Venus?" Her voice had a teasing quality in it. "But—" "And who besides Johnny Johnson would recognize the Karmer nerve grip and be able to break it instantly?" "Hell—" "John Michael Johnson, known as Johnny to his friends, Earth's foremost expert in the field of electro-magnetic radiations within the human body!" Her words were needles of icy fact, each one jabbing deeper and deeper into him. "And how would I make certain you were Johnny Johnson, except by seeing if you could break the Karmer nerve grip? If you could break it, then there was no doubt who you were!" Her words went on and on. "Who are you?" His words were blasts of sound. "Please, darling, you are making a scene. I am sure this is the last thing you really want to do." He looked quickly around them. The Venusians and humans moving into this room seemed to be paying no attention to him. His gaze came back to her. Again she patted his arm. "Relax, darling. Your secrets are safe with me." A gray color came up inside his soul. "But—but—" His voice was suddenly weak. The fingers on his arm were very gentle. "No harm will come to you. Am I not with you?" "That's what I'm afraid of!" he snapped at her. If he had had a choice, he might have drawn back. But with circumstances as they were—his life, Caldwell's life, possibly Vee Vee's life hung in the balance. Didn't she know that this was true? And as for Martin—But Caldwell had said that she had been asking about Martin. What connection did she have with that frantic human genius he sought here? Johnson felt his skin crawl. He moved toward a nest of cushions on a ramp, found a Venusian was beating him to them, deftly changed to another nest, found it. Vee Vee flowed to the floor on his right, moved cushions to make him more comfortable. She moved in an easy sort of way that was all flowing movement. He sat down. Someone bumped him on the left. "Sorry, bud. Didn't mean to bump into you." Caldwell's voice was still thick and heavy. He sprawled to the floor on Johnson's left. Under the man's coat, Johnson caught a glimpse of a slight bulge, the zit gun hidden there. His left arm pressed against his own coat, feeling his own zit gun. Operating under gas pressure, throwing a charge of gas-driven corvel, the zit guns were not only almost noiseless in operation but they knocked out a human or a Venusian in a matter of seconds. True, the person they knocked unconscious would be all right the next day. For this reason, many people did not regard the zit guns as effective weapons, but Johnson had a fondness for them. The feel of the little weapon inside his coat sent a surge of comfort through him. The music picked up a beat, perfume seemed to flow even more freely through the air, the lights dimmed almost to darkness, a single bright spotlight appeared in the ceiling, casting a circle of brilliant illumination on the mat and the headrest at the bottom of the room. The curtain rose. Unger stood in the middle of the spot of light. Johnson felt his chest muscles contract, then relax. Vee Vee's fingers sought his arm, not to harm him but running to him for protection. He caught the flutter of her breathing. On his left, Caldwell stiffened and became a rock. Johnson had not seen Unger appear. One second the circle of light had been empty, the next second the Venusian, smiling with all the impassivity of a bland Buddha, was in the light. He weighed three hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce, he was clad in a long robe that would impede movement. He had appeared in the bright beam of the spotlight as if by magic. Vee Vee's fingers dug deeper into Johnson's arm. "How—" "Shhh. Nobody knows." No human knew the answer to that trick. Unless perhaps Martin— Unger bowed. A little ripple of something that was not quite sound passed through the audience. Unger bowed again. He stretched himself flat on the mat, adjusted the rest to support his head, and apparently went to sleep. Johnson saw the Dreamer's eyes close, watched the chest take on the even, regular rhythm of sleep. The music changed, a slow dreamy tempo crept into it. Vee Vee's fingers dug at Johnson's arm as if they were trying to dig under his hide for protection. She was shivering. He reached for her hand, patted it. She drew closer to him. A few minutes earlier, she had been a very certain young woman, able to take care of herself, and handle anyone around her. Now she was suddenly uncertain, suddenly scared. In the Room of the Dreaming, she had suddenly become a frightened child looking for protection. "Haven't you ever seen this before?" he whispered. "N—o." She shivered again. "Oh, Johnny...." Under the circle of light pouring down from the ceiling, the Dreamer lay motionless. Johnson found himself with the tendency to hold his breath. He was waiting, waiting, waiting—for what? The whole situation was senseless, silly, but under its apparent lack of coherence, he sensed a pattern. Perhaps the path to the far-off stars passed this way, through such scented and musical and impossible places as these Rooms of the Dreamers. Certainly Martin thought so. And Johnson himself was not prepared to disagree. Around him, he saw that the Venusians were already going ... going ... going.... Some of them were already gone. This was an old experience to them. They went rapidly. Humans went more slowly. The Venusian watchers had relaxed. They looked as if they were asleep, perhaps in a hypnotic trance, lulled into this state by the music and the perfume, and by something else. It was this something else that sent Johnson's thoughts pounding. The Venusians were like opium smokers. But he was not smoking opium. He was not in a hypnotic trance. He was wide awake and very much alert. He was ... watching a space ship float in an endless void . As Unger had come into the spotlight, so the space ship had come into his vision, out of nowhere, out of nothingness. The room, the Dreamer, the sound of the music, the sweetness of the perfume, Vee Vee and Caldwell were gone. They were no longer in his reality. They were not in the range of his vision. It was as if they did not exist. Yet he knew they did exist, the memory of them, and of other things, was out on the periphery of his universe, perhaps of the universe. All he saw was the space ship. It was a wonderful thing, perhaps the most beautiful sight he had seen in his life. At the sight of it, a deep glow sprang inside of him. Back when he had been a kid he had dreamed of flight to the far-off stars. He had made models of space ships. In a way, they had shaped his destiny, had made him what he was. They had brought him where he was this night, to the Dream Room of a Venusian tavern. The vision of the space ship floating in the void entranced and thrilled him. Something told him that this was real; that here and now he was making contact with a vision that belonged to time. He started to his feet. Fingers gripped his arm. "Please, darling. You startled me. Don't move." Vee Vee's voice. Who was Vee Vee? The fingers dug into his arm. Pain came up in him. The space ship vanished. He looked with startled eyes at Vee Vee, at the Dream Room, at Unger, dreaming on the mat under the spot. "You ... you startled me," Vee Vee whispered. She released the grip on his arm. "But, didn't you see it?" "See what?" "The space ship!" "No. No." She seemed startled and a little terrified and half asleep. "I ... I was watching something else. When you moved I broke contact with my dream." "Your dream?" He asked a question but she did not answer it. "Sit down, darling, and look at your damned space ship." Her voice was a taut whisper of sound in the darkened room. Johnson settled down. A glance to his left told him that Caldwell was still sitting like a chunk of stone.... The Venusians were quiet. The music had shifted. A slow languorous beat of hidden drums filled the room. There was another sound present, a high-speed whirring. It was, somehow, a familiar sound, but Johnson had not heard it before in this place. He thought about the space ship he had seen. The vision would not come. He shook his head and tried again. Beside him, Vee Vee was silent, her face ecstatic, like the face of a woman in love. He tried again for the space ship. It would not come. Anger came up instead. Somehow he had the impression that the whirring sound which kept intruding into his consciousness was stopping the vision. So far as he could tell, he was the only one present who was not dreaming, who was not in a state of trance. His gaze went to Unger, the Dreamer.... Cold flowed over him. Unger was slowly rising from the mat. The bland face and the body in the robe were slowly floating upward! III An invisible force seemed to twitch at Johnson's skin, nipping it here and there with a multitude of tiny pinches, like invisible fleas biting him. "This is it!" a voice whispered in his mind. "This is what you came to Venus to see. This ... this...." The first voice went into silence. Another voice took its place. "This is another damned vision!" the second voice said. "This ... this is something that is not real, that is not possible! No Venusian Dreamer, and no one else, can levitate, can defy the laws of gravity, can float upward toward the ceiling. Your damned eyes are tricking you!" "We are not tricking you!" the eyes hotly insisted. "It is happening. We are seeing it. We are reporting accurately to you. That Venusian Buddha is levitating. We, your eyes, do not lie to you!" "You lied about the space ship!" the second voice said. "We did not lie about the space ship!" the eyes insisted. "When our master saw that ship we were out of focus, we were not reporting. Some other sense, some other organ, may have lied, but we did not." "I—" Johnson whispered. "I am your skin," another voice whispered. "I am covered with sweat." "We are your adrenals. We are pouring forth adrenalin." "I am your pancreas. I am gearing you for action." "I am your thyroid. I...." A multitude of tiny voices seemed to whisper through him. It was as if the parts of his body had suddenly found voices and were reporting to him what they were doing. These were voices out of his training days when he had learned the names of these functions and how to use them. "Be quiet!" he said roughly. The little voices seemed to blend into a single chorus. "Action, Master! Do something." "Quiet!" Johnson ordered. "But hurry. We are excited." "There is a time to be excited and a time to hurry. In this situation, if action is taken before the time for it—if that time ever comes—we can all die." "Die?" the chorus quavered. "Yes," Johnson said. "Now be quiet. When the time goes we will all go together." The chorus went into muted silence. But just under the threshold the little voices were a multitude of tiny fretful pressures. "I hear a whirring sound," his ears reported. "Please!" Johnson said. In the front of the room Unger floated ten feet above the floor. "Master, we are not lying!" his eyes repeated. "I sweat...." his skin began. "Watch Unger!" Johnson said. The Dreamer floated. If wires suspended him, Johnson could not see them. If any known force lifted him, Johnson could not detect that force. All he could say for certain was that Unger floated. "Yaaah!" The silence of a room was broken by the enraged scream of a Venusian being jarred out of his dream. "Damn it!" A human voice said. A wave as sharp as the tip of a sword swept through the room. Unger fell. He was ten feet high when he started to fall. With a bone-breaking, body-jarring thud, the Dreamer fell. Hard. There was a split second of startled silence in the Dreaming Room. The silence went. Voices came. "Who did that?" "What happened?" "That human hidden there did it! He broke the Dreaming!" Anger marked the voices. Although the language was Venusian, Johnson got most of the meaning. His hand dived under his coat for the gun holstered there. At his left, Caldwell was muttering thickly. "What—what happened? I was back in the lab on Earth—" Caldwell's voice held a plaintive note, as if some pleasant dream had been interrupted. On Johnson's right, Vee Vee seemed to flow to life. Her arms came up around his neck. He was instantly prepared for anything. Her lips came hungrily against his lips, pressed very hard, then gently drew away. "What—" he gasped. "I had to do it now, darling," she answered. "There may not be a later." Johnson had no time to ask her what she meant. Somewhere in the back of the room a human screamed. He jerked around. Back there a knot of Venusians were attacking a man. "It's Martin!" Caldwell shouted. "He is here!" In Johnson's hand as he came to his feet the zit gun throbbed. He fired blindly at the mass of Venusians. Caldwell was firing too. The soft throb of the guns was not audible above the uproar from the crowd. Struck by the gas-driven corvel charges, Venusians were falling. But there seemed to be an endless number of them. "Vee Vee?" Johnson suddenly realized that she had disappeared. She had slid out of his sight. "Vee Vee!" Johnson's voice became a shout. "To hell with the woman!" Caldwell grunted. "Martin's the important one." Zit, zit, zit, Caldwell moved toward the rear, shooting as he went. Johnson followed.

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Jinx Ship To The Rescue By ALFRED COPPEL, JR. Stand by for T.R.S. Aphrodite , butt of the Space Navy. She's got something terrific in her guts and only her ice-cold lady engineer can coax it out of her! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Brevet Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III of the Tellurian Wing, Combined Solarian Navies, stood ankle deep in the viscous mud of Venusport Base and surveyed his new command with a jaundiced eye. The hot, slimy, greenish rain that drenched Venusport for two-thirds of the 720-hour day had stopped at last, but now a miasmic fog was rising from the surrounding swampland, rolling across the mushy landing ramp toward the grounded spaceship. Visibility was dropping fast, and soon porto-sonar sets would have to be used to find the way about the surface Base. It was an ordinary day on Venus. Strike cursed Space Admiral Gorman and all his ancestors with a wealth of feeling. Then he motioned wearily to his companion, and together they sloshed through the mud toward the ancient monitor. The scaly bulk of the Tellurian Rocket Ship Aphrodite loomed unhappily into the thick air above the two men as they reached the ventral valve. Strike raised reluctant eyes to the sloping flank of the fat spaceship. "It looks," he commented bitterly, "like a pregnant carp." Senior Lieutenant Coburn Whitley—"Cob" to his friends—nodded in agreement. "That's our Lover-Girl ... old Aphrodisiac herself. The ship with the poison personality." Cob was the Aphrodite's Executive, and he had been with her a full year ... which was a record for Execs on the Aphrodite . She generally sent them Earthside with nervous breakdowns in half that time. "Tell me, Captain," continued Cob curiously, "how does it happen that you of all people happened to draw this tub for a command? I thought...." "You know Gorman?" queried Strykalski. Cob nodded. "Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Old Brass-bottom Gorman?" "The same." "Well," Cob ran a hand over his chin speculatively, "I know Gorman's a prize stinker ... but you were in command of the Ganymede . And, after all, you come from an old service family and all that. How come this?" He indicated the monitor expressively. Strike sighed. "Well, now, Cob, I'll tell you. You'll be spacing with me and I guess you've a right to know the worst ... not that you wouldn't find it out anyway. I come from a long line of very sharp operators. Seven generations of officers and gentlemen. Lousy with tradition. "The first David Farragut Strykalski, son of a sea-loving Polish immigrant, emerged from World War II a four-striper and Congressional Medal winner. Then came David Farragut Strykalski, Jr., and, in the abortive Atomic War that terrified the world in 1961, he won a United Nations Peace Citation. And then came David Farragut Strykalski III ... me. "From such humble beginnings do great traditions grow. But something happened when I came into the picture. I don't fit with the rest of them. Call it luck or temperament or what have you. "In the first place I seem to have an uncanny talent for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Gorman for example. And I take too much on my own initiative. Gorman doesn't like that. I lost the Ganymede because I left my station where I was supposed to be running section-lines to take on a bunch of colonists I thought were in danger...." "The Procyon A people?" asked Cob. "So you've heard about it." Strike shook his head sadly. "My tactical astrophysicist warned me that Procyon A might go nova. I left my routine post and loaded up on colonists." He shrugged. "Wrong guess. No nova. I made an ass of myself and lost the Ganymede . Gorman gave it to his former aide. I got this." Cob coughed slightly. "I heard something about Ley City, too." "Me again. The Ganymede's whole crew ended up in the Luna Base brig. We celebrated a bit too freely." Cob Whitley looked admiringly at his new Commander. "That was the night after the Ganymede broke the record for the Centaurus B-Earth run, wasn't it? And then wasn't there something about...." "Canalopolis?" Whitley nodded. "That time I called the Martian Ambassador a spy. It was at a Tellurian Embassy Ball." "I begin to see what you mean, Captain." "Strike's the name, Cob." Whitley's smile was expansive. "Strike, I think you're going to like our old tin pot here." He patted the Aphrodite's nether belly affectionately. "She's old ... but she's loose. And we're not likely to meet any Ambassadors or Admirals with her, either." Strykalski sighed, still thinking of his sleek Ganymede . "She'll carry the mail, I suppose. And that's about all that's expected of her." Cob shrugged philosophically. "Better than tanking that stinking rocket fuel, anyway. Deep space?" Strike shook his head. "Venus-Mars." Cob scratched his chin speculatively. "Perihelion run. Hot work." Strike was again looking at the spaceship's unprepossessing exterior. "A surge-circuit monitor, so help me." Cob nodded agreement. "The last of her class." And she was not an inspiring sight. The fantastically misnamed Aphrodite was a surge-circuit monitor of twenty guns built some ten years back in the period immediately preceding the Ionian Subjugation Incident. She had been designed primarily for atomics, with a surge-circuit set-up for interstellar flight. At least that was the planner's view. In those days, interstellar astrogation was in its formative stage, and at the time of the Aphrodite's launching the surge-circuit was hailed as the very latest in space drives. Her designer, Harlan Hendricks, had been awarded a Legion of Merit for her, and every silver-braided admiral in the Fleet had dreamed of hoisting his flag on one of her class. There had been three. The Artemis , the Andromeda , and the prototype ... old Aphrodisiac. The three vessels had gone into action off Callisto after the Phobos Raid had set off hostilities between the Ionians and the Solarian Combine. All three were miserable failures. The eager officers commanding the three monitors had found the circuit too appealing to their hot little hands. They used it ... in some way, wrongly. The Artemis exploded. The Andromeda vanished in the general direction of Coma Berenices glowing white hot from the heat of a ruptured fission chamber and spewing gamma rays in all directions. And the Aphrodite's starboard tubes blew, causing her to spend her store of vicious energy spinning like a Fourth of July pinwheel under 20 gravities until all her interior fittings ... including crew were a tangled, pulpy mess within her pressure hull. The Aphrodite was refitted for space. And because it was an integral part of her design, the circuit was rebuilt ... and sealed. She became a workhorse, growing more cantankerous with each passing year. She carried personnel.... She trucked ores. She ferried skeeterboats and tanked rocket fuel. Now, she would carry the mail. She would lift from Venusport and jet to Canalopolis, Mars, without delay or variation. Regulations, tradition and Admiral Gorman of the Inner Planet Fleet required it. And it was now up to David Farragut Strykalski III to see to it that she did.... The Officer of the Deck, a trim blonde girl in spotless greys saluted smartly as Strike and Cob stepped through the valve. Strike felt vaguely uncomfortable. He knew, of course, that at least a third of the personnel on board non-combat vessels of the Inner Planet Fleet was female, but he had never actually had women on board a ship of his own, and he felt quite certain that he preferred them elsewhere. Cob sensed his discomfort. "That was Celia Graham, Strike. Ensign. Radar Officer. She's good, too." Strike shook his head. "Don't like women in space. They make me uncomfortable." Cob shrugged. "Celia's the only officer. But about a quarter of our ratings are women." He grinned maliciously. "Equal rights, you know." "No doubt," commented the other sourly. "Is that why they named this ... ship 'Aphrodite'?" Whitley saw fit to consider the question rhetorical and remained silent. Strike lowered his head to clear the arch of the flying-bridge bulkhead. Cob followed. He trailed his Captain through a jungle of chrome piping to the main control panels. Strike sank into an acceleration chair in front of the red DANGER seal on the surge-circuit rheostat. "Looks like a drug-store fountain, doesn't it?" commented Cob. Strykalski nodded sadly, thinking of the padded smoothness of the Ganymede's flying-bridge. "But she's home to us, anyway." The thick Venusian fog had closed in around the top levels of the ship, hugging the ports and cutting off all view of the field outside. Strike reached for the squawk-box control. "Now hear this. All officer personnel will assemble in the flying bridge at 600 hours for Captain's briefing. Officer of the Deck will recall any enlisted personnel now on liberty...." Whitley was on his feet, all the slackness gone from his manner. "Orders, Captain?" "We can't do anything until the new Engineering Officer gets here. They're sending someone down from the Antigone , and I expect him by 600 hours. In the meantime you'll take over his part of the work. See to it that we are fueled and ready to lift ship by 602. Base will start loading the mail at 599:30. That's about all." "Yes, sir." Whitley saluted and turned to go. At the bulkhead, he paused. "Captain," he asked, "Who is the new E/O to be?" Strike stretched his long legs out on the steel deck. "A Lieutenant Hendricks, I. V. Hendricks, is what the orders say." Cob thought hard for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders. "I. V. Hendricks." He shook his head. "Don't know him." The other officers of the T.R.S. Aphrodite were in conference with the Captain when Cob and the girl at his side reached the flying bridge. She was tall and dark-haired with regular features and pale blue eyes. She wore a service jumper with two silver stripes on the shoulder-straps, and even the shapeless garment could not hide the obvious trimness of her figure. Strike's back was toward the bulkhead, and he was addressing the others. "... and that's about the story. We are to jet within 28,000,000 miles of Sol. Orbit is trans-Mercurian hyperbolic. With Mars in opposition, we have to make a perihelion run and it won't be pleasant. But I'm certain this old boiler can take it. I understand the old boy who designed her wasn't as incompetent as they say. But Space Regs are specific about mail runs. This is important to you, Evans. Your astrogation has to be accurate to within twenty-five miles plus or minus the shortest route. And there'll be no breaking orbit. Now be certain that the refrigeration units are checked, Mister Wilkins, especially in the hydroponic cells. Pure air is going to be important." "That's about all there is to tell you. As soon as our rather leisurely E/O gets here, we can jet with Aunt Nelly's postcard." He nodded. "That's the story. Lift ship in...." He glanced at his wrist chronograph, "... in an hour and five." The officers filed out and Cob Whitley stuck his head into the room. "Captain?" "Come in, Cob." Strike's dark brows knit at the sight of the uniformed girl in the doorway. Cob's face was sober, but hidden amusement was kindling behind his eyes. "Captain, may I present Lieutenant Hendricks? Lieutenant I-vy Hendricks?" Strike looked blankly at the girl. "Our new E/O, Captain," prompted Whitley. "Uh ... welcome aboard, Miss Hendricks," was all the Captain could find to say. The girl's eyes were cold and unfriendly. "Thank you, Captain." Her voice was like cracked ice tinkling in a glass. "If I may have your permission to inspect the drives, Captain, I may be able to convince you that the designer of this vessel was not ... as you seem to think ... a senile incompetent." Strike was perplexed, and he showed it. "Why, certainly ... uh ... Miss ... but why should you be so...." The girl's voice was even colder than before as she said, "Harlan Hendricks, Captain, is my father." A week in space had convinced Strike that he commanded a jinx ship. Jetting sunward from Venus, the cantankerous Aphrodite had burned a steering tube through, and it had been necessary to go into free-fall while Jenkins, the Assistant E/O, and a damage control party effected repairs. When the power was again applied, Old Aphrodisiac was running ten hours behind schedule, and Strike and Evans, the Astrogation Officer, were sweating out the unforeseen changes introduced into the orbital calculations by the time spent in free-fall. The Aphrodite rumbled on toward the orbit of Mercury.... For all the tension between the occupants of the flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks worked well together. And after a second week in space, a reluctant admiration was replacing the resentment between them. Ivy spent whatever time she could spare tinkering with her father's pet surge-circuit and Strike began to realize that there was little she did not know about spaceship engineering. Then, too, Ivy spent a lot of time at the controls, and Strike was forced to admit that he had never seen a finer job of piloting done by man or woman. And finally, Ivy hated old Brass-bottom Gorman even more than Strike did. She felt that Gorman had ruined her father's career, and she was dedicating her life to proving her father right and Brass-bottom wrong. There's nothing in the cosmos to nurture friendship like a common enemy. At 30,000,000 miles from the sun, the Aphrodite's refrigeration units could no longer keep the interior of the ship at a comfortable temperature. The thermometer stood at 102°F, the very metal of the ship's fittings hot to the touch. Uniforms were discarded, insignia of rank vanished. The men dressed in fiberglass shorts and spaceboots, sweat making their naked bodies gleam like copper under the sodium-vapor lights. The women in the crew added only light blouses to their shorts ... and suffered from extra clothing. Strike was in the observation blister forward, when Ensign Graham called to say that she had picked up a radar contact sunward. The IFF showed the pips to be the Lachesis and the Atropos . The two dreadnaughts were engaged in coronary research patrol ... a purely routine business. But the thing that made Strike curse under his breath was Celia Graham's notation that the Atropos carried none other than Space Admiral Horatio Gorman, Cominch Inplan. Strike thought it a pity that old Brass-bottom couldn't fall into Hell's hottest pit ... and he told Ivy so. And she agreed. Old Aphrodisiac had reached perihelion when it happened. The thermometer stood at 135° and tempers were snapping. Cob and Celia Graham had tangled about some minor point concerning Lover-Girl's weight and balance. Ivy went about her work on the bridge without speaking, and Strike made no attempt to brighten her sudden depression. Lieutenant Evans had punched Bayne, the Tactical Astrophysicist, in the eye for some disparaging remark about Southern California womanhood. The ratings were grumbling about the food.... And then it happened. Cob was in the radio room when Sparks pulled the flimsy from the scrambler. It was a distress signal from the Lachesis . The Atropos had burst a fission chamber and was falling into the sun. Radiation made a transfer of personnel impossible, and the Atropos skeeterboats didn't have the power to pull away from the looming star. The Lachesis had a line on the sister dreadnaught and was valiantly trying to pull the heavy vessel to safety, but even the thundering power of the Lachesis' mighty drive wasn't enough to break Sol's deathgrip on the battleship. A fleet of souped-up space-tugs was on its way from Luna and Venusport, but they could not possibly arrive on time. And it was doubtful that even the tugs had the necessary power to drag the crippled Atropos away from a fiery end. Cob snatched the flimsy from Sparks' hands and galloped for the flying-bridge. He burst in and waved the message excitedly in front of Strykalski's face. "Have a look at this! Ye gods and little catfish! Read it!" "Well, dammit, hold it still so I can!" snapped Strike. He read the message and passed it to Ivy Hendricks with a shake of his head. She read it through and looked up exultantly. "This is it ! This is the chance I've been praying for, Strike!" He returned her gaze sourly. "For Gorman to fall into the sun? I recall I said something of the sort myself, but there are other men on those ships. And, if I know Captain Varni on the Lachesis , he won't let go that line even if he fries himself." Ivy's eyes snapped angrily. "That's not what I meant, and you know it! I mean this!" She touched the red-sealed surge-circuit rheostat. "That's very nice, Lieutenant," commented Cob drily. "And I know that you've been very busy adjusting that gismo. But I seem to recall that the last time that circuit was uncorked everyone aboard became part of the woodwork ... very messily, too." "Let me understand you, Ivy," said Strike in a flat voice. "What you are suggesting is that I risk my ship and the lives of all of us trying to pull old Gorman's fat out of the fire with a drive that's blown skyhigh three times out of three. Very neat." There were tears bright in Ivy Hendricks' eyes and she sounded desperate. "But we can save those ships! We can, I know we can! My father designed this ship! I know every rivet of her! Those idiots off Callisto didn't know what they were doing. These ships needed specially trained men. Father told them that! And I'm trained! I can take her in and save those ships!" Her expression turned to one of disgust. "Or are you afraid?" "Frankly, Ivy, I haven't enough sense to be afraid. But are you so certain that we can pull this off? If I make a mistake this time ... it'll be the last. For all of us." "We can do it," said Ivy Hendricks simply. Strike turned to Cob. "What do you say, Cob? Shall we make it hotter in here?" Whitley shrugged. "If you say so, Strike. It's good enough for me." Celia Graham left the bridge shaking her head. "We'll all be dead soon. And me so young and pretty." Strike turned to the squawk-box. "Evans!" "Evans here," came the reply. "Have Sparks get a DF fix on the Atropos and hold it. We'll home on their carrier wave. They're in trouble and we're going after them. Plot the course." "Yes, Captain." Strike turned to Cob. "Have the gun-crews stand by to relieve the black-gang in the tube rooms. It's going to get hotter than the hinges of hell down there and we'll have to shorten shifts." "Yes, sir!" Cob saluted and was gone. Strike returned to the squawk-box. "Radar!" "Graham here," replied Celia from her station. "Get a radar fix on the Lachesis and hold it. Send your dope up to Evans and tell him to send us a range estimate." "Yes, Captain," the girl replied crisply. "Gun deck!" "Gun deck here, sir," came a feminine voice. "Have number two starboard torpedo tube loaded with a fish and a spool of cable. Be ready to let fly on short notice ... any range." "Yes, sir!" The girl switched off. "And now you, Miss Hendricks." "Yes, Captain?" Her voice was low. "Take over Control ... and Ivy...." "Yes?" "Don't kill us off." He smiled down at her. She nodded silently and took her place at the control panel. Smoothly she turned old Aphrodisiac's nose sunward.... Lashed together with a length of unbreakable beryllium steel cable, the Lachesis and the Atropos fell helplessly toward the sun. The frantic flame that lashed out from the Lachesis' tube was fading, her fission chambers fusing under the terrific heat of splitting atoms. Still she tried. She could not desert her sister ship, nor could she save her. Already the two ships had fallen to within 18,000,000 miles of the sun's terrifying atmosphere of glowing gases. The prominences that spouted spaceward seemed like great fiery tentacles reaching for the trapped men on board the warships. The atmospheric guiding fins, the gun-turrets and other protuberances on both ships were beginning to melt under the fierce radiance. Only the huge refrigeration plants on the vessels made life within them possible. And, even so, men were dying. Swiftly, the fat, ungainly shape of old Aphrodisiac drew near. In her flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks watched the stricken ships in the darkened viewport. The temperature stood at 140° and the air was bitter with the smell of hot metal. Ivy's blouse clung to her body, soaked through with perspiration. Sweat ran from her hair into her eyes and she gasped for breath in the oven hot compartment. Strike watched her with apprehension. Carefully, Ivy circled the two warships. From the starboard tube on the gun-deck, a homing rocket leapt toward the Atropos . It plunged straight and true, spilling cable as it flew. It slammed up against the hull, and stuck there, fast to the battleship's flank. Quickly, a robocrane drew it within the ship and the cable was made secure. Like cosmic replicas of the ancient South American "bolas," the three spacecraft whirled in space ... and all three began that sunward plunge together. They were diving into the sun. The heat in the Aphrodite's bridge was unbearable. The thermometer showed 145° and it seemed to Strike that Hell must be cool by comparison. Ivy fought her reeling senses and the bucking ship as the slack came out of the cable. Blackness was flickering at the edges of her field of vision. She could scarcely lift her hand to the red-sealed circuit rheostat. Shudderingly, she made the effort ... and failed. Conscious, but too spent to move, she collapsed over the blistering hot instrument panel. " Ivy! " Strike was beside her, cradling her head in his arm. "I ... I ... can't make it ... Strike. You'll ... have to run ... the show ... after ... all." Strike laid her gently in an acceleration chair and turned toward the control panel. His head was throbbing painfully as he broke the seal on the surge-circuit. Slowly he turned the rheostat. Relays chattered. From deep within old Lover-Girl's vitals came a low whine. He fed more power into the circuit. Cadmium rods slipped into lead sheaths decks below in the tube-rooms. The whining rose in pitch. The spinning of the ships in space slowed. Stopped. With painful deliberation, they swung into line. More power. The whine changed to a shriek. A banshee wail. Cob's voice came through the squawk-box, soberly. "Strike, Celia's fainted down here. We can't take much more of this heat." "We're trying, Cob!" shouted Strike over the whine of the circuit. The gauges showed the accumulators full. " Now! " He spun the rheostat to the stops, and black space burst over his brain.... The last thing he remembered was a voice. It sounded like Bayne's. And it was shouting. "We're moving 'em! We're pulling away! We're...." And that was all. The space-tug Scylla found them. The three ships ... Atropos , Lachesis , and old Aphrodisiac ... lashed together and drifting in space. Every man and woman aboard out cold from the acceleration, and Aphrodite's tanks bone dry. But they were a safe 80,000,000 miles from Sol.... The orchestra was subdued, the officer's club softly lighted. Cob leaned his elbow on the bar and bent to inspect the blue ribbon of the Spatial Cross on Strike's chest. Then he inspected his own and nodded with tipsy satisfaction. He stared out at the Martian night beyond the broad windows and back again at Strike. His frown was puzzled. "All right," said Strike, setting down his glass. "What's on your mind, Cob? Something's eating you." Whitley nodded very slowly. He took a long pull at his highball. "I understand that you goofballed your chances of getting the Ganymede back when Gorman spoke his piece to you...." "All I said to him...." "I know. I know what you said ... and it won't bear repeating. But you're not fooling me. You've fallen for old Lover-Girl and you don't want to leave her. Ver-ry commendable. Loyal! Stout fellah! But what about Ivy?" "Ivy?" Cob looked away. "I thought that you and she ... well, I thought that when we got back ... well...." Strike shook his head. "She's gone to the Bureau of Ships with a designing job." Cob waved an expressive arm in the air. "But dammit, man, I thought...." "The answer is no . Ivy's a nice girl ... but...." He paused and sighed. "Since she was promoted to her father's old rank ... well...." He shrugged. "Who wants a wife that ranks you?" "Never thought of that," mused Cob. For a long while he was silent; then he pulled out an address book and leafed through until he came to the pages marked "Canalopolis, Mars." And he was gratified to see that Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III was doing the same.

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20002

The Absurdity of Family Love Don't get me wrong. Kids are great. I have some, and I adore them. Every Christmas I become a slave to my camcorder. Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow, and so on. But now that the radiance of the yuletide season is fading, it's time to confront a sobering scientific truth: The more you think about the biology of parental love, the more absurd it seems. The same goes for love of kin generally--brothers, sisters, nephews, etc. Readers familiar with my obsessions may fear that this column is just another attempt to spoil everyone's fun, to replace the beautiful mystery of life with ugly Darwinian clarity. Actually, what I hope to dispel isn't pre-Darwinian mystery, but a kind of post-Darwinian mysticism, a confused exaltation of genetic affinity. You see the confusion when biological parents invoke "blood ties" to reclaim a child from adoptive parents. You see it when opponents of cross-ethnic adoption argue--as in a New York Times op-ed piece a few months ago--that we must respect "the strength of the biological and cultural ties that Indian tribes can offer their own children." In a sense, you see it every year around Christmas, when people pay lip service to the idea of universal brotherhood but believe in their hearts that it's ridiculous, that truly loving people to whom you aren't related violates some law of nature. Thanks to the biologist William Hamilton, it is now clear why people feel brotherly love in the literal sense--and sisterly love, maternal love, and paternal love. It's all due to the operation of "kin selection" during evolution. A greatly oversimplified textbook example: Two million years ago, two hominids, Loveless Bob and Loving Bob, stand on two different riverbanks, in identical situations. Each is watching his full sibling Bill drown. Loving Bob has a gene inclining him to love his brother and thus jump in the raging river, even though his risk of dying is 10 percent. Loveless Bob has no such gene, and thus stands on the bank wondering whether his brother's corpse will attract any large, edible fish. Which Bob's genes will survive the Darwinian reaper--genes for love or for cold indifference? Love triumphs. True, there's a one-in-10 chance that the love gene will sink along with Loving Bob. But consider the upside. There's a one-in-two chance that Bob's full sibling Bill has the same gene and, thus, that a successful rescue mission will pluck an otherwise doomed copy of the gene from the dustbin of history. Do the math, and you'll see that, over time, Loving Bobs send more genes to posterity than Loveless Bobs. As love genes spread at the expense of indifference genes, Loveless Bobs slowly become extinct. Die, selfish scum! Genes for sibling love come to permeate our species--as, in fact, they now do. So do genes for maternal love and paternal love. All brought to you by kin selection. As modern Darwinism gets popularized, the basic idea of kin selection is approaching the status of conventional wisdom. So are some attendant misconceptions. Misconception No. 1: Genes are smart . People often assume that kin-selected altruism is foolproof; that a gene can magically sense copies of itself in other organisms--or, at least, can somehow ascertain with perfect accuracy which organisms are close relatives of its own host organism and thus may carry copies of itself. In truth, genes aren't omniscient, or even sentient. If kin-selected genes are going to induce love of kin, they'll have to determine who qualifies as kin in some pedestrian and probably fallible way. For example: Back when Loving Bob was 6 years old, if his mother was nursing some infant named Bill and sleeping by its side every night, there's a very good chance that Bill was Bob's sibling. So a gene disposing Bob to love children whom he sees his mother nurturing could spread through the population until everyone obeys the same rule. But this rule would misfire now and then, when a mother is for some reason nurturing a non-offspring. It's just that the misfiring wouldn't happen often enough to greatly dilute the genetic math favoring the gene's proliferation. Little is known about which rules for identifying kin--"kin-recognition mechanisms"--do operate in our species. But clearly, they are fallible. Even mothers, who you'd think would have a damn good idea of who their offspring are, can in principle be fooled. When hospital staffers for some reason handed hours-old Kimberly Mays to a mother who was not hers, the mother's kin-recognition mechanisms--a k a bonding processes--kicked in. This woman wound up loving Kimberly like a daughter (though the mother died two years later, so that Kimberly was reared mostly by a stepmother). Meanwhile, Kimberly's genetic mother, having missed years of bonding, can never love Kimberly quite like her own child, even though Kimberly is her own child. Because genetic relationship per se doesn't matter. This irrelevance of genes is why surrogate motherhood is so messy. Even when, thanks to in vitro fertilization, the birth mother is unrelated to the fetus she carries, she will, upon giving birth, fall in love with the child. During evolution, after all, having a baby come out of your womb was reasonably strong evidence of kinship. The power of the hormones that govern this bonding is familiar to anyone who has watched a woman clutch her just-born child and turn into a love-drunk cuddle-bunny. (When my wife went through this magic moment, I briefly considered snatching the baby and replacing it with an 8-by-10 glossy of myself.) This hormonal power was also observed by researchers studying oxytocin, a hormone that's present in human and other mammalian mothers at birth. The researchers put it in a syringe and used it to shatter all previous records for cuddling among laboratory rats. By the way, the synthetic version of oxytocin, Pitocin, is what doctors use to induce labor. Misconception No. 2: People are smart--or, at least, they are smart Darwinian robots . Darwinian theory does posit that homo sapiens were "designed" to get their genes into the next generation, but not that they were designed to do so consciously and rationally. As surrogate mothers have proved, knowing that you've given no genes to an infant needn't stop the bonding process. Thus, "kin- recognition mechanism" is a doubly misleading term--first because, as we've seen, the mechanism doesn't positively identify kin, but just identifies factors correlated with kinship; and second because people aren't really aware of doing the identifying. We don't think, "There's strong evidence that she's my daughter, so I adore her." More like, "God but my daughter's adorable." It is good news for adoptive parents that neither genetic relationship nor conscious awareness of genetic relationship is a prerequisite for love. Still, it is bad news that maternal bonding begins with hormones at birth. It is also bad news that breast-feeding, which adoptive mothers usually can't do, releases the bonding hormone oxytocin. Then again, there is no reason in principle that adoptive parents couldn't take Pitocin once a day for synthetic bonding sessions. (Oxytocin seems to be part of the bonding formula in men, too.) Besides, some genetic mothers aren't conscious at birth, and many don't breast-feed, yet they all nonetheless wind up loving their kids. As the many successful adoptive parents know, lots of the magic moments that add up to durabonding have nothing to do with birthing or breast-feeding. (Tiny tots, with their eyes all aglow ... ) Anyway, the main point is that when genetic parents give up a child for adoption and have second thoughts weeks, months, or even years later, their appeals to blood ties should count for zilch. Their love of their child, and their child's love of them, depends not on genetic math but on a long and complex chain of bonding, much of which they have already voluntarily missed out on. Similarly, the idea that Native American babies, or black babies, or whatever, have some mystical genetic affinity with their "own" kind is silly. Obviously, cross-ethnic adoption is dicey. It draws sidelong glances and playground taunts, and it may give the adopted child an identity crisis. But it won't do this because of some ancestral memory in the genes. As attitudes change, cross-ethnic adoption will get easier; and as cross-ethnic adoption gets more common, attitudes will change. (There are other pop-genetics arguments against cross-ethnic adoption, and against adoption in general. One is that genes influence personality so powerfully that mixing unrelated siblings is like mixing oil and water. This idea is .) Misconception No. 3: Our genes, though perhaps not real smart, aren't downright stupid . Here we come, at last, to the true absurdity of familial love. As we've seen, the genes that sponsor it flourished by encouraging an "altruism" that was, in fact, self-serving at the genetic level (the inexorable triumph of Loving Bob's genes). As we've also seen, these genes can be "fooled" into encouraging altruism toward non-kin, altruism that presumably is not self-serving at the genetic level. Still, you might argue, in defense of your genes, they usually direct familial love toward genuine kin, and thus usually succeed in being efficiently selfish. Wrong! When genes confine altruism to kin, and deny it to needy non-kin, they are in fact failing spectacularly to be efficiently selfish. Because nowadays, copies of these genes do reside in non-kin--in your next-door neighbor and, for that matter, your worst enemy. After all, the Darwinian logic behind love of kin was so relentless that these genes permeated our entire species! Loveless Bob is extinct, remember? You can be forgiven for doubting my logic. People like me, in writing about kin selection, often talk about full siblings sharing "half their genes," implying that nonrelatives share none. But in truth, you share virtually all your genes with any randomly selected homo sapien on any continent. What people like me really mean is that full siblings share half of any genes that are newly minted--genes that have recently arisen and on which natural selection is just starting to pass judgment. Genes that natural selection fully endorsed long ago--the basic genes for hunger, for lust, for familial love--are in everyone. So genes that originally flourished by bestowing love with discerning selfishness--by discriminating against people not containing copies of themselves--now, having spread through the species, discriminate against people who do contain copies! You may doubt that natural selection, a process that supposedly maximizes genetic selfishness, could fail so abjectly to do so. But it's true. . So this past holiday season, as you rushed to buy presents for your kids or your siblings or your nieces or nephews, impelled by "selfishly" altruistic genes, you were operating under flawed Darwinian logic. These "selfish" genes could do just as much for themselves by encouraging you to instead spend your money on the beggar outside the department store. In fact, they could do more, since the beggar is closer to perishing than your relatives are. (Also, the beggar might buy something useful such as food, as opposed to a hair-eating Cabbage Patch doll.) But our genes are too stupid to so deftly serve their own welfare. Not that I attach much weight to what is and isn't "good" from the standpoint of genetic self-interest. As virtually all ethical philosophers who have pondered the matter agree, it doesn't make sense to model our moral values on the logic of nature anyway; to infer ought from is --to commit the "naturalistic fallacy"--only leads to moral confusion. For example, you might, after observing the natural behavior of praying mantises, be tempted to conclude that it is morally good for females to eat males after sex--and this, I submit, would be a repugnant and wrongheaded doctrine! (Though slightly less repugnant than the idea of eating males before the sex.) Most people implicitly recognize the naturalistic fallacy in some contexts. They sense that there's something visceral about, say, malice; yet they'll tell you (when not in its thrall) that they disapprove of it. It's obvious, they believe, that the natural strength of hatred is not a good thing. They're right. What is equally right, but a bit less obvious, is that the "natural" limits of love aren't necessarily good either. And, on close inspection, these limits turn out not to be all that rigorously "natural" anyway.

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60412

R X BY ALAN E. NOURSE The tenth son of a tenth son was very sick, but it was written that he would never die. Of course, it was up to the Earth doctor to see that he didn't! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] They didn't realize they were in trouble until it was too late to stop it. The call from Morua II came in quite innocently, relayed to the ship from HQ in Standard GPP Contract code for crash priority, which meant Top Grade Planetary Emergency, and don't argue about it, fellows, just get there, fast. Red Doctor Sam Jenkins took one look at the flashing blinker and slammed the controls into automatic; gyros hummed, bearings were computed and checked, and the General Practice Patrol ship Lancet spun in its tracks, so to speak, and began homing on the call-source like a hound on a fox. The fact that Morua II was a Class VI planet didn't quite register with anybody, just then. Ten minutes later the Red Doctor reached for the results of the Initial Information Survey on Morua II, and let out a howl of alarm. A single card sat in the slot with a wide black stripe across it. Jenkins snapped on the intercom. "Wally," he yelped. "Better get up here fast." "Trouble?" said the squawk-box, sleepily. "Oh, brother," said Jenkins. "Somebody's cracked the Contract Code or something." A moment later a tall sleepy man in green undershorts appeared at the control room, rubbing his eyes. "What happened?" he said. "We've changed course." "Yeah. Ever hear of Morua II?" Green Doctor Wally Stone frowned and scratched his whiskered chin. "Sounds familiar, but I can't quite tune in. Crash call?" His eye caught the black-striped card. "Class VI planet ... a plague spot! How can we get a crash-call from this ?" "You tell me," said Jenkins. "Wait a minute. Seems to me there was some sort of nasty business—" Jenkins nodded heavily. "There sure was. Five successive attempts to establish a Contract with them, and five times we got thrown out bodily. The last time an Earth ship landed there half the crew was summarily shot and the others came home with their ears cut off. Seems the folks on Morua II didn't want a Contract with Hospital Earth. And they're still in the jungle, as far as their medicine goes. Witch doctors and spells." He tossed the Info-card down the chute with a growl. "So now we have an emergency call from them in a Contract code they couldn't possibly know." The surgeon in the green undershorts chewed his lip. "Looks like somebody in that last crew spilled the beans before they shot him." "Obviously." "Well, what are we doing on automatics? We're not going there, are we?" "What else? You know the law. Instantaneous response to any crash-priority call, regardless of circumstances—" "Law be damned," Stone cried. "File a protest with HQ. Cancel the course bearings and thumb our noses at them!" "And spend the next twenty years scrubbing test tubes." Jenkins shook his head. "Sorry, it took me too long to get aboard one of these tubs. We don't do that in the General Practice Patrol, remember? I don't know how Morua II got the code, but they got it, and that's all the farther we're supposed to think. We answer the call, and beef about it later. If we still happen to be around later, that is." It had always been that way. Since the first formal Medical Service Contract had been signed with Deneb III centuries before, Hospital Earth had laboriously built its reputation on that single foundation stone: immediate medical assistance, without question or hesitation, whenever and wherever it was required, on any planet bound by Contract. That was the law, for Hospital Earth could not afford to jeopardize a Contract. In the early days of galactic exploration, of course, Medical Services was only a minor factor in an expanding commercial network that drew multitudes of planets into social and economic interdependence; but in any growing civilization division of labor inevitably occurs. Other planets outstripped Earth in technology, in communications, in transport, and in production techniques—but Earth stood unrivaled in its development of the biological sciences. Wherever an Earth ship landed, the crew was soon rendering Medical Services of one sort or another, whether they had planned it that way or not. On Deneb III the Medical Service Contract was formalized, and Hospital Earth came into being. Into all known corners of the galaxy ships of the General Practice Patrol were dispatched—"Galactic Pill Peddlers" forging a chain of Contracts from Aldebaran to Zarn, accepting calls, diagnosing ills, arranging for proper disposition of whatever medical problems they came across. Serious problems were shuttled back to Hospital Earth without delay; more frequently the GPP crews—doctors of the Red and Green services, representing the ancient Earthly arts of medicine and surgery—were able to handle the problems on the spot and by themselves. It was a rugged service for a single planet to provide, and it was costly. Many planets studied the terms of Contract and declined, pleasantly but firmly—and were assured nevertheless that GPP ships would answer an emergency call if one was received. There would be a fee, of course, but the call would be answered. And then there were other planets—places such as Morua II.... The Lancet homed on the dismal grey planet with an escort of eight ugly fighter ships which had swarmed up like hornets to greet her. They triangled her in, grappled her, and dropped her with a bone-jarring crash into a landing slot on the edge of the city. As Sam Jenkins and Wally Stone picked themselves off the bulkheads, trying to rearrange the scarlet and green uniforms of their respective services, the main entrance lock burst open with a squeal of tortured metal. At least a dozen Moruans poured into the control room—huge bearlike creatures with heavy grey fur ruffing out around their faces like thick hairy dog collars. The one in command strode forward arrogantly, one huge paw leveling a placer-gun with a distinct air of business about it. "Well, you took long enough!" he roared, baring a set of yellow fangs that sent shivers up Jenkins' spine. "Fourteen hours! Do you call that speed?" Jenkins twisted down the volume on his Translator with a grimace. "You're lucky we came at all," he said peevishly. "Where's your Contract? Where did you get the Code?" "Bother the Contract," the Moruan snarled. "You're supposed to be physicians, eh?" He eyed them up and down as though he disapproved of everything that he saw. "You make sick people well?" "That's the general idea." "All right." He poked a hairy finger at a shuttle car perched outside. "In there." They were herded into the car with three guards in front and three behind. A tunnel gulped them into darkness as the car careened madly into the city. For an endless period they pitched and churned through blackness—then suddenly emerged into a high, gilded hall with pale sunlight filtering down. From the number of decorated guards, and the scraping and groveling that went on as they were hurried through embattled corridors, it seemed likely they were nearing the seat of government. Finally a pair of steel doors opened to admit them to a long, arched hallway. Their leader, who was called Aguar by his flunkies, halted them with a snarl and walked across to the tall figure guarding the far door. The guard did not seem pleased; he wore a long purple cap with a gold ball on the end which twitched wildly as their whispered conference devolved into growling and snarling. Finally Aguar motioned them to follow, and they entered the far chamber, with Purple-Hat glaring at them malignantly as they passed. Aguar halted them at the door-way. "His Eminence will see you," he growled. "Who is His Eminence?" Jenkins asked. "The Lord High Emperor of All Morua and Creator of the Galaxies," Aguar rumbled. "He is the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son, and it is written that he can never die. When you enter, bow," he added. The Tenth Son of a Tenth Son couldn't have cared less whether they bowed or not. The room was dark and rank with the smell of sickness. On a pallet in the center lay a huge Moruan, panting and groaning. He was wrapped like a mummy in bedclothes of scarlet interwoven with gold; on either side of the bed braziers flickered with sickly greenish light. His Eminence looked up at them from bloodshot eyes and greeted them with a groan of anguish that seemed to roll up from the soles of his feet. "Go away," he moaned, closing his eyes again and rolling over with his back toward them. The Red Doctor blinked at his companion, then turned to Aguar. "What illness is this?" he whispered. "He is afflicted with a Pox, as any fool can see. All others it kills—but His Eminence is the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son, and it is written—" "Yes, yes, I know. He can never die." Sam gave Wally a sour look. "What happens, though, if he just up and does?" Aguar's paw came down with a clatter on the hilt of his sword. " He does not die. We have you here now. You are doctors, you say. Cure him." They walked to the bedside and lifted back the covers. Jenkins took a limp paw in his hand. He finally found a palpable pulse just below the second elbow joint. It was fast and thready. The creature's skin bagged loosely from his arm. "Looks like His Eminence can't read," Wally muttered. "He's going fast, Doc." Jenkins nodded grimly. "What does it look like to you?" "How should I know? I've never seen a healthy Moruan before, to say nothing of a sick one. It looks like a pox all right." "Probably a viremia of some sort." Jenkins went over the great groaning hulk with inquiring fingers. "If it's a viremia, we're cooked," Stone whispered. "None of the drugs cross over—and we won't have time to culture the stuff and grow any new ones—" Jenkins turned to Aguar. "How long has this gone on?" "For days," the Moruan growled. "He can't speak. He grows hot and cannot eat. He moans until the Palace trembles." "What about your own doctors?" Aguar spat angrily on the floor. "They are jealous as cats until trouble comes. Then they hide in the caves like chickens. See the green flames? Death flames. They leave him here to die. But now that is all over. We have heard about you wizards from Hospital Earth. You cure all, the stories say. You are very wise, they say. You balance the humors and drive forth the spirits of the Pox like devils." He gave them a terrible grin and tightened his hand on the gold-encrusted sword. "Now we see." "We can't promise," Jenkins began. "Sometimes we're called too late—but perhaps not in this case," he added hastily when he saw the Moruan's face. "Tenth Son and all that. But you'll have to give us freedom to work." "What kind of freedom?" "We'll need supplies and information from our ship. We'll have to consult your physicians. We'll need healthy Moruans to examine—" "But you will cure him," Aguar said. Jenkins took a deep breath and gripped his red tunic around his throat tightly. "Sure, sure," he said weakly. "You just watch us." "But what do you think we're going to do?" the surgeon wailed, back in the control room of the Lancet . "Sam, we can't touch him. If he didn't die naturally we'd kill him for sure! We can't go near him without a Bio-survey—look what happened on Baron when they tried it! Half the planetary population wiped out before they realized that the antibiotic was more deadly to the race than the virus was...." "Might not be such a bad idea for Morua," the Red Doctor muttered grimly. "Well, what did you expect me to do—politely refuse? And have our throats slit right on the spot?" He grabbed a pad and began scribbling. "We've got to do something just to keep alive for a while." "Yeah," said Wally. "What, for instance?" "Well, we've got a little to go on just from looking at them. They're oxygen-breathers, which means they manage internal combustion of carbohydrates, somehow. From the grey skin color I'd guess at a cuprous or stannous heme-protein carrying system. They're carnivores, but god knows what their protein metabolism is like—Let's get going on some of these specimens Aguar has rounded up for us." They dug in frantically. Under normal conditions a GPP ship would send in a full crew of technicians to a newly-Contracted planet to make the initial Bio-survey of the indigenous races. Bio-chemists, physiologists, anatomists, microbiologists, radiologists—survey workers from every Service would examine and study the new clients, take them apart cell by cell to see what made them tick. Certain basic principles were always the same, a fact which accelerated the program considerably. Humanoid or not, all forms of life had basic qualities in common. Biochemical reactions were biochemical reactions, whether they happened to occur in a wing-creature of Wolf IV or a doctor from Sol III. Anatomy was a broad determinant: a jelly-blob from Deneb I with its fine skein of pulsating nerve fibrils was still just a jelly-blob, and would never rise above the level of amoeboid yes-no response because of its utter lack of organization. But a creature with an organized central nervous system and a functional division of work among organ systems could be categorized, tested, studied, and compared, and the information used in combating native disease. Given no major setbacks, and full cooperation of the natives, the job only took about six months to do— For the crew of the Lancet six hours was seven hours too long. They herded cringing Moruan "volunteers" into the little ship's lab. Jenkins handled external examinations and blood and tissue chemistries; Stone ran the X-ray and pan-endoscopic examinations. After four grueling hours the Red Doctor groaned and scowled at the growing pile of data. "Okay. It seems that they're vaguely humanoid. And that's about all we can say for sure. I think we're wasting time. What say we tackle the Wizards for a while?" Aguar's guards urged the tall Moruan with the purple cap into the control room at gunpoint, along with a couple of minor medical potentates. Purple-hat's name was Kiz, and it seemed that he wasn't having any that day. "Look," said Jenkins intensely. "You've seen this illness before. We haven't. So you can at least get us started. What kind of course does it run?" Silence. "All right then, what causes it? Do you know? Bacteria? Virus? Degeneration?" Silence. Jenkins' face was pale. "Look, boys—your Boss out there is going to cool before long if something doesn't happen fast—" His eyes narrowed on Kiz. "Of course, that might be right up your alley—how about that? His Eminence bows out, somebody has to bow in, right? Maybe you, huh?" Kiz began sputtering indignantly; the Red Doctor cut him off. "It adds up," he said heatedly. "You've got the power, you've got your magic and all. Maybe you were the boys that turned thumbs down so violently on the idea of a Hospital Earth Contract, eh? Couldn't risk having outsiders cutting in on your trade." Jenkins rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "But somehow it seems to me you'd have a whale of a lot more power if you learned how to control this Pox." Kiz stopped sputtering quite abruptly. He blinked at his confederates for a long moment. Then: "You're an idiot. It can't be done." "Suppose it could." "The Spirit of the Pox is too strong. Our most powerful spells make him laugh. He eats our powders and drinks our potions. Even the Iron Circle won't drive him out." "Won't it, now! Well, we have iron needles and potions that eat the bottoms out of their jars. Suppose they drive him out?" The Moruan was visibly shaken. He held a whispered conference with his henchmen. "You'll show us these things?" he asked suspiciously. "I'll make a bargain," said Jenkins. "You give us a Contract, we give you the power—fair enough?" More whispers. Wally Stone tugged at Sam's sleeve. "What do you think you're doing?" he choked. "These boys will cut your throat quicker than Aguar will—" "Maybe not," said Sam. "Look, I've got an idea—risky, but it might work if you'll play along. We can't lose much." The whispers stopped and Kiz nodded to the Red Doctor. "All right, we bargain," he said. " After you show us." "Now or never." Jenkins threw open the door and nodded to the guards. "I'll be in the sickroom in a very short while. If you're with me, I'll see you there. If not—" He fingered his throat suggestively. As soon as they had gone Jenkins dived into the storeroom and began throwing flasks and bottles into a black bag. Wally Stone watched him in bewilderment. "You're going to kill him," he moaned. "Prayers, promises, pills and post-mortems. That's the Medical service for you." Sam grinned. "Maybe you should operate on him. That would open their eyes all right." "No thanks, not me. This is a medical case and it's all yours. What do you want me to do?" "Stay here and try your damnedest to get through to HQ," said Sam grimly. "Tell them to send an armada, because we're liable to need one in the next few hours—" If the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son had looked bad before, three hours had witnessed no improvement. The potentate's skin had turned from grey to a pasty green as he lay panting on the bed. He seemed to have lost strength enough even to groan, and his eyes were glazed. Outside the royal chambers Jenkins found a group of green-clad mourners, wailing like banshees and tearing out their fur in great grey chunks. They stood about a flaming brazier; as Jenkins entered the sickroom the wails rose ten decibels and took on a howling-dog quality. Aguar met him at the door. "He's dying," he roared angrily. "Why don't you do something? Every hour he sinks more rapidly, and all you do is poke holes in the healthy ones! And then you send in this bag of bones again—" He glowered at the tall purple-capped figure bending over the bed. Jenkins looked sharply at Kiz, and the wizard nodded his head slowly. "Try being quiet for a while," Jenkins said to Aguar. "We're going to cure the Boss here." Solemnly he slipped off his scarlet tunic and cap and laid them on a bench, then set his black bag carefully on the floor and threw it open. "First off, get rid of those things." He pointed to the braziers at the bedside. "They're enough to give anybody a headache. And tell those people outside to stop the racket. How can they expect the Spirit of the Pox to come out of His Eminence when they're raising a din like that?" Aguar's eyes widened for a moment as he hesitated; then he threw open the door and screamed a command. The wailing stopped as though a switch had been thrown. As a couple of cowering guards crept in to remove the braziers, Red Doctor Jenkins drew the wizard aside. "Tell me what spells you've already used." Hurriedly, Kiz began enumerating, ticking off items on hairy fingers. As he talked Jenkins dug into the black bag and started assembling a liter flask, tubing and needles. "First we brewed witches' root for seven hours and poured it over his belly. When the Pox appeared in spite of this we lit three red candles at the foot of the bed and beat His Eminence steadily for one hour out of four, with new rawhide. When His Eminence protested this, we were certain the Spirit had possessed him, so we beat him one hour out of two—" Jenkins winced as the accounting of cabalistic clap-trap continued. His Eminence, he reflected, must have had the constitution of an ox. He glanced over at the panting figure on the bed. "But doesn't anybody ever recover from this?" "Oh, yes—if the Spirit that afflicts them is very small. Those are the fortunate ones. They grow hot and sick, but they still can eat and drink—" The wizard broke off to stare at the bottle-and-tube arrangement Jenkins had prepared. "What's that?" "I told you about the iron needles, didn't I? Hold this a moment." Jenkins handed him the liter flask. "Hold it high." He began searching for a vein on the patient's baggy arm. The Moruan equivalent of blood flowed back greenishly in the tube for an instant as he placed the needle; then the flask began to drip slowly. Aguar let out a horrified scream and raced from the room; in a moment he was back with a detachment of guards, all armed to the teeth, and three other Moruan physicians with their retinues of apprentices. Sam Jenkins held up his hand for silence. He allowed the first intravenous flask to pour in rapidly; the second he adjusted to a steady drip-drip-drip. Next he pulled two large bunsen burners and a gas tank from the bag. These he set up at the foot of the bed, adjusting the blue flames to high spear-tips. On the bedside table he set up a third with a flask above it; into this he poured some water and a few crystals from a dark bottle. In a moment the fluid in the flask was churning and boiling, an ominous purple color. Kiz watched goggle-eyed. "Now!" said Jenkins, pulling out a long thin rubber tube. "This should annoy the Spirit of the Pox something fierce." He popped the tube into the patient's mouth. His Eminence rose up with a gasp, choking and fighting, but the tube went down. The Red Doctor ground three white pills into powder, mixed in some water, and poured it down the tube. Then he stepped back to view the scene, wiping cold perspiration from his forehead. He motioned to Kiz. "You see what I'm doing, of course?" he said loudly enough for Aguar and the guards to hear. "Oh, yes—yes! Indeed, indeed," said Kiz. "Fine. Now this is most important." Jenkins searched in the bag until he found a large mortar which he set down on the floor. Squatting behind it, he began tapping it slowly with the pestle, in perfect rhythm with the intravenous drip ... and waited. The room was deathly still except for a heavy snuffling sound from His Eminence and the plink-plink of the pestle on the mortar. The flask of purple stuff gurgled quietly. An hour passed, and another. Suddenly Jenkins motioned to Kiz. "His pulse—quickly!" Kiz scampered gratefully over to the bedside. "A hundred and eighty," he whispered. Jenkins' face darkened. He peered at the sick man intently. "It's a bad sign," he said. "The Spirit is furious at the intrusion of an outsider." He motioned toward the mortar. "Can you do this?" Without breaking the rhythm he transferred the plinking-job to Kiz. He changed the dwindling intravenous bottle. "Call me when the bottle is empty—or if there is any change. Whatever you do, don't touch anything ." With that he tiptoed from the room. Four murderous-looking guards caught Aguar's eye and followed him out, swords bared. Jenkins sank down on a bench in the hall and fell asleep in an instant. They woke him once, hours later, to change the intravenous solution, and he found Kiz still intently pounding on the mortar. Jenkins administered more of the white powder in water down the tube, and went back to his bench. He had barely fallen asleep again when they were rousing him with frightened voices. "Quickly!" Aguar cried. "There's been a terrible change!" In the sickroom His Eminence was drenched with sweat, his face glistening in the light of the bunsen burners. He rolled from side to side, groaning hoarsely. " Faster! " Jenkins shouted to Kiz at the mortar, and began stripping off the sodden bedclothes. "Blankets, now—plenty of them." The plink-plink rose to a frantic staccato as Jenkins checked the patient's vital signs, wiped more sweat from his furry brow. Quite suddenly His Eminence opened bleary eyes, stared about him, let out a monumental groan and buried his head in the blankets. In two minutes he was snoring softly. His face was cool now, his heart-beat slow and regular. Jenkins snatched the mortar from Kiz, and with a wild flourish smashed it on the stone floor. Then he grabbed the wizard's paw, raising it high. "You've done well!" he cried to the bewildered physician. "It's over now—the Spirit has departed. His Eminence will recover." They escorted him in triumphal procession back to the Lancet , where Wally Stone stared in disbelief as Jenkins and Kiz bowed and hugged each other like long-lost brothers at a sad farewell. "I finally got through to somebody at HQ," he said as the Red Doctor climbed aboard. "It'll take them twenty days at least, to get help, considering that Morua is not a Contract planet and we're not supposed to be here in the first place, but that's the best they can do...." "Tell them to forget the armada," said Jenkins, grinning. "And anyway, they've got things all wrong back at HQ." He brandished a huge roll of parchment, stricken through with the colors of the seven Medical Services of Hospital Earth. "Take a look, my boy—the juiciest Medical Services Contract that's been written in three centuries—" He tossed the Contract in the dry-storage locker with a sigh. "Old Kiz just finished his first lesson, and he's still wondering what went on—" "So am I," said the Green Doctor suspiciously. "It was simple. We cured His Eminence of the Pox." "With what? Incantations?" "Oh, the incantations were for the doctors ," said Jenkins. "They expected them, obviously, since that was the only level of medicine they could understand. And incidentally, the only level that could possibly get us a Contract. Anyway, I couldn't do very much else, under the circumstances, except for a little supportive therapy. Without a Bio-survey we were hamstrung. But whatever the Pox is, it obviously involves fever, starvation and dehydration. I knew that His Eminence could assimilate carbohydrates, and I took a long gamble that an antipyretic wouldn't hurt him too much—" Wally Stone's jaw sagged. "So you treated him with sugar-water and aspirin," he said weakly. "And on that you risked our necks." "Not quite," said the Red Doctor. "You're forgetting that I had one other prescription to use—the oldest, most trustworthy healer-of-all-ills known to medicine, just as potent now as it was a thousand years ago. Without it, Hospital Earth might just as well pack up her little black bag and go home." He smiled into the mirror as he adjusted the scarlet band of the Red Service across his shoulders. "We call it Tincture of Time," he said.

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THE STARBUSTERS By ALFRED COPPEL, JR. A bunch of kids in bright new uniforms, transiting the constellations in a disreputable old bucket of a space-ship—why should the leathery-tentacled, chlorine-breathing Eridans take them seriously? [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] HQ TELWING CSN 30 JAN 27 TO CMDR DAVID FARRAGUT STRYKALSKI VII CO TRS CLEOPATRA FLEET BASE CANALOPOLIS MARS STOP SUBJECT ORDERS STOP ROUTE LUNA PHOBOS SYRTIS MAJOR TRANSSENDERS PRIORITY AAA STOP MESSAGE FOLLOWS STOP TRS CLEOPATRA AND ALL ATTACHED AND OR ASSIGNED PERSONNEL HEREBY RELIEVED ASSIGNMENT AND DUTY INNER PLANET PATROL GROUP STOP ASSIGNED TEMP DUTY BUREAU RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT STOP SUBJECT VESSEL WILL PROCEED WITHOUT DELAY FLEET EXPERIMENTAL SUBSTATION PROVING GROUNDS TETHYS SATURNIAN GROUP STOP CO WILL REPORT UPON ARRIVAL TO CAPT IVY HENDRICKS ENGINEERING OFFICER PROJECT WARP STOP SIGNED H. GORMAN SPACE ADMIRAL COMMANDING STOP END MESSAGE END MESSAGE END MESSAGE. "Amen! Amen! Amen! Stop." Commander Strykalski smoothed out the wrinkled flimsy by spreading it carefully on the wet bar. Coburn Whitley, the T.R.S. Cleopatra's Executive, set down his Martini and leaned over very slowly to give the paper a microscopic examination in the mellow light. "Maybe," he began hopefully, "It could be a forgery?" Strike shook his head. Lieutenant Whitley looked crestfallen. "Then perhaps old Brass-bottom Gorman means some other guy named Strykalski?" To Cob, eight Martinis made anything possible. "Could there be two Strykalskis?" demanded the owner of the name under discussion. "No." Whitley sighed unhappily. "And there's only one Tellurian Rocket Ship Cleopatra in the Combined Solarian Navies, bless her little iron rump! Gorman means us. And I think we've been had, that's what I think!" "Tethys isn't so bad," protested Strike. Cob raised a hand to his eyes as though to blot out the sight of that distant moonlet. "Not so bad, he says! All you care about is seeing Ivy Hendricks again, I know you! Tethys!" Strike made a passing effort to look stern and failed. "You mean Captain Hendricks, don't you, Mister Whitley? Captain Hendricks of Project Warp?" Cob made a sour face. "Project Warp, yet! Sounds like a dog barking!" He growled deep in his throat and barked once or twice experimentally. The officer's club was silent, and a silver-braided Commodore sitting nearby scowled at Whitley. The Lieutenant subsided with a final small, "Warp!" An imported Venusian quartet began to play softly. Strike ordered another round of drinks from the red-skinned Martian tending bar and turned on his stool to survey the small dance floor. The music and the subdued lights made him think of Ivy Hendricks. He really wanted to see her again. It had been a long time since that memorable flight when they had worked together to pull Admiral Gorman's flagship Atropos out of a tight spot on a perihelion run. Ivy was good to work with ... good to be around. But there was apparently more to this transfer than just Ivy pulling wires to see him again. Things were tense in the System since Probe Fleet skeeterboats had discovered a race of group-minded, non-human intelligences on the planets of 40 Eridani C. They lived in frozen worlds that were untenable for humans. And they were apparently all parts of a single entity that never left the home globe ... a thing no human had seen. The group-mind. They were rabidly isolationist and they had refused any commerce with the Solar Combine. Only CSN Intelligence knew that the Eridans were warlike ... and that they were strongly suspected of having interstellar flight.... So, reflected Strike, the transfer of the Cleopatra to Tethys for work under the Bureau of Research and Development meant innovations and tests. And Commander Strykalski was concerned. The beloved Old Aphrodisiac didn't take kindly to innovations. At least she never had before, and Strike could see no reason to suppose the cantankerous monitor would have changed her disposition. "There's Celia!" Cob Whitley was waving toward the dance floor. Celia Graham, trim in her Ensign's greys, was making her way through the crowd of dancers. Celia was the Cleopatra's Radar Officer, and like all the rest, bound with chains of affection to the cranky old warship. The Cleopatra's crew was a unit ... a team in the true sense of the word. They served in her because they wanted to ... would serve in no other. That's the way Strike ran his crew, and that's the way the crew ran Lover-Girl. Old Aphrodisiac's family was a select community. There was a handsome Martian Naval Lieutenant with Celia, but when she saw the thoughtful expression on her Captain's face, she dismissed him peremptorily. Here was something, apparently, of a family matter. "Well, I can't see anything to worry about, Skipper," she said when he had explained. "I should think you'd be glad of a chance to see Ivy again." Cob Whitley leaned precariously forward on his bar-stool to wag a finger under Celia's pretty nose. "But he doesn't know what Captain Hendricks has cooked up for Lover-Girl, and you know the old carp likes to be treated with respect." He affected a very knowing expression. "Besides, we shouldn't be gallivanting around testing Ivy's electronic eyelash-curlers when the Eridans are likely to be swooshing around old Sol any day!" "Cob, you're drunk!" snapped Celia. "I am at that," mused Whitley with a foolish grin. "And I'd better enjoy it. There'll be no Martinis on Tethys, that's for sure! This cruise is going to interfere with my research on ancient twentieth century potables..." Strike heaved his lanky frame upright. "Well, I suppose we'd better call the crew in." He turned to Cob. "Who is Officer of the Deck tonight?" "Bayne." "Celia, you'd better go relieve him. He'll have to work all night to get us an orbit plotted." "Will do, Skipper," Celia Graham left. "Cob, you'd better turn in. Get some sleep. But have the NPs round up the crew. If any of them are in the brig, let me know. I'll be on the bridge." "What time do you want to lift ship?" "0900 hours." "Right." Cob took a last loving look around the comfortable officer's club and heaved a heavy sigh. "Tethys, here comes Lover-Girl. It's going to be a long, long cruise, Captain." How long, he couldn't have known ... then. The flight out was uneventful. Uneventful, that is for the T.R.S. Cleopatra . Only one tube-liner burned through, and only six hours wasted in nauseous free-fall. Lover-Girl wormed her way through the asteroid belt, passed within a million miles of Jupiter and settled comfortably down on the airless field next to the glass-steel dome of the Experimental Substation on Tethys. But her satisfied repose was interrupted almost before it was begun. Swarms of techmen seemed to burst from the dome and take her over. Welders and physicists, naval architects and shipfitters, all armed with voluminous blueprints and atomic torches set to work on her even before her tubes had cooled. Power lines were crossed and re-crossed, shunted and spliced. Weird screen-like appendages were welded to her bow and stern. Workmen and engineers stomped through her companionways, bawling incomprehensible orders. And her crew watched in mute dismay. They had nothing to say about it... Ivy Hendricks rose from her desk as Strike came into her Engineering Office. There was a smile on her face as she extended her hand. "It's good to see you again, Strike." Strykalski studied her. Yes, she hadn't changed. She was still the Ivy Hendricks he remembered. She was still calm, still lovely, and still very, very competent. "I've missed you, Ivy." Strike wasn't just being polite, either. Then he grinned. "Lover-Girl's missed you, too. There never has been an Engineering Officer that could get the performance out of her cranky hulk the way you used to!" "It's a good thing," returned Ivy, still smiling, "that I'll be back at my old job for a while, then." Strykalski raised his eyebrows inquisitively. Before Ivy could explain, Cob and Celia Graham burst noisily into the room and the greetings began again. Ivy, as a former member of the Cleopatra's crew, was one of the family. "Now, what I would like to know," Cob demanded when the small talk had been disposed of, "is what's with this 'Project Warp'? What are you planning for Lover-Girl? Your techmen are tearing into her like she was a twenty-day leave!" "And why was the Cleopatra chosen?" added Celia curiously. "Well, I'll make it short," Ivy said. "We're going to make a hyper-ship out of her." "Hyper-ship?" Cob was perplexed. Ivy Hendricks nodded. "We've stumbled on a laboratory effect that warps space. We plan to reproduce it in portable form on the Cleopatra ... king size. She'll be able to take us through the hyper-spatial barrier." "Golly!" Celia Graham was wide-eyed. "I always thought of hyperspace as a ... well, sort of an abstraction." "That's been the view up to now. We all shared it here, too, until we set up this screen system and things began to disappear when they got into the warped field. Then we rigged a remote control and set up telecameras in the warp...." Ivy's face sobered. "We got plates of star-fields ... star-fields that were utterly different and ... and alien . It seems that there's at least one other space interlocked and co-existent with ours. When we realized that we decided to send a ship through. I sent a UV teletype to Admiral Gorman at Luna Base ... and here you are." "Why us?" Cob asked thoughtfully. "I'll answer that," offered Strike, "Lover-Girl's a surge circuit monitor, and it's a safe bet this operation takes plenty of power." He looked over to Ivy. "Am I right?" "Right on the nose, Strike," she returned. Then she broke into a wide smile. "Besides, I wouldn't want to enter an alien cosmos with anyone but Lover-Girl's family. It wouldn't be right." "Golly!" said Celia Graham again. "Alien cosmos ... it sounds so creepy when you say it that way." "You could call it other things, if you should happen to prefer them," Ivy Hendricks said, "Subspace ... another plane of existence. I...." She never finished her sentence. The door burst open and a Communications yeoman came breathlessly into the office. From the ante-room came the sound of an Ultra Wave teletype clattering imperiously ... almost frantically. "Captain Hendricks!" cried the man excitedly, "A message is coming through from the Proxima transsender ... they're under attack!" Strykalski was on his feet. "Attack!" "The nonhumans from Eridanus have launched a major invasion of the solar Combine! All the colonies in Centaurus are being invaded!" Strike felt the bottom dropping out of his stomach, and he knew that all the others felt the same. If this was a war, they were the ones who would have to fight it. And the Eridans! Awful leathery creatures with tentacles ... chlorine breathers! They would make a formidable enemy, welded as they were into one fighting unit by the functioning of the group-mind.... He heard himself saying sharply into Ivy's communicator: "See to it that my ship is fueled and armed for space within three hours!" "Hold on, Strike!" Ivy Hendricks intervened, "What about the tests?" "I'm temporarily under Research and Development command, Ivy, but Regulations say that fighting ships cannot be held inactive during wartime! The Cleopatra's a warship and there's a war on now. If you can have your gear jerry-rigged in three hours, you can come along and test it when we have the chance. Otherwise the hell with it!" Strykalski's face was dead set. "I mean it, Ivy." "All right, Strike. I'll be ready," Ivy Hendricks said coolly. Exactly three hours and five minutes later, the newly created hyper-ship that was still Old Aphrodisiac lifted from the ramp outside the Substation dome. She rose slowly at first, the radioactive flame from her tubes splashing with sun-bright coruscations over the loading pits and revetments. For a fleeting instant she was outlined against the swollen orb of Saturn that filled a quarter of Tethys' sky, and then she was gone into the galactic night. Aboard, all hands stood at GQ. On the flying bridge Strykalski and Coburn Whitley worked steadily to set the ship into the proper position in response to the steady flood of equations that streamed into their station from Bayne in the dorsal astrogation blister. An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus. When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral Gorman had no great affection for either the Cleopatra or her crew. Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman had been as unfortunate as any of the others. "I was afraid you'd say that," grumbled Cob, "I was just hoping you wouldn't." The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch. "Bridge." "Communications here. Message from Luna Base, Captain." "Here it is," Strykalski told Cob. "Right on time." "Speak of the devil," muttered the Executive. "From the Admiral, sir," the voice in the interphone said, "Shall I read it?" "Just give me the dope," ordered Strike. "The Admiral orders us to quote make a diversionary attack on the planet of 40 Eridani C II unquote," said the squawk-box flatly. "Acknowledge," ordered Strykalski. "Wilco. Communications out." Strike made an I-told-you-so gesture to his Executive. Then he turned toward the enlisted man at the helm. "Quarter-master?" The man looked up from his auto-pilot check. "Sir." "Steady as she goes." "Yes, sir." "And that," shrugged Ivy Hendricks, "Is that." Three weeks passed in the timeless limbo of second-order flight. Blast tubes silent, the Cleopatra rode the curvature of space toward Eridanus. At eight and a half light years from Sol, the second-order was cut so that Bayne could get a star sight. As the lights of the celestial globe slowly retreated from their unnatural grouping ahead and astern, brilliant Sirius and its dwarf companion showed definite disks in the starboard ports. At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from the Dog Star, its fourteen heavy-gravity planets were plainly visible through the electron telescope. Strykalski and Ivy Hendricks stood beside Bayne in the dorsal blister while the astrogator sighted Altair through his polytant. His long, horse face bore a look of complete self-approbation when he had completed his last shot. "A perfect check with the plotted course! How's that for fancy dead reckoning?" he exclaimed. He was destined never to know the accolade, for at that moment the communicator began to flash angrily over the chart table. Bayne cut it in with an expression of disgust. "Is the Captain there?" demanded Celia Graham's voice excitedly. Strike took over the squawk-box. "Right here, Celia. What is it?" "Radar contact, sir! The screen is crazy with blips!" "Could it be window?" "No, sir. The density index indicates spacecraft. High value in the chlorine lines...." "Eridans!" cried Ivy. "What's the range, Celia?" demanded Strike. "And how many of them are there?" The sound of the calculator came through the grill. Then Celia replied: "Range 170,000 miles, and there are more than fifty and less than two hundred. That's the best I can do from this far away. They seem to have some sort of radiation net out and they are moving into spread formation." Strike cursed. "They've spotted us and they want to scoop us in with that force net! Damn that group-mind of theirs ... it makes for uncanny co-ordination!" He turned back to the communicator. "Cob! Are you on?" "Right here, Captain," came Cob Whitley's voice from the bridge. "Shift into second-order! We'll have to try and run their net!" "Yes, sir," Whitley snapped. "Communications!" called Strike. "Communications here." "Notify Luna Base we have made contact. Give their numbers, course, and speed!" Ivy could feel her heart pounding under her blouse. Her face was deadly pale, mouth pinched and drawn. This was the first time in battle for any of them ... and she dug her fingernails into her palms trying not to be afraid. Strykalski was rapping out his orders with machine-gun rapidity, making ready to fight his ship if need be ... and against lop-sided odds. But years of training were guiding him now. "Gun deck!" A feminine voice replied. "Check your accumulators. We may have to fight. Have the gun-pointers get the plots from Radar. And load fish into all tubes." "Yes, sir!" the woman rapped out. "Radar!" "Right here, Skipper!" "We're going into second-order, Celia. Use UV Radar and keep tabs on them." "Yes, Captain." Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. "Let's get back to the bridge, Ivy. It's going to be a hell of a rough half hour!" As they turned to go, all the pin-points of light that were the stars vanished, only to reappear in distorted groups ahead and behind the ship. They were in second-order flight again, and traveling above light speed. Within seconds, contact would be made with the advance units of the alien fleet. Old Aphrodisiac readied herself for war. Like a maddened bull terrier, the old monitor charged at the Eridan horde. Within the black hulls strange, tentacled creatures watched her in scanners that were activated by infrared light. The chlorine atmosphere grew tense as the Tellurian warship drove full at the pulsating net of interlocked force lines. Parsecs away, on a frozen world were a dull red shrunken sun shone dimly through fetid air, the thing that was the group-mind of the Eridans guided the thousand leathery tentacles that controlled the hundred and fifty black spaceships. The soft quivering bulk of it throbbed with excitement as it prepared to kill the tiny Tellurian thing that dared to threaten its right to conquest. Old Lover-Girl tried gallantly to pierce the strange trap. She failed. The alien weapons were too strange, too different from anything her builders could have imagined or prepared her to face. The net sucked the life from her second-order generators, and she slowed, like the victim of a nightmare. Now rays of heat reached out for her, grazing her flanks as she turned and twisted. One touched her atmospheric fins and melted them into slowly congealing globes of steel glowing with a white heat. She fought back with whorls of atomic fire that sped from her rifles to wreak havoc among her attackers. Being non-entities in themselves, and only limbs of the single mentality that rested secure on its home world, the Eridans lacked the vicious will to live that drove the Tellurian warship and her crew. But their numbers wore her down, cutting her strength with each blow that chanced to connect. Torpedoes from the tubes that circled her beam found marks out in space and leathery aliens died, their black ships burst asunder by the violence of new atoms being created from old. But there were too many. They hemmed her in, heat rays ever slashing, wounding her. Strykalski fought her controls, cursing her, coaxing her. Damage reports were flowing into the flying bridge from every point in the monitor's body. Lover-Girl was being hurt ... hurt badly. The second-order drive was damaged, not beyond repair, but out of commission for at least six hours. And they couldn't last six hours. They couldn't last another ten minutes. It was only the practiced hands of her Captain and crew that kept the Cleopatra alive.... "We're caught, Ivy!" Strike shouted to the girl over the noises of battle. "She can't stand much more of this!" Cob was screaming at the gun-pointers through the open communicator circuit, his blood heated by the turbulent cacophony of crackling rays and exploding torpedoes. "Hit 'em! Damn it! Damn it, hit 'em now! Dead ahead! Hit 'em again!..." Ivy stumbled across the throbbing deck to stand at Strykalski's side. "The hyper drive!" she yelled, "The hyper drive!" It was a chance. It was the only chance ... for Lover-Girl and Ivy and Cob and Celia ... for all of them. He had to chance it. "Ivy!" he called over his shoulder, "Check with Engineering! See if the thing's hooked into the surge circuit!" She struggled out of the flying bridge and down the ramp toward the engine deck. Strike and Cob stayed and sweated and cursed and fought. It seemed that she would never report. At last the communicator began to flash red. Strike opened the circuit with his free hand. "All right?" he demanded with his heart in his throat. " Try it! " Ivy shouted back. Strykalski lurched from his chair as another ray caught the ship for an instant and heated a spot on the wall to a cherry red. Gods! he prayed fervently. Let it work! A movement of the ship threw him to the deck. He struggled to his feet and across to the jerry-rigged switchboard that controlled the hyper drive's warp field. With a prayer on his lips, he slapped at the switches with wild abandon.... The sudden silence was like a physical blow. Strike staggered to the port and looked out. No alien ships filled the void with crisscrossing rays. No torpedoes flashed. The Cleopatra was alone, floating in star-flecked emptiness. There were no familiar constellations. The stars were spread evenly across the ebony bowl of the sky, and they looked back at him with an alien, icy disdain. The realization that he stood with a tiny shell, an infinitesimal human island lost in the vastness of a completely foreign cosmos broke with an almost mind-shattering intensity over his brain! He was conscious of Cob standing beside him, looking out into this unknown universe and whispering in awe: " We're the aliens here...." Ivy Hendricks came into the bridge then, a haggard look around her eyes. "I came up through the ventral blister," she said, "Bayne is down there and he's having fits. There isn't a star in sight he recognizes and the whole hull of the ship is glowing !" Cob and Strykalski rushed back to the port, straining to see the back-curving plates of the hull. Ivy was right. The metal, and to a lesser extent, even the leaded glassteel of the port was covered with a dim, dancing witchfire. It was as though the ship were being bombarded by a continuous shower of microscopic fire bombs. Whitley found refuge in his favorite expression. "Ye gods and little catfish!" Strike turned to Ivy. "What do you think it is?" "I ... I don't know. Matter itself might be different ... here." Strykalski found himself at the port again, looking out into the vast stretch of alien void. Terror was seeping like dampness through him, stretching cold fingers into his heart and mind. He realized that everyone on board must feel the same way. It was the old human devil rising from the pit of the primeval past. Fear of the unknown, of the strange. And there was loneliness. From the dark corners of his mind, the terrible loneliness came stealing forth. Never had a group of human beings been so frighteningly apart from their kind. He felt rejected, scorned and lost. The others felt it, too. Ivy and Cob drew closer, until all three stood touching each other; as though they could dispel the loneliness of the unnatural environment by the warmth of human, animal contact. Celia came into the bridge softly ... just to be near her friends. It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a reassurance he did not feel. Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The Cleopatra demanded attention and service, and her demanding saved them. "Cob," Strike directed with forced briskness, "Take over Damage Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive." Cob pulled himself together, smiling as all the accustomed pieces of his life began to fit together again. It didn't matter that they were in an unknown cosmos. Damage Control was something he knew and understood. He smiled thankfully and left the bridge. "Maintain a continuous radar-watch, Celia. We can't tell what we may encounter here." "Yes, Captain," replied Celia gratefully. Strykalski reached for the squawk-box and called Bayne. "Astrogation here," came the shaky reply. In the exposed blisters the agoraphobia must be more acute, reasoned Strike, and Bayne must have been subconsciously stirred up by the disappearance of the familiar stars that were his stock-in-trade. "Plot us a course to 40 Eridani C, Bayne," Strykalski directed. "On gyro-headings." "What?" The astrogator sounded as though he thought Strike had lost his mind. "Through this space?" "Certainly," Strykalski insisted quietly. "You're so proud of your dead-reckoning. Here's a chance for you to do a real job. Get me an orbit." "I ... all right, Captain," grumbled Bayne. Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. "Well, Captain Hendricks, this is some gadget you have dreamed up out of your Project Warp," he breathed shakily. "At least the fat's out of the fire for the time being...." Ivy looked out of the port and back with a shudder. "I hope so, Strike. I hope so." They fell silent, seeking comfort in each other's presence. The second-order drive repaired, Old Aphrodisiac moved out through the alien space toward the spot where 40 Eridani C existed on the other side of the barrier. The ship's tactical astrophysicist brought in some disturbing reports on the stars that shone brightly all around her. They fitted the accepted classifications in all particulars ... except one. And that one had the scientist tearing his hair. The mass of every observable body except the ship herself was practically non-existent. Even the two planetary systems discovered by the electron telescope flouted their impossible lack of mass. Ivy suggested that since the Cleopatra and her crew were no part of this alien cosmos, no prime-space instruments could detect the errant mass. Like a microscopic bull in a gargantuan china shop, the Tellurian warship existed under a completely different set of physical laws than did the heavenly bodies of this strange space. It was pure conjecture, but it seemed well supported by the observable facts. The hull continued to glow with its unnatural witchfire, and soon disturbing reports were coming in from the Damage Control section that the thickness of the outer hull was actually being reduced. The rate was slow, and there was no immediate danger, but it was nevertheless unnerving to realize that Lover-Girl was being dissolved by something . Also, the outside Geigs recorded a phenomenal amount of short radiation emanating from the ship herself . The insulation kept most of it from penetrating, but tests showed that the strange radiation's source was the glow that clung stubbornly to the spacer's skin. A tense week passed and then the ship neared the spot where a change over to prime-space could be effected. According to Bayne's calculations, 40 Eridani C would be within 40,000,000 miles of them when the ship emerged from hyper space. And then the Radar section picked up the planetoids. Millions of them, large and small, lay in a globular cluster dead ahead. They spread out in all directions for more than half a parsec ... dull, rocky little worlds without a gram of detectable mass. All that waited for the Cleopatra in her own cosmos was a hot reception at the hands of the defenders of 40 Eridani C II, while here was mystery at close range. Mystery that was not cosmic in scope ... just a swarm of innocuous seeming planetoids ... the first explorable worlds that they had neared in this universe. Strike decided to heave to and examine their find. Ivy wanted samples and though no one said it in so many words ... no one was anxious for another encounter with the rapacious Eridans. With typically human adaptiveness they had sublimated their fear of the unknown space in which they found themselves. Curiosity took the place of fear and here was something close at hand to probe. Anthropoid inquisitiveness prevailed.

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THRALLS of the ENDLESS NIGHT By LEIGH BRACKETT The Ship held an ancient secret that meant life to the dying cast-aways of the void. Then Wes Kirk revealed the secret to his people's enemies—and found that his betrayal meant the death of the girl he loved. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Wes Kirk shut his teeth together, hard. He turned his back on Ma Kirk and the five younger ones huddled around the box of heat-stones and went to the doorway, padding soft and tight with the anger in him. He shoved the curtain of little skins aside and crouched there with his thick shoulders fitted into the angle of the jamb, staring out, cold wind threading in across his splayed and naked feet. The hackles rose golden and stiff across Kirk's back. He said carefully, "I would like to kill the Captain and the First Officer and the Second Officer and all the little Officers, and the Engineers, and all their families." His voice carried inside on the wind eddies. Ma Kirk yelled, "Wes! You come here and let that curtain down! You want us all to freeze?" Her dark-furred shoulders moved rhythmically over the rocking child. She added sharply, "Besides, that's fool's talk, Jakk Randl's talk, and only gets the sucking-plant." "Who's to hear it?" Kirk raised his heavy overlids and let his pupils widen, huge liquid drops spreading black across his eyeballs, sucking the dim grey light into themselves, forcing line and shape out of blurred nothingness. He made no move to drop the curtain. The same landscape he had stared at since he was able to crawl by himself away from the box of heat-stones. Flat grey plain running right and left to the little curve of the horizon. Rocks on it, and edible moss. Wind-made gullies with grey shrubs thick in their bottoms, guarding their sour white berries with thorns and sacs of poisoned dust that burst when touched. Between the fields and the gullies there were huts like his own, sunk into the earth and sodded tight. A lot of huts, but not as many as there had been, the old ones said. The Hans died, and the huts were empty, and the wind and the earth took them back again. Kirk raised his shaggy head. The light of the yellow star they called Sun caught in the huge luminous blackness of his eyes. Beyond the Hansquarter, just where the flat plain began to rise, were the Engineers. Not many of them any more. You could see the dusty lumps where the huts had been, the tumbled heaps of metal that might have meant something once, a longer time ago than anyone could remember. But there were still plenty of huts standing. Two hands and one hand and a thumb of them, full of Engineers who said how the furrows should be laid for the planting but did nothing about the tilling of them. And beyond the Engineers—the Officers. The baby cried. Ma Kirk shrilled at her son, and two of the younger ones fought over a bone with no meat on it, rolling and snapping on the dirt floor. Kirk shifted his head forward to shut out the sound of them and followed the line of the plain upward with sullen, glowing eyes. The huts of the Engineers were larger than those in the Hansquarter. The huts of the Officers were not much larger than the Engineers', but there were more of them and they climbed higher up the grey slope. Five, nearly six hands of them, with the Captain's metal-roofed place highest of all. Highest and nearest, right under the titanic shape lifting jagged against the icy stars from the crest of the ridge. The Ship. Kirk's voice was soft in his thick throat. "I would like to kill them," he said. "I would like to kill them all." "Yah!" cried a shrill voice over his shoulder. "All but the Captain's yellow daughter!" Kirk spun angrily around. Lil, next below himself, danced back out of reach, her kilt of little skins flying around her thin hips. "Yah!" she said again, and wrinkled her flat nose. "I've seen you looking at her. All yellow from head to foot and beautiful pink lids to her eyes. You wouldn't kill her , I bet!" "I bet I'll half kill you if you don't shut up!" Lil stuck out her tongue. Kirk aimed a cuff at her. She danced behind his arm and jerked the curtain down and shot away again, making two jumps over the brawling young ones and the box of heat-stones. She squatted demurely beside Ma Kirk and said, as though nothing had happened, "Ma says will you please not let so much heat out." Kirk didn't say anything. He started to walk around the heat box. Lil yelled, "Ma!" The young ones stopped fighting, scuttling out of reach and watching with bright moist eyes, grinning. The baby had reached the hiccoughing stage. Ma Kirk said, "Sit down, or go pick on somebody your own size." Kirk stopped. "Aw, I wasn't going to hurt her. She has to be so smart!" He leaned forward to glare at Lil. "And I would so kill the Captain's daughter!" The baby was quiet. Ma Kirk laid it down in a nest of skins put close to the heat and said wearily: "You men, always talking about killing! Haven't we enough trouble without that?" Kirk looked at the little box of heat-stones, his pupils shrinking. "Maybe there'd be less trouble for us." Lil poked her shock of black hair around Ma Kirk's knee. Her big eyes glowed in the feeble light. She said, "You men! He's no man, Ma. He's just a little boy who has to stay behind and shoo the beetles out of the fields." The young ones giggled, well out of reach. Lil's thin body was strung tight, quivering to move. "Besides," she demanded, "what have the Officers and the Engineers ever done to you that you should want to kill them—all but the Captain's yellow daughter?" Kirk's big heavy chest swelled. "Ma," he said, "you make that brat shut up or I'll whale her, anyhow." Ma Kirk looked at him. "Your Pa's still big enough to whale you, young man! Now you stop it, both of you." "All right," said Kirk sullenly. He squatted down, holding his hands over the heat. His back twitched with the cold, but it was nice to have his belly warm, even if it was empty. "Wish Pa'd hurry up. I'm hungry. Hope they killed meat." Ma Kirk sighed. "Seems like meat gets scarcer all the time, like the heat-stones." "Maybe," said Kirk heavily, "it all goes to the same place." Lil snorted. "And where's that, Smarty?" His anger forced out the forbidden words. "Where everybody says, stupid! Into the Ship." There was suddenly a lot of silence in the room. The word "Ship" hung there, awesome and accusing. Ma Kirk's eyes flicked to the curtain over the door and back to her son. "Don't you say things like that, Wes! You don't know." "It's what everybody says. Why else would they guard the Ship the way they do? We can't even get near the outside of it." Lil tossed her head. "Well neither do they." "Not when we can see 'em, no. Of course not. But how do we know they haven't got ways of getting into the Ship that don't show from the plain? Jakk says a lot goes on that we don't know about." He got up, forcing his belief at them with his big square hands. "There must be something in the Ship that they don't want us to have. Something valuable, something they want to keep for themselves. What else could it be but heat-stones and maybe dried meat?" "We don't know, Wes! The Ship is—well, we shouldn't talk about it. And the Officers wouldn't do that. If they wanted us killed off they'd let the Piruts in on us, or the shags, and let 'em finish us quick. Freezing and starving would take too long. There'd be too many of us if we found out, or got mad." Kirk snorted. "You women know so much. If they let the shags or the Piruts in on us, how could they stop 'em before they killed everybody, including the Officers? As for slow death—well, they think we're dumb. They've kept us away from the Ship ever since the Crash , and nobody knows how long ago that was. They think they can go on doing it. They think we'd never suspect." "Yah!" said Lil sharply. "You just like to talk. Why should the Officers want us killed off anyhow?" Kirk looked at the thin fuzzy baby curled tight in the skins. "There aren't enough heat-stones to go around any more. Why should they let their young ones cry with the cold?" There was silence in the room again. Kirk felt it, thick and choky. His heart kicked against his ribs. He was scared, suddenly. He'd never talked that much before. It was the baby, crying in the cold, that set him off. Suppose someone had heard him. Suppose he was reported for a mutineer. That meant the sucking-plant.... "Listen!" said Ma Kirk. Nerves crackled icily all over Kirk's skin. But there wasn't any need to listen. The noise rolled in over them. It hit rock faces polished by the wind, and the drifts of crystalline pebbles, and it splintered into a tangle of echoes that came from everywhere at once, but there was no mistaking it. No need even to use sensitive earcups to locate its source. The great alarm gong by the Captain's hut. Kirk began to move, very swiftly and quietly. Before the third gong stroke hit them he had his spear and his sling and was already lifting aside the door curtain. Ma Kirk said stiffly, "Which way are they coming?" Kirk's ears twitched. He sorted the gong sounds, and the wind, and found a whisper underneath them, rushing up out of the gullied plain. Kirk pointed. "From the west. Piruts, I think." Ma Kirk sucked in her breath. Her voice had no tone in it. "Your Pa went hunting that way." "Yeah," said Kirk. "I'll watch out for him." He glanced back just before he let the curtain drop. The pale glow of the heat-stones picked dots of luminous blackness out of the gloom, where the still breathless faces were, watching him. He saw the blurred shapes of clay cooking pots, of low bed frames, of huddled bodies. The baby began to whimper again. Kirk shivered in the cold wind. "Lil," he said. "I would, too, kill the Captain's yellow daughter." "Yah," said Lil. "Go chase the beetles away." There was no conviction in her voice. The wind was freezing on Kirk's bare feet. He dropped the curtain and went across the plain. Men and youths like himself, old enough to fight, were spilling out of low doorways and forming companies on the flat ground. Kirk spotted Jakk Randl and fell in beside him. They stood with their backs to the wind, stamping and shivering, their head-hair and scant fur clouts blown straight out. Randl nudged Kirk's elbow. "Look at 'em," he said, and coughed. He was always coughing, jerking his thin sharp face back and forth. Kirk could have broken his brittle light-furred body in two. All Randl's strength was in his eyes. The pupils were always spread, always hot with some bitter force, always probing. He wasn't much older than Kirk. Kirk looked up the hill. Officers were running from the huts below the gaunt, dead Ship. They didn't look so different from the Hans, only they were built a little taller and lighter, less bowed and bunchy in the shoulders, quicker on their feet. Kirk stepped behind Randl to shield him from the wind. His voice was only a whisper, but it had a hard edge. The baby's thin, terrible wail was still in his ears. "Is it true, Jakk? Do you know? Because if they are...." Randl laughed and shuddered with a secret, ugly triumph. "I crawled up on the peak during the last darkness. The guards were cold and the wind made them blind and deaf. I lay in the rocks and watched. And I saw...." He coughed. The Officers' voices rang sharp through the wind. Compact groups of men began to run, off toward the west. The whisper of sound had grown louder in Kirk's ears. He could hear men yelling and the ringing of metal on stone. He started to run, holding Randl's elbow. Grey dust blew under their feet. The drifts of crystal stones sent their sound shivering back at them in splinters. Kirk said fiercely: "What did you see?" They were passing under the hill now. Randl jerked his head. "Up there, Wes." Kirk looked up. Someone was standing at the doorway of the Captain's hut. Someone tall and slender and the color of the Sunstar from head to foot. "I saw her," said Randl hoarsely. "She was carrying heat-stones into the Ship." Kirk's pupils shrank to points no warmer nor softer than the tip of his knife. He smiled, almost gently, looking up the hill. The captain's yellow daughter, taking life into the Ship. It was a big raid. Kirk saw that when he scrambled up out of the last gully, half-carrying the wheezing Randl. The Piruts had come up the tongue of rock between two deep cuts and tackled the guards' pillbox head on. They hadn't taken it, not yet. But they were still trying, piling up their dead on the swept grey stone. They were using shags again. They drove the lumbering beasts on into the hail of stones and thrown spears from the pillbox, keeping low behind them, and then climbing on the round hairy bodies. It took courage, because sometimes the shags turned and clawed the men who drove them, and sometimes the dead ones weren't quite dead and it was too bad for the man who climbed on them. It looked to Kirk as though the pillbox was pretty far gone. He ran down the slope with the others, slipping in the crystal drifts. Randl was spent. Kirk kept him going, thinking of the huts back there on the plain, and Ma and Lil and the little ones, and the baby. You had to fight the Piruts, no matter what you thought about the Officers. You had to keep them from getting onto the plain. He wondered about Pa. Hunting shags in the outer gullies was mean work any time, but when the Piruts were raiding.... No time to think about that. Wite, the second son of the First Officer, was signalling for double time. Kirk ran faster, his ears twitching furiously as they sifted the flying echoes into some kind of order. Pa hadn't been alone, of course. Frank and Russ went with him. The three of them would have sense enough to keep safe. Maybe they were in the pillbox. A big raid. More Piruts than he'd ever seen before. He wondered why. He wondered how so many of them had been able to get so close to the pillbox all at once, walking two or three abreast on the narrow tongue of rock under the spears and slingstones. They poured in through the gates of the stone-walled building, scattering up onto the parapet. There were slits in the rooms below and rusty metal things crouching behind them, but they weren't any good for fighting. A man needed shoulder room for spear and sling. It was pretty hot up there. The wall of bodies had built up so high, mostly with shags, that the Piruts were coming right over the wall. Kirk's nose wrinkled at the smell of blood. He avoided the biggest puddles and found a place to stand between the dead. Randl went down on his knees. He was coughing horribly, but his hot black eyes saw everything. He tried three times to lift his sling and gave it up. "I'll cover you," said Kirk. He began taking crystal pebbles out of a big pile that was kept there and hurling them at the Piruts. They made a singing noise in the air, and they didn't stop going when they hit. They were heavy for their size, very heavy, with sharp edges. Randl said, "Something funny, Wes. Too many Piruts. They couldn't risk 'em on an ordinary raid." Kirk grunted. A Pirut with red hair standing straight in the wind came over the wall. Kirk speared him left-handed in the belly, dodged the downstroke of his loaded sap, and kicked the body out of the way. He said, "Wonder how they got so close, so fast?" "Some trick." Randl laughed suddenly. "Funny their wanting the Ship as much as you and I do." "Think they could know what's in it?" Randl's narrow shoulders twitched. "Near as we know, their legend is the same as ours. Something holy in the Ship, sacred and tabu. Only difference is they want to get it for themselves, and we want to keep it." He coughed and spat in sudden angry disgust. "And we've swallowed that stuff. We've let the Officers hoard heat and food so they can live no matter what happens to us. We're fools, Wes! A lot of bloody fools!" He got up and began jabbing with his spear at heads that poked up over the wall. The Piruts began to slack off. Stones still whistled past Kirk's head—a couple of them had grazed him by now—and spears showered down, but they weren't climbing the walls any more. Randl grounded his spear, gasping. "That's that. Pretty soon they'll break, and then we can start thinking about...." He stopped. Kirk put a stone accurately through the back of a Pirut's head and said grimly: "Yeah. About what we're going to do." Randl didn't answer. He sat down suddenly, doubled over. Kirk grinned. "Take it easy," he said softly. "I'll cover you." Randl whispered, "Wes. Wes!" He held up one thin hand. Kirk let his own drop, looking at it. There was blood on it, running clear to the elbow. He went down beside Randl, putting his arms around him, trying to see. Randl shook him off. "Don't move me, you fool! Just listen." His voice was harsh and rapid. He was holding both hands over the left side of his neck, where it joined the shoulder. Kirk could see the bright blood beating up through his fingers. He said, "Jakk, I'll get the sawbones...." Hot black eyes turned to his. Burnt-out fires in a face with the young beard hardly full on its sharp jaw. "Sit down, Wes, quick, and listen. Sawbones is no good—and why would I want to go on living anyway?" He smiled. Kirk had never seen him smile like that, without bitterness or pain. He sat down, crouched on the body of a man who lived only two huts away from him. The blood made little red fountains between Randl's fingers. "It's up to you, Wes. You're the only one that really knows about the Ship. You'll do better than I would, anyhow. You're a fighter. You carry it on, so the Hans can live. Promise." Kirk nodded. He couldn't say anything. The heat was dying in Randl's eyes. "Listen, Wes. I saw the secret way into Ship. Bend closer, and listen...." Kirk bent. He didn't move for a long time. After a while Randl's voice stopped, and then the blood wasn't pumping any more, just oozing. Randl's hands slid away, so that Kirk could see the hole the stone had made. Everything seemed to be very quiet. Kirk sat there, holding Randl in his arms. Presently someone came up and shook Kirk's shoulder and said, "Hey, kid, are you deaf? We been yelling for you." He stopped, and then said more gently, "Oh. Jakk got it, did he?" Kirk laid the body carefully on the stones and got up. "Yeah." "Kind of a pal of yours, wasn't he?" "He wasn't very strong. He needed someone to cover him." "Too bad." The man shook his head, and then shrugged. "Maybe it's better, at that. He was headed for trouble, that one. Kinda leading you that way, too, I heard. Always talking." He looked at Kirk's face and shut up suddenly. He turned away and grunted over his shoulders, "The O.D.'s looking for you." Kirk followed. The wind was cold, howling up from the outer gullies. The Officer of the Day was waiting at the north end of the wall. There was a ladder dropped over it now, and men were climbing up and down with bodies and sheaves of recovered spears. More were busy down below, rolling the dead Piruts and the shags down into the deep gullies for the scavenger rats and the living shags who didn't mind turning cannibal. That ladder made Kirk think of Pa. It was the only way for a man to get into the outer gullies from the west escarpment of the colony. He shook some of the queer heaviness out of his head, touched his forelock and said: "I'm Wes Kirk, sir. You wanted me?" "Yes." The O.D. was also the Third Officer. Taller than Kirk, thinner, with the hair going grey on his body and exhausted eyes sunk deep under his horny overlids. He said quietly: "I'm sorry to have to tell you this...." Kirk knew. The knowledge leaped through him. It was strange, to feel a spear-stab where there was no spear. He said, "Pa." The Officer nodded. He seemed very tired, and he didn't look at Kirk. He hadn't, after the first glance. "Your father, and his two friends." Kirk shivered. The horny lids dropped over his eyes. "I wish I'd known," he whispered. "I'd have killed more of them." The Officer put his hands flat on the top of the wall and looked at them as if they were strange things and no part of him. "Kirk," he said, "this is going to be hard to explain. I've never done anything as hard. The Piruts didn't kill them. They were responsible, but they didn't actually kill them." Wes raised his head slowly. "I don't understand." "We saw them coming up the tongue of rock. The Piruts were behind them, but not far. Not far enough. One of the three, it wasn't your father, called to us to put the ladder down. We waited...." A muscle began to twitch under Kirk's eye. That, too, was something that had never happened before, like the stab of pain with no spear behind it. He licked his lips and repeated hoarsely: "I don't understand." The Officer tightened suddenly and made one hand into a fist and beat it slowly on the wall, up and down. "I didn't want to give the order. God knows I didn't want to! But there was nothing else to do." A man came up over the top of the ladder. He was carrying a body over his shoulder, and breathing hard. "Here's Kirk," he said. "Where'll I put him?" There was a clear space off to the right. Kirk pointed to it. "Over there, Charley. I'll help." It was hard to move. He'd never been tired like this before. He'd never been afraid like this, either. He didn't know what he was afraid of. Something in the Officer's voice. He helped to lay his father down. He'd seen bodies before. He'd handled them, fighting on the pillbox walls. But never one he'd known so long, one he'd eaten and slept and wrestled with. The thick arm that hauled him out of bed this morning, the big hands that warmed the baby against the barrel chest. You saw it lying lax and cold, but you didn't believe it. You saw it. You saw the spear shaft sticking out clean from the heart.... You saw it.... "That's one of our spears!" He screamed it, like a woman. "One of our own—from the front!" "I let them get as close as I dared," said the Officer tonelessly. "I tried to find a way. But there wasn't any way but the ladder, and that was what the Piruts wanted. That's why they made them come." Kirk's voice wasn't a voice at all. "You killed them. You killed my father." "Three lives, against all those back on the plain. We held our fire too long as it was, hoping. The Piruts nearly broke through. Try to understand! I had to do it." Kirk's spear made a flat clatter on the stone. He started forward. Men moved in and held him, without rancor, looking at their own feet. "Please try to understand," whispered the Officer. "I had to do it." The Officer, the bloody wall, the stars and the cold grey gullies all went away. There was nothing but darkness, and wind, a long way off. Kirk thought of Pa coming up under the wall, close to safety, close enough to touch it, and no way through. Pa and Frank and Russ, standing under the wall, looking up, and no way through. Looking up, calling to the men they knew, asking for help and getting a spear through the heart. After that, even the wind was gone, and the darkness had turned red. There was a voice, a long way off. It said, "God, he's strong!" Over and over. It got louder. There were weights on his arms and legs, and he couldn't throw them off. He was pressed against something. It was the wall. He saw that after a while. The wall where the Officer had been standing. There were six men holding him, three on each side. The Officer was gone. Kirk relaxed. He was shivering and covered with rime from body sweat. Somebody whistled. "Six men! Didn't know the kid had it in him." The Officer's voice said dully, "No discipline. Better take him home." Kirk tried to turn. The six men swung with him. Kirk said, "You better discipline me. You better kill me, because, if you don't, I'll kill you." "I don't blame you, boy. Go and rest. You'll understand." "I'll understand, all right." Kirk's voice was a hoarse, harsh whisper that came out by itself and wouldn't be stopped. "I'll understand about Pa, and the Ship with the heat-stones in it, and the Captain's yellow daughter getting fat and warm while my sisters freeze and go hungry. I'll understand, and I'll make everybody else understand, too!" The Officer's eyes held a quick fire. "Boy! Do you know what you're saying?" "You bet I know!" "That's mutiny. For God's sake, don't make things worse!" "Worse for us, or for you?" Kirk was shouting, holding his head up in the wind. "Listen, you men! Do you know what the Officers are doing up there in the Ship they won't let us touch?" There was an uneasy stirring among the Hans, a slipping aside of luminous black eyes. The Officer shut his jaw tight. He stepped in close to Kirk. "Shut up," he said urgently. "Don't make me punish you, not now. You're talking rot, but it's dangerous." Kirk's eyes were hot and not quite sane. He couldn't have stopped if he'd wanted to. "Rot, is it? Jakk Randl knew. He saw with his own eyes and he told me while he was dying. The Captain's yellow daughter, sneaking heat-stones into...." The Officer hit him on the jaw, carefully and without heat. Kirk sagged down. The Officer stepped back, looking as though he had a pain in him that he didn't want to show. He said quietly, but so that everyone could hear him, "Discipline, for not longer than it takes to clear the rock below." Two of the men nodded and took Kirk away down a flight of stone steps. One of the four who were left looked over the wall and spat. "Rock's pretty near clean," he said, "but even so...." He shook himself like a dog. "That Jakk Randl, he was always talking." One of the others flicked a quick look around and whispered, "Yeah. And maybe he knew what he was talking about!"

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STALEMATE IN SPACE *** Stalemate In Space By CHARLES L. HARNESS Two mighty metal globes clung in a murderous death-struggle, lashing out with flames of poison. Yet deep in their twisted, radioactive wreckage the main battle raged—where a girl swayed sensuously before her conqueror's mocking eyes. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] At first there was only the voice, a monotonous murmur in her ears. " Die now—die now—die now —" Evelyn Kane awoke, breathing slowly and painfully. The top of the cubicle was bulging inward on her chest, and it seemed likely that a rib or two was broken. How long ago? Years? Minutes? She had no way of knowing. Her slender right hand found the oxygen valve and turned it. For a long while she lay, hurting and breathing helplessly. " Die now—die now—die now —" The votron had awakened her with its heart-breaking code message, and it was her duty to carry out its command. Nine years after the great battle globes had crunched together the mentors had sealed her in this tiny cell, dormant, unwaking, to be livened only when it was certain her countrymen had either definitely won—or lost. The votron's telepathic dirge chronicled the latter fact. She had expected nothing else. She had only to find the relay beside her cot, press the key that would set in motion gigantic prime movers in the heart of the great globe, and the conquerors would join the conquered in the wide and nameless grave of space. But life, now doled out by the second, was too delicious to abandon immediately. Her mind, like that of a drowning person, raced hungrily over the memories of her past. For twenty years, in company with her great father, she had watched The Defender grow from a vast metal skeleton into a planet-sized battle globe. But it had not grown fast enough, for when the Scythian globe, The Invader , sprang out of black space to enslave the budding Terran Confederacy, The Defender was unfinished, half-equipped, and undermanned. The Terrans could only fight for time and hope for a miracle. The Defender , commanded by her father, Gordon, Lord Kane, hurled itself from its orbit around Procyon and met The Invader with giant fission torpedoes. And then, in an intergalactic proton storm beyond the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, the globes lost their bearings and collided. Hordes of brute-men poured through the crushed outer armor of the stricken Defender . The prone woman stirred uneasily. Here the images became unreal and terrible, with the recurrent vision of death. It had taken the Scythians nine years to conquer The Defender's outer shell. Then had come that final interview with her father. "In half an hour our last space port will be captured," he had telepathed curtly. "Only one more messenger ship can leave The Defender . Be on it." "No. I shall die here." His fine tired eyes had studied her face in enigmatic appraisal. "Then die usefully. The mentors are trying to develop a force that will destroy both globes in the moment of our inevitable defeat. If they are successful, you will have the task of pressing the final button of the battle." "There's an off-chance you may survive," countered a mentor. "We're also working on a means for your escape—not only because you are Gordon's daughter, but because this great proton storm will prevent radio contact with Terra for years, and we want someone to escape with our secret if and when our experiments prove successful." "But you must expect to die," her father had warned with gentle finality. She clenched her fingernails vehemently into her palms and wrenched herself back to the present. That time had come. With some effort she worked herself out of the crumpled bed and lay on the floor of her little cubicle, panting and holding her chest with both hands. The metal floor was very cold. Evidently the enemy torpedo fissionables had finally broken through to the center portions of the ship, letting in the icy breath of space. Small matter. Not by freezing would she die. She reached out her hand, felt for the all-important key, and gasped in dismay. The mahogany box containing the key had burst its metal bonds and was lying on its side. The explosion that had crushed her cubicle had been terrific. With a gurgle of horror she snapped on her wrist luminar and examined the interior of the box. It was a shattered ruin. Once the fact was clear, she composed herself and lay there, breathing hard and thinking. She had no means to construct another key. At best, finding the rare tools and parts would take months, and during the interval the invaders would be cutting loose from the dead hulk that clutched their conquering battle globe in a metallic rigor mortis. She gave herself six weeks to accomplish this stalemate in space. Within that time she must know whether the prime movers were still intact, and whether she could safely enter the pile room herself, set the movers in motion, and draw the moderator columns. If it were unsafe, she must secure the unwitting assistance of her Scythian enemies. Still prone, she found the first-aid kit and taped her chest expertly. The cold was beginning to make itself felt, so she flicked on the chaudiere she wore as an under-garment to her Scythian woman's uniform. Then she crawled on her elbows and stomach to the tiny door, spun the sealing gear, and was soon outside. Ignoring the pain and pulling on the side of the imitation rock that contained her cell, she got slowly to her feet. The air was thin indeed, and frigid. She turned the valve of her portable oxygen bottle almost subconsciously, while exploring the surrounding blackened forest as far as she could see. Mentally she was alert for roving alien minds. She had left her weapons inside the cubicle, except for the three things in the little leather bag dangling from her waist, for she knew that her greatest weapon in the struggle to come would be her apparent harmlessness. Four hundred yards behind her she detected the mind of a low-born Scythe, of the Tharn sun group. Very quickly she established it as that of a tired, brutish corporal, taking a mop-up squad through the black stumps and forlorn branches of the small forest that for years had supplied oxygen to the defenders of this sector. The corporal could not see her green Scythian uniform clearly, and evidently took her for a Terran woman. In his mind was the question: Should he shoot immediately, or should he capture her? It had been two months since he had seen a woman. But then, his orders were to shoot. Yes, he would shoot. Evelyn turned in profile to the beam-gun and stretched luxuriously, hoping that her grimace of pain could not be detected. With satisfaction, she sensed a sudden change of determination in the mind of the Tharn. The gun was lowered, and the man was circling to creep up behind her. He did not bother to notify his men. He wanted her first. He had seen her uniform, but that deterred him not a whit. Afterwards, he would call up the squad. Finally, they would kill her and move on. Women auxiliaries had no business here, anyway. Hips dipping, Evelyn sauntered into the shattered copse. The man moved faster, though still trying to approach quietly. Most of the radions in the mile-high ceiling had been destroyed, and the light was poor. He was not surprised when he lost track of his quarry. He tip-toed rapidly onward, picking his way through the charred and fallen branches, thinking that she must turn up again soon. He had not gone twenty yards in this manner when a howl of unbearable fury sounded in his mind, and the dull light in his brain went out. She fought for her life under that mile-high ceiling. Breathing deeply from her mental effort, the woman stepped from behind a great black tree trunk and hurried to the unconscious man. For I.Q.'s of 100 and less, telepathic cortical paralysis was quite effective. With cool efficiency and no trace of distaste she stripped the odorous uniform from the man, then took his weapon, turned the beam power down very low, and needled a neat slash across his throat. While he bled to death, she slipped deftly into the baggy suit, clasped the beam gun by the handle, and started up the sooty slope. For a time, at least, it would be safer to pass as a Tharn soldier than as any kind of a woman. II The inquisitor leaned forward, frowning at the girl before him. "Name?" "Evelyn Kane." The eyes of the inquisitor widened. "So you admit to a Terran name. Well, Terran, you are charged with having stolen passage on a supply lorry, and you also seem to be wearing the uniform of an infantry corporal as well as that of a Scythian woman auxiliary. Incidentally, where is the corporal? Did you kill him?" He was prepared for a last-ditch denial. He would cut it short, have the guards remove her, and execution would follow immediately. In a way, it was unfortunate. The woman was obviously of a high Terran class. No—he couldn't consider that. His slender means couldn't afford another woman in his quarters, and besides, he wouldn't feel safe with this cool murderess. "Do you not understand the master tongue? Why did you kill the corporal?" He leaned impatiently over his desk. The woman stared frankly back at him with her clear blue eyes. The guards on either side of her dug their nails into her arms, as was their custom with recalcitrant prisoners, but she took no notice. She had analyzed the minds of the three men. She could handle the inquisitor alone or the two guards alone, but not all three. "If you aren't afraid of me, perhaps you'd be so kind as to send the guards out for a few minutes," she said, placing a hand on her hip. "I have interesting information." So that was it. Buy her freedom by betraying fugitive Terrans. Well, he could take the information and then kill her. He nodded curtly to the guards, and they walked out of the hut, exchanging sly winks with one another. Evelyn Kane crossed her arms across her chest and felt her broken rib gingerly. The inquisitor stared up at her in sadistic admiration. He would certainly be on hand for the execution. His anticipation was cut short with a horrible realization. Under the paralyzing force of a mind greater than his own, he reached beneath the desk and switched off the recorder. "Who is the Occupational Commandant for this Sector," she asked tersely. This must be done swiftly before the guards returned. "Perat, Viscount of Tharn," replied the man mechanically. "What is the extent of his jurisdiction?" "From the center of the Terran globe, outward four hundred miles radius." "Good. Prepare for me the usual visa that a woman clerk needs for passage to the offices of the Occupational Commandant." The inquisitor filled in blanks in a stiff sheet of paper and stamped a seal at its bottom. "You will add in the portion reserved for 'comments', the following: 'Capable clerk. Others will follow as they are found available.'" The man's pen scratched away obediently. Evelyn Kane smiled gently at the impotent, inwardly raging inquisitor. She took the paper, folded it, and placed it in a pocket in her blouse. "Call the guards," she ordered. He pressed the button on his desk, and the guards re-entered. "This person is no longer a prisoner," said the inquisitor woodenly. "She is to take the next transport to the Occupational Commandant of Zone One." When the transport had left, neither inquisitor nor guards had any memory of the woman. However, in the due course of events, the recording was gathered up with many others like it, boxed carefully, and sent to the Office of the Occupational Commandant, Zone One, for auditing. Evelyn was extremely careful with her mental probe as she descended from the transport. The Occupational Commandant would undoubtedly be high-born and telepathic. He must not have occasion to suspect a similar ability in a mere clerk. Fighting had passed this way, too, and recently. Many of the buildings were still smoking, and many of the radions high above were either shot out or obscured by slowly drifting dust clouds. The acrid odor of radiation-remover was everywhere. She caught the sound of spasmodic small-arm fire. "What is that?" she asked the transport attendant. "The Commandant is shooting prisoners," he replied laconically. "Oh." "Where did you want to go?" "To the personnel office." "That way." He pointed to the largest building of the group—two stories high, reasonably intact. She walked off down the gravel path, which was stained here and there with dark sticky red. She gave her visa to the guard at the door and was admitted to an improvised waiting room, where another guard eyed her stonily. The firing was much nearer. She recognized the obscene coughs of a Faeg pistol and began to feel sick. A woman in the green uniform of the Scythe auxiliary came in, whispered something to the guard, and then told Evelyn to follow her. In the anteroom a grey cat looked her over curiously, and Evelyn frowned. She might have to get rid of the cat if she stayed here. Under certain circumstances the animal could prove her deadliest enemy. The next room held a foppish little man, evidently a supervisor of some sort, who was studying her visa. "I'm very happy to have you here, S'ria—ah—"—he looked at the visa suspiciously—"S'ria Lyn. Do sit down. But, as I was just remarking to S'ria Gerek, here"—he nodded to the other woman, who smiled back—"I wish the field officers would make up their august minds as to whether they want you or don't want you. Just why did they transfer you to H.Q.?" She thought quickly. This pompous little ass would have to be given some answer that would keep him from checking with the inquisitor. It would have to be something personal. She looked at the false black in his eyebrows and sideburns, and the artificial way in which he had combed hair over his bald spot. She crossed her knees slowly, ignoring the narrowing eyes of S'ria Gerek, and smoothed the back of her braided yellow hair. He was studying her covertly. "The men in the fighting zones are uncouth, S'ria Gorph," she said simply. "I was told that you , that is, I mean—" "Yes?" he was the soul of graciousness. S'ria Gerek began to dictate loudly into her mechanical transcriber. Evelyn cleared her throat, averted her eyes, and with some effort, managed a delicate flush. "I meant to say, I thought I would be happier working for—working here. So I asked for a transfer." S'ria Gorph beamed. "Splendid. But the occupation isn't over, yet, you know. There'll be hard work here for several weeks yet, before we cut loose from the enemy globe. But you do your work well"—winking artfully—"and I'll see that—" He stopped, and his face took on a hunted look of mingled fear and anxiety. He appeared to listen. Evelyn tensed her mind to receive and deceive a mental probe. She was certain now that the Zone Commandant was high-born and telepathic. The chances were only fifty-fifty that she could delude him for any length of time if he became interested in her. He must be avoided if at all possible. It should not be too difficult. He undoubtedly had a dozen personal secretaries and/or concubines and would take small interest in the lowly employees that amused Gorph. Gorph looked at her uncertainly. "Perat, Viscount of the Tharn Suns, sends you his compliments and wishes to see you on the balcony." He pointed to a hallway. "All the way through there, across to the other wing." As she left, she heard all sound in the room stop. The transcribing and calculating machines trailed off into a watchful silence, and she could feel the eyes of the men and women on her back. She noticed then that the Faeg had ceased firing. Her heart was beating faster as she walked down the hall. She felt a very strong probe flooding over her brain casually, palping with mild interest the artificial memories she supplied: Escapades with officers in the combat areas. Reprimands. Demotion and transfer. Her deception of Gorph. Her anticipation of meeting a real Viscount and hoping he would let her dance for him. The questing probe withdrew as idly as it had come, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She could not hope to deceive a suspicious telepath for long. Perat was merely amused at her "lie" to his under-supervisor. He had accepted her at her own face value, as supplied by her false memories. She opened the door to the balcony and saw a man leaning moodily on the balustrade. He gave no immediate notice of her presence. The five hundred and sixth heir of Tharn was of uncertain age, as were most of the men of both globes. Only the left side of his face could be seen. It was gaunt and leathery, and a deep thin scar lifted the corner of his mouth into a satanic smile. A faint paunch was gathering at his abdomen, as befitted a warrior turned to boring paper work. His closely cut black hair and the two sparkling red-gemmed rings—apparently identical—on his right hand seemed to denote a certain fastidiousness and unconscious superiority. To Evelyn the jeweled fingers bespoke an unnatural contrast to the past history of the man and were symptomatic of a personality that could find stimulation only in strange and cruel pleasures. In alarm she suddenly realized that she had inadvertently let her appraisal penetrate her uncovered conscious mind, and that this probe was there awaiting it. "You are right," he said coldly, still staring into the court below. "Now that the long battle is over, there is little left to divert me." He pushed the Faeg across the coping toward her. "Take this." He had not as yet looked at her. She crossed the balcony, simultaneously grasping the pistol he offered her and looking down into the courtyard. There seemed to be nearly twenty Terrans lying about, in pools of their own blood. Only one man, a Terran officer of very high rank—was left standing. His arms were folded somberly across his chest, and he studied the killer above him almost casually. But when the woman came out, their eyes met, and he started imperceptibly. Evelyn Kane felt a horrid chill creeping over her. The man's hair was white, now, and his proud face lined with deep furrows, but there could be no mistake. It was Gordon, Lord Kane. Her father. The sweat continued to grow on her forehead, and she felt for a moment that she needed only to wish hard enough, and this would be a dream. A dream of a big, kind, dark-haired man with laugh-wrinkles about his eyes, who sat her on his knee when she was a little girl and read bedtime stories to her from a great book with many pictures. An icy, amused voice came through: "Our orders are to kill all prisoners. It is entertaining to shoot down helpless men, isn't it? It warms me to know that I am cruel and wanton, and worthy of my trust." Even in the midst of her horror, a cold, analytical part of her was explaining why the Commandant had called her to the balcony. Because all captured Terrans had to be killed, he hated his superiors, his own men, and especially the prisoners. A task so revolting he could not relegate to his own officers. He must do it himself, but he wanted his underlings to know he loathed them for it. She was merely a symbol of that contempt. His next words did not surprise her. "It is even more stimulating to require a shuddering female to kill them. You are shuddering you know?" She nodded dumbly. Her palm was so wet that a drop of sweat dropped from it to the floor. She was thinking hard. She could kill the Commandant and save her father for a little while. But then the problem of detonating the pile remained, and it would not be solved more quickly by killing the man who controlled the pile area. On the contrary if she could get him interested in her— "So far as our records indicate," murmured Perat, "the man down there is the last living Terran within The Defender . It occurred to me that our newest clerk would like to start off her duties with a bang. The Faeg is adjusted to a needle-beam. If you put a bolt between the man's eyes, you may dance for me tonight, and perhaps there will be other nights—" The woman seemed lost in thought for a long time. Slowly, she lifted the ugly little weapon. The doomed Terran looked up at her peacefully, without expression. She lowered the Faeg, her arm trembling. Gordon, Lord Kane, frowned faintly, then closed his eyes. She raised the gun again, drew cross hairs with a nerveless wrist, and squeezed the trigger. There was a loud, hollow cough, but no recoil. The Terran officer, his eyes still closed and arms folded, sank to the ground, face up. Blood was running from a tiny hole in his forehead. The man leaning on the balustrade turned and looked at Evelyn, at first with amused contempt, then with narrowing, questioning eyes. "Come here," he ordered. The Faeg dropped from her hand. With a titanic effort she activated her legs and walked toward him. He was studying her face very carefully. She felt that she was going to be sick. Her knees were so weak that she had to lean on the coping. With a forefinger he lifted up the mass of golden curls that hung over her right forehead and examined the scar hidden there, where the mentors had cut into her frontal lobe. The tiny doll they had created for her writhed uneasily in her waist-purse, but Perat seemed to be thinking of something else, and missed the significance of the scar completely. He dropped his hand. "I'm sorry," he said with a quiet weariness. "I shouldn't have asked you to kill the Terran. It was a sorry joke." Then: "Have you ever seen me before?" "No," she whispered hoarsely. His mind was in hers, verifying the fact. "Have you ever met my father, Phaen, the old Count of Tharn?" "No." "Do you have a son?" "No." His mind was out of hers again, and he had turned moodily back, surveying the courtyard and the dead. "Gorph will be wondering what happened to you. Come to my quarters at the eighth metron tonight." Apparently he suspected nothing. Father. Father. I had to do it. But we'll all join you, soon. Soon. III Perat lay on his couch, sipping cold purple terif and following the thinly-clad dancer with narrowed eyes. Music, soft and subtle, floated from his communications box, illegally tuned to an officer's club somewhere. Evelyn made the rhythm part of her as she swayed slowly on tiptoe. For the last thirty "nights"—the hours allotted to rest and sleep—it had been thus. By "day" she probed furtively into the minds of the office staff, memorizing area designations, channels for official messages, and the names and authorizations of occupational field crews. By night she danced for Perat, who never took his eyes from her, nor his probe from her mind. While she danced it was not too difficult to elude the probe. There was an odd autohypnosis in dancing that blotted out memory and knowledge. "Enough for now," he ordered. "Careful of your rib." When he had first seen the bandages on her bare chest, that first night, she had been ready with a memory of dancing on a freshly waxed floor, and of falling. Perat seemed to be debating with himself as she sat down on her own couch to rest. He got up, unlocked his desk, and drew out a tiny reel of metal wire, which Evelyn recognized as being feed for an amateur stereop projector. He placed the reel in a projector that had been installed in the wall, flicked off the table luminar, and both of them waited in the dark, breathing rather loudly. Suddenly the center of the room was bright with a ball of light some two feet in diameter, and inside the luminous sphere were an old man, a woman, and a little boy of about four years. They were walking through a luxurious garden, and then they stopped, looked up, and waved gaily. Evelyn studied the trio with growing wonder. The old man and the boy were complete strangers. But the woman—! "That is Phaen, my father," said Perat quietly. "He stayed at home because he hated war. And that is a path in our country estate on Tharn-R-VII. The little boy I fail to recognize, beyond a general resemblance to the Tharn line. "But— can you deny that you are the woman ?" The stereop snapped off, and she sat wordless in the dark. "There seemed to be some similarity—" she admitted. Her throat was suddenly dry. Yet, why should she be alarmed? She really didn't know the woman. The table luminar was on now, and Perat was prowling hungrily about the room, his scar twisting his otherwise handsome face into a snarling scowl. "Similarity! Bah! That loop of hair over her right forehead hid a scar identical to yours. I have had the individual frames analyzed!" Evelyn's hands knotted unconsciously. She forced her body to relax, but her mind was racing. This introduced another variable to be controlled in her plan for destruction. She must make it a known quantity. "Did your father send it to you?" she asked. "The day before you arrived here. It had been en route for months, of course." "What did he say about it?" "He said, 'Your widow and son send greetings. Be of good cheer, and accept our love.' What nonsense! He knows very well I'm not married and that—well, if I have ever fathered any children, I don't know about them." "Is that all he said?" "That's all, except that he included this ring." He pulled one of the duplicate jewels from his right middle finger and tossed it to her. "It's identical to the one he had made for me when I entered on my majority. For a long time it was thought that it was the only stone of its kind on all the planets of the Tharn suns, a mineralogical freak, but I guess he found another. But why should I want two of them?" Evelyn crossed the room and returned the ring. "Existence is so full of mysteries, isn't it?" murmured Perat. "Sometimes it seems unfortunate that we must pass through a sentient phase on our way to death. This foolish, foolish war. Maybe the old count was right." "You could be courtmartialed for that." "Speaking of courtmartials, I've got to attend one tonight—an appeal from a death sentence." He arose, smoothed his hair and clothes, and poured another glass of terif . "Some fool inquisitor can't show proper disposition of a woman prisoner." Evelyn's heart skipped a beat. "Indeed?" "The wretch insists that he could remember if we would just let him alone. I suppose he took a bribe. You'll find one now and then who tries for a little extra profit." She must absolutely not be seen by the condemned inquisitor. The stimulus would almost certainly make him remember. "I'll wait for you," she said indifferently, thrusting her arms out in a languorous yawn. "Very well." Perat stepped to the door, then turned and looked back at her. "On the other hand, I may need a clerk. It's way after hours, and the others have gone." Beneath a gesture of wry protest, she swallowed rapidly. "Perhaps you'd better come," insisted Perat. She stood up, unloosed her waist-purse, checked its contents swiftly, and then followed him out. This might be a very close thing. From the purse she took a bottle of perfume and rubbed her ear lobes casually. "Odd smell," commented Perat, wrinkling his nose. "Odd scent," corrected Evelyn cryptically. She was thinking about the earnest faces of the mentors as they instructed her carefully in the use of the "perfume." The adrenalin glands, they had explained, provided a useful and powerful stimulant to a man in danger. Adrenalin slowed the heart and digestion, increased the systole and blood pressure, and increased perspiration to cool the skin. But there could be too much of a good thing. An overdose of adrenalin, they had pointed out, caused almost immediate edema. The lungs filled rapidly with the serum and the victim ... drowned. The perfume she possessed over-stimulated, in some unknown way, the adrenals of frightened persons. It had no effect on inactive adrenals. The question remained—who would be the more frightened, she or the condemned inquisitor? She was perspiring freely, and the blonde hair on her arms and neck was standing stiffly when Perat opened the door for her and they entered the Zone Provost's chambers.

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TIME and the WOMAN By Dewey, G. Gordon [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Orbit volume 1 number 2, 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] HER ONLY PASSION WAS BEAUTY—BEAUTY WHICH WOULD LAST FOREVER. AND FOR IT—SHE'D DO ANYTHING! Ninon stretched. And purred, almost. There was something lazily catlike in her flexing; languid, yet ferally alert. The silken softness of her couch yielded to her body as she rubbed against it in sensual delight. There was almost the litheness of youth in her movements. It was true that some of her joints seemed to have a hint of stiffness in them, but only she knew it. And if some of the muscles beneath her polished skin did not respond with quite the resilience of the youth they once had, only she knew that, too. But they would again , she told herself fiercely. She caught herself. She had let down her guard for an instant, and a frown had started. She banished it imperiously. Frowns—just one frown—could start a wrinkle! And nothing was as stubborn as a wrinkle. One soft, round, white, long-nailed finger touched here, and here, and there—the corners of her eyes, the corners of her mouth, smoothing them. Wrinkles acknowledged only one master, the bio-knife of the facial surgeons. But the bio-knife could not thrust deep enough to excise the stiffness in a joint; was not clever enough to remold the outlines of a figure where they were beginning to blur and—sag. No one else could see it—yet. But Ninon could! Again the frown almost came, and again she scourged it fiercely into the back of her mind. Time was her enemy. But she had had other enemies, and destroyed them, one way or another, cleverly or ruthlessly as circumstances demanded. Time, too, could be destroyed. Or enslaved. Ninon sorted through her meagre store of remembered reading. Some old philosopher had said, "If you can't whip 'em, join 'em!" Crude, but apt. Ninon wanted to smile. But smiles made wrinkles, too. She was content to feel that sureness of power in her grasp—the certain knowledge that she, first of all people, would turn Time on itself and destroy it. She would be youthful again. She would thread through the ages to come, like a silver needle drawing a golden filament through the layer on layer of the cloth of years that would engarment her eternal youth. Ninon knew how. Her shining, gray-green eyes strayed to the one door in her apartment through which no man had ever gone. There the exercising machines; the lotions; the unguents; the diets; the radioactive drugs; the records of endocrine transplantations, of blood transfusions. She dismissed them contemptuously. Toys! The mirages of a pseudo-youth. She would leave them here for someone else to use in masking the downhill years. There, on the floor beside her, was the answer she had sought so long. A book. "Time in Relation to Time." The name of the author, his academic record in theoretical physics, the cautious, scientific wording of his postulates, meant nothing to her. The one thing that had meaning for her was that Time could be manipulated. And she would manipulate it. For Ninon! The door chimes tinkled intimately. Ninon glanced at her watch—Robert was on time. She arose from the couch, made sure that the light was behind her at just the right angle so he could see the outlines of her figure through the sheerness of her gown, then went to the door and opened it. A young man stood there. Young, handsome, strong, his eyes aglow with the desire he felt, Ninon knew, when he saw her. He took one quick step forward to clasp her in his strong young arms. "Ninon, my darling," he whispered huskily. Ninon did not have to make her voice throaty any more, and that annoyed her too. Once she had had to do it deliberately. But now, through the years, it had deepened. "Not yet, Robert," she whispered. She let him feel the slight but firm resistance so nicely calculated to breach his own; watched the deepening flush of his cheeks with the clinical sureness that a thousand such experiences with men had given her. Then, "Come in, Robert," she said, moving back a step. "I've been waiting for you." She noted, approvingly, that Robert was in his spaceman's uniform, ready for the morrow's flight, as he went past her to the couch. She pushed the button which closed and locked the door, then seated herself beside the young spaceman on the silken couch. His hands rested on her shoulders and he turned her until they faced each other. "Ninon," he said, "you are so beautiful. Let me look at you for a long time—to carry your image with me through all of time and space." Again Ninon let him feel just a hint of resistance, and risked a tiny pout. "If you could just take me with you, Robert...." Robert's face clouded. "If I only could!" he said wistfully. "If there were only room. But this is an experimental flight—no more than two can go." Again his arms went around her and he leaned closer. "Wait!" Ninon said, pushing him back. "Wait? Wait for what?" Robert glanced at his watch. "Time is running out. I have to be at the spaceport by dawn—three hours from now." Ninon said, "But that's three hours, Robert." "But I haven't slept yet tonight. There's been so much to do. I should rest a little." "I'll be more than rest for you." "Yes, Ninon.... Oh, yes." "Not yet, darling." Again her hands were between them. "First, tell me about the flight tomorrow." The young spaceman's eyes were puzzled, hurt. "But Ninon, I've told you before ... there is so much of you that I want to remember ... so little time left ... and you'll be gone when I get back...." Ninon let her gray-green eyes narrow ever so slightly as she leaned away from him. But he blundered on. "... or very old, no longer the Ninon I know ... oh, all right. But you know all this already. We've had space flight for years, but only rocket-powered, restricting us to our own system. Now we have a new kind of drive. Theoretically we can travel faster than light—how many times faster we don't know yet. I'll start finding out tomorrow, with the first test flight of the ship in which the new drive is installed. If it works, the universe is ours—we can go anywhere." "Will it work?" Ninon could not keep the avid greediness out of her voice. Robert said, hesitantly, "We think it will. I'll know better by this time tomorrow." "What of you—of me—. What does this mean to us—to people?" Again the young spaceman hesitated. "We ... we don't know, yet. We think that time won't have the same meaning to everyone...." "... When you travel faster than light. Is that it?" "Well ... yes. Something like that." "And I'll be—old—or dead, when you get back? If you get back?" Robert leaned forward and buried his face in the silvery-blonde hair which swept down over Ninon's shoulders. "Don't say it, darling," he murmured. This time Ninon permitted herself a wrinkling smile. If she was right, and she knew she was, it could make no difference now. There would be no wrinkles—there would be only the soft flexible skin, naturally soft and flexible, of real youth. She reached behind her, over the end of the couch, and pushed three buttons. The light, already soft, dimmed slowly to the faintest of glows; a suave, perfumed dusk as precisely calculated as was the exact rate at which she let all resistance ebb from her body. Robert's voice was muffled through her hair. "What were those clicks?" he asked. Ninon's arms stole around his neck. "The lights," she whispered, "and a little automatic warning to tell you when it's time to go...." The boy did not seem to remember about the third click. Ninon was not quite ready to tell him, yet. But she would.... Two hours later a golden-voiced bell chimed, softly, musically. The lights slowly brightened to no more than the lambent glow which was all that Ninon permitted. She ran her fingers through the young spaceman's tousled hair and shook him gently. "It's time to go, Robert," she said. Robert fought back from the stubborn grasp of sleep. "So soon?" he mumbled. "And I'm going with you," Ninon said. This brought him fully awake. "I'm sorry, Ninon. You can't!" He sat up and yawned, stretched, the healthy stretch of resilient youth. Then he reached for the jacket he had tossed over on a chair. Ninon watched him with envious eyes, waiting until he was fully alert. "Robert!" she said, and the youth paused at the sharpness of her voice. "How old are you?" "I've told you before, darling—twenty-four." "How old do you think I am?" He gazed at her in silent curiosity for a moment, then said, "Come to think of it, you've never told me. About twenty-two or -three, I'd say." "Tomorrow is my birthday. I'll be fifty-two." He stared at her in shocked amazement. Then, as his gaze went over the smooth lines of her body, the amazement gave way to disbelief, and he chuckled. "The way you said it, Ninon, almost had me believing you. You can't possibly be that old, or anywhere near it. You're joking." Ninon's voice was cold. She repeated it: "I am fifty-two years old. I knew your father, before you were born." This time she could see that he believed it. The horror he felt was easy to read on his face while he struggled to speak. "Then ... God help me ... I've been making love to ... an old woman!" His voice was low, bitter, accusing. Ninon slapped him. He swayed slightly, then his features froze as the red marks of her fingers traced across his left cheek. At last he bowed, mockingly, and said, "Your pardon, Madame. I forgot myself. My father taught me to be respectful to my elders." For that Ninon could have killed him. As he turned to leave, her hand sought the tiny, feather-light beta-gun cunningly concealed in the folds of her gown. But the driving force of her desire made her stay her hand. "Robert!" she said in peremptory tones. The youth paused at the door and glanced back, making no effort to conceal the loathing she had aroused in him. "What do you want?" Ninon said, "You'll never make that flight without me.... Watch!" Swiftly she pushed buttons again. The room darkened, as before. Curtains at one end divided and rustled back, and a glowing screen sprang to life on the wall revealed behind them. And there, in life and movement and color and sound and dimension, she—and Robert—projected themselves, together on the couch, beginning at the moment Ninon had pressed the three buttons earlier. Robert's arms were around her, his face buried in the hair falling over her shoulders.... The spaceman's voice was doubly bitter in the darkened room. "So that's it," he said. "A recording! Another one for your collection, I suppose. But of what use is it to you? I have neither money nor power. I'll be gone from this Earth in an hour. And you'll be gone from it, permanently—at your age—before I get back. I have nothing to lose, and you have nothing to gain." Venomous with triumph, Ninon's voice was harsh even to her ears. "On the contrary, my proud and impetuous young spaceman, I have much to gain, more than you could ever understand. When it was announced that you were to be trained to command this experimental flight I made it my business to find out everything possible about you. One other man is going. He too has had the same training, and could take over in your place. A third man has also been trained, to stand by in reserve. You are supposed to have rested and slept the entire night. If the Commandant of Space Research knew that you had not...." "I see. That's why you recorded my visit tonight. But I leave in less than an hour. You'd never be able to tell Commander Pritchard in time to make any difference, and he'd never come here to see...." Ninon laughed mirthlessly, and pressed buttons again. The screen changed, went blank for a moment, then figures appeared again. On the couch were she and a man, middle-aged, dignified in appearance, uniformed. Blane Pritchard, Commandant of Space Research. His arms were around her, and his face was buried in her hair. She let the recording run for a moment, then shut it off and turned up the lights. To Robert, she said, "I think Commander Pritchard would be here in five minutes if I called and told him that I have information which seriously affects the success of the flight." The young spaceman's face was white and stricken as he stared for long moments, wordless, at Ninon. Then in defeated tones he said, "You scheming witch! What do you want?" There was no time to gloat over her victory. That would come later. Right now minutes counted. She snatched up a cloak, pushed Robert out through the door and hurried him along the hall and out into the street where his car waited. "We must hurry," she said breathlessly. "We can get to the spaceship ahead of schedule, before your flight partner arrives, and be gone from Earth before anyone knows what is happening. I'll be with you, in his place." Robert did not offer to help her into the car, but got in first and waited until she closed the door behind her, then sped away from the curb and through the streets to the spaceport. Ninon said, "Tell me, Robert, isn't it true that if a clock recedes from Earth at the speed of light, and if we could watch it as it did so, it would still be running but it would never show later time?" The young man said gruffly, "Roughly so, according to theory." "And if the clock went away from Earth faster than the speed of light, wouldn't it run backwards?" The answer was curtly cautious. "It might appear to." "Then if people travel at the speed of light they won't get any older?" Robert flicked a curious glance at her. "If you could watch them from Earth they appear not to. But it's a matter of relativity...." Ninon rushed on. She had studied that book carefully. "And if people travel faster than light, a lot faster, they'll grow younger, won't they?" Robert said, "So that's what's in your mind." He busied himself with parking the car at the spaceport, then went on: "You want to go back in the past thirty years, and be a girl again. While I grow younger, too, into a boy, then a child, a baby, at last nothing...." "I'll try to be sorry for you, Robert." Ninon felt again for her beta-gun as he stared at her for a long minute, his gaze a curious mixture of amusement and pity. Then, "Come on," he said flatly, turning to lead the way to the gleaming space ship which poised, towering like a spire, in the center of the blast-off basin. And added, "I think I shall enjoy this trip, Madame, more than you will." The young man's words seemed to imply a secret knowledge that Ninon did not possess. A sudden chill of apprehension rippled through her, and almost she turned back. But no ... there was the ship! There was youth; and beauty; and the admiration of men, real admiration. Suppleness in her muscles and joints again. No more diets. No more transfusions. No more transplantations. No more the bio-knife. She could smile again, or frown again. And after a few years she could make the trip again ... and again.... The space ship stood on fiery tiptoes and leaped from Earth, high into the heavens, and out and away. Past rusted Mars. Past the busy asteroids. Past the sleeping giants, Jupiter and Saturn. Past pale Uranus and Neptune; and frigid, shivering Pluto. Past a senseless, flaming comet rushing inward towards its rendezvous with the Sun. And on out of the System into the steely blackness of space where the stars were hard, burnished points of light, unwinking, motionless; eyes—eyes staring at the ship, staring through the ports at Ninon where she lay, stiff and bruised and sore, in the contoured acceleration sling. The yammering rockets cut off, and the ship seemed to poise on the ebon lip of a vast Stygian abyss. Joints creaking, muscles protesting, Ninon pushed herself up and out of the sling against the artificial gravity of the ship. Robert was already seated at the controls. "How fast are we going?" she asked; and her voice was rusty and harsh. "Barely crawling, astronomically," he said shortly. "About forty-six thousand miles a minute." "Is that as fast as the speed of light?" "Hardly, Madame," he said, with a condescending chuckle. "Then make it go faster!" she screamed. "And faster and faster—hurry! What are we waiting for?" The young spaceman swivelled about in his seat. He looked haggard and drawn from the strain of the long acceleration. Despite herself, Ninon could feel the sagging in her own face; the sunkenness of her eyes. She felt tired, hating herself for it—hating having this young man see her. He said, "The ship is on automatic control throughout. The course is plotted in advance; all operations are plotted. There is nothing we can do but wait. The light drive will cut in at the planned time." "Time! Wait! That's all I hear!" Ninon shrieked. "Do something!" Then she heard it. A low moan, starting from below the limit of audibility, then climbing, up and up and up and up, until it was a nerve-plucking whine that tore into her brain like a white-hot tuning fork. And still it climbed, up beyond the range of hearing, and up and up still more, till it could no longer be felt. But Ninon, as she stumbled back into the acceleration sling, sick and shaken, knew it was still there. The light drive! She watched through the ports. The motionless, silent stars were moving now, coming toward them, faster and faster, as the ship swept out of the galaxy, shooting into her face like blazing pebbles from a giant slingshot. She asked, "How fast are we going now?" Robert's voice sounded far off as he replied, "We are approaching the speed of light." "Make it go faster!" she cried. "Faster! Faster!" She looked out the ports again; looked back behind them—and saw shining specks of glittering blackness falling away to melt into the sootiness of space. She shuddered, and knew without asking that these were stars dropping behind at a rate greater than light speed. "Now how fast are we going?" she asked. She was sure that her voice was stronger; that strength was flowing back into her muscles and bones. "Nearly twice light speed." "Faster!" she cried. "We must go much faster! I must be young again. Youthful, and gay, and alive and happy.... Tell me, Robert, do you feel younger yet?" He did not answer. Ninon lay in the acceleration sling, gaining strength, and—she knew—youth. Her lost youth, coming back, to be spent all over again. How wonderful! No woman in all of time and history had ever done it. She would be immortal; forever young and lovely. She hardly noticed the stiffness in her joints when she got to her feet again—it was just from lying in the sling so long. She made her voice light and gay. "Are we not going very, very fast, now, Robert?" He answered without turning. "Yes. Many times the speed of light." "I knew it ... I knew it! Already I feel much younger. Don't you feel it too?" He did not answer, and Ninon kept on talking. "How long have we been going, Robert?" He said, "I don't know ... depends on where you are." "It must be hours ... days ... weeks. I should be hungry. Yes, I think I am hungry. I'll need food, lots of food. Young people have good appetites, don't they, Robert?" He pointed to the provisions locker, and she got food out and made it ready. But she could eat but a few mouthfuls. It's the excitement , she told herself. After all, no other woman, ever, had gone back through the years to be young again.... Long hours she rested in the sling, gaining more strength for the day when they would land back on Earth and she could step out in all the springy vitality of a girl of twenty. And then as she watched through the ingenious ports she saw the stars of the far galaxies beginning to wheel about through space, and she knew that the ship had reached the halfway point and was turning to speed back through space to Earth, uncounted light-years behind them—or before them. And she would still continue to grow younger and younger.... She gazed at the slightly-blurred figure of the young spaceman on the far side of the compartment, focussing her eyes with effort. "You are looking much younger, Robert," she said. "Yes, I think you are becoming quite boyish, almost childish, in appearance." He nodded slightly. "You may be right," he said. "I must have a mirror," she cried. "I must see for myself how much younger I have become. I'll hardly recognize myself...." "There is no mirror," he told her. "No mirror? But how can I see...." "Non-essentials were not included in the supplies on this ship. Mirrors are not essential—to men." The mocking gravity in his voice infuriated her. "Then you shall be my mirror," she said. "Tell me, Robert, am I not now much younger? Am I not becoming more and more beautiful? Am I not in truth the most desirable of women?... But I forget. After all, you are only a boy, by now." He said, "I'm afraid our scientists will have some new and interesting data on the effects of time in relation to time. Before long we'll begin to decelerate. It won't be easy or pleasant. I'll try to make you as comfortable as possible." Ninon felt her face go white and stiff with rage. "What do you mean?" Robert said, coldly brutal, "You're looking your age, Ninon. Every year of your fifty-two!" Ninon snatched out the little beta-gun, then, leveled it and fired. And watched without remorse as the hungry electrons streamed forth to strike the young spaceman, turning him into a motionless, glowing figure which rapidly became misty and wraith-like, at last to disappear, leaving only a swirl of sparkling haze where he had stood. This too disappeared as its separate particles drifted to the metallite walls of the space ship, discharged their energy and ceased to sparkle, leaving only a thin film of dust over all. After a while Ninon got up again from the sling and made her way to the wall. She polished the dust away from a small area of it, trying to make the spot gleam enough so that she could use it for a mirror. She polished a long time, until at last she could see a ghostly reflection of her face in the rubbed spot. Yes, unquestionably she was younger, more beautiful. Unquestionably Time was being kind to her, giving her back her youth. She was not sorry that Robert was gone—there would be many young men, men her own age, when she got back to Earth. And that would be soon. She must rest more, and be ready. The light drive cut off, and the great ship slowly decelerated as it found its way back into the galaxy from which it had started. Found its way back into the System which had borne it. Ninon watched through the port as it slid in past the outer planets. Had they changed? No, she could not see that they had—only she had changed—until Saturn loomed up through the port, so close by, it looked, that she might touch it. But Saturn had no rings. Here was change. She puzzled over it a moment, frowning then forgot it when she recognized Jupiter again as Saturn fell behind. Next would be Mars.... But what was this? Not Mars! Not any planet she knew, or had seen before. Yet there, ahead, was Mars! A new planet, where the asteroids had been when she left! Was this the same system? Had there been a mistake in the calculations of the scientists and engineers who had plotted the course of the ship? Was something wrong? But no matter—she was still Ninon. She was young and beautiful. And wherever she landed there would be excitement and rushing about as she told her story. And men would flock to her. Young, handsome men! She tottered back to the sling, sank gratefully into the comfort of it, closed her eyes, and waited. The ship landed automatically, lowering itself to the land on a pillar of rushing flame, needing no help from its passenger. Then the flame died away—and the ship—and Ninon—rested, quietly, serenely, while the rocket tubes crackled and cooled. The people outside gathered at a safe distance from it, waiting until they could come closer and greet the brave passengers who had voyaged through space from no one knew where. There was shouting and laughing and talking, and much speculation. "The ship is from Maris, the red planet," someone said. And another: "No, no! It is not of this system. See how the hull is pitted—it has traveled from afar." An old man cried: "It is a demon ship. It has come to destroy us all." A murmur went through the crowd, and some moved farther back for safety, watching with alert curiosity. Then an engineer ventured close, and said, "The workmanship is similar to that in the space ship we are building, yet not the same. It is obviously not of our Aerth." And a savant said, "Yes, not of this Aerth. But perhaps it is from a parallel time stream, where there is a system with planets and peoples like us." Then a hatch opened in the towering flank of the ship, and a ramp slid forth and slanted to the ground. The mingled voices of the crowd attended it. The fearful ones backed farther away. Some stood their ground. And the braver ones moved closer. But no one appeared in the open hatch; no one came down the ramp. At last the crowd surged forward again. Among them were a youth and a girl who stood, hand in hand, at the foot of the ramp, gazing at it and the ship with shining eyes, then at each other. She said, "I wonder, Robin, what it would be like to travel through far space on such a ship as that." He squeezed her hand and said, "We'll find out, Nina. Space travel will come, in our time, they've always said—and there is the proof of it." The girl rested her head against the young man's shoulder. "You'll be one of the first, won't you, Robin? And you'll take me with you?" He slipped an arm around her. "Of course. You know, Nina, our scientists say that if one could travel faster than the speed of light one could live in reverse. So when we get old we'll go out in space, very, very fast, and we'll grow young again, together!" Then a shout went up from the two men who had gone up the ramp into the ship to greet whoever was aboard. They came hurrying down, and Robin and Nina crowded forward to hear what they had to report. They were puffing from the rush of their excitement. "There is no one alive on the ship," they cried. "Only an old, withered, white-haired lady, lying dead ... and alone. She must have fared long and far to have lived so long, to be so old in death. Space travel must be pleasant, indeed. It made her very happy, very, very happy—for there is a smile on her face."

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The Anglers of Arz By Roger Dee Illustrated by BOB MARTIN [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction January 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] There were two pinkish, bipedal fishermen on the tiny islet. In order to make Izaak Walton's sport complete, there must be an angler, a fish, and some bait. All three existed on Arz but there was a question as to which was which. The third night of the Marco Four's landfall on the moonless Altarian planet was a repetition of the two before it, a nine-hour intermission of drowsy, pastoral peace. Navigator Arthur Farrell—it was his turn to stand watch—was sitting at an open-side port with a magnoscanner ready; but in spite of his vigilance he had not exposed a film when the inevitable pre-dawn rainbow began to shimmer over the eastern ocean. Sunrise brought him alert with a jerk, frowning at sight of two pinkish, bipedal Arzian fishermen posted on the tiny coral islet a quarter-mile offshore, their blank triangular faces turned stolidly toward the beach. "They're at it again," Farrell called, and dropped to the mossy turf outside. "Roll out on the double! I'm going to magnofilm this!" Stryker and Gibson came out of their sleeping cubicles reluctantly, belting on the loose shorts which all three wore in the balmy Arzian climate. Stryker blinked and yawned as he let himself through the port, his fringe of white hair tousled and his naked paunch sweating. He looked, Farrell thought for the thousandth time, more like a retired cook than like the veteran commander of a Terran Colonies expedition. Gibson followed, stretching his powerfully-muscled body like a wrestler to throw off the effects of sleep. Gibson was linguist-ethnologist of the crew, a blocky man in his early thirties with thick black hair and heavy brows that shaded a square, humorless face. "Any sign of the squids yet?" he asked. "They won't show up until the dragons come," Farrell said. He adjusted the light filter of the magnoscanner and scowled at Stryker. "Lee, I wish you'd let me break up the show this time with a dis-beam. This butchery gets on my nerves." Stryker shielded his eyes with his hands against the glare of sun on water. "You know I can't do that, Arthur. These Arzians may turn out to be Fifth Order beings or higher, and under Terran Regulations our tampering with what may be a basic culture-pattern would amount to armed invasion. We'll have to crack that cackle-and-grunt language of theirs and learn something of their mores before we can interfere." Farrell turned an irritable stare on the incurious group of Arzians gathering, nets and fishing spears in hand, at the edge of the sheltering bramble forest. "What stumps me is their motivation," he said. "Why do the fools go out to that islet every night, when they must know damned well what will happen next morning?" Gibson answered him with an older problem, his square face puzzled. "For that matter, what became of the city I saw when we came in through the stratosphere? It must be a tremendous thing, yet we've searched the entire globe in the scouter and found nothing but water and a scattering of little islands like this one, all covered with bramble. It wasn't a city these pink fishers could have built, either. The architecture was beyond them by a million years." Stryker and Farrell traded baffled looks. The city had become something of a fixation with Gibson, and his dogged insistence—coupled with an irritating habit of being right—had worn their patience thin. "There never was a city here, Gib," Stryker said. "You dozed off while we were making planetfall, that's all." Gibson stiffened resentfully, but Farrell's voice cut his protest short. "Get set! Here they come!" Out of the morning rainbow dropped a swarm of winged lizards, twenty feet in length and a glistening chlorophyll green in the early light. They stooped like hawks upon the islet offshore, burying the two Arzian fishers instantly under their snapping, threshing bodies. Then around the outcrop the sea boiled whitely, churned to foam by a sudden uprushing of black, octopoid shapes. "The squids," Stryker grunted. "Right on schedule. Two seconds too late, as usual, to stop the slaughter." A barrage of barbed tentacles lashed out of the foam and drove into the melee of winged lizards. The lizards took the air at once, leaving behind three of their number who disappeared under the surface like harpooned seals. No trace remained of the two Arzian natives. "A neat example of dog eat dog," Farrell said, snapping off the magnoscanner. "Do any of those beauties look like city-builders, Gib?" Chattering pink natives straggled past from the shelter of the thorn forest, ignoring the Earthmen, and lined the casting ledges along the beach to begin their day's fishing. "Nothing we've seen yet could have built that city," Gibson said stubbornly. "But it's here somewhere, and I'm going to find it. Will either of you be using the scouter today?" Stryker threw up his hands. "I've a mountain of data to collate, and Arthur is off duty after standing watch last night. Help yourself, but you won't find anything." The scouter was a speeding dot on the horizon when Farrell crawled into his sleeping cubicle a short time later, leaving Stryker to mutter over his litter of notes. Sleep did not come to him at once; a vague sense of something overlooked prodded irritatingly at the back of his consciousness, but it was not until drowsiness had finally overtaken him that the discrepancy assumed definite form. He recalled then that on the first day of the Marco's planetfall one of the pink fishers had fallen from a casting ledge into the water, and had all but drowned before his fellows pulled him out with extended spear-shafts. Which meant that the fishers could not swim, else some would surely have gone in after him. And the Marco's crew had explored Arz exhaustively without finding any slightest trace of boats or of boat landings. The train of association completed itself with automatic logic, almost rousing Farrell out of his doze. "I'll be damned," he muttered. "No boats, and they don't swim. Then how the devil do they get out to that islet? " He fell asleep with the paradox unresolved. Stryker was still humped over his records when Farrell came out of his cubicle and broke a packaged meal from the food locker. The visicom over the control board hummed softly, its screen blank on open channel. "Gibson found his lost city yet?" Farrell asked, and grinned when Stryker snorted. "He's scouring the daylight side now," Stryker said. "Arthur, I'm going to ground Gib tomorrow, much as I dislike giving him a direct order. He's got that phantom city on the brain, and he lacks the imagination to understand how dangerous to our assignment an obsession of that sort can be." Farrell shrugged. "I'd agree with you offhand if it weren't for Gib's bullheaded habit of being right. I hope he finds it soon, if it's here. I'll probably be standing his watch until he's satisfied." Stryker looked relieved. "Would you mind taking it tonight? I'm completely bushed after today's logging." Farrell waved a hand and took up his magnoscanner. It was dark outside already, the close, soft night of a moonless tropical world whose moist atmosphere absorbed even starlight. He dragged a chair to the open port and packed his pipe, settling himself comfortably while Stryker mixed a nightcap before turning in. Later he remembered that Stryker dissolved a tablet in his glass, but at the moment it meant nothing. In a matter of minutes the older man's snoring drifted to him, a sound faintly irritating against the velvety hush outside. Farrell lit his pipe and turned to the inconsistencies he had uncovered. The Arzians did not swim, and without boats.... It occurred to him then that there had been two of the pink fishers on the islet each morning, and the coincidence made him sit up suddenly, startled. Why two? Why not three or four, or only one? He stepped out through the open lock and paced restlessly up and down on the springy turf, feeling the ocean breeze soft on his face. Three days of dull routine logwork had built up a need for physical action that chafed his temper; he was intrigued and at the same time annoyed by the enigmatic relation that linked the Arzian fishers to the dragons and squids, and his desire to understand that relation was aggravated by the knowledge that Arz could be a perfect world for Terran colonization. That is, he thought wryly, if Terran colonists could stomach the weird custom pursued by its natives of committing suicide in pairs. He went over again the improbable drama of the past three mornings, and found it not too unnatural until he came to the motivation and the means of transportation that placed the Arzians in pairs on the islet, when his whole fabric of speculation fell into a tangled snarl of inconsistencies. He gave it up finally; how could any Earthman rationalize the outlandish compulsions that actuated so alien a race? He went inside again, and the sound of Stryker's muffled snoring fanned his restlessness. He made his decision abruptly, laying aside the magnoscanner for a hand-flash and a pocket-sized audicom unit which he clipped to the belt of his shorts. He did not choose a weapon because he saw no need for one. The torch would show him how the natives reached the outcrop, and if he should need help the audicom would summon Stryker. Investigating without Stryker's sanction was, strictly speaking, a breach of Terran Regulations, but— "Damn Terran Regulations," he muttered. "I've got to know ." Farrell snapped on the torch at the edge of the thorn forest and entered briskly, eager for action now that he had begun. Just inside the edge of the bramble he came upon a pair of Arzians curled up together on the mossy ground, sleeping soundly, their triangular faces wholly blank and unrevealing. He worked deeper into the underbrush and found other sleeping couples, but nothing else. There were no humming insects, no twittering night-birds or scurrying rodents. He had worked his way close to the center of the island without further discovery and was on the point of turning back, disgusted, when something bulky and powerful seized him from behind. A sharp sting burned his shoulder, wasp-like, and a sudden overwhelming lassitude swept him into a darkness deeper than the Arzian night. His last conscious thought was not of his own danger, but of Stryker—asleep and unprotected behind the Marco's open port.... He was standing erect when he woke, his back to the open sea and a prismatic glimmer of early-dawn rainbow shining on the water before him. For a moment he was totally disoriented; then from the corner of an eye he caught the pinkish blur of an Arzian fisher standing beside him, and cried out hoarsely in sudden panic when he tried to turn his head and could not. He was on the coral outcropping offshore, and except for the involuntary muscles of balance and respiration his body was paralyzed. The first red glow of sunrise blurred the reflected rainbow at his feet, but for some seconds his shuttling mind was too busy to consider the danger of predicament. Whatever brought me here anesthetized me first , he thought. That sting in my shoulder was like a hypo needle. Panic seized him again when he remembered the green flying-lizards; more seconds passed before he gained control of himself, sweating with the effort. He had to get help. If he could switch on the audicom at his belt and call Stryker.... He bent every ounce of his will toward raising his right hand, and failed. His arm was like a limb of lead, its inertia too great to budge. He relaxed the effort with a groan, sweating again when he saw a fiery half-disk of sun on the water, edges blurred and distorted by tiny surface ripples. On shore he could see the Marco Four resting between thorn forest and beach, its silvered sides glistening with dew. The port was still open, and the empty carrier rack in the bow told him that Gibson had not yet returned with the scouter. He grew aware then that sensation was returning to him slowly, that the cold surface of the audicom unit at his hip—unfelt before—was pressing against the inner curve of his elbow. He bent his will again toward motion; this time the arm tensed a little, enough to send hope flaring through him. If he could put pressure enough against the stud.... The tiny click of its engaging sent him faint with relief. "Stryker!" he yelled. "Lee, roll out— Stryker !" The audicom hummed gently, without answer. He gathered himself for another shout, and recalled with a chill of horror the tablet Stryker had mixed into his nightcap the night before. Worn out by his work, Stryker had made certain that he would not be easily disturbed. The flattened sun-disk on the water brightened and grew rounder. Above its reflected glare he caught a flicker of movement, a restless suggestion of flapping wings. He tried again. "Stryker, help me! I'm on the islet!" The audicom crackled. The voice that answered was not Stryker's, but Gibson's. "Farrell! What the devil are you doing on that butcher's block?" Farrell fought down an insane desire to laugh. "Never mind that—get here fast, Gib! The flying-lizards—" He broke off, seeing for the first time the octopods that ringed the outcrop just under the surface of the water, waiting with barbed tentacles spread and yellow eyes studying him glassily. He heard the unmistakable flapping of wings behind and above him then, and thought with shock-born lucidity: I wanted a backstage look at this show, and now I'm one of the cast . The scouter roared in from the west across the thorn forest, flashing so close above his head that he felt the wind of its passage. Almost instantly he heard the shrilling blast of its emergency bow jets as Gibson met the lizard swarm head on. Gibson's voice came tinnily from the audicom. "Scattered them for the moment, Arthur—blinded the whole crew with the exhaust, I think. Stand fast, now. I'm going to pick you up." The scouter settled on the outcrop beside Farrell, so close that the hot wash of its exhaust gases scorched his bare legs. Gibson put out thick brown arms and hauled him inside like a straw man, ignoring the native. The scouter darted for shore with Farrell lying across Gibson's knees in the cockpit, his head hanging half overside. Farrell had a last dizzy glimpse of the islet against the rush of green water below, and felt his shaky laugh of relief stick in his throat. Two of the octopods were swimming strongly for shore, holding the rigid Arzian native carefully above water between them. "Gib," Farrell croaked. "Gib, can you risk a look back? I think I've gone mad." The scouter swerved briefly as Gibson looked back. "You're all right, Arthur. Just hang on tight. I'll explain everything when we get you safe in the Marco ." Farrell forced himself to relax, more relieved than alarmed by the painful pricking of returning sensation. "I might have known it, damn you," he said. "You found your lost city, didn't you?" Gibson sounded a little disgusted, as if he were still angry with himself over some private stupidity. "I'd have found it sooner if I'd had any brains. It was under water, of course." In the Marco Four , Gibson routed Stryker out of his cubicle and mixed drinks around, leaving Farrell comfortably relaxed in the padded control chair. The paralysis was still wearing off slowly, easing Farrell's fear of being permanently disabled. "We never saw the city from the scouter because we didn't go high enough," Gibson said. "I realized that finally, remembering how they used high-altitude blimps during the First Wars to spot submarines, and when I took the scouter up far enough there it was, at the ocean bottom—a city to compare with anything men ever built." Stryker stared. "A marine city? What use would sea-creatures have for buildings?" "None," Gibson said. "I think the city must have been built ages ago—by men or by a manlike race, judging from the architecture—and was submerged later by a sinking of land masses that killed off the original builders and left Arz nothing but an oversized archipelago. The squids took over then, and from all appearances they've developed a culture of their own." "I don't see it," Stryker complained, shaking his head. "The pink fishers—" "Are cattle, or less," Gibson finished. "The octopods are the dominant race, and they're so far above Fifth Order that we're completely out of bounds here. Under Terran Regulations we can't colonize Arz. It would be armed invasion." "Invasion of a squid world?" Farrell protested, baffled. "Why should surface colonization conflict with an undersea culture, Gib? Why couldn't we share the planet?" "Because the octopods own the islands too, and keep them policed," Gibson said patiently. "They even own the pink fishers. It was one of the squid-people, making a dry-land canvass of his preserve here to pick a couple of victims for this morning's show, that carried you off last night." "Behold a familiar pattern shaping up," Stryker said. He laughed suddenly, a great irrepressible bellow of sound. "Arz is a squid's world, Arthur, don't you see? And like most civilized peoples, they're sportsmen. The flying-lizards are the game they hunt, and they raise the pink fishers for—" Farrell swore in astonishment. "Then those poor devils are put out there deliberately, like worms on a hook—angling in reverse! No wonder I couldn't spot their motivation!" Gibson got up and sealed the port, shutting out the soft morning breeze. "Colonization being out of the question, we may as well move on before the octopods get curious enough about us to make trouble. Do you feel up to the acceleration, Arthur?" Farrell and Stryker looked at each other, grinning. Farrell said: "You don't think I want to stick here and be used for bait again, do you?" He and Stryker were still grinning over it when Gibson, unamused, blasted the Marco Four free of Arz.

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PEGGY PLAYS OFF-BROADWAY I Cast Call “First casting calls are so difficult,” Peggy Lane said, looking ruefully at the fifty or more actresses and actors who milled about nervously, chatting with one another, or sat on the few folding chairs trying to read. “With only nine roles to be filled,” she continued, “it doesn’t matter how good these people are; most of them just haven’t got a chance. I can’t help feeling sorry for them—for all of us, I mean. After all, I’m trying for a part, too.” Peggy’s friend and housemate, Amy Preston, smiled in agreement and said, “It’s not an easy business, honey, is it? But the ones I feel sorriest for right now are Mal and Randy. After all, they have the unpleasant job of choosing and refusing, and a lot of these folks are their friends. I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes.” 2 Peggy nodded thoughtfully, and reflected that it must, indeed, be more wearing on the boys. Mallory Seton, director of the new play, had been an upper-class student at the Academy when Peggy had started there, and he was a good friend of hers. She had worked with him before, as a general assistant, when they had discovered a theater. It would not be easy for him to consider Peggy for an acting role, and to do so completely without bias. It would not be a question of playing favorites, Peggy knew, but quite the reverse. Mal’s sense of fair play would make him bend over backward to keep from giving favors to his friends. If she was to get a role in this new production, she would really have to work for it. And if it was difficult for Mal, she thought, it was more so for Randy Brewster, the author of the play, for her friendship with him was of a different sort than with Mal. Mal was just a friend—a good one, to be sure—but with Randy Brewster, somehow, things were different. There was nothing “serious,” she assured herself, but they had gone on dates together with a regularity that was a little more than casual and, whatever his feelings were for her, she was sure that they were more complicated than Mal’s. “Do you think they’ll ever get through all these people?” Amy asked, interrupting her thoughts. “How can they hope to hear so many actors read for them in just one afternoon?” “Oh, they won’t be doing readings today,” Peggy replied, glad to turn her attention from what was becoming a difficult subject for thought. “This is just a first cast call. All they want to do today is pick people for type. They’ll select all the possible ones, send the impossible ones away, and then go into elimination readings later.” 3 “But what if the people they pick for looks can’t act?” Amy asked. “And what if some of the rejects are wonderful actors?” “They won’t go back to the rejects,” Peggy explained, “because they both have a pretty good idea of what the characters in the play should look like. And if the people they pick aren’t good enough actors, then they hold another cast call and try again. Mal says that sometimes certain parts are so hard to cast that they have to go through a dozen calls just to find one actor.” “It seems kind of unfair, doesn’t it, to be eliminated just because you’re not the right physical type,” Amy said, “but I can understand it. They have to start somewhere, and I guess that’s as good a place as any.” Then she smiled and added, “I guess I’m just feeling sorry for myself, because Mal told me there was no sense in my trying out at all, because I didn’t look or sound right for any part in the play. If I don’t get rid of this Southern accent of mine, I may never get a part at all, except in a Tennessee Williams play!” Peggy nodded sympathetically. “But it wasn’t just your accent, Amy,” she said. “It’s your looks, too. At least for this play. Mal and Randy told you that you’re just too pretty for any of the parts that fit your age, and that’s nothing to feel bad about. If anybody ought to feel insulted, it’s me, because they asked me to try out!” 4 “Oh, they were just sweet-talking me,” Amy replied. “And as for you, you know you don’t have to worry about your looks. You have a wonderful face! You can look beautiful, or comic, or pathetic, or cute or anything. I’m stuck with just being a South’n Belle, blond and helpless, po’ li’l ol’ me, lookin’ sad and sweet through those ol’ magnolia blossoms!” She broadened her slight, soft accent until it sounded like something you could spread on hot cornbread, and both girls broke into laughter that sounded odd in the strained atmosphere of the bare rehearsal studio. It was at this point that Mal and Randy came in, with pleasant, if somewhat brisk, nods to the assembled actors and actresses, and a special smile for Amy and Peggy. In a businesslike manner, they settled themselves at a table near the windows, spread out scripts and pads and pencils, and prepared for the chore that faced them. Amy, who was there to help the boys by acting as secretary for the occasion, wished Peggy good luck, and joined the boys at the table. Her job was to take names and addresses, and to jot down any facts about each actor that Randy and Mal wanted to be sure to remember. Mal started the proceedings by introducing himself and Randy. Then, estimating the crowd, he said, “Since there are fewer men here, and also fewer male roles to cast, we’re going to do them first. I hope that you ladies won’t mind. We won’t keep you waiting long, but if we worked with you first, we’d have these gentlemen waiting most of the day. Shall we get started?” After a brief glance at his notes, he called out, “First, I’d like to see businessman types, young forties. How many have we?” 5 Four men separated themselves from the crowd and approached the table. Peggy watched with interest as Mal and Randy looked them over, murmured to Amy to take notes, and asked questions. After a few minutes, the men left, two of them looking happy, two resigned. Then Mal stood and called for leading man types, late twenties or early thirties, tall and athletic. As six tall, athletic, handsome young men came forward, Peggy felt that she just couldn’t stand watching the casting interviews any longer. It reminded her too much of the livestock shows she had attended as a youngster in her home town of Rockport, Wisconsin. Necessary though it was, she felt it was hardly a way to have to deal with human beings. Slipping back through the crowd of waiting actors, she joined the actresses in the rear of the room, and found an empty seat next to a young girl. “Hi,” she said. “What’s the matter, can’t you watch it either?” The girl smiled in understanding. “It always upsets me,” she replied, “but it’s something we simply have to learn to live with. At least until we get well-known, or get agents to do this sort of thing for us.” “It sounds as if you’ve been in a few of these before,” Peggy said. “I have. But not here in the East,” the girl replied. “I’m from California, and I’ve been in a few little-theater things there, but nobody seems to pay much attention to them. I heard that off-Broadway theater in New York attracts a lot of critics, and I thought that I’d do better here. Have you had any luck?” “Oh, I’m just beginning,” Peggy said. “I’m still studying at the New York Dramatic Academy. I hope I can get some kind of supporting role in this play, but I don’t think I’m ready for anything big yet. By the way, my name is Peggy Lane. What’s yours?” 6 “I’m Paula Andrews,” the girl answered, “and maybe I’m shooting too high, but I’m trying out for the female lead. I hope I have a chance for it.” Peggy looked carefully at her new friend, at the somewhat uncertain smile that played about her well-formed, generous mouth and the intelligence that shone from her large, widely placed green eyes. Her rather long face was saved from severity by a soft halo of red-brown hair, the whole effect being an appealing combination of strength and feminine softness. “I think you do have a chance,” Peggy said. “In fact, if you can act, I bet you’ll get the part. I’ve read the play, and I know the author and director, and unless I’m way off, you look just the way the lead should look. In fact, it’s almost uncanny. You look as if you just walked out of the script!” “Oh, I hope you’re right!” Paula said with animation. “And I hope you get a part, too. I have a feeling that you’re going to bring me good luck!” “The one who needs luck is me, I’m afraid,” Peggy said. “Being friendly with Randy and Mal isn’t going to help me in the least, and I’m going to have to be awfully good to get the part. And it’s really important to me, too, because I’m getting near the end of my trial year.” “Trial year?” Paula asked curiously. 7 “Uh-huh. My parents agreed to let me come to New York to study acting and try for parts for a year, and I agreed that if I didn’t show signs of success before the year was up, I’d come home and go back to college. I’ve been here for eight months now, and I haven’t got anything to show my parents yet. The part I’m trying for now isn’t a big one, but it’s a good supporting role, and what’s more, we get paid. If I can show my mother and father that I can earn some money by acting, I’m sure that they’ll let me go on trying.” “But do you expect to make enough to live on right away?” Paula asked. “Oh, no! I’m not that naïve! But when my year is over at the Academy, I can always take a job as a typist or a secretary somewhere, while I look for parts. If you can type and take shorthand, you never have to worry about making a living.” “I wish that I could do those things,” Paula said wistfully. “The only way I’ve been able to make ends meet is by working in department stores as a salesgirl, and that doesn’t pay much. Besides, the work is so unsteady.” “My parents are very practical people,” Peggy said with a smile, “and they made sure that I learned routine office skills before they would let me think about other and more glamorous kinds of careers. Daddy owns the newspaper in our small town in Wisconsin, and I’ve worked with him as a typist and a reporter of sorts and as a proofreader, too. I’ll always be grateful that he made me learn all those things. I don’t think he has much faith in the acting business, but he’s been wonderful about giving me a chance. What do your parents think of your wanting to be an actress?” Instead of answering, Paula suddenly stood up. “Let’s go see how they’re coming with the actors,” she said. “I think they’re almost finished.” 8 Not wanting to press Paula further, and feeling that perhaps she had asked too personal a question on such short acquaintance, Peggy reluctantly stood too, and joined Paula to watch the last of what she now could only think of as the livestock show. As she drew closer to the table, she heard Mal saying, “I’m really sorry, Mr. Lang, but you’re just not the right type for the role. Perhaps some other....” and his voice trailed off in embarrassment. Lang, a short, thin, unhappy young man, answered almost tearfully, “But, Mr. Seton, looks aren’t everything. I’m really a funny comedian. Honestly! If you would only give me a chance to read for you, I know that I could make you change your mind about the way this character should look!” “I don’t doubt that you could,” Mal said gently, “but if you did, the play would suffer. I’m afraid the comedian we need for this must be a large, rather bluff-looking person, like these three gentlemen whom I have chosen to hear. The part calls for it. I’m sorry.” Mr. Lang nodded sadly, mumbled, “I understand,” and walked off, his head hanging and his hands thrust deep in his pockets, looking less like a comedian than any man in the world. Peggy watched him go, not knowing whether to feel sorrier for him or for Mal. “All right, gentlemen,” Mal called out. “That takes care of the male roles. All of you who are left will be given copies of the play to study, marked at the passages I want to hear. Be sure to read the whole play carefully, so that you understand the workings of the characters you have been selected to read. You have three days to look it over. We’ll meet at ten o’clock on Saturday morning at the Penthouse Theater to hear you. Thank you. And now for the ladies.” 9 The men left, after being given their scripts, and though they chatted amiably with one another, Peggy was sure that each was casting rather hostile looks toward others who were trying for the same parts. Keeping friendships in the theater was not an easy thing, she thought, particularly for people of similar physical types! Mal’s first concern in reviewing the actresses was, of course, for the leading role. And, of course, it was for this role that he had the most applicants. More than twenty girls came forward when the announcement was made, and Peggy thought that she had never seen so many striking and beautiful faces and figures. It was not going to be easy for Mal to make a choice. As Paula, her new friend, went forward to join the others, Peggy whispered a word of encouragement, then stood to one side to watch. Mal went down the line, regretfully dismissing one after the other of the girls, and occasionally asking one to step aside to try for another role. His tough-looking expression hardly varied as he spoke to each one, but Peggy thought she saw the ghost of a smile cross his face when he spoke to Paula Andrews. Another review of the remaining girls eliminated a few more. Finally, there were only four left, Paula among them. Mal thanked them, distributed scripts, and asked them to be at the Penthouse Theater on Saturday at noon. Paula returned to Peggy with eyes shining. “Oh, Peggy! I think you were right! I just know I’m going to get the part! I know it!” 10 “Don’t count too much on it,” Peggy cautioned, “or you may be too bitterly disappointed if you don’t get it. But,” she added, enthusiastically violating her own rule of caution, “I’m sure, too! I’ll see you Saturday. Even if I don’t get a script, I’ll be there just to hear you read!” Then, with a smile of farewell, Peggy turned her attention to the “career woman, early thirties” classification that Mal had called for next. Once that was out of the way, she knew it would be her turn. This time, there were not so many applicants and Peggy remembered Randy telling her that this would be one of their most difficult roles to cast. Only four actresses came forward, and Mal, with difficulty, reviewed them all. Unable to eliminate by type, he gave them all scripts and asked them to come to the theater. Then he called for “character ingénues” and Peggy joined seven other girls in the “livestock show.” Mal reviewed them carefully, managing to look at Peggy with complete lack of recognition. He gently eliminated three of them on the basis of hair coloring, height or general type. Another, curiously enough, was eliminated, like Amy, for a Southern accent, and a fifth, also like Amy, was too beautiful. “The part calls for a pretty girl,” Mal said with a rare smile, “but not for a girl so pretty that she’ll dominate the stage! It was a pleasure to look at you, but I’m afraid you’re not quite right for the part.” When he was done, Peggy and two others were given scripts and told to come to the theater on Saturday. Feeling lightheaded and giddy, Peggy settled herself on one of the folding chairs that lined the back wall, and waited for Mal, Randy, and Amy to finish so she could join them for coffee. 11 Scarcely noticing the rest of the proceedings, she thought only about the coming readings. She was so familiar with the play that she knew she had an advantage, perhaps unfairly, over the other two girls. She had watched the script grow from its first rough draft to the finished text now in her hands, and had discussed it with Randy through each revision. She knew she could play the part; in fact, she suspected secretly that Randy had written it for her, and the thought made her blush. Still, it would not be easy, she knew. Mal’s sense of fairness and his absolute devotion to the play above everything else would keep him from making up his mind in advance. But despite this knowledge, she could not help looking ahead—all the way ahead—to the restless stir of the opening-night audience out front, the last-minute preparations backstage, the bright, hot lights and the smell of make-up and scenery paint as she waited to go on in Act One, Scene One of Come Closer , Randy Brewster’s brilliant new play in which Peggy Lane would be discovered! 12 II The Hopefuls The audience consisted of a handful of actors and actresses, and Randy Brewster and Mallory Seton. The stage lighting was a cold splash produced by two floodlights without color gels to soften them. The scenery was the brick back wall of the stage, two ladders, a table and two straight-backed chairs. Only the front row of house lights was on, and the back of the theater was dark, empty and gloomy, a shadowy wasteland of empty rows of seats like tombstones. On the stage, a “businessman type” was reading his lines. Peggy knew, after the first few words, that he would not do. He had somehow completely missed the character of the man he was portraying, and was heavily overplaying. Mal, being perhaps more patient than Peggy, listened and watched with great care. Amy, who was acting as Mal’s assistant for the production, sat in a chair by the proscenium, reading her script by the light of a small lamp and feeding the actor cue lines. Mal followed the whole sequence with no visible sign of impatience and, when the actor was through, said, “Thank you. We’ll let you know our decision in a day or two.” 13 The next “businessman type” was better, but still not quite on target, Peggy thought. He seemed to be playing the part for laughs, and although there were some comic values to be extracted from the role, it was really far more a straight dramatic character. Still, he was clearly a better actor than the first, and with direction might do well. Following his reading, Mal again repeated his polite, invariable formula, “Thank you. We’ll let you know our decision in a day or two,” and called for the next reading. Peggy watched the remaining actors try for the role, and made mental notes of which ones were possible, which probable, and which stood no chance at all. The same process was then followed for the leading men, and the same wide range of talent and understanding of the part was displayed. Some seemed to have no idea at all about the play or its meaning, and Peggy was sure that these men had read only the parts marked for them. Others had a clear understanding of the kind of character they were playing, and tried to create him in the brief time they had on stage. Others still were actors who had one rather inflexible way of playing, and used it for all kinds of parts. Their performances were uniform imitations of each other, and all were imitations of the early acting style of Marlon Brando. They seemed to forget, Peggy thought, that Brando’s style developed from the roles he had to play, and that as he got other roles, he showed other facets of a rounded talent. It made her angry that some actors thought they could get ahead in a creative field by being imitative. 14 Each actor, no matter how good or how bad, was treated with impersonal courtesy by Mal, and each left looking sure that the part was his. Peggy was glad that she would not have to see their faces when they learned that they had not been selected. “The pity of it,” she whispered to Randy, “isn’t that there are so many bad ones, but that there are so many good ones, and that only one can be selected for each role. I wish there were some way of telling the good ones you can’t take that they were really good, but that you just couldn’t take everyone!” “You can’t let yourself worry about that,” Randy replied. “The good ones know they’re good, and they’re not going to be discouraged by the loss of a role. And the bad ones think they’re good, too, and most of them have tremendous egos to protect them from ever finding out—or even thinking—otherwise!” The door at the back of the theater opened quietly, and Peggy, turning around in her seat, saw a few of the actresses entering. They quietly found seats in the rear and settled down to await their turn. “I think I’ll go back there with the girls,” Peggy whispered. “I’m looking for a girl I met at the casting call, and I’d like to chat with her for a few minutes when she comes. Do you mind if I don’t look at all this?” Randy grinned. “Go ahead. I’d get out of here, too, if I could without getting Mal mad at me. This kind of thing always breaks my heart, too!” 15 As she went up the aisle as unobtrusively as possible, Peggy glanced at the actresses who had just come in. She recognized a few of their faces from the casting call of three days ago, but did not see her new friend among them. She decided to go out to the lobby to wait for her there. A new group of girls entered the theater as Peggy was leaving and, as she passed, one reached out and grabbed her arm. Peggy turned in surprise to find herself greeted with a broad grin and a quick companionable kiss. “Greta!” she cried. “What are you doing here?” “Come on out to the lobby, and I’ll tell you,” Greta Larsen said, with a toss of her head that made her thick blond braid spin around and settle over her shoulder. “But I thought you were in New Haven, getting ready to open Over the Hill ,” Peggy said, when they had reached the lobby. “What on earth are you doing here?” “I’m afraid you don’t read your Variety very carefully,” Greta said. “ Over the Hill opened in New Haven to such bad notices that the producer decided to close out of town. At first we thought he’d call in a play doctor to try to fix things up, but he finally decided, and very sensibly, that it would be easier to just throw the whole thing out. I’m afraid he lost a lot of money, and he didn’t have any more left.” “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Peggy said. “And it was a real chance for you, wasn’t it?” 16 “Not really,” Greta said. “The part wasn’t too good, and I’d just as soon not be in a disaster. Anyway, it gave me a chance to work for a few weeks, and an agent saw me and said he thought I was good, so maybe I’m not any the worse for the experience.” At that moment, Peggy saw Paula Andrews enter the lobby, and she motioned to her to join them. “Greta, this is Paula Andrews. She’s reading for the lead today, and I hope she gets it. Paula, I want you to meet Greta Larsen, one of my housemates.” “Housemates?” Paula questioned, a little puzzled. “Yes. There are about a dozen of us, more or less. We live in a place called the Gramercy Arms—a wonderful place—and we live like one big noisy family. The Arms is run just for young actresses, so we all have a lot in common. I haven’t seen Greta for weeks—she’s been out of town with a play—and I’m just getting over being stunned at seeing her now.” “Peggy tactfully neglected to mention that the play flopped,” Greta laughed, “and now I’m back in town without a job. In fact, that’s why I’m here.” “You mean you’re going to read for Mal?” Peggy asked excitedly. “Uh-huh. I met him on the street an hour or so ago, and he told me he had a part he thought I should try out for, and that he was thinking of me for it all along, but assumed that I wouldn’t be available. Well, you can’t be more available than I am, so here I am!” “Have you read the play?” Paula asked. “I’m lucky there,” Greta replied. “I’ve seen it in three different drafts since it started. Peggy’s friendly with Randy Brewster, the boy who wrote it, and each time she brought a draft home, I got to read it. So I’m not at a disadvantage.” 17 “What do you think of Come Closer , Paula?” asked Peggy. “I think it’s wonderful! I hope more than ever that I get the part! Do you really think I have a chance?” Greta nodded decisively. “If you can act, you’re made for it,” she said. “That’s just what Peggy said!” Peggy stole a glance through the doors to the theater. “I think we’re about ready to find out whether or not you can act,” she said. “They seem to be about through with the actors, and that means you’re on next!” Wishing each other good luck, they entered the darkened part of the house and prepared for what Peggy could only think of as their ordeal. Afterward, as Peggy, Amy, Paula, and Greta sat at a table in a nearby coffeehouse waiting for Mal and Randy to join them, each was sure that she had been terrible. “Oh, no!” Peggy said. “You two were just marvelous! But I couldn’t have been worse. I know I read the part wrong. I thought I had the character clear in my mind, but I’m sure that the way it came out was a mile off!” “You have a lot more talent than judgment,” Greta said mournfully. “You were perfect. And so was Paula. As for me....” Her voice trailed off in despair. “I don’t know how you can say that, Greta,” Paula put in. “I know you were the best in your part, and nobody even came close to Peggy. But I’ve never felt so off in my life as I did reading that part. It’s a wonder any of you even want to be seen with me!” 18 Only when Amy started to laugh did the three others realize how much alike they had sounded. Then they joined in the laughter and couldn’t seem to stop. When they seemed at the point of dissolving helplessly into a permanent attack of the giggles, Randy and Mal joined them. “If you’re laughing at the play,” Randy said gloomily, “I can hardly blame you. You never know just how badly you’ve written until someone gets up and starts to read your lines.” All at the same time, the girls started to reassure him and tell him how good the play was, and how badly the actors, including themselves, had handled the lines, but this was so much like their last exchange of conversation that once more they broke up in helpless laughter. When they got their breath back, and when coffee and pastry had been ordered, they tried to explain the cause of their hilarity to the boys. “... so, you see,” Peggy concluded, “we were each explaining how good the others were and how bad we were, and when Randy started telling us how bad he had been as a writer, we just couldn’t stand it!” It was Mal who got them back to sane ground. With his tough face, like a movie gangster’s or private detective’s, and his gentle, cultured English voice and assured manner, he calmly gave his opinion of the afternoon’s auditions.

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GRANDMA PERKINS AND THE SPACE PIRATES By JAMES McCONNELL Raven-haired, seductive Darling Toujours' smoke-and-flame eyes kindled sparks in hearts all over the universe. But it took sweet old Grandma Perkins, of the pirate ship Dirty Shame, to set the Jupiter moons on fire . [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "I can always get along with a man if he remembers who he is," said Darling Toujours, the raven-haired, creamy-skinned televideo actress whose smoke-and-flame eyes lit fires in hearts all over the solar system. She was credited with being the most beautiful woman alive and there were few who dared to contradict her when she mentioned it. "And I can always get along with a woman if she remembers who I am," replied Carlton E. Carlton, the acid-tongued author whose biting novels had won him universal fame. He leaned his thin, bony body back into the comfort of an overstuffed chair and favored the actress with a wicked smile. The two of them were sitting in the finest lounge of the luxury space ship Kismet , enjoying postprandial cocktails with Captain Homer Fogarty, the Kismet's rotund commanding officer. The Kismet was blasting through space at close to the speed of light, bound from Callisto, one of Jupiter's moons, back to Earth. But none of the two hundred Earthbound passengers were conscious of the speed at all. Darling Toujours waved a long cigarette holder at the author. "Don't pay any attention to him, Captain. You know how writers are—always putting words in other people's mouths, and not very good ones at that." "Do you mean not very good words or not very good mouths, my dear?" Carlton asked. The solar system's most famous actress clamped her scarlet lips shut with rage. It would take someone like Carlton E. Carlton, she knew, to point out the one minor blemish in an otherwise perfect body—her slightly over-sized mouth. She began to wish that she had never left Callisto, that she had cancelled her passage on the Kismet when she learned that Carlton was to be a fellow passenger. But her studio had wired her to return to Earth immediately to make a new series of three dimensional video films. And the Kismet was the only first class space ship flying to Earth for two weeks. So she had kept her ticket in spite of Carlton. "I must say that I think Miss Toujours has the prettiest mouth I've ever seen," boomed Captain Fogarty, his voice sounding something like a cross between a foghorn and a steam whistle. And he was not merely being gallant, for many a lonely night as he flew the darkness between Earth and the many planets, he had dreamed of caressing those lips. "And I think you are definitely a man of discriminating taste," said Darling demurely, crossing her legs and arranging her dress to expose a little more of the Toujours charms to the Captain's eye. Carlton smiled casually at the exposed flesh. "It's all very pretty, my dear," he said smugly. "But we've seen it all before and in space you're supposed to act like a lady, if you can act that well." Darling Toujours drew back her hand to smack Carlton one in a very unlady-like manner when she suddenly realized that they were not alone. Her hand froze, poised elegantly in mid-air, as she turned to see a newcomer standing at the door. The witness to the impending slap was a withered little lady, scarcely five feet tall, with silvered hair, eyes that twinkled like a March wind, and a friendly rash of wrinkles that gave her face the kindly, weathered appearance of an old stone idol. Her slight figure was lost in volumes of black cloth draped on her in a manner that had gone out of style at least fifty years before. The little woman coughed politely. "I beg your pardon," she told them in a sweet, high little voice. "I hope I didn't interrupt anything. If you would like to hit the gentleman, Miss Toujours, I'll be glad to come back later." Darling Toujours opened her violet eyes wide in surprise. "Why, I was ... I was ... I—" The actress uttered a small, gulping sound as she recovered her poise. "Why, I was just going to pat him on the cheek for being such a nice boy. You are a nice boy, aren't you, Carlton?" She leaned forward to stroke him gently on the face. Carlton roared with laughter and the good Captain colored deeply. "Oh," said the little old woman, "I'm sorry. I didn't know that he was your son." Carlton choked suddenly and Darling suffered from a brief fit of hysteria. The Captain took command. "Now, look here, Madam," he sputtered. "What is it you want?" "I really wanted to see you, Captain," she told him, her battered old shoes bringing her fully into the room with little mincing steps. "The Purser says I have to sign a contract of some kind with you, and I wanted to know how to write my name. I'm Mrs. Omar K. Perkins, but you see, I'm really Mrs. Matilda Perkins because my Omar died a few years ago. But I haven't signed my name very much since then and I'm not at all sure of which is legal." She put one bird-like little hand to her throat and clasped the cameo there almost as if it could give her support. She looked so small and so frail that Fogarty forgave her the intrusion. "It really doesn't make much difference how you sign the thing, just so long as you sign it," he blustered. "Just a mere formality anyway. You just sign it any way you like." He paused, hoping that she would leave now that she had her information. "Oh, I'm so glad to hear that," she said, but made no move whatsoever to leave. Captain Fogarty gave her his hardened stare of the type which withered most people where they stood. Mrs. Perkins just smiled sweetly at him. His rage getting out of hand, he finally blurted, "And now, Mrs. Perkins, I think you'd better be getting back to your quarters. As you know, this is a private lounge for the first class passengers." Mrs. Perkins continued to smile at him. "Yes, I know. It's lovely, isn't it? I'll just go out this way." And before anyone could stop her, she had moved to the door to Darling Toujours' suite and had opened it, stepping inside. "That's my room, not the door out," Darling said loudly. "So I see," said Mrs. Perkins, staring at the opulent furnishings with avid pleasure. "It's such a pretty thing, all done up with mother-of-pearl like that, isn't it? And what a pretty lace nightie lying on the bed." Mrs. Perkins picked up the sheer, gossamer garment to examine it. "You do wear something under it, don't you?" Darling screeched and darted for the door. She snatched the nightie away from Mrs. Perkins and rudely propelled the older woman out the door, closing it behind her. "Captain, this woman must GO!" "I was just leaving, Miss Toujours. I hope you and your son have a very happy voyage. Good day, Captain Fogarty," she called over her shoulder as she exited. Carlton E. Carlton's shrill laughter followed her down the companionway. Mrs. Perkins had been lying in her berth reading for less than an hour when the knock sounded at her door. She would have preferred to sit up and read, but her cabin was so small that there was no room for any other furniture besides the bed. "Come in," she called in a small voice. Johnny Weaver, steward for the cheaper cabins, poked his youthful, freckled face through the door. "Howdy, Mrs. Perkins. I wondered if I could do anything for you? It's about ten minutes before we eat." "Well, you can pull that big box down from the top shelf there, if you don't mind. And, I wonder, would you mind calling me Grandma? All my children do it and I miss it so." She gave him a wrinkled smile that was at once wistful and petulant. Johnny laughed in an easy, infectious manner. "Sure thing, Grandma." He stretched his long arms up to bring down the heavy bag and found himself wondering just how it had gotten up there in the first place. He didn't remember ever putting it there for her and Grandma Perkins was obviously too frail a woman to have handled such a heavy box by herself. He put it on the floor. As she stooped over and extracted a pair of low-heeled, black and battered shoes from the box, she asked him, "Johnny, what was that paper I signed this afternoon?" "Oh, that? Why that was just a contract for passage, Grandma. You guaranteed to pay them so much for the flight, which you've already done, and they guaranteed that you wouldn't be put off against your will until you reached your destination." "But why do we have to have a contract?" Johnny leaned back, relaxing against the door. "Well, STAR—that's Stellar Transportation and Atomic Research, you know—is one of the thirteen monopolies in this part of the solar system. The "Big Thirteen," we call them. STAR charters every space flight in this neck of the woods. Well, back in the old days, when space flights were scarce, it used to be that you'd pay for a ticket from Saturn to Earth, say, and you'd get to Mars and they'd stop for fuel. Maybe somebody on Mars would offer a lot of money for your cabin. So STAR would just bump you off, refund part of your money and leave you stranded there. In order to get the monopoly, they had to promise to stop all that. And the Solar Congress makes them sign contracts guaranteeing you that they won't put you off against your wishes. Of course, they don't dare do it anymore anyway, but that's the law." Grandma Perkins sighed. "It's such a small cabin I don't think anybody else would want it. But it's all that I could afford," she said, smoothing out the wrinkles in her dress with both hands. "Anything else I can do for you, Grandma?" "No, thank you, Johnny. I think I can make it up the steps to the dining room by myself." A little while later when Johnny looked into her room to see if she had gone, the cabin was empty and the heavy box was back in place in the top cabinet. The food that evening was not the very best, Grandma Perkins thought to herself, but that was mostly due to her seat. By the time the waiter got around to her little cranny most of it was cold. But she didn't complain. She enjoyed watching the people with the more expensive cabins parade their clothes and their manners at the Captain's table. And, it must be admitted, she was more than a trifle envious of them. Her acquaintances of the afternoon, Miss Toujours and Mr. Carlton, were seated there, Miss Toujours having the place of honor to the Captain's right. Grandma watched them as they finished up their food and then she moved from her little table over to one of the very comfortable sofas in the main lounge. In reality she wasn't supposed to be sitting there, but she hoped that she could get away with it. The divans were so much more comfortable than her hard, narrow bed that she felt like sitting there for a long time, by herself, just thinking. But her hopes met with disappointment. For shortly after she sat down, Darling Toujours and Carlton E. Carlton strolled over and sat down across from her, not recognizing her at first. Then Carlton spied her. "Darling! There's that priceless little woman we met this afternoon." "The little hag, you mean," Miss Toujours muttered under her breath, but loudly enough for Grandma Perkins to hear. "Why, hello, Miss Toujours. And Mr. Carlton too. I hope you'll forgive me for this afternoon. I've found out who you were, you see." "Of course we forgive you, Mrs. Jerkins," Darling said throatily, baring her teeth like a feline. "My name is Perkins," Grandma smiled. "I hope you don't mind, Toujours, but you know, you remind me a great deal of my grandniece, Agatha. She was undoubtedly the most lovely child I've ever seen." "Why, thank you, Mrs. Perkins," Darling purred, starting to preen just a bit. Anything could be forgiven someone who complimented her. "Of course, Agatha never was quite bright," Grandma said as she turned her head aside as if in sorrow. "They were all set to put her in an institution when she ran off and married the lizard man in a carnival. I believe she's still appearing in the show as the bearded lady. A pity. She was so pretty, just like you." Darling Toujours muttered a few choice words under her breath. "But we must all make the best of things as they come. That's what Omar, my husband, used to say." Grandma paused to wipe away a small tear that had gotten lodged in one of her eyes. "That reminds me," she said finally, "I've got a three dimensional picture of Omar right here. And pictures of all my children, my ten lovely children. I brought them with me specially tonight because I thought you might want to look at them. Now, where did I put them?" Grandma opened her purse and began rummaging around in its voluminous confines. Darling and Carlton exchanged horrified glances and then rose silently and tip-toed out of the lounge. Grandma looked up from her search. "Oh, my, they seem to have gone." Johnny Weaver, who had been clearing one of the nearby tables, put down a stack of dirty dishes and came over to her. "I'd like to see the pictures, Grandma." "Oh, that's very nice of you, Johnny, but—" she said quickly. "Really I would, Grandma. Where are they?" "I—" She stopped and the devilment showed in her eyes. Her withered little face pursed itself into a smile. "There aren't any pictures, Johnny. I don't carry any. I know their faces all so well I don't have to. But any time I want to get rid of somebody I just offer to show them pictures of my family. You'd be surprised how effective it is." Johnny laughed. "Why are you going to Earth, anyway, Grandma?" The old woman sighed. "It's a long story, Johnny, but you just sit down and I'll tell it to you." "I can't sit down in the lounge, but I'll be glad to stand up and listen." "Then I'll make it a short story. You see, Johnny, I'm an old woman. I'll be 152 this year. And ever since Omar, my husband, died a few years ago, I've lived from pillar to post. First with one child and then with another. They've all been married for decades now of course, with children and grandchildren of their own. And I guess that I just get in their way. There just isn't much left in life for a feeble old woman like me." She sniffled a moment or two as if to cry. Johnny, remembering the heavy box in her cabin that got moved up and down without his help, suppressed a smile on the word "feeble." "There aren't many friends my age left around any more. So I'm being sent to Earth to a home full of dear, sweet old ladies my age, the money for which is being provided by my dear, sweet children—all ten of them." Grandma dabbed a bit of a handkerchief at her eyes. "The rats," she muttered under her breath. When she saw her companion was smiling she dropped her pretense of crying. "To be truthful, Johnny, they've grown old and stodgy, all of them. And I'm sure they think I've lost most of my marbles. Everything I did embarrassed them, so I guess it's for the best, but—" Grandma Perkins never finished the sentence, for interrupting her came the horrendous clang of the Kismet's general alarm, and on its heels, charging through the main salon like a rhinoceros in heat, came Captain Fogarty. "PIRATES! PIRATES! We're being attacked by space pirates! You there!" he shouted at Johnny. "Man your station! And you, Madam, to your quarters at once! PIRATES!" he shouted again and barged through the door again and bellowed down the hall to the main bridge. Johnny was off like a startled rabbit, but Grandma moved with serene calmness to the door. Maybe, she thought, we're going to have a little excitement after all. At the door to the steps leading to her downstairs cabin she paused to think. "If I go down and hide, I'll miss all the fun. Of course, it's safer, and an old woman like me shouldn't be up and about when pirates are around, but—" A delicious smile spread over her face as she took her scruples firmly in hand and turned to follow the bellowing Captain towards the bridge. II The Starship Kismet was the pride and joy of Stellar Transportation and Atomic Research. It was outfitted with every known safety device and the control room was masterfully planned for maximum efficiency. But the astral architect who designed her never anticipated the situation facing her at the present. The Kismet's bridge was a welter of confusion. The Senior Watch Officer was shouting at his assistant, the Navigator was cursing out the Pilot and the Gunnery Officer, whose job had been a sinecure until now, was bellowing at them all. Above the hubbub, suddenly, came the raucous voice of Captain Fogarty as he stalked onto the bridge. "What in great space has happened to the motors? Why are we losing speed?" The Senior Watch Officer saluted and shouted, "Engine Room reports the engines have all stopped, Sir. Don't know why. We're operating the lights and vents on emergency power." The Communications Officer spoke up. "The pirate ship reports that they're responsible, Sir. They say they've got a new device that will leave us without atomic power for as long as they like." As if to confirm this, over the loudspeaker came a voice. "Ahoy, STAR Kismet . Stand by for boarders. If you don't open up to us, we'll blast you off the map." "Pirates! Attacking us! Incredible!" cried the Captain. "There are no pirates any more. What have we got a Space Patrol for? Where in blazes is the Space Patrol anyway?" The Communications Officer gulped. "Er, ah, we got in contact with Commodore Trumble. He says his ship can get here in ten hours anyway, and for us to wait for him." Captain Fogarty snorted. "Fat lot of good he'll do us. Wait for him, eh? Well, we'll just blow that pirate out of the sky right now. Stand by the guns!" "The guns are useless," whined the Gunnery Officer. "The atomics that run them won't operate at all. What will we do?" "Ahoy, STAR Kismet . Open up your hatches when we arrive and let us in, or we won't spare a man of you," boomed the loudspeaker. "Pirates going to board us. How nice," muttered Grandma to herself as she eavesdropped just outside the door to the bridge. "They'll never get through the hatches alive. At least our small arms still work. We'll kill 'em all!" cried Captain Fogarty. "We only want one of you. All the rest of you will be spared if you open up the hatches and don't try to make no trouble," came the voice over the radio. "Tell them I'd rather all of us be killed than to let one dirty pirate on board my ship," the Captain shouted to the Communications Officer. "Oh, my goodness. That doesn't sound very smart," Grandma said half aloud. And turning from the doorway, she crept back through the deserted passageway. The main passenger hatch was not too far from the bridge. Grandma found it with ease, and in less than three minutes she had zipped herself into one of the emergency-use space suits stowed away beside the port. She felt awfully awkward climbing into the monstrous steel and plastic contraption, and her small body didn't quite fit the proportions of the metallic covering. But once she had maneuvered herself into it, she felt quite at ease. Opening the inner door to the airlock, she clanked into the little room. As the door shut behind her, she pressed the cycling button and evacuated the air from the lock. A minute or so later she heard poundings outside the airlock and quite calmly she reached out a mailed fist and turned a switch plainly marked: EMERGENCY LOCK DO NOT OPERATE IN FLIGHT The outer hatch opened almost immediately. The radio in Grandma's suit crackled with static. "What are you doing here?" demanded a voice over the suit radio. "Pirates! I'm hiding from the pirates. They'll never find me here!" she told them in a voice she hoped sounded full of panic. "What's your name?" asked the voice. "Darling Toujours, famous television actress," she lied quite calmly. "That's the one, boys," said another voice. "Let's go." Catching hold of Grandma's arm, they led her out into the emptiness of free space. Half an hour later, after the pirate ship had blasted far enough away from the Kismet , the men in the control room relaxed and began to take off their space suits. One of the men who Grandma soon learned was Lamps O'Toole, the nominal leader of the pirates, stretched his brawny body to ease the crinks out of it and then rubbed his hands together. Grandma noticed that he carried a week's beard on his face, as did most of the other men. "Well, that was a good one, eh, Snake?" said Lamps. Snake Simpson was a wiry little man whose tough exterior in no way suggested a reptile, except, perhaps, for his eyes which sat too close to one another. "You bet, Skipper. We're full fledged pirates now, just like old Captain Blackbrood." "You mean Blackbeard, Snake," said Lamps. "Sure. He used to sit around broodin' up trouble all the time." One of the other men piped up. "And to think we get the pleasurable company of the sweetest doll in the whole solar system for free besides the money." "Aw, women are no dern good—all of them," said Snake. "Now, Snake, that's no way to talk in front of company. You just apologize to the lady," Lamps told him. Lamps was six inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than Snake. Snake apologized. "That's better. And now, Miss Toujours, maybe you'd be more comfortable without that space suit on," he said. "Oh, no, thank you. I feel much better with it on," a small voice said over the suit's loudspeaker system. Lamps grinned. "Oh, come now, Miss Toujours. We ain't going to hurt you. I guarantee nobody will lay a finger to you." "But I feel much—much safer, if you know what I mean," said the voice. "Heck. With one of them things on, you can't eat, can't sleep, can't—Well, there's lots of things you can't do with one of them things on. Besides, we all want to take a little look at you, if you don't mind. Snake, you and Willie help the little lady out of her attire." As the men approached her, Grandma sensed the game was up. "Okay," she told them. "I give up. I can make it by myself." She started to take the bulky covering off. She had gotten no more than the headpiece off when the truth dawned on her companions. "Holy Smoke (or something like that)," said one of the men. "Nippin' Nebulae," said another. "It ain't Darling Toujours at all!" cried Lamps. "It ain't even no woman!" cried Snake. "I beg your pardon," said Grandma, and quite nonchalantly shed the rest of the suit and sat down in a comfortable chair. "I am Mrs. Matilda Perkins." When he could recover his powers of speech, Lamps sputtered, "I think you owe us a sort of an explanation, lady. If you know what I mean." "Certainly. I know exactly what you mean. It's all quite simple. When I overheard that you intended to board the Kismet , searching for only one person, I decided that one person had to be Darling Toujours. I guessed right off that she was the only one on board worth kidnapping and holding for ransom, so I simply let you believe that I was she and you took me. That's easy to understand, isn't it?" "Lady, I don't know what your game is, but it better be good. Now, just why did you do this to us?" Lamps was restraining himself nobly. "You never would have gotten inside the Kismet without my assistance. And even if you had, you'd never have gotten back out alive. "Captain Fogarty's men would have cut you to ribbons. So I opened the hatch to let you in, planted myself in the way, and you got out with me before they could muster their defenses. So, you see, I saved your lives." Grandma Perkins paused in her narrative and looked up at her audience, giving them a withered little smile. "And if you want to know why, well ... I was bored on the Kismet , and I thought how nice it would be to run away and join a gang of cutthroat pirates." "She's batty," moaned Snake. "She's lost her marbles," muttered another. "Let's toss her overboard right now," said still another. Lamps O'Toole took the floor. "Now, wait a minute. We can't do that," he said loudly. "We got enough trouble as is. You know what would happen to us if the Space Patrol added murder to the list. They'd put the whole fleet in after us and track us and our families down to the last kid." Then he turned to the little old lady to explain. "Look, lady—" "My name is Mrs. Matilda Perkins. You may call me Grandma." "Okay, Grandma, look. You really fixed us good. To begin with, we ain't really pirates. We used to operate this tub as a freighter between the Jupiter moons. But STAR got a monopoly on all space flights, including freight, and they just froze us out. We can't operate nowhere in the solar system, unless we get their permission. And they just ain't giving permission to nobody these days." Lamps flopped into one of the control seats and lit a cigarette. "So, when us good, honest men couldn't find any work because of STAR, and we didn't want to give up working in space, we just ups and decides to become pirates. This was our first job, and we sure did need the money we could have gotten out of Darling Toujours' studios for ransom." Lamps sighed. "Now, we got you instead, no chance of getting the ransom money, and to top it all off, we'll be wanted for piracy by the Space Patrol." "Well, it doesn't seem to me that you're ever going to be good pirates at this rate," Grandma told him. "You should have known better than to take a woman at her word." "I don't suppose you got any rich relatives what would pay to get you back?" suggested Snake hopefully. "I haven't got any rich relatives period," she said pertly. Then she added, "But my ten children might scrape up a little cash for you if you promised you wouldn't bring me back at all." "I figured as much," Lamps said dolefully. "Lookit, Grandma, the best thing we can do is to put you off safely at the next place we stop. Unless we get you back in one piece the Space Patrol will be on our necks forever. So don't go getting any ideas about joining up with us." "Well, the very least you could do for a poor old lady is to feed her," Grandma told him, her lower lip sticking out in a most petulant manner. "They like to have starved me to death on that Kismet ." "We ain't got much fancy in the line of grub...." Lamps began. "Just show me the way to the kitchen," said Grandma.

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Doorway to Kal-Jmar By Stuart Fleming Two men had died before Syme Rector's guns to give him the key to the ancient city of Kal-Jmar—a city of untold wealth, and of robots that made desires instant commands. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The tall man loitered a moment before a garish window display, his eyes impassive in his space-burned face, as the Lillis patrolman passed. Then he turned, burying his long chin in the folds of his sand cape, and took up the pursuit of the dark figure ahead once more. Above, the city's multicolored lights were reflected from the translucent Dome—a distant, subtly distorted Lillis, through which the stars shone dimly. Getting through that dome had been his first urgent problem, but now he had another, and a more pressing one. It had been simple enough to pass himself off as an itinerant prospector and gain entrance to the city, after his ship had crashed in the Mare Cimmerium. But the rest would not be so simple. He had to acquire a spaceman's identity card, and he had to do it fast. It was only a matter of time until the Triplanet Patrol gave up the misleading trail he had made into the hill country, and concluded that he must have reached Lillis. After that, his only safety lay in shipping out on a freighter as soon as possible. He had to get off Mars, because his trail was warm, and the Patrol thorough. They knew, of course, that he was an outlaw—the very fact of the crashed, illegally-armed ship would have told them that. But they didn't know that he was Syme Rector, the most-wanted and most-feared raider in the System. In that was his only advantage. He walked a little faster, as his quarry turned up a side street and then boarded a moving ramp to an upper level. He watched until the short, wide-shouldered figure in spaceman's harness disappeared over the top of the ramp, and then followed. The man was waiting for him at the mouth of the ascending tunnel. Syme looked at him casually, without a flicker of expression, and started to walk on, but the other stepped into his path. He was quite young, Syme saw, with a fighter's shoulders under the white leather, and a hard, determined thrust to his firm jaw. "All right," the boy said quietly. "What is it?" "I don't understand," Syme said. "The game, the angle. You've been following me. Do you want trouble?" "Why, no," Syme told him bewilderedly. "I haven't been following you. I—" The boy knuckled his chin reflectively. "You could be lying," he said finally. "But maybe I've made a mistake." Then—"Okay, citizen, you can clear—but don't let me catch you on my tail again." Syme murmured something and turned away, feeling the spaceman's eyes on the small of his back until he turned the corner. At the next street he took a ramp up, crossed over and came down on the other side a block away. He waited until he saw the boy's broad figure pass the intersection, and then followed again more cautiously. It was risky, but there was no other way. The signatures, the data, even the photograph on the card could be forged once Syme got his hands on it, but the identity card itself—that oblong of dark diamondite, glowing with the tiny fires of radioactivity—that could not be imitated, and the only way to get it was to kill. Up ahead was the Founders' Tower, the tallest building in Lillis. The boy strode into the entrance lobby, bought a ticket for the observation platform, and took the elevator. As soon as his car was out of sight in the transparent tube, Syme followed. He put a half-credit slug into the machine, took the punctured slip of plastic that came out. The ticket went into a scanning slot in the wall of the car, and the elevator whisked him up. The tower was high, more than a hundred meters above the highest level of the city, and the curved dome that kept air in Lillis was close overhead. Syme looked up, after his first appraising glance about the platform, and saw the bright-blue pinpoint of Earth. The sight stirred a touch of nostalgia in him, as it always did, but he put it aside. The boy was hunched over the circular balustrade a little distance away. Except for him, the platform was empty. Syme loosened his slim, deadly energy pistol in its holster and padded catlike toward the silent figure. It was over in a minute. The boy whirled as he came up, warned by some slight sound, or by the breath of Syme's passage in the still air. He opened his mouth to shout, and brought up his arm in a swift, instinctive gesture. But the blow never landed. Syme's pistol spat its silent white pencil of flame, and the boy crumpled to the floor with a minute, charred hole in the white leather over his chest. Syme stooped over him swiftly, found a thick wallet and thrust it into his pocket without a second glance. Then he raised the body in his arms and thrust it over the parapet. It fell, and in the same instant Syme felt a violent tug at his wrist. Before he could move to stop himself, he was over the edge. Too late, he realized what had happened—one of the hooks on the dead spaceman's harness had caught the heavy wristband of his chronometer. He was falling, linked to the body of his victim! Hardly knowing what he did, he lashed out wildly with his other arm, felt his fingertips catch and bite into the edge of the balustrade. His body hit the wall of the tower with a thump, and, a second later, the corpse below him hit the wall. Then they both hung there, swaying a little and Syme's fingers slipped a little with each motion. Gritting his teeth, he brought the magnificent muscles of his arm into play, raising the forearm against the dead weight of the dangling body. Fraction by slow fraction of an inch, it came up. Syme could feel the sweat pouring from his brow, running saltily into his eyes. His arms felt as if they were being torn from their sockets. Then the hook slipped free, and the tearing, unbearable weight vanished. The reaction swung Syme against the building again, and he almost lost his slippery hold on the balustrade. After a moment he heard the spaceman's body strike with a squashy thud, somewhere below. He swung up his other arm, got a better grip on the balustrade. He tried cautiously to get a leg up, but the motion loosened his hold on the smooth surface again. He relaxed, thinking furiously. He could hold on for another minute at most; then it was the final blast-off. He heard running footsteps, and then a pale face peered over the ledge at him. He realized suddenly that the whole incident could have taken only a few seconds. He croaked, "Get me up." Wordlessly, the man clasped thin fingers around his wrist. The other pulled, with much puffing and panting, and with his help Syme managed to get a leg over the edge and hoist his trembling body to safety. "Are you all right?" Syme looked at the man, nursing the tortured muscles of his arms. His rescuer was tall and thin, of indeterminate age. He had light, sandy hair, a sharp nose, and—oddly conflicting—pale, serious eyes and a humorous wide mouth. He was still panting. "I'm not hurt," Syme said. He grinned, his white teeth flashing in his dark, lean face. "Thanks for giving me a hand." "You scared hell out of me," said the man. "I heard a thud. I thought—you'd gone over." He looked at Syme questioningly. "That was my bag," the outlaw said quickly. "It slipped out of my hand, and I overbalanced myself when I grabbed for it." The man sighed. "I need a drink. You need a drink. Come on." He picked up a small black suitcase from the floor and started for the elevator, then stopped. "Oh—your bag. Shouldn't we do something about that?" "Never mind," said Syme, taking his arm. "The shock must have busted it wide open. My laundry is probably all over Lillis by now." They got off at the amusement level, three tiers down, and found a cafe around the corner. Syme wasn't worried about the man he had just killed. He had heard no second thud, so the body must have stayed on the first outcropping of the tower it struck. It probably wouldn't be found until morning. And he had the wallet. When he paid for the first round of culcha , he took it out and stole a glance at the identification card inside. There it was—his ticket to freedom. He began feeling expansive, and even friendly toward the slender, mouse-like man across the table. It was the culcha , of course. He knew it, and didn't care. In the morning he'd find a freighter berth—in as big a spaceport as Lillis, there were always jobs open. Meanwhile, he might as well enjoy himself, and it was safer to be seen with a companion than to be alone. He listened lazily to what the other was saying, leaning his tall, graceful body back into the softly-cushioned seat. "Lissen," said Harold Tate. He leaned forward on one elbow, slipped, caught himself, and looked at the elbow reproachfully. "Lissen," he said again, "I trust you, Jones. You're obvi-obviously an adventurer, but you have an honest face. I can't see it very well at the moment, but I hic!—pardon—seem to recall it as an honest face. I'm going to tell you something, because I need your help!—help." He paused. "I need a guide. D'you know this part of Mars well?" "Sure," said Syme absently. Out in the center of the floor, an AG plate had been turned on. Five Venusian girls were diving and twisting in its influence, propelling themselves by the motion of their delicately-webbed feet and trailing long gauzy streamers of synthesilk after them. Syme watched them through narrowed lids, feeling the glow of culcha inside him. "I wanta go to Kal-Jmar," said Tate. Syme snapped to attention, every nerve tingling. An indefinable sense, a hunch that had served him well before, told him that something big was coming—something that promised adventure and loot for Syme Rector. "Why?" he asked softly. "Why to Kal-Jmar?" Harold Tate told him, and later, when Syme had taken him to his rooms, he showed him what was in his little black suitcase. Syme had been right; it was big. Kal-Jmar was the riddle of the Solar System. It was the only remaining city of the ancient Martian race—the race that, legends said, had risen to greater heights than any other Solar culture. The machines, the artifacts, the records of the Martians were all there, perfectly preserved inside the city's bubble-like dome, after God knew how many thousands of years. But they couldn't be reached. For Kal-Jmar's dome was not the thing of steelite that protected Lillis: it was a tenuous, globular field of force that defied analysis as it defied explosives and diamond drills. The field extended both above and below the ground, and tunneling was of no avail. No one knew what had happened to the Martians, whether they were the ancestors of the present decadent Martian race, or a different species. No one knew anything about them or about Kal-Jmar. In the early days, when the conquest of Mars was just beginning, Earth scientists had been wild to get into the city. They had observed it from every angle, taken photographs of its architecture and the robots that still patrolled its fantastically winding streets, and then they had tried everything they knew to pierce the wall. Later, however, when every unsuccessful attempt had precipitated a bloody uprising of the present-day Martians—resulting in a rapid dwindling of the number of Martians—the Mars Protectorate had stepped in and forbidden any further experiments; forbidden, in fact, any Earthman to go near the place. Thus matter had stood for over a hundred years, until Harold Tate. Tate, a physicist, had stumbled on a field that seemed to be identical in properties to the Kal-Jmar dome; and what is more, he had found a force that would break it down. And so he had made his first trip to Mars, and within twenty-four hours, by the blindest of chances, blurted out his secret to Syme Rector, the scourge of the spaceways, the man with a thousand credits on his sleek, tigerish head. Syme's smile was not tigerish now; it was carefully, studiedly mild. For Tate was no longer drunk, and it was important that it should not occur to him that he had been indiscreet. "This is native territory we're coming to, Harold," he said. "Better strap on your gun." "Why. Are they really dangerous?" "They're unpredictable," Syme told him. "They're built differently, and they think differently. They breathe like us, down in their caverns where there's air, but they also eat sand, and get their oxygen that way." "Yes, I've heard about that," Tate said. "Iron oxide—very interesting metabolism." He got his energy pistol out of the compartment and strapped it on absently. Syme turned the little sand car up a gentle rise towards the tortuous hill country in the distance. "Not only that," he continued. "They eat the damndest stuff. Lichens and fungi and tumble-grass off the deserts—all full of deadly poisons, from arsenic up the line to xopite. They seem intelligent enough—in their own way—but they never come near our cities and they either can't or won't learn Terrestrial. When the first colonists came here, they had to learn their crazy language. Every word of it can mean any one of a dozen different things, depending on the inflection you give it. I can speak it some, but not much. Nobody can. We don't think the same." "So you think they might attack us?" Tate asked again, nervously. "They might do anything," Syme said curtly. "Don't worry about it." The hills were much closer than they had seemed, because of Mars' deceptively low horizon. In half an hour they were in the midst of a wilderness of fantastically eroded dunes and channels, laboring on sliding treads up the sides of steep hills only to slither down again on the other side. Syme stopped the car abruptly as a deep, winding channel appeared across their path. "Gully," he announced. "Shall we cross it, or follow it?" Tate peered through the steelite nose of the car. "Follow, I guess," he offered. "It seems to go more or less where we're going, and if we cross it we'll only come to a couple dozen more." Syme nodded and moved the sand car up to the edge of the gully. Then he pressed a stud on the control board; a metal arm extruded from the tail of the car and a heavy spike slowly unscrewed from it, driving deep into the sand. A light on the board flashed, indicating that the spike was in and would bear the car's weight, and Syme started the car over the edge. As the little car nosed down into the gully, the metal arm left behind revealed itself to be attached to a length of thick, very strong wire cable, with a control cord inside. They inched down the almost vertical incline, unreeling the cable behind them, and starting minor landslides as they descended. Finally they touched bottom. Syme pressed another stud, and above, the metal spike that had supported them screwed itself out of the ground again and the cable reeled in. Tate had been watching with interest. "Very ingenious," he said. "But how do we get up again?" "Most of these gullies peter out gradually," said Syme, "but if we want or have to climb out where it's deep, we have a little harpoon gun that shoots the anchor up on top." "Good. I shouldn't like to stay down here for the rest of my natural life. Depressing view." He looked up at the narrow strip of almost-black sky visible from the floor of the gully, and shook his head. Neither Syme nor Tate ever had a chance to test the efficiency of their harpoon gun. They had traveled no more than five hundred meters, and the gully was as deep as ever, when Tate, looking up, saw a deeper blackness blot out part of the black sky directly overhead. He shouted, "Look out!" and grabbed for the nearest steering lever. The car wheeled around in a half circle and ran into the wall of the gully. Syme was saying, "What—?" when there was a thunderous crash that shook the sturdy walls of the car, as a huge boulder smashed into the ground immediately to their left. When the smoky red dust had cleared away, they saw that the left tread of the sand car was crushed beyond all recognition. Syme was cursing slowly and steadily with a deep, seething anger. Tate said, "I guess we walk from here on." Then he looked up again and caught a glimpse of the horde of beasts that were rushing up the gully toward them. "My God!" he said. "What are those?" Syme looked. "Those," he said bitterly, "are Martians." The natives, like all Martian fauna, were multi-legged. Also like all Martian fauna, they moved so fast that you couldn't see how many legs they did have. Actually, however, the natives had six legs apiece—or, more properly, four legs and two arms. Their lungs were not as large as they appeared, being collapsed at the moment. What caused the bulge that made their torsos look like sausages was a huge air bladder, with a valve arrangement from the stomach and feeding directly into the bloodstream. Their faces were vaguely canine, but the foreheads were high, and the lips were not split. They did resemble dogs, in that their thick black fur was splotched with irregulate patches of white. These patches of white were subject to muscular control and could be spread out fanwise; or, conversely, the black could be expanded to cover the white, which helped to take care of the extremes of Martian temperature. Right now they were mostly black. The natives slowed down and spread out to surround the wrecked sand car, and it could be seen that most of them were armed with spears, although some had the slim Benson energy guns—strictly forbidden to Martians. Syme stopped cursing and watched tensely. Tate said nothing, but he swallowed audibly. One Martian, who looked exactly like all the rest, stepped forward and motioned unmistakably for the two to come out. He waited a moment and then gestured with his energy gun. That gun, Syme knew from experience, could burn through a small thickness of steelite if held on the same spot long enough. "Come on," Syme said grimly. He rose and reached for a pressure suit, and Tate followed him. "What do you think they'll—" he began, and then stopped himself. "I know. They're unpredictable." "Yeah," said Syme, and opened the door. The air in the car whooshed into the near-vacuum outside, and he and Tate stepped out. The Martian leader looked at them enigmatically, then turned and started off. The other natives closed in on them, and they all bounded along under the weak gravity. They bounded along for what Syme figured as a good kilometer and a half, and they then reached a branch in the gully and turned down it, going lower all the time. Under the light of their helmet lamps, they could see the walls of the gully—a tunnel, now—getting darker and more solid. Finally, when Syme estimated they were about nine kilometers down, there was even a suggestion of moisture. The tunnel debouched at last into a large cavern. There was a phosphorescent gleam from fungus along the walls, but Syme couldn't decide how far away the far wall was. He noticed something else, though. "There's air here," he said to Tate. "I can see dust motes in it." He switched his helmet microphone from radio over to the audio membrane on the outside of the helmet. " Kalis methra ," he began haltingly, " seltin guna getal. " "Yes, there is air here," said the Martian leader, startlingly. "Not enough for your use, however, so do not open your helmets." Syme swore amazedly. "I thought you said they didn't speak Terrestrial," Tate said. Syme ignored him. "We had our reasons for not doing so," the Martian said. "But how—?" "We are telepaths, of course. On a planet which is nearly airless on its surface, we have to be. A tendency of the Terrestrial mind is to ignore the obvious. We have not had a spoken language of our own for several thousand years." He darted a glance at Syme's darkly scowling face. His own hairy face was expressionless, but Syme sensed that he was amused. "Yes, you're right," he said. "The language you and your fellows struggled to learn is a fraud, a hodge-podge concocted to deceive you." Tate looked interested. "But why this—this gigantic masquerade?" "You had nothing to give us," the Martian said simply. Tate frowned, then flushed. "You mean you avoided revealing yourselves because you—had nothing to gain from mental intercourse with us?" "Yes." Tate thought again. "But—" "No," the Martian interrupted him, "revealing the extent of our civilization would have spared us nothing at your people's hands. Yours is an imperialist culture, and you would have had Mars, whether you thought you were taking it from equals or not." "Never mind that," Syme broke in impatiently. "What do you want with us?" The Martian looked at him appraisingly. "You already suspect. Unfortunately, you must die." It was a weird situation, Syme thought. His mind was racing, but as yet he could see no way out. He began to wonder, if he did, could he keep the Martians from knowing about it? Then he realized that the Martian must have received that thought, too, and he was enraged. He stood, holding himself in check with an effort. "Will you tell us why?" Tate asked. "You were brought here for that purpose. It is part of our conception of justice. I will tell you and your—friend—anything you wish to know." Syme noticed that the other Martians had retired to the farther side of the cavern. Some were munching the glowing fungus. That left only the leader, who was standing alertly on all fours a short distance away from them, holding the Benson gun trained on them. Syme tried not to think about the gun, especially about making a grab for it. It was like trying not to think of the word "hippopotamus." Tate squatted down comfortably on the floor of the cavern, apparently unconcerned, but his hands were trembling slightly. "First why—" he began. "There are many secrets in Kal-Jmar," the Martian said, "among them a very simple catalyzing agent which could within fifty years transform Mars to a planet with Terrestrially-thick atmosphere." "I think I see," Tate said thoughtfully. "That's been the ultimate aim all along, but so far the problem has us licked. If we solved it, then we'd have all of Mars, not just the cities. Your people would die out. You couldn't have that, of course." He sighed deeply. He spread his gloved hands before him and looked at them with a queer intentness. "Well—how about the Martians—the Kal-Jmar Martians, I mean? I'd dearly love to know the answer to that one." "Neither of the alternatives in your mind is correct. They were not a separate species, although they were unlike us. But they were not our ancestors, either. They were the contemporaries of our ancestors." "Several thousand years ago Mars' loss of atmosphere began to make itself felt. There were two ways out. Some chose to seal themselves into cities like Kal-Jmar; our ancestors chose to adapt their bodies to the new conditions. Thus the race split. Their answer to the problem was an evasion; they remained static. Our answer was the true one, for we progressed. We progressed beyond the need of science; they remained its slaves. They died of a plague—and other causes. "You see," he finished gently, "our deception has caused a natural confusion in your minds. They were the degenerates, not we." "And yet," Tate mused, "you are being destroyed by contact with an—inferior—culture." "We hope to win yet," the Martian said. Tate stood up, his face very white. "Tell me one thing," he begged. "Will our two races ever live together in amity?" The Martian lowered his head. "That is for unborn generations." He looked at Tate again and aimed the energy gun. "You are a brave man," he said. "I am sorry." Syme saw all his hopes of treasure and glory go glimmering down the sights of the Martian's Benson gun, and suddenly the pent-up rage in him exploded. Too swiftly for his intention to be telegraphed, before he knew himself what he meant to do, he hurled himself bodily into the Martian. It was like tangling with a draft horse. The Martian was astonishingly strong. Syme scrambled desperately for the gun, got it, but couldn't tear it out of the Martian's fingers. And all the time he could almost feel the Martian's telepathic call for help surging out. He heard the swift pad of his followers coming across the cavern. He put everything he had into one mighty, murderous effort. Every muscle fiber in his superbly trained body crackled and surged with power. He roared his fury. And the gun twisted out of the Martian's iron grip! He clubbed the prostrate leader with it instantly, then reversed the weapon and snapped a shot at the nearest Martian. The creature dropped his lance and fell without a sound. The next instant a ray blinked at him, and he rolled out of the way barely in time. The searing ray cut a swath over the leader's body and swerved to cut down on him. Still rolling, he fired at the holder of the weapon. The gun dropped and winked out on the floor. Syme jumped to his feet and faced his enemies, snarling like the trapped tiger he was. Another ray slashed at him, and he bent lithely to let it whistle over his head. Another, lower this time. He flipped his body into the air and landed upright, his gun still blazing. His right leg burned fiercely from a ray-graze, but he ignored it. And all the while he was mowing down the massed natives in great swaths, seeking out the ones armed with Bensons in swift, terrible slashes, dodging spears and other missiles in midair, and roaring at the top of his powerful lungs. At last there were none with guns left to oppose him. He scythed down the rest in two terrible, lightning sweeps of his ray, then dropped the weapon from blistered fingers. He was gasping for breath, and realized that he was losing air from the seared-open right leg of his suit. He reached for the emergency kit at his side, drawing in great, gasping breaths, and fumbled out a tube of sealing liquid. He spread the stuff on liberally, smearing it impartially over flesh and fabric. It felt like liquid hell on the burned, bleeding leg, but he kept on until the quick-drying fluid formed an airtight patch. Only then did he turn, to see Tate flattened against the wall behind him, his hands empty at his sides. "I'm sorry," Tate said miserably. "I could have grabbed a spear or something, but—I just couldn't, not even to save my own life. I—I halfway hoped they'd kill both of us." Syme glared at him and spat, too enraged to think of diplomacy. He turned and strode out of the cavern, carrying his right leg stiffly, but with his feral, tigerish head held high. He led the way, wordlessly, back to the wrecked sand car. Tate followed him with a hangdog, beaten air, as though he had just found something that shattered all his previous concepts of the verities in life, and didn't know what to do about it. Still silently, Syme refilled his oxygen tank, watched Tate do the same, and then picked up two spare tanks and the precious black suitcase and handed one of the tanks to Tate. Then he stumped around to the back of the car and inspected the damage. The cable reel, which might have drawn them out of the gully, was hopelessly smashed. That was that.

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63130

Mr. Meek Plays Polo By CLIFFORD D. SIMAK Mr. Meek was having his troubles. First, the educated bugs worried him; then the welfare worker tried to stop the Ring Rats' feud by enlisting his aid. And now, he was a drafted space-polo player—a fortune bet on his ability at a game he had never played in his cloistered life. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The sign read: Atomic Motors Repaired. Busted Plates Patched Up. Rocket Tubes Relined. Wheeze In, Whiz Out! It added, as an afterthought, in shaky, inexpert lettering: We Fix Anything. Mr. Oliver Meek stared owlishly at the sign, which hung from an arm attached to a metal standard sunk in solid rock. A second sign was wired to the standard just below the metal arm, but its legend was faint, almost illegible. Meek blinked at it through thick-lensed spectacles, finally deciphered its scrawl: Ask About Educated Bugs. A bit bewildered, but determined not to show it, Meek swung away from the sign-post and gravely regarded the settlement. On the chart it was indicated by a fairly sizeable dot, but that was merely a matter of comparison. Out Saturn-way even the tiniest outpost assumes importance far beyond its size. The slab of rock was no more than five miles across, perhaps even less. Here in its approximate center, were two buildings, both of almost identical construction, semi-spherical and metal. Out here, Meek realized, shelter was the thing. Architecture merely for architecture's sake was still a long way off. One of the buildings was the repair shop which the sign advertised. The other, according to the crudely painted legend smeared above its entrance lock, was the Saturn Inn . The rest of the rock was landing field, pure and simple. Blasters had leveled off the humps and irregularities so spaceships could sit down. Two ships now were on the field, pulled up close against the repair shop. One, Meek noticed, belonged to the Solar Health and Welfare Department, the other to the Galactic Pharmaceutical Corporation. The Galactic ship was a freighter, ponderous and slow. It was here, Meek knew, to take on a cargo of radiation moss. But the other was a puzzler. Meek wrinkled his brow and blinked his eyes, trying to figure out what a welfare ship would be doing in this remote corner of the Solar System. Slowly and carefully, Meek clumped toward the squat repair shop. Once or twice he stumbled, hoping fervently he wouldn't get the feet of his cumbersome spacesuit all tangled up. The gravity was slight, next to non-existent, and one who wasn't used to it had to take things easy and remember where he was. Behind him Saturn filled a tenth of the sky, a yellow, lemon-tinged ball, streaked here and there with faint crimson lines and blotched with angry, bright green patches. To right and left glinted the whirling, twisting, tumbling rocks that made up the Inner Ring, while arcing above the horizon opposed to Saturn were the spangled glistening rainbows of the other rings. "Like dewdrops in the black of space," Meek mumbled to himself. But he immediately felt ashamed of himself for growing poetic. This sector of space, he knew, was not in the least poetic. It was hard and savage and as he thought about that, he hitched up his gun belt and struck out with a firmer tread that almost upset him. After that, he tried to think of nothing except keeping his two feet under him. Reaching the repair shop's entrance lock, he braced himself solidly to keep his balance, reached out and pressed a buzzer. Swiftly the lock spun outward and a moment later Meek had passed through the entrance vault and stepped into the office. A dungareed mechanic sat tilted in a chair against a wall, feet on the desk, a greasy cap pushed back on his head. Meek stamped his feet gratefully, pleased at feeling Earth gravity under him again. He lifted the hinged helmet of his suit back on his shoulders. "You are the gentleman who can fix things?" he asked the mechanic. The mechanic stared. Here was no hell-for-leather freighter pilot, no be-whiskered roamer of the outer orbits. Meek's hair was white and stuck out in uncombed tufts in a dozen directions. His skin was pale. His blue eyes looked watery behind the thick lenses that rode his nose. Even the bulky spacesuit failed to hide his stooped shoulders and slight frame. The mechanic said nothing. Meek tried again. "I saw the sign. It said you could fix anything. So I...." The mechanic shook himself. "Sure," he agreed, still slightly dazed. "Sure I can fix you up. What you got?" He swung his feet off the desk. "I ran into a swarm of pebbles," Meek confessed. "Not much more than dust, really, but the screen couldn't stop it all." He fumbled his hands self-consciously. "Awkward of me," he said. "It happens to the best of them," the mechanic consoled. "Saturn sweeps in clouds of the stuff. Thicker than hell when you reach the Rings. Lots of ships pull in with punctures. Won't take no time." Meek cleared his throat uneasily. "I'm afraid it's more than a puncture. A pebble got into the instruments. Washed out some of them." The mechanic clucked sympathetically. "You're lucky. Tough job to bring in a ship without all the instruments. Must have a honey of a navigator." "I haven't got a navigator," Meek said, quietly. The mechanic stared at him, eyes popping. "You mean you brought it in alone? No one with you?" Meek gulped and nodded. "Dead reckoning," he said. The mechanic glowed with sudden admiration. "I don't know who you are, mister," he declared, "but whoever you are, you're the best damn pilot that ever took to space." "Really I'm not," said Meek. "I haven't done much piloting, you see. Up until just a while ago, I never had left Earth. Bookkeeper for Lunar Exports." "Bookkeeper!" yelped the mechanic. "How come a bookkeeper can handle a ship like that?" "I learned it," said Meek. "You learned it?" "Sure, from a book. I saved my money and I studied. I always wanted to see the Solar System and here I am." Dazedly, the mechanic took off his greasy cap, laid it carefully on the desk, reached out for a spacesuit that hung from a wall hook. "Afraid this job might take a while," he said. "Especially if we have to wait for parts. Have to get them in from Titan City. Why don't you go over to the Inn . Tell Moe I sent you. They'll treat you right." "Thank you," said Meek, "but there's something else I'm wondering about. There was another sign out there. Something about educated bugs." "Oh, them," said the mechanic. "They belong to Gus Hamilton. Maybe belong ain't the right word because they were on the rock before Gus took over. Anyhow, Gus is mighty proud of them, although at times they sure run him ragged. First year they almost drove him loopy trying to figure out what kind of game they were playing." "Game?" asked Meek, wondering if he was being hoaxed. "Sure, game. Like checkers. Only it ain't. Not chess, neither. Even worse than that. Bugs dig themselves a batch of holes, then choose up sides and play for hours. About the time Gus would think he had it figured out, they'd change the rules and throw him off again." "That doesn't make sense," protested Meek. "Stranger," declared the mechanic, solemnly, "there ain't nothing about them bugs that make sense. Gus' rock is the only one they're on. Gus thinks maybe the rock don't even belong to the Solar system. Thinks maybe it's a hunk of stone from some other solar system. Figures maybe it crossed space somehow and was captured by Saturn, sucked into the Ring. That would explain why it's the only one that has the bugs. They come along with it, see." "This Gus Hamilton," said Meek. "I'd like to see him. Where could I find him?" "Go over to the Inn and wait around," advised the mechanic. "He'll come in sooner or later. Drops around regular, except when his rheumatism bothers him, to pick up a bundle of papers. Subscribes to a daily paper, he does. Only man out here that does any reading. But all he reads is the sports section. Nuts about sports, Gus is." II Moe, bartender at Saturn Inn, leaned his elbow on the bar and braced his chin in an outspread palm. His face wore a melancholy, hang-dog look. Moe liked things fairly peaceable, but now he saw trouble coming in big batches. "Lady," he declared mournfully, "you sure picked yourself a job. The boys around here don't take to being uplifted and improved. They ain't worth it, either. Just ring-rats, that's all they are." Henrietta Perkins, representative for the public health and welfare department of the Solar government, shuddered at his suggestion of anything so low it didn't yearn for betterment. "But those terrible feuds," she protested. "Fighting just because they live in different parts of the Ring. It's natural they might feel some rivalry, but all this killing! Surely they don't enjoy getting killed." "Sure they enjoy it," declared Moe. "Not being killed, maybe ... although they're willing to take a chance on that. Not many of them get killed, in fact. Just a few that get sort of careless. But even if some of them are killed, you can't go messing around with that feud of theirs. If them boys out in sectors Twenty-Three and Thirty-Seven didn't have their feud they'd plain die of boredom. They just got to have somebody to fight with. They been fighting, off and on, for years." "But they could fight with something besides guns," said the welfare lady, a-smirk with righteousness. "That's why I'm here. To try to get them to turn their natural feelings of rivalry into less deadly and disturbing channels. Direct their energies into other activities." "Like what?" asked Moe, fearing the worst. "Athletic events," said Miss Perkins. "Tin shinny, maybe," suggested Moe, trying to be sarcastic. She missed the sarcasm. "Or spelling contests," she said. "Them fellow can't spell," insisted Moe. "Games of some sort, then. Competitive games." "Now you're talking," Moe enthused. "They take to games. Seven-toed Pete with the deuces wild." The inner door of the entrance lock grated open and a spacesuited figure limped into the room. The spacesuit visor snapped up and a brush of grey whiskers spouted into view. It was Gus Hamilton. He glared at Moe. "What in tarnation is all this foolishness?" he demanded. "Got your message, I did, and here I am. But it better be important." He hobbled to the bar. Moe reached for a bottle and shoved it toward him, keeping out of reach. "Have some trouble?" he asked, trying to be casual. "Trouble! Hell, yes!" blustered Gus. "But I ain't the only one that's going to have trouble. Somebody sneaked over and stole the injector out of my space crate. Had to borrow Hank's to get over here. But I know who it was. There ain't but one other ring-rat got a rocket my injector will fit." "Bud Craney," said Moe. It was no secret. Every man in the two sectors of the Ring knew just exactly what kind of spacecraft the other had. "That's right," said Gus, "and I'm fixing to go over into Thirty-seven and yank Bud up by the roots." He took a jolt of liquor. "Yes, sir, I sure aim to crucify him." His eyes lighted on Miss Henrietta Perkins. "Visitor?" he asked. "She's from the government," said Moe. "Revenuer?" "Nope. From the welfare outfit. Aims to help you fellows out. Says there ain't no sense in you boys in Twenty-three all the time fighting with the gang from Thirty-seven." Gus stared in disbelief. Moe tried to be helpful. "She wants you to play games." Gus strangled on his drink, clawed for air, wiped his eyes. "So that's why you asked me over here. Another of your danged peace parleys. Come and talk things over, you said. So I came." "There's something in what she says," defended Moe. "You ring-rats been ripping up space for a long time now. Time you growed up and settled down. You're aiming on going over right now and pulverizing Bud. It won't do you any good." "I'll get a heap of satisfaction out of it," insisted Gus. "And, besides, I'll get my injector back. Might even take a few things off Bud's ship. Some of the parts on mine are wearing kind of thin." Gus took another drink, glowering at Miss Perkins. "So the government sent you out to make us respectable," he said. "Merely to help you, Mr. Hamilton," she declared. "To turn your hatreds into healthy competition." "Games, eh?" said Gus. "Maybe you got something, after all. Maybe we could fix up some kind of game...." "Forget it, Gus," warned Moe. "If you're thinking of energy guns at fifty paces, it's out. Miss Perkins won't stand for anything like that." Gus wiped his whiskers and looked hurt. "Nothing of the sort," he denied. "Dang it, you must think I ain't got no sportsmanship at all. I was thinking of a real sport. A game they play back on Earth and Mars. Read about it in my papers. Follow the teams, I do. Always wanted to see a game, but never did." Miss Perkins beamed. "What game is it, Mr. Hamilton?" "Space polo," said Gus. "Why, how wonderful," simpered Miss Perkins. "And you boys have the spaceships to play it with." Moe looked alarmed. "Miss Perkins," he warned, "don't let him talk you into it." "You shut your trap," snapped Gus. "She wants us to play games, don't she. Well, polo is a game. A nice, respectable game. Played in the best society." "It wouldn't be no nice, respectable game the way you fellows would play it," predicted Moe. "It would turn into mass murder. Wouldn't be one of you who wouldn't be planning on getting even with someone else, once you got him in the open." Miss Perkins gasped. "Why, I'm sure they wouldn't!" "Of course we wouldn't," declared Gus, solemn as an owl. "And that ain't all," said Moe, warming to the subject. "Those crates you guys got wouldn't last out the first chukker. Most of them would just naturally fall apart the first sharp turn they made. You can't play polo in ships tied up with haywire. Those broomsticks you ring-rats ride around on are so used to second rate fuel they'd split wide open first squirt of high test stuff you gave them." The inner locks grated open and a man stepped through into the room. "You're prejudiced," Gus told Moe. "You just don't like space polo, that is all. You ain't got no blueblood in you. We'll leave it up to this man here. We'll ask his opinion of it." The man flipped back his helmet, revealing a head thatched by white hair and dominated by a pair of outsize spectacles. "My opinion, sir," said Oliver Meek, "seldom amounts to much." "All we want to know," Gus told him, "is what you think of space polo." "Space polo," declared Meek, "is a noble game. It requires expert piloting, a fine sense of timing and...." "There, you see!" whooped Gus, triumphantly. "I saw a game once," Meek volunteered. "Swell," bellowed Gus. "We'll have you coach our team." "But," protested Meek, "but ... but." "Oh, Mr. Hamilton," exulted Miss Perkins, "you are so wonderful. You think of everything." "Hamilton!" squeaked Meek. "Sure," said Gus. "Old Gus Hamilton. Grow the finest dog-gone radiation moss you ever clapped your eyes on." "Then you're the gentleman who has bugs," said Meek. "Now, look here," warned Gus, "you watch what you say or I'll hang one on you." "He means your rock bugs," Moe explained, hastily. "Oh, them," said Gus. "Yes," said Meek, "I'm interested in them. I'd like to see them." "See them," said Gus. "Mister, you can have them if you want them. Drove me out of house and home, they did. They're dippy over metal. Any kind of metal, but alloys especially. Eat the stuff. They'll tromp you to death heading for a spaceship. Got so I had to move over to another rock to live. Tried to fight it out with them, but they whipped me pure and simple. Moved out and let them have the place after they started to eat my shack right out from underneath my feet." Meek looked crestfallen. "Can't get near them, then," he said. "Sure you can," said Gus. "Why not?" "Well, a spacesuit's metal and...." "Got that all fixed up," said Gus. "You come back with me and I'll let you have a pair of stilts." "Stilts?" "Yeah. Wooden stilts. Them danged fool bugs don't know what wood is. Seem to be scared of it, sort of. You can walk right among them if you want to, long as you're walking on the stilts." Meek gulped. He could imagine what stilt walking would be like in a place where gravity was no more than the faintest whisper. III The bugs had dug a new set of holes, much after the manner of a Chinese checker board, and now were settling down into their respective places preparatory to the start of another game. For a mile or more across the flat surface of the rock that was Gus Hamilton's moss garden, ran a string of such game-boards, each one different, each one having served as the scene of a now-completed game. Oliver Meek cautiously wedged his stilts into two pitted pockets of rock, eased himself slowly and warily against the face of a knob of stone that jutted from the surface. Even in his youth, Meek remembered, he never had been any great shakes on stilts. Here, on this bucking, weaving rock, with slick surfaces and practically no gravity, a man had to be an expert to handle them. Meek knew now he was no expert. A half-dozen dents in his space armor was ample proof of that. Comfortably braced against the upjutting of stone, Meek dug into the pouch of his space gear, brought out a notebook and stylus. Flipping the pages, he stared, frowning, at the diagrams that covered them. None of the diagrams made sense. They showed the patterns of three other boards and the moves that had been made by the bugs in playing out the game. Apparently, in each case, the game had been finished. Which, Meek knew, should have meant that some solution had been reached, some point won, some advantage gained. But so far as Meek could see from study of the diagrams there was not even a purpose or a problem, let alone a solution or a point. The whole thing was squirrely. But, Meek told himself, it fitted in. The whole Saturnian system was wacky. The rings, for example. Debris of a moon smashed up by Saturn's pull? Sweepings of space? No one knew. Saturn itself, for that matter. A planet that kept Man at bay with deadly radiations. But radiations that, while they kept Man at a distance, at the same time served Man. For here, on the Inner Ring, where they had become so diluted that ordinary space armor filtered them out, they made possible the medical magic of the famous radiation moss. One of the few forms of plant life found in the cold of space, the moss was nurtured by those mysterious radiations. Planted elsewhere, on kindlier worlds, it wilted and refused to grow. The radiations had been analyzed, Meek knew, and reproduced under laboratory conditions, but there still was something missing, some vital, elusive factor that could not be analyzed. Under the artificial radiation, the moss still wilted and died. And because Earth needed the moss to cure a dozen maladies and because it would grow nowhere else but here on the Inner Ring, men squatted on the crazy swirl of spacial boulders that made up the ring. Men like Hamilton, living on rocks that bucked and heaved along their orbits like chips riding the crest of a raging flood. Men who endured loneliness, dared death when crunching orbits intersected or, when rickety spacecraft flared, who went mad with nothing to do, with the mockery of space before them. Meek shrugged his shoulders, almost upsetting himself. The bugs had started the game and Meek craned forward cautiously, watching eagerly, stylus poised above the notebook. Crawling clumsily, the tiny insect-like creatures moved about, solemnly popping in and out of holes. If there were opposing sides ... and if it were a game, there'd have to be ... they didn't seem to alternate the moves. Although, Meek admitted, certain rules and conditions which he had failed to note or recognize, might determine the number and order of moves allowed each side. Suddenly there was confusion on the board. For a moment a half-dozen of the bugs raced madly about, as if seeking the proper hole to occupy. Then, as suddenly, all movement had ceased. And in another moment, they were on the move again, orderly again, but retracing their movements, going back several plays beyond the point of confusion. Just as one would do when one made a mistake working a mathematical problem ... going back to the point of error and going on again from there. "Well, I'll be...." Mr. Meek said. Meek stiffened and the stylus floated out of his hand, settled softly on the rock below. A mathematical problem! His breath gurgled in his throat. He knew it now! He should have known it all the time. But the mechanic had talked about the bugs playing games and so had Hamilton. That had thrown him off. Games! Those bugs weren't playing any game. They were solving mathematical equations! Meek leaned forward to watch, forgetting where he was. One of the stilts slipped out of position and Meek felt himself start to fall. He dropped the notebook and frantically clawed at empty space. The other stilt went, then, and Meek found himself floating slowly downward, gravity weak but inexorable. His struggle to retain his balance had flung him forward, away from the face of the rock and he was falling directly over the board on which the bugs were arrayed. He pawed and kicked at space, but still floated down, course unchanged. He struck and bounced, struck and bounced again. On the fourth bounce he managed to hook his fingers around a tiny projection of the surface. Fighting desperately, he regained his feet. Something scurried across the face of his helmet and he lifted his hand before him. It was covered with the bugs. Fumbling desperately, he snapped on the rocket motor of his suit, shot out into space, heading for the rock where the lights from the ports of Hamilton's shack blinked with the weaving of the rock. Oliver Meek shut his eyes and groaned. "Gus will give me hell for this," he told himself. Gus shook the small wooden box thoughtfully, listening to the frantic scurrying within it. "By rights," he declared, judiciously, "I should take this over and dump it in Bud's ship. Get even with him for swiping my injector." "But you got the injector back," Meek pointed out. "Oh, sure, I got it back," admitted Gus. "But it wasn't orthodox, it wasn't. Just getting your property back ain't getting even. I never did have a chance to smack Bud in the snoot the way I should of smacked him. Moe talked me into it. He was the one that had the idea the welfare lady should go over and talk to Bud. She must of laid it on thick, too, about how we should settle down and behave ourselves and all that. Otherwise Bud never would have given her that injector." He shook his head dolefully. "This here Ring ain't ever going to be the same again. If we don't watch out, we'll find ourselves being polite to one another." "That would be awful," agreed Meek. "Wouldn't it, though," declared Gus. Meek squinted his eyes and pounced on the floor, scrabbling on hands and knees after a scurrying thing that twinkled in the lamplight. "Got him," yelped Meek, scooping the shining mote up in his hand. Gus inched the lid of the wooden box open. Meek rose and popped the bug inside. "That makes twenty-eight of them," said Meek. "I told you," Gus accused him, "that we hadn't got them all. You better take another good look at your suit. The danged things burrow right into solid metal and pull the hole in after them, seems like. Sneakiest cusses in the whole dang system. Just like chiggers back on Earth." "Chiggers," Meek told him, "burrow into a person to lay eggs." "Maybe these things do, too," Gus contended. The radio on the mantel blared a warning signal, automatically tuning in on one of the regular newscasts from Titan City out on Saturn's biggest moon. The syrupy, chamber of commerce voice of the announcer was shaky with excitement and pride. "Next week," he said, "the annual Martian-Earth football game will be played at Greater New York on Earth. But in the Earth's newspapers tonight another story has pushed even that famous classic of the sporting world down into secondary place." He paused and took a deep breath and his voice practically yodeled with delight. "The sporting event, ladies and gentlemen, that is being talked up and down the streets of Earth tonight, is one that will be played here in our own Saturnian system. A space polo game. To be played by two unknown, pick-up, amateur teams down in the Inner Ring. Most of the men have never played polo before. Few if any of them have even seen a game. There may have been some of them who didn't, at first, know what it was. "But they're going to play it. The men who ride those bucking rocks that make up the Inner Ring will go out into space in their rickety ships and fight it out. And ladies and gentlemen, when I say fight it out, I really mean fight it out. For the game, it seems, will be a sort of tournament, the final battle in a feud that has been going on in the Ring for years. No one knows what started the feud. It has gotten so it really doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is that when men from sector Twenty-three meet those from sector Thirty-seven, the feud is taken up again. But that is at an end now. In a few days the feud will be played out to its bitter end when the ships from the Inner Ring go out into space to play that most dangerous of all sports, space polo. For the outcome of that game will decide, forever, the supremacy of one of the two sectors."

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The CONJURER of VENUS By CONAN T. TROY A world-famed Earth scientist had disappeared on Venus. When Johnson found him, he found too the secret to that globe-shaking mystery—the fabulous Room of The Dreaming. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories November 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The city dripped with rain. Crossing the street toward the dive, Johnson got rain in his eyes, his nose, and his ears. That was the way with the rain here. It came at you from all directions. There had been occasions when Johnson had thought the rain was falling straight up. Otherwise, how had the insides of his pants gotten wet? On Venus, everything came at you from all directions, it seemed to Johnson. Opening the door of the joint, it was noise instead of rain that came at him, the wild frantic beat of a Venusian rhumba, the notes pounding and jumping through the smoke and perfume clouded room. Feeling states came at him, intangible, but to his trained senses, perceptible emotional nuances of hate, love, fear, and rage. But mostly love. Since this place had been designed to excite the senses of both humans and Venusians, the love feelings were heavily tinged with straight sex. He sniffed at them, feeling them somewhere inside of him, aware of them but aware also that here was apprehension, and plain fear. Caldwell, sitting in a booth next to the door, glanced up as Johnson entered but neither Caldwell's facial expression or his eyes revealed that he had ever seen this human before. Nor did Johnson seem to recognize Caldwell. "Is the mighty human wanting liquor, a woman or dreams?" His voice was all soft syllables of liquid sound. The Venusian equivalent of a headwaiter was bowing to him. "I'll have a tarmur to start," Johnson said. "How are the dreams tonight?" "Ze vill be the most wonserful of all sonight. The great Unger hisself will be here to do ze dreaming. There is no ozzer one who has quite his touch at dreaming, mighty one." The headwaiter spread his hands in a gesture indicating ecstasy. "It is my great regret that I must do ze work tonight instead of being wiz ze dreamers. Ah, ze great Unger hisself!" The headwaiter kissed the tips of his fingers. "Um," Johnson said. "The great Unger!" His voice expressed surprise, just the right amount of it. "I'll have a tarmur to start but when does the dreaming commence?" "In one zonar or maybe less. Shall I make ze reservations for ze mighty one?" As he was speaking, the headwaiter was deftly conducting Johnson to the bar. "Not just yet," Johnson said. "See me a little later." "But certainly." The headwaiter was gone into the throng. Johnson was at the bar. Behind it, a Venusian was bowing to him. "Tarmur," Johnson said. The green drink was set before him. He held it up to the light, admiring the slow rise of the tiny golden bubbles in it. To him, watching the bubbles rise was perhaps more important than drinking itself. "Beautiful, aren't they?" a soft voice said. He glanced to his right. A girl had slid into the stool beside him. She wore a green dress cut very low at the throat. Her skin had the pleasant tan recently on Earth. Her hair was a shade of abundant brown and her eyes were blue, the color of the skies of Earth. A necklace circled her throat and below the necklace ... Johnson felt his pulse quicken, for two reasons. Women such as this one had been quickening the pulse of men since the days of Adam. The second reason concerned her presence here in this place where no woman in her right mind ever came unescorted. Her eyes smiled up at him unafraid. Didn't she know there were men present here in this space port city who would snatch her bodily from the bar stool and carry her away for sleeping purposes? And Venusians were here who would cut her pretty throat for the sake of the necklace that circled it? "They are beautiful," he said, smiling. "Thank you." "I was referring to the bubbles." "You were talking about my eyes," she answered, unperturbed. "How did you know? I mean...." "I am very knowing," the girl said, smiling. "Are you sufficiently knowing to be here?" For an instant, as if doubt crossed her mind, the smile flickered. Then it came again, stronger. "Aren't you here?" Johnson choked as bubbles from the tarmur seemed to go suddenly up his nose. "My dear child ..." he sputtered. "I am not a child," she answered with a firm sureness that left no doubt in his mind that she knew what she was saying. "And my name is Vee Vee." "Vee Vee? Um. That is...." "Don't you think it's a nice name?" "I certainly do. Probably the rest of it is even nicer." "There is no more of it. Just Vee Vee. Like Topsy, I just grew." "What the devil are you doing here on Venus and here in this place?" "Growing." The blue eyes were unafraid. Sombrely, Johnson regarded her. What was she doing here? Was she in the employ of the Venusians? If she was being planted on him, then his purpose here was suspected. He shrugged the thought aside. If his purpose here was suspected, there would be no point in planting a woman on him. There would only be the minor matter of slipping a knife into his back. In this city, as on all of Venus, humans died easily. No one questioned the motives of the killer. "You look as if you were considering some very grave matter," Vee Vee said. "Not any longer," he laughed. "You have decided them?" "Yes." "Every last one of them?" "Oh, there might be one or two matters undecided somewhere, say out on the periphery of the galaxy. But we will solve them when we get to them." He waved vaguely toward the roof and the sky of space hidden behind the clouds that lay over the roof, glanced around as a man eased himself into an empty stool on his left. The man was Caldwell. "Zlock!" Caldwell said, to the bartender. "Make it snappy. Gotta have zlock. Finest damn drink in the solar system." Caldwell's voice was thick, his tongue heavy. Johnson's eyes went back to the girl but out of the corner of them he watched Caldwell's hand lying on the bar. The fingers were beating a quick nervous tattoo on the yellow wood. "I haven't seen him," Caldwell's fingers beat out their tattoo. "But I think he is, or was, here." "Um," Johnson said, his eyes on Vee Vee. "How—" "Because that girl was asking for him," Caldwell's fingers answered. "Watch that girl!" Picking up the zlock, he lurched away from the bar. "Your friend is not as drunk as he seems," Vee Vee said, watching Caldwell. "My friend? Do you mean that drunk? I never saw him—" "Lying is one of the deadly sins." Her eyes twinkled at him. Under the merriment that danced in them there was ice. Johnson felt cold. "The reservations for ze dreaming, great one?" The headwaiter was bowing and scraping in front of him. "The great one has decided, yes?" "The dreaming!" Vee Vee looked suddenly alert. "Of course. We must see the dreaming. Everyone wants to see the dreaming. We will go, won't we darling?" She hooked her hand into Johnson's elbow. "Certainly," Johnson said. The decision was made on the spur of the moment. That there was danger in it, he did not doubt. But there might be something else. And he might be there. "Oh. But very good. Ze great Unger, you will love him!" The headwaiter clutched the gold coins that Johnson extended, bowed himself out of sight. "Say, I want to know more—" Johnson began. His words were drowned in a blast of trumpets. The band that had been playing went into sudden silence. Waves of perfume began to flow into the place. The perfumes were blended, but one aroma was prominent among them, the sweet, cloying, soul-stirring perfume of the Dreamer. In the suddenly hushed place little sounds began to appear as Venusians and humans began to shift their feet and their bodies in anticipation of what was to happen. The trumpets flared again. On one side of the place, a big door began to swing slowly open. From beyond that slowly opening door came music, soft, muted strains that sounded like lutes from heaven. Vee Vee, her hand on Johnson's elbow, rose. Johnson stood up with her. He got the surprise of his life as her fingers clenched, digging into his muscles. Pain shot through his arm, paralyzing it and almost paralyzing him. He knew instantly that she was using the Karmer nerve block paralysis on him. His left hand moved with lightning speed, the tips of his fingers striking savagely against her shoulder. She gasped, her face whitened as pain shot through her in response to the thrust of his finger tips. Her hand that had been digging into his elbow lost its grip, dropped away and hung limp at her side. Grabbing it, she began to massage it. "You—you—" Hot anger and shock were in her voice. "You're the first man I ever knew who could break the Karmer nerve paralysis." "And you're the first woman who ever tried it on me." "But—" "Shall we go watch the dreaming?" He took the arm that still hung limp at her side and tucked it into his elbow. "If you try to use the Karmer grip on me again I'll break your arm," he said. His voice was low but there was a wealth of meaning in it. "I won't do it again," the girl said stoutly. "I never make the same mistake twice." "Good," Johnson said. "The second time we break our victim's neck," Vee Vee said. "What a sweet, charming child you—" "I told you before, I'm not a child." "Child vampire," Johnson said. "Let me finish my sentences before you interrupt." She was silent. A smile, struggling to appear on her face, seemed to say she held no malice. Her fingers tightened on Johnson's arm. He tensed, expecting the nerve block grip again. Instead with the tips of her fingers she gently patted his arm. "There, there, darling, relax," she said. "I know a better way to get you than by using the Karmer grip." "What way?" Her eyes sparkled. "Eve's way," she answered. "Um!" Surprise sounded in his grunt. "But apples don't grow on Venus." "Eve's daughters don't use apples any more, darling. Come along." Moving toward the open door that led to the Room of the Dreaming, Johnson saw that Caldwell had risen and was following them. Caldwell's face was writhing in apprehensive agony and he was making warning signs. Johnson ignored them. With Vee Vee's fingers lightly patting his arm, they moved into the Room of the Dreaming. II It was a huge, semi-illumined room, with tier on tier of circling ramps rising up from an open space at the bottom. There ought to have been a stage there at the bottom, but there wasn't. Instead there was an open space, a mat, and a head rest. Up at the top of the circling ramps the room was in darkness, a fit hiding place for ghosts or Venusian werewolves. Pillows and a thick rug covered the circling ramps. The soul-quickening Perfume of the Dreamer was stronger here. The throbbing of the lutes was louder. It was Venusian music the lutes were playing. Human ears found it inharmonious at first, but as they became accustomed to it, they began to detect rhythms and melodies that human minds had not known existed. The room was pleasantly cool but it had the feel of dampness. A world that was rarely without pelting rain would have the feel of dampness in its dreaming rooms. The music playing strange harmonies in his ears, the perfume sending tingling feelings through his nose, Johnson entered the Room of the Dreamer. He suspected that other forces, unknown to him, were catching hold of his senses. He had been in dreaming rooms many times before but he had not grown accustomed to them. He wondered if any human ever did. A touch of chill always came over him as he crossed the threshold. In entering these places, it was as if some unknown nerve center inside the human organism was touched by something, some force, some radiation, some subtlety, that quite escaped radiation. He felt the coldness now. Vee Vee's fingers left off patting his arm. "Do you feel it, darling?" "Yes." "What is it?" "How would I know?" "Please!" Her voice grew sharp. "I think Johnny Johnson ought to know." "Johnny! How do you know my name?" "Shouldn't I recognize one of Earth's foremost scientists, even if he is incognito on Venus?" Her voice had a teasing quality in it. "But—" "And who besides Johnny Johnson would recognize the Karmer nerve grip and be able to break it instantly?" "Hell—" "John Michael Johnson, known as Johnny to his friends, Earth's foremost expert in the field of electro-magnetic radiations within the human body!" Her words were needles of icy fact, each one jabbing deeper and deeper into him. "And how would I make certain you were Johnny Johnson, except by seeing if you could break the Karmer nerve grip? If you could break it, then there was no doubt who you were!" Her words went on and on. "Who are you?" His words were blasts of sound. "Please, darling, you are making a scene. I am sure this is the last thing you really want to do." He looked quickly around them. The Venusians and humans moving into this room seemed to be paying no attention to him. His gaze came back to her. Again she patted his arm. "Relax, darling. Your secrets are safe with me." A gray color came up inside his soul. "But—but—" His voice was suddenly weak. The fingers on his arm were very gentle. "No harm will come to you. Am I not with you?" "That's what I'm afraid of!" he snapped at her. If he had had a choice, he might have drawn back. But with circumstances as they were—his life, Caldwell's life, possibly Vee Vee's life hung in the balance. Didn't she know that this was true? And as for Martin—But Caldwell had said that she had been asking about Martin. What connection did she have with that frantic human genius he sought here? Johnson felt his skin crawl. He moved toward a nest of cushions on a ramp, found a Venusian was beating him to them, deftly changed to another nest, found it. Vee Vee flowed to the floor on his right, moved cushions to make him more comfortable. She moved in an easy sort of way that was all flowing movement. He sat down. Someone bumped him on the left. "Sorry, bud. Didn't mean to bump into you." Caldwell's voice was still thick and heavy. He sprawled to the floor on Johnson's left. Under the man's coat, Johnson caught a glimpse of a slight bulge, the zit gun hidden there. His left arm pressed against his own coat, feeling his own zit gun. Operating under gas pressure, throwing a charge of gas-driven corvel, the zit guns were not only almost noiseless in operation but they knocked out a human or a Venusian in a matter of seconds. True, the person they knocked unconscious would be all right the next day. For this reason, many people did not regard the zit guns as effective weapons, but Johnson had a fondness for them. The feel of the little weapon inside his coat sent a surge of comfort through him. The music picked up a beat, perfume seemed to flow even more freely through the air, the lights dimmed almost to darkness, a single bright spotlight appeared in the ceiling, casting a circle of brilliant illumination on the mat and the headrest at the bottom of the room. The curtain rose. Unger stood in the middle of the spot of light. Johnson felt his chest muscles contract, then relax. Vee Vee's fingers sought his arm, not to harm him but running to him for protection. He caught the flutter of her breathing. On his left, Caldwell stiffened and became a rock. Johnson had not seen Unger appear. One second the circle of light had been empty, the next second the Venusian, smiling with all the impassivity of a bland Buddha, was in the light. He weighed three hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce, he was clad in a long robe that would impede movement. He had appeared in the bright beam of the spotlight as if by magic. Vee Vee's fingers dug deeper into Johnson's arm. "How—" "Shhh. Nobody knows." No human knew the answer to that trick. Unless perhaps Martin— Unger bowed. A little ripple of something that was not quite sound passed through the audience. Unger bowed again. He stretched himself flat on the mat, adjusted the rest to support his head, and apparently went to sleep. Johnson saw the Dreamer's eyes close, watched the chest take on the even, regular rhythm of sleep. The music changed, a slow dreamy tempo crept into it. Vee Vee's fingers dug at Johnson's arm as if they were trying to dig under his hide for protection. She was shivering. He reached for her hand, patted it. She drew closer to him. A few minutes earlier, she had been a very certain young woman, able to take care of herself, and handle anyone around her. Now she was suddenly uncertain, suddenly scared. In the Room of the Dreaming, she had suddenly become a frightened child looking for protection. "Haven't you ever seen this before?" he whispered. "N—o." She shivered again. "Oh, Johnny...." Under the circle of light pouring down from the ceiling, the Dreamer lay motionless. Johnson found himself with the tendency to hold his breath. He was waiting, waiting, waiting—for what? The whole situation was senseless, silly, but under its apparent lack of coherence, he sensed a pattern. Perhaps the path to the far-off stars passed this way, through such scented and musical and impossible places as these Rooms of the Dreamers. Certainly Martin thought so. And Johnson himself was not prepared to disagree. Around him, he saw that the Venusians were already going ... going ... going.... Some of them were already gone. This was an old experience to them. They went rapidly. Humans went more slowly. The Venusian watchers had relaxed. They looked as if they were asleep, perhaps in a hypnotic trance, lulled into this state by the music and the perfume, and by something else. It was this something else that sent Johnson's thoughts pounding. The Venusians were like opium smokers. But he was not smoking opium. He was not in a hypnotic trance. He was wide awake and very much alert. He was ... watching a space ship float in an endless void . As Unger had come into the spotlight, so the space ship had come into his vision, out of nowhere, out of nothingness. The room, the Dreamer, the sound of the music, the sweetness of the perfume, Vee Vee and Caldwell were gone. They were no longer in his reality. They were not in the range of his vision. It was as if they did not exist. Yet he knew they did exist, the memory of them, and of other things, was out on the periphery of his universe, perhaps of the universe. All he saw was the space ship. It was a wonderful thing, perhaps the most beautiful sight he had seen in his life. At the sight of it, a deep glow sprang inside of him. Back when he had been a kid he had dreamed of flight to the far-off stars. He had made models of space ships. In a way, they had shaped his destiny, had made him what he was. They had brought him where he was this night, to the Dream Room of a Venusian tavern. The vision of the space ship floating in the void entranced and thrilled him. Something told him that this was real; that here and now he was making contact with a vision that belonged to time. He started to his feet. Fingers gripped his arm. "Please, darling. You startled me. Don't move." Vee Vee's voice. Who was Vee Vee? The fingers dug into his arm. Pain came up in him. The space ship vanished. He looked with startled eyes at Vee Vee, at the Dream Room, at Unger, dreaming on the mat under the spot. "You ... you startled me," Vee Vee whispered. She released the grip on his arm. "But, didn't you see it?" "See what?" "The space ship!" "No. No." She seemed startled and a little terrified and half asleep. "I ... I was watching something else. When you moved I broke contact with my dream." "Your dream?" He asked a question but she did not answer it. "Sit down, darling, and look at your damned space ship." Her voice was a taut whisper of sound in the darkened room. Johnson settled down. A glance to his left told him that Caldwell was still sitting like a chunk of stone.... The Venusians were quiet. The music had shifted. A slow languorous beat of hidden drums filled the room. There was another sound present, a high-speed whirring. It was, somehow, a familiar sound, but Johnson had not heard it before in this place. He thought about the space ship he had seen. The vision would not come. He shook his head and tried again. Beside him, Vee Vee was silent, her face ecstatic, like the face of a woman in love. He tried again for the space ship. It would not come. Anger came up instead. Somehow he had the impression that the whirring sound which kept intruding into his consciousness was stopping the vision. So far as he could tell, he was the only one present who was not dreaming, who was not in a state of trance. His gaze went to Unger, the Dreamer.... Cold flowed over him. Unger was slowly rising from the mat. The bland face and the body in the robe were slowly floating upward! III An invisible force seemed to twitch at Johnson's skin, nipping it here and there with a multitude of tiny pinches, like invisible fleas biting him. "This is it!" a voice whispered in his mind. "This is what you came to Venus to see. This ... this...." The first voice went into silence. Another voice took its place. "This is another damned vision!" the second voice said. "This ... this is something that is not real, that is not possible! No Venusian Dreamer, and no one else, can levitate, can defy the laws of gravity, can float upward toward the ceiling. Your damned eyes are tricking you!" "We are not tricking you!" the eyes hotly insisted. "It is happening. We are seeing it. We are reporting accurately to you. That Venusian Buddha is levitating. We, your eyes, do not lie to you!" "You lied about the space ship!" the second voice said. "We did not lie about the space ship!" the eyes insisted. "When our master saw that ship we were out of focus, we were not reporting. Some other sense, some other organ, may have lied, but we did not." "I—" Johnson whispered. "I am your skin," another voice whispered. "I am covered with sweat." "We are your adrenals. We are pouring forth adrenalin." "I am your pancreas. I am gearing you for action." "I am your thyroid. I...." A multitude of tiny voices seemed to whisper through him. It was as if the parts of his body had suddenly found voices and were reporting to him what they were doing. These were voices out of his training days when he had learned the names of these functions and how to use them. "Be quiet!" he said roughly. The little voices seemed to blend into a single chorus. "Action, Master! Do something." "Quiet!" Johnson ordered. "But hurry. We are excited." "There is a time to be excited and a time to hurry. In this situation, if action is taken before the time for it—if that time ever comes—we can all die." "Die?" the chorus quavered. "Yes," Johnson said. "Now be quiet. When the time goes we will all go together." The chorus went into muted silence. But just under the threshold the little voices were a multitude of tiny fretful pressures. "I hear a whirring sound," his ears reported. "Please!" Johnson said. In the front of the room Unger floated ten feet above the floor. "Master, we are not lying!" his eyes repeated. "I sweat...." his skin began. "Watch Unger!" Johnson said. The Dreamer floated. If wires suspended him, Johnson could not see them. If any known force lifted him, Johnson could not detect that force. All he could say for certain was that Unger floated. "Yaaah!" The silence of a room was broken by the enraged scream of a Venusian being jarred out of his dream. "Damn it!" A human voice said. A wave as sharp as the tip of a sword swept through the room. Unger fell. He was ten feet high when he started to fall. With a bone-breaking, body-jarring thud, the Dreamer fell. Hard. There was a split second of startled silence in the Dreaming Room. The silence went. Voices came. "Who did that?" "What happened?" "That human hidden there did it! He broke the Dreaming!" Anger marked the voices. Although the language was Venusian, Johnson got most of the meaning. His hand dived under his coat for the gun holstered there. At his left, Caldwell was muttering thickly. "What—what happened? I was back in the lab on Earth—" Caldwell's voice held a plaintive note, as if some pleasant dream had been interrupted. On Johnson's right, Vee Vee seemed to flow to life. Her arms came up around his neck. He was instantly prepared for anything. Her lips came hungrily against his lips, pressed very hard, then gently drew away. "What—" he gasped. "I had to do it now, darling," she answered. "There may not be a later." Johnson had no time to ask her what she meant. Somewhere in the back of the room a human screamed. He jerked around. Back there a knot of Venusians were attacking a man. "It's Martin!" Caldwell shouted. "He is here!" In Johnson's hand as he came to his feet the zit gun throbbed. He fired blindly at the mass of Venusians. Caldwell was firing too. The soft throb of the guns was not audible above the uproar from the crowd. Struck by the gas-driven corvel charges, Venusians were falling. But there seemed to be an endless number of them. "Vee Vee?" Johnson suddenly realized that she had disappeared. She had slid out of his sight. "Vee Vee!" Johnson's voice became a shout. "To hell with the woman!" Caldwell grunted. "Martin's the important one." Zit, zit, zit, Caldwell moved toward the rear, shooting as he went. Johnson followed.

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Jinx Ship To The Rescue By ALFRED COPPEL, JR. Stand by for T.R.S. Aphrodite , butt of the Space Navy. She's got something terrific in her guts and only her ice-cold lady engineer can coax it out of her! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Brevet Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III of the Tellurian Wing, Combined Solarian Navies, stood ankle deep in the viscous mud of Venusport Base and surveyed his new command with a jaundiced eye. The hot, slimy, greenish rain that drenched Venusport for two-thirds of the 720-hour day had stopped at last, but now a miasmic fog was rising from the surrounding swampland, rolling across the mushy landing ramp toward the grounded spaceship. Visibility was dropping fast, and soon porto-sonar sets would have to be used to find the way about the surface Base. It was an ordinary day on Venus. Strike cursed Space Admiral Gorman and all his ancestors with a wealth of feeling. Then he motioned wearily to his companion, and together they sloshed through the mud toward the ancient monitor. The scaly bulk of the Tellurian Rocket Ship Aphrodite loomed unhappily into the thick air above the two men as they reached the ventral valve. Strike raised reluctant eyes to the sloping flank of the fat spaceship. "It looks," he commented bitterly, "like a pregnant carp." Senior Lieutenant Coburn Whitley—"Cob" to his friends—nodded in agreement. "That's our Lover-Girl ... old Aphrodisiac herself. The ship with the poison personality." Cob was the Aphrodite's Executive, and he had been with her a full year ... which was a record for Execs on the Aphrodite . She generally sent them Earthside with nervous breakdowns in half that time. "Tell me, Captain," continued Cob curiously, "how does it happen that you of all people happened to draw this tub for a command? I thought...." "You know Gorman?" queried Strykalski. Cob nodded. "Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Old Brass-bottom Gorman?" "The same." "Well," Cob ran a hand over his chin speculatively, "I know Gorman's a prize stinker ... but you were in command of the Ganymede . And, after all, you come from an old service family and all that. How come this?" He indicated the monitor expressively. Strike sighed. "Well, now, Cob, I'll tell you. You'll be spacing with me and I guess you've a right to know the worst ... not that you wouldn't find it out anyway. I come from a long line of very sharp operators. Seven generations of officers and gentlemen. Lousy with tradition. "The first David Farragut Strykalski, son of a sea-loving Polish immigrant, emerged from World War II a four-striper and Congressional Medal winner. Then came David Farragut Strykalski, Jr., and, in the abortive Atomic War that terrified the world in 1961, he won a United Nations Peace Citation. And then came David Farragut Strykalski III ... me. "From such humble beginnings do great traditions grow. But something happened when I came into the picture. I don't fit with the rest of them. Call it luck or temperament or what have you. "In the first place I seem to have an uncanny talent for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Gorman for example. And I take too much on my own initiative. Gorman doesn't like that. I lost the Ganymede because I left my station where I was supposed to be running section-lines to take on a bunch of colonists I thought were in danger...." "The Procyon A people?" asked Cob. "So you've heard about it." Strike shook his head sadly. "My tactical astrophysicist warned me that Procyon A might go nova. I left my routine post and loaded up on colonists." He shrugged. "Wrong guess. No nova. I made an ass of myself and lost the Ganymede . Gorman gave it to his former aide. I got this." Cob coughed slightly. "I heard something about Ley City, too." "Me again. The Ganymede's whole crew ended up in the Luna Base brig. We celebrated a bit too freely." Cob Whitley looked admiringly at his new Commander. "That was the night after the Ganymede broke the record for the Centaurus B-Earth run, wasn't it? And then wasn't there something about...." "Canalopolis?" Whitley nodded. "That time I called the Martian Ambassador a spy. It was at a Tellurian Embassy Ball." "I begin to see what you mean, Captain." "Strike's the name, Cob." Whitley's smile was expansive. "Strike, I think you're going to like our old tin pot here." He patted the Aphrodite's nether belly affectionately. "She's old ... but she's loose. And we're not likely to meet any Ambassadors or Admirals with her, either." Strykalski sighed, still thinking of his sleek Ganymede . "She'll carry the mail, I suppose. And that's about all that's expected of her." Cob shrugged philosophically. "Better than tanking that stinking rocket fuel, anyway. Deep space?" Strike shook his head. "Venus-Mars." Cob scratched his chin speculatively. "Perihelion run. Hot work." Strike was again looking at the spaceship's unprepossessing exterior. "A surge-circuit monitor, so help me." Cob nodded agreement. "The last of her class." And she was not an inspiring sight. The fantastically misnamed Aphrodite was a surge-circuit monitor of twenty guns built some ten years back in the period immediately preceding the Ionian Subjugation Incident. She had been designed primarily for atomics, with a surge-circuit set-up for interstellar flight. At least that was the planner's view. In those days, interstellar astrogation was in its formative stage, and at the time of the Aphrodite's launching the surge-circuit was hailed as the very latest in space drives. Her designer, Harlan Hendricks, had been awarded a Legion of Merit for her, and every silver-braided admiral in the Fleet had dreamed of hoisting his flag on one of her class. There had been three. The Artemis , the Andromeda , and the prototype ... old Aphrodisiac. The three vessels had gone into action off Callisto after the Phobos Raid had set off hostilities between the Ionians and the Solarian Combine. All three were miserable failures. The eager officers commanding the three monitors had found the circuit too appealing to their hot little hands. They used it ... in some way, wrongly. The Artemis exploded. The Andromeda vanished in the general direction of Coma Berenices glowing white hot from the heat of a ruptured fission chamber and spewing gamma rays in all directions. And the Aphrodite's starboard tubes blew, causing her to spend her store of vicious energy spinning like a Fourth of July pinwheel under 20 gravities until all her interior fittings ... including crew were a tangled, pulpy mess within her pressure hull. The Aphrodite was refitted for space. And because it was an integral part of her design, the circuit was rebuilt ... and sealed. She became a workhorse, growing more cantankerous with each passing year. She carried personnel.... She trucked ores. She ferried skeeterboats and tanked rocket fuel. Now, she would carry the mail. She would lift from Venusport and jet to Canalopolis, Mars, without delay or variation. Regulations, tradition and Admiral Gorman of the Inner Planet Fleet required it. And it was now up to David Farragut Strykalski III to see to it that she did.... The Officer of the Deck, a trim blonde girl in spotless greys saluted smartly as Strike and Cob stepped through the valve. Strike felt vaguely uncomfortable. He knew, of course, that at least a third of the personnel on board non-combat vessels of the Inner Planet Fleet was female, but he had never actually had women on board a ship of his own, and he felt quite certain that he preferred them elsewhere. Cob sensed his discomfort. "That was Celia Graham, Strike. Ensign. Radar Officer. She's good, too." Strike shook his head. "Don't like women in space. They make me uncomfortable." Cob shrugged. "Celia's the only officer. But about a quarter of our ratings are women." He grinned maliciously. "Equal rights, you know." "No doubt," commented the other sourly. "Is that why they named this ... ship 'Aphrodite'?" Whitley saw fit to consider the question rhetorical and remained silent. Strike lowered his head to clear the arch of the flying-bridge bulkhead. Cob followed. He trailed his Captain through a jungle of chrome piping to the main control panels. Strike sank into an acceleration chair in front of the red DANGER seal on the surge-circuit rheostat. "Looks like a drug-store fountain, doesn't it?" commented Cob. Strykalski nodded sadly, thinking of the padded smoothness of the Ganymede's flying-bridge. "But she's home to us, anyway." The thick Venusian fog had closed in around the top levels of the ship, hugging the ports and cutting off all view of the field outside. Strike reached for the squawk-box control. "Now hear this. All officer personnel will assemble in the flying bridge at 600 hours for Captain's briefing. Officer of the Deck will recall any enlisted personnel now on liberty...." Whitley was on his feet, all the slackness gone from his manner. "Orders, Captain?" "We can't do anything until the new Engineering Officer gets here. They're sending someone down from the Antigone , and I expect him by 600 hours. In the meantime you'll take over his part of the work. See to it that we are fueled and ready to lift ship by 602. Base will start loading the mail at 599:30. That's about all." "Yes, sir." Whitley saluted and turned to go. At the bulkhead, he paused. "Captain," he asked, "Who is the new E/O to be?" Strike stretched his long legs out on the steel deck. "A Lieutenant Hendricks, I. V. Hendricks, is what the orders say." Cob thought hard for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders. "I. V. Hendricks." He shook his head. "Don't know him." The other officers of the T.R.S. Aphrodite were in conference with the Captain when Cob and the girl at his side reached the flying bridge. She was tall and dark-haired with regular features and pale blue eyes. She wore a service jumper with two silver stripes on the shoulder-straps, and even the shapeless garment could not hide the obvious trimness of her figure. Strike's back was toward the bulkhead, and he was addressing the others. "... and that's about the story. We are to jet within 28,000,000 miles of Sol. Orbit is trans-Mercurian hyperbolic. With Mars in opposition, we have to make a perihelion run and it won't be pleasant. But I'm certain this old boiler can take it. I understand the old boy who designed her wasn't as incompetent as they say. But Space Regs are specific about mail runs. This is important to you, Evans. Your astrogation has to be accurate to within twenty-five miles plus or minus the shortest route. And there'll be no breaking orbit. Now be certain that the refrigeration units are checked, Mister Wilkins, especially in the hydroponic cells. Pure air is going to be important." "That's about all there is to tell you. As soon as our rather leisurely E/O gets here, we can jet with Aunt Nelly's postcard." He nodded. "That's the story. Lift ship in...." He glanced at his wrist chronograph, "... in an hour and five." The officers filed out and Cob Whitley stuck his head into the room. "Captain?" "Come in, Cob." Strike's dark brows knit at the sight of the uniformed girl in the doorway. Cob's face was sober, but hidden amusement was kindling behind his eyes. "Captain, may I present Lieutenant Hendricks? Lieutenant I-vy Hendricks?" Strike looked blankly at the girl. "Our new E/O, Captain," prompted Whitley. "Uh ... welcome aboard, Miss Hendricks," was all the Captain could find to say. The girl's eyes were cold and unfriendly. "Thank you, Captain." Her voice was like cracked ice tinkling in a glass. "If I may have your permission to inspect the drives, Captain, I may be able to convince you that the designer of this vessel was not ... as you seem to think ... a senile incompetent." Strike was perplexed, and he showed it. "Why, certainly ... uh ... Miss ... but why should you be so...." The girl's voice was even colder than before as she said, "Harlan Hendricks, Captain, is my father." A week in space had convinced Strike that he commanded a jinx ship. Jetting sunward from Venus, the cantankerous Aphrodite had burned a steering tube through, and it had been necessary to go into free-fall while Jenkins, the Assistant E/O, and a damage control party effected repairs. When the power was again applied, Old Aphrodisiac was running ten hours behind schedule, and Strike and Evans, the Astrogation Officer, were sweating out the unforeseen changes introduced into the orbital calculations by the time spent in free-fall. The Aphrodite rumbled on toward the orbit of Mercury.... For all the tension between the occupants of the flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks worked well together. And after a second week in space, a reluctant admiration was replacing the resentment between them. Ivy spent whatever time she could spare tinkering with her father's pet surge-circuit and Strike began to realize that there was little she did not know about spaceship engineering. Then, too, Ivy spent a lot of time at the controls, and Strike was forced to admit that he had never seen a finer job of piloting done by man or woman. And finally, Ivy hated old Brass-bottom Gorman even more than Strike did. She felt that Gorman had ruined her father's career, and she was dedicating her life to proving her father right and Brass-bottom wrong. There's nothing in the cosmos to nurture friendship like a common enemy. At 30,000,000 miles from the sun, the Aphrodite's refrigeration units could no longer keep the interior of the ship at a comfortable temperature. The thermometer stood at 102°F, the very metal of the ship's fittings hot to the touch. Uniforms were discarded, insignia of rank vanished. The men dressed in fiberglass shorts and spaceboots, sweat making their naked bodies gleam like copper under the sodium-vapor lights. The women in the crew added only light blouses to their shorts ... and suffered from extra clothing. Strike was in the observation blister forward, when Ensign Graham called to say that she had picked up a radar contact sunward. The IFF showed the pips to be the Lachesis and the Atropos . The two dreadnaughts were engaged in coronary research patrol ... a purely routine business. But the thing that made Strike curse under his breath was Celia Graham's notation that the Atropos carried none other than Space Admiral Horatio Gorman, Cominch Inplan. Strike thought it a pity that old Brass-bottom couldn't fall into Hell's hottest pit ... and he told Ivy so. And she agreed. Old Aphrodisiac had reached perihelion when it happened. The thermometer stood at 135° and tempers were snapping. Cob and Celia Graham had tangled about some minor point concerning Lover-Girl's weight and balance. Ivy went about her work on the bridge without speaking, and Strike made no attempt to brighten her sudden depression. Lieutenant Evans had punched Bayne, the Tactical Astrophysicist, in the eye for some disparaging remark about Southern California womanhood. The ratings were grumbling about the food.... And then it happened. Cob was in the radio room when Sparks pulled the flimsy from the scrambler. It was a distress signal from the Lachesis . The Atropos had burst a fission chamber and was falling into the sun. Radiation made a transfer of personnel impossible, and the Atropos skeeterboats didn't have the power to pull away from the looming star. The Lachesis had a line on the sister dreadnaught and was valiantly trying to pull the heavy vessel to safety, but even the thundering power of the Lachesis' mighty drive wasn't enough to break Sol's deathgrip on the battleship. A fleet of souped-up space-tugs was on its way from Luna and Venusport, but they could not possibly arrive on time. And it was doubtful that even the tugs had the necessary power to drag the crippled Atropos away from a fiery end. Cob snatched the flimsy from Sparks' hands and galloped for the flying-bridge. He burst in and waved the message excitedly in front of Strykalski's face. "Have a look at this! Ye gods and little catfish! Read it!" "Well, dammit, hold it still so I can!" snapped Strike. He read the message and passed it to Ivy Hendricks with a shake of his head. She read it through and looked up exultantly. "This is it ! This is the chance I've been praying for, Strike!" He returned her gaze sourly. "For Gorman to fall into the sun? I recall I said something of the sort myself, but there are other men on those ships. And, if I know Captain Varni on the Lachesis , he won't let go that line even if he fries himself." Ivy's eyes snapped angrily. "That's not what I meant, and you know it! I mean this!" She touched the red-sealed surge-circuit rheostat. "That's very nice, Lieutenant," commented Cob drily. "And I know that you've been very busy adjusting that gismo. But I seem to recall that the last time that circuit was uncorked everyone aboard became part of the woodwork ... very messily, too." "Let me understand you, Ivy," said Strike in a flat voice. "What you are suggesting is that I risk my ship and the lives of all of us trying to pull old Gorman's fat out of the fire with a drive that's blown skyhigh three times out of three. Very neat." There were tears bright in Ivy Hendricks' eyes and she sounded desperate. "But we can save those ships! We can, I know we can! My father designed this ship! I know every rivet of her! Those idiots off Callisto didn't know what they were doing. These ships needed specially trained men. Father told them that! And I'm trained! I can take her in and save those ships!" Her expression turned to one of disgust. "Or are you afraid?" "Frankly, Ivy, I haven't enough sense to be afraid. But are you so certain that we can pull this off? If I make a mistake this time ... it'll be the last. For all of us." "We can do it," said Ivy Hendricks simply. Strike turned to Cob. "What do you say, Cob? Shall we make it hotter in here?" Whitley shrugged. "If you say so, Strike. It's good enough for me." Celia Graham left the bridge shaking her head. "We'll all be dead soon. And me so young and pretty." Strike turned to the squawk-box. "Evans!" "Evans here," came the reply. "Have Sparks get a DF fix on the Atropos and hold it. We'll home on their carrier wave. They're in trouble and we're going after them. Plot the course." "Yes, Captain." Strike turned to Cob. "Have the gun-crews stand by to relieve the black-gang in the tube rooms. It's going to get hotter than the hinges of hell down there and we'll have to shorten shifts." "Yes, sir!" Cob saluted and was gone. Strike returned to the squawk-box. "Radar!" "Graham here," replied Celia from her station. "Get a radar fix on the Lachesis and hold it. Send your dope up to Evans and tell him to send us a range estimate." "Yes, Captain," the girl replied crisply. "Gun deck!" "Gun deck here, sir," came a feminine voice. "Have number two starboard torpedo tube loaded with a fish and a spool of cable. Be ready to let fly on short notice ... any range." "Yes, sir!" The girl switched off. "And now you, Miss Hendricks." "Yes, Captain?" Her voice was low. "Take over Control ... and Ivy...." "Yes?" "Don't kill us off." He smiled down at her. She nodded silently and took her place at the control panel. Smoothly she turned old Aphrodisiac's nose sunward.... Lashed together with a length of unbreakable beryllium steel cable, the Lachesis and the Atropos fell helplessly toward the sun. The frantic flame that lashed out from the Lachesis' tube was fading, her fission chambers fusing under the terrific heat of splitting atoms. Still she tried. She could not desert her sister ship, nor could she save her. Already the two ships had fallen to within 18,000,000 miles of the sun's terrifying atmosphere of glowing gases. The prominences that spouted spaceward seemed like great fiery tentacles reaching for the trapped men on board the warships. The atmospheric guiding fins, the gun-turrets and other protuberances on both ships were beginning to melt under the fierce radiance. Only the huge refrigeration plants on the vessels made life within them possible. And, even so, men were dying. Swiftly, the fat, ungainly shape of old Aphrodisiac drew near. In her flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks watched the stricken ships in the darkened viewport. The temperature stood at 140° and the air was bitter with the smell of hot metal. Ivy's blouse clung to her body, soaked through with perspiration. Sweat ran from her hair into her eyes and she gasped for breath in the oven hot compartment. Strike watched her with apprehension. Carefully, Ivy circled the two warships. From the starboard tube on the gun-deck, a homing rocket leapt toward the Atropos . It plunged straight and true, spilling cable as it flew. It slammed up against the hull, and stuck there, fast to the battleship's flank. Quickly, a robocrane drew it within the ship and the cable was made secure. Like cosmic replicas of the ancient South American "bolas," the three spacecraft whirled in space ... and all three began that sunward plunge together. They were diving into the sun. The heat in the Aphrodite's bridge was unbearable. The thermometer showed 145° and it seemed to Strike that Hell must be cool by comparison. Ivy fought her reeling senses and the bucking ship as the slack came out of the cable. Blackness was flickering at the edges of her field of vision. She could scarcely lift her hand to the red-sealed circuit rheostat. Shudderingly, she made the effort ... and failed. Conscious, but too spent to move, she collapsed over the blistering hot instrument panel. " Ivy! " Strike was beside her, cradling her head in his arm. "I ... I ... can't make it ... Strike. You'll ... have to run ... the show ... after ... all." Strike laid her gently in an acceleration chair and turned toward the control panel. His head was throbbing painfully as he broke the seal on the surge-circuit. Slowly he turned the rheostat. Relays chattered. From deep within old Lover-Girl's vitals came a low whine. He fed more power into the circuit. Cadmium rods slipped into lead sheaths decks below in the tube-rooms. The whining rose in pitch. The spinning of the ships in space slowed. Stopped. With painful deliberation, they swung into line. More power. The whine changed to a shriek. A banshee wail. Cob's voice came through the squawk-box, soberly. "Strike, Celia's fainted down here. We can't take much more of this heat." "We're trying, Cob!" shouted Strike over the whine of the circuit. The gauges showed the accumulators full. " Now! " He spun the rheostat to the stops, and black space burst over his brain.... The last thing he remembered was a voice. It sounded like Bayne's. And it was shouting. "We're moving 'em! We're pulling away! We're...." And that was all. The space-tug Scylla found them. The three ships ... Atropos , Lachesis , and old Aphrodisiac ... lashed together and drifting in space. Every man and woman aboard out cold from the acceleration, and Aphrodite's tanks bone dry. But they were a safe 80,000,000 miles from Sol.... The orchestra was subdued, the officer's club softly lighted. Cob leaned his elbow on the bar and bent to inspect the blue ribbon of the Spatial Cross on Strike's chest. Then he inspected his own and nodded with tipsy satisfaction. He stared out at the Martian night beyond the broad windows and back again at Strike. His frown was puzzled. "All right," said Strike, setting down his glass. "What's on your mind, Cob? Something's eating you." Whitley nodded very slowly. He took a long pull at his highball. "I understand that you goofballed your chances of getting the Ganymede back when Gorman spoke his piece to you...." "All I said to him...." "I know. I know what you said ... and it won't bear repeating. But you're not fooling me. You've fallen for old Lover-Girl and you don't want to leave her. Ver-ry commendable. Loyal! Stout fellah! But what about Ivy?" "Ivy?" Cob looked away. "I thought that you and she ... well, I thought that when we got back ... well...." Strike shook his head. "She's gone to the Bureau of Ships with a designing job." Cob waved an expressive arm in the air. "But dammit, man, I thought...." "The answer is no . Ivy's a nice girl ... but...." He paused and sighed. "Since she was promoted to her father's old rank ... well...." He shrugged. "Who wants a wife that ranks you?" "Never thought of that," mused Cob. For a long while he was silent; then he pulled out an address book and leafed through until he came to the pages marked "Canalopolis, Mars." And he was gratified to see that Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III was doing the same.

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20002

The Absurdity of Family Love Don't get me wrong. Kids are great. I have some, and I adore them. Every Christmas I become a slave to my camcorder. Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow, and so on. But now that the radiance of the yuletide season is fading, it's time to confront a sobering scientific truth: The more you think about the biology of parental love, the more absurd it seems. The same goes for love of kin generally--brothers, sisters, nephews, etc. Readers familiar with my obsessions may fear that this column is just another attempt to spoil everyone's fun, to replace the beautiful mystery of life with ugly Darwinian clarity. Actually, what I hope to dispel isn't pre-Darwinian mystery, but a kind of post-Darwinian mysticism, a confused exaltation of genetic affinity. You see the confusion when biological parents invoke "blood ties" to reclaim a child from adoptive parents. You see it when opponents of cross-ethnic adoption argue--as in a New York Times op-ed piece a few months ago--that we must respect "the strength of the biological and cultural ties that Indian tribes can offer their own children." In a sense, you see it every year around Christmas, when people pay lip service to the idea of universal brotherhood but believe in their hearts that it's ridiculous, that truly loving people to whom you aren't related violates some law of nature. Thanks to the biologist William Hamilton, it is now clear why people feel brotherly love in the literal sense--and sisterly love, maternal love, and paternal love. It's all due to the operation of "kin selection" during evolution. A greatly oversimplified textbook example: Two million years ago, two hominids, Loveless Bob and Loving Bob, stand on two different riverbanks, in identical situations. Each is watching his full sibling Bill drown. Loving Bob has a gene inclining him to love his brother and thus jump in the raging river, even though his risk of dying is 10 percent. Loveless Bob has no such gene, and thus stands on the bank wondering whether his brother's corpse will attract any large, edible fish. Which Bob's genes will survive the Darwinian reaper--genes for love or for cold indifference? Love triumphs. True, there's a one-in-10 chance that the love gene will sink along with Loving Bob. But consider the upside. There's a one-in-two chance that Bob's full sibling Bill has the same gene and, thus, that a successful rescue mission will pluck an otherwise doomed copy of the gene from the dustbin of history. Do the math, and you'll see that, over time, Loving Bobs send more genes to posterity than Loveless Bobs. As love genes spread at the expense of indifference genes, Loveless Bobs slowly become extinct. Die, selfish scum! Genes for sibling love come to permeate our species--as, in fact, they now do. So do genes for maternal love and paternal love. All brought to you by kin selection. As modern Darwinism gets popularized, the basic idea of kin selection is approaching the status of conventional wisdom. So are some attendant misconceptions. Misconception No. 1: Genes are smart . People often assume that kin-selected altruism is foolproof; that a gene can magically sense copies of itself in other organisms--or, at least, can somehow ascertain with perfect accuracy which organisms are close relatives of its own host organism and thus may carry copies of itself. In truth, genes aren't omniscient, or even sentient. If kin-selected genes are going to induce love of kin, they'll have to determine who qualifies as kin in some pedestrian and probably fallible way. For example: Back when Loving Bob was 6 years old, if his mother was nursing some infant named Bill and sleeping by its side every night, there's a very good chance that Bill was Bob's sibling. So a gene disposing Bob to love children whom he sees his mother nurturing could spread through the population until everyone obeys the same rule. But this rule would misfire now and then, when a mother is for some reason nurturing a non-offspring. It's just that the misfiring wouldn't happen often enough to greatly dilute the genetic math favoring the gene's proliferation. Little is known about which rules for identifying kin--"kin-recognition mechanisms"--do operate in our species. But clearly, they are fallible. Even mothers, who you'd think would have a damn good idea of who their offspring are, can in principle be fooled. When hospital staffers for some reason handed hours-old Kimberly Mays to a mother who was not hers, the mother's kin-recognition mechanisms--a k a bonding processes--kicked in. This woman wound up loving Kimberly like a daughter (though the mother died two years later, so that Kimberly was reared mostly by a stepmother). Meanwhile, Kimberly's genetic mother, having missed years of bonding, can never love Kimberly quite like her own child, even though Kimberly is her own child. Because genetic relationship per se doesn't matter. This irrelevance of genes is why surrogate motherhood is so messy. Even when, thanks to in vitro fertilization, the birth mother is unrelated to the fetus she carries, she will, upon giving birth, fall in love with the child. During evolution, after all, having a baby come out of your womb was reasonably strong evidence of kinship. The power of the hormones that govern this bonding is familiar to anyone who has watched a woman clutch her just-born child and turn into a love-drunk cuddle-bunny. (When my wife went through this magic moment, I briefly considered snatching the baby and replacing it with an 8-by-10 glossy of myself.) This hormonal power was also observed by researchers studying oxytocin, a hormone that's present in human and other mammalian mothers at birth. The researchers put it in a syringe and used it to shatter all previous records for cuddling among laboratory rats. By the way, the synthetic version of oxytocin, Pitocin, is what doctors use to induce labor. Misconception No. 2: People are smart--or, at least, they are smart Darwinian robots . Darwinian theory does posit that homo sapiens were "designed" to get their genes into the next generation, but not that they were designed to do so consciously and rationally. As surrogate mothers have proved, knowing that you've given no genes to an infant needn't stop the bonding process. Thus, "kin- recognition mechanism" is a doubly misleading term--first because, as we've seen, the mechanism doesn't positively identify kin, but just identifies factors correlated with kinship; and second because people aren't really aware of doing the identifying. We don't think, "There's strong evidence that she's my daughter, so I adore her." More like, "God but my daughter's adorable." It is good news for adoptive parents that neither genetic relationship nor conscious awareness of genetic relationship is a prerequisite for love. Still, it is bad news that maternal bonding begins with hormones at birth. It is also bad news that breast-feeding, which adoptive mothers usually can't do, releases the bonding hormone oxytocin. Then again, there is no reason in principle that adoptive parents couldn't take Pitocin once a day for synthetic bonding sessions. (Oxytocin seems to be part of the bonding formula in men, too.) Besides, some genetic mothers aren't conscious at birth, and many don't breast-feed, yet they all nonetheless wind up loving their kids. As the many successful adoptive parents know, lots of the magic moments that add up to durabonding have nothing to do with birthing or breast-feeding. (Tiny tots, with their eyes all aglow ... ) Anyway, the main point is that when genetic parents give up a child for adoption and have second thoughts weeks, months, or even years later, their appeals to blood ties should count for zilch. Their love of their child, and their child's love of them, depends not on genetic math but on a long and complex chain of bonding, much of which they have already voluntarily missed out on. Similarly, the idea that Native American babies, or black babies, or whatever, have some mystical genetic affinity with their "own" kind is silly. Obviously, cross-ethnic adoption is dicey. It draws sidelong glances and playground taunts, and it may give the adopted child an identity crisis. But it won't do this because of some ancestral memory in the genes. As attitudes change, cross-ethnic adoption will get easier; and as cross-ethnic adoption gets more common, attitudes will change. (There are other pop-genetics arguments against cross-ethnic adoption, and against adoption in general. One is that genes influence personality so powerfully that mixing unrelated siblings is like mixing oil and water. This idea is .) Misconception No. 3: Our genes, though perhaps not real smart, aren't downright stupid . Here we come, at last, to the true absurdity of familial love. As we've seen, the genes that sponsor it flourished by encouraging an "altruism" that was, in fact, self-serving at the genetic level (the inexorable triumph of Loving Bob's genes). As we've also seen, these genes can be "fooled" into encouraging altruism toward non-kin, altruism that presumably is not self-serving at the genetic level. Still, you might argue, in defense of your genes, they usually direct familial love toward genuine kin, and thus usually succeed in being efficiently selfish. Wrong! When genes confine altruism to kin, and deny it to needy non-kin, they are in fact failing spectacularly to be efficiently selfish. Because nowadays, copies of these genes do reside in non-kin--in your next-door neighbor and, for that matter, your worst enemy. After all, the Darwinian logic behind love of kin was so relentless that these genes permeated our entire species! Loveless Bob is extinct, remember? You can be forgiven for doubting my logic. People like me, in writing about kin selection, often talk about full siblings sharing "half their genes," implying that nonrelatives share none. But in truth, you share virtually all your genes with any randomly selected homo sapien on any continent. What people like me really mean is that full siblings share half of any genes that are newly minted--genes that have recently arisen and on which natural selection is just starting to pass judgment. Genes that natural selection fully endorsed long ago--the basic genes for hunger, for lust, for familial love--are in everyone. So genes that originally flourished by bestowing love with discerning selfishness--by discriminating against people not containing copies of themselves--now, having spread through the species, discriminate against people who do contain copies! You may doubt that natural selection, a process that supposedly maximizes genetic selfishness, could fail so abjectly to do so. But it's true. . So this past holiday season, as you rushed to buy presents for your kids or your siblings or your nieces or nephews, impelled by "selfishly" altruistic genes, you were operating under flawed Darwinian logic. These "selfish" genes could do just as much for themselves by encouraging you to instead spend your money on the beggar outside the department store. In fact, they could do more, since the beggar is closer to perishing than your relatives are. (Also, the beggar might buy something useful such as food, as opposed to a hair-eating Cabbage Patch doll.) But our genes are too stupid to so deftly serve their own welfare. Not that I attach much weight to what is and isn't "good" from the standpoint of genetic self-interest. As virtually all ethical philosophers who have pondered the matter agree, it doesn't make sense to model our moral values on the logic of nature anyway; to infer ought from is --to commit the "naturalistic fallacy"--only leads to moral confusion. For example, you might, after observing the natural behavior of praying mantises, be tempted to conclude that it is morally good for females to eat males after sex--and this, I submit, would be a repugnant and wrongheaded doctrine! (Though slightly less repugnant than the idea of eating males before the sex.) Most people implicitly recognize the naturalistic fallacy in some contexts. They sense that there's something visceral about, say, malice; yet they'll tell you (when not in its thrall) that they disapprove of it. It's obvious, they believe, that the natural strength of hatred is not a good thing. They're right. What is equally right, but a bit less obvious, is that the "natural" limits of love aren't necessarily good either. And, on close inspection, these limits turn out not to be all that rigorously "natural" anyway.

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The Flytrap Blame Game One of the few truths universally acknowledged about Flytrap is that presidential secretary Betty Currie deserves our sympathy: an honest, loyal civil servant dragooned into a scandal she had nothing to do with. But does Currie deserve such sanctification? After all, she knew Clinton's history when she took her job then enabled Clinton's sleaziness anyway. She stood by while Clinton cuckolded his wife and perhaps even helped him commit obstruction of justice. And did she protest? Not as far as we have heard. Did she quit on principle? No. Currie may not be Flytrap's chief malefactor, but nor is she the saintly innocent that the American public believes her to be. The Currie case suggests that Flytrap needs a moral recalibration. Monica Lewinsky, for example, has fantastically low approval ratings, much lower than Clinton's. One poll I saw pegged her favorability rating at 5 percent (even Newt Gingrich manages at least 25 percent). Now, Monica certainly isn't the heroine of Flytrap. She did seduce a married man, damage the presidency for the sake of casual sex, lie frequently and insouciantly, and blab her "secret" affair to anyone who'd listen. But she was also sexually exploited by her older, sleazy boss; had her reputation smeared by Clinton's lackeys; and was betrayed by her "friend" Linda Tripp. She hardly deserves such universal contempt. Others besides Currie have benefited from the public's excessive generosity. George Stephanopoulos has become a white knight of Flytrap, the former Clinton aide who had the courage to turn on his boss. And bravo to George for chastising Clinton! But it smacks of hypocrisy for Stephanopoulos to "discover" in 1998 that Clinton is a lying, womanizing dog. He has, after all known this since 1992. Back then Stephanopoulos himself helped quell bimbo eruptions and parroted Clinton's lying denials. He has never shouldered blame for those deceptions. (Mickey Kaus first noted Stephanopoulos' unbearable sanctimony in this "Chatterbox" item in January.) And while loyalty isn't a universal good, it was opportunistic for Stephanopoulos to betray Clinton just at the moment Clinton's stock was about to plunge. (Sometimes, of course, the public's rating is dead on target. Linda Tripp's allies--a group that includes her lawyers, Kenneth Starr, the Goldberg family, and absolutely no one else as far as I can tell--have tried repeatedly to improve her sorry public image. Jonah Goldberg tried right here in Slate. No sale.) Below is Slate 's entire scorecard, which ranks 31 of Flytrap's key players: The scale runs from -10 to +10. Anything less than zero means the player is a net miscreant. Anything above zero rates a sympathy card. (This is not, of course, an exact science. How, for example, do we judge Ann Lewis compared to other last ditch Clinton defenders? Lewis is said to be more outraged by Clinton's misbehavior than The Guys in the White House. Yet Lewis didn't quit in disgust. Is her outrage a plus or a minus if she doesn't act on it? You decide.) The Scorecard Bill Clinton (The public's rating: -6 ) Minuses: To recapitulate a) Had an adulterous affair with a young intern. b) Lied about it to everyone . c) Probably perjured himself. d) Perhaps obstructed justice. e) Entangled allies and aides in his web of deceit. f) Humiliated his wife and daughter. g) Did not have the grace to apologize to Lewinsky. h)Tried to shift the blame for his failures onto his accusers. Pluses: a) Had his private life exposed to the world in a way no one's should be. b) Has been persecuted by enemies who won't be satisfied until he is destroyed. Slate rating-- He never asked for our sympathy, and he doesn't deserve it: -9 Dick Morris (The public's rating: -6 ) Minuses: a) Encouraged Clinton's most deplorable habits: lying and polling. (When Clinton revealed his adultery to Morris, the political consultant immediately took a poll to see how America would respond to a Clinton admission. When the results suggested Americans would be angry if Clinton had perjured himself, Morris encouraged Clinton to deny the affair.) b) Further sullied the Clintons with a revolting comment suggesting that Clinton cheats because Hillary is a lesbian. c) Not even loyal enough to keep his mouth shut. Pluses: I cannot think of any. Slate rating: -7 Linda Tripp (The public's rating: -7 ) Minuses: a) Betrayed her "friend." b) Obsessively nosed into the private lives of others. c) Tried to score a book deal off sex gossip and other people's distress. d) Tattletale. Pluses: a) Whistleblower (see d under Minuses): risked humiliation to expose something she believed was wrong. b) Smeared mercilessly by Clinton allies, the media. Slate rating: -7 James Carville (The public's rating: -1 ) Minuses: a) Has known about Clinton's woman problem since 1992. b) Happily parroted Clinton's denial despite knowing that Clinton was a deceitful womanizer. c) Has not expressed the slightest chagrin or disappointment since Clinton's apology. d) Has not retreated from vicious attacks on Starr, despite evidence of Clinton's lies. Pluses: a) Perfectly loyal. b) Consistent in attacks against Starr. Slate rating: -5 Bruce Lindsey (The public's rating : To be determined ) Minuses: a) Not yet known what he did to protect Clinton from the Lewinsky affair. Early signs suggest he knew a lot and helped clean it up. Pluses: a) Unquestionably loyal to his boss. b) Silent. Slate rating-- Not enough information to make a clean guess: Approx -5 Vernon Jordan (The public's rating: +3 ) Minuses: a) May have known and must have suspected that Lewinsky was a mistress (given that he and Clinton are confidants, it's hard to believe that Jordan was totally in the dark about her). b) Protected too readily by Washington establishment. Pluses: a) May have helped Lewinsky simply because he's bighearted and generous not because she was the president's lover. Slate rating: -4 Sidney Blumenthal (The public's rating: -3 ) Minuses: a) Spun the president's denial for months without bothering to check if it was true. b) Pushed for Clinton to be aggressive rather than contrite during his speech. c) Trumpeted Clinton's denial but has not expressed chagrin now that Clinton has admitted his lies. Pluses: a) Consistent in belief that Starr is an ideologue and that the sex charges are political. b) Loyal. Slate rating: -3 Lanny Davis (The public's rating: -1 ) Minuses: a) Spun the president's denial for months without bothering to check if it was true. b) Said for seven months that we'd have to "wait and see." Then, when Clinton finally admitted his lies, Davis was hardly embarrassed or critical of the president. Pluses: a) Loyalty to old boss. Slate rating: -3 George Stephanopoulos (The public's rating: +4 ) Minuses: a) Hypocritical for him to "discover" in 1998 that Clinton is a lying dog. After all, he knew that Clinton was a lech in 1992 and helped cover it up. Yet he has never shouldered responsibility for the lies Clinton told then. b) Disloyal to turn on old boss as viciously as he has in past few weeks. Pluses: a) Had courage to turn on old boss and criticize his moral lapses. b) Urged Clinton to be fully contrite. Slate rating: -2 Betty Currie (The public's rating: +8 ) Minuses: a) Abetted adulterous affair. b) May have abetted obstruction of justice. c) Knew what she was getting into when she took the job so can't be excused on grounds of naiveté. d) Did not quit on principle. Pluses: a) Reputation for honesty. b) Probably dragooned into cover-up against her will. Slate rating: -2 Paul Begala (The public's rating: 0 ) Minuses: a) Spun the president's denial for months without bothering to check if it was true. b) Did not quit on principle after Clinton admitted lies. Pluses: a) Urged president to be contrite and wrote excellent, sufficiently apologetic speech. b) Loyal. Slate rating: -2 Rahm Emanuel (The public's rating: -1 ) Minuses and Pluses: Same as Begala (except Emanuel didn't write the speech). Slate rating: -2 Ann Lewis (The public's rating: -1 ) Minuses and Pluses: Same as Emanuel, except Lewis seems more morally outraged with Clinton than other White House aides. Slate rating: -2 Monica Lewinsky (The public's rating: -9 ) Minuses: a) Seduced a married man. b) Damaged and endangered the presidency for the sake of casual sex. c) Has lied frequently. d) Is a capable adult, not--as her advocates claim--a naive child, defenseless against the president's wiles. e) Protected herself with immunity when she needed to, even though her testimony would do enormous harm to Clinton and the nation. f) Blabbed her "secret" affair to lots of people. (So, while she was dragged into the scandal against her will, it was her own loquaciousness that made the dragging possible.) Pluses: a) Sexually exploited by her older boss. b) Had her reputation smeared by Clintonistas and the media. c) Betrayed by Linda Tripp. d) Dragged into the scandal against her will. Slate rating: -2 Mike McCurry (The public's rating: +2 ) Minuses: a) Spun and spun and spun the president's denial for months without bothering to check if it was true. Pluses: a) Was clearly dismayed by the entire scandal and his role in it. b) Is quitting the administration (though not, apparently, on principle). c) Loyal. Slate rating: -1 David Kendall (The public's rating: 0 ) Minuses: a) Relied on iffy legalisms to help Clinton escape trouble. Pluses: a) Relying on iffy legalisms to help Clinton escape trouble is his job. He's a lawyer. b) Admirably reticent, compared to Robert Bennett. Slate rating: -1 The Rev. Jesse Jackson (The public's rating: +2 ) Minuses: a) Revealed Clinton family troubles immediately after his pastoral visit. b) Parlayed pastoral visit into a week of self-promotion. Pluses: a) Graciously counseled a political rival in time of need. b) Did not demand any political compensation in exchange. Slate rating: -1 Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga. (The public's rating: -5 ) Minuses: a) Unapologetically vicious, partisan, and unforgiving in his impeachment quest. Pluses: a) Consistent throughout the scandal: He has been pushing impeachment since before Monica materialized in January. Slate rating: 0 Kenneth Starr (The public's rating: -9 ) Minuses: a) Seems merciless toward Clinton. b) Has pursued investigation into Clinton's private life with more zeal than seems appropriate. c) Is too willing to provoke constitutional standoffs for the sake of his investigation, seems indifferent to the dignity of the presidency. Pluses: a) Was right about Clinton and Lewinsky. b) Is compelled by law to investigate diligently and forcefully. c) Has been patient with the stonewalling, deceiving Clinton. Slate rating: +1 Paula Jones (The public's rating: -5 ) Minuses: a) Brought a legally dubious, gold-digging lawsuit. b) Resisted a settlement that would have saved the nation much embarrassment. c) Happily became a tool for Clinton's enemies. Pluses: a) Is vindicated because Clinton probably did it. b) Forced Clinton's lechery out in the open. c) Persisted in the face of ridicule and humiliation. Slate rating: +1 The American People (The public's rating: +7 ) Minuses: a) Hypocritically claim to despise scandal, follow it breathlessly, then blame the media for obsessing over it. b) Are secretly fascinated by the sleaziness of it. Pluses: a) Magnanimous toward the president. Slate rating: +1 The Media (The public's rating: -8 ) Minuses: a) No sense of proportionality. Coverage is wretchedly excessive even when it shouldn't be. b) Endlessly self-involved. How many stories have you seen about the media and the scandal? c) Unforgiving. The media want the scandal to continue, hence won't ever be satisfied that Clinton has suffered enough. Pluses: a) Worked hard to break a very important story and investigated the hell out of it. b) Unfairly savaged by hypocritical American people (see above). Slate rating: +1 Leon Panetta (The public's rating: +1 ) Minuses: a) Slightly disloyal to old boss. b) May have known about Clinton's extracurricular activities, yet turned a blind eye. c) On television too much. Pluses: a) Urged Clinton early on to come clean. b) Had good sense to leave the White House before corrupting himself. Slate rating: +1 Hillary Clinton (The public's rating: +4 ) Minuses: a) Knew what a lech he was, yet always protected him. b) May have always known truth about Lewinsky, yet still lied to protect Bill. c) Chose aggressive, political strategy over contrition. Pluses: a) Lied to, betrayed, and cuckolded by husband. b) Personally humiliated. c) May have disgraced her own good name by echoing his denials on the Today show. Slate rating-- She made a Faustian bargain, but you still feel sorry for Faust: +2 Al Gore (The public's rating: +3 ) Minuses: a) Did not (apparently) urge the president to come clean with American people. Pluses: a) Stayed loyal. b) Did not take advantage of scandal to burnish his own image. Slate rating: +2 Kathleen Willey (The public's rating: 0 ) Minuses: a) Was in it for the money (told her story partly in order to land a book contract). Pluses: a) Seems to have told story honestly and forthrightly. b) Reluctantly dragged into scandal. c) Was victimized by Clinton. Slate rating: +2 The Clinton Cabinet (The public's rating: +2 ) Minuses: a) Spun his denials without digging for the truth. b) Did not quit on principle. Pluses: a) Were conscripted unwillingly into scandal defense. (Unlike political aides such as Begala, who are expected to do political dirty work, the Cabinet members are public servants who should be kept away from such sleaze.) b) Were lied to by Clinton. c) Loyal. Slate rating: +3 Erskine Bowles (The public's rating: Doesn't care ) Minuses: a) Refused to involve himself in the critical issue of the presidency. b) Stood aside while White House was shanghaied by lawyers. Pluses: a) Stayed utterly silent about the scandal, clearly disgusted by it all. b) Kept the rest of the administration focused on policy, thus preventing total executive paralysis. c) Did not lie or spin for the president. Slate rating: +4 Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill. (The public's rating: +4 ) Minuses: There are none yet. Pluses: a) (Mostly) kept his mouth shut and prevented the House Judiciary Committee from jumping the gun on impeachment. Slate rating: +4 Secret Service (The public's rating: +8 ) Minuses: a) Fought Starr subpoena too hard because it considers itself the Praetorian Guard. Pluses: a) Dragged unwillingly into scandal by Clinton (unlike Currie or his political aides, the Secret Service agents have no choice about being near the president). b) Testified honestly but unwillingly, as they should. c) Did not leak. Slate rating: +5 Chelsea Clinton (The public's rating: +10 ) Minuses: There are none. Pluses: a) Humiliated and embarrassed by her father's misbehavior. b) Had family problems paraded before the world in a way they should not be. c) Has been endlessly psychologized by the media. d) Had her summer vacation ruined. Slate rating: +10 More Flytrap ...

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STRANGE EXODUS By ROBERT ABERNATHY Gigantic, mindless, the Monsters had come out of interstellar space to devour Earth. They gnawed at her soil, drank deep of her seas. Where, on this gutted cosmic carcass, could humanity flee? [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Westover got a shock when he stumbled onto the monster, for all that he knew one had been through here. He had been following the high ground toward the hills, alternately splashing through waist-deep water and climbing onto comparatively dry knolls. To right and left of him was the sullen noise of the river in flood, and behind him, too, the rising water he had barely escaped. The night was overcast, the moon a faint disk of glow that left river and hills and even the mud underfoot invisible. He had not sought in his mind for the flood's cause, but had merely taken it numbly as part of the fury and confusion of a world in ruin. Anyway, he was dead tired out on his feet. He sensed more than saw the looming wall before him, but he thought it the bare ledge-rock of a stripped hillside until he stepped into a small pot-hole and lurched forward, and his outflung hands sank into the slime that covered a surface faintly, horrifyingly resilient. He recoiled as if seared, and retreated, slithering in the muck. For moments his mind was full of dark formless panic; then he took a firm hold on himself and tried to comprehend the situation. Nothing was distinguishable beyond a few yards, but his mind's eye could see the rest—the immense slug-like shape that extended in ponderous repose across the river valley, its head and tail spilling over the hills on either side, five miles apart. The beast was quiescent until morning—sleeping, if such things slept. And that explained the flood; the monster's body had formed an unbreakable dam behind which the river had been steadily piling up in those first hours of night; if it did not move until dawn, the level would be far higher then. Westover stood motionless in the blackness; how long, he did not know. He was hardly aware of the water that covered his feet, crept over his ankles, and swirled halfway to his knees. Only the emergence of the moon through a rift of the cloud blanket brought him awake; its dim light gleamed all around on a great sheet of water, unbroken save for scattered black hummocks—crests of knolls like that on which he stood, all soon to be hidden by the rising flood. For a moment he knew despair. The way back was impassable, and the way ahead was blocked by the titanic enemy. Then the impersonal will that had driven him implacably two days and nights without stopping came to his rescue. Westover plodded forward, pressed his shrinking body against the slimy, faintly warm surface of the monster's foot, and sought above him with upstretched hands—found holds, and began to climb with a strength he had not known was left in him. The moonlight's fading again was merciful as he climbed the sheer, slippery face of the foot; but he could hear the wash and chuckle of the flood below. His tired brain told him treacherously: "I'm already asleep—this is a nightmare." Once, listening to that insidious voice, he slipped and for instants hung dizzily by his hands, and for some minutes after he had found a new foothold merely clung panting with pounding heart. Some time after he had found courage to resume the climb, he dragged himself, gasping and quivering, to comparative safety on the broad shelf that marked the rim of the foot. Above him lay the great black steep that rose to the summit of the monster's humped back, a mountain to be climbed. Westover felt poignantly that his exhausted body could not make that ascent and face the long and dangerous descent beyond, which he had to make before dawn ... but not now ... not now.... He lay in a state between waking and dreaming, high on the monster's side; and it seemed that the colossal body moved, swelling and sighing—but he knew they did not breathe as backboned animals do. Westover had been one of the men who, in the days when humanity was still fighting, had accumulated quite a store of knowledge about the enemy—the enemy that was brainless and toolless, but that was simply too vast for human intelligence and weapons to defeat.... Westover no longer saw the murky moonlight, the far faint glitter of the flood or the slope of the living mountain. He saw, as he had seen from a circling jet plane, an immense tree of smoke that rose and expanded under the noonday sun, creamy white above and black and oily below, and beneath the black cloud something that writhed and flowed sluggishly in a cyclopean death agony. That picture dissolved, and was replaced by the face of a man—one who might now be alive or dead, elsewhere in the chaos of a desolated planet. It was an ordinary face, roundish, spectacled, but etched now by tragedy; the voice that went with it was flat, unemotional, pedantic. "There are so many of them, and we've destroyed so few—and to kill those few took our mightiest weapons. Examination of the ones that have been killed discloses the reason why ordinary projectiles and bombs and poisons are ineffective against them—apart, that is, from the chief reason of sheer size. The creatures are so loosely organized that a local injury hardly affects the whole. In a sense, each one of them is a single cell—like the slime molds, the Earthly life forms that most resemble them. "That striking resemblance, together with the fact that they chose Earth to attack out of all the planets of the Solar System, shows they must have originated on a world much like this. But while on Earth the slime molds are the highest reticular organisms, and the dominant life is all multicellular, on the monsters' home world conditions must have favored unicellular growth. Probably as a result of this unspecialized structure, the monsters have attained their great size and perhaps for the same reason they have achieved what even intelligent cellular life so far hasn't—liberation from existence bound to one world's surface, the conquest of space. They accomplished it not by invention but by adaptation, as brainless life once crawled out of the sea to conquer the dry land. "The monsters who have descended on Earth must represent the end result of a long evolution completed in space itself. They are evidently deep-space beings, able to propel themselves from planet to planet and from star to star in search of food, guided by instinct to suns and worlds like ours. Descending on such a planet, they move across its surface systematically ingesting all edible material—all life not mobile enough to avoid their march. They are like caterpillars that overrun a planet and strip it of its leaves, before moving on to the next. "Man is a highly mobile species, so our direct casualties of this invasion have been very light and will continue to be. But when the monsters have finished with Earth, there will be no vegetation left for man's food, no houses, no cities, none of the fixed installations of civilization, and the end will be far more terrible than if we were all devoured by the monsters." Westover awoke, feeling himself bathed by the cold sweat of nightmare—then he realized that a misty rain had wetted his face and sogged his clothes. That, and the sleep he had had, refreshed him and made his mind clearer than it had been for days, and he remembered that he could not sleep but had to go on, searching with a hope that would not die for some miraculously spared refuge where civilization and science might yet exist, where there would be the means to realize his idea for stopping the monsters. He sat up, eyes searching the sky for a sign to tell him how long he had slept. Low on the western horizon he found the faint glow that told of the moon's setting; and in the east a stronger light was already struggling through the clouds and mist, becoming every moment less tenuous and illusory, more the bitter reality of the breaking day. Even as Westover began frantically climbing, out of that lightening sky the hopelessness of his effort pressed down on him. With dawn the monster would begin to move, to crawl eastward impelled by the same dim phototropic urge which must guide these things out of the interstellar depths to Sun-type stars. All of them had crept endlessly eastward around the Earth, gutting the continents and churning the sea bottoms, and by now whatever was left of human civilization must be starving beyond the Arctic circle, or aboard ships at sea. The hordes that still lived and wandered over the once populous fertile lands, like this—would not live long. For a man like Westover, who had been a scientist, it was not the prospect of death that was most crushing, but the death blow to his human pride, the star-storming pride of mind and will—defeated by sheer bulk and mindless hunger. Near the crest of the monster's back, he stumbled and fell hands and knees on the shagreen-roughness of the skin; at first he thought only that an attack of dizziness had made him fall, then he realized that the surface beneath him had shifted. Unmistakably even in the misty dawn-light, the hills and valleys of the rugose back were changing shape, as the vast protoplasmic mass below crawled, flowed beneath its integument. In slow peristaltic motion the waves marched eastward, toward the monster's head. He could stay where he was unharmed, of course. On the monster's back, of all places, he had nothing to fear from it or from others of its kind. But he knew with desperate clarity that by nightfall, when the beast became still once more, exhaustion and growing hunger would have made him unable to descend. As he lay where he had fallen, he felt that weakness creeping over him, no longer held in check by the will that had kept him doggedly plodding forward. Again he lay half conscious, in a lethargy that unchecked must grow steadily deeper until death. Isolated thoughts floated through his head. It occurred to him that he was now ideally located to conduct the experiments necessary to prove his theory of how to destroy the monsters—if only someone had had the foresight to build a biological laboratory on the monster's back. Of course the rolling motion would create special problems of technique.... Idiocy.... Once more he seemed to glimpse Sutton's face, as the biologist calmly made that grisly report to the President's Committee on Extermination.... Sutton's prediction had been a hundred percent correct. The monsters' hunger knew no halt until they had absorbed into themselves all the organic material on the world which was their prey.... And men must starve, as he was starving now.... With a struggle Westover roused himself, first sitting up, then swaying to his feet, frowning with the effort to look sanely at the terrible inspiration that had come to him. The cloud blanket was breaking up, the sun already high, beating down on the naked moving plateau on which the man stood. The idea born in him seemed to stand that light, even to expand into hope. Fingers shaking, he unhitched the light ax from his belt and began to hack with feverish industry at the monster's crusted hide. The scaly, weathered epidermis seemed immeasurably thick. But at last he had chopped through it, reached the softer protoplasm beneath. Clawing and hewing in the hole he had made, he tore out heavy slabs of the monster's flesh. A ripple that did not belong to the crawling motion ran over the thing's surface round about. Westover laughed wildly with a sudden sense of power. He, the insignificant human mite, had made the miles-long beast twitch like a flea-bitten dog. The analogy was pat; like a flea, he had lodged on a larger animal and was about to nourish himself from it. The slabs of flesh he had cut off were gray and unappetizing, but he knew from the studies he had helped Sutton make that the monsters, extraterrestrial though they were, were in the basic chemistry of proteins, fats and carbohydrates one with man or the amoeba, and therefore might be—food. His matches were dry in their water-proof case; he made a smoldering fire from the loose fibrous scale of the monster's back, and half an hour later was replete. Either the long fast, or involuntary revulsion, or perhaps merely the motion of the creature brought on nausea, but he fought it sternly back and succeeded in keeping his strange meal down. Then he was tormented by thirst. It was some time, though, before he could bring himself to drink the colorless fluid that had collected in the wound he had inflicted on the monster. Thus began for him a weird existence—the life of a parasite, of a flea on a dog. The monster crawled by day and rested by night; strengthened, the man could have left it then, but somehow night after night he did not. It wasn't, he argued with himself sometimes in the days when he lay torpidly drowsing, lulled by the long sway, arms over his head to protect him from the sun's baking, merely that he was chained to the only source of food he knew in all the world—not just that he was developing a flea's psychology. He was a man and a scientist, and he was conducting an experiment.... His life on the monster's back was proving something, something of vast importance for man, the extinct animal—but for increasingly longer periods of time he could not remember what it was.... There came a morning, though, when he remembered. Thus began for him a weird existence—the life of a parasite, of a flea on a dog. He woke with the sun's warmth on his body and the realization of something amiss trickling through his head. It was a little while before he recognized the wrongness, and when he did he sat bolt upright. The sun was already up, and the monster should have begun once more its steady, ravenous march to the east. But there was no motion; the great living expanse lay still around him. He wondered wildly if it was dead. Presently, though, he felt a faint shuddering and lift beneath his feet, and heard far stifled mutterings and sighs. Westover's mind was beginning to function again; it was as though the cessation of the rock and sway had exorcised the lethargy that had lain upon him. He knew now that he had been almost insane for the time he had passed here, touched by the madness that takes hermits and men lost in deserts or oceans. And his was a stranger solitude than any of those. Now he listened strainingly to the portentous sounds of change in the monster's vitals, and in a flash of insight knew them for what they were. The scientists had found, in the burst bodies of the Titans that had been killed by atomic bombs, the answer to the riddle of these creatures' crossing of space: great vacuoles, pockets of gas that in the living animal could be under exceedingly high pressures, and that could be expelled to drive the monster in flight like a reaction engine. Rocket propulsion, of course, was nothing new to zoology; it was developed ages before man, by the squids and by those odd degenerate relatives of the vertebrates that are called tunicates because of their gaudy cellulose-plastic armor.... The monster on which Westover had been living as a parasite was generating gases within itself, preparing to leave the ravished Earth. That was the meaning of its gargantuan belly rumblings. And they meant further that he must finally leave it—now or never—or be borne aloft to die gasping in the stratosphere. Hurriedly the man scrambled to the highest eminence of the back and stood looking about; and what he saw brought him to the brink of despair. For all around lay blue water, waves dancing and glinting in the fresh breeze; and sniffing the air he recognized the salt tang of the sea. While he slept the monster had crept beyond the coast line, and lay now in what to it was shallow water—fifty or a hundred fathoms. Back the way it had come, a headland was visible, mockingly, hopelessly distant. Of course—the great beast would crawl into the sea, which would float its bloated bulk and enable it to accelerate and take flight. It would never have been able to lift itself into the air from the dry land. He should have foreseen that and made his escape in time. Now that he had solved the problem of human survival.... But the bright ocean laughed at him, sparkling away wave beyond rolling wave, and beyond that blue headland could be only a land made desert, where men become beasts fought crazily over the last morsels of food. He had lost track of the days he had been on the monster's back, but the rape of Earth must be finished now. He had no doubt that the things would depart as they had come into the Solar System—in that close, seemingly one-willed swarm that Earth's astronomers had at first taken for a comet. If this one was leaving, the rest no doubt were too. Westover sat for a space with head in hands, hearing the faint continuing murmurs from below. And he remembered the voices. He had been hearing them again as he awoke—the distant muffled voices whose words he could not make out, not the small close ones that sometimes in the hot middays had spoken clearly in his ear and even called his name. The latter had to be, as he had vaguely accepted them even then, illusions—but the others—with his new clarity he was suddenly sure that they had been real. And a wild, white light of hope blazed in him, and he flung himself flat on the rough surface, beat on it with bare fists and shouted: "Help! Here I am! Help!" He paused to listen with fierce intentness, and heard nothing but the faint eructations deep inside the monster. Then he sprang to his feet, gripping his hand-ax, and ran panting to the place where he had dug for food. His excavations tended to close and heal overnight; now he went to work with vicious strokes enlarging the latest one, hacking and tearing it deeper and deeper. He was almost hidden in the cavity when a shadow fell across him from behind. He whirled, for there could be no shadows on the monster's back. A man stood watching him calmly—an elderly man in rusty black clothing, leaning on a stick. The staff, the snowy beard, and something that smoldered behind the benign eyes, gave him the look of an ancient prophet. "Who are you?" asked Westover, breathlessly but almost without surprise. "I am the Preacher," the old man said. "The Lord hath sent me to save you. Arise, my son, and follow me." Westover hesitated. "I'm not just imagining you?" he appealed. "Somebody else has really found the answer?" The Preacher's brows knitted faintly, but then his look turned to benevolent understanding. "You have been alone too long here. Come with me—I will take you to the Doctor." Westover was still not sure that the other was more than one of the powerful specters of childhood—the Preacher, the Doctor, no doubt the Teacher next—risen to rob him of his last shreds of sanity. But he nodded in childlike obedience, and followed. When, a few hundred yards nearer the monster's head, the other halted at a black rent in the rugose hide, the mouth of a burrow descending into utter blackness—Westover knew that both the Preacher and his own wild hope were real. "Down here. Into the belly of Leviathan," said the old man solemnly, and Westover nodded this time with alacrity. The crawling descent through the twisting, Stygian burrow had much that ought to belong to a journey into Hell.... More than that, no demonologist's imagination could have conceived without experiencing the sheer horror of the yielding beslimed walls that seemed every moment squeezing in to trap them unspeakably. The air was warm and rank with the familiar heavy sweetish odor of the monster's colorless blood.... Then, as he knew it must, a light glimmered ahead, the sinus widened, and Westover climbed to his feet and stood, weak-kneed still, staring at a chamber carved in the veritable belly of Leviathan. The floor underfoot was firm, as was the wall his shaking fingers tested. Dazzled, he saw tools leaning against the walls, spades, crowbars, axes, and a half-dozen people, men and women in rough grimy clothing, who stood watching him with lively interest. The Preacher stood beside him, breathing hard and mopping his forehead. But he brushed aside the deferential offers of the others: "No—I will take him to the Doctor myself. All of you must hurry now to close the shaft." There was another tunnel to be crawled through, but that one was firm-walled as the room they left behind. They emerged into a larger cavern, that like the first was lit—only now did the miracle of it obtrude itself in his dazed mind—by fluorescent tubes, and filled with equipment that gleamed glass and metal. Over an apparatus with many fluid-dripping trays, like an air-conditioning device, bent a lone man. "Is it working?" inquired the Preacher. "It's working," the other answered without looking up from the adjustment he was making. Bubbles were rising in the fluid that filled the trays, rising and bursting, rising and bursting with a curiously fascinating monotony. The subtly tense attitudes of the two initiates told Westover better than words that there was something hugely important in the success of whatever magic was producing those bubbles. The thaumaturge straightened, wiping his hands on his trousers as he turned with a satisfied grin on his round, spectacled face—then both he and Westover froze in dumbfounded recognition. Sutton was first to recover. He said quietly, "Welcome aboard the ark, Bill. You're just in time—I think we're about to hoist anchor." His quick eyes studied Westover's face, and he gestured toward a packing box against the wall opposite his apparatus. "Sit down. You've been through the mill." "That's right," Westover sat down dizzily. "I've been aboard your ark for some time now, though. Only as an ectoparasite." "It's high time you joined the endoparasites. Lucky you scratched around enough up there to create repercussions we could feel down here. You got the same idea, then?" "I stumbled onto it," Westover admitted. "I was wandering across country—my plane crashed on the way back from that South American bug hunt dreamed up by somebody who'd been reading Wells' War of the Worlds . I think my pilot went nuts; you could see too much of the destruction from up there.... But I got out in one piece and started walking—looking for some place with people and facilities that could try out my method of killing the monsters. I thought—I still think—I had a sure-fire way to do that—but I didn't realize then that it was too late to think of killing them off." Sutton nodded thoughtfully. "It was too late—or too early, perhaps. We'll have to talk that over." Westover finished the brief account of his coming to dwell on the monster's back. The other grinned happily. "You began with the practice, where I worked out the theory first." "I haven't got so far with the theory," said Westover, "but I think I've got the main outlines. Until the monsters came, man was a parasite on the face of the Earth. Fundamentally, parasitism—on the green plants and their by-products—was our way of life, as of all animals from the beginning. But the monsters absorbed into themselves all the plant food and even the organic material in the soil. So we have only one way out—to transfer our parasitism to the only remaining food source—the monsters themselves. "The monsters almost defeated us, because of their two special adaptations of extreme size and ability to cross space. But man has always won the battle of adaptations before, because he could improvise new ones as the need arose. The greatest crisis humanity ever faced called for the most radical innovation in our way of life." "Very well put," approved Sutton. "Except that you make it sound easy. By the time I'd worked it out like that, things were already in such a turmoil that putting it into effect was the devil's own job. About the only ones I could find to help me were the Preacher and his people. They have the faith that moves mountains, that has made this self-moving mountain inhabitable." "It is inhabitable?" Westover's question reflected no doubt. Sutton gestured at the bubbling device behind him. "That thing is making air now, which we're going to need when the monster's in space. It was when we were still trying to find a poison for the beasts that I hit on the catalyst that makes their blood give up its oxygen—that's its blood flowing through the filters. We've got an electric generator running by tapping the monster's internal gas pressure. There are problems left before we'll be fully self-sufficient here—but the monster is so much like us in fundamental makeup that its body contains all the elements human life needs too." "Then," Westover glanced appreciatively around, "it looks like the main hazard is claustrophobia." "Don't worry about a cave-in. We're surrounded by solid cystoid tissue. But," Sutton's voice took on a graver note, "there may be other psychological dangers. I don't think all our people—there are fifty-one, fifty-two of us now—realize yet that this colony isn't just a temporary expedient. Human history hasn't had such a turning-point since men first started chipping stone. Spengler's Mensch als Raubtier —if he ever existed—has to be replaced by the Mensch als Schmarotzer , and the adjustment may come hard. We've got to plan for the rest of our lives—and our children's and our children's children's—as parasites inside this monster and whatever others we can manage to—infect—when they're clustered again in space." "For the future," put in the Preacher, who had watched benignly the biologists' reunion, "the Lord will provide, even as He did unto Jonah when he cried to Him out of the belly of the fish." "Amen," agreed Sutton. But the gaze he fixed on Westover was oddly troubled. "Speaking of the future brings up the question of the idea you mentioned—your monster-killing scheme." Westover flexed his hands involuntarily, like one who has been too long enforcedly idle. In terse eager sentences he outlined for Sutton the plan that had burned in him during his bitter wandering over the face of the ruined land. It would be very easy to accomplish from an endoparasite's point of vantage, merely by isolating from the creature's blood over a long period enough of some potent secretion—hormone, enzyme or the like—to kill when suddenly reintroduced into the system. "Originally I thought we could accomplish the same thing by synthesis—but this way will be simpler." "Beautifully simple." Sutton smiled wryly. "So much so that I wish you'd never thought of it." Westover stared. "Why?" "Describing your plan, you sounded almost ready to put it into effect on the spot." "No! Of course I realize—Well, I see what you mean—I think." Westover was crestfallen. Sutton smiled faintly. "I think you do, Bill. To survive, we've got to be good parasites. That means before all, for the coming generations, that we keep our numbers down. A good parasite doesn't destroy or even overtax its host. We don't want to follow the sorry example of such unsuccessful species as the bugs of bubonic plague or typhoid; we'll do better to model ourselves on the humble tapeworm. "Your idea is dangerous for the same reason. The monsters probably spend thousands of years in interstellar space; during that time they'll be living exclusively on their fat—the fuel they stored on Earth, and so will we. We've got a whole new history of man ahead of us, under such changed conditions that we can't begin to predict what turns it may take. There's a very great danger that men will proliferate until they kill their hosts. But imagine a struggle for Lebensraum when all the living space there is is a few thousand monsters capable of supporting a very limited number of people each—with your method giving an easy way to destroy these little worlds our descendants will inhabit. It's too much dynamite to have around the house." Westover bowed his head, but he had caught a curiously expectant glint in Sutton's eyes as he spoke. He thought, and his face lightened. "Suppose we work out a way to record my idea, one that can't be deciphered by anyone unintelligent enough to be likely to misuse it. A riddle for our descendants—who should have use for it some day." At last Sutton smiled. "That's better. You've thought it through to the end, I see.... This phase of our history won't last forever. Eventually, the monsters will come to another planet not too unlike Earth, because it's on such worlds they prey. A tapeworm can cross the Sahara desert in the intestine of a camel—" His voice was drowned in a vast hissing roar. An irresistible pressure distorted the walls of the chamber and scythed its occupants from their feet. Sutton staggered drunkenly almost erect, fought his way across the tilting floor to make sure of his precious apparatus. He turned back toward the others, bracing himself and shouting something; then, knowing his words lost in the thunder, gestured toward the Earth they were leaving, a half-regretful, half-triumphant farewell.

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20008

The Olympic Gene Pool Why the human race keeps getting faster. By Andrew Berry ( 2,168 words; posted Thursday, July 4; to be composted Thursday, July 11 ) On May 6, 1954, at Oxford University's Iffley Road track, Roger Bannister became, by just half a second, the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes. The Holy Grail of middle-distance running was his. Forty-two years later, however, that achievement seems less significant. Four-minute miles are commonplace; the current record, held by Algerian Noureddine Morceli, is 3:44 , more than 5 percent faster than Bannister's speed. What Iffley Road witnessed was just another step along the road to an ever quicker mile, part of the inexorable improvement of athletic performance that we usually take for granted, particularly when the Olympics roll around. If you stop to think about it, though, such constant progress is remarkable. After all, as biomechanical machines with a standard set of parts, humans should be subject to the same limitations we see in, say, automobiles. How come they aren't? A lot of entrepreneurs and technophiles would like us to think that the answer has to do with discoveries in the world of sports technology. A new Nike shoe is trumpeted as something that will shave at least one-thousandth of a second off your 100-meter time. Trainers measure the rate of buildup of lactic acid in your muscles, then claim that their programs will control it. Nutritionists fine-tune athletes' diets. Even the old sexual-abstinence-before-the-race dogma is being re-evaluated under the all-seeing eye of science. But I consider all this little more than tinkering. Sports records would continue to tumble even if training methods or athletic clothing or sexual practices were exactly the same today as they were in 1896, when the first modern Olympics took place. These minor miracles are the product neither of technology nor of training but of demographic patterns that affect us all. Over the past century, the human race has been affected by a slew of what demographers call "secular" trends. (In this context, "secular" does not refer to a trend's lack of spirituality but to its longevity: Secular trends are long-term modifications, not just brief fluctuations.) One such trend is an increase in average size. You have to stoop to get through the doorways of a Tudor cottage in England because its inhabitants were smaller than you are, not because they had a penchant for crouching. Another trend is in life expectancy. People are living longer. Life expectancy in Africa increased over the past 20 years from 46 to 53 years. Over the same period in Europe, where things were already pretty comfortable to begin with, life expectancy increased from 71 to 75 years. The global average was an increase from 58 to 65 years. Probably the most striking change, though, is how much more quickly children are maturing. A 12-year-old child in 1990 who was in what the World Health Organization calls "average economic circumstances" was about 9 inches taller than his or her 1900 counterpart. This is not solely the product of the first trend--the increase in average size--but also due to the fact that children develop faster. Girls menstruate earlier than they used to. The age of menarche (the onset of menstruation) has decreased by three or four months per decade in average sections of Western European populations for the past 150 years. There is a good chance that our 1990 12-year-old already had started to menstruate. Her 1900 counterpart would still have had three years to wait. What do such trends have to do with athletic performance? Well, if we're living longer and growing up faster, that must mean we're producing bigger, better bodies. Better bodies imply faster miles. We run faster and faster for the same reason it is now common for 11-year-old girls to menstruate. But why are these things happening? Demographers have offered a variety of explanations, but the main one is that our diet is improving. A 12-year-old ate better in 1990 than she would have in the Victorian era. This conclusion is supported by studies of the social elite: Because its members were well-nourished even in the early years of this century, this group has experienced relatively little change, over the past 100 years, in the age girls first menstruate. Another explanation is that health care is getting better. In 1991, according to the WHO, more than 75 percent of all 1-year-olds worldwide were immunized against a range of common diseases. Smallpox, that scourge of previous generations, now is effectively extinct. Probably the best measure of how much healthier we are is the rate of infant mortality, which measures both the health of the mother (a sickly mother is more likely to produce a sickly baby) and the health of the baby. In the past 20 years, infant mortality around the world has dropped from 92 deaths per 1000 live births to just 62. A lot of this can be chalked up to primary-heath-care programs in the developing world--the African average, for instance, has dropped from 135 deaths per 1000 births to 95. But there are also significant improvements in the developed world, with infant deaths dropping in Europe over the same 20-year period from 24 per 1000 live births to just 10. Better health care affects athletic ability directly. This is true in the trivial case in which, say, antibiotics cure a runner's fever before the big race, but it may also be true in a more significant way. Diseases contracted in early infancy can have a lifetime impact on health--not necessarily a big one, but an impact nevertheless. Previous generations bore scars from all sorts of non-life-threatening diseases, the stuff everyone picked up as a baby. Nowadays, though, more and more people grow up with no history of disease. Since top athletes inevitably are drawn from the healthiest sector of the population, a generally superior system of health care means a bigger pool of people to draw from. You are much more likely to find someone who can run a mile in 3:30 in a sample of several million superbly healthy people than you are in a sample of 10,000. The pool of potential athletes has expanded in other ways, too. First, the population has exploded. Second, we are coming ever closer to a worldwide middle class, the class from which athletes typically are drawn. Whether, in an age of multinational capitalism, we may talk reasonably about a post-colonial era is way beyond the scope of this article. The fact remains, however, that the developing world is doing just that--developing. Even Mozambique, which ranks at, or near, the bottom of national per capita gross national product tables, has shown an increase of some 20 percent in adult literacy rates over the past 20 years. Literacy rates are merely an index of education, which itself is another way of talking about a global move away from a hand-to-mouth lifestyle. The decline of empire has its Olympic corollaries. Britain won, on average, 17 gold medals per Olympics in the five official games held in its imperial heyday before World War I. That average has dropped to only five medals per Olympics in the 17 held since. This is not a reflection of declining athletic standards in Britain, however; it's a function of how much more competitive other nations have become. The Olympics originally were the preserve of the socioeconomic elite of the socioeconomic elite among nations. Consider this: Only 13 nations participated in 1896, but there were 172 in 1992. Black Africans didn't take part until the third modern games, held in St. Louis in 1908. Even this was accidental: Lentauw and Yamasami, Zulu tribesmen, entered the marathon because they happened to be in St. Louis as part of an exhibit about the Boer war. Lentauw finished ninth despite being chased into a cornfield by dogs. Since all these are changes in how we live, not anything innate, we have to conclude that what we are describing here are effects of environment, not genes. Let us assume that our 1900 and 1990 12-year-olds are identical twins magically born 90 years apart. The 1990 girl still will grow up faster, end up bigger, menstruate earlier, and live longer than the 1900 girl. Perhaps way, way back in human history, when our forebears were still fleeing saber-toothed tigers, natural selection for athletic prowess came into play. But all that ended long ago. Indeed, the laws of natural selection probably work against athletes these days: Given the rigors of training schedules, it is possible that today's top athletes have fewer children than average. Just because nurture has a more significant effect on athletic performance doesn't mean that nature lies dormant, though. Genetic variation exists for just about any trait you choose to study, and the ability to run quickly would be no exception. To take a trivial case, we know that the inheritance of extra fingers or toes is determined genetically. It is quite possible that the possession of an extra toe would hinder an aspiring miler--their genes have affected their athletic performance. One genetic factor that may be influencing performance trends is what is known as "hybrid vigor." Cattle breeders have known about this for a long time: Take two inbred lines of cattle, cross them, and what you have is "better" (say, larger) than any single individual in either of the two parental lines. This does not require natural selection; it is the accidental byproduct of combining two previously isolated stocks. There are a number of theories to account for this at the genetic level, but it has proved difficult to discriminate among them. It is possible that modern humans exhibit some form of hybrid vigor simply because migration and admixture of populations are now occurring at unprecedented rates. Perhaps, just perhaps, such hybridization is being translated into enhanced performance. That doesn't mean, however, that genetic differences in athletic ability can be correlated automatically with race. That is a claim that is impossible to test, because you cannot control, in an experimental sense, environmental differences among the study groups. Sure, you will find more Africans or descendants of Africans standing on the podiums at the end of Olympic track events. And you will find far fewer Asians on those same podiums. But can you, therefore, conclude that Africans have better genes for running than Asians do? No. Environmental differences between the two groups could account for differing levels of athletic success. It is scarcely surprising that Ethiopian or Kenyan distance runners do better than everyone else, since they are in the habit of running immense distances to and from primary school, middle school, and high school. The training is what's crucial, not the blackness. The Chinese sports establishment also has carried out an enormous, and effective, experiment to help dispel the myth that race has a direct relation to athletic ability. Until recently, a quick glance at the medals table confirmed every stereotype people held about Asians and sports. Then the Chinese decided to produce record-breaking female distance runners (and swimmers), and, boy, did they ever. In 1992, China ranked fourth in the Olympic-medal haul. You can bring a single generation up to speed through training, but the trends we're dealing with transcend individual generations. Which brings us to another question: Will there come a time when the human machine will hit some sort of natural limit and an Olympic Games pass without a single record tumbling? In principle, yes. There are some barriers that simply cannot be broken. We will never run a mile at the same speed at which we now run 100 meters, for instance. The laws of oxygen exchange will not permit it. Race horses seem already to have hit that outer limit. For years, they were as good as human athletes at pushing back speed records, but then they simply stopped getting faster. Take the prestigious British Derby. From 1850 to 1930, winning times dropped from 2:55 to 2:39. But from 1986 to 1996, the average time has been--2:39. Unlike people, race horses are specifically bred and reared to run. Generations of careful genetic selection have ensured that today's race horse has every possible speed-enhancing characteristic. Training techniques, too, are tremendously sophisticated. But you can go only so far. You can only breed horses with ultralight thin bones to a certain point; the bones will break under stress if they get any lighter. Human improvement, like race-horse improvement, must eventually bow to the basic constraints of biomechanics. The age of menarche cannot keep on falling forever. On the other hand, it is clear from the remarkable demographic changes of just the past 20 years that these long-term trends are with us still. They may be slowing down in some more developed societies, but they roar along in others. And these trends will continue to fuel the improvement in athletic performance. Several new records will be set in Atlanta. And in Sydney in 2000, and wherever the Olympics are held in 2044. We will continue running faster and jumping further for a good long while to come.

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63150

THE SOUL EATERS By WILLIAM CONOVER Firebrand Dennis Brooke had one final chance to redeem himself by capturing Koerber whose ships were the scourge of the Void. But his luck had run its course, and now he was marooned on a rogue planet—fighting to save himself from a menace weapons could not kill. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] " And so, my dear ," Dennis detected a faint irony in the phrase, " I'm afraid I can offer no competition to the beauties of five planets—or is it six? With regret I bow myself out, and knowing me as you do, you'll understand the futility of trying to convince me again. Anyway, there will be no temptation, for I'm sailing on a new assignment I've accepted. I did love you.... Good-by. " Dennis Brooke had lost count of the times he'd read Marla's last letter, but every time he came to these final, poignant lines, they never failed to conjure a vision of her tawny loveliness, slender as the palms of Venus, and of the blue ecstasy of her eyes, wide with a perpetual wonder—limpid as a child's. The barbaric rhythms of the Congahua , were a background of annoyance in Dennis' mind; he frowned slightly as the maneuvers of the Mercurian dancer, who writhed among the guests of the notorious pleasure palace, began to leave no doubt as to her intentions. The girl was beautiful, in a sultry, almost incandescent sort of way, but her open promise left him cold. He wanted solitude, somewhere to coordinate his thoughts in silence and salvage something out of the wreck of his heart, not to speak of his career. But Venus, in the throes of a gigantic boom upon the discovery of radio-active fields, could offer only one solitude—the fatal one of her swamps and virgin forests. Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending. When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded. True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers that almost surrounded the space pirate. A night in the Jovian Chamber, was to be emperor for one night. Every dream of a man's desire was marvelously induced through the skilful use of hypnotics; the rarest viands and most delectable drinks appeared as if by magic; the unearthly peace of an Olympus descended on a man's soul, and beauty ... beauty such as men dreamed of was a warm reality under the ineffable illumination of the Chamber. It cost a young fortune. But to pleasure mad, boom-ridden Venus, a fortune was a bagatelle. Only it had cost Dennis Brooke far more than a sheaf of credits—it had cost him the severe rebuff of the I.S.P., and most of his heart in Marla. Dennis sighed, he tilted his red, curly head and drank deeply of the insidious Verbena , fragrant as a mint garden, in the tall frosty glass of Martian Bacca-glas , and as he did so, his brilliant hazel eyes found themselves gazing into the unwinking, violet stare of a young Martian at the next table. There was a smouldering hatred in those eyes, and something else ... envy, perhaps, or was it jealousy? Dennis couldn't tell. But his senses became instantly alert. Danger brought a faint vibration which his superbly trained faculties could instantly denote. His steady, bronzed hand lowered the drink, and his eyes narrowed slightly. Absorbed in trying to puzzle the sudden enmity of this Martian stranger, he was unaware of the Mercurian Dancer. The latter had edged closer, whirling in prismatic flashes from the myriad semi-precious stones that studded her brief gauze skirt. And now, in a final bid for the spacer's favor she flung herself in his lap and tilted back invitingly. Some of the guests laughed, others stared in plain envy at the handsome, red-haired spacer, but from the table across, came the tinkling sound of a fragile glass being crushed in a powerful hand, and a muffled Martian curse. Without warning, the Martian was on his feet with the speed of an Hellacorium, the table went crashing to one side as he leaped with deadly intent on the sprawled figure of Dennis Brooke. A high-pitched scream brought instant silence as a Terran girl cried out. Then the Martian's hand reached out hungrily. But Dennis was not there. Leaping to one side, impervious to the fall of the dancer, he avoided the murderous rush of the Martian youth, then he wheeled swiftly and planted a sledge-hammer blow in that most vulnerable spot of all Martians, the spot just below their narrow, wasp-like waist, and as the Martian half-doubled over, he lefted him with a short jab to the chin that staggered and all but dropped him. The Martian's violet eyes were black with fury now. He staggered back and sucked in air, his face contorted with excruciating pain. But he was not through. His powerful right shot like a blast straight for Dennis' chest, striking like a piston just below the heart. Dennis took it, flat-footed, without flinching; then he let his right ride over with all the force at his command. It caught the Martian on the jaw and spun him like a top, the pale, imperious face went crimson as he slowly sagged to his knees and rolled to the impeccable mosaics of the floor. Dennis, breathing heavily, stood over him until the international police arrived, and then he had the surprise of his life. Upon search, the police found a tiny, but fatal silvery tube holstered under his left arm-pit—an atomic-disintegrator, forbidden throughout the interplanetary League. Only major criminals and space pirates still without the law were known to possess them. "Looks like your brawl has turned out to be a piece of fool's luck, Brooke!" The Police Lieutenant favored Dennis with a wry smile. "If I'm not mistaken this chap's a member of Bren Koerber's pirate crew. Who else could afford to risk his neck at the International, and have in his possession a disintegrator? Pity we have no complete records on that devil's crew! Anyway, we'll radio the I.S.P., perhaps they have details on this dandy!" He eyed admiringly the priceless Martian embroideries on the unconscious Martian's tunic, the costly border of red, ocelandian fur, and the magnificent black acerine on his finger. Dennis Brooke shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that would have put to shame the Athenian statues of another age. A faint, bitter smile curved his generous mouth. "I'm grounded, Gillian, it'd take the capture of Koerber himself to set me right with the I.S.P. again—you don't know Bertram! To him an infraction of rules is a major crime. Damn Venus!" He reached for his glass of Verbena but the table had turned over during the struggle, and the glass was a shattered mass of gleaming Bacca-glas shards. He laughed shortly as he became conscious of the venomous stare of the Mercurian Dancer, of the excited voices of the guests and the emphatic disapproval of the Venusian proprietor who was shocked at having a brawl in his ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive Palace. "Better come to Headquarters with me, Dennis," the lieutenant said gently. "We'll say you captured him, and if he's Koerber's, the credit's yours. A trip to Terra's what you need, Venus for you is a hoodoo!" The stern, white haired I.S.P. Commander behind the immense Aluminil desk, frowned slightly as Dennis Brooke entered. He eyed the six foot four frame of the Captain before him with a mixture of feelings, as if uncertain how to begin. Finally, he sighed as if, having come to a decision, he were forcing himself to speak: "Sit down, Dennis. I've sent for you, despite your grounding, for two reasons. The first one you already know—your capture of one of Koerber's henchmen—has given us a line as to his present orbit of piracy, and the means of a check on his activities. But that's not really why I've brought you here." He frowned again as if what he had to say were difficult indeed. "Marla Starland, your fiancee, accepted an assignment we offered her—a delicate piece of work here on Terra that only a very beautiful, and very clever young lady could perform. And," he paused, grimacing, "somewhere between Venus and Terra, the interplanetary spacer bringing her and several other passengers, began to send distress signals. Finally, we couldn't contact the ship any more. It is three days overdue. All passengers, a cargo of radium from Venus worth untold millions, the spacer itself—seem to have vanished." Dennis Brooke's space-tanned features had gone pale. His large hazel eyes, fringed with auburn lashes, too long for a man, were bright slits that smouldered. He stood silent, his hands clenched at his sides, while something cold and sharp seemed to dig at his heart with cruel precision. "Marla!" He breathed at last. The thought of Marla in the power of Koerber sent a wave of anguish that seared through him like an atom-blast. "Commander," Dennis said, and his rich baritone voice had depths of emotion so great that they startled Commander Bertram himself—and that grizzled veteran of the I.S.P., had at one time or another known every change of torture that could possibly be wrung on a human soul. "Commander, give me one ... one chance at that spawn of unthinkable begetting! Let me try, and I promise you ..." in his torture, Dennis was unconsciously banging a knotted fist on the chaste, satiny surface of the priceless desk, "I promise you that I will either bring you Koerber, or forfeit my life!" Commander Bertram nodded his head. "I brought you here for that purpose, son. We have reached a point in our war with Koerber, where the last stakes must be played ... and the last stake is death!" He reached over and flipped up the activator on a small telecast set on his desk; instantly the viso-screen lighted up. "You'll now see a visual record of all we know about the passenger spacer that left Venus with passengers and cargo, as far as we could contact the vessel in space. This, Dennis," the Commander emphasized his words, "is your chance to redeem yourself!" He fell silent, while the viso-screen began to show a crowded space port on Venus, and a gigantic passenger spacer up-tilted in its cradle. They watched the parabola it made in its trajectory as it flashed into space and then fell into orbit there beyond the planetary attraction of Venus. On the three-dimensional viso-screen it was uncannily real. A flight that had taken many hours to accomplish, was shortened on the viso-screen to a matter of minutes. They saw the great, proud interplanetary transport speeding majestically through the starry void, and suddenly, they saw her swerve in a great arc; again she swerved as if avoiding something deadly in space, and point upwards gaining altitude. It was zig-zagging now, desperately maneuvering in an erratic course, and as if by magic, a tiny spot appeared on the transport's side. Tiny on the viso-screen, the fatal spots must have been huge in actuality. To the Commander of the I.S.P., and to Captain Brooke, it was an old story. Atom-blasts were pitting the spacer's hull with deadly Genton shells. The great transport trembled under the impact of the barrage, and suddenly, the screen went blank. Commander Bertram turned slowly to face the young I.S.P. captain, whose features were a mask devoid of all expression now, save for the pallor and the burning fire in his eyes. "And that's the sixth one in a month. Sometimes the survivors reach Terra in emergency spacers, or are picked up in space by other transports ... and sometimes son ... well, as you know, sometimes they're never seen again." "When do I leave, Commander!" Dennis Brooke's voice was like a javelin of ice. "Right now, if you wish. We have a new cruiser armored in beryloid with double hull—a new design against Genton shells, but it's the speed of the thing that you'll want to know about. It just about surpasses anything ever invented. Get the figures and data from the coordination room, son; it's serviced and fueled and the crew's aboard." He extended his hand. "You're the best spacer we have—aside from your recklessness—and on your success depends far more than the capture of an outlaw." Bertram smiled thinly. "Happy landing!" II Their nerves were ragged. Days and days of fruitless search for a phantom ship that seemed to have vanished from space, and an equally elusive pirate whose whereabouts were hidden in the depths of fathomless space. To all but Captain Brooke, this was a new adventure, their first assignment to duty in a search that went beyond the realm of the inner planets, where men spent sleepless nights in eternal vigilance against stray asteroids and outlaw crews of ruthless vandal ships. Even their cruiser was a new experience, the long, tapering fighter lacked the luxurious offices and appointments of the regular I.S.P. Patrol spacers. It placed a maximum on speed, and all available space was hoarded for fuel. The lightning fast tiger of the space-lanes, was a thing of beauty, but of grim, sleek beauty instinct with power, not the comfortable luxury that they knew. Day after day they went through their drills, donning space suits, manning battle stations; aiming deadly atom-cannon at empty space, and eternally scanning the vast empty reaches by means of the telecast. And suddenly, out of the void, as they had all but given up the search as a wild goose chase, a speck was limned in the lighted surface of the viso-screen in the control room. Instantly the I.S.P. cruiser came to life. In a burst of magnificent speed, the cruiser literally devoured the space leagues, until the spacer became a flashing streak. On the viso-screen, the speck grew larger, took on contours, growing and becoming slowly the drifting shell of what had been a transport. Presently they were within reaching distance, and Captain Brooke commanded through the teleradio from the control room: "Prepare to board!" Every member of the crew wanted to be among the boarding party, for all but George Randall, the junior member of the crew had served his apprenticeship among the inner planets, Mars, Venus and Terra. He felt nauseated at the very thought of going out there in that vast abyss of space. His young, beardless face, with the candid blue eyes went pale when the order was given. But presently, Captain Brooke named those who were to go beside himself: "You, Tom and Scotty, take one emergency plane, and Dallas!" "Yes, Captain!" Dallas Bernan, the immense third lieutenant boomed in his basso-profundo voice. "You and I'll take a second emergency!" There was a pause in the voice of the Captain from the control room, then: "Test space suits. Test oxygen helmets! Atom-blasts only, ready in five minutes!" George Randall breathed a sigh of relief. He watched them bridge the space to the drifting wreck, then saw them enter what had once been a proud interplanetary liner, now soon to be but drifting dust, and he turned away with a look of shame. Inside the liner, Captain Dennis Brooke had finished making a detailed survey. "No doubt about it," he spoke through the radio in his helmet. "Cargo missing. No survivors. No indication that the repulsion fields were out of order. And finally, those Genton shells could only have been fired by Koerber!" He tried to maintain a calm exterior, but inwardly he seethed in a cold fury more deadly than any he had ever experienced. Somehow he had expected to find at least one compartment unharmed, where life might have endured, but now, all hope was gone. Only a great resolve to deal with Koerber once and for all remained to him. Dennis tried not to think of Marla, too great an ache was involved in thinking of her and all he had lost. When he finally spoke, his voice was harsh, laconic: "Prepare to return!" Scotty Byrnes, the cruiser's nurse, who could take his motors through a major battle, or hell and high water and back again, for that matter, shifted the Venusian weed that made a perpetual bulge on his cheek and gazed curiously at Captain Brooke. They all knew the story in various versions, and with special additions. But they were spacemen, implicit in their loyalty, and with Dennis Brooke they could and did feel safe. Tom Jeffery, the tall, angular and red-faced Navigator, whose slow, easygoing movements belied the feral persistence of a tiger, and the swiftness of a striking cobra in a fight, led the small procession of men toward the emergency planes. Behind him came Dallas Bernan, third lieutenant, looming like a young asteroid in his space suit, followed by Scotty, and finally Captain Brooke himself. All left in silence, as if the tragedy that had occurred aboard the wrecked liner, had touched them intimately. Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser, a surprise awaited them. It was young George Randall, whose excited face met them as soon as they had entered the airlocks and removed the space suits. "Captain Brooke ... Captain, recordings are showing on the new 'Jet Analyzers' must be the trail of some spacer. Can't be far!" He was fairly dancing in his excitement, as if the marvelous work of the new invention that detected the disturbance of atomic jets at great distance were his own achievement. Dennis Brooke smiled. His own heart was hammering, and inwardly he prayed that it were Koerber. It had to be! No interplanetary passenger spacer could possibly be out here at the intersection of angles Kp 39 degrees, 12 minutes, Fp 67 degrees of Ceres elliptic plane. None but a pirate crew with swift battle cruisers could dare! This was the dangerous asteroid belt, where even planetoids drifted in eccentric uncharted orbits. Dennis, Tom Jeffery and Scotty Byrnes raced to the control room, followed by the ponderous Dallas to whom hurry in any form was anathema. There could be no doubt now! The "Jet Analyzer" recorded powerful disturbance, atomic—could be nothing else. Instantly Captain Brooke was at the inter-communication speaker: "Crew, battle stations! Engine room, full speed!" Scotty Byrnes was already dashing to the engine room, where his beloved motors purred with an ascending hum. Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser each member of the crew raced to his assigned task without delay. Action impended, and after days and nights of inertia, it was a blessed relief. Smiles appeared on haggard faces, and the banter of men suddenly galvanized by a powerful incentive was bandied back and forth. All but George Randall. Now that action was imminent. Something gripped his throat until he could hardly stand the tight collar of his I.S.P. uniform. A growing nausea gripped his bowels, and although he strove to keep calm, his hands trembled beyond control. In the compact, super-armored control room, Captain Brooke watched the telecast's viso-screen, with hungry eyes that were golden with anticipation. It seemed to him as if an eternity passed before at last, a black speck danced on the illuminated screen, until it finally reached the center of the viso-screen and remained there. It grew by leaps and bounds as the terrific speed of the cruiser minimized the distance long before the quarry was aware of pursuit. But at last, when the enemy cruiser showed on the viso-screen, unmistakably for what it was—a pirate craft, it showed by its sudden maneuver that it had detected the I.S.P. cruiser. For it had described a parabola in space and headed for the dangerous asteroid belt. As if navigated by a masterly hand that knew each and every orbit of the asteroids, it plunged directly into the asteroid drift, hoping to lose the I.S.P. cruiser with such a maneuver. Ordinarily, it would have succeeded, no I.S.P. patrol ship would have dared to venture into such a trap without specific orders. But to Dennis Brooke, directing the chase from the control room, even certain death was welcome, if only he could take Koerber with him. Weaving through the deadly belt for several hours, Dennis saw his quarry slow down. Instantly he seized the chance and ordered a salvo from starboard. Koerber's powerful spacer reeled, dived and came up spewing Genton-shells. The battle was on at last. From the banked atom-cannon of the I.S.P. Cruiser, a deadly curtain of atomic fire blazed at the pirate craft. A ragged rent back toward midship showed on Koerber's Cruiser which trembled as if it had been mortally wounded. Then Dennis maneuvered his cruiser into a power dive as a rain of Genton-shells swept the space lane above him, but as he came up, a lone shell struck. At such close range, super-armor was ripped, second armor penetrated and the magnificent vessel shook under the detonating impact. It was then that Dennis Brooke saw the immense dark shadow looming immediately behind Koerber's ship. He saw the pirate cruiser zoom desperately in an effort to break the gravity trap of the looming mass, but too late. It struggled like a fly caught in a spider-web to no avail. It was then that Koerber played his last card. Sensing he was doomed, he tried to draw the I.S.P. Cruiser down with him. A powerful magnetic beam lashed out to spear the I.S.P. Cruiser. With a wrenching turn that almost threw them out of control, Dennis maneuvered to avoid the beam. Again Koerber's beam lashed out, as he sank lower into the looming mass, and again Dennis anticipating the maneuver avoided it. "George Randall!" He shouted desperately into the speaker. "Cut all jets in the rocket room! Hurry, man!" He banked again and then zoomed out of the increasing gravity trap. "Randall! I've got to use the magnetic repulsion plates.... Cut all the jets!" But there was no response. Randall's screen remained blank. Then Koerber's lashing magnetic beam touched and the I.S.P. ship was caught, forced to follow the pirate ship's plunge like the weight at the end of a whiplash. Koerber's gunners sent one parting shot, an atom-blast that shook the trapped cruiser like a leaf. Beneath them, growing larger by the second, a small world rushed up to meet them. The readings in the Planetograph seemed to have gone crazy. It showed diameter 1200 miles; composition mineral and radio-active. Gravity seven-eighths of Terra. It couldn't be! Unless perhaps this unknown planetoid was the legendary core of the world that at one time was supposed to have existed between Jupiter and Mars. Only that could possibly explain the incredible gravity. And then began another type of battle. Hearing the Captain's orders to Randall, and noting that no result had been obtained, Scotty Byrnes himself cut the jets. The Magnetic Repulsion Plates went into action, too late to save them from being drawn, but at least they could prevent a crash. Far in the distance they could see Koerber's ship preceding them in a free fall, then the Planetoid was rushing up to engulf them. III The atmosphere was somewhat tenuous, but it was breathable, provided a man didn't exert himself. To the silent crew of the I.S.P. Cruiser, the strange world to which Koerber's magnetic Beam had drawn them, was anything but reassuring. Towering crags jutted raggedly against the sky, and the iridescent soil of the narrow valley that walled in the cruiser, had a poisonous, deadly look. As far as their eyes could reach, the desolate, denuded vista stretched to the horizon. "Pretty much of a mess!" Dennis Brooke's face was impassive as he turned to Scotty Byrnes. "What's your opinion? Think we can patch her up, or are we stuck here indefinitely?" Scotty eyed the damage. The atom-blast had penetrated the hull into the forward fuel chambers and the armor had blossomed out like flower petals. The crash-landing had not helped either. "Well, there's a few beryloid plates in the storage locker, Captain, but," he scratched his head ruminatively and shifted his precious cud. "But what? Speak up man!" It was Tom Jeffery, his nerves on edge, his ordinarily gentle voice like a lash. "But, you may as well know it," Scotty replied quietly. "That parting shot of Koerber's severed our main rocket feed. I had to use the emergency tank to make it down here!" For a long moment the four men looked at each other in silence. Dennis Brooke's face was still impassive but for the flaming hazel eyes. Tom tugged at the torn sleeve of his I.S.P. uniform, while Scotty gazed mournfully at the damaged ship. Dallas Bernan looked at the long, ragged line of cliffs. "I think we got Koerber, though," he said at last. "While Tom was doing a job of navigation, I had one last glimpse of him coming down fast and out of control somewhere behind those crags over there!" "To hell with Koerber!" Tom Jeffery exploded. "You mean we're stuck in this hellish rock-pile?" "Easy, Tom!" Captain Brooke's tones were like ice. On his pale, impassive face, his eyes were like flaming topaz. "Where's Randall?" "Probably hiding his head under a bunk!" Dallas laughed with scorn. His contemptuous remark voiced the feelings of the entire crew. A man who failed to be at his battle-station in time of emergency, had no place in the I.S.P. "Considering the gravity of this planetoid," Dennis Brooke said thoughtfully, "it's going to take some blast to get us off!" "Maybe we can locate a deposit of anerioum or uranium or something for our atom-busters to chew on!" Scotty said hopefully. He was an eternal optimist. "Better break out those repair plates," Dennis said to Scotty. "Tom, you get the welders ready. I've got a few entries to make in the log book, and then we'll decide on a party to explore the terrain and try to find out what happened to Koerber's ship. I must know," he said in a low voice, but with such passion that the others were startled. A figure appeared in the slanting doorway of the ship in time to hear the last words. It was George Randall, adjusting a bandaged forehead bumped during the crash landing. "Captain ... I ... I wanted ..." he paused unable to continue. "You wanted what?" Captain Brooke's voice was terse. "Perhaps you wanted to explain why you weren't at your battle station?" "Sir, I wanted to know if ... if I might help Scotty with the welding job...." That wasn't at all what he'd intended to say. But somehow the words had stuck in his throat and his face flushed deep scarlet. His candid blue eyes were suspiciously brilliant, and the white bandage with its crimson stains made an appealing, boyish figure. It softened the anger in Brooke's heart. Thinking it over calmly, Dennis realized this was the youngster's first trip into the outer orbits, and better men than he had cracked in those vast reaches of space. But there had been an instant when he'd found Randall cowering in the rocket-room, in the grip of paralyzing hysteria, when he could cheerfully have wrung his neck! "Certainly, Randall," he replied in a much more kindly tone. "We'll need all hands now." "Thank you, sir!" Randall seemed to hesitate for a moment, opened his mouth to speak further, but feeling the other's calculating gaze upon him, he whirled and re-entered the ship. "But for him we wouldn't be here!" Dallas exclaimed. "Aagh!" He shook his head in disgust until the several folds of flesh under his chin shook like gelatin. "Cowards are hell!" He spat. "Easy, Dallas, Randall's a kid, give 'im a chance." Dennis observed. "You Captain ... you're defending 'im? Why you had a greater stake in this than we, and he's spoiled it for you!" "Yep," Dennis nodded. "But I'm still keeping my senses clear. No feuds on my ship. Get it!" The last two words cut like a scimitar. Dallas nodded and lowered his eyes. Scotty shifted his cud and spat a thin stream of juice over the iridescent ground. One by one they re-entered the cruiser.

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The Last Monster By GARDNER F. FOX Irgi was the last of his monster race, guardian of a dead planet, master of the secret of immortality. It was he whom the four men from Earth had to conquer to gain that secret—a tentacled monstrosity whom Earthly weapons could not touch. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Irgi was the last of his race. There was no one else, now; there had been no others for hundreds and hundreds of years. Irgi had lost count of time dwelling alone amid the marble halls of the eon-ancient city, but he knew that much. There were no others. Only Irgi, alone. He moved now along the ebony flooring, past the white marble walls hung with golden drapes that never withered or shed their aurate luster in the opalescent mists that bathed the city in shimmering whiteness. They hung low, those wispy tendrils of mist, clasping everything in their clinging shelter, destroying dust and germs. Irgi had discovered the mist many years ago, when it was too late to save his kind. He had flung a vast globe of transparent metal above this greatest of the cities of the Urg and filled it with the mist, and in it he had stored the treasures of his people. From Bar Nomala, from Faryl, and from the far-off jungle city of Kreed had he brought the riches of the Urg and set them up. Irgi enjoyed beauty, and he enjoyed work. It was the combination of both that kept him sane. Toward a mighty bronze doorway he went, and as his body passed an invisible beam, the bronze portals slid apart, noiselessly, opening to reveal a vast circular chamber that hummed and throbbed, and was filled with a pale blue luminescence that glimmered upon metal rods and bars and ten tall cones of steelite. In the doorway, Irgi paused and ran his eyes about the chamber, sighing. This was his life work, this blue hum and throb. Those ten cones lifting their disced tips toward a circular roof bathed in, and drew their power from, a huge block of radiant white matter that hung suspended between the cones, in midair. All power did the cones and the block possess. There was nothing they could not do, if Irgi so willed. It was another discovery that came too late to save the Urg. Irgi moved across the room. He pressed glittering jewels inset in a control panel on the wall, one after another, in proper sequence. The blue opalescence deepened, grew dark and vivid. The hum broadened into a hoarse roar. And standing out, startlingly white against the blue, was the queer block of shining metal, shimmering and pulsing. Irgi drew himself upwards, slowly turning, laving in the quivering bands of cobalt that sped outward from the cones. He preened his body in their patterns of color, watching it splash and spread over his chest and torso. Where it touched, a faint tingle lingered; then spread outwards, all over his huge form. Irgi was immortal, and the blue light made him so. "There, it is done," he whispered to himself. "Now for another oval I can roam all Urg as I will, for the life spark in me has been cleansed and nourished." He touched the jeweled controls, shutting the power to a low murmur. He turned to the bronze doors, passed through and into the misty halls. "I must speak," Irgi said as he moved along the corridor. "I have not spoken for many weeks. I must exercise my voice, or lose it. That is the law of nature. It would atrophy, otherwise. "Yes, I will use my voice tonight, and I will go out under the dome and look up at the stars and the other planets that swing near Urg, and I will talk to them and tell them how lonely Irgi is." He turned and went along a hall that opened into a broad balcony which stood forth directly beneath a segment of the mighty dome. He stared upwards, craning all his eyes to see through the darkness pressing down upon him. "Stars," he whispered, "listen to me once again. I am lonely, stars, and the name and fame of Irgi means nothing to the walls of my city, nor to the Chamber of the Cones, nor even—at times—to Irgi himself." He paused and his eyes widened, staring upwards. "By the Block," he said to the silence about him. "There is something up there that is not a star, nor a planet, nor yet a meteor." It was a spaceship. Emerson took his hands from the controls of the gigantic ship that hurtled through space, and wiped his sweaty palms on his thighs. His grey eyes bored like a steel awl downward at the mighty globe swinging in the void. "The last planet in our course," he breathed. "Maybe it has the radium!" "Yes," whispered the man beside him, wetting his lips with his tongue. "No use to think of failure. If it hasn't, we'll die ourselves, down there." Radium. And the Plague. It had come on Earth suddenly, had the Plague, back in the first days of space travel, after Quigg, the American research scientist at Cal Tech, discovered a way to lift a rocket ship off the Earth, and propel it to the Moon. They had been slow, lumbering vessels, those first spaceships; not at all like the sleek craft that plied the voids today. But it had been a beginning. And no one had thought anything of it when Quigg, who had made the first flight through space, died of cancer. As the years passed to a decade, and the ships of Earth rode to Mars and Venus, it began to be apparent that a lifetime of space travel meant a hideous death. Scientists attributed it to the cosmic rays, for out in space there was no blanketing layer of atmosphere to protect the fleshy tissues of man from their piercing power. It had long been a theory that cosmic rays were related to the birth of new life in the cosmos; perhaps they were, said some, the direct cause of life. Thus by causing the unorderly growth of new cells that man called cancer, the cosmic rays were destroying the life they had created. It meant death to travel in space, and only the stupendous fees paid to the young men who believed in a short life and a merry one, kept the ships plying between Mars and Earth and Venus. Lead kept out the cosmic rays, but lead would not stand the terrific speed required to lift a craft free of planetary gravity; and an inner coating of lead brought men into port raving with lead poisoning illusions. Cancer cases increased on Earth. It was learned that the virulent form of space cancer, as it was called, was in some peculiar manner, contagious to a certain extent. The alarm spread. Men who voyaged in space were segregated, but the damage had been done. The Plague spread, and ravaged the peoples of three planets. Hospitals were set up, and precious radium used for the fight. But the radium was hard to come by. There was just not enough for the job. A ship was built, the fastest vessel ever made by man. It was designed for speed. It made the swiftest interplanetary craft seem a lumbering barge by comparison. And mankind gave it to Valentine Emerson to take it out among the stars to find the precious radium in sufficient quantities to halt the Plague. It had not been easy to find a crew. The three worlds knew the men were going to their doom. It would be a miracle if ever they reached a single planet, if they did not perish of space cancer before their first goal. Carson Nichols, whose wife and children were dying of the Plague, begged him for a chance. A murderer convicted to the Martian salt mines, Karl Mussdorf, grudgingly agreed to go along on the promise that he won a pardon if he ever came back. With Mussdorf went a little, wry-faced man named Tilford Gunn, who knew radio, cookery, and the fine art of pocket-picking. The two seemed inseparable. Now Emerson was breathing softly, "Yes, it had better be there, or else we die." He ran quivering fingers over his forearm, felt the strange lumps that heralded cancer. Involuntarily, he shuddered. Steps clanged on the metal runway beneath them. Mussdorf pushed up through the trap and got to his feet. He was as big as Emerson, bulky where Emerson was lithe, granite where Emerson was chiseled steel. His hair was black, and his brows shaggy. A stubborn jaw shot out under thin, hard lips. "There it is, Karl," said Nichols. "Start hoping." Mussdorf scowled darkly, and spat. "A hell of a way to spend my last days," he growled. "I'm dying on my feet, and I've got to be a martyr to a billion people who don't know I'm alive." "You know a better way to die, of course," replied Emerson. "You bet I do. There's a sweet little redhead in New Mars. She'd make dying a pleasure. In fact," he chuckled softly, "that's just the way I'd let her kill me." Emerson snorted, glancing down at the controls. Beneath his steady fingers, the ship sideslipped into the gravity tug of the looming orb, shuddered a moment, then eased downward. "Tell Gunn to come up," ordered Emerson. "No need for him to be below." Mussdorf dropped to the floor, lowered his shaggy head through the open trap, and bellowed. A hail from the depths of the ship answered him. A moment later, Gunn stood with the others: a little man with a wry smile twisting his features to a hard mask. "Think she's got the stuff, skipper?" he asked Emerson. "The spectroscope'll tell us. Break it out." "You bet." The ship rocked gently as Emerson set it down on a flat, rocky plain between two high, craggy mountains that rose abruptly from the tiny valley. It was just lighting as the faint rays of the suns that served this planet nosed their way above the peaks. Like a silver needle on a floor of black rock, the spacecraft bounced once, twice; then lay still. Within her gleaming walls, four men bent with hard faces over gleaming bands of color on a spectroscopic screen. With quivering fingers, Emerson twisted dials and switches. "Hell!" exploded Mussdorf. "I might have known it. Not a trace." Emerson touched his forearm gently, and shuddered. Nichols bit his lips, and thought of Marge and the kids; Gunn licked his lips with a dry tongue and kept looking at Emerson. With one sweep of his brawny arm, Mussdorf sent the apparatus flying against the far wall to shatter in shards. No one said a word. Something whispered in the ship. They jerked their heads up, stood listening. The faint susurration swept all about them, questioning, curious. It came again, imperative; suddenly demanding. "Gawd," whispered Gunn. "Wot is it, guv'nor?" Emerson shook his head, frowning, suddenly glad that the others had heard it, too. "Maybe somebody trying to speak to us," stated Nichols. The whispers grew louder and harsher. Angry. "Take it easy," yelled Mussdorf savagely. "We don't know what you're talking about. How can we answer you, you stupid lug?" Gunn giggled hysterically, "We can't even 'alf talk 'is bloomin' language." The rustle ceased. The silence hung eerily in the ship. The men looked at one another, curious; somehow, a little nervous. "What a radio he must have," said Emerson softly. "The metal of our hull is his loudspeaker. That's why we heard him in all directions." Mussdorf nodded, shaggy brows knotted. "We'll see what his next move is," he muttered. "If he gets too fresh, we'll try a sun-blaster out on him." The ship began to glow softly, flushing a soft, delicate green. The light bathed the interior, turning the men a ghastly hue. Gunn shivered and looked at Emerson, who went to the port window; stood staring out, gasping. "Wot's happenin' now?" choked Gunn. "We're off the ground! Whatever it is, it's lifting us." The others crowded about him, looking out. Here the green was more vivid, intense. They could feel its surging power tingling on their skins. Beneath them, the jagged peak of the mountain almost grazed the hull. Spread out under their eyes was the panorama of a dead planet. Great rocks lay split and tumbled over one another in a black desolation. Sunlight glinting on their jagged edges, made harsh shadows. Far to the north a mountain range shrugged its snow-topped peaks to a sullen sky. To the south, beyond the rocks, lay a white waste of desert. To the west— "A city," yelled Nichols, "the place is inhabited. Thank God, thank God—" Mussdorf erupted laughter. "For what? How do we know what they're like? An inhabited planet doesn't mean men. We found that out—several times." "We can hope," said Emerson sharply. "Maybe they have some radium, stored so that our spectroscope couldn't pick it up." The mighty globe that hung over the city glimmered in the morning suns. Beneath it, the white towers and spires of the city reared in alien loveliness above graceful buildings and rounded roofs. A faint mist seemed to hang in the city streets. "It's empty," said Nichols heavily. "Deserted." "Something's alive," protested Emerson. "Something that spoke to us, that is controlling this green beam." A section of the globe slid back, and the spaceship moved through the opening. The globe slipped back and locked after it. "They have us now," grunted Mussdorf. He slid his fingers along the transparent window, pressing hard, the skin showing white as his knuckles lifted. He said swiftly, "You guys can stay here if you want, but I'm getting myself a sun-blaster. Two of them. I'm not going to be caught short when the time for action comes." He swung through the trap and out of sight. They heard him running below; heard the slam of opened doors, the withdrawal of the guns. They could imagine him belting them about his waist. "Bring us some," cried Emerson suddenly, and turned again to look out the window. The spaceship settled down on the white flagging of an immense square. The green beam was gone, suddenly. The uncanny silence of the place pressed in on them. "Think it's safe to go out?" asked Nichols. "Try the atmospheric recorder," said Emerson. "If the air's okay, I'd like to stretch my own legs." Nichols twisted chrome wheels, staring at a red line that wavered on a plastic screen, then straightened abruptly, rigid. "Hey," yelled Nichols excitedly. "It's pure. I mean actually pure. No germs. No dust. Just clean air!" Emerson leaped to his side, staring, frowning. "No germs. No dust. Why—that means there's no disease in this place! No disease." He began to laugh, then caught himself. "No disease," he whispered, "and every one of us is going to die of cancer." Mussdorf came up through the trap and passed out the sun-blasters. They buckled them around their waists while Mussdorf swung the bolts of the door. He threw it open, and clean air, and faint tendrils of whitish mist came swirling into the ship. Nichols took a deep breath and his boyish face split with a grin. "I feel like a kid again on a Spring day back on Earth. You know, with a ball and a glove under your arm, with the sun beating down on you, swinging a bat and whistling. You felt good. You were young. Young! I feel like that now." They grinned and went through the door, dropping to the street. They turned. It was coming across the square, flowing along on vast black tentacles towering over twenty feet high, with a great torso seemingly sculpted out of living black marble. A head that held ten staring eyes looked down at them. Six arms thrust out of the torso, moving like tentacles, fringed with cilia thick as fingers. "Lord," whispered Mussdorf. "What is it?" "Don't know," said Emerson. "Maybe it's friendly—" "Friendly?" queried Mussdorf harshly. " That doesn't know the meaning of the word! I'm going to let it taste a blast—" His hand dove for the sun-blaster in his holster; yanked it free and upward, firing brilliant yellow jets as he jerked the trigger. "Look out !" yelled Emerson. The thing twisted sideways with an eerie grace, dodging the amber beams of solar power that sizzled past its bulbous head. As it moved, its tentacled arms and legs slithered out with unthinkable rapidity, fell and wrapped around Mussdorf. The big Earthman was lifted high into the air, squeezed until his lungs nearly collapsed. He hung limp in a gigantic tentacle as Emerson ran to one side, trying for a shot without hitting Mussdorf. But the thing was diabolically clever. It held Mussdorf aloft, between itself and Emerson, while its other arms stabbed out at Gunn and Nichols, catching them up and shaking them as a terrier shakes a rat. "Hold on," called Emerson, dodging and twisting, gun in hand, seeking a spot to fire at. The thing dropped the Earthmen suddenly; its legs gathered beneath it and launched it full at Emerson. Caught off guard, the Earthman lifted his sun-blaster—felt it ripped from his fingers, knew a hard blackness thrashing down at him. He went backwards, sickened.... Irgi stared at the things that lay on the white flagging. Queer beings they were, unlike anything Irgi had ever conceived. Only two legs, only two arms. And such weak little limbs! Why, an Urgian cat would make short work of them if an Urgian cat existed any more, and Irgi had never rated cats very highly. He looked at the spaceship, ran exploring feelers over it. He cast a glance back at the creatures again, and shook his head. Strange beings they might be, but they had mastered interplanetary travel. Well, he'd always maintained that life would be different on other worlds. Life here on Urg took different patterns. Irgi bent to wrap long arms about the queer beings, lifting them. His eyes were caught suddenly by the lumps protruding from their arms and legs, from face and chest. The growth disease! That was bad, but Irgi knew a way to cure it. Irgi knew a way to cure anything. He slid swiftly across the square and onto a flat, glittering ramp that stretched upward toward an arched doorway set like a jewel of light in a long, low building next to the vast, round Chamber of the Cones. He carried these creatures easily, without trouble. The ease of his passage gave him time to think. He had been glad to find these creatures. They were someone to converse with after centuries of loneliness. But as he approached them there in the square, calling out gladly to them, they could not hear him. His voice was pitched eight vibrations to the second. He wondered idly if that was beyond the hearing range of these two-legged things. He ought to check that, to be sure. Still, they had heard him on their ship. He had caught a confused, angry murmur on the radiation recorder. Perhaps the metal of the hull had in some manner made his voice audible to them, speeded up the vibrations to twelve or fifteen a second. Then there was the matter of the growth disease. He could eliminate that easily enough, in the Chamber of the Cones. But first they would have to be prepared. And the preparation—hurt. Well, better a few moments of agony than a death through a worse. And if he could not speak to them, they could speak to him, through their minds. Once unconscious, he could tap their memories with an electrigraph screen. That should be absorbing. It made Irgi happy, reflecting upon it, and Irgi had not known happiness for a long time. From the passage he hurried into a large white room, fitted with glass vials and ovules and glittering metal instruments, so many in number that the room seemed a jungle of metal. Down on flat, smooth tables Irgi dropped his burdens. With quick tendrils he adjusted straps to them, bound them securely. From a small, wheeled vehicle he took a metal rod and touched it to their foreheads. As it met the flesh, it hummed once faintly. "It's short-circulated their nervous systems for a while, absorbed the electric charges all intelligent beings cast," Irgi said aloud, glad at this chance to exercise his voice. "They won't be able to feel for some time. When the worst pain will have passed, they will recover. And now to examine their minds—" He fitted metal clamps over their heads and screwed them tight. He wheeled forward a glassy screen; plugged in the cords that dangled from its frame to the metal clamps. "I wonder if they've perfected this," Irgi mused. "They must be aware that the brain gives off electrical waves. Perhaps they can chart those waves on graphs. But do they know that each curve and bend of those waves represents a picture? I can translate those waves into pictures—but can they?" He slouched a little on his tentacles, squatting, gazing at the screen as he flipped over a lever. A picture quivered on the screen; grew nebulous, then cleared. Irgi found himself staring at a city far vaster than Urg. Grim white towers peaked high into the air, and broad, flat ramps circled them, interwoven like ribbons in the sunlight. On the tallest and largest buildings were great fields of metal painted a dull luster, where queerly wrought flying ships landed and took off. The scene changed suddenly. He looked into a hospital room and watched a pretty young woman smiling up at him. She too, had the growth disease. Now he beheld the mighty salt mines where naked men swung huge picks at the crusted crystals, sweating and dying under a strange sun. Even these remnants of humanity festered with the growth. A tall, lean man in white looked out at him. His lips moved, and Irgi read their meaning. This man spoke to one named Emerson, commissioning him with a spaceship, reciting the need of radium, the dread of the plague. The thoughts of this Emerson were coming in clearer, as Irgi in sudden interest, flipped over different dials. The unspoken thoughts pouring into his brain through the screen continued. The words he did not understand, but the necessity for radium, and the danger of the growth disease he did. The pictures jumbled, grew chameleonesque— Irgi stared upward at a colossal figure graven in lucent white marble. He made out the letters chiseled into the base: GEORGE WASHINGTON. He wondered idly what this Washington had done, to merit such undying fame. He must have created a nation, or saved it. He wished there were Urgians alive to build a statue to him . He rose suddenly, standing upright on his tentacles, swaying gently. Why, he had the power to make himself immortal! These creatures would gladly build statues to him! True, he could not create a nation— but he could save it ! Irgi unfastened clamps, and rolled the screen aside. He reached to a series of black knobs inset in the wall, and turned them carefully. Turning, he saw the figures of the four men stiffen to rigidity as a red aura drifted upward from the tabletop, passing through them as if they were mist, rising upwards to dissipate in the air near the ceiling. "That will prepare their bodies for the Chamber of the Cones," he said. "When they realize that I am their friend, they will gladly hear my counsels!" Opening the laboratory door, Irgi passed out and closed it behind him. It was the sweat of agony trickling down his forehead and over his eyes and cheeks that woke Emerson. He opened his eyes, then clamped them shut as his body writhed in pain. "Oh, Lord!" he whimpered, bloodying his mouth where his teeth sank into his lips. In every fibre of his body sharp lancets cut and dug. In arms and legs and chest and belly they twisted and tore. Into the tissues beneath his skin, all along the muscles and the bone, the fiery torment played. He could not stand it; he could not— He flipped his head to right, to left; saw the others stretched out and strapped even as he. They were unconscious. What right had they to ignore this agony? Why didn't they share it with him? He opened his lips to shriek; then bit down again, hard. Nichols screamed suddenly, his body aching. It woke the others. They too, bellowed and screamed and sobbed, and their arms and legs writhed like wild things in a trap. "Got to get free," Emerson panted, straining against the wristbands. The hard muscles of his arms ridged with effort, but the straps held. He dropped back, sobbing. "That fiend," yelled Mussdorf. "That ten-eyed, octopus-legged, black-hearted spawn of a mismated monster did this to us. Damn him! Damn him! If I ever get loose I'll cut his heart out and make him eat it." "Maybe—maybe he's vivisecting us," moaned Nichols. "With rays or—or something—aagh! I can't stand it!" "Hang on, kid," gritted Emerson, fighting the straps. "I think it's lessening. Yeah, yeah—it is. It doesn't hurt so much now." Mussdorf grunted astonishment. "You're right. It is lessening. And—hey, one of my arm buckles is coming loose. It's torn a little. Maybe I can work it free." They turned their heads to watch, biting their lips, the sweat standing in colorless beads on their pale foreheads. Mussdorf's thick arm bulged its muscles as he wrenched and tugged, panting. A buckle swung outward, clanging against the tabletop as it ripped loose. Mussdorf held his arm aloft and laughed harsh triumph. "I'll have you all loose in a second," he grunted, ripping straps from his body. He leaped from the table and stretched. He grinned into their faces. "You know, it's funny—but I feel great. Huh, I must've sweated all the aches out of me. Here, Gunn—you first." "Thanks, Karl. We're still pals, aren't we?" When Gunn was free, Mussdorf came to stand over Emerson, looking down at him. His eyes narrowed suddenly. He grinned a little, twisting his lips. "Maybe you fellows ought to stay tied up," he said. "In case that—that thing comes back. He won't blame us all for the break we're making." "Not on your life," said Emerson. But Mussdorf shook his head, and his lips tightened. "No. No, I think it's better the way I say." "Don't be a fool, Mussdorf," snapped Emerson savagely. "It isn't your place to think, anyhow. That's mine. I'm commander of this force. What I say is an order." Mussdorf grinned dryly. Into his eyes came a glint of hot, sullen anger. "You were our commander—out there, in space. We're on a planet now. Things are different. I want to learn the secret of those mists, Emerson. Something tells me I'd get a fortune for it, on Earth." Emerson squirmed helplessly, cursing him, saying, "What's gotten into you?" "Nothing new. Remember me, Karl Mussdorf? I'm a convict, I am. A salt mine convict. I'd have done anything to get out of that boiling hell. I volunteered to go with you for the radium. Me and Gunn. Nichols doesn't count. He came on account of his wife and kids. We were the only two who'd come. Convicts, both of us."

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RETIEF OF THE RED-TAPE MOUNTAIN by KEITH LAUMER Retief knew the importance of sealed orders—and the need to keep them that way! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "It's true," Consul Passwyn said, "I requested assignment as principal officer at a small post. But I had in mind one of those charming resort worlds, with only an occasional visa problem, or perhaps a distressed spaceman or two a year. Instead, I'm zoo-keeper to these confounded settlers. And not for one world, mind you, but eight!" He stared glumly at Vice-Consul Retief. "Still," Retief said, "it gives an opportunity to travel—" "Travel!" the consul barked. "I hate travel. Here in this backwater system particularly—" He paused, blinked at Retief and cleared his throat. "Not that a bit of travel isn't an excellent thing for a junior officer. Marvelous experience." He turned to the wall-screen and pressed a button. A system triagram appeared: eight luminous green dots arranged around a larger disk representing the primary. He picked up a pointer, indicating the innermost planet. "The situation on Adobe is nearing crisis. The confounded settlers—a mere handful of them—have managed, as usual, to stir up trouble with an intelligent indigenous life form, the Jaq. I can't think why they bother, merely for a few oases among the endless deserts. However I have, at last, received authorization from Sector Headquarters to take certain action." He swung back to face Retief. "I'm sending you in to handle the situation, Retief—under sealed orders." He picked up a fat buff envelope. "A pity they didn't see fit to order the Terrestrial settlers out weeks ago, as I suggested. Now it is too late. I'm expected to produce a miracle—a rapprochement between Terrestrial and Adoban and a division of territory. It's idiotic. However, failure would look very bad in my record, so I shall expect results." He passed the buff envelope across to Retief. "I understood that Adobe was uninhabited," Retief said, "until the Terrestrial settlers arrived." "Apparently, that was an erroneous impression." Passwyn fixed Retief with a watery eye. "You'll follow your instructions to the letter. In a delicate situation such as this, there must be no impulsive, impromptu element introduced. This approach has been worked out in detail at Sector. You need merely implement it. Is that entirely clear?" "Has anyone at Headquarters ever visited Adobe?" "Of course not. They all hate travel. If there are no other questions, you'd best be on your way. The mail run departs the dome in less than an hour." "What's this native life form like?" Retief asked, getting to his feet. "When you get back," said Passwyn, "you tell me." The mail pilot, a leathery veteran with quarter-inch whiskers, spat toward a stained corner of the compartment, leaned close to the screen. "They's shootin' goin' on down there," he said. "See them white puffs over the edge of the desert?" "I'm supposed to be preventing the war," said Retief. "It looks like I'm a little late." The pilot's head snapped around. "War?" he yelped. "Nobody told me they was a war goin' on on 'Dobe. If that's what that is, I'm gettin' out of here." "Hold on," said Retief. "I've got to get down. They won't shoot at you." "They shore won't, sonny. I ain't givin' 'em the chance." He started punching keys on the console. Retief reached out, caught his wrist. "Maybe you didn't hear me. I said I've got to get down." The pilot plunged against the restraint, swung a punch that Retief blocked casually. "Are you nuts?" the pilot screeched. "They's plenty shootin' goin' on fer me to see it fifty miles out." "The mail must go through, you know." "Okay! You're so dead set on gettin' killed, you take the skiff. I'll tell 'em to pick up the remains next trip." "You're a pal. I'll take your offer." The pilot jumped to the lifeboat hatch and cycled it open. "Get in. We're closin' fast. Them birds might take it into their heads to lob one this way...." Retief crawled into the narrow cockpit of the skiff, glanced over the controls. The pilot ducked out of sight, came back, handed Retief a heavy old-fashioned power pistol. "Long as you're goin' in, might as well take this." "Thanks." Retief shoved the pistol in his belt. "I hope you're wrong." "I'll see they pick you up when the shootin's over—one way or another." The hatch clanked shut. A moment later there was a jar as the skiff dropped away, followed by heavy buffeting in the backwash from the departing mail boat. Retief watched the tiny screen, hands on the manual controls. He was dropping rapidly: forty miles, thirty-nine.... A crimson blip showed on the screen, moving out. Retief felt sweat pop out on his forehead. The red blip meant heavy radiation from a warhead. Somebody was playing around with an outlawed but by no means unheard of fission weapon. But maybe it was just on a high trajectory and had no connection with the skiff.... Retief altered course to the south. The blip followed. He checked instrument readings, gripped the controls, watching. This was going to be tricky. The missile bored closer. At five miles Retief threw the light skiff into maximum acceleration, straight toward the oncoming bomb. Crushed back in the padded seat, he watched the screen, correcting course minutely. The proximity fuse should be set for no more than 1000 yards. At a combined speed of two miles per second, the skiff flashed past the missile, and Retief was slammed violently against the restraining harness in the concussion of the explosion ... a mile astern, and harmless. Then the planetary surface was rushing up with frightening speed. Retief shook his head, kicked in the emergency retro-drive. Points of light arced up from the planet face below. If they were ordinary chemical warheads the skiff's meteor screens should handle them. The screen flashed brilliant white, then went dark. The skiff flipped on its back. Smoke filled the tiny compartment. There was a series of shocks, a final bone-shaking concussion, then stillness, broken by the ping of hot metal contracting. Coughing, Retief disengaged himself from the shock-webbing. He beat out sparks in his lap, groped underfoot for the hatch and wrenched it open. A wave of hot jungle air struck him. He lowered himself to a bed of shattered foliage, got to his feet ... and dropped flat as a bullet whined past his ear. He lay listening. Stealthy movements were audible from the left. He inched his way to the shelter of a broad-boled dwarf tree. Somewhere a song lizard burbled. Whining insects circled, scented alien life, buzzed off. There was another rustle of foliage from the underbrush five yards away. A bush quivered, then a low bough dipped. Retief edged back around the trunk, eased down behind a fallen log. A stocky man in grimy leather shirt and shorts appeared, moving cautiously, a pistol in his hand. As he passed, Retief rose, leaped the log and tackled him. They went down together. The stranger gave one short yell, then struggled in silence. Retief flipped him onto his back, raised a fist— "Hey!" the settler yelled. "You're as human as I am!" "Maybe I'll look better after a shave," said Retief. "What's the idea of shooting at me?" "Lemme up. My name's Potter. Sorry 'bout that. I figured it was a Flap-jack boat; looks just like 'em. I took a shot when I saw something move. Didn't know it was a Terrestrial. Who are you? What you doin' here? We're pretty close to the edge of the oases. That's Flap-jack country over there." He waved a hand toward the north, where the desert lay. "I'm glad you're a poor shot. That missile was too close for comfort." "Missile, eh? Must be Flap-jack artillery. We got nothing like that." "I heard there was a full-fledged war brewing," said Retief. "I didn't expect—" "Good!" Potter said. "We figured a few of you boys from Ivory would be joining up when you heard. You are from Ivory?" "Yes. I'm—" "Hey, you must be Lemuel's cousin. Good night! I pretty near made a bad mistake. Lemuel's a tough man to explain something to." "I'm—" "Keep your head down. These damn Flap-jacks have got some wicked hand weapons. Come on...." He moved off silently on all fours. Retief followed. They crossed two hundred yards of rough country before Potter got to his feet, took out a soggy bandana and mopped his face. "You move good for a city man. I thought you folks on Ivory just sat under those domes and read dials. But I guess bein' Lemuel's cousin you was raised different." "As a matter of fact—" "Have to get you some real clothes, though. Those city duds don't stand up on 'Dobe." Retief looked down at the charred, torn and sweat-soaked powder-blue blazer and slacks. "This outfit seemed pretty rough-and-ready back home," he said. "But I guess leather has its points." "Let's get on back to camp. We'll just about make it by sundown. And, look. Don't say anything to Lemuel about me thinking you were a Flap-jack." "I won't, but—" Potter was on his way, loping off up a gentle slope. Retief pulled off the sodden blazer, dropped it over a bush, added his string tie and followed Potter. II "We're damn glad you're here, mister," said a fat man with two revolvers belted across his paunch. "We can use every hand. We're in bad shape. We ran into the Flap-jacks three months ago and we haven't made a smart move since. First, we thought they were a native form we hadn't run into before. Fact is, one of the boys shot one, thinkin' it was fair game. I guess that was the start of it." He stirred the fire, added a stick. "And then a bunch of 'em hit Swazey's farm here," Potter said. "Killed two of his cattle, and pulled back." "I figure they thought the cows were people," said Swazey. "They were out for revenge." "How could anybody think a cow was folks?" another man put in. "They don't look nothin' like—" "Don't be so dumb, Bert," said Swazey. "They'd never seen Terries before. They know better now." Bert chuckled. "Sure do. We showed 'em the next time, didn't we, Potter? Got four." "They walked right up to my place a couple days after the first time," Swazey said. "We were ready for 'em. Peppered 'em good. They cut and run." "Flopped, you mean. Ugliest lookin' critters you ever saw. Look just like a old piece of dirty blanket humpin' around." "It's been goin' on this way ever since. They raid and then we raid. But lately they've been bringing some big stuff into it. They've got some kind of pint-sized airships and automatic rifles. We've lost four men now and a dozen more in the freezer, waiting for the med ship. We can't afford it. The colony's got less than three hundred able-bodied men." "But we're hanging onto our farms," said Potter. "All these oases are old sea-beds—a mile deep, solid topsoil. And there's a couple of hundred others we haven't touched yet. The Flap-jacks won't get 'em while there's a man alive." "The whole system needs the food we can raise," Bert said. "These farms we're trying to start won't be enough but they'll help." "We been yellin' for help to the CDT, over on Ivory," said Potter. "But you know these Embassy stooges." "We heard they were sending some kind of bureaucrat in here to tell us to get out and give the oases to the Flap-jacks," said Swazey. He tightened his mouth. "We're waitin' for him...." "Meanwhile we got reinforcements comin' up, eh, boys?" Bert winked at Retief. "We put out the word back home. We all got relatives on Ivory and Verde." "Shut up, you damn fool!" a deep voice grated. "Lemuel!" Potter said. "Nobody else could sneak up on us like that." "If I'd a been a Flap-jack; I'd of et you alive," the newcomer said, moving into the ring of fire, a tall, broad-faced man in grimy leather. He eyed Retief. "Who's that?" "What do ya mean?" Potter spoke in the silence. "He's your cousin...." "He ain't no cousin of mine," Lemuel said slowly. He stepped to Retief. "Who you spyin' for, stranger?" he rasped. Retief got to his feet. "I think I should explain—" A short-nosed automatic appeared in Lemuel's hand, a clashing note against his fringed buckskins. "Skip the talk. I know a fink when I see one." "Just for a change, I'd like to finish a sentence," said Retief. "And I suggest you put your courage back in your pocket before it bites you." "You talk too damned fancy to suit me." "Maybe. But I'm talking to suit me. Now, for the last time, put it away." Lemuel stared at Retief. "You givin' me orders...?" Retief's left fist shot out, smacked Lemuel's face dead center. He stumbled back, blood starting from his nose; the pistol fired into the dirt as he dropped it. He caught himself, jumped for Retief ... and met a straight right that snapped him onto his back: out cold. "Wow!" said Potter. "The stranger took Lem ... in two punches!" "One," said Swazey. "That first one was just a love tap." Bert froze. "Hark, boys," he whispered. In the sudden silence a night lizard called. Retief strained, heard nothing. He narrowed his eyes, peered past the fire— With a swift lunge he seized up the bucket of drinking water, dashed it over the fire, threw himself flat. He heard the others hit the dirt a split second behind him. "You move fast for a city man," breathed Swazey beside him. "You see pretty good too. We'll split and take 'em from two sides. You and Bert from the left, me and Potter from the right." "No," said Retief. "You wait here. I'm going out alone." "What's the idea...?" "Later. Sit tight and keep your eyes open." Retief took a bearing on a treetop faintly visible against the sky and started forward. Five minutes' stealthy progress brought him to a slight rise of ground. With infinite caution he raised himself, risking a glance over an out-cropping of rock. The stunted trees ended just ahead. Beyond, he could make out the dim contour of rolling desert. Flap-jack country. He got to his feet, clambered over the stone—still hot after a day of tropical heat—and moved forward twenty yards. Around him he saw nothing but drifted sand, palely visible in the starlight, and the occasional shadow of jutting shale slabs. Behind him the jungle was still. He sat down on the ground to wait. It was ten minutes before a movement caught his eye. Something had separated itself from a dark mass of stone, glided across a few yards of open ground to another shelter. Retief watched. Minutes passed. The shape moved again, slipped into a shadow ten feet distant. Retief felt the butt of the power pistol with his elbow. His guess had better be right this time.... There was a sudden rasp, like leather against concrete, and a flurry of sand as the Flap-jack charged. Retief rolled aside, then lunged, threw his weight on the flopping Flap-jack—a yard square, three inches thick at the center and all muscle. The ray-like creature heaved up, curled backward, its edge rippling, to stand on the flattened rim of its encircling sphincter. It scrabbled with prehensile fringe-tentacles for a grip on Retief's shoulders. He wrapped his arms around the alien and struggled to his feet. The thing was heavy. A hundred pounds at least. Fighting as it was, it seemed more like five hundred. The Flap-jack reversed its tactics, went limp. Retief grabbed, felt a thumb slip into an orifice— The alien went wild. Retief hung on, dug the thumb in deeper. "Sorry, fellow," he muttered between clenched teeth. "Eye-gouging isn't gentlemanly, but it's effective...." The Flap-jack fell still, only its fringes rippling slowly. Retief relaxed the pressure of his thumb; the alien gave a tentative jerk; the thumb dug in. The alien went limp again, waiting. "Now we understand each other," said Retief. "Take me to your leader." Twenty minutes' walk into the desert brought Retief to a low rampart of thorn branches: the Flap-jacks' outer defensive line against Terry forays. It would be as good a place as any to wait for the move by the Flap-jacks. He sat down and eased the weight of his captive off his back, but kept a firm thumb in place. If his analysis of the situation was correct, a Flap-jack picket should be along before too long.... A penetrating beam of red light struck Retief in the face, blinked off. He got to his feet. The captive Flap-jack rippled its fringe in an agitated way. Retief tensed his thumb in the eye-socket. "Sit tight," he said. "Don't try to do anything hasty...." His remarks were falling on deaf ears—or no ears at all—but the thumb spoke as loudly as words. There was a slither of sand. Another. He became aware of a ring of presences drawing closer. Retief tightened his grip on the alien. He could see a dark shape now, looming up almost to his own six-three. It looked like the Flap-jacks came in all sizes. A low rumble sounded, like a deep-throated growl. It strummed on, faded out. Retief cocked his head, frowning. "Try it two octaves higher," he said. "Awwrrp! Sorry. Is that better?" a clear voice came from the darkness. "That's fine," Retief said. "I'm here to arrange a prisoner exchange." "Prisoners? But we have no prisoners." "Sure you have. Me. Is it a deal?" "Ah, yes, of course. Quite equitable. What guarantees do you require?" "The word of a gentleman is sufficient." Retief released the alien. It flopped once, disappeared into the darkness. "If you'd care to accompany me to our headquarters," the voice said, "we can discuss our mutual concerns in comfort." "Delighted." Red lights blinked briefly. Retief glimpsed a gap in the thorny barrier, stepped through it. He followed dim shapes across warm sand to a low cave-like entry, faintly lit with a reddish glow. "I must apologize for the awkward design of our comfort-dome," said the voice. "Had we known we would be honored by a visit—" "Think nothing of it," Retief said. "We diplomats are trained to crawl." Inside, with knees bent and head ducked under the five-foot ceiling, Retief looked around at the walls of pink-toned nacre, a floor like burgundy-colored glass spread with silken rugs and a low table of polished red granite that stretched down the center of the spacious room, set out with silver dishes and rose-crystal drinking-tubes. III "Let me congratulate you," the voice said. Retief turned. An immense Flap-jack, hung with crimson trappings, rippled at his side. The voice issued from a disk strapped to its back. "You fight well. I think we will find in each other worthy adversaries." "Thanks. I'm sure the test would be interesting, but I'm hoping we can avoid it." "Avoid it?" Retief heard a low humming coming from the speaker in the silence. "Well, let us dine," the mighty Flap-jack said at last. "We can resolve these matters later. I am called Hoshick of the Mosaic of the Two Dawns." "I'm Retief." Hoshick waited expectantly, "... of the Mountain of Red Tape," Retief added. "Take place, Retief," said Hoshick. "I hope you won't find our rude couches uncomfortable." Two other large Flap-jacks came into the room, communed silently with Hoshick. "Pray forgive our lack of translating devices," he said to Retief. "Permit me to introduce my colleagues...." A small Flap-jack rippled the chamber bearing on its back a silver tray laden with aromatic food. The waiter served the four diners, filled the drinking tubes with yellow wine. It smelled good. "I trust you'll find these dishes palatable," said Hoshick. "Our metabolisms are much alike, I believe." Retief tried the food. It had a delicious nut-like flavor. The wine was indistinguishable from Chateau d'Yquem. "It was an unexpected pleasure to encounter your party here," said Hoshick. "I confess at first we took you for an indigenous earth-grubbing form, but we were soon disabused of that notion." He raised a tube, manipulating it deftly with his fringe tentacles. Retief returned the salute and drank. "Of course," Hoshick continued, "as soon as we realized that you were sportsmen like ourselves, we attempted to make amends by providing a bit of activity for you. We've ordered out our heavier equipment and a few trained skirmishers and soon we'll be able to give you an adequate show. Or so I hope." "Additional skirmishers?" said Retief. "How many, if you don't mind my asking?" "For the moment, perhaps only a few hundred. There-after ... well, I'm sure we can arrange that between us. Personally I would prefer a contest of limited scope. No nuclear or radiation-effect weapons. Such a bore, screening the spawn for deviations. Though I confess we've come upon some remarkably useful sports. The rangerform such as you made captive, for example. Simple-minded, of course, but a fantastically keen tracker." "Oh, by all means," Retief said. "No atomics. As you pointed out, spawn-sorting is a nuisance, and then too, it's wasteful of troops." "Ah, well, they are after all expendable. But we agree: no atomics. Have you tried the ground-gwack eggs? Rather a specialty of my Mosaic...." "Delicious," said Retief. "I wonder. Have you considered eliminating weapons altogether?" A scratchy sound issued from the disk. "Pardon my laughter," Hoshick said, "but surely you jest?" "As a matter of fact," said Retief, "we ourselves seldom use weapons." "I seem to recall that our first contact of skirmishforms involved the use of a weapon by one of your units." "My apologies," said Retief. "The—ah—the skirmishform failed to recognize that he was dealing with a sportsman." "Still, now that we have commenced so merrily with weapons...." Hoshick signaled and the servant refilled tubes. "There is an aspect I haven't yet mentioned," Retief went on. "I hope you won't take this personally, but the fact is, our skirmishforms think of weapons as something one employs only in dealing with certain specific life-forms." "Oh? Curious. What forms are those?" "Vermin. Or 'varmints' as some call them. Deadly antagonists, but lacking in caste. I don't want our skirmishforms thinking of such worthy adversaries as yourself as varmints." "Dear me! I hadn't realized, of course. Most considerate of you to point it out." Hoshick clucked in dismay. "I see that skirmishforms are much the same among you as with us: lacking in perception." He laughed scratchily. "Imagine considering us as—what was the word?—varmints." "Which brings us to the crux of the matter. You see, we're up against a serious problem with regard to skirmishforms. A low birth rate. Therefore we've reluctantly taken to substitutes for the mass actions so dear to the heart of the sportsman. We've attempted to put an end to these contests altogether...." Hoshick coughed explosively, sending a spray of wine into the air. "What are you saying?" he gasped. "Are you proposing that Hoshick of the Mosaic of the Two Dawns abandon honor....?" "Sir!" said Retief sternly. "You forget yourself. I, Retief of the Red Tape Mountain, make an alternate proposal more in keeping with the newest sporting principles." "New?" cried Hoshick. "My dear Retief, what a pleasant surprise! I'm enthralled with novel modes. One gets so out of touch. Do elaborate." "It's quite simple, really. Each side selects a representative and the two individuals settle the issue between them." "I ... um ... fear I don't understand. What possible significance could one attach to the activities of a couple of random skirmishforms?" "I haven't made myself clear," said Retief. He took a sip of wine. "We don't involve the skirmishforms at all. That's quite passe." "You don't mean...?" "That's right. You and me." Outside on the starlit sand Retief tossed aside the power pistol, followed it with the leather shirt Swazey had lent him. By the faint light he could just make out the towering figure of the Flap-jack rearing up before him, his trappings gone. A silent rank of Flap-jack retainers were grouped behind him. "I fear I must lay aside the translator now, Retief," said Hoshick. He sighed and rippled his fringe tentacles. "My spawn-fellows will never credit this. Such a curious turn fashion has taken. How much more pleasant it is to observe the action of the skirmishforms from a distance." "I suggest we use Tennessee rules," said Retief. "They're very liberal. Biting, gouging, stomping, kneeing and of course choking, as well as the usual punching, shoving and kicking." "Hmmm. These gambits seem geared to forms employing rigid endo-skeletons; I fear I shall be at a disadvantage." "Of course," Retief said, "if you'd prefer a more plebeian type of contest...." "By no means. But perhaps we could rule out tentacle-twisting, just to even it." "Very well. Shall we begin?" With a rush Hoshick threw himself at Retief, who ducked, whirled, and leaped on the Flap-jack's back ... and felt himself flipped clear by a mighty ripple of the alien's slab-like body. Retief rolled aside as Hoshick turned on him; he jumped to his feet and threw a right hay-maker to Hoshick's mid-section. The alien whipped his left fringe around in an arc that connected with Retief's jaw, sent him spinning onto his back ... and Hoshick's weight struck him. Retief twisted, tried to roll. The flat body of the alien blanketed him. He worked an arm free, drumming blows on the leathery back. Hoshick nestled closer. Retief's air was running out. He heaved up against the smothering weight. Nothing budged. It was like burial under a dump-truck-load of concrete. He remembered the rangerform he had captured. The sensitive orifice had been placed ventrally, in what would be the thoracic area.... He groped, felt tough hide set with horny granules. He would be missing skin tomorrow ... if there was a tomorrow. His thumb found the orifice and probed. The Flap-jack recoiled. Retief held fast, probed deeper, groping with the other hand. If the alien were bilaterally symmetrical there would be a set of ready made hand-holds.... There were. Retief dug in and the Flap-jack writhed, pulled away. Retief held on, scrambled to his feet, threw his weight against the alien and fell on top of him, still gouging. Hoshick rippled his fringe wildly, flopped in terror, then went limp. Retief relaxed, released his hold and got to his feet, breathing hard. Hoshick humped himself over onto his ventral side, lifted and moved gingerly over to the sidelines. His retainers came forward, assisted him into his trappings, strapped on the translator. He sighed heavily, adjusted the volume. "There is much to be said for the old system," he said. "What a burden one's sportsmanship places on one at times." "Great sport, wasn't it?" said Retief. "Now, I know you'll be eager to continue. If you'll just wait while I run back and fetch some of our gougerforms—" "May hide-ticks devour the gougerforms!" Hoshick bellowed. "You've given me such a sprong-ache as I'll remember each spawning-time for a year." "Speaking of hide-ticks," said Retief, "we've developed a biterform—" "Enough!" Hoshick roared, so loudly that the translator bounced on his hide. "Suddenly I yearn for the crowded yellow sands of Jaq. I had hoped...." He broke off, drew a rasping breath. "I had hoped, Retief," he said, speaking sadly now, "to find a new land here where I might plan my own Mosaic, till these alien sands and bring forth such a crop of paradise-lichen as should glut the markets of a hundred worlds. But my spirit is not equal to the prospect of biterforms and gougerforms without end. I am shamed before you...." "To tell you the truth, I'm old-fashioned myself. I'd rather watch the action from a distance too." "But surely your spawn-fellows would never condone such an attitude." "My spawn-fellows aren't here. And besides, didn't I mention it? No one who's really in the know would think of engaging in competition by mere combat if there were any other way. Now, you mentioned tilling the sand, raising lichens—things like that—" "That on which we dined but now," said Hoshick, "and from which the wine is made." "The big news in fashionable diplomacy today is farming competition. Now, if you'd like to take these deserts and raise lichen, we'll promise to stick to the oases and vegetables." Hoshick curled his back in attention. "Retief, you're quite serious? You would leave all the fair sand hills to us?" "The whole works, Hoshick. I'll take the oases." Hoshick rippled his fringes ecstatically. "Once again you have outdone me, Retief," he cried. "This time, in generosity." "We'll talk over the details later. I'm sure we can establish a set of rules that will satisfy all parties. Now I've got to get back. I think some of the gougerforms are waiting to see me."

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OUT OF THE IRON WOMB! By POUL ANDERSON Behind a pale Venusian mask lay hidden the arch-humanist, the anti-tech killer ... one of those who needlessly had strewn Malone blood across the heavens from Saturn to the sun. Now—on distant Trojan asteroids—the rendezvous for death was plainly marked. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The most dangerous is not the outlawed murderer, who only slays men, but the rebellious philosopher: for he destroys worlds. Darkness and the chill glitter of stars. Bo Jonsson crouched on a whirling speck of stone and waited for the man who was coming to kill him. There was no horizon. The flying mountain on which he stood was too small. At his back rose a cliff of jagged rock, losing its own blackness in the loom of shadows; its teeth ate raggedly across the Milky Way. Before him, a tumbled igneous wilderness slanted crazily off, with one long thin crag sticking into the sky like a grotesque bowsprit. There was no sound except the thudding of his own heart, the harsh rasp of his own breath, locked inside the stinking metal skin of his suit. Otherwise ... no air, no heat, no water or life or work of man, only a granite nakedness spinning through space out beyond Mars. Stooping, awkward in the clumsy armor, he put the transparent plastic of his helmet to the ground. Its cold bit at him even through the insulating material. He might be able to hear the footsteps of his murderer conducted through the ground. Stillness answered him. He gulped a heavy lungful of tainted air and rose. The other might be miles away yet, or perhaps very close, catfooting too softly to set up vibrations. A man could do that when gravity was feeble enough. The stars blazed with a cruel wintry brilliance, over him, around him, light-years to fall through emptiness before he reached one. He had been alone among them before; he had almost thought them friends. Sometimes, on a long watch, a man found himself talking to Vega or Spica or dear old Beetle Juice, murmuring what was in him as if the remote sun could understand. But they didn't care, he saw that now. To them, he did not exist, and they would shine carelessly long after he was gone into night. He had never felt so alone as now, when another man was on the asteroid with him, hunting him down. Bo Jonsson looked at the wrench in his hand. It was long and massive, it would have been heavy on Earth, but it was hardly enough to unscrew the stars and reset the machinery of a universe gone awry. He smiled stiffly at the thought. He wanted to laugh too, but checked himself for fear he wouldn't be able to stop. Let's face it , he told himself. You're scared. You're scared sweatless. He wondered if he had spoken it aloud. There was plenty of room on the asteroid. At least two hundred square miles, probably more if you allowed for the rough surface. He could skulk around, hide ... and suffocate when his tanked air gave out. He had to be a hunter, too, and track down the other man, before he died. And if he found his enemy, he would probably die anyway. He looked about him. Nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing but the streaming of the constellations as the asteroid spun. Nothing had ever moved here, since the beginning of time when moltenness congealed into death. Not till men came and hunted each other. Slowly he forced himself to move. The thrust of his foot sent him up, looping over the cliff to drift down like a dead leaf in Earth's October. Suit, equipment, and his own body, all together, weighed only a couple of pounds here. It was ghostly, this soundless progress over fields which had never known life. It was like being dead already. Bo Jonsson's tongue was dry and thick in his mouth. He wanted to find his enemy and give up, buy existence at whatever price it would command. But he couldn't do that. Even if the other man let him do it, which was doubtful, he couldn't. Johnny Malone was dead. Maybe that was what had started it all—the death of Johnny Malone. There are numerous reasons for basing on the Trojan asteroids, but the main one can be given in a single word: stability. They stay put in Jupiter's orbit, about sixty degrees ahead and behind, with only minor oscillations; spaceships need not waste fuel coming up to a body which has been perturbed a goodly distance from where it was supposed to be. The trailing group is the jumping-off place for trans-Jovian planets, the leading group for the inner worlds—that way, their own revolution about the sun gives the departing ship a welcome boost, while minimizing the effects of Jupiter's drag. Moreover, being dense clusters, they have attracted swarms of miners, so that Achilles among the leaders and Patroclus in the trailers have a permanent boom town atmosphere. Even though a spaceship and equipment represent a large investment, this is one of the last strongholds of genuinely private enterprise: the prospector, the mine owner, the rockhound dreaming of the day when his stake is big enough for him to start out on his own—a race of individualists, rough and noisy and jealous, but living under iron rules of hospitality and rescue. The Last Chance on Achilles has another name, which simply sticks an "r" in the official one; even for that planetoid, it is a rowdy bar where Guardsmen come in trios. But Johnny Malone liked it, and talked Bo Jonsson into going there for a final spree before checkoff and departure. "Nothing to compare," he insisted. "Every place else is getting too fantangling civilized, except Venus, and I don't enjoy Venus." Johnny was from Luna City himself: a small, dark man with the quick nervous movements and dipped accent of that roaring commercial metropolis. He affected the latest styles, brilliant colors in the flowing tunic and slacks, a beret cocked on his sleek head. But somehow he didn't grate on Bo, they had been partners for several years now. They pushed through a milling crowd at the bar, rockhounds who watched one of Achilles' three live ecdysiasts with hungry eyes, and by some miracle found an empty booth. Bo squeezed his bulk into one side of the cubicle while Johnny, squinting through a reeking smoke-haze, dialed drinks. Bo was larger and heavier than most spacemen—he'd never have gotten his certificate before the ion drive came in—and was usually content to let others talk while he listened. A placid blond giant, with amiable blue eyes in a battered brown face, he did not consider himself bright, and always wanted to learn. Johnny gulped his drink and winced. "Whiskey, they call it yet! Water, synthetic alcohol, and a dash of caramel they have the gall to label whiskey and charge for!" "Everything's expensive here," said Bo mildly. "That's why so few rockhounds get rich. They make a lot of money, but they have to spend it just as fast to stay alive." "Yeh ... yeh ... wish they'd spend some of it on us." Johnny grinned and fed the dispenser another coin. It muttered to itself and slid forth a tray with a glass. "C'mon, drink up, man. It's a long way home, and we've got to fortify ourselves for the trip. A bottle, a battle, and a wench is what I need. Most especially the wench, because I don't think the eminent Dr. McKittrick is gonna be interested in sociability, and it's close quarters aboard the Dog ." Bo kept on sipping slowly. "Johnny," he said, raising his voice to cut through the din, "you're an educated man. I never could figure out why you want to talk like a jumper." "Because I am one at heart. Look, Bo, why don't you get over that inferiority complex of yours? A man can't run a spaceship without knowing more math and physical science than the average professor on Earth. So you had to work your way through the Academy and never had a chance to fan yourself with a lily white hand while somebody tootled Mozart through a horn. So what?" Johnny's head darted around, birdlike. "If we want some women we'd better make our reservations now." "I don't, Johnny," said Bo. "I'll just nurse a beer." It wasn't morals so much as fastidiousness; he'd wait till they hit Luna. "Suit yourself. If you don't want to uphold the honor of the Sirius Transportation Company—" Bo chuckled. The Company consisted of (a) the Sirius ; (b) her crew, himself and Johnny; (c) a warehouse, berth, and three other part owners back in Luna City. Not exactly a tramp ship, because you can't normally stop in the middle of an interplanetary voyage and head for somewhere else; but she went wherever there was cargo or people to be moved. Her margin of profit was not great in spite of the charges, for a space trip is expensive; but in a few more years they'd be able to buy another ship or two, and eventually Fireball and Triplanetary would be getting some competition. Even the public lines might have to worry a little. Johnny put away another couple of shots and rose. Alcohol cost plenty, but it was also more effective in low-gee. "'Scuse me," he said. "I see a target. Sure you don't want me to ask if she has a friend?" Bo shook his head and watched his partner move off, swift in the puny gravity—the Last Chance didn't centrifuge like some of the tommicker places downtown. It was hard to push through the crowd without weight to help, but Johnny faded along and edged up to the girl with his highest-powered smile. There were several other men standing around her, but Johnny had The Touch. He'd be bringing her back here in a few minutes. Bo sighed, feeling a bit lonesome. If he wasn't going to make a night of it, there was no point in drinking heavily. He had to make the final inspection of the ship tomorrow, and grudged the cost of anti-hangover tablets. Besides what he was putting back into the business, he was trying to build a private hoard; some day, he'd retire and get married and build a house. He already had the site picked out, on Kullen overlooking the Sound, back on Earth. Man, but it was a long time since he'd been on Earth! A sharp noise slashed through the haze of talk and music Bo looked up. There was a tall black haired man, Venusian to judge by his kilts, arguing with Johnny. His face was ugly with anger. Johnny made some reply. Bo heaved up his form and strode toward the discussion, casually picking up anyone in the way and setting him aside. Johnny liked a fight, but this Venusian was big. As he neared, he caught words: "—my girl, dammit." "Like hell I am!" said the girl. "I never saw you before—" "Run along and play, son," said Johnny. "Or do you want me to change that diaper of yours?" That was when it happened. Bo saw the little needler spit from the Venusian's fingers. Johnny stood there a moment, looking foolishly at the dart in his stomach. Then his knees buckled and he fell with a nightmare slowness. The Venusian was already on the move. He sprang straight up, slammed a kick at the wall, and arced out the door into the dome corridor beyond. A spaceman, that. Knows how to handle himself in low-gee. It was the only clear thought which ran in the sudden storm of Bo's head. The girl screamed. A man cursed and tried to follow the Venusian. He tangled with another. "Get outta my way!" A roar lifted, someone slugged, someone else coolly smashed a bottle against the bar and lifted the jagged end. There was the noise of a fist meeting flesh. Bo had seen death before. That needle wasn't anesthetic, it was poison. He knelt in the riot with Johnny's body in his arms. II Suddenly the world came to an end. There was a sheer drop-off onto the next face of the rough cube which was the asteroid. Bo lay on his belly and peered down the cliff, it ran for a couple of miles and beyond it were the deeps of space and the cold stars. He could dimly see the tortured swirl of crystallization patterns in the smooth bareness. No place to hide; his enemy was not there. He turned the thought over in a mind which seemed stiff and slow. By crossing that little plain he was exposing himself to a shot from one of its edges. On the other hand, he could just as well be bushwhacked from a ravine as he jumped over. And this route was the fastest for completing his search scheme. The Great Bear slid into sight, down under the world as it turned. He had often stood on winter nights, back in Sweden, and seen its immense sprawl across the weird flicker of aurora; but even then he wanted the spaceman's experience of seeing it from above. Well, now he had his wish, and much good it had done him. He went over the edge of the cliff, cautiously, for it wouldn't take much of an impetus to throw him off this rock entirely. Then his helpless and soon frozen body would be just another meteor for the next million years. The vague downward sensation of gravity shifted insanely as he moved; he had the feeling that the world was tilting around him. Now it was the precipice which was a scarred black plain underfoot, reaching to a saw-toothed bluff at its farther edge. He moved with flat low-gee bounds. Besides the danger of springing off the asteroid entirely, there was its low acceleration to keep a man near the ground; jump up a few feet and it would take you a while to fall back. It was utterly silent around him. He had never thought there could be so much stillness. He was halfway across when the bullet came. He saw no flash, heard no crack, but suddenly the fissured land before him exploded in a soundless shower of chips. The bullet ricocheted flatly, heading off for outer space. No meteor gravel, that! Bo stood unmoving an instant, fighting the impulse to leap away. He was a spaceman, not a rockhound; he wasn't used to this environment, and if he jumped high he could be riddled as he fell slowly down again. Sweat was cold on his body. He squinted, trying to see where the shot had come from. Suddenly he was zigzagging off across the plain toward the nearest edge. Another bullet pocked the ground near him. The sun rose, a tiny heatless dazzle blinding in his eyes. Fire crashed at his back. Thunder and darkness exploded before him. He lurched forward, driven by the impact. Something was roaring, echoes clamorous in his helmet. He grew dimly aware that it was himself. Then he was falling, whirling down into the black between the stars. There was a knife in his back, it was white-hot and twisting between the ribs. He stumbled over the edge of the plain and fell, waking when his armor bounced a little against stone. Breath rattled in his throat as he turned his head. There was a white plume standing over his shoulder, air streaming out through the hole and freezing its moisture. The knife in him was not hot, it was cold with an ultimate cold. Around him, world and stars rippled as if seen through heat, through fever. He hung on the edge of creation by his fingertips, while chaos shouted beneath. Theoretically, one man can run a spaceship, but in practice two or three are required for non-military craft. This is not only an emergency reserve, but a preventive of emergencies, for one man alone might get too tired at the critical moments. Bo knew he wouldn't be allowed to leave Achilles without a certified partner, and unemployed spacemen available for immediate hiring are found once in a Venusian snowfall. Bo didn't care the first day. He had taken Johnny out to Helmet Hill and laid him in the barren ground to wait, unchanging now, till Judgement Day. He felt empty then, drained of grief and hope alike, his main thought a dull dread of having to tell Johnny's father when he reached Luna. He was too slow and clumsy with words; his comforting hand would only break the old man's back. Old Malone had given six sons to space, Johnny was the last; from Saturn to the sun, his blood was strewn for nothing. It hardly seemed to matter that the Guards office reported itself unable to find the murderer. A single Venusian should have been easy to trace on Achilles, but he seemed to have vanished completely. Bo returned to the transient quarters and dialed Valeria McKittrick. She looked impatiently at him out of the screen. "Well," she said, "what's the matter? I thought we were blasting today." "Hadn't you heard?" asked Bo. He found it hard to believe she could be ignorant, here where everybody's life was known to everybody else. "Johnny's dead. We can't leave." "Oh ... I'm sorry. He was such a nice little man—I've been in the lab all the time, packing my things, and didn't know." A frown crossed her clear brow. "But you've got to get me back. I've engaged passage to Luna with you." "Your ticket will be refunded, of course," said Bo heavily. "But you aren't certified, and the Sirius is licensed for no less than two operators." "Well ... damn! There won't be another berth for weeks, and I've got to get home. Can't you find somebody?" Bo shrugged, not caring much. "I'll circulate an ad if you want, but—" "Do so, please. Let me know." She switched off. Bo sat for a moment thinking about her. Valeria McKittrick was worth considering. She wasn't beautiful in any conventional sense but she was tall and well built; there were good lines in the strong high boned face, and her hair was a cataract of spectacular red. And brains, too ... you didn't get to be a physicist with the Union's radiation labs for nothing. He knew she was still young, and that she had been on Achilles for about a year working on some special project and was now ready to go home. She was human enough, had been to most of the officers' parties and danced and laughed and flirted mildly, but even the dullest rockhound gossip knew she was too lost in her work to do more. Out here a woman was rare, and a virtuous woman unheard-of; as a result, unknown to herself, Dr. McKittrick's fame had spread through more thousands of people and millions of miles than her professional achievements were ever likely to reach. Since coming here, on commission from the Lunar lab, to bring her home, Bo Jonsson had given her an occasional wistful thought. He liked intelligent women, and he was getting tired of rootlessness. But of course it would be a catastrophe if he fell in love with her because she wouldn't look twice at a big dumb slob like him. He had sweated out a couple of similar affairs in the past and didn't want to go through another. He placed his ad on the radinews circuit and then went out to get drunk. It was all he could do for Johnny now, drink him a final wassail. Already his friend was cold under the stars. In the course of the evening he found himself weeping. He woke up many hours later. Achilles ran on Earth time but did not rotate on it; officially, it was late at night, actually the shrunken sun was high over the domes. The man in the upper bunk said there was a message for him; he was to call one Einar Lundgard at the Comet Hotel soonest. The Comet! Anyone who could afford a room to himself here, rather than a kip in the public barracks, was well fueled. Bo swallowed a tablet and made his way to the visi and dialed. The robo-clerk summoned Lundgard down to the desk. It was a lean, muscular face under close cropped brown hair which appeared in the screen. Lundgard was a tall and supple man, somehow neat even without clothes. "Jonsson," said Bo. "Sorry to get you up, but I understood—" "Oh, yes. Are you looking for a spaceman? I heard your ad and I'm available." Bo felt his mouth gape open. "Huh? I never thought—" "We're both lucky, I guess." Lundgard chuckled. His English had only the slightest trace of accent, less than Bo's. "I thought I was stashed here too for the next several months." "How does a qualified spaceman happen to be marooned?" "I'm with Fireball, was on the Drake —heard of what happened to her?" Bo nodded, for every spaceman knows exactly what every spaceship is doing at any given time. The Drake had come to Achilles to pick up a cargo of refined thorium for Earth; while she lay in orbit, she had somehow lost a few hundred pounds of reaction-mass water from a cracked gasket. Why the accident should have occurred, nobody knew ... spacemen were not careless about inspections, and what reason would anyone have for sabotage? The event had taken place about a month ago, when the Sirius was already enroute here; Bo had heard of it in the course of shop talk. "I thought she went back anyway," he said. Lundgard nodded. "She did. It was the usual question of economics. You know what refined fuel water costs in the Belt; also, the delay while we got it would have carried Earth and Achilles past optimum position, which'd make the trip home that much more expensive. Since we had one more man aboard than really required, it was cheaper to leave him behind; the difference in mass would make up for the fuel loss. I volunteered, even suggested the idea, because ... well, it happened during my watch, and even if nobody blamed me I couldn't help feeling guilty." Bo understood that kind of loyalty. You couldn't travel space without men who had it. "The Company beamed a message: I'd stay here till their schedule permitted an undermanned ship to come by, but that wouldn't be for maybe months," went on Lundgard. "I can't see sitting on this lump that long without so much as a chance at planetfall bonus. If you'll take me on, I'm sure the Company will agree; I'll get a message to them on the beam right away." "Take us a while to get back," warned Bo. "We're going to stop off at another asteroid to pick up some automatic equipment, and won't go into hyperbolic orbit till after that. About six weeks from here to Earth, all told." "Against six months here?" Lundgard laughed; it emphasized the bright charm of his manner. "Sunblaze. I'll work for free." "No need to. Bring your papers over tomorrow, huh?" The certificate and record were perfectly in order, showing Einar Lundgard to be a Spacetech 1/cl with eight years' experience, qualified as engineer, astronaut, pilot, and any other of the thousand professions which have run into one. They registered articles and shook hands on it. "Call me Bo. It really is my name ... Swedish." "Another squarehead, eh?" grinned Lundgard. "I'm from South America myself." "Notice a year's gap here," said Bo, pointing to the service record. "On Venus." "Oh, yes. I had some fool idea about settling but soon learned better. I tried to farm, but when you have to carve your own land out of howling desert—Well, let's start some math, shall we?" They were lucky, not having to wait their turn at the station computer; no other ship was leaving immediately. They fed it the data and requirements, and got back columns of numbers: fuel requirements, acceleration times, orbital elements. The figures always had to be modified, no trip ever turned out just as predicted, but that could be done when needed with a slipstick and the little ship's calculator. Bo went at his share of the job doggedly, checking and re-checking before giving the problem to the machine; Lundgard breezed through it and spent his time while waiting for Bo in swapping dirty limericks with the tech. He had some good ones. The Sirius was loaded, inspected, and cleared. A "scooter" brought her three passengers up to her orbit, they embarked, settled down, and waited. At the proper time, acceleration jammed them back in a thunder of rockets. Bo relaxed against the thrust, thinking of Achilles falling away behind them. "So long," he whispered. "So long, Johnny." III In another minute, he would be knotted and screaming from the bends, and a couple of minutes later he would be dead. Bo clamped his teeth together, as if he would grip consciousness in his jaws. His hands felt cold and heavy, the hands of a stranger, as he fumbled for the supply pouch. It seemed to recede from him, down a hollow infinite corridor where echoes talked in a language he did not know. "Damn," he gasped. "Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn." He got the pouch open somehow. The stars wheeled around him. There were stars buzzing in his head, like cold white fireflies, buzzing and buzzing in the enormous ringing emptiness of his skull. Pain jagged through him, he felt his eardrums popping as pressure dropped. The plastic patch stuck to his metal gauntlet. He peeled it off, trying not to howl with the fury ripping in his nerves. His body was slow, inert, a thing to fight. There was no more feeling in his back, was he dead already? Redness flamed before his eyes, red like Valeria's hair blowing across the stars. It was sheer reflex which brought his arm around to slap the patch over the hole in his suit. The adhesive gripped, drying fast in the sucking vacuum. The patch bellied out from internal air pressure, straining to break loose and kill him. Bo's mind wavered back toward life. He opened the valves wide on his tanks, and his thermostatic capacitors pumped heat back into him. For a long time he lay there, only lungs and heart had motion. His throat felt withered and flayed, but the rasp of air through it was like being born again. Born, spewed out of an iron womb into a hollowness of stars and cold, to lie on naked rock while the enemy hunted him. Bo shuddered and wanted to scream again. Slowly he groped back toward awareness. His frostbitten back tingled as it warmed up again, soon it would be afire. He could feel a hot trickling of blood, but it was along his right side. The bullet must have spent most of its force punching through the armor, caromed off the inside, scratched his ribs, and fallen dead. Next time he probably wouldn't be so lucky. A magnetic-driven .30 slug would go through a helmet, splashing brains as it passed. He turned his head, feeling a great weariness, and looked at the gauges. This had cost him a lot of air. There was only about three hours worth left. Lundgard could kill him simply by waiting. It would be easy to die. He lay on his back, staring up at the stars and the spilling cloudy glory of the Milky Way. A warmth was creeping back into numbed hands and feet; soon he would be warm all over, and sleepy. His eyelids felt heavy, strange that they should be so heavy on an asteroid. He wanted terribly to sleep.

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DUST UNTO DUST By LYMAN D. HINCKLEY It was alien but was it dead, this towering, sinister city of metal that glittered malignantly before the cautious advance of three awed space-scouters. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Martin set the lifeboat down carefully, with all the attention one usually exercises in a situation where the totally unexpected has occurred, and he and his two companions sat and stared in awed silence at the city a quarter-mile away. He saw the dull, black walls of buildings shouldering grimly into the twilight sky, saw the sheared edge where the metal city ended and the barren earth began ... and he remembered observing, even before they landed, the too-strict geometry imposed on the entire construction. He frowned. The first impression was ... malignant. Wass, blond and slight, with enough nose for three or four men, unbuckled his safety belt and stood up. "Shall we, gentlemen?" and with a graceful movement of hand and arm he indicated the waiting city. Martin led Wass, and the gangling, scarecrow-like Rodney, through the stillness overlaying the barren ground. There was only the twilight sky, and harsh and black against it, the convoluted earth. And the city. Malignant. He wondered, again, what beings would choose to build a city—even a city like this one—in such surroundings. The men from the ship knew only the surface facts about this waiting geometric discovery. Theirs was the eleventh inter-planetary flight, and the previous ten, in the time allowed them for exploration while this planet was still close enough to their own to permit a safe return in their ships, had not spotted the city. But the eleventh expedition had, an hour ago, with just thirteen hours left during which a return flight could be safely started. So far as was known, this was the only city on the planet—the planet without any life at all, save tiny mosses, for a million years or more. And no matter which direction from the city a man moved, he would always be going north. "Hey, Martin!" Rodney called through his helmet radio. Martin paused. "Wind," Rodney said, coming abreast of him. He glanced toward the black pile, as if sharing Martin's thoughts. "That's all we need, isn't it?" Martin looked at the semi-transparent figures of wind and dust cavorting in the distance, moving toward them. He grinned a little, adjusting his radio. "Worried?" Rodney's bony face was without expression. "Gives me the creeps, kind of. I wonder what they were like?" Wass murmured, "Let us hope they aren't immortal." Three feet from the edge of the city Martin stopped and stubbed at the sand with the toe of his boot, clearing earth from part of a shining metal band. Wass watched him, and then shoved aside more sand, several feet away. "It's here, too." Martin stood up. "Let's try farther on. Rodney, radio the ship, tell them we're going in." Rodney nodded. After a time, Wass said, "Here, too. How far do you think it goes?" Martin shrugged. "Clear around the city? I'd like to know what it is—was—for." "Defense," Rodney, several yards behind, suggested. "Could be," Martin said. "Let's go in." The three crossed the metal band and walked abreast down a street, their broad soft soled boots making no sound on the dull metal. They passed doors and arches and windows and separate buildings. They moved cautiously across five intersections. And they stood in a square surrounded by the tallest buildings in the city. Rodney broke the silence, hesitantly. "Not—not very big. Is it?" Wass looked at him shrewdly. "Neither were the—well, shall we call them, people? Have you noticed how low everything is?" Rodney's laughter rose, too. Then, sobering—"Maybe they crawled." A nebulous image, product of childhood's vivid imagination, moved slowly across Martin's mind. "All right!" he rapped out—and the image faded. "Sorry," Rodney murmured, his throat working beneath his lantern jaw. Then—"I wonder what it's like here in the winter when there's no light at all?" "I imagine they had illumination of some sort," Martin answered, dryly. "If we don't hurry up and get through this place and back to the ship, we're very likely to find out." Rodney said quickly, "I mean outside." "Out there, too, Rodney, they must have had illumination." Martin looked back along the straight, metal street they'd walked on, and past that out over the bleak, furrowed slopes where the ship's lifeboat lay ... and he thought everything outside the city seemed, somehow, from here, a little dim, a little hazy. He straightened his shoulders. The city was alien, of course, and that explained most of it ... most of it. But he felt the black city was something familiar, yet twisted and distorted. "Well," Wass said, his nose wrinkling a bit, "now that we're here...." "Pictures," Martin decided. "We have twelve hours. We'll start here. What's the matter, Wass?" The blond man grinned ruefully. "I left the camera in the lifeboat." There was a pause. Then Wass, defensively—"It's almost as if the city didn't want to be photographed." Martin ignored the remark. "Go get it. Rodney and I will be somewhere along this street." Wass turned away. Martin and Rodney started slowly down the wide metal street, at right angles to their path of entrance. Again Martin felt a tug of twisted, distorted familiarity. It was almost as if ... they were human up to a certain point, the point being, perhaps, some part of their minds.... Alien things, dark and subtle, things no man could ever comprehend. Parallel evolution on two inner planets of the same system? Somewhere, sometime, a common ancestor? Martin noted the shoulder-high doors, the heavier gravity, remembered the inhabitants of the city vanished before the thing that was to become man ever emerged from the slime, and he decided to grin at himself, at his own imagination. Rodney jerked his scarecrow length about quickly, and a chill sped up Martin's spine. "What's the matter?" The bony face was white, the gray eyes were wide. "I saw—I thought I saw—something—moving—" Anger rose in Martin. "You didn't," he said flatly, gripping the other's shoulder cruelly. "You couldn't have. Get hold of yourself, man!" Rodney stared. "The wind. Remember? There isn't any, here." "... How could there be? The buildings protect us now. It was blowing from the other direction." Rodney wrenched free of Martin's grip. He gestured wildly. "That—" "Martin!" Wass' voice came through the receivers in both their radios. "Martin, I can't get out!" Rodney mumbled something, and Martin told him to shut up. Wass said, more quietly, "Remember that metal band? It's all clear now, and glittering, as far as I can see. I can't get across it; it's like a glass wall." "We're trapped, we're trapped, they are—" "Shut up, Rodney! Wass, I'm only two sections from the edge. I'll check here." Martin clapped a hand on Rodney's shoulder again, starting him moving, toward the city's edge, past the black, silent buildings. The glittering band was here, too, like a halo around a silhouette. "No go," Martin said to Wass. He bit at his lower lip. "I think it must be all around us." He was silent for a time, exploring the consequences of this. Then—"We'll meet you in the middle of the city, where we separated." Walking with Rodney, Martin heard Wass' voice, flat and metallic through the radio receiver against his ear. "What do you suppose caused this?" He shook his head angrily, saying, "Judging by reports of the rest of the planet, it must have been horribly radioactive at one time. All of it." "Man-made radiation, you mean." Martin grinned faintly. Wass, too, had an active imagination. "Well, alien-made, anyhow. Perhaps they had a war." Wass' voice sounded startled. "Anti-radiation screen?" Rodney interrupted, "There hasn't been enough radiation around here for hundreds of thousands of years to activate such a screen." Wass said coldly, "He's right, Martin." Martin crossed an intersection, Rodney slightly behind him. "You're both wrong," he said. "We landed here today." Rodney stopped in the middle of the metal street and stared down at Martin. "The wind—?" "Why not?" "That would explain why it stopped so suddenly, then." Rodney stood straighter. When he walked again, his steps were firmer. They reached the center of the city, ahead of the small, slight Wass, and stood watching him labor along the metal toward them. Wass' face, Martin saw, was sober. "I tried to call the ship. No luck." "The shield?" Wass nodded. "What else?" "I don't know—" "If we went to the roof of the tallest building," Rodney offered, "we might—" Martin shook his head. "No. To be effective, the shield would have to cover the city." Wass stared down at the metal street, as if he could look through it. "I wonder where it gets its power?" "Down below, probably. If there is a down below." Martin hesitated. "We may have to...." "What?" Rodney prompted. Martin shrugged. "Let's look." He led the way through a shoulder-high arch in one of the tall buildings surrounding the square. The corridor inside was dim and plain, and he switched on his flashlight, the other two immediately following his example. The walls and the rounded ceiling of the corridor were of the same dull metal as the buildings' facades, and the streets. There were a multitude of doors and arches set into either side of the corridor. It was rather like ... entering a gigantic metal beehive. Martin chose an arch, with beyond it a metal ramp, which tilted downward, gleaming in the pale circle of his torch. A call from Rodney halted him. "Back here," the tall man repeated. "It looks like a switchboard." The three advanced to the end of the central corridor, pausing before a great arch, outlined in the too-careful geometrical figures Martin had come to associate with the city builders. The three torches, shining through the arch, picked out a bank of buttons, handles ... and a thick rope of cables which ran upward to vanish unexpectedly in the metal roof. "Is this it," Wass murmured, "or an auxiliary?" Martin shrugged. "The whole city's no more than a machine, apparently." "Another assumption," Wass said. "We have done nothing but make assumptions ever since we got here." "What would you suggest, instead?" Martin asked calmly. Rodney furtively, extended one hand toward a switch. "No!" Martin said, sharply. That was one assumption they dared not make. Rodney turned. "But—" "No. Wass, how much time have we?" "The ship leaves in eleven hours." "Eleven hours," Rodney repeated. "Eleven hours!" He reached out for the switch again. Martin swore, stepped forward, pulled him back roughly. He directed his flashlight at Rodney's thin, pale face. "What do you think you're doing?" "We have to find out what all this stuff's for!" "Going at it blindly, we'd probably execute ourselves." "We've got to—" "No!" Then, more quietly—"We still have eleven hours to find a way out." "Ten hours and forty-five minutes," Wass disagreed softly. "Minus the time it takes us to get to the lifeboat, fly to the ship, land, stow it, get ourselves aboard, and get the big ship away from the planet. And Captain Morgan can't wait for us, Martin." "You too, Wass?" "Up to the point of accuracy, yes." Martin said, "Not necessarily. You go the way the wind does, always thinking of your own tender hide, of course." Rodney cursed. "And every second we stand here doing nothing gives us that much less time to find a way out. Martin—" "Make one move toward that switchboard and I'll stop you where you stand!" Wass moved silently through the darkness beyond the torches. "We all have guns, Martin." "I'm holding mine." Martin waited. After a moment, Wass switched his flashlight back on. He said quietly, "He's right, Rodney. It would be sure death to monkey around in here." "Well...." Rodney turned quickly toward the black arch. "Let's get out of here, then!" Martin hung back waiting for the others to go ahead of him down the metal hall. At the other arch, where the ramp led downward, he called a halt. "If the dome, or whatever it is, is a radiation screen there must be at least half-a-dozen emergency exits around the city." Rodney said, "To search every building next to the dome clean around the city would take years." Martin nodded. "But there must be central roads beneath this main level leading to them. Up here there are too many roads." Wass laughed rudely. "Have you a better idea?" Wass ignored that, as Martin hoped he would. He said slowly, "That leads to another idea. If the band around the city is responsible for the dome, does it project down into the ground as well?" "You mean dig out?" Martin asked. "Sure. Why not?" "We're wearing heavy suits and bulky breathing units. We have no equipment." "That shouldn't be hard to come by." Martin smiled, banishing Wass' idea. Rodney said, "They may have had their digging equipment built right in to themselves." "Anyway," Martin decided, "we can take a look down below." "In the pitch dark," Wass added. Martin adjusted his torch, began to lead the way down the metal ramp. The incline was gentle, apparently constructed for legs shorter, feet perhaps less broad than their own. The metal, without mark of any sort, gleamed under the combined light of the torches, unrolling out of the darkness before the men. At length the incline melted smoothly into the next level of the city. Martin shined his light upward, and the others followed his example. Metal as smooth and featureless as that on which they stood shone down on them. Wass turned his light parallel with the floor, and then moved slowly in a circle. "No supports. No supports anywhere. What keeps all that up there?" "I don't know. I have no idea." Martin gestured toward the ramp with his light. "Does all this, this whole place, look at all familiar to you?" Rodney's gulp was clearly audible through the radio receivers. "Here?" "No, no," Martin answered impatiently, "not just here. I mean the whole city." "Yes," Wass said dryly, "it does. I'm sure this is where all my nightmares stay when they're not on shift." Martin turned on his heel and started down a metal avenue which, he thought, paralleled the street above. And Rodney and Wass followed him silently. They moved along the metal, past unfamiliar shapes made more so by gloom and moving shadows, past doors dancing grotesquely in the three lights, past openings in the occasional high metal partitions, past something which was perhaps a conveyor belt, past another something which could have been anything at all. The metal street ended eventually in a blank metal wall. The edge of the city—the city which was a dome of force above and a bowl of metal below. After a long time, Wass sighed. "Well, skipper...?" "We go back, I guess," Martin said. Rodney turned swiftly to face him. Martin thought the tall man was holding his gun. "To the switchboard, Martin?" "Unless someone has a better idea," Martin conceded. He waited. But Rodney was holding the gun ... and Wass was.... Then—"I can't think of anything else." They began to retrace their steps along the metal street, back past the same dancing shapes of metal, the partitions, the odd windows, all looking different now in the new angles of illumination. Martin was in the lead. Wass followed him silently. Rodney, tall, matchstick thin, even in his cumbersome suit, swayed with jaunty triumph in the rear. Martin looked at the metal street lined with its metal objects and he sighed. He remembered how the dark buildings of the city looked at surface level, how the city itself looked when they were landing, and then when they were walking toward it. The dream was gone again for now. Idealism died in him, again and again, yet it was always reborn. But—The only city, so far as anyone knew, on the first planet they'd ever explored. And it had to be like this. Nightmares, Wass said, and Martin thought perhaps the city was built by a race of beings who at some point twisted away from their evolutionary spiral, plagued by a sort of racial insanity. No, Martin thought, shaking his head. No, that couldn't be. Viewpoint ... his viewpoint. It was the haunting sense of familiarity, a faint strain through all this broad jumble, the junkpile of alien metal, which was making him theorize so wildly. Then Wass touched his elbow. "Look there, Martin. Left of the ramp." Light from their torches was reflected, as from glass. "All right," Rodney said belligerently into his radio. "What's holding up the procession?" Martin was silent. Wass undertook to explain. Why not, after all? Martin asked himself. It was in Wass' own interest. In a moment, all three were standing before a bank of glass cases which stretched off into the distance as far as the combined light of their torches would reach. "Seeds!" Wass exclaimed, his faceplate pressed against the glass. Martin blinked. He thought how little time they had. He wet his lips. Wass' gloved hands fumbled awkwardly at a catch in the nearest section of the bank. Martin thought of the dark, convoluted land outside the city. If they wouldn't grow there.... Or had they, once? "Don't, Wass!" Torchlight reflected from Wass' faceplate as he turned his head. "Why not?" They were like children.... "We don't know, released, what they'll do." "Skipper," Wass said carefully, "if we don't get out of this place by the deadline we may be eating these." Martin raised his arm tensely. "Opening a seed bank doesn't help us find a way out of here." He started up the ramp. "Besides, we've no water." Rodney came last up the ramp, less jaunty now, but still holding the gun. His mind, too, was taken up with childhood's imaginings. "For a plant to grow in this environment, it wouldn't need much water. Maybe—" he had a vision of evil plants attacking them, growing with super-swiftness at the air valves and joints of their suits "—only the little moisture in the atmosphere." They stood before the switchboard again. Martin and Wass side by side, Rodney, still holding his gun, slightly to the rear. Rodney moved forward a little toward the switches. His breathing was loud and rather uneven in the radio receivers. Martin made a final effort. "Rodney, it's still almost nine hours to take off. Let's search awhile first. Let this be a last resort." Rodney jerked his head negatively. "No. Now, I know you, Martin. Postpone and postpone until it's too late, and the ship leaves without us and we're stranded here to eat seeds and gradually dehydrate ourselves and God only knows what else and—" He reached out convulsively and yanked a switch. Martin leaped, knocking him to the floor. Rodney's gun skittered away silently, like a live thing, out of the range of the torches. The radio receivers impersonally recorded the grating sounds of Rodney's sobs. "Sorry," Martin said, without feeling. He turned quickly. "Wass?" The slight, blond man stood unmoving. "I'm with you, Martin, but, as a last resort it might be better to be blown sky high than to die gradually—" Martin was watching Rodney, struggling to get up. "I agree. As a last resort. We still have a little time." Rodney's tall, spare figure looked bowed and tired in the torchlight, now that he was up again. "Martin, I—" Martin turned his back. "Skip it, Rodney," he said gently. "Water," Wass said thoughtfully. "There must be reservoirs under this city somewhere." Rodney said, "How does water help us get out?" Martin glanced at Wass, then started out of the switchboard room, not looking back. "It got in and out of the city some way. Perhaps we can leave the same way." Down the ramp again. "There's another ramp," Wass murmured. Rodney looked down it. "I wonder how many there are, all told." Martin placed one foot on the metal incline. He angled his torch down, picking out shadowy, geometrical shapes, duplicates of the ones on the present level. "We'll find out," he said, "how many there are." Eleven levels later Rodney asked, "How much time have we now?" "Seven hours," Wass said quietly, "until take-off." "One more level," Martin said, ignoring the reference to time. "I ... think it's the last." They walked down the ramp and stood together, silent in a dim pool of artificial light on the bottom level of the alien city. Rodney played his torch about the metal figures carefully placed about the floor. "Martin, what if there are no reservoirs? What if there are cemeteries instead? Or cold storage units? Maybe the switch I pulled—" "Rodney! Stop it!" Rodney swallowed audibly. "This place scares me...." "The first time I was ever in a rocket, it scared me. I was thirteen." "This is different," Wass said. "Built-in traps—" "They had a war," Martin said. Wass agreed. "And the survivors retired here. Why?" Martin said, "They wanted to rebuild. Or maybe this was already built before the war as a retreat." He turned impatiently. "How should I know?" Wass turned, too, persistent. "But the planet was through with them." "In a minute," Martin said, too irritably, "we'll have a sentient planet." From the corner of his eye he saw Rodney start at that. "Knock it off, Wass. We're looking for reservoirs, you know." They moved slowly down the metal avenue, between the twisted shadow shapes, looking carefully about them. Rodney paused. "We might not recognize one." Martin urged him on. "You know what a man-hole cover looks like." He added dryly, "Use your imagination." They reached the metal wall at the end of the avenue and paused again, uncertain. Martin swung his flashlight, illuminating the distorted metal shapes. Wass said, "All this had a purpose, once...." "We'll disperse and search carefully," Martin said. "I wonder what the pattern was." "... The reservoirs, Wass. The pattern will still be here for later expeditions to study. So will we if we don't find a way to get out." Their radios recorded Rodney's gasp. Then—"Martin! Martin! I think I've found something!" Martin began to run. After a moment's hesitation, Wass swung in behind him. "Here," Rodney said, as they came up to him, out of breath. "Here. See? Right here." Three flashlights centered on a dark, metal disk raised a foot or more from the floor. "Well, they had hands." With his torch Wass indicated a small wheel of the same metal as everything else in the city, set beside the disk. From its design Martin assumed that the disk was meant to be grasped and turned. He wondered what precisely they were standing over. "Well, Skipper, are you going to do the honors?" Martin kneeled, grasped the wheel. It turned easily—almost too easily—rotating the disk as it turned. Suddenly, without a sound, the disk rose, like a hatch, on a concealed hinge. The three men, clad in their suits and helmets, grouped around the six-foot opening, shining their torches down into the thing that drifted and eddied directly beneath them. Rodney's sudden grip on Martin's wrist nearly shattered the bone. "Martin! It's all alive! It's moving!" Martin hesitated long enough for a coil to move sinuously up toward the opening. Then he spun the wheel and the hatch slammed down. He was shaking. After a time he said, "Rodney, Wass, it's dust, down there. Remember the wind? Air currents are moving it." Rodney sat down on the metal flooring. For a long time he said nothing. Then—"It wasn't.... Why did you close the hatch then?" Martin did not say he thought the other two would have shot him, otherwise. He said merely, "At first I wasn't sure myself." Rodney stood up, backing away from the closed hatch. He held his gun loosely, and his hand shook. "Then prove it. Open it again." Martin went to the wheel. He noticed Wass was standing behind Rodney and he, too, had drawn his gun. The hatch rose again at Martin's direction. He stood beside it, outlined in the light of two torches. For a little while he was alone. Then—causing a gasp from Wass, a harsh expletive from Rodney—a tenuous, questing alien limb edged through the hatch, curling about Martin, sparkling in ten thousand separate particles in the torchlight, obscuring the dimly seen backdrop of geometrical processions of strange objects. Martin raised an arm, and the particles swirled in stately, shimmering spirals. Rodney leaned forward and looked over the edge of the hatch. He said nothing. He eyed the sparkling particles swirling about Martin, and now, himself. "How deep," Wass said, from his safe distance. "We'll have to lower a flashlight," Martin answered. Rodney, all eagerness to be of assistance now, lowered a rope with a torch swinging wildly on the end of it. The torch came to rest about thirty feet down. It shone on gently rolling mounds of fine, white stuff. Martin anchored the rope soundly, and paused, half across the lip of the hatch to stare coldly at Wass. "You'd rather monkey with the switches and blow yourself to smithereens?" Wass sighed and refused to meet Martin's gaze. Martin looked at him disgustedly, and then began to descend the rope, slowly, peering into the infinite, sparkling darkness pressing around him. At the bottom of the rope he sank to his knees in dust, and then was held even. He stamped his feet, and then, as well as he was able, did a standing jump. He sank no farther than his knees. He sighted a path parallel with the avenue above, toward the nearest edge of the city. "I think we'll be all right," he called out, "as long as we avoid the drifts." Rodney began the descent. Looking up, Martin saw Wass above Rodney. "All right, Wass," Martin said quietly, as Rodney released the rope and sank into the dust. "Not me," the answer came back quickly. "You two fools go your way, I'll go mine." "Wass!" There was no answer. The light faded swiftly away from the opening. The going was hard. The dust clung like honey to their feet, and eddied and swirled about them until the purifying systems in their suits were hard-pressed to remove the fine stuff working in at joints and valves. "Are we going straight?" Rodney asked. "Of course," Martin growled. There was silence again, the silence of almost-exhausted determination. The two men lifted their feet out of the dust, and then laboriously plunged forward, to sink again to the knees, repeated the act, times without number. Then Wass broke his silence, taunting. "The ship leaves in two hours, Martin. Two hours. Hear me, Rodney?" Martin pulled his left foot from the sand and growled deep in his throat. Ahead, through the confusing patterns of the sparkling dust, his flashlight gleamed against metal. He grabbed Rodney's arm, pointed. A grate. Rodney stared. "Wass!" he shouted. "We've found a way out!" Their radios recorded Wass' laughter. "I'm at the switchboard now, Martin. I—" There was a tinkle of breaking glass, breaking faceplate. The grate groaned upward and stopped. Wass babbled incoherently into the radio for a moment, and then he began to scream. Martin switched off his radio, sick. He turned it on again when they reached the opening in the metal wall. "Well?" "I've been trying to get you," Rodney said, frantically. "Why didn't you answer?" "We couldn't do anything for him." Rodney's face was white and drawn. "But he did this for us." "So he did," Martin said, very quietly. Rodney said nothing. Then Martin said, "Did you listen until the end?" Rodney nodded, jerkily. "He pulled three more switches. I couldn't understand it all. But—Martin, dying alone like that in a place like this—!" Martin crawled into the circular pipe behind the grate. It tilted up toward the surface. "Come on, Rodney. Last lap." An hour later they surfaced about two hundred yards away from the edge of the city. Behind them the black pile rose, the dome of force shimmering, almost invisible, about it. Ahead of them were the other two scoutships from the mother ship. Martin called out faintly, pulling Rodney out of the pipe. Crew members standing by the scoutships, and at the edge of the city, began to run toward them. "Radio picked you up as soon as you entered the pipe," someone said. It was the last thing Martin heard before he collapsed.

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61434

MIGHTIEST QORN BY KEITH LAUMER Sly, brave and truculent, the Qornt held all humans in contempt—except one! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I Ambassador Nitworth glowered across his mirror-polished, nine-foot platinum desk at his assembled staff. "Gentlemen, are any of you familiar with a race known as the Qornt?" There was a moment of profound silence. Nitworth leaned forward, looking solemn. "They were a warlike race known in this sector back in Concordiat times, perhaps two hundred years ago. They vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. There was no record of where they went." He paused for effect. "They have now reappeared—occupying the inner planet of this system!" "But, sir," Second Secretary Magnan offered. "That's uninhabited Terrestrial territory...." "Indeed, Mr. Magnan?" Nitworth smiled icily. "It appears the Qornt do not share that opinion." He plucked a heavy parchment from a folder before him, harrumphed and read aloud: His Supreme Excellency The Qorn, Regent of Qornt, Over-Lord of the Galactic Destiny, Greets the Terrestrials and, with reference to the presence in mandated territory of Terrestrial squatters, has the honor to advise that he will require the use of his outer world on the thirtieth day. Then will the Qornt come with steel and fire. Receive, Terrestrials, renewed assurances of my awareness of your existence, and let Those who dare gird for the contest. "Frankly, I wouldn't call it conciliatory," Magnan said. Nitworth tapped the paper with a finger. "We have been served, gentlemen, with nothing less than an Ultimatum!" "Well, we'll soon straighten these fellows out—" the Military Attache began. "There happens to be more to this piece of truculence than appears on the surface," the Ambassador cut in. He paused, waiting for interested frowns to settle into place. "Note, gentlemen, that these invaders have appeared on terrestrial controlled soil—and without so much as a flicker from the instruments of the Navigational Monitor Service!" The Military Attache blinked. "That's absurd," he said flatly. Nitworth slapped the table. "We're up against something new, gentlemen! I've considered every hypothesis from cloaks of invisibility to time travel! The fact is—the Qornt fleets are indetectible!" The Military Attache pulled at his lower lip. "In that case, we can't try conclusions with these fellows until we have an indetectible drive of our own. I recommend a crash project. In the meantime—" "I'll have my boys start in to crack this thing," the Chief of the Confidential Terrestrial Source Section spoke up. "I'll fit out a couple of volunteers with plastic beaks—" "No cloak and dagger work, gentlemen! Long range policy will be worked out by Deep-Think teams back at the Department. Our role will be a holding action. Now I want suggestions for a comprehensive, well rounded and decisive course for meeting this threat. Any recommendation?" The Political Officer placed his fingertips together. "What about a stiff Note demanding an extra week's time?" "No! No begging," the Economic Officer objected. "I'd say a calm, dignified, aggressive withdrawal—as soon as possible." "We don't want to give them the idea we spook easily," the Military Attache said. "Let's delay the withdrawal—say, until tomorrow." "Early tomorrow," Magnan said. "Or maybe later today." "Well, I see you're of a mind with me," Nitworth nodded. "Our plan of action is clear, but it remains to be implemented. We have a population of over fifteen million individuals to relocate." He eyed the Political Officer. "I want five proposals for resettlement on my desk by oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow." Nitworth rapped out instructions. Harried-looking staff members arose and hurried from the room. Magnan eased toward the door. "Where are you going, Magnan?" Nitworth snapped. "Since you're so busy, I thought I'd just slip back down to Com Inq. It was a most interesting orientation lecture, Mr. Ambassador. Be sure to let us know how it works out." "Kindly return to your chair," Nitworth said coldly. "A number of chores remain to be assigned. I think you, Magnan, need a little field experience. I want you to get over to Roolit I and take a look at these Qornt personally." Magnan's mouth opened and closed soundlessly. "Not afraid of a few Qornt, are you, Magnan?" "Afraid? Good lord, no, ha ha. It's just that I'm afraid I may lose my head and do something rash if I go." "Nonsense! A diplomat is immune to heroic impulses. Take Retief along. No dawdling, now! I want you on the way in two hours. Notify the transport pool at once. Now get going!" Magnan nodded unhappily and went into the hall. "Oh, Retief," Nitworth said. Retief turned. "Try to restrain Mr. Magnan from any impulsive moves—in any direction." II Retief and Magnan topped a ridge and looked down across a slope of towering tree-shrubs and glossy violet-stemmed palms set among flamboyant blossoms of yellow and red, reaching down to a strip of white beach with the blue sea beyond. "A delightful vista," Magnan said, mopping at his face. "A pity we couldn't locate the Qornt. We'll go back now and report—" "I'm pretty sure the settlement is off to the right," Retief said. "Why don't you head back for the boat, while I ease over and see what I can observe." "Retief, we're engaged in a serious mission. This is not a time to think of sightseeing." "I'd like to take a good look at what we're giving away." "See here, Retief! One might almost receive the impression that you're questioning Corps policy!" "One might, at that. The Qornt have made their play, but I think it might be valuable to take a look at their cards before we fold. If I'm not back at the boat in an hour, lift without me." "You expect me to make my way back alone?" "It's directly down-slope—" Retief broke off, listening. Magnan clutched at his arm. There was a sound of crackling foliage. Twenty feet ahead, a leafy branch swung aside. An eight-foot biped stepped into view, long, thin, green-clad legs with back-bending knees moving in quick, bird-like steps. A pair of immense black-lensed goggles covered staring eyes set among bushy green hair above a great bone-white beak. The crest bobbed as the creature cocked its head, listening. Magnan gulped audibly. The Qornt froze, head tilted, beak aimed directly at the spot where the Terrestrials stood in the deep shade of a giant trunk. "I'll go for help," Magnan squeaked. He whirled and took three leaps into the brush. A second great green-clad figure rose up to block his way. He spun, darted to the left. The first Qornt pounced, grappled Magnan to its narrow chest. Magnan yelled, threshing and kicking, broke free, turned—and collided with the eight-foot alien, coming in fast from the right. All three went down in a tangle of limbs. Retief jumped forward, hauled Magnan free, thrust him aside and stopped, right fist cocked. The two Qornt lay groaning feebly. "Nice piece of work, Mr. Magnan," Retief said. "You nailed both of them." "Those undoubtedly are the most bloodthirsty, aggressive, merciless countenances it has ever been my misfortune to encounter," Magnan said. "It hardly seems fair. Eight feet tall and faces like that!" The smaller of the two captive Qornt ran long, slender fingers over a bony shin, from which he had turned back the tight-fitting green trousers. "It's not broken," he whistled nasally in passable Terrestrial, eyeing Magnan through the heavy goggles, now badly cracked. "Small thanks to you." Magnan smiled loftily. "I daresay you'll think twice before interfering with peaceable diplomats in future." "Diplomats? Surely you jest." "Never mind us," Retief said. "It's you fellows we'd like to talk about. How many of you are there?" "Only Zubb and myself." "I mean altogether. How many Qornt?" The alien whistled shrilly. "Here, no signalling!" Magnan snapped, looking around. "That was merely an expression of amusement." "You find the situation amusing? I assure you, sir, you are in perilous straits at the moment. I may fly into another rage, you know." "Please, restrain yourself. I was merely somewhat astonished—" a small whistle escaped—"at being taken for a Qornt." "Aren't you a Qornt?" "I? Great snail trails, no!" More stifled whistles of amusement escaped the beaked face. "Both Zubb and I are Verpp. Naturalists, as it happens." "You certainly look like Qornt." "Oh, not at all—except perhaps to a Terrestrial. The Qornt are sturdily built rascals, all over ten feet in height. And, of course, they do nothing but quarrel. A drone caste, actually." "A caste? You mean they're biologically the same as you?" "Not at all! A Verpp wouldn't think of fertilizing a Qornt." "I mean to say, you are of the same basic stock—descended from a common ancestor, perhaps." "We are all Pud's creatures." "What are the differences between you, then?" "Why, the Qornt are argumentive, boastful, lacking in appreciation for the finer things of life. One dreads to contemplate descending to their level." "Do you know anything about a Note passed to the Terrestrial Ambassador at Smorbrod?" Retief asked. The beak twitched. "Smorbrod? I know of no place called Smorbrod." "The outer planet of this system." "Oh, yes. We call it Guzzum. I had heard that some sort of creatures had established a settlement there, but I confess I pay little note to such matters." "We're wasting time, Retief," Magnan said. "We must truss these chaps up, hurry back to the boat and make our escape. You heard what they said." "Are there any Qornt down there at the harbor, where the boats are?" Retief asked. "At Tarroon, you mean? Oh, yes. Planning some adventure." "That would be the invasion of Smorbrod," Magnan said. "And unless we hurry, Retief, we're likely to be caught there with the last of the evacuees!" "How many Qornt would you say there are at Tarroon?" "Oh, a very large number. Perhaps fifteen or twenty." "Fifteen or twenty what?" Magnan looked perplexed. "Fifteen or twenty Qornt." "You mean that there are only fifteen or twenty individual Qornt in all?" Another whistle. "Not at all. I was referring to the local Qornt only. There are more at the other Centers, of course." "And the Qornt are responsible for the ultimatum—unilaterally?" "I suppose so; it sounds like them. A truculent group, you know. And interplanetary relations are rather a hobby of theirs." Zubb moaned and stirred. He sat up slowly, rubbing his head. He spoke to his companion in a shrill alien clatter of consonants. "What did he say?" "Poor Zubb. He blames me for his bruises, since it was my idea to gather you as specimens." "You should have known better than to tackle that fierce-looking creature," Zubb said, pointing his beak at Magnan. "How does it happen that you speak Terrestrial?" Retief asked. "Oh, one picks up all sorts of dialects." "It's quite charming, really," Magnan said. "Such a quaint, archaic accent." "Suppose we went down to Tarroon," Retief asked. "What kind of reception would we get?" "That depends. I wouldn't recommend interfering with the Gwil or the Rheuk; it's their nest-mending time, you know. The Boog will be busy mating—such a tedious business—and of course the Qornt are tied up with their ceremonial feasting. I'm afraid no one will take any notice of you." "Do you mean to say," Magnan demanded, "that these ferocious Qornt, who have issued an ultimatum to the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne—who openly avow their occupied world—would ignore Terrestrials in their midst?" "If at all possible." Retief got to his feet. "I think our course is clear, Mr. Magnan. It's up to us to go down and attract a little attention." III "I'm not at all sure we're going about this in the right way," Magnan puffed, trotting at Retief's side. "These fellows Zubb and Slun—Oh, they seem affable enough, but how can we be sure we're not being led into a trap?" "We can't." Magnan stopped short. "Let's go back." "All right," Retief said. "Of course there may be an ambush—" Magnan moved off. "Let's keep going." The party emerged from the undergrowth at the edge of a great brush-grown mound. Slun took the lead, rounded the flank of the hillock, halted at a rectangular opening cut into the slope. "You can find your way easily enough from here," he said. "You'll excuse us, I hope—" "Nonsense, Slun!" Zubb pushed forward. "I'll escort our guests to Qornt Hall." He twittered briefly to his fellow Verpp. Slun twittered back. "I don't like it, Retief," Magnan whispered. "Those fellows are plotting mischief." "Threaten them with violence, Mr Magnan. They're scared of you." "That's true. And the drubbing they received was well-deserved. I'm a patient man, but there are occasions—" "Come along, please," Zubb called. "Another ten minutes' walk—" "See here, we have no interest in investigating this barrow," Magnan announced. "We wish you to take us direct to Tarroon to interview your military leaders regarding the ultimatum!" "Yes, yes, of course. Qornt Hall lies here inside the village." "This is Tarroon?" "A modest civic center, sir, but there are those who love it." "No wonder we didn't observe their works from the air," Magnan muttered. "Camouflaged." He moved hesitantly through the opening. The party moved along a wide, deserted tunnel which sloped down steeply, then leveled off and branched. Zubb took the center branch, ducking slightly under the nine-foot ceiling lit at intervals with what appeared to be primitive incandescent panels. "Few signs of an advanced technology here," Magnan whispered. "These creatures must devote all their talents to warlike enterprise." Ahead, Zubb slowed. A distant susurration was audible, a sustained high-pitched screeching. "Softly, now. We approach Qornt Hall. They can be an irascible lot when disturbed at their feasting." "When will the feast be over?" Magnan called hoarsely. "In another few weeks, I should imagine, if, as you say, they've scheduled an invasion for next month." "Look here, Zubb." Magnan shook a finger at the tall alien. "How is it that these Qornt are allowed to embark on piratical ventures of this sort without reference to the wishes of the majority?" "Oh, the majority of the Qornt favor the move, I imagine." "These few hotheads are permitted to embroil the planet in war?" "Oh, they don't embroil the planet in war. They merely—" "Retief, this is fantastic! I've heard of iron-fisted military cliques before, but this is madness!" "Come softly, now." Zubb beckoned, moving toward a bend in the yellow-lit corridor. Retief and Magnan moved forward. The corridor debouched through a high double door into a vast oval chamber, high-domed, gloomy, paneled in dark wood and hung with tattered banners, scarred halberds, pikes, rusted longswords, crossed spears over patinaed hauberks, pitted radiation armor, corroded power rifles, the immense mummified heads of horned and fanged animals. Great guttering torches in wall brackets and in stands along the length of the long table shed a smoky light that reflected from the mirror polish of the red granite floor, gleamed on polished silver bowls and paper-thin glass, shone jewel-red and gold through dark bottles—and cast long flickering shadows behind the fifteen trolls at the board. Lesser trolls—beaked, bush-haired, great-eyed—trotted briskly, bird-kneed, bearing steaming platters, stood in groups of three strumming slender bottle-shaped lutes, or pranced an intricate-patterned dance, unnoticed in the shrill uproar as each of the magnificently draped, belted, feathered and jeweled Qornt carried on a shouted conversation with an equally noisy fellow. "A most interesting display of barbaric splendor," Magnan breathed. "Now we'd better be getting back." "Ah, a moment," Zubb said. "Observe the Qornt—the tallest of the feasters—he with the head-dress of crimson, purple, silver and pink." "Twelve feet if he's an inch," Magnan estimated. "And now we really must hurry along—" "That one is chief among these rowdies. I'm sure you'll want a word with him. He controls not only the Tarroonian vessels but those from the other Centers as well." "What kind of vessels? Warships?" "Certainly. What other kind would the Qornt bother with?" "I don't suppose," Magnan said casually, "that you'd know the type, tonnage, armament and manning of these vessels? And how many units comprise the fleet? And where they're based at present?" "They're fully automated twenty-thousand-ton all-purpose dreadnaughts. They mount a variety of weapons. The Qornt are fond of that sort of thing. Each of the Qornt has his own, of course. They're virtually identical, except for the personal touches each individual has given his ship." "Great heavens, Retief!" Magnan exclaimed in a whisper. "It sounds as though these brutes employ a battle armada as simpler souls might a set of toy sailboats!" Retief stepped past Magnan and Zubb to study the feasting hall. "I can see that their votes would carry all the necessary weight." "And now an interview with the Qorn himself," Zubb shrilled. "If you'll kindly step along, gentlemen...." "That won't be necessary," Magnan said hastily, "I've decided to refer the matter to committee." "After having come so far," Zubb said, "it would be a pity to miss having a cosy chat." There was a pause. "Ah ... Retief," Magnan said. "Zubb has just presented a most compelling argument...." Retief turned. Zubb stood gripping an ornately decorated power pistol in one bony hand, a slim needler in the other. Both were pointed at Magnan's chest. "I suspected you had hidden qualities, Zubb," Retief commented. "See here, Zubb! We're diplomats!" Magnan started. "Careful, Mr. Magnan; you may goad him to a frenzy." "By no means," Zubb whistled. "I much prefer to observe the frenzy of the Qornt when presented with the news that two peaceful Verpp have been assaulted and kidnapped by bullying interlopers. If there's anything that annoys the Qornt, it's Qornt-like behavior in others. Now step along, please." "Rest assured, this will be reported!" "I doubt it." "You'll face the wrath of Enlightened Galactic Opinion!" "Oh? How big a navy does Enlightened Galactic Opinion have?" "Stop scaring him, Mr. Magnan. He may get nervous and shoot." Retief stepped into the banquet hall, headed for the resplendent figure at the head of the table. A trio of flute-players broke off in mid-bleat, staring. An inverted pyramid of tumblers blinked as Retief swung past, followed by Magnan and the tall Verpp. The shrill chatter at the table faded. Qorn turned as Retief came up, blinking three-inch eyes. Zubb stepped forward, gibbered, waving his arms excitedly. Qorn pushed back his chair—a low, heavily padded stool—and stared unwinking at Retief, moving his head to bring first one great round eye, then the other, to bear. There were small blue veins in the immense fleshy beak. The bushy hair, springing out in a giant halo around the grayish, porous-skinned face, was wiry, stiff, moss-green, with tufts of chartreuse fuzz surrounding what appeared to be tympanic membranes. The tall head-dress of scarlet silk and purple feathers was slightly askew, and a loop of pink pearls had slipped down above one eye. Zubb finished his speech and fell silent, breathing hard. Qorn looked Retief over in silence, then belched. "Not bad," Retief said admiringly. "Maybe we could get up a match between you and Ambassador Sternwheeler. You've got the volume on him, but he's got timbre." "So," Qorn hooted in a resonant tenor. "You come from Guzzum, eh? Or Smorbrod, as I think you call it. What is it you're after? More time? A compromise? Negotiations? Peace?" He slammed a bony hand against the table. "The answer is no !" Zubb twittered. Qorn cocked an eye, motioned to a servant. "Chain that one." He indicated Magnan. His eyes went to Retief. "This one's bigger; you'd best chain him, too." "Why, your Excellency—" Magnan started, stepping forward. "Stay back!" Qorn hooted. "Stand over there where I can keep an eye on you." "Your Excellency, I'm empowered—" "Not here, you're not!" Qorn trumpeted. "Want peace, do you? Well, I don't want peace! I've had a surfeit of peace these last two centuries! I want action! Loot! Adventure! Glory!" He turned to look down the table. "How about it, fellows? It's war to the knife, eh?" There was a momentary silence from all sides. "I guess so," grunted a giant Qornt in iridescent blue with flame-colored plumes. Qorn's eyes bulged. He half rose. "We've been all over this," he bassooned. He clamped bony fingers on the hilt of a light rapier. "I thought I'd made my point!" "Oh, sure, Qorn." "You bet." "I'm convinced." Qorn rumbled and resumed his seat. "All for one and one for all, that's us." "And you're the one, eh, Qorn?" Retief commented. Magnan cleared his throat. "I sense that some of you gentlemen are not convinced of the wisdom of this move," he piped, looking along the table at the silks, jewels, beaks, feather-decked crests and staring eyes. "Silence!" Qorn hooted. "No use your talking to my loyal lieutenants anyway," he added. "They do whatever I convince them they ought to do." "But I'm sure that on more mature consideration—" "I can lick any Qornt in the house." Qorn said. "That's why I'm Qorn." He belched again. A servant came up staggering under a weight of chain, dropped it with a crash at Magnan's feet. Zubb aimed the guns while the servant wrapped three loops around Magnan's wrists, snapped a lock in place. "You next!" The guns pointed at Retief's chest. He held out his arms. Four loops of silvery-gray chain in half-inch links dropped around them. The servant cinched them up tight, squeezed a lock through the ends and closed it. "Now," Qorn said, lolling back in his chair, glass in hand. "There's a bit of sport to be had here, lads. What shall we do with them?" "Let them go," the blue and flame Qornt said glumly. "You can do better than that," Qorn hooted. "Now here's a suggestion: we carve them up a little—lop off the external labiae and pinnae, say—and ship them back." "Good lord! Retief, he's talking about cutting off our ears and sending us home mutilated! What a barbaric proposal!" "It wouldn't be the first time a Terrestrial diplomat got a trimming," Retief commented. "It should have the effect of stimulating the Terries to put up a reasonable scrap," Qorn said judiciously. "I have a feeling that they're thinking of giving up without a struggle." "Oh, I doubt that," the blue-and-flame Qornt said. "Why should they?" Qorn rolled an eye at Retief and another at Magnan. "Take these two," he hooted. "I'll wager they came here to negotiate a surrender!" "Well," Magnan started. "Hold it, Mr. Magnan," Retief said. "I'll tell him." "What's your proposal?" Qorn whistled, taking a gulp from his goblet. "A fifty-fifty split? Monetary reparations? Alternate territory? I can assure you, it's useless. We Qornt like to fight." "I'm afraid you've gotten the wrong impression, your Excellency," Retief said blandly. "We didn't come to negotiate. We came to deliver an Ultimatum." "What?" Qorn trumpeted. Behind Retief, Magnan spluttered. "We plan to use this planet for target practice," Retief said. "A new type hell bomb we've worked out. Have all your people off of it in seventy-two hours, or suffer the consequences." IV "You have the gall," Qorn stormed, "to stand here in the center of Qornt Hall—uninvited, at that—and in chains—" "Oh, these," Retief said. He tensed his arms. The soft aluminum links stretched and broke. He shook the light metal free. "We diplomats like to go along with colorful local customs, but I wouldn't want to mislead you. Now, as to the evacuation of Roolit I—" Zubb screeched, waved the guns. The Qornt were jabbering. "I told you they were brutes," Zubb shrilled. Qorn slammed his fist down on the table. "I don't care what they are!" he honked. "Evacuate, hell! I can field eighty-five combat-ready ships!" "And we can englobe every one of them with a thousand Peace Enforcers with a hundred megatons/second firepower each." "Retief." Magnan tugged at his sleeve. "Don't forget their superdrive." "That's all right. They don't have one." "But—" "We'll take you on!" Qorn French-horned. "We're the Qorn! We glory in battle! We live in fame or go down in—" "Hogwash," the flame-and-blue Qorn cut in. "If it wasn't for you, Qorn, we could sit around and feast and brag and enjoy life without having to prove anything." "Qorn, you seem to be the fire-brand here," Retief said. "I think the rest of the boys would listen to reason—" "Over my dead body!" "My idea exactly," Retief said. "You claim you can lick any man in the house. Unwind yourself from your ribbons and step out here on the floor, and we'll see how good you are at backing up your conversation." Magnan hovered at Retief's side. "Twelve feet tall," he moaned. "And did you notice the size of those hands?" Retief watched as Qorn's aides helped him out of his formal trappings. "I wouldn't worry too much, Mr. Magnan. This is a light-Gee world. I doubt if old Qorn would weigh up at more than two-fifty standard pounds here." "But that phenomenal reach—" "I'll peck away at him at knee level. When he bends over to swat me, I'll get a crack at him." Across the cleared floor, Qorn shook off his helpers with a snort. "Enough! Let me at the upstart!" Retief moved out to meet him, watching the upraised backward-jointed arms. Qorn stalked forward, long lean legs bent, long horny feet clacking against the polished floor. The other aliens—both servitors and bejeweled Qornt—formed a wide circle, all eyes unwaveringly on the combatants. Qorn struck suddenly, a long arm flashing down in a vicious cut at Retief, who leaned aside, caught one lean shank below the knee. Qorn bent to haul Retief from his leg—and staggered back as a haymaker took him just below the beak. A screech went up from the crowd as Retief leaped clear. Qorn hissed and charged. Retief whirled aside, then struck the alien's off-leg in a flying tackle. Qorn leaned, arms windmilling, crashed to the floor. Retief whirled, dived for the left arm, whipped it behind the narrow back, seized Qorn's neck in a stranglehold and threw his weight backward. Qorn fell on his back, his legs squatted out at an awkward angle. He squawked and beat his free arm on the floor, reaching in vain for Retief. Zubb stepped forward, pistols ready. Magnan stepped before him. "Need I remind you, sir," he said icily, "that this is an official diplomatic function? I can brook no interference from disinterested parties." Zubb hesitated. Magnan held out a hand. "I must ask you to hand me your weapons, Zubb." "Look here," Zubb began. "I may lose my temper," Magnan hinted. Zubb lowered the guns, passed them to Magnan. He thrust them into his belt with a sour smile, turned back to watch the encounter. Retief had thrown a turn of violet silk around Qorn's left wrist, bound it to the alien's neck. Another wisp of stuff floated from Qorn's shoulder. Retief, still holding Qorn in an awkward sprawl, wrapped it around one outflung leg, trussed ankle and thigh together. Qorn flopped, hooting. At each movement, the constricting loop around his neck, jerked his head back, the green crest tossing wildly. "If I were you, I'd relax," Retief said, rising and releasing his grip. Qorn got a leg under him; Retief kicked it. Qorn's chin hit the floor with a hollow clack. He wilted, an ungainly tangle of over-long limbs and gay silks. Retief turned to the watching crowd. "Next?" he called. The blue and flame Qornt stepped forward. "Maybe this would be a good time to elect a new leader," he said. "Now, my qualifications—" "Sit down," Retief said loudly. He stepped to the head of the table, seated himself in Qorn's vacated chair. "A couple of you finish trussing Qorn up for me." "But we must select a leader!" "That won't be necessary, boys. I'm your new leader." "As I see it," Retief said, dribbling cigar ashes into an empty wine glass, "you Qornt like to be warriors, but you don't particularly like to fight." "We don't mind a little fighting—within reason. And, of course, as Qornt, we're expected to die in battle. But what I say is, why rush things?" "I have a suggestion," Magnan said. "Why not turn the reins of government over to the Verpp? They seem a level-headed group." "What good would that do? Qornt are Qornt. It seems there's always one among us who's a slave to instinct—and, naturally, we have to follow him." "Why?" "Because that's the way it's done." "Why not do it another way?" Magnan offered. "Now, I'd like to suggest community singing—" "If we gave up fighting, we might live too long. Then what would happen?" "Live too long?" Magnan looked puzzled. "When estivating time comes there'd be no burrows for us. Anyway, with the new Qornt stepping on our heels—" "I've lost the thread," Magnan said. "Who are the new Qornt?" "After estivating, the Verpp moult, and then they're Qornt, of course. The Gwil become Boog, the Boog become Rheuk, the Rheuk metamorphosize into Verpp—" "You mean Slun and Zubb—the mild-natured naturalists—will become warmongers like Qorn?" "Very likely. 'The milder the Verpp, the wilder the Qorn,' as the old saying goes." "What do Qornt turn into?" Retief asked. "Hmmmm. That's a good question. So far, none have survived Qornthood." "Have you thought of forsaking your warlike ways?" Magnan asked. "What about taking up sheepherding and regular church attendance?" "Don't mistake me. We Qornt like a military life. It's great sport to sit around roaring fires and drink and tell lies and then go dashing off to enjoy a brisk affray and some leisurely looting afterward. But we prefer a nice numerical advantage. Not this business of tackling you Terrestrials over on Guzzum—that was a mad notion. We had no idea what your strength was." "But now that's all off, of course," Magnan chirped. "Now that we've had diplomatic relations and all—" "Oh, by no means. The fleet lifts in thirty days. After all, we're Qornt; we have to satisfy our drive to action." "But Mr. Retief is your leader now. He won't let you!" "Only a dead Qornt stays home when Attack day comes. And even if he orders us all to cut our own throats, there are still the other Centers—all with their own leaders. No, gentlemen, the Invasion is definitely on." "Why don't you go invade somebody else?" Magnan suggested. "I could name some very attractive prospects—outside my sector, of course." "Hold everything," Retief said. "I think we've got the basis of a deal here...."

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The logistics of presidential adultery. The Washington Times could hardly contain its excitement: "A former FBI agent assigned to the White House describes in a new book how President Clinton slips past his Secret Service detail in the dead of night, hides under a blanket in the back of a dark-colored sedan, and trysts with a woman, possibly a celebrity, at the JW Marriott Hotel in downtown Washington." For Clinton-haters, Gary Aldrich's tale sounded too good to be true. And it was. The not-so-Secret-Service agent's "source" turned out to be a thirdhand rumor passed on by Clinton scandalmonger David Brock. Those who know about White House security--Clinton staffers, the Secret Service, former aides to Presidents Reagan and Bush--demolished Aldrich's claims. Clinton couldn't give his Secret Service agents the slip (they shadow him when he walks around the White House), couldn't arrange a private visit without tipping off hotel staff, and couldn't re-enter the White House without getting nabbed. (Guards check all cars at the gate--especially those that arrive at 4 a.m.) Even so, the image resonates. For some Americans, it is an article of faith: Bill Clinton cheated on his wife when he was governor, and he cheats on her as president. But can he? Is it possible for the president of the United States to commit adultery and get away with it? Maybe, but it's tougher than you think. Historically, presidential adultery is common. Warren Harding cavorted with Nan Britton and Carrie Phillips. Franklin Roosevelt "entertained" Lucy Rutherford at the White House when Eleanor was away. America was none the wiser, even if White House reporters were. Those who know Clinton is cheating often point to the model of John F. Kennedy, who turned presidential hanky-panky into a science. Kennedy invited mistresses to the White House for afternoon (and evening, and overnight) liaisons. Kennedy seduced women on the White House staff (including, it seems, Jackie's own press secretary). Kennedy made assignations outside the White House, then escaped his Secret Service detail by scaling walls and ducking out back doors. If Kennedy did it, so can Clinton. Well, no. Though Clinton slavishly emulates JFK in every other way, he'd be a fool to steal Kennedy's MO d'amour . Here's why: 1) Too many people would know. Kennedy hardly bothered to hide his conquests. According to Kennedy mistress (and mob moll) Judith Campbell's autobiography, those who knew about their affair included: Kennedy's personal aides and secretary (who pandered for him), White House drivers, White House gate guards, White House Secret Service agents, White House domestic staff, most of Campbell's friends, a lot of Kennedy's friends, and several Kennedy family members. Such broad circulation would be disastrous today because: 2) The press would report it. Kennedy conducted his affairs brazenly because he trusted reporters not to write about them. White House journalists knew about, or at least strongly suspected, Kennedy's infidelity, but never published a story about it. Ask Gary Hart if reporters would exercise the same restraint today. Clinton must worry about this more than most presidents. Not only are newspapers and magazines willing to publish an adultery story about him, but many are pursuing it. For the same reason, Clinton would find it difficult to hire a mistress. A lovely young secretary would set off alarm bells in any reporter investigating presidential misbehavior. Says a former Clinton aide, "There has been a real tendency to have no good-looking women on the staff in order to protect him." 3) Clinton cannot avoid Secret Service protection. During the Kennedy era, the Secret Service employed fewer than 500 people and had an annual budget of about $4 million. Then came Lee Harvey Oswald, Squeaky Fromme, and John Hinckley. Now the Secret Service payroll tops 4,500 (most of them agents), and the annual budget exceeds $500 million (up 300 percent just since 1980). At any given time, more than 100 agents guard the president in the White House. Top aides from recent administrations are adamant: The Secret Service never lets the president escape its protection. So what's a randy president to do? Any modern presidential affair would need to meet stringent demands. Only a tiny number of trusted aides and Secret Service agents could know of it. They would need to maintain complete silence about it. And no reporters could catch wind of it. Such an affair is improbable, but--take heart, Clinton-haters--it's not impossible. Based on scuttlebutt and speculation from insiders at the Clinton, Bush, Reagan, and Ford White Houses, here are the four likeliest scenarios for presidential adultery. 1) The White House Sneak. This is a discreet variation of the old Kennedy/Campbell liaison. It's late at night. The president's personal aides have gone home. The family is away. He is alone in the private quarters. The private quarters, a k a "the residence," occupy the second and third floors of the White House. Secret Service agents guard the residence's entrances on the first floor and ground floors, but the first family has privacy in the quarters themselves. Maids and butlers serve the family there, but the president and first lady ask them to leave when they want to be alone. The president dials a "friend" on his private line. (Most presidents placed all their calls through the White House operators, who kept a record of each one; the Clintons installed a direct-dial line in the private quarters.) The president invites the friend over for a cozy evening at the White House. After he hangs up with the friend, he phones the guard at the East Executive Avenue gate and tells him to admit a visitor. He also notifies the Secret Service agent and the usher on duty downstairs that they should send her up to the residence. A taxi drops the woman near the East gate. She identifies herself to the guard, who examines her ID, runs her name through a computer (to check for outstanding warrants), and logs her in a database. A White House usher escorts her into the East Wing of the White House. They walk through the East Wing and pass the Secret Service guard post by the White House movie theater. The agent on duty waves them on. The usher takes her to the private elevator, where another Secret Service agent is posted. She takes the elevator to the second floor. The president opens the door and welcomes her. Under no circumstances could she enter the living quarters without first encountering Secret Service agents. Let us pause for a moment to demolish two of the splashier rumors about White House fornication. First, the residence is the only place in the White House where the president can have safe (i.e. uninterrupted) sex. He can be intruded upon or observed everywhere else--except, perhaps, the Oval Office bathroom. Unless the president is an exhibitionist or a lunatic, liaisons in the Oval Office, bowling alley, or East Wing are unimaginable. Second, the much-touted tunnel between the White House and the Treasury Department is all-but-useless to the presidential adulterer. It is too well-guarded. The president could smuggle a mistress through it, but it would attract far more attention from White House staff than a straightforward gate entry would. Meanwhile, back in the private quarters, the president and friend get comfortable in one of the 14 bedrooms (or, perhaps, the billiard room). After a pleasant 15 minutes (or two hours?), she says goodbye. Depending on how long she stays, she may pass a different shift of Secret Service agents as she departs. She exits the White House grounds, unescorted and unbothered, at the East gate. The Risks : A gate guard, an usher, and a handful of Secret Service agents see her. All of them have a very good idea of why she was there. The White House maid who changes the sheets sees other suspicious evidence. And the woman's--real--name is entered in a Secret Service computer. None of this endangers the president too much. The computer record of her visit is private, at least for several decades after he leaves office. No personal aides know about the visit. Unless they were staking out the East gate, no journalists do either. The Secret Service agents, the guard, the steward, and the maid owe their jobs to their discretion. Leaks get them fired. That said, the current president has every reason not to trust his Secret Service detail. No one seriously compares Secret Service agents (who are pros) to Arkansas state troopers (who aren't). But Clinton might not trust any security guards after the beating he took from his Arkansas posse. Also, if other Secret Service agents are anything like Aldrich, they may dislike this president. One Secret Service leak--the lamp-throwing story--already damaged Clinton. Agents could tattle again. 2) The "Off-the-Record" Visit. Late at night, after his personal aides and the press have gone home, the president tells his Secret Service detail that he needs to take an "off-the-record" trip. He wants to leave the White House without his motorcade and without informing the press. He requests two agents and an unobtrusive sedan. The Secret Service shift leader grumbles, but accepts the conditions. Theoretically, the president could refuse all Secret Service protection, but it would be far more trouble than it's worth. He would have to inform the head of the Secret Service and the secretary of the Treasury. The president and the two agents drive the unmarked car to a woman friend's house. Ideally, she has a covered garage. (An apartment building or a hotel would raise considerably the risk of getting caught.) The agents guard the outside of the house while the president and his friend do their thing. Then the agents chauffeur the president back to the White House, re-entering through the Southwest or Southeast gate, away from the press station. The Risks : Only two Secret Service agents and their immediate supervisor know about the visit. It is recorded in the Secret Service log, which is not made public during the administration's tenure. Gate guards may suspect something fishy when they see the car. A reporter or passer-by could spy the president--even through tinted windows--as the car enters and exits the White House. The friend's neighbors might spot him, or they might notice the agents lurking outside her house. A neighbor might call the police to report the suspicious visitors. All in all, a risky, though not unthinkable, venture. 3. The Camp David Assignation. A bucolic, safer version of the White House Sneak. The president invites a group of friends and staffers--including his paramour but not his wife--to spend the weekend at Camp David. The girlfriend is assigned the cabin next to the president's lodge. Late at night, after the Hearts game has ended and everyone has retired to their cabins, she strolls next door. There is a Secret Service command post outside the cabin. The agents on duty (probably three of them) let her enter. A few hours later, she slips back to her own cabin. The Risks : Only a few Secret Service agents know about the liaison. Even though the guest list is not public, all the Navy and Marine personnel at Camp David, as well as the other guests, would know that the presidential entourage included an attractive woman, but not the first lady. That would raise eyebrows if it got back to the White House press room. 4. The Hotel Shuffle. The cleverest strategy, and the only one that cuts out the Secret Service. The president is traveling without his family. The Secret Service secures an entire hotel floor, reserving elevators and guarding the entrance to the president's suite. The president's personal aide (a man in his late 20s) takes the room adjoining the president's. An internal door connects the two rooms, so the aide can enter the president's room without alerting the agents in the hall. This is standard practice. Late in the evening, the aide escorts a comely young woman back to the hotel. The Secret Service checks her, then waves her into the aide's room. She emerges three hours later, slightly disheveled. She kisses the aide in the hall as she leaves. Someone got lucky--but who? The Risks : The posted Secret Service agents might see through the charade. More awkwardly, the aide would be forced to play the seamy role of procurer. (He would probably do it. Kennedy's assistants performed this task dutifully.) In short, presidential adultery is just barely possible in 1996. But it would be extremely inconvenient, extremely risky, and potentially disastrous. It seems, in fact, a lot more trouble than it's worth. A president these days might be wiser to imitate Jimmy Carter, not Jack Kennedy, and only lust in his heart.

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

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

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51461

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

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

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

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51027

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

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

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51351

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

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

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

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

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

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

valid

51320

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

valid

51395

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

valid

51436

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

valid

51362

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

valid

51150

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