Unknown

Usually there are two "reasons" why something is done; the reason why it needs to be done, and, quite separate, the reason people want to do it. The foul-up starts when the reason-for-wanting is satisfied ... and the need remains!

The message was an electronic shout, the most powerful and tightly-beamed short-wave transmission which men could generate, directed with all the precision which mathematics and engineering could offer. Nevertheless that pencil must scrawl broadly over the sky, and for a long time, merely hoping to write on its target. For when distances are measured in light-weeks, the smallest errors grow monstrous.

As it happened, the attempt was successful. Communications Officer Anastas Mardikian had assembled his receiver after acceleration ceased--a big thing, surrounding the flagship Ranger like a spiderweb trapping a fly--and had kept it hopefully tuned over a wide band. The radio beam swept through, ghostly faint from dispersion, wave length doubled by Doppler effect, ragged with cosmic noise. An elaborate system of filters and amplifiers could make it no more than barely intelligible.

But that was enough.

Mardikian burst onto the bridge. He was young, and the months had not yet devoured the glory of his first deep-space voyage. "Sir!" he yelled. "A message ... I just played back the recorder ... from Earth!"

Fleet Captain Joshua Coffin started. That movement, in weightlessness, spun him off the deck. He stopped himself with a practiced hand, stiffened, and rapped back: "If you haven't yet learned regulations, a week of solitary confinement may give you a chance to study them."

"I ... but, sir--" The other man retreated. His uniform made a loose rainbow splash across metal and plastic. Coffin alone, of all the fleet's company, held to the black garments of a space service long extinct.

"But, sir," said Mardikian. His voice seemed to have fallen off a high cliff. "Word from Earth!"

"Only the duty officer may enter the bridge without permission," Coffin reminded him. "If you had anything urgent to tell, there is an intercom."

"I thought--" choked Mardikian. He paused, then came to the free-fall equivalent of attention. Anger glittered in his eyes. "Sorry, sir."

Coffin hung quiet a while, looking at the dark young man in the brilliant clothes. Forget it, he said to himself. Times are another. You went once to e Eridani, and almost ninety years had passed when you returned. Earth was like a foreign planet. This is as good as spacemen get to be nowadays, careless, superstitious, jabbering among each other in languages I don't understand. Thank God there are any recruits at all, and hope He will let there continue to be a few for what remains of your life.

The duty officer, Hallmyer, was tall and blond and born in Lancashire; but he watched the other two with Asian eyes. No one spoke, though Mardikian breathed heavily. Stars filled the bow viewport, crowding a huge night.

Coffin sighed. "Very well," he said. "I'll let it pass this time."

After all, he reflected, a message from Earth was an event. Radio had, indeed, gone between Sol and Alpha Centauri, but that was with very special equipment. To pinpoint a handful of ships, moving at half the speed of light, and to do it so well that the comparatively small receiver Mardikian had erected would pick up the beam--Yes, the boy had some excuse for gladness.

"What was the signal?" Coffin inquired.

He expected it would only be routine, a test, so that engineers a lifetime hence could ask the returning fleet whether their transmission had registered. (If there were any engineers by then, on an Earth sinking into poverty and mysticism.)

Instead, Mardikian blurted: "Old Svoboda is dead. The new Psychologics Commissioner is Thomas ... Thomson ... that part didn't record clearly ... anyway, he must be sympathetic to the Constitutionalists. He's rescinded the educational decree--promised more consideration to provincial mores. Come hear for yourself, sir!"

Despite himself, Coffin whistled. "But that's why the e Eridani colony was being founded," he said. His words fell flat and silly into silence.

Hallmyer said, with the alien hiss in his English that Coffin hated, for it was like the Serpent in a once noble garden:

"Apparently the colony has no more reason to be started. But how shall we consult with three thousand would-be pioneers lying in deepsleep?"

"Shall we?" Coffin did not know why--not yet--but he felt his brain move with the speed of fear. "We've undertaken to deliver them to Rustum. In the absence of definite orders from Earth, are we even allowed to consider a change of plans ... since a general vote can't be taken? Better avoid possible trouble and not even mention--" He broke off. Mardikian's face had become a mask of dismay.

"But, sir!" bleated the Com officer.

A chill rose up in Coffin. "You have already told," he said.

"Yes," whispered Mardikian. "I met Coenrad de Smet, he had come over to this ship for some repair parts, and ... I never thought--"

"Exactly!" growled Coffin.

The fleet numbered fifteen, more than half the interstellar ships humankind possessed. But Earth's overlords had been as anxious to get rid of the Constitutionalists (the most stubborn ones, at least; the stay-at-homes were ipso facto less likely to be troublesome) as that science-minded, liberty-minded group of archaists were to escape being forcibly absorbed by modern society. Rustum, e Eridani II, was six parsecs away, forty-one years of travel, and barely habitable: but the only possible world yet discovered. A successful colony would be prestigious, and could do no harm; its failure would dispose of a thorn in the official ribs. Tying up fifteen ships for eight decades was all right too. Exploration was a dwindling activity, which interested fewer men each generation.

* * * * *

So Earth's government co-operated fully. It even provided speeches and music when the colonists embarked for the orbiting fleet. After which, Coffin thought, the government had doubtless grinned to itself and thanked its various heathen gods that that was over with.

"Only now," he muttered, "it isn't."

He free-sat in the Ranger's general room, a tall, bony, faintly grizzled Yankee, and waited. The austerity of the walls was broken by a few pictures. Coffin had wanted to leave them bare--since no one else would care for a view of the church where his father had preached, a hundred years ago, or be interested in a model of that catboat the boy Joshua had sailed on a bay which glittered in summers now forgotten--but even the theoretically absolute power of a fleet captain had its limits. At least the men nowadays were not making this room obscene with naked women. Though in all honesty, he wasn't sure he wouldn't rather have that than ... brush-strokes on rice paper, the suggestion of a tree, and a classic ideogram. He did not understand the new generations.

The Ranger skipper, Nils Kivi, was like a breath of home: a small dapper Finn who had traveled with Coffin on the first e Eridani trip. They were not exactly friends, an admiral has no intimates, but they had been young in the same decade.

Actually, thought Coffin, most of us spacemen are anachronisms. I could talk to Goldstein or Yamato or Pereira, to quite a few on this voyage, and not meet blank surprise when I mentioned a dead actor or hummed a dead song. But of course, they are all in unaging deepsleep now. We'll stand our one-year watches in turn, and be put back in the coldvats, and have no chance to talk till journey's end.

"It may prove to be fun," mused Kivi.

"What?" asked Coffin.

"To walk around High America again, and fish in the Emperor River, and dig up our old camp," said Kivi. "We had some fine times on Rustum, along with all the work and danger."

Coffin was startled, that his own thoughts should have been so closely followed. "Yes," he agreed, remembering strange wild dawns on the Cleft edge, "that was a pretty good five years."

Kivi sighed. "Different this time," he said. "Now that I think about it, I am not sure I do want to go back. We had so much hope then--we were discoverers, walking where men had never even laid eyes before. Now the colonists will be the hopeful ones. We are just their transportation."

Coffin shrugged. "We must take what is given us, and be thankful."

"This time," said Kivi, "I will constantly worry: suppose I come home again and find my job abolished? No more space travel at all. If that happens, I refuse to be thankful."

Forgive him, Coffin asked his God. It is cruel to watch the foundation of your life being gnawed away.

Kivi's eyes lit up, the briefest flicker. "Of course," he said, "if we really do cancel this trip, and go straight back, we may not arrive too late. We may still find a few expeditions to new stars being organized, and get on their rosters."

Coffin tautened. Again he was unsure why he felt an emotion: now, anger. "I shall permit no disloyalty to the purpose for which we are engaged," he clipped.

"Oh, come off it," said Kivi. "Be rational. I don't know your reason for undertaking this wretched cruise. You had rank enough to turn down the assignment; no one else did. But you still want to explore as badly as I. If Earth didn't care about us, they would not have bothered to invite us back. Let us seize the opportunity while it lasts." He intercepted a reply by glancing at the wall chrono. "Time for our conference." He flicked the intership switch.

* * * * *

A panel came to life, dividing into fourteen sections, one for each accompanying vessel. One or two faces peered from each. The craft which bore only supplies and sleeping crewmen were represented by their captains. Those which had colonists also revealed a civilian spokesman.

Coffin studied every small image in turn. The spacemen he knew, they all belonged to the Society and even those born long after him had much in common. There was a necessary minimum discipline of mind and body, and the underlying dream for which all else had been traded: new horizons under new suns. Not that spacemen indulged in such poetics; they had too much work to do.

The colonists were something else. Coffin shared things with them--predominantly North American background, scientific habit of thought, distrust of all governments. But few Constitutionalists had any religion; those who did were Romish, Jewish, Buddhist, or otherwise alien to him. All were tainted with the self-indulgence of this era: they had written into their covenant that only physical necessity could justify moralizing legislation, and that free speech was limited only by personal libel. Coffin thought sometimes he would be glad to see the last of them.

"Are you all prepared?" he began. "Very well, let's get down to business. It's unfortunate the Com officer gossiped so loosely. He stirred up a hornet's nest." Coffin saw that few understood the idiom. "He made discontent which threatens this whole project, and which we must now deal with."

Coenrad de Smet, colonist aboard the Scout, smiled in an irritating way he had. "You would simply have concealed the fact?" he asked.

"It would have made matters easier," said Coffin stiffly.

"In other words," said de Smet, "you know better what we might want than we do ourselves. That, sir, is the kind of arrogance we hoped to escape. No man has the right to suppress any information bearing on public affairs."

A low voice, with a touch of laughter, said through a hood: "And you accuse Captain Coffin of preaching!"

The New Englander's eyes were drawn to her. Not that he could see through the shapeless gown and mask, such as hid all the waking women; but he had met Teresa Zeleny on Earth. Hearing her now was somehow like remembering Indian summer on a wooded hilltop, a century ago.

An involuntary smile quirked his lips. "Thank you," he said. "Do you, Mr. de Smet, know what the sleeping colonists might want? Have you any right to decide for them? And yet we can't wake them, even the adults, to vote. There simply isn't room; if nothing else, the air regenerators couldn't supply that much oxygen. That's why I felt it best to tell no one, until we were actually at Rustum. Then those who wished could return with the fleet, I suppose."

"We could rouse them a few at a time, let them vote, and put them back to sleep," suggested Teresa Zeleny.

"It would take weeks," said Coffin. "You, of all people, should know metabolism isn't lightly stopped, or easily restored."

"If you could see my face," she said, again with a chuckle, "I would grimace amen. I'm so sick of tending inert human flesh that ... well, I'm glad they're only women and girls, because if I also had to massage and inject men I'd take a vow of chastity!"

Coffin blushed, cursed himself for blushing, and hoped she couldn't see it over the telecircuit. He noticed Kivi grin.

* * * * *

Kivi provided the merciful interruption. "Your few-at-a-time proposal is pointless anyhow," he said. "In the course of those weeks, we would pass the critical date."

"What's that?" asked a young girl's voice.

"You don't know?" said Coffin, surprised.

"Let it pass for now," broke in Teresa. Once again, as several times before, Coffin admired her decisiveness. She cut through nonsense with a man's speed and a woman's practicality. "Take our word for it, June, if we don't turn about within two months, we'll do better to go on to Rustum. So, voting is out. We could wake a few sleepers, but those already conscious are really as adequate a statistical sample."

Coffin nodded. She spoke for five women on her ship, who stood a year-watch caring for two hundred ninety-five asleep. The one hundred twenty who would not be restimulated for such duty during the voyage, were children. The proportion on the other nine colonist-laden vessels was similar; the crew totaled one thousand six hundred twenty, with forty-five up and about at all times. Whether the die was cast by less than two per cent, or by four or five per cent, was hardly significant.

"Let's recollect exactly what the message was," said Coffin. "The educational decree which directly threatened your Constitutionalist way of life has been withdrawn. You're no worse off now than formerly--and no better, though there's a hint of further concessions in the future. You're invited home again. That's all. We have not picked up any other transmissions. It seems very little data on which to base so large a decision."

"It's an even bigger one, to continue," said de Smet. He leaned forward, a bulky man, until he filled his little screen. Hardness rang in his tones. "We were able people, economically rather well off. I daresay Earth already misses our services, especially in technological fields. Your own report makes Rustum out a grim place; many of us would die there. Why should we not turn home?"

"Home," whispered someone.

The word filled a sudden quietness, like water filling a cup, until quietness brimmed over with it. Coffin sat listening to the voice of his ship, generators, ventilators, regulators, and he began to hear a beat frequency which was Home, home, home.

Only his home was gone. His father's church was torn down for an Oriental temple, and the woods where October had burned were cleared for another tentacle of city, and the bay was enclosed to make a plankton farm. For him, only a spaceship remained, and the somehow cold hope of heaven.

A very young man said, almost to himself: "I left a girl back there."

"I had a little sub," said another. "I used to poke around the Great Barrier Reef, skindiving out the air lock or loafing on the surface. You wouldn't believe how blue the waves could be. They tell me on Rustum you can't come down off the mountain tops."

"But we'd have the whole planet to ourselves," said Teresa Zeleny.

One with a gentle scholar's face answered: "That may be precisely the trouble, my dear. Three thousand of us, counting children, totally isolated from the human mainstream. Can we hope to build a civilization? Or even maintain one?"

"Your problem, pop," said the officer beside him dryly, "is that there are no medieval manuscripts on Rustum."

"I admit it," said the scholar. "I thought it more important my children grow up able to use their minds. But if it turns out they can do so on Earth--How much chance will the first generations on Rustum have to sit down and really think, anyway?"

"Would there even be a next generation on Rustum?"

"One and a quarter gravities--I can feel it now."

"Synthetics, year after year of synthetics and hydroponics, till we can establish an ecology. I had steak on Earth, once in a while."

"My mother couldn't come. Too frail. But she's paid for a hundred years of deepsleep, all she could afford ... just in case I do return."

"I designed skyhouses. They won't build anything on Rustum much better than sod huts, in my lifetime."

"Do you remember moonlight on the Grand Canyon?"

"Do you remember Beethoven's Ninth in the Federal Concert Hall?"

"Do you remember that funny little Midlevel bar, where we all drank beer and sang Lieder?"

"Do you remember?"

* * * * *

Teresa Zeleny shouted across their voices: "In Anker's name! What are you thinking about? If you care so little, you should never have embarked in the first place!"

It brought back the silence, not all at once but piece by piece, until Coffin could pound the table and call for order. He looked straight at her hidden eyes and said: "Thank you, Miss Zeleny. I was expecting tears to be uncorked any moment."

One of the girls snuffled behind her mask.

Charles Lochaber, speaking for the Courier colonists, nodded. "Aye, 'tis a blow to our purpose. I am not so sairtain I myself would vote to continue, did I feel the message was to be trusted."

"What?" De Smet's square head jerked up from between his shoulders.

Lochaber grinned without much humor. "The government has been getting more arbitrary each year," he said. "They were ready enough to let us go, aye. But they may regret it now--not because we could ever be any active threat, but because we will be a subversive example, up there in Earth's sky. Or just because we will be. Mind ye, I know not for sairtain; but 'tis possible they decided we are safer dead, and this is to trick us back. 'Twould be characteristic dictatorship behavior."

"Of all the fantastic--" gasped an indignant female voice.

Teresa broke in: "Not as wild as you might think, dear. I have read a little history, and I don't mean that censored pap which passes for it nowadays. But there's another possibility, which I think is just as alarming. That message may be perfectly honest and sincere. But will it still be true when we get back? Remember how long that will take! And even if we could return overnight, to an Earth which welcomed us home, what guarantee would there be that our children, or our grandchildren, won't suffer the same troubles as us, without the same chance to break free?"

"Ye vote, then, to carry on?" asked Lochaber.

Pride answered: "Of course."

"Good lass. I, too."

Kivi raised his hand. Coffin recognized him, and the spaceman said: "I am not sure the crew ought not to have a voice in this also."

"What?" De Smet grew red. He gobbled for a moment before he could get out: "Do you seriously think you could elect us to settle on that annex of hell--and then come home to Earth yourselves?"

"As a matter of fact," said Kivi, smiling, "I suspect the crew would prefer to return at once. I know I would. Seven years may make a crucial difference."

"If a colony is planted, though," said Coffin, "it might provide the very inspiration which space travel needs to survive."

"Hm-m-m. Perhaps. I shall have to think about that."

"I hope you realize," said the very young man with ornate sarcasm, "that every second we sit here arguing takes us one hundred fifty thousand kilometers farther from home."

"Dinna fash yourself," said Lochaber. "Whatever we do, that girl of yours will be an auld carline before you reach Earth."

De Smet was still choking at Kivi: "You lousy little ferryman, if you think you can make pawns of us--"

And Kivi stretched his lips in anger and growled, "If you do not watch your language, you clodhugger, I will come over there and stuff you down your own throat."

"Order!" yelled Coffin. "Order!"

Teresa echoed him: "Please ... for all our lives' sake ... don't you know where we are? You've got a few centimeters of wall between you and zero! Please, whatever we do, we can't fight or we'll never see any planet again!"

But she did not say it weeping, or as a beggary. It was almost a mother's voice--strange, in an unmarried woman--and it quieted the male snarling more than Coffin's shouts.

The fleet captain said finally: "That will do. You're all too worked up to think. Debate is adjourned sixteen hours. Discuss the problem with your shipmates, get some sleep, and report the consensus at the next meeting."

"Sixteen hours?" yelped someone. "Do you know how much return time that adds?"

"You heard me," said Coffin. "Anybody who wants to argue may do so from the brig. Dismissed!"

He snapped off the switch.

Kivi, temper eased, gave him a slow confidential grin. "That heavy-father act works nearly every time, no?"

Coffin pushed from the table. "I'm going out," he said. His voice sounded harsh to him, a stranger's. "Carry on."

He had never felt so alone before, not even the night his father died. O God, who spake unto Moses in the wilderness, reveal now thy will. But God was silent, and Coffin turned blindly to the only other help he could think of.

* * * * *

Space armored, he paused a moment in the air lock before continuing. He had been an astronaut for twenty-five years--for a century if you added time in the vats--but he could still not look upon naked creation without fear.

An infinite blackness flashed: stars beyond stars, to the bright ghost-road of the Milky Way and on out to other galaxies and flocks of galaxies, until the light which a telescope might now register had been born before the Earth. Looking from his air-lock cave, past the radio web and the other ships, Coffin felt himself drown in enormousness, coldness, and total silence--though he knew that this vacuum burned and roared with man-destroying energies, roiled like currents of gas and dust more massive than planets and travailed with the birth of new suns--and he said to himself the most dreadful of names, I am that I am, and sweat formed chilly little globules under his arms.

This much a man could see within the Solar System. Traveling at half light-speed stretched the human mind still further, till often it ripped across and another lunatic was shoved into deepsleep. For aberration redrew the sky, crowding stars toward the bows, so that the ships plunged toward a cloud of Doppler hell-blue. The constellations lay thinly abeam, you looked out upon the dark. Aft, Sol was still the brightest object in heaven, but it had gained a sullen red tinge, as if already grown old, as if the prodigal would return from far places to find his home buried under ice.

What is man that thou art mindful of him? The line gave its accustomed comfort; for, after all, the Sun-maker had also wrought this flesh, atom by atom, and at the very least would think it worthy of hell. Coffin had never understood how his atheist colleagues endured free space.

Well--

He took aim at the next hull and fired his little spring-powered crossbow. A light line unreeled behind the magnetic bolt. He tested its security with habitual care, pulled himself along until he reached the companion ship, yanked the bolt loose and fired again, and so on from hull to slowly orbiting hull, until he reached the Pioneer.

Its awkward ugly shape was like a protective wall against the stars. Coffin drew himself past the ion tubes, now cold. Their skeletal structure seemed impossibly frail to have hurled forth peeled atoms at one half c. Mass tanks bulked around the vessel; allowing for deceleration, plus a small margin, the mass ratio was about nine to one. Months would be required at Rustum to refine enough reaction material for the home voyage. Meanwhile such of the crew as were not thus engaged would help the colony get established--

If it ever did!

Coffin reached the forward air lock and pressed the "doorbell." The outer valve opened for him, and he cycled through. First Officer Karamchand met him and helped him doff armor. The other man on duty found an excuse to approach and listen; for monotony was as corrosive out here as distance and strangeness.

"Ah, sir. What brings you over?"

Coffin braced himself. Embarrassment roughened his tone: "I want to see Miss Zeleny."

"Of course--But why come yourself? I mean, the telecircuit--"

"In person!" barked Coffin.

"What?" escaped the crewman. He propelled himself backward in terror of a wigging. Coffin ignored it.

"Emergency," he snapped. "Please intercom her and arrange for a private discussion."

"Why ... why ... yes, sir. At once. Will you wait here ... I mean ... yes, sir!" Karamchand shot down the corridor.

Coffin felt a sour smile on his own lips. He could understand if they got confused. His own law about the women had been like steel, and now he violated it himself.

The trouble was, he thought, no one knew if it was even required. Until now there had been few enough women crossing space, and then only within the Solar System, on segregated ships. There was no background of interstellar experience. It seemed reasonable, though, that a man on his year-watch should not be asked to tend deepsleeping female colonists. (Or vice versa!) The idea revolted Coffin personally; but for once the psychotechs had agreed with him. And, of course, waking men and women, freely intermingling, were potentially even more explosive. Haremlike seclusion appeared the only answer; and husband and wife were not to be awake at the same time.

Bad enough to see women veiled when there was a telecircuit conference. (Or did the masks make matters still worse, by challenging the imagination? Who knew?) Best seal off the living quarters and coldvat sections of the craft which bore them. Crewmen standing watches on those particular ships had better return to their own vessels to sleep and eat.

Coffin braced his muscles. The rules wouldn't apply if a large meteor struck, he reminded himself. What has come up is more dangerous than that. So never mind what anyone thinks.

Karamchand returned to salute him and say breathlessly: "Miss Zeleny will see you, captain. This way, if you please."

"Thanks." Coffin followed to the main bulkhead. The women had its doorkey. Now the door stood ajar. Coffin pushed himself through so hard that he overshot and caromed off the farther wall.

Teresa laughed. She closed the door and locked it. "Just to make them feel safe out there," she said. "Poor well-meaning men! Welcome, captain."

* * * * *

He turned about, almost dreading the instant. Her tall form was decent in baggy coveralls, but she had dropped the mask. She was not pretty, he supposed: broad-faced, square-jawed, verging on spinsterhood. But he had liked her way of smiling.

"I--" He found no words.

"Follow me." She led him down a short passage, hand-over-hand along the null-gee rungs. "I've warned the other girls to stay away. You needn't fear being shocked." At the end of the hall was a little partitioned-off room. Few enough personal goods could be taken along, but she had made this place hers, a painting, a battered Shakespeare, the works of Anker, a microplayer. Her tapes ran to Bach, late Beethoven and Strauss, music which could be studied endlessly. She took hold of a stanchion and nodded, all at once grown serious.

"What do you want to ask me, captain?"

Coffin secured himself by the crook of an arm and stared at his hands. The fingers strained against each other. "I wish I could give you a clear reply," he said, very low and with difficulty. "You see, I've never met anything like this before. If it involved only men, I guess I could handle the problem. But there are women along, and children."

"And you want a female viewpoint. You're wiser than I had realized. But why me?"

He forced himself to meet her eyes. "You appear the most sensible of the women awake."

"Really!" She laughed. "I appreciate the compliment, but must you deliver it in that parade-ground voice, and glare at me to boot? Relax, captain." She cocked her head, studying him. Then: "Several of the girls don't get this business of the critical point. I tried to explain, but I was only an R.N. at home, and I'm afraid I muddled it rather. Could you put it in words of one and a half syllables?"

"Do you mean the equal-time point?"

"The Point of No Return, some of them call it."

"Nonsense! It's only--Well, look at it this way. We accelerated from Sol at one gravity. We dare not apply more acceleration, even though we could, because so many articles aboard have been lightly built to save mass--the coldvats, for example. They'd collapse under their own weight, and the persons within would die, if we went as much as one-point-five gee. Very well. It took us about one hundred eighty days to reach maximum velocity. In the course of that period, we covered not quite one-and-a-half light-months. We will now go free for almost forty years. At the end of that time, we'll decelerate at one gee for some one hundred eighty days, covering an additional light-month and a half, and enter the e Eridani System with low relative speed. Our star-to-star orbit was plotted with care, but of course the errors add up to many Astronomical Units; furthermore, we have to maneuver, put our ships in orbit about Rustum, send ferry craft back and forth. So we carry a reaction-mass reserve which allows us a total velocity change of about one thousand kilometers per second after journey's end.

"Now imagine we had changed our minds immediately after reaching full speed. We'd still have to decelerate in order to return. So we'd be almost a quarter light-year from Sol, a year after departure, before achieving relative rest. Then, to come back three light-months at one thousand K.P.S. takes roughly seventy-two years. But the whole round trip as originally scheduled, with a one-year layover at Rustum, runs just about eighty-three years!

"Obviously there's some point in time beyond which we can actually get home quicker by staying with the original plan. This date lies after eight months of free fall, or not quite fourteen months from departure. We're only a couple of months from the critical moment right now; if we start back at once, we'll still have been gone from Earth for about seventy-six years. Each day we wait adds months to the return trip. No wonder there's impatience!"

"And the relativity clock paradox makes it worse," Teresa said.

"Well, not too much," Coffin decided. "The tau factor is 0.87. Shipboard time during eighty years of free fall amounts to about seventy years; so far the difference isn't significant. And anyhow, we'll all spend most of the time in deepsleep. What they're afraid of, the ones who want to go back, is that the Earth they knew will have slipped away from them."

She nodded. "Can't they understand it already has?" she said.

It was like a blade stabbed into Coffin. Though he could not see why that should be: surely he, of all men, knew how relentlessly time flowed. He had already come back once, to an Earth scarcely recognizable. The Society had been a kind of fixed point, but even it had changed; and he--like Kivi, like all of them--was now haunted by the fear of returning again and not finding any other spacemen whatsoever.

But when she spoke it--

* * * * *

"Maybe they're afraid to understand," he said.

"You keep surprising me, captain," said Teresa with a hint of her smile. "You actually show a bit of human sympathy."

And, thought a far-off part of Coffin, you showed enough to put me at ease by getting me to lecture you with safe impersonal figures. But he didn't mind. The fact was that now he could free-sit, face to face, alone, and talk to her like a friend.

"Since we could only save about seven years by giving up at once," he said, "I admit I'm puzzled why so many people are so anxious about it. Couldn't we go on as planned and decide things at Rustum?"

"I think not," said Teresa. "You see, nobody in his right mind wants to be a pioneer. To explore, yes; to settle rich new country with known and limited hazards, yes; but not to risk his children, his whole racial future, on a wild gamble. This group was driven into space by a conflict which just couldn't be settled at home. If that conflict has ended--"

"But ... you and Lochaber ... you pointed out that it had not ended. That at best this is a breathing spell."

"Still, they'd like to believe otherwise, wouldn't they? I mean, at least believe they have a fighting chance on Earth."

"All right," said Coffin. "But it looks a safe bet, that there are a number of deepsleepers who'd agree with you, who'd think their chances are actually better on Rustum. Why can't we take them there first? It seems only fair."

"Uh-uh." Her hair was short, but it floated in loose waves when she shook her head, and light rippled mahogany across it. "You've been there and I haven't, but I've studied your reports. A handful couldn't survive. Three thousand is none too many. It will have to be unanimous, whatever is decided."

"I was trying to avoid that conclusion," he said wearily, "but if you agree--Well, can't we settle the argument at Rustum, after they've looked the place over?"

"No. And I'll tell you why, captain," she said. "I know Coenrad de Smet well, and one or two others. Good men ... don't get me wrong ... but born politicians, intuitive rather than logical thinkers. They believe, quite honestly, it's best to go back. And, of course, the timid and lazy and selfish ones will support them. They don't want to risk having Rustum there, a whole new world for the taking--and the vote to go against them. I've seen plenty of your photographs, captain. They were so beautiful, some of them, that I can hardly wait for the reality. I know--and so does de Smet--High America is a magnificent place. Room, freedom, unpoisoned air. We'll remember all that we hated on Earth and that isn't on Rustum; we'll reflect much more soberly how long a time will have passed before we could possibly get back, and what a gamble we'd be taking on finding a tolerable situation there. The extra quarter gee won't seem so bad till it's time for heavy manual labor; the alien biochemistry won't bother us much till we have to stop eating rations and start trying to farm; the isolation won't really be felt till your spaceships have departed and we're all the humanity there is for more than twenty light-years.

"No ... de Smet won't risk it. He might get caught up in the glamour himself!"

Coffin murmured thoughtfully: "After only a few days of deceleration, there won't be enough reaction mass to do anything but continue home."

"De Smet knows that, too," said Teresa. "Captain, you can make a hard decision and stick to it. That's why you have your job. But maybe you forget how few people can--how most of us pray someone will come along and tell us what to do. Even under severe pressure, the decision to go to Rustum was difficult. Now that there's a chance to undo it, go back to being safe and comfortable--but still a real risk that by the time we get home, Earth will no longer be safe or comfortable--we've been forced to decide all over again. It's agony, captain! De Smet is a strong man, in his way. He'll compel us to do the irrevocable, as soon as possible, just because it will make a final commitment. Once we've turned far enough back, it'll be out of our hands and we can stop thinking."

He regarded her with a sort of wonder. "But you look calm enough," he said.

"I made my decision back on Earth," she answered. "I've seen no reason to change it."

* * * * *

"What do the women think?" he asked, leaping back to safely denumerable things.

"Most want to give up, of course." She said it with a mildness which softened the judgment. "Few of them really wanted to come in the first place. They did so only because their men insisted. Women are much too practical to care about a philosophy, or a frontier, or anything except their families."

"Do you?" he challenged her.

She shrugged ruefully. "I've no family, captain. At the same time, I suppose ... a sense of humor? ... kept me from sublimating it into a Cause of any kind." Counterattacking: "Why do you care what we do, captain?"

"Why?" He was taken aback, and found himself stammering. "Why ... because ... I'm in charge--"

"Oh, yes. But isn't it more than that? You spent years on Earth lecturing about Rustum and its colonization. I think it must be a deep symbol to you. Don't worry, I won't go analytic. I happen to think, myself, that this colony is enormously important, objectively speaking, I mean. If our race muffs this chance, we may never get another. But you and I wouldn't care about that, not really, unless it was personally important too. Would we? Why did you accept this thankless job, commanding a colonial fleet? It can't be an itch to explore. Rustum's already been visited once, and you'll have precious little time to carry on any further studies. You could have been off to some star where men have never traveled at all. Do you see, captain? You're not a bit more cold-blooded about this than I. You want that colony planted."

She stopped, laughed, and color went across her face. "Oh, dear, I do chatter, don't I? Pardon me. Let's get back to business."

"I think," said Coffin, slowly and jaggedly, "I'm beginning to realize what's involved."

She settled back and listened.

He bent a leg around a stanchion to hold his lean black frame in place and beat one fist softly into the palm of another. "Yes, it is an emotional issue," he said, the words carving the thoughts to shape. "Logic has nothing to do with it. There are some who want so badly to go to Rustum and be free, or whatever they hope to be there, that they'll dice with their lives for the privilege--and their wives' and children's lives. Others went reluctantly, against their own survival instincts, and now that they think they see a way of retreat, something they can justify to themselves, they'll fight any man who tries to bar it. Yes. It's a ghastly situation.

"One way or another, the decision has got to be made soon. And the facts can't be hidden. Every deepsleeper must be wakened and nursed to health by someone now conscious. The word will pass, year after year, always to a different combination of spacemen and colonists, with always a proportion who're furious about what was decided while they slept. No, furious is too weak a word. Onward or backward, whichever way we go, we've struck at the emotional roots of people. And interstellar space can break the calmest men. How long before just the wrong percentage of malcontents, weaklings, and shaky sanities goes on duty? What's going to happen then?"

He sucked in an uneven breath. "I'm sorry," he faltered. "I should not--"

"Blow off steam? Why not?" she asked calmly. "Would it be better to keep on being the iron man, till one day you put a pistol to your head?"

"You see," he said in his misery, "I'm responsible. Men and women ... all the little children--But I'll be in deepsleep. I'd go crazy if I tried to stay awake the whole voyage; the organism can't take it. I'll be asleep, and there'll be nothing I can do, but these ships were given into my care!"

He began to shiver. She took both his hands. Neither of them spoke for a long while.

* * * * *

When he left the Pioneer, Coffin felt oddly hollow, as if he had opened his chest and pulled out heart and lungs. But his mind functioned with machine precision. For that he was grateful to Teresa: she had helped him discover what the facts were. It was a brutal knowledge, but without such understanding the expedition might well be doomed.

Or might it? Dispassionately, now, Coffin estimated chances. Either they went on to Rustum or they turned back; in either case, the present likelihood of survival was--fifty-fifty? Well, you couldn't gauge it in percentages. Doubtless more safety lay in turning back. But even there the odds were such that no sane man would willingly gamble. Certainly the skipper had no right to take the hazard, if he could avoid it by any means.

But what means were there?

As he hauled himself toward the Ranger, Coffin watched the receiver web grow in his eyes, till it snared a distorted Milky Way. It seemed very frail to have carried so much hell. And, indeed, it would have to be dismantled before deceleration. No trick to sabotage the thing. If only I had known!

Or if someone on Earth, the villain or well-meaning fool or whatever he was who wrote that first message ... if only he would send another. "Ignore preceding. Educational decree still in force." Or something. But no. Such things didn't happen. A man had to make his own luck, in an angry world.

Coffin sighed and clamped boot-soles to his flagship's air lock.

Mardikian helped him through. When he removed his hoarfrosted space helmet, Coffin saw how the boy's mouth quivered. A few hours had put years on Mardikian.

He was in medical whites. Unnecessarily, to break the silence with any inane remark, Coffin said: "Going on vat duty, I see."

"Yes, sir." A mutter. "My turn." The armor made a lot of noise while they stowed it. "We'll need some more ethanol soon, captain," blurted Mardikian desperately.

* * * * *

"What for?" grumbled Coffin. He had often wished the stuff were not indispensable. He alone had the key to its barrel. Some masters allowed a small liquor ration on voyage, and said Coffin was only disguising prejudice in claiming it added risk. ("What the devil can happen in interstellar orbit? The only reason anyone stays conscious at all is the machinery to care properly for sleepers would mass more than the extra supplies do. You can issue the grog when a man comes off watch, can't you? Oh, never mind, never mind! I'm just grateful I don't ship under you!")

"Gammagen fixative ... and so on ... sir," stumbled Mardikian. "Mr. Hallmyer will ... make the requisition as usual."

"All right." Coffin faced his radio man, captured the fearful eyes and would not let them go. "Have there been any further communications?" he snapped.

"From Earth? No. No, sir. I ... I wouldn't really expect it ... we're about at the ... the ... the limit of reception now. It's almost a miracle, sir, I suppose, that we picked up the first. Of course, we might get another--" Mardikian's voice trailed off.

Coffin continued to stare. At last: "They've been giving you a hard time, haven't they?"

"What?"

"The ones like Lochaber, who want to go on. They wish you'd had the sense to keep your mouth shut, at least till you consulted me. And then others, like de Smet, have said the opposite. Even over telecircuit, it's no fun being a storm center, is it?"

"No, sir--"

* * * * *

Coffin turned away. Why torment the fellow more? This thing had happened, that was all. And the fewer who realized the danger, and were thereby put under still greater strain, the less that danger would be.

"Avoid such disputes," said Coffin. "Most especially, don't brood over those which do arise. That's just begging for a nervous breakdown--out here. Carry on."

Mardikian gulped and went aft.

Coffin drifted athwartships. The vessel thrummed around him.

He was not on watch, and had no desire to share the bridge with whoever was. He should eat something, but the idea was nauseating; he should try to sleep, but that would be useless. How long had he been with Teresa, while she cleared his mind and gave him what comfort she had to offer? A couple of hours. In fourteen hours or less, he must confront the spokesmen of crew and colonists. And meanwhile the fleet seethed.

On Earth, he thought wearily, a choice between going on and turning back would not have drawn men so close to insanity, even if the time elements had been the same. But Earth was long domesticated. Maybe, centuries ago, when a few wind-powered hulks wallowed forth upon hugeness, unsure whether they might sail off the world's edge--maybe then there had been comparable dilemmas. Yes ... hadn't Columbus' men come near mutiny? Even unknown, though, and monster-peopled by superstition, Earth had not been as cruel an environment as space; nor had a caravel been as unnatural as a spaceship. Minds could never have disintegrated as quickly in mid-ocean as between the stars.

Coffin grew aware, startled, that he had wandered to the radio shack.

He entered. It was a mere cubbyhole, one wall occupied by gleaming electronic controls, the rest full of racked equipment, tools, testers, spare parts, half-assembled units for this and that special purpose. The fleet did not absolutely need a Com officer--any spaceman could do the minimal jobs, and any officer had intensive electronics training--but Mardikian was a good, conscientious, useful technician.

His trouble was, perhaps, only that he was human.

Coffin pulled himself to the main receiver. A tape whirred slowly between spools, preserving what the web gathered. Coffin looked at a clipboard. Mardikian had written half an hour ago: "Nothing received. Tape wiped and reset, 1530 hr." Maybe since then--? Coffin flipped a switch. A scanner went quickly through the recording, found only cosmic noise--none of the orderliness which would have meant code or speech--and informed the man.

Now if it had just--

Coffin grew rigid. He floated among the mechanisms for a long time, blank-eyed as they, and alone the quick harsh breath showed him to be alive.

* * * * *

O God, help me do that which is right.

But what is right?

I should wrestle with Thy angel until I knew. But there is no time. Lord, be not wroth with me because I have no time.

Anguish ebbed. Coffin got busy.

Decision would be reached at the meeting, fourteen hours hence. A message which was to make a substantial difference ought to be received before then. But not very much before; nor too late, eleventh-hour-reprieve style, either.

But first, what should its wording be? Coffin didn't have to look up the last one. It was branded on his brain. An invitation to return and talk matters over. But necessarily short, compact, with minimum redundancy: which meant an increased danger of misinterpretation.

He braced himself before the typer and began to compose, struck out his first words and started again, and again and again. It had to be exactly right. A mere cancellation of the previous message wouldn't do after all. Too pat. And a suspicion, brooded on during a year-watch, could be as deadly as an outright sense of betrayal. So....

Since fleet now approaching equal-time point, quick action necessary. Colonization plans abandoned. Expedition ordered, repeat ordered to return to Earth. Education decree already rescinded (a man back home wouldn't be certain the first beam had made contact) and appeals for further concessions will be permitted through proper channels. Constitutionalists reminded that their first duty is to put their skills at disposal of society.

Would that serve? Coffin read it over. It didn't contradict the first one; it only changed a suggestion to a command, as if someone were growing more frantic by the hour. (And a picture of near-chaos in government wasn't attractive, was it?) The bit about "proper channels" underlined that speech was not free on Earth, and that the bureaucracy could restore the school decree any time it wished. The pompous last sentence ought to irritate men who had turned their backs on the thing which Terrestrial society was becoming.

Maybe it could be improved, though--Coffin resumed work.

When he ripped out his last version, he was astonished to note that two hours had passed. Already? The ship seemed very quiet. Too quiet. He grew feverishly aware that anyone might break in on him at any time.

The tape could run for a day, but was usually checked and wiped every six or eight hours. Coffin decided to put his words on it at a spot corresponding to seven hours hence. Mardikian would have come off vat duty, but probably be asleep; he wouldn't play back until shortly before the council meeting.

Coffin turned to a small auxiliary recorder. He had to tape his voice through a circuit which would alter it beyond recognition. And, of course, the whole thing had to be blurred, had to fade and come back, had to be full of squeals and buzzes and the crackling talk of the stars. No easy job to blend all those elements, in null-gee at that. Coffin lost himself in the task. He dared not do otherwise, for then he would be alone with himself.

Plug in this modulator, add an oscillation--Let's see, where's that slide rule, what quantities do you want for--

"What are you doing?"

Coffin twisted about. Fingers clamped on his heart.

Mardikian floated in the doorway, looking dazed and afraid as he saw who the intruder was. "What's wrong, sir?" he asked.

"You're on watch," breathed Coffin.

"Tea break, sir, and I thought I'd check and--" The boy pushed himself into the shack. Coffin saw him framed in meters and transformer banks, like some futuristic saint. But sweat glistened on the dark young face, broke free and drifted in tiny spheroids toward the ventilator.

"Get out of here," said Coffin thickly. And then: "No! I don't mean that! Stay where you are!"

"But--" Almost, the captain could read a mind: If the old man has gone space-dizzy, name of fate, what's to become of us all? "Yes, sir."

Coffin licked sandy lips. "It's O.K.," he said. "You surprised me, our nerves are on edge. That's why I hollered."

"S-s-sorry, sir."

"Anyone else around?"

"No, sir. All on duty or--" I shouldn't have told him that! Coffin read. Now he knows I'm alone with him!

"It's O.K., son," repeated the captain. But his voice came out like a buzz saw cutting through bone. "I had a little project here I was, uh, playing with, and ... uh--"

"Yes, sir. Of course." Humor him till I can get away. Then see Mr. Kivi. Let him take the responsibility. I don't want it! I don't want to be the skipper, with nobody between me and the sky. It's too much. It'll crack a man wide open.

* * * * *

Mardikian's trapped eyes circled the little room. They fell on the typer, and the drafts which Coffin had not yet destroyed.

Silence closed in.

"Well," said Coffin at last. "Now you know."

"Yes, sir." Mardikian could scarcely be heard.

"I'm going to fake this onto the receiver tape."

"B-b ... Yes, sir." Humor him! Mardikian was drawn bowstring tight, his nostrils flared by terror.

"You see," rasped Coffin, "it has to look genuine. This ought to get their backs up. They'll be more united on colonizing Rustum than they ever were before. At the same time, I can resist them, claim I have my orders to turn about and don't want to get into trouble. Finally, of course, I'll let myself be talked into continuing, however reluctantly. So no one will suspect me of ... fraud."

Mardikian's lips moved soundlessly. He was close to hysteria, Coffin saw.

"It's unavoidable," the captain said, and cursed himself for the roughness in his tone. Though maybe no orator could persuade this boy. What did he know of psychic breaking stress, who had never been tried to his own limit? "We'll have to keep the secret, you and I, or--" No, what was the use? Within Mardikian's small experience, it was so much more natural to believe that one man, Coffin, had gone awry, than to understand a month-by-month rotting of the human soul under loneliness and frustration.

"Yes, sir," Mardikian husked. "Of course, sir."

Even if he meant that, Coffin thought, he might talk in his sleep. Or I might; but the admiral, alone of all the fleet, has a completely private room.

He racked his tools, most carefully, and faced about. Mardikian shoved away, bulging-eyed. "No," whispered Mardikian. "No. Please."

He opened his mouth to scream, but he didn't get time. Coffin chopped him on the neck. As he doubled up, Coffin gripped him with legs and one hand, balled the other fist, and hit him often in the solar plexus.

Mardikian rolled in the air like a drowned man.

Swiftly, then, Coffin towed him down the corridor, to the pharmacy room. He unlocked the alcohol barrel, tapped a hypo, diluted it with enough water, and injected. Lucky the fleet didn't carry a real psychiatrist; if you broke, you went into deepsleep and weren't revived till you got home again to the clinics.

Coffin dragged the boy to a point near the air lock. Then he shouted. Hallmyer came from the bridge. "He started raving and attacked me," panted the captain. "I had to knock him out."

Mardikian was revived for a check-up, but since he only mumbled incoherently, he was given a sedative. Two men began processing him for the vat. Coffin said he would make sure that the Com officer hadn't damaged any equipment. He went back to the shack.

* * * * *

Teresa Zeleny met him. She did not speak, but led him to her room again.

"Well," he said, strangling on it, "so we're continuing to Rustum, by unanimous vote. Aren't you happy?"

"I was," she said quietly, "till now, when I see that you aren't. I hardly think you're worried about legal trouble on Earth; you have authority to ignore orders if the situation warrants. So what is the matter?"

He stared beyond her. "I shouldn't have come here at all," he said. "But I had to talk with someone, and only you might understand. Will you bear with me a few minutes? I won't bother you again."

"Not till Rustum." Her smile was a gesture of compassion. "And it's no bother." After waiting a bit: "What did you want to say?"

He told her, in short savage words.

She grew a little pale. "The kid was actually dead drunk, and they didn't know it when they processed him?" she said. "That's a grave risk. He might not live."

"I know," said Coffin, and covered his eyes.

Her hand fell on his shoulder. "I suppose you've done the only possible thing," she said with much gentleness. "Or, if there was a better way, you didn't have time to think of it."

He said through his fingers, while his head turned away from her: "If you don't tell on me, and I know you won't, then you're violating your own principles, too: total information, free discussion and decision. Aren't you?"

She sighed. "I imagine so. But don't all principles have their limits? How libertarian, or kind ... how human can you be, out here?"

"I shouldn't have told you."

"I'm glad you did."

Then, briskly, as if she, too, fled something, the woman said: "The truth is bound to come out when your fleet returns to Earth, so we'll need to work out a defense for you. Or is necessity enough?"

"It doesn't matter." He raised his head, and now he could again speak steadily. "I don't figure to skulk more than I must. Let them say what they will, eight decades from now. I'll already have been judged."

"What?" She retreated a little, perhaps to see the gaunt form better. "You don't mean you'll stay on Rustum? But it isn't necessary!"

"A liar ... quite likely a murderer ... I am not worthy to be the master of a ship." His voice cracked over. "And maybe, after all, there isn't going to be any more space travel to come home to."

He jerked free of her and went through the door. She stared after him. She had better let him out; no, the key had been left in the bulkhead lock. She had no excuse to follow.

You aren't alone, Joshua, she wanted to call. Every one of us is beside you. Time is the bridge that always burns behind us.

THE END

Contents

LORDS OF THE STRATOSPHERE

by Arthur J. Burks

High into air are the great New York buildings lifted by a ray whose source no telescope can find

CHAPTER I

The Take-off

It seemed only fitting and proper that the greatest of all leaps into space should start from Roosevelt Field, where so many great flights had begun and ended. Fliers whose names had rung--for a space--around the world, had landed here and been received by New York with all the pomp of visiting kings. Fliers had departed here for the lands of kings, to be received by them when their journeys were ended.

Of course Lucian Jeter and Tema Eyer were disappointed that Franz Kress had beaten them out in the race to be first into the stratosphere above fifty-five thousand feet. There was a chance that Kress would fail, when it would be the turn of Jeter and Eyer. They didn't wish for his failure, of course. They were sports-men as well as scientists; but they were just human enough to anticipate the plaudits of the world which would be showered without stint upon the fliers who succeeded.

"At least, Tema," said Jeter quietly, "we can look his ship over and see if there is anything about it that will suggest something to us. Of course, whether he succeeds or fails, we shall make the attempt as soon as we are ready."

"Indeed, yes," replied Eyer. "For no man will ever fly so high that another may not fly even higher. Once planes are constructed of unlimited flying radius ... well, the universe is large and there should be no end of space fights for a long time."

Eyer, the elder of the two partner scientists, was given sometimes to quiet biting sarcasm that almost took the hide off. Jeter never minded greatly, for he knew Eyer thoroughly and liked him immensely. Besides they were complements to each other. The brain of each received from the other exactly that which he needed to supplement his own knowledge of science.

They had one other thing in common. They had been "child prodigies," but contrary to the usual rule, they had both fulfilled their early promise. Their early precocious wisdom had not vanished with the passing of childhood. Each possessed a name with which to conjure in the world of science. And each possessed that name by right of having made it famous. And yet--they were under forty.

Jeter was a slender athletic chap with deep blue eyes and brown hair. His forehead was high and unnaturally white. There was always a still sort of tenseness about him when his mind was working with some idea that set him apart from the rest of the world. You felt then that you couldn't have broken his preoccupation in any manner at all--but that if by some miracle you did, he would wither you with his wrath.

Tema Eyer was the good nature of the partnership, with a brain no less agile and profound. He was a swart fellow, straight as an arrow, black of eyes--the sort which caused both men and women to turn and look after him on the street. Children took to both men on sight.

The crowd which had come out to watch the take-off of Franz Kress was a huge one--huge and restless. There had been much publicity attendant on this flight, none of it welcome to Kress. Oh, later, if he succeeded, he would welcome publicity, but publicity in advance rather nettled him.

Jeter and Eyer went across to him as he was saying his last words into the microphone before stepping into his sealed cabin for the flight. Kress saw them coming and his face lighted up.

"Lord," he said, "I'm glad to see you two. I've something I must ask you."

"Anything you ask will be answered," said Jeter, "if Tema and I can answer it. Or granted--if it's a favor you wish."

Kress motioned people back in order to speak more or less privately with his brother scientists. His face became unusually grave.

"You've probably wondered--everybody has--why I insist on making this flight alone," he said, speaking just loudly enough to be heard above the purring of the mighty, but almost silent motor behind him. "I'll tell you, partly. I've had a feeling for the last month that ... well, that things may not turn out exactly as everybody hopes. Of course I'll blaze the way to new discoveries; yes, and I'll climb to a height of around a hundred thousand feet ... and ... and...."

Jeter and Eyer looked at each other. It wasn't like Kress to be gloomy just before doing something that no man had ever done before. He should have been smiling and happy--at least for the movietone cameras--but he wasn't even that. Certainly it must be something unusual to so concern him.

"Tell us, Kress," said Eyer.

Kress looked at them both for several moments.

"Just this," he said at last: "work on your own high altitude plane with all possible speed. If I don't come back ... take off and follow me into the stratosphere at once."

Had Kress, possessor of one of the keenest scientific minds in the world, taken leave of his senses? "If I don't come back," he had said. What did he expect to do? Fly off the earth utterly? That was silly.

But when the partners looked again at Kress they both had the same feeling. It probably wasn't as silly as it sounded. Did Kress know something he wasn't telling them? Did he really think he might ... well, might fly off the earth entirely, away beyond her atmosphere, and never return? How utterly absurd! And yet....

"Of course we'll do it," said Jeter. "We'd do it anyway, without word from you. We haven't stopped our own work because of your swiftly approaching conquest of the greater heights. But why shouldn't you come back?"

* * * * *

For a moment there was a look of positive dread upon Kress' face.

Then he spoke again very quietly:

"You know all the stuff that's been written about my flight," he said. "Most of it has been nonsense. How could laymen newspaper reporters have any conception of what I may encounter aloft? They've tried to make something of the recent passage of the Earth through an area of so-called shooting stars. They've speculated until they're black in the face as to the true nature of the recent bombardment of meteorites. They've pictured me as a hero in advance, doomed to death by direct attack from what they are pleased to call--after having invented them--denizens of the stratosphere."

"Yes?" said Jeter, when Kress paused.

Kress took a deep breath.

"They've come nearer than they hoped for in some guesses," he said. "Of course I don't know it, but I've had a feeling for some time. You know what sometimes happens when a man gets a sudden revolutionary idea? He concentrates on it like all get-out. Then somebody else bursts into the newspapers with the same identical idea, which in turn brings out hordes of claims to the same idea by countless other people. It's no new thing to writers and such-like gentry. They know that when they get such an idea they must act on it at once or somebody else will, because their thoughts on the subject have gone forth and impinged upon the mental receiving sets of others. Well, that's a rough idea, anyway. This idea of denizens of the stratosphere has attacked the popular imagination. You'll remember it broke in the papers simultaneously, in thirty countries of the world!"

A cold chill ran down the spine of Tema Eyer. He saw, in a flash, whither Kress' thoughts were tending--and when he saw that, it thrilled him, too, for it seemed to be proof of the very thing Kress was saying.

"You mean," he said hoarsely, "that you too think there may be something up there, something ... well, sensate? Some great composite thought which inspires the general dread of stratosphere denizens?"

Kress shrugged. He wouldn't commit himself, being too careful a scientist, but he hadn't hesitated to plant the idea. Jeter and Eyer both understood the thoughts which were teeming in Kress' brain.

"We'll do our part Kress," said Eyer. Lucian Jeter nodded agreement. Kress gripped their hands tightly--almost desperately, Jeter thought. Jeter was usually the leader where Eyer and himself were concerned and he thought already that he foresaw cataclysmic events.

* * * * *

Kress climbed into his plane. The vast crowd murmured. They knew he was adjusting everything inside for the days-long endurance test ahead of him. Kress had forgotten nothing. There was even a specially made cylinder, comparable to the globe which Picard had used in his historic balloon ascensions in Europe. This was attached to a parachute which, if the emergency arose, could be dropped. Kress, in the ball, could pass through the sub-arctic cold of the stratosphere if necessity demanded. The ball, if it struck the ocean, would preserve him for a great length of time. It was even equipped with rockets.

This plane was revolutionary. It was, to begin with, carrying a vast load. Kress was taking every conceivable kind of instrument he fancied he might need. There was food as for a long siege.

Jeter shuddered. Why had he thought of the word "siege"?

The great load would be carried without difficulty, however, for this plane was little short of a miracle. Among other things, Kress would be able, in case of fatigue, to set his controls--as at sea a pilot may sometimes lash his wheel--and sleep while his plane mounted on up, and up, in great spirals.

Up beyond fifty-five thousand he hoped to attain a thousand miles an hour velocity. That meant, say, breakfast in New York, lunch in London, tea in Novo-Sibirsk, dinner in Yokohama--as soon as the myriad planes which would follow this one in design and capabilities took off on the trail Kress was blazing.

Jeter sighed at the thought. For several years he had explored little-known sections of the world. He had visited every country. He had entered every port that could be reached from the ocean--and all the time he had felt the Earth shrinking before the gods of speed. The time would soon come when everything on Earth would be commonplace. Then man's urge to go places he hadn't seen before would take him away from the Earth entirely--when he would begin the task of making even the universe shrink to appease the gods of speed. Somehow the thought was a melancholy one.

Now the crowd gave back as Kress speeded up his motor, indicating that he would soon take off. Jeter and Eyer studied the outward outline of Kress' craft. It looked exactly like a black beetle which has just alighted after flight, but has not yet quite hidden its wings. It was black, probably because it was believed a black object could be followed easier from the Earth.

There would be many anxious eyes watching that spiraling ship as it grew smaller and smaller, climbing upward.

With a rush, and a spinning of dust in the slipstream, the ship was away. It lifted as easily as a bird and mounted with great speed. It was capable of climbing in wide spirals at a hundred and fifty miles an hour.

A great sigh burst from the thousands who had come to watch history made. For solid hours now they would watch the plane climb, growing smaller, becoming a speck, vanishing. Many curious ones would stay right here until Kress returned, fearful of being cheated of a great thrill. For Kress was to land right here when, and if, he had conquered the stratosphere.

* * * * *

Jeter and Eyer wormed their way through the crowd to the road and found their car in a jam of other cars. Without a word they climbed in and drove themselves to their dwelling--combined home and laboratory--in Mineola. There they fell to on their own ship, which was being built piece by piece in their laboratory.

Every half hour or so one or the other would go to the lawn and gaze aloft, seeking Kress.

"He's out of eyesight," said Eyer, the last to go. "Is the telescope set up?"

"Yes, and arranged to cover all the area of sky through which Kress is likely to climb."

At intervals through the night, long after they had ceased work, the partners rose from bed and sought their fellow scientist among the stars. They alternated at this task.

"According to my calculations," said Jeter, when the eastern sky was just paling into dawn, "Kress has now reached a point higher than man has ever flown before, higher than any living--"

Jeter stopped on the word. Both men remembered Kress' last words. Kress, upset or not, properly or improperly, had hinted of living things in the stratosphere--perhaps utterly malignant entities.

It was just here, in the dawning of the first day after Kress' departure, that the dread began to grow on Jeter and Eyer. And during the day they labored like Trojans at their work, as though to forget it.

The world had begun its grim wait for the return of Kress.

They waited all that day ... and the next ... and the next!

Then telegraph and radio, at the suggestion of Jeter, instructed the entire civilized world to turn its eyes skyward to watch for the return of Kress.

The world obeyed that day ... and the next ... and the next!

But Kress did not return; nor, so far as the world knew, did any or all of his great airplane.

The world itself began to have a feeling of dread--that grew.

CHAPTER II

The Ghostly Columns

Franz Kress had been gone a week, when all the world knew that he couldn't possibly have stayed aloft that length of time. Yet no word was received from him, no report received from any part of the world that he had returned. Various islands which he might have reached were scoured for traces of him. The lighter vessels of most of the navies of the world joined in the search to no avail. Kress had merely mounted into the sky and vanished.

The world's last word from him had been a few words on the radio-telephone:

"Have reached sixty thousand feet and--"

There the message had ended, as though the speaker, eleven miles above the earth, had been strangled. Yet he didn't drop, as far as anybody in the world knew.

Lucian Jeter and Tema Eyer worked harder than ever, remembering the promise they had made Kress at his take-off. Whatever had happened to him, he seemingly in part had anticipated. And now the partners would go up, too, seeking information--perhaps to vanish as Kress had vanished. They were not afraid. They shared the world's feeling of dread, but they were not afraid. Of course death would end their labors, but there were many scientists in the world to take up where they might leave off.

There were, for example, Sitsumi of Japan, rumored discoverer of a substance capable of bending light rays about itself to render itself invisible; Wang Li, Liao Wu, Yung Chan, of China--three who had degrees from the world's greatest universities and had added miraculously to the store of knowledge by their own inspired research. These three were patriotically eager to bring China back to her rightful place as the leader in scientific research--a place she had not held for a thousand years. It was generally agreed among scientists that the three would shortly outstrip all their contemporaries.

As Jeter thought of these four men, Orientals all, it suddenly occurred to him to communicate with them. He talked it over with Eyer and decided to send carefully worded cables to all four.

In a few hours he received answers to them:

From Japan: "Sitsumi does not care to communicate." There was a world of cold hostility in the words, Jeter thought, and Eyer agreed with him.

From China came the strangest message of all:

"Wang, Liao and Yung have been cut off from world for past four months, conducting confidential research in Gobi laboratories. Impossible to communicate because area in which laboratories situated in Japanese hands and surrounded by cordon of guards."

Jeter and Eyer stared at each other when the cable had been read and digested.

"Queer, isn't it?" said Eyer.

Jeter didn't answer. That preoccupied expression was on his face, that distant look which no man could erase from his face by any interruption until Jeter had finished his train of thought.

"Queer," thought Jeter, "that Sitsumi should be so snooty and the three Chinese totally unavailable."

* * * * *

There were many strange things happening lately, too, and the queer things kept on happening, and in ever-increasing numbers, during the second week of Kress' impossible absence in the stratosphere. Or was he there? Had he ever reached it? Had he--Jeter and Eyer had noticed his utter gloom at the take-off--merely, climbed out of sight of the Earth and then slanted down to a dive into the ocean? Maybe he was a suicide. But some bits of wreckage of his plane had many unsinkable parts about it--the parachute ball for instance.

No, the solemn fact remained that Kress had simply flown up and hadn't come down again. It would have sounded silly and absurd if it hadn't been so serious.

And strange stories were seeping into the press of the world.

Out in Wyoming a cattleman had driven a herd of prime steers into the round-up corral at night. Next morning not one of the steers could be found. No tracks led away from the corral. The gates were closed, exactly as they had been left the night before. There had been no cowboys watching the steers, for the corral had always been strong enough to hold the most rambunctious.

The tale of the missing steers hit the headlines, but so far nobody had thought of this disappearance in connection with Kress'. How could any one? Steers and scientists didn't go together. But it still was strange.

At least so Jeter thought. His mind worked with this and other strange happenings even as he and Eyer worked at top speed.

A young fellow in Arizona told a yarn of wandering about the crater of a meteor which had fallen on the desert thousands of years before. The place wasn't important nor did it seem to have anything to do with the crater or meteors--but the young fellow reported that he had seen a faded white column of light, like the beam of a great searchlight, reaching up into the sky from somewhere on the desert.

When people became amazed at his story he added to it. There had been five columns of light instead of one. The one he had first mentioned had touched the Earth, or had shot up from the Earth, within several miles of his point of vantage. A second glowed off to the northwest, a third to the southwest, a fourth to the southeast, the fifth to the northeast. The first one seemed to "center" the other four--they might have been the five legs of a table, according to their arrangement....

Arrangement! Jeter wondered how that word had happened to come to him.

* * * * *

The story of the fellow who had seen the columns of light might have been believed if he had stuck to his first yarn of seeing but one. But when he mentioned five ... well, he didn't have any too good a reputation for veracity and wasn't regarded as being overly bright. Besides, he had stated that the thickness of the columns of light seemed to be the same from the ground as far as his eyes could follow them upward. Everybody knew that a searchlight's beams spread out a bit.

"I wonder," thought Jeter, "why the kid didn't say he saw those five columns move--like a five-legged animal, walking."

Silly, of course, but behind the silliness of the thought Jeter thought there might be something of interest, something on which to work.

The Jeter-Eyer space ship still was not finished--though almost--when the world moved into the third week since the disappearance of Franz Kress.

An Indian in the Southwest had reported seeing one of those columns of light. However, this merited just a line on about page sixteen, even of the newspaper closest to the spot where the redskin had seen the column.

"Eyer," said Jeter at last, "we've got to start digging into newspaper stories, especially into stories which deal with unusually queer happenings throughout the world. I've a hunch that the keys to Kress' disappearance may be found in some of them, or a combination of a great many of them."

"How do you mean, Lucian?"

"Don't you notice that all this queer stuff has been happening since Kress left? It sounds silly, perhaps, but I feel sure that the disappearance of those steers in Wyoming, the story the boy told about the columns of light--yes, all five of them!--and the Indian's partial confirmation of it, are all tied up together with the disappearance of Kress."

* * * * *

Eyer started to grin his disbelief, but a look at his partner's tense face stopped him.

"What could want all those steers, Lucian?" said Eyer softly. "I can't think of anything or anybody disposing of such a bunch on such short notice, except a marching army, a marching column of soldier ants, or all the world's buzzards gathered together at one place. In any case the animals themselves would have created a fuss, would have kicked up so much noise that somebody would have heard. But this story of the steers seems to suggest, or say right out loud--though I know you can't believe everything in the newspapers--that the steers vanished in utter silence."

"Doesn't it also seem funny to you," went on Jeter, "that the vanishing of the herd wasn't discovered until next morning? I've read enough Western stuff to know that a herd always makes noise. Yes, even at night. The cowhands wouldn't have lost a wink of sleep over that. But, listen, Tema, suppose you lived in New York City near some busy intersection which was always noisy, even after midnight--and all the noise suddenly stopped. Would you sleep right on through it?"

"No, I'd wake up--unless I were drunk or doped."

"Yet nobody seems to have wakened at that ranch when--and it must have happened--the herd stopped making any noise whatever. The utter silence should have wakened seasoned cowhands. It didn't. Why? What happened to them that they slept so soundly they heard nothing?"

Eyer did not answer. It wasn't the first time he had been called upon to hear Jeter think out loud.

"It all ties up somehow," repeated Jeter, "and I intend to find out how."

But he didn't find out. Strange stories kept appearing. The three Chinese scientists still had not communicated with the outside world. The chap out in Arizona had now so elaborated on his yarn that nobody believed him and the public lost interest--all save Jeter, who was on the trail of a queer idea.

Nothing happened however until near the end of the third week after Kress' disappearance.

Then, out of a clear sky almost, Kress came back.

He came down by parachute, without the ball in which he should have sealed himself. His return caused plenty of comment. There was good reason. He had been gone the impossibly long period of three weeks.

He was dead--but had been for less than seventy-two hours!

His body was frozen solid.

It landed on the roof of the Jeter-Eyer laboratory; had he been alive he couldn't possibly have maneuvered his chute to land him on such a small place.

The partners stared at each other. It seemed strange to them indeed that Kress should have come back to land on the roof of the two who had promised to follow him into the stratosphere if he didn't return.

Very strange indeed.

He had returned, though, releasing Jeter and Eyer from their promise. Strangely enough that fact made them all the more determined to go. And while the newspaper reporters went wild over Kress' return, the partners started making additional plans.

CHAPTER III

Strange Levitation

"In two days we'll be ready, Tema," said Lucian Jeter quietly. "And make no mistake about it; when we take off for the stratosphere we're going to encounter strange things. Nobody can tell me that Kress' plane actually flew three weeks! And where did it come down? Why didn't Kress use the parachute ball? Where is it? I'll wager we'll find answers to plenty of those questions--if we live!"

"If we live?" repeated Eyer. "You mean--?"

"You know what happened to Kress? Or rather you know the result of what happened to him?"

"Sure."

"Why should we be immune? I tell you, Eyer, we're on the eve of something colossal, awe-inspiring--perhaps catastrophic."

Eyer grinned. Jeter grinned back at him. If they knew they flew inescapably to death they still would have grinned. They had plenty of courage.

"We'd better go into town for a meeting with newspaper people," went on Jeter. "You know how things go in the news; there are probably plenty of stories which for one reason or another have not been published. Maybe the law has clamped down on some of them. I've a feeling that if everything were told, the whole world would be frightened stiff. And you notice how quickly the papers finished with the Kress' thing."

Eyer knew, all right. The papers had broken the story of the return in flaming scareheads. Then the thing had come to a full stop. It was significant that no real satisfactory explanation had been offered by any one. The papers had, on their own initiative, tried to communicate with Sitsumi, and the three Chinese scientists, and had failed all around. Sitsumi did not answer, denied himself to representatives of the American press in Japan, and crawled into an impenetrable Oriental shell. The three Chinese could not answer, according to advices from Peking, because they could not be located.

Jeter called the publisher of the leading newspaper for a conference.

"Strange that you should have called just now," said the publisher, "for I was on the point of calling you and Eyer and inviting you to a conference to be held this evening at my office in Manhattan."

"What's the purpose of your conference? Who will attend?"

"I--I--well, let us say I had hoped to make you and Eyer available to all interviewers on the eve of your flight into the stratosphere."

Jeter hesitated, realizing that the publisher did not wish to tell everything over the telephone.

"We'll be right along, sir," he said.

* * * * *

It took an hour for them to reach the publisher's office. Wires had plainly been pulled, too, for a motorcycle escort joined them at the Queensboro Bridge and led them, sirens screaming, to their meeting with George Hadley, the publisher.

They looked at each other in surprise when they were admitted to the meeting.

Hadley's huge offices were packed. The mayor was there, the police commissioner, the assistant to the head of Federal Secret Service. The State Governor had sent a representative. All the newspapers had their most famous men sitting in. Right in this one big room was represented almost the entire public opinion of the United States. American representatives of foreign newspapers were there. And there wasn't a smile on a single face.

It was beginning to be borne in upon everybody that the Western Hemisphere was in the grip of a strange unearthly malady--almost an other-earthly malady, but what was it?

Hadley nodded to the two scientists and they took the seats he indicated.

Hadley cleared his throat and spoke.

"We have here people who represent the press of the world," he said. "We have men who control billions in money. I don't know how many of you have thought along the same lines as I have, but I feel that after I have finished speaking most of you will. First, there are certain news stories which, for reasons of policy, never reach the pages of our papers. I shall now tell you some of them...."

The whole crowd shifted slightly in its chairs. There was a strained leaning forward. Grave faces went whiter as they anticipated gripping announcements.

"All the strange things have not been happening in the United States, gentlemen," said Hadley. "That young fellow who reported seeing the columns of light in Arizona--you remember?--"

There was a chorus of nods.

"He probably told the exact truth, as far as he knew it. But it isn't only in Arizona that it has been seen--those columns I mean. Only there is just one column--not five. It has since been reported in Nepal and Bhutan, in Egypt and Morocco and a dozen other places. But in the cases of such stories emanating from foreign countries, a congress of publishers has withheld the facts, not because of their strangeness but because of the effect they might have on the public sanity. In Nepal, for example, the column of light rested for a moment on an ancient temple, and when the light vanished the temple also had vanished, with everybody in it at the time for worship! Rumor had it that some of the worshipers were later found and identified. They appear to have been scattered over half of Nepal--and every last one was smashed almost to a pulp, as though the body had been dropped from an enormous height."

A concerted gasp raced around the assemblage. Then silence again, while the pale-faced Hadley went on with his unbelievable story.

* * * * *

"A mad story comes from the heart of the terai, in India. I don't know what importance to give this story since the only witnesses to the phenomenon were ignorant natives. But the column of light played into the terai--and tigers, huge snakes, buffalo and even elephants rose bodily over the treetops and vanished. They started up slowly--then disappeared with the speed of light."

"Were crushed animals later found in the jungle?" asked Jeter quietly.

Hadley turned his somber eyes on the questioner. Every white face, every fearful eye, also turned toward Jeter.

And Hadley nodded.

"It's too much to be coincidence," he said. "The crushed and broken bodies in Nepal and India--of course they aren't so far apart but that natives in either place might have heard the story from the other--but I am inclined to believe in the inner truth of the stories in each case."

Hadley turned to the two scientists. There were other scientists present, but the fact that Jeter and Eyer, who were so soon to follow Kress into the stratosphere--and eternity?--held the places of honor near the desk of the spokesman, was significant.

"What do you gentlemen think?" asked Hadley quietly.

"There is undoubtedly some connection between the two happenings," said Jeter. "I think Eyer and myself will be able to make some report on the matter soon. We will, take off for the stratosphere day after to-morrow."

"Then you think the same thing I do?" said Hadley. "If that is so, can't you start to-morrow? God knows what may happen if we delay longer--though what two of you can do against something which appears to blanket the earth, and strikes from the heavens, I don't know. And yet, the fate of your country may be in your hands."

"We realize that," said Jeter, while Eyer nodded.

Hadley opened his mouth to make some other observation, then closed it again, tightly, as a horrible thing happened.

The conference was being held on the tenth floor of the Hadley building. And just as Hadley started to speak the whole building began to shake, to tremble as with the ague. Jeter turned his eyes on the others, to see their faces blurred by the vibration of the entire building.

Swiftly then he looked toward the windows of the big room.

Outside the south windows he witnessed an unbelievable thing. Out there was a twelve-story building, and its lighted windows were moving--not to right or left, but straight up! The movement gave the same impression which passing windows give to one in an elevator. Either that other building was rising straight into the air, or the Hadley building was sinking into the Earth.

* * * * *

"Quick, Hadley!" yelled Jeter. "To the roof the fastest way possible!"

Even as Jeter spoke every last light in the building across the way went out. Jeter knew then that it was the other building that was moving--and that electrical connection with the earth had been severed.

Hadley led the way to the roof, four stories above. Fortunately this was an old building and they didn't have to wait to travel a hundred floors or so. The whole conference followed at the heels of Hadley, Jeter and Eyer.

They reached the roof at top speed.

They were first conscious of the cries of despair, of disbelief, of horror which rose from the street canyons below them. But they forgot these the next instant at what they saw.

The Vandercook building, the twelve-story building whose lights Jeter had seen moving, was rising bodily, straight out of the well which had been built around it. From the building came shrieks and cries of mortal terror. Even as the conference froze to horrified immobility, many men and women stepped to the ledges of those darkened windows and plunged out in their fear.

"God!" said Hadley.

"It's just as well," said Jeter in a far-away voice, "they haven't a chance anyway!"

"I know," replied Hadley. "God, Jeter, isn't there something we can do?"

"I hope to find something," said Jeter. "But just now I'm afraid we are helpless."

The Vandercook building continued to rise. It did not totter; it simply rose in its entirety, leaving the gaping hole into which, decades ago, it had been built. It rose straight into the sky, apparently of its own volition. No rays of light, no supernatural agencies could be seen or fancied. The utterly impossible was happening. A building was a-wing.

Jeter and Eyer looked at each other with protruding eyes.

* * * * *

Then they looked back at the Vandercook, whose base now was on a level with the roof of the Hadley building.

"See?" said Hadley. "Not so much as a brick falls from the foundation. It's--it's--ghastly."

Jeter would never forget the screams of mortal terror which came from the lips of the doomed who had been working late in the Vandercook building--for, horror piled upon horror, those who had sought to escape calamity did not fall to Earth at all, but, at the same speed of the rising building, traveled skyward with it, human flies outside those leering dark windows.

Then, free of New York's skyline, the flying building was gone with a rush. A thousand feet above New York's tallest building, the Vandercook changed direction and moved directly into the west.

The conference watched it go....

"Commissioner," Jeter yelled at the police chief of Manhattan, "get word out at once for all lights to be put out in the city! Hurry! Radio would be fastest."

In ten minutes Manhattan was a darkened, silent city ... and now the conference could see why Jeter had asked for all lights to be extinguished.

Five thousand feet aloft, directly over the Hudson River, the Vandercook building now hung motionless--and all eyes saw the thin column of light. It came down from the dark skies from a vast distance, widening to encompass the top of the Vandercook building.

The Vandercook building might almost have been a mouse caught in the talons of some unbelievable night-hawk.

As though some intellect had just realized the significance of New York's sudden darkness; as though that intellect had realized that the column was ordinarily invisible because of Manhattan's brilliant incandescents, and now was visible in the darkness--the column of light snapped out....

"God Almighty! May the Lord of Hosts save the world from destruction!"

From New York's canyons, from the roof of the Hadley building, came the great composite prayer.

A whistling shriek, growing second by second into enormous proportions, came out of the west, above the Hudson.

CHAPTER IV

Frantic Scheming

There was no mistaking the meaning of that whistling shriek. Whatever agency had held the Vandercook building aloft had now released its uncanny grip on the building, and thousands of tons of brick and mortar, of stone and steel, were plunging down in a mass from five thousand feet above the Hudson. The same force had also released the ill-fated men and women who had been carried aloft with the building. And there must have been hundreds of people inside side the building.

It fell as one piece, that great building. It didn't topple until it had almost reached the river and its shrieking plunge became meteor-like, the sound of its fall monstrous beyond imagining. The conference above the Hadley building fancied they could feel the outward rush of air displaced by the falling monster--and drew back in fear from the edge of the roof.

The Vandercook struck the surface of the Hudson and an uprush of geysering water for a few seconds blotted the great building from view. Then all Manhattan seemed to shudder. Most of it was perhaps fancy, but thousands of frightened Manhattanites saw that fall, heard the whistling, and felt the trembling of immovable Manhattan.

The great columns of water fell back into the turbulent Hudson which had received the plunging building. Not so much as a wooden desk showed above the surface as far as any one could see from shore. Not a soul had been saved. Shrieks of the doomed had never stopped from the moment the Vandercook building had started its mad journey aloft.

Jeter whirled on Hadley.

"Will you see that all my suggestions are carried out, Hadley?" he demanded.

Hadley, face gray as ashes, nodded.

From Manhattan rose the long abysmal wailing of a populace just finding its voice of fear after a stunning, numbing catastrophe.

"I'll do whatever you say, Jeter," said Hadley. "We all agreed before the arrival of Eyer and yourself that your advice would be followed if you chose to give any."

"Then listen," said Jeter, while Eyer stood quietly at his elbow, missing nothing. "Advise the people of New York to quit the city as quietly and in as orderly a manner as possible. Let the police commissioner look after that. Then get word to the leading aviation authorities, promoters, and fliers and have them get to our Mineola laboratory as fast as possible. We've kept much of the detail of construction of our space-ship secret, for obvious reasons. But the time has come to forget personal aggrandizement and the world must know all we have learned by our labor and research. Then see that every manufacturing agency, capable of even a little of what it will take for the program, is drafted to the work--by Federal statute if necessary--and turn out copies of our plane as quickly as God will let you."

* * * * *

Hadley's eyes were bulging. So were those of the others who had crowded close to listen. They seemed to think Jeter had taken leave of his senses, and yet--all had seen the Vandercook building perform the utterly impossible.

Hadley nodded.

"What do you want with the filers and others at your laboratory?"

"To listen to the details of construction of our space ship. Eyer will hold a couple of classes to explain everything. Then, when we've made things as clear as possible, Eyer and I will take off and get up to do our best to counteract the--whatever it is--that seems to be ruling the stratosphere. We'll do everything possible to hold the influences in check until you can send up other space ships to our assistance."

Hadley stared.

"You speak as though you expected to be up for a long time. Planes like yours aren't made overnight."

"Planes like ours must be made almost overnight--and have you forgotten that Kress was gone for three weeks, and yet had been dead but seventy-two hours when he landed on our roof? Incidentally, Hadley, that fall of his was guided by something or someone. He didn't fall on our roof by chance. He was dropped there, as a challenge to us!"

"That means?" said Hadley hoarsely.

"That everything we do is known to the intelligence of the stratosphere! That every move we make is watched!"

"God!" said Hadley.

Then Hadley straightened. His jaws became firm, his eyes lost their fear. He was like a good soldier receiving orders.

"All the power of the press will be massed to get the country to back your suggestions, Jeter. They seem good to me. Now get back to your ship and leave everything to me. Suppose you do encounter some intelligence in the stratosphere? How will you combat it, especially if it proves inimical--which to-night's horror would seem to prove?"

Jeter shrugged.

"We'll take such armament as we have. We have several drums of a deadly volatile gas. We have guns of great power, hurling projectiles of great velocity; but I feel all of that will be more or less useless. The intelligence up there--well, it knows everything we know and far more besides, for do any of us know how to strike at the earth from the stratosphere? Therefore our only weapons must be our own intelligence--at least that will be the program for Eyer and me. Later, when your planes which are yet to be built follow us up the sky, perhaps they will be better armed. I hope to be able to communicate information somehow, relative to whatever we find."

Hadley thrust out his hand.

"Good luck," he said simply.

* * * * *

Then he was gone and Jeter and Eyer were dropping swiftly down in the elevator to the street--to find that the streets of Manhattan had gone mad. The ban on electric lights had been lifted, and the faces of fear-ridden men and women were ghastly in the brilliance of thousands of lights. Traffic accidents were happening on every corner, at every intersection, and there were all too few police to manage traffic.

However, a motorcycle squad was ready to lead the way through the press for Eyer and Jeter--two grim-faced men now, who dared not look at each other, because each feared to show his abysmal fear to the other.

Automobiles raced past on either side of them driven by crazy men and hysterical women.

"Queensboro Bridge will be packed tight as a drum," said Eyer quietly.

Jeter didn't seem to hear. Eyer talked on softly, unbothered by Jeter's silence, knowing that Jeter wouldn't hear a word, that his partner had drawn into himself and was even now, perhaps, visualizing what they might encounter in the stratosphere. Eyer talked to give shape to his own thoughts.

A world gone mad, a world that fled from the menace which hung over Manhattan.... Jeter hoped that the calm brains of men like Hadley would at least be able to quiet the populace somewhat, else many of them would be self-destroyed, as men and women destroy one another in rushes for the exits during great theater fire alarms.

Fast as they traveled, some of the foremost airmen of the adjoining country had reached Mineola ahead of them. They understood that many of them had arrived by plane in obedience to word broadcast by Hadley. Hadley was doing his bit with a vengeance.

The partners reached their laboratory.

Their head servant met them at the door.

"A Mr. Hadley frantically telephoning, sir," he said to Jeter.

Jeter listened to Hadley's words--which were not so frantic now, as though Hadley had been numbed by the awful happenings.

"The new bridge between Manhattan and Jersey," said Hadley, "has just been lifted by whatever the unearthly force is. It was pulled up from its very foundations. It was crowded with cars as people fled from New York--and cars and people were lifted with the bridge. Awful irony was in the rest of the event. The great bridge was simply turned, along its entire length--which remained intact during the miracle--until it was parallel with the river and directly above midstream. Then it was dropped into the water."

"No telling how many lives were lost?" asked Jeter.

"No, and hundreds and thousands of lives are being lost every moment now. Frantic thousands are swamping boats of all sizes in their craze to get away. Dozens of overloaded vessels have capsized and the surface of the river is alive with doomed people, fighting the water and one another...."

* * * * *

Jeter clicked up the receiver on the horror, knowing there was nothing he could do. There would be no end to the loss of life until some measure of sanity had been argued into crazed humanity.

All the time he kept wondering.

What was doing all this awful business? He surmised that some anti-gravitational agency was responsible for the levitation of the Vandercook building, but what sort of intelligence was directing it? Was the intelligence human? Bestial? Maniacal? Or was it something from Outside? Jeter did not think the latter could be considered. He didn't believe that any planet, possibly inhabited, was close enough to make a visit possible. At any rate, he felt that there should be some sort of warning. He held to the belief that the whole thing was caused by human, and earthly, intelligence.

But why? The world was at peace. And yet....

Thousands of lives had been snuffed out, a twelve-story building had leaped five thousand feet into the air, and the world's biggest bridge had turned upstream as though turning its back against the mad traffic it had at last been called upon to bear.

Eyer was going over their plane with the visitors, men of intellect who were taking notes at top speed, men who knew planes and were quick to grasp new appliances.

"Have any of you got the whole story now?" Eyer asked.

A half dozen men nodded.

"Then pass your knowledge on to the others. Jeter and I must get ready to be off. Every minute we delay costs untold numbers of lives."

Willing hands rolled their ship out to their own private runway, while Jeter and Eyer made last minute preparations. There was the matter of food, of oxygen necessary so far above the Earth, of clothing. All had been provided for and their last duties were largely those of checking and rechecking, to make sure no fatal errors in judgment had been made.

Eyer was to fly the ship in the beginning.

A small crowd watched as the partners, white of face now in the last minutes of their stay on Earth--which they might never touch again in life--climbed into their cabin, which was capable of being sealed against the cold of the heights and the lack of breathable oxygen.

Nobody smiled at them, for the world had stopped smiling.

Nobody waved at them, for a wave would have been frivolous.

Nobody cheered or even shouted--but the two knew that the best wishes, the very hopes for life, of all the land, went with them into the ghastly unknown.

CHAPTER V

Into the Void

Their watches and the clock in the plane were synchronized with Hadley's time, which was Eastern Standard, and as soon as the plane had reached eight thousand feet altitude, Jeter spoke into the radiophone and arranged for a connection with the office of Hadley.

Hadley himself soon spoke into Jeter's ear.

"Yes, Jeter?"

"See that someone is always at your radiophone to listen to us. I'll keep you informed of developments as long as possible. Everything is running like clockwork so far. How is it with you?"

"Two additional buildings, older buildings of the city, have been lifted some hundreds of feet above ground level, then dropped back upon their own foundations, to be broken apart. Many lives lost despite the fact that the city will be deserted within a matter of hours. It seems that the--shall we say enemy?--is concentrating only on old buildings."

"Perhaps they wish to preserve the new ones," said Jeter quietly.

"What? Why?"

"For their own use, perhaps; who knows? Keep me informed of every eventuality. If the center of force which seems to be causing all this havoc shifts in any direction, advise us at once."

"All right, Jeter."

Jeter broke the connection temporarily. Hadley could get him at any moment. A buzzer would sound inside the almost noiseless cabin when anyone wished to contact him over the radiophone.

Eyer was concentrating on the controls. The plane was climbing in great sweeping spirals. Its speed was a hundred and fifty miles an hour. Their air speed indicator was capable of registering eight hundred miles an hour. They hoped to attain that speed and more, flying on an even keel above ninety thousand feet.

Both Eyer and Jeter were perfect navigators. If, as they hoped, they could reach ninety thousand or more, they could cross the whole United States in four hours or less. They could quarter the country, winged bloodhounds of space, seeking their quarry.

Jeter studied the sky above them through their special telescopes, seeking some hint of the location of the point of departure of that devastating column of light. He could think of no ray that would nullify gravitation--yet that column of light had been the visual manifestation that the thing had somehow been brought about.

If this were true, was the enemy vulnerable? Was his base of attack capable of being destroyed or crippled if anything happened to the column of light? There was no way of knowing--yet. A search of the sky above Manhattan failed to disclose any visible substance from which the light beam might emanate. That seemed to indicate some unbelievable height. Yet, Kress must have reached that base. Else why had he been destroyed and sent back to Jeter and Eyer as a challenge?

* * * * *

Jeter's mind went back to Kress. Frozen solid ... but that could have been caused by his downward plunge through space. And what had happened to Kress' plane? No word had been received concerning it up to the time of the Jeter-Eyer departure. Had the "enemy" taken possession of it?

The whole thing seemed absurd. Nobody knew better than Jeter that he was working literally and figuratively in the dark. He was doing little better than guessing. He felt sure of but one thing, that the agency which was wreaking the havoc was a human one, and he was perfectly willing to match his wits and Eyer's against any human intelligence.

Jeter slipped into the cushioned seat beside Eyer.

The altimeter registered fifteen thousand feet. New York was just a blur against the abysmal darkness under their careening wings.

"You've never ventured an opinion, Tema," said Jeter softly, "even to me."

Eyer grinned.

"Who knows?" he said. "It may all be just the very latest thing in aerial attack. If so, what country or coalition of countries harbor designs against our good Uncle Sam? Japan? China?"

"How do you explain the Vandercook incident? The bridge thing? The rise and fall of the other skyscrapers?"

"Some substance or ray capable of being controlled and directed. It creates a field, of any size desired, in which gravitation is--well, shall we say erased? Then any solid which is thus made weightless could be lifted by the two good hands of a strong man, or even of a weak one. How does that check with your guessing?"

Jeter shook his head ruefully.

"I've arrived at the same conclusions as yourself, Tema," he said. "I know we're all guessing. I know we're probably climbing off the Earth on a wild-goose chase from which we haven't a chance of returning alive. I know we're a pair of fools to think of matching a few drums of gas and a bunch of popguns against the equipment of an enemy capable of moving mountains--but what else is there to do?"

"Nothing," said Eyer cheerfully, "and I've got a feeling that you and I will manage to acquit ourselves with credit."

The radiophone buzzer sounded.

Hadley was speaking.

"One of the very latest types of battle-wagons," he said, "was steaming this way from the open sea outside the Narrows, ordered here to stand by in case of need, by the Navy Department. She was armed to the minute with the very latest ordnance. She carried a full crew...."

* * * * *

Hadley paused. Jeter could hear him take a deep breath, like a diver preparing to plunge into icy water. Jeter's spine tingled. He felt he guessed in advance what was to come.

Hadley went on.

The world seemed to spin dizzily as Jeter listened. Out of all the madness only one thing loomed which served for the moment to keep Jeter sane. That was the altimeter, which registered twenty-five thousand feet.

"The battle-wagon--the U.S.S. Hueber--was yanked bodily out of the water. It was taken aloft so quickly that it was just a blur. At least this was the way the skipper of a Norwegian steamer, a mile away from the Hueber, described it. The warship simply vanished into the night sky. The exact time was given by the Norwegian. Five minutes before midnight. At that moment nothing was happening in New York City--nothing new, that is."

Hadley paused again.

"Go on, man!" said Jeter hoarsely.

"Twenty minutes later the Hueber was lowered back into the water, practically unharmed. It had all happened so swiftly that the sailors aboard scarcely realized anything had happened. The skipper of the warship radios that the sensation was like a sudden attack of dizziness. One man died of heart failure. He was the only casualty."

Jeter's eyes began to blaze with excitement, as he spoke.

"Now you can tell the world that the thing which causes the havoc Manhattan is experiencing is not supernatural. It is human--and our people have no fear of human enemies."

"But why was not the warship dropped somewhere, as the buildings have been?" asked Hadley.

"Did you ever," replied Jeter, "hear what is described in the best fiction as a burst of ironic laughter? Well, that what the Hueber, as it now stands, or floats, is! But the enemy made a foolish move and will live to regret it bitterly."

"I wish I could share your sudden confidence," said Hadley. "Conditions here, where public morale is concerned, have become more frightful minute by minute since you left."

Jeter severed the connection.

* * * * *

The altimeter said thirty-five thousand feet. They were still spiraling upward. Again Jeter surveyed the sky aloft.

The earth below was a blur, save through the telescopes. The two had reached a height less than a third of what they hoped to attain.

Still they could see nothing up above them. They were almost over the "shaft" of atmosphere through which the Hueber must have been lifted and lowered. Suppose, Jeter thought, they had accidentally flown into that shaft at exactly the wrong moment? It brought a shudder. Still, Jeter's mind went on, if that had happened they would now, in all likelihood, have been right among the enemy--for gravity in that shaft would not have existed for them, either.

But would they have been lowered back to safety as the Hueber and her crew had been?

Believing as he did that the enemy knew everything that transpired within its sphere of influence, Jeter doubted that Eyer and himself would have been so humanely treated.

He had but to remember Kress to feel sure of this.

The altimeter said fifty thousand feet.

CHAPTER VI

Stratosphere Currents

Now the partner-scientists concentrated on the tremendous task of climbing higher than man had ever flown before. Nobody knew how high Kress had gone, for the only information which had come back had been the corpse of the sky pioneer. Jeter and Eyer hoped to land, too, but to be able to tell others, when they did, what had happened to them.

Somehow, away up here, the affairs of the Earth seemed trivial, unreal. What was the raising of an entire skyscraper--in reality so small that from this height it was difficult to pick out the biggest one through the telescope? What mattered a bridge across the Hudson that was really less than the footprint of an ant at this height?

Still, looking at each other, they were able to attain the old perspectives. Down there people like Jeter and Eyer were dying because of something that struck at them from somewhere up here in the blue darkness.

Their faces set grimly. The plane kept up its constant spiraling. Jeter and Eyer flew the ship in relays. Occasionally they secured the controls and allowed the plane to fly on, untended.

"But maybe we'd better not do too much of that," said Jeter dubiously. "I'm sure we are being observed, every foot of altitude we make. I don't care to run into something up here that will wreck us. Right now, Eyer, if we happened to be outside this sealed cabin instead of inside it, we'd die in less time than it takes to tell about it."

All known records for altitude--the only unknown one being Kress'--had now been broken by Jeter and Eyer. They informed Hadley of this fact.

"A week ago you'd have had headlines," came back Hadley. "To-day nobody cares, except that the world looks to you for information about this horror. The enemy is systematically destroying every building in Manhattan which dates back over eight years. Fortunately, save for the occasional die-hard who never believes anything, there are few deaths at the moment. But we're all waiting, holding our breaths, wondering what the next five minutes will bring forth. Is there any news there?"

How strange it seemed--as the altimeter said sixty-one thousand feet--to hear that voice out of the void. For under the plane there was no world at all, save through the telescope. Perhaps when morning came they would be able to see a little. Picard had reported the world to look flat from a little over fifty thousand-feet.

"No news, Hadley," said Jeter. "Except, that our plane behaves perfectly and we are at sixty-one thousand feet. Were it not for our turn and bank indicators, our altimeter and air speed instruments, and our navigational instruments, it would be impossible to tell--by looking at least, though we could tell by our shifting weight--whether we were upside down or right side up, on one wing or on an even keel. It's eery. We wouldn't be able to tell whether we were moving were it not for our air speed indicator. There are no clouds. The motor hum seems to be the only thing here--except ourselves of course--to remind us that we really belong down there with you."

* * * * *

The connection was broken again as Jeter ceased speaking. Things seemed to be marking time on the ground, save for the strange demolitions of the unseen and apparently unknowable enemy. Would they ever really encounter him, or it?

When the sun came out of the east they leveled off at ninety thousand feet. By their reckoning they had scarcely moved in any direction from the spot where they had taken off. Jeter was satisfied that they were almost directly above Mineola. But the world had vanished. The plane rode easily on. Now and again it dipped one wing or the other--and even the veteran aviators felt a thrill of uneasiness. From somewhere up here in this immensity, Franz Kress had dropped to his death. Of course, if it had happened at this height he hadn't lived to suffer.

Or had he? What had been done to him by the--the denizens of the stratosphere?

Jeter sat down beside Eyer. It seemed strange to eat breakfast here, but the sandwiches and hot coffee in a thermos bottle were extremely welcome. They ate in silence, their thoughts busy. When they had made an end, Jeter squared his shoulders. Eyer grinned.

"Well, Lucian," he said, "are we in enemy territory by your calculations? And if so how do you arrive at your conclusions?"

"I'm still guessing, Tema," said Jeter, "but I've a feeling I'm not guessing badly, and.... Yes, we're somewhere within striking distance of the enemy, whatever the enemy is."

"What's the next move?

"We'll systematically cover the sky over an area which blankets New York, Long Island, Jersey City and surrounding territory for a distance of twenty miles. If we're above the enemy, perhaps we can look down upon him. We know he can't be seen from below, perhaps not even from above. If we are below him we'll try to fly into that column of his. What they'll do to us I.... You're not afraid to find out, are you?"

Eyer grinned. Jeter grinned back at him.

"What they'll do to us if we fly into them I'm sure I don't know. I don't think they'll kill our motor. If whoever or whatever controls the light column decides to us prisoners.... Well, we'll hope to have better luck combating them than Kress had."

* * * * *

And so begin that hours-long vigil of quartering the stratosphere over the unmarked area which Jeter had set as a limit. Now and again Hadley spoke to Jeter. Yes, the demolitions were still continuing in Manhattan. Could all telescopes on the ground pick out their space ship? Yes, said Hadley, and a young scientist in New Jersey was constantly watching them. Were they, since sunrise, ever out of his sight? Only when clouds at comparatively low altitudes intervened. However, the sky was unusually clear and it was hoped to keep their plane in sight during the entire day.

"Hadley," Jeter almost whispered, "I'm satisfied we're above the area of force, else we'd have flown into the anti-gravitation field. Get in touch with that Jersey chap by direct personal wire or radiophone if he is equipped with it. See that his watch is set with yours, which is synchronised with ours. Got that?"

"Yes."

"When you've done that give him these instructions: He is never to take his eyes of us for more than a split second at a time--unless someone else takes his place. I doubt if, at this distance, this will work, but it may help us a little. If we become invisible for even the briefest of moments, he is to look at his watch and observe the exact time, even to split seconds. We shall try to follow a certain plan hereafter in quartering the stratosphere, and I shall mark our location on the navigational charts every minute until we hear from this chap, or until we decide nothing is to be accomplished by this trick. Understand?"

"You're hoping that the enemy, while invisible to all eyes, yet has substance...."

"Shut up!" snapped Jeter, but he was glad that Hadley had grasped the idea. It was a slim chance, but such as it was it was worth trying. If the plane were invisible for a time, then it would be proof of some opaque obstruction between the plane and the eye of the beholder on the surface of the Earth. Refraction had to be figured, perhaps. Oh, there were many arguments against it.

The fliers followed the very outer edge of the area above the world they had mapped out as their limit of exploration. This circuit completed, they banked inward, shortening their circuit by about a mile of space. A mile, seen at a distance of ninety thousand feet, would be little indeed.

It was almost midday when they had their first stroke of luck.

The buzzer sounded at the very moment Eyer uttered an ejaculation.

"The Jersey fellow says there is nothing between his lens and your plane to obstruct the view."

"O.K.," retorted Jeter. "At the moment your buzzer sounded our plane suddenly jumped upward. That means an upcurrent of air indicating an obstruction under us. It must however, be invisible."

He severed the connection. His brow was furrowed thoughtfully. He was remembering Sitsumi and his rumored discovery.

They circled back warily. The eyes of both were fixed downward, staring into space. Their jaws were firmly set. Their eyes were narrowed.

And then....

There was that uprush of air again! It appeared to rise from an angle of about sixty degrees. They got the wind against their nose and started a humming dive, feeling in the alien updraft for the obstruction which caused it.

CHAPTER VII

Invisible Globe

The buzzer of their radiophone was sounding, but so intent were they on this phenomenon they were facing, they paid it no heed. Their eyes were alight, their lips in firm straight lines of resolve, as they dived down upon the invisible obstruction--whatever it was--from whose surface the telltale updraft came.

It was Eyer who made the suggestion:

"Let's measure it to see what its plane extent is."

"How?" asked Jeter.

"Measure it by following the wind disturbance. We travel in one direction until we lose it. There is one extremity. In a few minutes we can discover exactly how big the thing is. What do you think it is?"

Jeter shook his head. There was no way of telling.

Jeter nodded agreement to Eyer. Then he spoke into the radiophone, telling Hadley what they had found, to which he could give no name.

"The world awaits in fear and trembling what you will have to report, Jeter," said Hadley. "What if you become unable to report, as Kress did?"

"Don't worry. We will or we won't. If we succeed we'll be back. If we fail, send up the other.... No, perhaps you hadn't better send up the new planes. But I think Eyer and I have a chance to discover the nature of this strange--whatever-it-is. If you can't contact us, delay twenty-four hours before doing anything. I--well, I scarcely know what to tell you to do. We'll just be shooting in the dark until we know what we're in for. You'll have to contain yourself in patience. What did you want with me?"

"Only to tell you of another strange news dispatch. It gives no details. It merely tells of strange activity around Lake Baikal, beyond the Gobi Desert. Queer noises at night, mysterious cordons of Eurasians to keep all investigators back, strange losses of livestock, foodstuffs...."

Jeter severed connection. There was little need to listen further to something which he couldn't explain yet, in any case.

Eyer, at the controls, banked the plane at right angles and flew on. In shortly less than a minute he banked again.

* * * * *

In five minutes he turned to Jeter with a queer expression on his face.

"Well," he said, "what's to do about it? What is it? It seems to be some solid substance approximately a quarter mile square. But it can't be true! A solid substance just hanging in the air at ninety thousand feet! It's beyond all imagining!"

"What man can imagine, man can do," replied Jeter. "A great newspaper editor said that, and we're going to discover now just how true it is."

"What's our next move?"

For a long time the partners, stared into each other's eyes. Each knew exactly what the other thought, exactly what he would propose as a course of action. Jeter heaved a sigh and nodded his head.

"We're as much in the power of the enemy here as we would be there, or anywhere else. We can't discover anything from here. Set the wheels down!"

"We can't tell anything about the condition of the surface of that stuff. We may crack up."

Jeter had to grin.

"Sounds strange, cracking up at ninety thousand feet, doesn't it? Well, hoist your helicopter vanes and drift down as straight as you can--but be sure and keep your motor idling."

Again they exchanged long looks.

"O.K.," said Eyer, as quietly as he would have answered the same order at Roosevelt Field. "Here we go!"

He pressed a button and the helicopters, set into the surface of the single sturdy wing, snapped up their shafts and began to spin, effectually slowing the forward motion of the plane. Eyer fish-tailed her with his rudder to help cut down speed.

"We can't see the surface of the thing at all, Lucian," said Eyer. "I'll simply have to feel for it."

"Well, you've done that before, too. We can manage all right."

Down they dropped. The updraft was now a cushion directly under them. And then their wheels struck something solid. The plane moved forward a few feet--with a strange sickening motion. It was as though the surface of this substance were globular. First one wheel rose, then dipped as the other rose. The plane came to rest on fairly even keel, and the partners, while the motor idled, stared at each other.

"Well?" said Eyer, a trace of a grin on his face.

"If it'll hold the plane it will hold us. Let's slide into our stratosphere suits and climb out. We have to get close to this thing to see what it is."

"Parachutes?" said Eyer.

Jeter nodded.

"It would simplify matters if the thing happened to tilt over and spill us off, I think," said Jeter, matching Eyer's grin with one of his own. "I can't think with any degree of equanimity of plunging ninety thousand feet without a parachute."

"I'm not sure I'd care for it with one," said Eyer.

* * * * *

They were soon in the tight-fitting suits which were customarily used by fliers who climbed above the air levels at which it was impossible for a human being to breathe without a supply of oxygen in a container. Their suits were sealed against cold. Set in their backs were oxygen tanks capable of holding enough oxygen for several hours. Over all this they fastened their parachutes.

Then, using a series of doors in order to conserve the warmth and oxygen inside their cabin, they let themselves out, closing each successive door behind them, until at last they faced the last door--and the grim unknown. They glanced at each other briefly, and Jeter's hand went forth to grasp the mechanism of the last door. Eyer stood at his side. Their eyes met. The door swung open.

They stepped down. The surface of this stratosphere substance was slippery smooth. Now that they stood on its surface they could sense something of its profile. Movement in any direction suggested walking on a huge ball. The queer thing was that they could feel but could not see. It was like walking on air. Their plane appeared to be suspended in midair.

For a moment Jeter had an overpowering desire to grab Eyer, jerk him back to the plane, and take off at top speed. But they couldn't do that, not when the world depended upon them. Had Kress encountered this thing? Perhaps. How must he have felt? He had been alone. These two were moral support for each other. But both were acutely remembering how Kress had come back.

And his plane? They'd perhaps discover what had happened to that too.

Eyer suddenly slipped and fell, as though he had been walking on a carpet which had been jerked from under his feet. From his almost prone position he looked up at Jeter. Jeter dropped to his knees beside him. Their covered hands played over the surface of their discovery, to find it smooth as glass. As though with one thought they placed their heads against it, right ears down, to listen. But the whole vast field seemed to be dead, lifeless. And yet--a solid it was, floating here in space--or just hanging. It seemed to be utterly motionless.

"There should be a way of discovering what this is, and why, and how it is controlled if an intelligence is behind it." Jeter spelled out the words in the sign language they had both learned as boys.

Eyer nodded.

* * * * *

They walked more warily when they had, traveling slowly and hesitantly, gone more than a hundred feet from their plane. They kept it in sight by constantly turning to look back. It was now several feet above them. No telling what might happen to them at any moment, and the plane was an avenue of escape.

They didn't wish to take a chance on stepping off into the stratosphere--and eternity.

"It's like an iceberg of space," said the fingers of Jeter. "But let's go back and look it over to the other side of the plane. We have to keep the plane in sight and work from it as a base. And say, what sort of sensations have you had about this surface we're standing on?"

Jeter could see Eyer's shudder as he asked the question. Slowly the fingers of his partner spelled out the answer.

"I've a feeling of eyes boring into my back. I sense that the substance under us is malignant, inimical. I have the same feeling with every step I take, as though the unseen surface were endowed with arms capable of reaching out and grabbing me."

"I feel it, too," said Jeter's fingers. "But I'm not afraid of fingers in the usual sense. I don't think of hands strangling us, or ripping us to shreds, but of questing--well, call them tentacles, which may clasp us with gentleness even, and absorb us, and annihilate us!"

Now the two faced each other squarely. Now they did not try to hide that their fear was an abysmal feeling, horrible and devastating.

"Let's get back to the plane and take off. We haven't a chance."

They clasped hands again and started running back, their plane their goal. Before they reached it they would change their minds, for they were not ordinarily lacking in courage--but so long as they ran both had the feeling of being pursued by malignant entities which were always just a step behind, but gaining.

They slipped on the smooth surface face and fell sprawling. Each felt, when he fell, that he must rise at once, with all his speed, lest something grasp him and hold him down forever. It was a horrible trapped feeling, and yet....

They had but to look at each other to see that they were free. Nothing gripped their feet to hold them back. Of course the way was slippery, but no more so than an icy surface which one essays in ordinary shoes. What then caused their fear?

* * * * *

The plane, so plainly visible there ahead and above, was like a haven of refuge to them. They panted inside their helmets and their breath misted the glass of their masks. But they stumbled on, making the best speed they could under the circumstances.

Perhaps if they took, off, and regained their courage, returned to normal in surroundings they knew and understood, they could come back and try again, after having heard each other's voices. The silence, the sign manual, the odd, awesome sensations, all combined to rob them of courage. They must get it back if they were to succeed. And they had been away from the plane for almost an hour. Hadley would be waiting for some news.

The plane was twenty yards away--and almost at the same time Eyer and Jeter saw something queer about it. At first it was hard to say just what it was.

They rushed on. They were within ten yards of the plane when a wail of anguish was born--and died--in two soundproof helmets. There was no questioning the fact that the plane had settled into the surface of the field.

The plane was invisible below the tops of the landing wheels, as though the plane were sinking into invisibility, slowly dissolving from the bottom.

"Understand?" Jeter's fingers almost shouted. "Understand why we felt the desire to keep moving? This field is alive, Eyer, and if we stand still it will swallow us just as it is swallowing our plane! Let's get in fast; maybe we can still pull free from the stuff and take off."

They were racing against time and in the heart of each was the feeling that whatever they did, their efforts would be hopeless. Still, the spinning propeller of their plane gave them strength to hope.

They went through the succession of doors as rapidly as they dared. Once in the comfort of their cabin they doffed their stratosphere suits with all possible speed. Jeter was the first free. He jumped to the controls and speeded up the motor. In a matter of seconds it was revving up to a speed which, had it been free, would have pulled the plane along at seven hundred miles an hour at the height at which they were.

But the plane did not move!

* * * * *

Jeter slowed the motor, then started racing it fast, trying to jerk the fuselage free of the imbedded wheels, but they would not be released. Both men realized that the wheels had sunk from sight while they had been delayed coming through the succession of doors--that the plane had sunk until the invisible surface gripped the floor of the fuselage.

Perspiration beaded the faces of both men. Eyer managed a ghastly grin. Jeter's brow was furrowed with frantic thought as he tried to imagine a way out.

"If we could somehow cut our landing gear free," began Jeter, "but--"

"But it's too late, Lucian," said Eyer quietly. "Look at the window."

They both looked.

Countless fingers of shadowy gray substance were undulating up the surface of the window, like pale angleworms or white serpents of many sizes, trying to climb up a pane of glass.

"Well," said Jeter, "here we are! You see? Outside we can see nothing. Inside we begin to see a little, and what good will it do us?"

Eyer grinned. It was as though he lighted a cigarette and nonchalantly blew smoke rings at the ceiling, save that they dared not use up any of their precious oxygen by smoking.

Their fear had left them utterly when it would have been natural for them to be stunned by it.

CHAPTER VIII

Cataclysmic Hunger

Eyer thrust out his hand to cut the motor. Jeter stayed it.

"I've an idea," he said softly; "let it run. We'll learn something more about the sensitiveness of this material."

The motor was cut to idling. The plane scarcely trembled now in the pull of the motor, so firmly was she held in the grip of the shadowy, vague tentacles. A grim sort of silence had settled in the cabin. The faces of the two partners were dead white, but their eyes were fearless. They had come aloft to give their lives if need be. They wouldn't try to get them back now. Besides, what use was there?

Jeter paused for a moment in thought.

Then he began to examine some of their weapons. The only one by which they could fire outside the plane--due to the necessity of keeping the cabin closed to retain oxygen--was the rapid firer on the wing. This could be depressed enough to fire downward at an angle of forty-five degrees. Jeter hesitated for a moment.

He looked at Eyer. Eyer grinned. "It can't bring death to us any sooner," he said. "Let her go!"

Jeter tripped the rapid firer and held it for half a minute, during which time three hundred projectiles, eight inches long by two inches in diameter, were poured into the invisible surface. The bullets simply accomplished nothing. It was almost as though the field had simply opened its mouth to catch thrown food. There was no movement of the field, no jarring, no vibration. Nor did the plane itself tremble or shake. Jeter had to stop the rapid firer because its base, the plane, was now so firmly fixed that the recoil might kick the gun out of its mount.

Now the partners sat and looked out through the windows of unbreakable glass, watching the work of those tentacular fingers.

"How does it feel, Tema, to be eaten alive?" asked Jeter.

"Have you radiophoned Hadley about what's happening to us?"

"No," replied Jeter. "It would frighten the world half out of its wits. Besides, what can we say has caught us? We don't know."

"And what are we going to do about it?"

* * * * *

"We're going to wait. I've a theory about some of this. We know blamed well that, except for the most miraculous luck, you couldn't have set the plane down on this field without it slipping off again. Well there's only one answer to that: the rubbery resilience of the surface. It must have given a little to hold the plane--and us when we walked on it. What does that mean? Simply that we were seen and the field made usable for us by some intelligence. That intelligence watches us now. It saved our lives for some reason or other. It didn't destroy us when we were afoot out there. It isn't destroying us now. It's swallowing us whole--and for some reason. Why? That we'll have to discover. But I think we can rest easy on one thing. We're not to be killed by this swallowing act, else we'd have been dead before now."

"Have you any idea what this stuff is?"

"Yes, but the idea is so wild and improbable that I'm reluctant to tell you what I guess until I know more. However, if it develops that we are to die in this swallowing act, then I'll give you a tip--and it will probably knock you off your pedestal. But the more I think of it the more certain I am that the whole things is at least a variation of my idea. And the brains behind it, if my guess proves even approximately correct, will be too great for us to win mastery except by some miraculous accident favoring us--and true miracles come but seldom in these days."

"No? What do you call this?"

Jeter shrugged.

With many ports all around the cabin, all fitted with unbreakable glass, it was possible for the partners to see out in all directions. The tentacle fingers had now climbed up to a height sufficient to smother both windows. The fuselage was about half swallowed.

"I can almost hear the stuff sigh inwardly with satisfaction as it takes us in," said Eyer.

"I have the same feeling. There's a peculiar sound about it too; do you hear it?"

They listened. The sound which came into the cabin was such a sound as might have been heard by a man inside a cylinder lying on the bottom of a still pond. A whisper that was less than a whisper--a moving whisper. In it were life and death, and grim terror.

* * * * *

And then--remembering that contact with the propeller would shatter it, Tema cut the switch--the propeller stopped, the motor died, and utter silence, in the midst of an utter absence of vibration, possessed the comfortable little cabin. It was hard to believe. The cabin was a breath of home. It was a home. And it was being swallowed by some substance concerning which Eyer had no ideas at all and Jeter but a growing suspicion.

The plane sank lower and lower. The surface of the field was now almost to the top of the cabin doors. Most of the windows had been erased, but it made no particular difference in the matter of light. Jeter had put out his hand to snap on the lights, but stayed it when he saw that light came through to them.

Moment by moment the mystery of the swallowing deepened. It was like sinking into a snow bank. There was a sensation of smothering, though it was not uncomfortable because the cabin itself was self-sufficient in all respects to maintain life for a long period of time.

It was like sinking slowly into the depths of the sea.

The last port on the sides of the plane was erased. Now the two sat in their chairs and stared up at the ceiling, and at the glass-protected ports there. It was grim business. They almost held their breath as they waited.

At last those blurred tentacles began to creep across the lowest of the ceiling ports. Faster they came, and faster. In a few minutes every port was covered with a film of the weird stuff.

"It may be a foot deep above us," said Jeter. "I don't think we'll be able to tell how thick any bit of the stuff is. The surface of the field may be ten feet above our heads right now. Well, Tema, old son, we're prisoners as surely as though we were locked in a chrome steel vault a thousand feet underground. We can't go anywhere, or come back if we go there. We're prisoners, that's all--and all we can do is wait."

Eyer grinned.

Jeter began nonchalantly to slip off his helmet and goggles. He doffed his flying coat. In a short time the two might have been sitting over liquor and cigars in their own library at Mineola.

"Expecting company?" asked Eyer.

"Most emphatically," replied Jeter. "Company that is an unknown quantity. Company that will be wholly and entirely interesting."

So they waited. They could now feel themselves sinking faster into the substance. They settled on an even keel, however, but more rapidly than before, as though the directing intelligence behind all these had tired of showing them his wonders and was eager to get on with the business of the day.

Eyer happened to look down at one of the ports in the floor of the cabin.

"Good God!" he yelled, "Lucian!"

* * * * *

He was pointing. His face had gone white again. His eyes were bulging. Jeter stared down into the floor ports--and gasped.

"I expected it, but it's a shock just the same, Tema," he said softly. "Get hold of yourself. You'll need all your faculties in a minute or two."

Through the ports they found themselves staring down all of twenty feet upon a milky white globe, set inside the greater, softer globe through which they were passing, like a kernel in a shell.

The plane was oozing through the "rind" which protected the strange globe below against the cold and discomfort of the stratosphere.

"They'd scarcely bring us this far to drop us, would they?" asked Eyer.

He was making a distinct effort to regain control of himself. His voice was normal, his breathing regular--and he had spoken thus to show Jeter that this was so.

"Whether we're to be dropped or lowered is all one to us," he said, "since we can do nothing in either case. Twenty feet of fall wouldn't smash us up much."

"Let's keep our eyes on the ceiling ports and see how this swallowing job is really done."

They alternately looked through the floor ports and the ceiling ports.

Under them the gray mass was crawling backward off the floor ports, leaving them clear. Now all of them were clear. Now the gray stuff began to vanish from the lower ports on either side of the cabin.

"I feel as though we were being digested and cast forth," said Jeter.

The action of the stuff was something like that. It had swallowed them in their entirety and now was disgorging them.

They watched the stuff move off the ports one by one, on either side. The lower ones were free. Then those next above, the gray substance retreating with what seemed to be pouting reluctance. Finally even the topmost ports were clear.

"The drop comes soon," said Eyer.

"Wait, maybe not."

* * * * *

They concentrated on the ceiling ports for a moment, but the clinging stuff did not vanish from them. They turned back to look through the floor ports. Right under them was the milky globe whose surface could easily accommodate their plane. If they had needed further proof of some guiding intelligence behind all this, that cleared space was it. They were being deliberately lowered to a landing place through a portion of the "rind" made soft in some mechanical way to allow the weight of their plane to sink through it.

They looked up again. Great masses of the gray substance still clung to the top of their cabin, like sticky tar. The substance was rubbery and lifelike in its resiliency, its tenacious grasp upon the Jeter-Eyer plane. By this means the plane was lowered to the "ground." Jeter and Eyer watched, fascinated, as the stuff slipped and lost its grip, and slowly retracted to become part of the dome above.

The plane had come through this white roof, bearing its two passengers, and now above them there was no slightest mark to show where they had come forth.

They rested on even keel atop the inner globe which they now could see was attached to the outer globe in countless places.

"I wonder if we dare risk getting out," said Eyer.

"I think so," said Jeter. "Look there!"

A trapdoor, shaped something like the profile of an ordinary milk bottle, was opening in the white globe just outside their plane. Framed in the door was a face. It was a dark face, but it was a human one--and the man's body below that face was dressed as simply, and in almost the same fashion, as were Jeter and Eyer themselves. He wore no oxygen tanks or clothing to keep out the cold.

The partners, lips firmly set, nodded to each other and began to open their doors. Imperturbably the dark man came to meet them.

Still other dark faces emerged from the door.

CHAPTER IX

A Scheme Is Described

The hands of the two wayfarers into the stratosphere dropped to their weapons as the men came through that door which masked the inner mystery of the white globe.

One of the men grinned. There was a threat in his grin--and a promise.

"I wouldn't use my weapons if I were in your place, gentlemen," he said. "Come this way, please. Sitsumi and The Three wish to see you at once."

Jeter and Eyer exchanged glances. Would it do any good to start a fight with these people? They seemed to be unarmed, but there were many of them. And probably there were many more beyond that door. Certainly this strange globe was capable of holding a small army at least.

Jeter shrugged. Eyer answered it with an eloquent gesture--and the two fell in with those who had come to meet them.

"How about our plane?" said Jeter.

"You need concern yourself with it no longer," replied one. "Its final disposal is in the hands of Sitsumi and The Three."

A cold chill ran along Jeter's spine. There was something too final about the guide's calm reply. Both adventurers remembered again, most poignantly, the fate of Kress.

The leaders stepped through the door. A flight of steps led downward.

Several of the swarthy-skinned folk walked behind Jeter and Eyer. There was no gainsaying the fact that they were prisoners.

Jeter and Eyer gasped a little as they looked into the interior of the white globe. It was of unusual extent, Jeter estimated, a complete globe; but this one was bisected by a floor at its center, of some substance that might, for its apparent lightness, have been aluminum. Plainly it was the dwelling place of these strange conquerors of the stratosphere. It might have been a vast room designed as the dwelling place of people accustomed to all sorts of personal comforts.

On the "floor" were several buildings, of the same material as the floor. It remained to be seen what these buildings were for, but Jeter could guess, he believed, with fair accuracy. The large building in the center would be the central control room housing whatever apparatus of any kind was needed in the working of this space ship. There were smaller buildings, most of them conical, looking oddly like beehives, which doubtless housed the denizens of the globe.

* * * * *

The atmosphere was much like that of New York in early autumn. It was of equable temperature. There was no discomfort in walking, no difficulty in breathing. Jeter surmised that at least one of those buildings, perhaps the central one, housed some sort of oxygen renewer. Such a device at this height was naturally essential.

The stairs ended. The prisoners and their guards stopped at floor level.

Jeter paused to look about him. His scientific eyes were studying the construction of the globe. The idea of escape from the predicament into which he and Eyer were plunged would never be out of his head for moment.

"Come along, you!"

Jeter started, stung by the savagery which suddenly edged the voice of the man who had first greeted him. There was contempt in it--and an assumption of personal superiority which galled the independent Jeter.

He grinned a little, looked at Eyer.

"I wonder if we have to take it," he said softly.

"It seems we might expect a little respect, at least," Eyer grinned in answer.

The guard suddenly caught Jeter by the shoulder.

"I said to come along!"

If the man had been intending to provoke a fight he couldn't have gone about it in any better way. Jeter suddenly, without a change of expression, sent a right fist crashing to the fellow's jaw.

"Don't use your gat, Eyer," he called to his partner. "We may kill a key man who may be necessary to our well-being later on. But black eyes and broken noses should be no bar to efficiency."

Without any fuss or hullabaloo, the dozen or so denizens of the globe who had met the partners closed on them. They came on with a rush. Jeter and Eyer stood back to back and slugged. They were young, with youthful joy in battle. They were trained to the minute. As fliers they took pride in their physical condition. They were out-numbered, but it was also a matter of pride with them to demand respect wherever they went. It was also a matter of pride to down as many of the attackers as possible before they themselves were downed.

* * * * *

It became plain that, though the denizens of the globe were armed with knives, they were not to be used. And it didn't seem they would be needed. The fighters were all muscular, well-trained fighters. But for the most part they fought in the manner of Chinese ta chaen, or Japanese ju-jutsu men. They used holds that were bone-breaking and it taxed the pair to the utmost to keep from being maimed by their killing strength.

The swarthy men were men of courage, no doubt about that. They fought with silent ferocity. They blinked when struck, but came back to take yet other blows with the tenacity of so many bulldogs. There was no gainsaying them, it seemed. They were here for the purpose of subduing their visitors and nothing short of death would stop them.

It wasn't courtesy, either, that failure to use knives, for Jeter saw murder looking out of more than one pair of eyes as their two pairs of fists landed on brown faces, smashed noses askew, and started eyes to closing.

"Their leader has them under absolute control--and that's a point for the enemy," Jeter panted to himself, as the strain of battle began to tell on him. "They've been instructed, no matter what we do, to bring us to their master or masters alive."

For a moment he toyed with the idea of drawing his weapon and firing pointblank into the enemy. He knew they would be compelled to take lives to escape--and that the lives of all these people were forfeit anyway because of the havoc which had descended upon New York City.

But he didn't make a move for his weapon. It would be sure death if he did, for the others were armed.

Brown men fell before the smashing of their fists. But the end of the fight was a foregone conclusion. Jeter had a bruised jaw. Eyer's nose was bleeding and one eye was closed when the reception committee finally came to close quarters, smothered them by sheer weight of numbers, and made them prisoners. Jeter's right wrist was manacled to Eyer's left with a pair of ordinary steel handcuffs. Their weapons were taken away from them now.

The leader of the committee, panting, but apparently unconcerned over what had happened, motioned the two men to lead the way. He pointed to the large building in the center of the "floor."

"That way," he said, "and I hope Sitsumi and The Three give us permission to throw you out without parachutes or high altitude suits."

"Pleasant cuss, aren't you?" said Eyer. "I don't think you like us."

The man would have struck Eyer for his grinning levity; but at that moment a door opened in the side of the large building and a man in Oriental robes stood there.

"Bring then here at once, Naka!" he said.

* * * * *

The man called Naka, the leader whom Jeter had first struck, bowed low, with deep respect, to the man in the doorway.

"Yes, O Sitsumi!" he said. As he spoke he sucked in his breath with that snakelike hissing sound which is the acme of politeness, in Japan--"that my humble breath may not blow upon you"--and spread wide his hands. "They are extremely low persons and dared lay hands upon your emissaries."

Eyer grinned again.

"I think," he called, "there transpired what might be called a general laying on of hands by all hands."

"I deeply deplore your inclination to levity, Tema Eyer," said the man in the doorway. "It is not seemly in one whose intelligence entitles him to a place in our counsels."

Eyer looked at Jeter. What was the meaning of Sitsumi's cryptic utterance?

"Bring them in," snapped Sitsumi.

Jeter studied the man with interest. He knew instantly who he was and understood why Sitsumi had refused to answer his radio messages to Japan. He couldn't very well have done so in the circumstances. Here, under the broad dome of Sitsumi was probably the greatest scientific brain of the century. Jeter saw cruelty in his eyes too; ruthlessness, and determination.

The prisoners were marched into the room behind Sitsumi, who stepped aside, looking curiously at Jeter and Eyer as they passed him. Inside the door, pausing only a moment to glance over the big room's appointments, Jeter turned on Sitsumi.

"Just what do you intend doing with us, Sitsumi?" he asked. "I suppose it's useless to ask you, also, what the meaning of all this is?"

"I shall answer both your questions, Jeter," said Sitsumi. "Step this way, please. The Three should hear our conference."

They were conducted into a smaller room. Its floors were covered with skins. There were easy chairs and divans. It might have been their own luxuriously appointed rooms at Mineola. At a long table three men--all Orientals--were deeply immersed in some activity which bent their heads absorbedly over the very center of the table. It might have been a three-sided chess game, by their attitudes.

"Gentlemen!" said Sitsumi.

The three men turned.

"My colleagues, Wang Li, Liao Wu and Yung Chan," Sitsumi introduced them. "Without them our great work would have been impossible."

* * * * *

Here were the three missing Chinese scientists. Jeter and Eyer had seen many pictures of them. Jeter wondered whether their adherence to Sitsumi were voluntary or forced. But it was voluntary, of course. The three brains of these brilliant men could easily have outwitted Sitsumi had they been unwilling to associate themselves with him. The three Orientals bowed.

Jeter and Eyer were bidden to take chairs side by side. The guards drew back a little but never took their eyes off the two. Sitsumi ranged himself beside his colleagues at the table.

"I'll answer your questions now, gentlemen, in the presence of my colleagues so that you shall know that we are together in what we propose. We wish you to join us. The only alternative is ... well, you recall what happened to your countryman, Kress? The same, or a similar fate, will be yours if you don't ally yourselves with us."

Jeter and Eyer exchanged glances.

"Just what are you doing?" asked Jeter. "I've seen some of the results of your activities, but I can see no reason for them. I would pronounce everything you have done so far to be the acts of madmen."

"We are not mad," said Sitsumi. "We are simply a group of people of mixed blood who deplore the barriers of racial prejudice, for one thing. We are advocates of a deliberately contrived super-race, produced by the amalgamation of the best minds and the best bodies of all races. We ourselves are what the world calls Eurasians. In our youth people patronised us. In Asia we were shunned. We were shunned everywhere by both races from which we trace our ancestry. We are not trying to be avenged upon the world because we have been pariahs. We are not so petty. But by striving until we have become the world's four greatest scientists we have proved to our own satisfaction that a mixture of blood is a wholesome thing. This expedition of ours, and its effect so far on New York City, is the result of our years of planning."

"I see no need for wholesale murder. Lecture platforms are open to all creeds, all races...."

Something suggestive of a sneer creased Sitsumi's lips. The Three did not change expression in the least.

* * * * *

"People do not listen to reason. They listen to force. We will use force to make them listen, in the end, to reason--backed in turn by force, if you like. We have settled on New York from which to begin our conquest of the world because it is the world's largest, richest, most representative city. If we control New York we control the wealth of the North American continent, and therefore the continent itself. Our destruction of buildings in New York City serves a twofold purpose. It prepares the inhabitants to listen to us later because, seeing what we are capable of doing, they will be afraid not to. Our efficiency is further shown in our destruction of the old out-of-date buildings, chosen for destruction simply because they are obsolete. The New York City of our schemes will be a magic city...."

"But what is your purpose, in a few words?" insisted Jeter.

"The foundation of a world government; the destruction of the mentally deficient; the scientific production of a mixed race of intellectuals, comparable to, but greater than, that of ancient Greece, which was great because it was a human melting pot."

"How are you going to do it--after you've finished your grandstand plays?" said Eyer.

Sitsumi stared at Eyer, his eyes narrowing. Eyer was making his dislike entirely too plain. Jeter nudged him, but the question had been asked.

"With this space ship--and others which are building," replied Sitsumi. "Haven't you guessed at any of our methods?"

"Yes," said Jeter, "I know you are the rumored inventor of a substance which is invisible because light rays are bent around it instead of passing through, yet the result is as though they actually passed through. I judge that the shell, or skin, of this stratosphere ship is composed of this substance, whose formula of construction is your secret. Light rays passing around it would render it invisible, yet would make the beholding eye seem to see in a straight line as usual, disregarding refraction."

Sitsumi nodded. The Three nodded with him, like puppets. But their eyes were glowingly alive.

"You are right. Are you further interested? If you have no interest in our theories there is little need to pursue our plans further, where you are concerned."

"We are interested, of course," said Jeter. "We are interested in your theories, without committing ourselves to acceptance of them; and we are naturally interested in saving our lives. Let us say then, for the moment, that we do not refuse to join you."

CHAPTER X

How It Came About

"You will have twenty-four hours in which to decide whether to join us," was Sitsumi's ultimatum. "We would not allow you five minutes were it not that our cause would be benefited by the addition of your scientific knowledge."

Sitsumi did not repeat the alternative. Remembering Kress, Jeter and Eyer did not need to ask him. There was but one alternative--death--a particularly horrible one. That Sitsumi and the Three would not hesitate was amply proved. Already they were guilty of the death of thousands. They were in deadly earnest with their scheme for a world government.

Jeter and Eyer were kept shackled together, and were, in addition, chained to the floor of the main room of the white globe with leg irons. Their keys were in the hands of Naka, whose hatred of Jeter for hitting him on the jaw was so malevolent it fairly glowed from his eyes like sparks shot forth.

Food was brought them when asked for. It wasn't easy to partake of it, because their manacled hands had to be moved together, which made it extremely awkward.

Jeter and Eyer set themselves the task of trying to figure some way out in the twenty-four hours of life still left them if they failed. That Hadley, down in New York City, and all the best minds who were cooperating with Jeter and Eyer in their mad effort to avert world catastrophe, would make every effort to come to their assistance by sending up the planes which must even now be nearing completion, they hadn't the slightest doubt.

Would they arrive in time? Even if they did, was there anything they could possibly do to save themselves? Surely this space ship must be vulnerable. Else why did it climb so high into the stratosphere? It was far beyond the reach of ordinary planes. High trajectory projectiles had slight chance of hitting it, even if it were visible. What then was its vulnerability, which this hiding seemed to indicate? They must know within twenty-four hours.

So they sat side by side, watching events unfold. The Three talked mandarin. Eyer, for all his levity, was a man of unusual attainments. He understood mandarin, for one thing--a fact which even Jeter did not know at first. The Chinese never seemed even to consider that either of them might know the tongue. Chinese seldom found foreigners who did comprehend them. In only so much were The Three in the least bit careless.

Eyer strained his ears to hear everything which passed between Sitsumi and the Three. Both men listened to any chance words in English or French on the part of all hands within the globe which might give them a hint.

And in those twenty-four hours the sky-scientists learned much.

* * * * *

They conversed together, when they spoke of important matters which they wished hidden from their captors, out of the corners of their mouths after the method of criminals. They used it with elaborate unconcern. They might have seemed to be simply staring into space at such moments, dreading approaching death perhaps, and simply twiddling their fingers. But by each other every word was clearly heard.

"That last outburst of Sitsumi's explains a lot of the reported activity in the Lake Baikal region, beyond the Gobi," swiftly dropped from Jeter's lips. "The materials which Sitsumi uses in the preparation of his light-ray-bending substance are found near there somehow. And that means that the Japanese guards--which may be Eurasian guards, after what Sitsumi told us--and employees of this unholy crowd, are easily engaged in the preparation of other space ships."

"Does this thing seem to have any armament?" asked Eyer.

Jeter signified negation with a swift movement of his head.

"Their one weapon seems to be the apparatus which causes that ray. You know, the ray which lifts buildings, pulling them up by the roots."

"Have you any idea what it is?"

"Yes. That last stuff of the Three which you translated for me gives me a clue. At first I thought that they had perfected some substance, perhaps with unknown electrical properties, which nullified gravity. But that won't prove out. If the ray simply nullified gravity, the buildings down there, while weightless, would not rise as they did. They might sway if somebody breathed against them. A midget might lift one with his finger; but they wouldn't fly skyward as they did--and do!"

For a moment the partners ceased their whispering and talked together naturally to disarm suspicion. The fact that the space ship and its ruthless denizens still engaged in the awful work of devastation was amply being proved. In the main room it was possible, through the use of telescopes and audiphones--set into the walls so that they were invisible, yet enabled any one in the room to see everything, and hear everything that transpired on the far earth below--to keep close watch on the work of the destroyers. Anything close enough could be seen with the naked eye through the walls of the globe.

* * * * *

Now the space ship was systematically destroying buildings the length and breadth of Manhattan Island. The river-front buildings were destroyed in a single sweep, from north to south, of the ghastly ray. Farther back from the Hudson, however, after the water-front buildings had been reduced to mere piles of rubble, the most beautiful, most modern buildings were left standing.

"Can't you just imagine those beautiful structures filled with the monsters created by the genius of Sitsumi and the Three--and their as yet unknown lieutenants back at Lake Baikal?"

Eyer gritted his teeth. His hands closed atop the table at which they were seated. The knuckles went white with the strain. The lips of both men were white. They realized to the full the dreadful responsibility which they had assumed. They knew how abysmally hopeless was their chance of accomplishing anything. And without some gigantic effort being made, the world as they knew it would be destroyed. In its place would be a race of strange beings, of vengeful hybrids endowed from birth with the will to conquer, or destroy utterly.

"You were speaking of the levitating ray," prompted Eyer with swift change to the sidewise whispering.

"From what you heard I'm sure it is something invented by Liao Wu, Yung Chan and Wang Li. In so much they have an advantage over Sitsumi. I doubt if there is any love lost among them, beyond the fact that they need one another. Sitsumi is master of the substance which bends light rays--and thus is rendered invisible, while the Three are masters of the ray which not only propels this space ship, but is the agency by which buildings are torn up, dropped and destroyed. It's plain to me that this room is the control room of the space ship. The ray is--well, it's as difficult to explain as electricity, and perhaps as simple in its operation. The ray does more than nullify gravity--can be made to reverse gravity! Let's call the ray the gravity inverter for want of a better name. It makes anything it touches literally fall away from the Earth, toward the point whence the ray emanates!"

"And if we were to obtain control of the apparatus which harnesses the ray?"

"We lack the knowledge of the Three for its operation. No, we've got to find some simpler solution in the brief time we have."

* * * * *

At this point the partners had been within the white globe about ten hours and they had learned much about it. The inner globe, for example, maintained an even keel, no matter how the space ship as a whole moved on its rays that seemed like table legs. The gyroscopic principle was used. The inner globe was movable within the outer globe, or rind. If for any reason the space ship listed in one direction or the other, the inner globe, while it rose and fell naturally, remained upright, its floor always level so that, the gyroscope controlling the whole, the central, levitating, ray would always, must always, as it proved, point downward.

Try as they might, the partners could not see how the Three manipulated the ray. They guessed that there were many buttons on the table at which they sat. The table itself was not an ordinary table. What might have been called a fifth leg, squarely under the center of the table, was about three feet square. Through this, Jeter guessed, ran the wires by which they controlled all their activities, machinery to operate which had been installed under the floor in the unseen lower half of the inner globe.

They knew that must remain forever a secret from them.

There was a sudden stir among the Three. Jeter and Eyer turned aside for a moment to peer down upon New York City. They held their breath with horror as they saw the smoking devastation which must have buried thousands of people. The wrecking had been all but complete. Only the finest buildings still stood. Jeter wondered why the falling back of the shattered buildings had not shaken down those which the Sitsumi crowd had not wished to destroy. The repeated shocks must almost have shaken Manhattan Island on its foundations.

They saw what had caused the sudden stiffening of the Three. Sitsumi, busily engaged at something else nearby, quietly approached the Three.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Rescue planes," said Wang Li. "New York City sends six fliers to rescue Jeter and Eyer. New planes. They'll reach us, Sitsumi. We should have thought to destroy all dangerous air ports. A fatal oversight!"

Sitsumi's eyes were grave. He looked at each of the Three in turn.

"God!" said Jeter's whispering lips. "If we could read their minds! If only we could guess what it is they fear, we'd have the secret by which we might destroy them."

"They're vulnerable," said Eyer, "but how?"

"Watch!" said Jeter. "Listen! And here's to those six unknowns coming up to, maybe, get the same dose we're due for! We were closely watched. New York City knows exactly where we vanished in the sky. Those six planes are aiming at us--at a spot in the stratosphere they can't see. And yet, why should Sitsumi and the Three be so fearful? All they have to do is move a half mile in any direction and they'll never find them."

"But to move will interfere with their plans," said Eyer. "Lucian, look at the expressions on their faces! Something tells me they are vulnerable in ways we haven't guessed at. If we knew the secret maybe we could destroy them. We've got to discover their weak spot."

* * * * *

There was a long pause while Jeter and Eyer watched the rescue ships come climbing up the endless stairways of the sky. Then Jeter whispered again, guardedly as usual.

"There seems to be nothing we can do. If our friends are able, by some miracle, to do something, you know what that means to us?"

"It means we're as good as dead no matter what happens," replied Eyer. "But we're only two--and there must be a million buried under the debris in New York City alone. If we can do anything at all...."

There he left it. The partners looked at each other. Each read the right answer in the other's eyes. When the showdown came they'd die as cheerfully as they knew how, hoping to the last to do something for the people who must still hope that, somehow, they would cause this bitter cup of catastrophe to pass from them. And there were thousands upon thousands whose blood cried out for vengeance.

The hours sped as the six planes fled upward. To the ears of the partners, through the audiphones, came the stern roaring of their motors. In their eyes they bulked larger and larger as the time fled away.

The sand in the hour glass was running out. When it was all gone, and the time had come, what could the helpless Jeter and Eyer hope to accomplish?

For an hour they studied the concerned faces of Sitsumi and the Three.

They were fearful of something.

What?

CHAPTER XI

To the Rescue

"Why should we run?" the voice of Sitsumi suddenly rang out in the control room. "Must we admit in the very beginning of our revolution that we are vulnerable? Must we confess the fears to which all humanity is heir? We had not thought ourselves liable to attack, but there still is a way to destroy these upstarts. To your places, everyone! We shall fight these winged upstarts and destroy them!"

The denizens of the space ship were at their stations. Jeter and Eyer could imagine the minions of Sitsumi and the Three, below the floor of the white globe, standing-to on platforms about the unseen engines which gave life and movability to this ship of the stratosphere. How many there were of them there was no way of knowing. They had guessed two hundred. There might have been a thousand. It scarcely mattered.

Sitsumi's face was set in a firm mask. He, of all the "lords of the stratosphere," seemed to possess endless courage. His example fired the three.

"What do you plan?" asked Wang Li.

Jeter and Eyer listened with all their ears.

"We have only one weapon in this unexpected emergency," said Sitsumi quietly. "We cannot direct the ray upward or laterally: it is not so constructed. But we can attack with the space ship itself! And remember that so long as our outer rind remains intact and hard we are invisible to attackers."

Jeter and Eyer exchanged glances.

"If only we could find the way to break or soften that outer rind," said Jeter.

"What can we do?" asked Eyer. "If it is impervious to the cold of these heights; if it is so strong that it is impervious to the tremendous pressure inside the globe--which must be kept at a certain degree to maintain human life--what can we do? We tried bullets. We might as well have used peas and pea-shooters. If our friends try bombs they will still be unsuccessful. If only we could somehow open up the outer rind or soften it, so that our friends could see the inner globe and reach it with their bombs!"

Jeter's face was now dead white. His eyes were aglow with excitement.

"Tema," he whispered, "Tema, that's their vulnerability! That's what they fear! They're scared that the outer rind may be broken--which would spell destruction to the space ship and everybody in it."

"Including us," replied Eyer, "but, anyway--well, what's the odds? We're only two--and with this thing destroyed the nightmare will end. Of course there should be some way to raid the Lake Baikal area and destroy any other ships in the making, besides ferreting out the secret of the invisible substance and the elements of the gravity inverter. If we somehow survive, and this ship is destroyed, that's the next thing to do."

Jeter nodded and signaled Eyer to cease whispering.

* * * * *

They devoted their attention now to the six planes. They were coming up in battle formation. They were in plain view and through the telescopes it could be seen that each was armed with bombs of some kind. Useless against the invisible space ship as matters now stood; but what would those bombs do to the inner globe?

It still lacked several hours of the time allowed in the ultimatum to Jeter and Eyer of Sitsumi and the Three, when the six planes leveled off within a couple of miles of the space ship. They knew about where the stratosphere had swallowed up Jeter and Eyer. Now they were casting about for a sign, like bloodhounds seeking the spoor of an enemy.

Jeter and Eyer held their breaths as they watched. Now and again they stole glances at Sitsumi and the Three, who were watching the six planes with the intensity of eagles preparing to dive.

Naka stepped up close to Jeter.

"When the time comes," he said menacingly, "and it appears that we may be in difficulties with the fools who think to thwart Sitsumi and the Three and rescue you, it shall give me great pleasure to destroy you with your own automatic."

"Pleasant fellow," said Eyer. "Shall I smash him, Lucian?"

Jeter shook his head.

"Our friends out there will look after that, Tema," he said in a natural tone of voice. "I'll bet you two to one they get this ship within an hour. Not that a bet will mean anything, as they'll get us, too!"

"Your friends," said Naka, "will be destroyed. They will not even be given the opportunity you were given. Sitsumi and the Three will waste but little time on them!"

"What," said Jeter calmly "is Sitsumi's hurry? Why is he scared?"

"Scared?" Naka seemed on the point of hitting Jeter for the blasphemy. "Scared? He fears nothing. We'll down your friends long before their motors--"

Sitsumi suddenly turned and looked at Naka. The look in Sitsumi's eyes was murderous, Naka went dead white.

"I think your master believes you talk too much, Naka," said Jeter, but Jeter's eyes were gleaming, too.

As soon as Sitsumi had turned back to his station Jeter's lips began to move.

"See?" he said. "It isn't their machine guns these people fear. It isn't their bombs--it's their motors! I wonder why...."

* * * * *

By now the six planes were flying abreast, in battle formation, almost above the space ship, at perhaps a thousand feet greater elevation. A strange humming sound was traveling through the space ship. The whole inner globe was vibrating, shaking--and vibration was a menace to glass or crystal!

"We've got the answer!" said Jeter. "The outer rind, while capable of being softened--in sections at least, with safety--for special reasons, such as happened when we were 'swallowed,' can be hardened to the point of disruption. It can be shattered, Tema, by vibration! That's why the space ship keeps far above the roar of cities! The humming of countless automobile engines might shatter the rind! God, I hope this is the answer!"

In his mind's eye Eyer could picture it--the outer rind "freezing" solid, and cracking with the thunderous report of snapping ice on a forest lake. No wonder Sitsumi and the Three must destroy the six planes.

"Now!" yelled Sitsumi. "Shift positions! The space ship will be hurled directly at the formation of planes! Wang Li, to the beam controls!"

Wang Li sprang to the table, pressed a button. The humming sound in the space ship grew to mighty proportions. The trembling increased.

Jeter and Eyer kept their eyes glued to the six planes above. Without tilting their noses the six planes seemed to plunge straight down toward the surface of the space ship. Thus the two knew that the space ship was in motion--itself being bodily hurled, as its only present weapon of offense, against the earthling attackers.

A split second--

One of the planes struck the surface solidly and crashed. Instantly its wheels and its motor were caught in the outer rind.

The other five ships scattered wildly, escaping the collision by some sixth sense, or through pure chance.

"Poor devil!" said Jeter. "But his buddies can see his plane and know that it marks the spot where they could conveniently drop their bombs."

Eyer was on the point of nodding when Sitsumi shouted.

"Quickly, Wang Li! Spin the outer shell before the enemy uses the wrecked plane as an aiming point!"

* * * * *

A whirring sound. The plane whirled around as though it were twirled on the end of a string. To the five other pilots it must have seemed that the plane had struck some invisible obstruction, been smashed, and now was whirling away to destruction after a strange, incomprehensible hesitation in the heart of the stratosphere.

"Quickly, you fool!" shouted Sitsumi at Wang Li. "You're napping! You should have got all those planes! And you should have spun the outer globe instantly, before the remaining enemy had a chance to find out our location."

"I can move away a half mile," suggested Wang Li.

"We've got to silence those motors, fool!" yelled Sitsumi. "You know very well that we can't run. Charge them again, and take care this time that you crash into the middle of their formation."

"They're scattered over too great an area. I should wait for them to reform."

"Fool! Fool! Don't you think I know the weakness in my own invention? The proper vibration will destroy us! If the rind is softened we become visible. We dare not wait for them to reform! Attack each plane separately if necessary, and at top speed!"

Jeter began to speak rapidly out of the corner of his mouth. Even Naka's attention was fastened on the five planes and Wang Li's efforts to destroy them.

"Gag Naka!" said Jeter. "The keys! In some way we've got to get to our plane. It's barely possible. If we can start the motor.... Hurry! Now, while the whole outfit is watching our friends out there!"

Eyer rose and reached for Naka with his right hand.

He dared not miss his lunge. He did not. His huge hand fastened in the throat of their keeper. Nobody--neither Sitsumi nor the Three--turned as Naka gasped and struggled. Eyer pulled the man back over the table and, his neck thus within reach of both hands, snapped it as he would have broken the neck of a chicken.

Jeter was already searching the body for the keys. He found them.

Their leg irons were just falling free when Sitsumi turned. Eyer was feeling for the automatics in Naka's belt.

"We won't need them!" yelled Jeter. "There isn't time. Let's go!"

Jeter was away at top speed, almost pulling Eyer off his feet because their hands were still fastened together with the handcuffs.

They were outside on the floor level.

And through many doors denizens of the lower control room, hurried out by the commands of Sitsumi, were racing to head them off. But nothing could stop them. One man got in their way and Eyer's right fist caved in his face with one deadly, devastating blow. They had now reached the stairs.

* * * * *

The space ship was being hurled at the five remaining planes. Even as the two men reached the stairs and started up, another of the dauntless rescuers paid with his life for his courage. Several bombs exploded as his plane struck the space ship, but they caused no damage whatever. The hard outer rind seemed to be impervious to the explosions. Obviously no explosive could destroy the space ship.

"Quickly, Tema," said Jeter. "The rind can be shattered by vibration, and we've got to do it somehow."

"And after that?" panted Eyer.

"Our friends out there can then see the inner globe. They'll drop bombs. They'll smash in the globe and--"

"I know," said Eyer. "Its inhabitants, including us, will start off in all directions through the stratosphere, with great speed, and probably in many pieces."

Jeter laughed. Eyer laughed with him. They didn't fear death, for now they felt they were on the verge of destroying this monster of space.

Their pursuers were following them closely.

Jeter frantically tried to unfasten the handcuffs as they ran. He didn't manage it until the door was almost reached. He left one cuff dangling on his right wrist.

Then, they were through the door.

"Now, Tema," shouted Jeter, "if you believe in God--if you have faith--pray for strength to move this plane!"

"Where?"

"So that its wheels and nose go through this open door! Then it won't travel forward when we start the motor--and our pursuers won't be able to get through to stop us."

"You think of everything, don't you?" There was a grin on Eyer's face. But his eyes were stern. He wasn't belittling their deadly danger. And there was also a chance that Jeter's vibration idea was wrong.

"Those four planes," panted Jeter, as the two tried to get their plane in motion toward the door, "cause, from a distance, through thin air, a slight vibration, varying with their distance from the globe; our plane motor racing and actually in contact with the globe, can set up a tremendous vibration by its great motor speed. If we can vibrate the globe up to its shattering point there's a chance!"

"We can't pull her, Lucian," said Eyer. "I'll do a Horatius at the door. You get in, start the motor, taxi her until the wheels go through. I'll keep the crowd back."

"Right!"

Jeter went through the doors into the plane. In a few seconds the propeller kicked over, hesitated, kicked again. Then the motor coughed, coughed again, and broke into a steady roaring.

CHAPTER XII

High Chaos

The plane moved forward. Its tail swung around. Its wheels headed for the door. They dropped through, into the faces of the foremost pursuers, all of whom were thus effectually blocked off.

The plane was held as in a vise. The propeller vanished in a blur as Jeter let the motor out. It was humming an even, steady note. The doors came open again.

Jeter came out, his eyes glowing.

"We haven't the chance of the proverbial celluloid dog chasing the asbestos cat," he shouted to be heard above the roar of the motor. "But grab your high altitude suit, oxygen container, and parachute, and let's get as far away from this plane as we can. Who knows? When the end comes we may get a break at that!"

They ran until the bulge of the inner globe all but hid the plane from them. They could see only the top wing. They did not go farther because they wished to make sure that the enemy did not dislodge the plane and nullify all their work.

"They won't be able to," said Jeter, "for that motor is pulling against the wheels and holding them so tight against the side of that door that a hundred men couldn't budge the plane. But we can't take chances."

Quickly the partners slipped into their suits, adjusted their oxygen tanks and parachutes. Then Jeter slipped back the elastic sleeve of his suit and motioned Eyer to do the same. The manacles were brought into view again. They looked at each other. Eyer grinned and held out his left hand. Jeter snapped the second cuff to Eyer's wrist.

The act was significant.

Whatever happened to them, would happen to both in equal measure. It was a gesture which needed no words. If they were slain when their friends--if their theory was correct--finally saw the space ship, they would die together. If by some miracle they were hurled into outer space and lived to use their parachutes--well, the discomfort was a small price to pay to stay together.

Now they devoted all their attention to their own situation. Four planes still spun warily above the space ship. Wang Li was patently trying with all his might to get all four of them before the Jeter-Eyer plane, by shattering the rind, disclosed the inner core to the bombs of the remaining planes.

"Lucian!" said the fingers of Eyer. "Can you tell whether anything is happening to the rind?"

Jeter hesitated for a long time. There was a distinct and almost nauseating vibration throughout all the space ship. And was there not something happening to the rind over a wide area, directly above the Jeter-Eyer plane?

They could fancy the snapping of ice on a forest lake in mid-winter.

They couldn't hear, in their suits. They could only feel. But all at once the outer rind, above their plane, vanished. At the same instant the plane itself, propeller still spinning, rose swiftly up through the hole in the rind. The air inside the globe was going out in a great rush.

The partners looked at each other. At that moment the four planes swooped over the space ship....

* * * * *

Jeter and Eyer knew that the inner globe had at last become visible, for from the bellies of the four planes dropped bomb after bomb. They fell into the great aperture. Jeter and Eyer flung themselves flat. But the bombs had worked sufficient havoc. They had removed all protection from the low-pressure stratosphere. The air inside the space ship went out with a rush. Jeter and Eyer, hearing nothing, though they knew that the explosions must have been cataclysmic, were picked up and whirled toward that opening, like chips spun toward the heart of a whirlpool.

But for their space suits they would have been destroyed in the outrush of air. Out of the inner globe came men that flew, sprawled out, somersaulting up and out of apertures made by the crashing bombs. Ludicrous they looked. Blood streamed from their mouths. Their faces were set in masks of agony. There were Sitsumi and, one after another, the Three.

Then fastened together by the cuffs, the partners were being whirled over and over, out into space. Their last signals to each other had been:

"Even if you're already dead, pull the ripcord ring of your chute!"

Crushed, buffeted, they still retained consciousness. They sought through the spinning stratosphere for their rescuers. Thousands of feet below--or was it above?--they saw them. Yes, below, for they looked at the tops of the planes. Their upward flight had been dizzying. They waited until their upward flight ceased.

Then, as they started the long fall to Earth, they pulled their rings and waited for their chutes to flower above them.

Soon they were floating downward. Side by side they rode. Above them their parachutes were like two umbrellas, pressed almost too closely together.

They looked about them, seeking the space ship.

The devastation of its outer rind had been complete, for they now could see the inner globe, and it too was like--well, like merely part of an eggshell.

The doomed space ship--gyroscope still keeping the ray pointed Earthward--describing an erratic course, was shooting farther upward into the stratosphere, propelled by the ghastly ray which, now no longer controlled by Wang Li, drove the space ship madly through the outer cold.

Far below the partners many things were falling: broken furnishings of mad dreamers' stratosphere laboratories, parts of strange machines, whirling, somersaulting things that had once been men.

The partners looked at each other.

The same thought was in the mind of each, as the four remaining planes came in toward them to convoy them down--that when the lords of the stratosphere finally reached the far Earth, only God would know which was Sitsumi and who were the Three.

Contents

THE WEAKLING

By EVERETT B. COLE

A strong man can, of course, be dangerous, but he doesn't approach the vicious deadliness of a weakling--with a weapon!

Naran Makun looked across the table at the caravan master.

"And you couldn't find a trace of him?"

"Nothing. Not even a scrap of his cargo or so much as the bones of a long-neck. He just dropped out of sight of his whole train. He went through this big estate, you see. Then he cut back to pick up some of his stops on the northern swing. Well, that was all. He didn't get to the first one." The other waved a hand.

"Weird situation, too. Oh, the null was swirling, we know that, and he could have been caught in an arm. It happens, but it isn't too often that an experienced man like your brother gets in so deep he can't get out somehow--or at least leave some trace of what happened." The man picked up his cup, eying it thoughtfully.

"Oh, we've all had close ones, sure. We've all lost a long-neck or so, now and then. Whenever the null swirls, it can cover big territory in a big hurry and most of that northern swing is null area at one time or another. One of those arms can overrun a train at night and if a man loses his head, he's in big trouble." He sipped from his cup.

"Young caravan master got caught that way, just a while back. A friend of mine, Dr. Zalbon, was running the swing after the null retracted. He found what was left."

"Told me he ran into a herd of carnivores. Fifteen or twenty real big fellows. Jaws as long as a man. He killed them off and then found they'd been feeding on what was left of Dar Konil's train."

He shook his head. "It's not a nice area."

"Hold everything." Naran leaned forward. "You said my brother went through this big estate. Anyone see him come out?"

Dar Girdek smiled. "Oh, sure. The Master of the Estates, Kio Barra, himself. He saw him to the border and watched him go on his way."

Naran looked doubtful. "And what kind of a character is this Barra?"

"Oh, him!" Dar Girdek waved a hand. "Nothing there. In the first place, he holds one of the biggest estates in the mountain area. So what would he want to rob a freight caravan for?" He laughed.

"In the second place, the guy's practically harmless. Oh, sure, he's got a title. He's Lord of the Mountain Lake. And he wears a lot of psionic crystalware. But he's got about enough punch to knock over some varmint--if it's not too tough. Dar Makun might be your weak brother, but he'd have eaten that guy for breakfast if he'd tried to be rough."

"Psionic weakling, you mean? But how does he manage to be a master Protector of an Estate?"

Dar Girdek smiled wryly. "Father died. Brother sneaked off somewhere. That left him. Title's too clear for anyone to try any funny business."

"I see." Naran leaned back. "Now, what about this null?"

"Well, of course you know about the time the pseudomen from the Fifth managed to sneak in and lay a mess of their destructors on Carnol?"

"I might. I was one of the guys that saw to it they didn't get back to celebrate." Naran closed his eyes for an instant.

"Yeah. Way I heard it, you were the guy that wrapped 'em up. Too bad they didn't get you on the job sooner. Maybe we wouldn't have this mess on our hands now." Dar Girdek shrugged.

"Anyway, they vaporized the city and a lot of area around it. That was bad, but the aftereffect is worse. We've got scholars beating their brains cells together, but all they can tell us is that there's a big area up there just as psionically dead as an experimental chamber." He grinned.

"I could tell 'em that much myself. It's a sort of cloud. Goes turbulent, shoots out arms, then folds in again.

"We'd by-pass the whole thing, but it's right on the main trade route. Only way around it is plenty of days out of the path, clear down around the middle sea and into the lake region. Then you have to go all the way back anyway, if you plan to do any mid-continent trading. And you still take a chance of getting caught in a swirl arm."

Naran tilted his head. "So? Suppose you do get into a swirl? All you need to do is wait." He smiled.

"You know. Just sort of ignore it. It'll go away."

"Uh huh. Sounds easy enough. It's about what we do when we have to. But there are things living there. They can be hard to ignore."

"You mean the carnivores?"

"That's right. If you meet one of those fellow out in normal territory, he's no trouble at all. You hit him with a distorter and he flops. Then you figure out whether to reduce him to slime or leave the carcass for his friends and relations." He smiled.

"From what your brother said, you wouldn't need the distorter."

Naran smiled deprecatingly. "That's one of the things they pay me for," he remarked. "We run into some pretty nasty beasties at sea."

"Yeah. I've heard. Big, rough fellows. Our varmints are smaller. But what would you do if you ran into twenty tons or so of pure murder, and you with no more psionic power than some pseudoman?"

Naran looked at him thoughtfully. "I hadn't thought of that," he admitted. "I might not like it. Jaws as longs as a man, you said?"

The other nodded. "Longer, sometimes. And teeth as long as your hand. One snap and there's nothing left.

"When they kill a long-neck, they have a good meal and walk away from whatever's left. But people are something else. They just can't get enough and they don't leave any crumbs." He waved a hand.

"There've been several trains caught by those things. A swirl arm comes over at night, you see, and the caravan master loses his head. He can't think of anything but getting out. Oh, he can yell at his drivers. They've got a language, and we all know it. That's easy. But did you ever try to get a long-neck going without psionic control?"

"I see what you mean. It could be a little rough."

"Yeah. It could be. Anyway, about this time, everybody's yelling at everybody else. The long-necks are squealing and bellowing. Drivers are jerking on reins. And a herd of carnivores hears the commotion. So, they drop around to see the fun. See what I mean?"

Naran nodded and Dar Girdek went on.

"Well, that's about it. Once in a great while, some guy manages to get into a cave and hide out till the null swings away and another caravan comes along. But usually, no one sees anything but a little of the cargo and some remains of long-necks. No one's ever come up with any part of man or pseudoman. As I said, one snap and there's nothing left."

Naran smiled wryly. "Tough to be popular, I guess." He leaned forward.

"But you've been over the trail several times since he disappeared. And you said you've seen nothing. No trace of the train. That right?"

The other shook his head. "Not even a cargo sling."

"You're making up a train now, aren't you? I'd like to go along on this next trip. Fact is, I've been thinking some nasty thoughts. And I'm going to be uneasy till I find out whether I'm right or not."

Dar Girdek rubbed his chin. "Want to buy in, maybe?"

"No, I don't think so. I'll work my way--as your lead driver."

"Oh, no!" Dar Girdek laughed. "You don't put a psionic on some long-neck. Lead driver's pseudoman, just like the rest." He sobered.

"Oh, sure. You could handle the drivers, but it just isn't done."

Naran smiled. "Oh, as far as the other drivers'll know, I'm just another pseudoman. I've been a ship's non-psi agent, remember? We earn our keep by dealing with the people in non-psi areas."

"It won't work." The caravan master shook his head. "These drivers can get pretty rough with each other. You'd have to set two or three of them back on their heels the first day. It would be either that, or get a lot of bruises and end up as camp flunky."

"Could be," Naran told him. "Tell you what. You turn me loose in an experimental chamber so I can't fudge. Then send your toughest driver in and tell him to kick me out of there. I'll show him some tricks I learned from the non-psi's overseas and he'll be a smarter man when he wakes up."

* * * * *

Leuwan, Kio Barra, Lord of the Mountain Lake, Master of the Estates Kira Barra, and Protector of the Common Good, stood examining the assortment of crystals in a cabinet. He hesitated over a large, brilliantly gleaming sphere of crystallized carbon, then shook his head. That one would be pretty heavy going, he was sure. The high intensity summary said something about problems of the modern world, so it could be expected to be another of those dull reports on the welfare of the Commonwealth.

Why, he wondered, did some projection maker waste good time and effort by making up things like that? And why did they waste more time and effort by sending them around? When a man wanted to relax, he wanted something to relax with. What he was looking for was something light.

He turned his attention to other crystals, at last selecting a small, blue prism. He held it up, regarding it, then nodded and placed it on the slender black pedestal near his chair, where he could observe without undue effort.

He turned, examining each corner of his empty study, then took his sapphire-tipped golden staff from under his arm, placing it carefully on a rack built into his chair arm, where it would be convenient to his hand should the need arise.

One could never be too careful, he thought. Of course, he could deal with any recalcitrant slave by other means, but the distorter was convenient and could be depended upon to give any degree of pressure desired. And it was a lot less trouble to use than to concentrate on more fatiguing efforts such as neural pressure or selective paralysis.

One must conserve one's powers for times when they might be really needed.

Too, there was the remote possibility that some lackland wanderer might come by and find a flaw in the protection of the Estates--even somehow penetrate to the Residence. Barra shuddered at that thought, then shrugged it off. Kira Barra was well protected, of that he had made sure. Ever vigilant surrogates were deposited in all the strategic spots of the Estates--not only to allow quick observations of the condition of the lands, but also to give automatic warning of the approach of anyone of inimical turn of mind.

He eased his bulk into the chair, twisted about for a few moments as it adjusted to fit his body, then leaned back with a sigh of relaxation and directed his thoughts to the crystal before him.

Under the impulses of his amplified thought, the crystal glowed, appeared to expand, then became a three-dimensional vista.

The high intensity summary and excerpt leader had been not too deceptive, Barra told himself as the story unfolded. It was a well done adventure projection, based on the war with the Fifth planet. Critically, he watched the actions of a scout crew, approving of the author's treatment and selection of material. He, Barra, was something of a connoisseur of these adventure crystals, even though he had never found it necessary to leave the protection of Earth's surface.

He shrugged, taking his attention from the projection.

The lacklanders, he told himself--entertainment people, caravan masters, seafarers, other wanderers of light responsibility--were the natural ones to be selected to go out and deal with remote emergencies.

Like all stable, responsible men of property and worth, he was far too valuable to the Commonwealth to risk himself in wild dashes to the dead, non-psionic lands, or out into the emptiness of space. As far as risking himself on combat missions of interplanetary war-- He shook his head. This was pure stupidity.

He frowned uneasily. It had been a bit unfair, though, of the Controllers. They had completely excused him from service on the basis of inaptitude. It had rankled ever since.

Of course he couldn't be expected to dash madly about in some two-man scout. Even as his brother's assistant, he had been a person of quite definite standing and responsibility and such antics would have been beneath his dignity. He had made that quite plain to them.

There had been responsible posts where a man of his quality and standing could have been of positive value. And, as he had pointed out, they could have assigned him to one of those.

But no! They had merely excused him. Inapt!

As far as that went, he told himself angrily, he, Kio Barra, could comport himself with the best if necessity demanded.

Those dashing characters in this projection were, of course, the figments of some unstable dreamer's imagination. But they showed the instability of the usual lackland wanderers. And what could such men do that a solid, responsible man like himself couldn't do better?

He returned to the crystal, then shook his head in disgust. It had become full--flat--meaningless. Besides, he had matters of real import to take care.

He directed his attention to the chair, which obediently swung about until he faced his large view crystal.

"Might as well have a look at the East Shore," he told himself.

* * * * *

As he focused his attention, the crystal expanded, then became a huge window through which he could see the shores of the inland sea, then the lands to the east of the large island on which he had caused his Residence to be built. He looked approvingly at the rolling, tree-clad hills as the view progressed.

Suddenly, he frowned in annoyance. The great northern null was in turbulence again, thrusting its shapeless arms down toward the borders of Kira Barra. He growled softly.

There, he told himself, was the result of the carelessness of those lackland fools who had been entrusted with the defense of the home planet. Their loose, poorly planned defenses had allowed the pseudomen of the Fifth to dash in and drop their destructors in a good many spots on the surface. And here was one of them.

Here was a huge area which had once been the site of a great city and which had contained the prosperous and productive estates of a Master Protector, now reduced to a mere wasteland into which slaves might escape, to lead a brute-like existence in idleness.

He had lost pseudomen slaves in this very null and he knew he would probably lose more. Despite the vigilance of the surrogates, they kept slipping across the river and disappearing into that swirling nothingness. And now, with that prominence so close--

He had no guards he could trust to go after the fellows, either. Such herd guards as he had would decide to desert their protector and take up the idle life which their fellow pseudomen had adopted. A few of them had gone out and done just that. Their memories of the protection and privileges granted them were short and undependable. He sighed.

"Ungrateful beasts!"

Some Master Protectors had little trouble along that line. Others had managed to hire the services of halfmen--weak psionics, too weak to govern and yet strong and able enough to be more than mere pseudomen.

These halfmen made superb, loyal guards and overseers--for some--but none had remained at Kira Barra. They had come, to be sure, but they had stayed on for a time, then drifted away.

And, he thought angrily, it was illegal to restrain these halfmen in any way. Some soft-headed fool had granted their kind the rights of Commonwealth citizenship. Halfmen had even managed to take service with the fleet during the war with the Fifth Planet. Some of them had even managed somehow to be of small value--and now many of them held the status of veterans of that victorious war--a status he, one of the great landholders, was denied.

No, he told himself, until such time as the nulls were solved and eliminated, such pseudomen as managed to cross the northeastern river were safe enough in their unknown land. And, he thought sourly, the scholars had made no progress in their studies of the nulls.

Probably they were concerning themselves with studies more likely to give them preferment or more immediate personal gain.

Of course, the wasteland wasn't entirely unknown, not to him, at least. He had viewed the area personally. There were hilltops on the Estates from which ordinary eyesight would penetrate far into the dead area, even though the more powerful and accurate parasight was stopped at its borders. Yes, he had seen the affected area.

He had noted that much of it had regained a measure of fertility. There was life now--some of it his own meat lizards who had wandered across the river and out of his control. And he had even seen some of the escaped pseudomen slinking through the scrub growth and making their crudely primitive camps.

"Savages!" he told himself. "Mere animals. And one can't do a thing about them, so long as they let that dead area persist."

Eventually, the scholars had reported, the dead areas would diminish and fade from existence. He smiled bitterly. Here was a nice evasion--a neat excuse for avoiding study and possible, dangerous research.

So long as those nulls remained, they would be sources of constant loss of the responsible Master Protectors, and would thus threaten the very foundations of the Commonwealth.

Possibly, he should-- He shook his head.

No, he thought, this was impractical. Parasight was worthless beyond the borders of the null. No surrogate could penetrate it and no weapon would operate within it. It would be most unsafe for any true man to enter. There, one would be subject to gross, physical attack and unable to make proper defense against it.

Certainly, the northern null was no place for him to go. Only the pseudomen could possibly tolerate the conditions to be found there, and thus, there they had found haven and were temporarily supreme.

Besides, this matter was the responsibility of the Council of Controllers and the scholars they paid so highly.

He concentrated on the crystal, shifting the view to scan toward the nearest village.

* * * * *

Suddenly, he sat forward in his chair. A herd of saurians was slowly drifting toward one of the arms the null had thrust out. Shortly, they would have ambled into a stream and beyond, out of all possible control. Perhaps they might wander for years in the wastelands. Perhaps they and their increase might furnish meat for the pseudomen who lurked inside the swirling blankness.

He snarled to himself. No herders were in sight. No guard was in attendance. He would have to attend to this matter himself. He concentrated his attention on the power crystals of a distant surrogate, willing his entire ego into the controls.

At last, the herd leader's head came up. Then the long-neck curved, snaking around until the huge beast stared directly at the heap of rocks which housed the crystals of the surrogate himself. The slow drift of the herd slowed even more, then stopped as the other brutes dimly recognized that something had changed. More of the ridiculously tiny heads swiveled toward the surrogate.

Kio Barra squirmed in his chair. Holding these empty minds was a chore he had always hated.

Certainly, there was less total effort than that required for the control of the more highly organized pseudomen, but the more complex minds reacted with some speed and the effort was soon over. There was a short, sometimes sharp struggle, then surrender.

But this was long-term, dragging toil--a steady pushing at a soggy, unresisting, yet heavy mass. And full concentration was imperative if anything was to be accomplished. The reptilian minds were as unstable as they were empty and would slip away unless firmly held. He stared motionlessly at his crystal, willing the huge reptiles to turn--to waddle back to the safe grasslands of the estate, far from the null.

At last, the herd was again in motion. One by one, the huge brutes swung about and galloped clumsily toward more usual pastures, their long necks swaying loosely with their motion.

Switching from surrogate to surrogate, Barra followed them, urged them, forced them along until they plunged into the wide swamp northeast of Tibara village.

He signed wearily and shifted his viewpoint to a surrogate which overlooked the village itself. What, he wondered, had happened to the herdsmen--and to the guards who should be overseeing the day's work?

* * * * *

Half hidden among ferns and the mastlike stems of trees, the rude huts of Tibara nestled in the forest, blending with their surroundings, until only the knowing observer could identify them by vague form. Barra shifted his viewpoint to the central village surrogate.

There were other open spaces in the village, but this was the largest. Here was the village well, near which a few children played some incomprehensible game. An old man had collected a pile of rock and had started work on the well curb. Now, he sat near his work, leaning against the partly torn down wall. Spots of sunlight, coming through the fronds high above, struck his body, leaving his face in shadow. He dozed in the warmth, occasionally allowing his eyes to half open as he idly regarded the scene before him.

Before some of the huts surrounding the rude plaza, women squatted on the ground, their arms swinging monotonously up and down as they struck their wooden pestles into bowls of grain which they were grinding to make the coarse meal which was their mainstay of diet.

A few men could be seen, scratching at small garden plots or idly repairing tools. Others squatted near their huts, their attention occupied by fishing gear. Still others merely leaned against convenient trees, looking at each other, their mouths moving in the grotesque way of the pseudoman when he could find an excuse to idle away time.

Barra listened to the meaningless chatter of grunts and hisses, then disregarded the sounds. They formed, he had been told, a sort of elementary code of communication. He coughed disparagingly. Only some subhuman could bring himself to study such things.

Of course, he knew that some lacklanders could make vocal converse with the pseudomen and caravan masters seemed to do it as a regular thing, but he could see no point in such effort. He could make his demands known without lowering himself by making idiotic noises.

His communicator crystals would drive simple thoughts into even the thick skulls of his slaves. And he could--and did--thus get obedience and performance from those slaves by using normal, sensible means as befitted one of the race of true men.

And what would one want of the pseudomen other than obedience? Would one perhaps wish to discuss matters of abstract interest with these beast men? He regarded the scene with growing irritation.

Now, he remembered. It was one of those days of rest which some idiot in the Council had once sponsored. And a group of soft-headed fools had concurred, so that one now had to tolerate periodic days of idleness.

Times had changed, he thought. There had been a time when slaves were slaves and a man could expect to get work from them in return for his protection and support.

But even with these new, soft laws, herds must be guarded--especially with that null expanding as it was. Even some lackland idiot should be able to understand that much.

He turned his attention to the headman's hut.

The man was there. Surrounded by a few villagers, he squatted before his flimsy, frond-roofed hut, his mouth in grotesque motion. Now, he stopped his noisemaking and poised his head. Then he nodded, looking about the village.

Obviously, he was taking his ease and allowing his people to do as they would, without supervision.

Barra started to concentrate on the surrogate, to make his wishes and his displeasure known. Then he turned impatiently from the crystal, seizing his staff. Efficient as the surrogates were, there were some things better attended to in person.

* * * * *

He got to his feet and strode angrily out of the study, sending a peremptory summons before him. As he entered the wide hallway, an elderly slave came toward him. Barra looked at the man imperiously.

"My cloak," he demanded, "and the cap of power."

He projected the image of his fiber cloak and of the heavy gold headpiece with its precisely positioned crystals, being careful to note the red, green and blue glow of the various jewels. Meticulously, he filled in details of the gracefully formed filigree which formed mounts to support the glowing spheres. And he indicated the padded headpiece with its incrustation of crystal carbon, so his servitor could make no mistake. The man was more sensitive than one of the village slaves, but even so, he was merely a pseudoman and had to have things carefully delineated for him.

As the man walked toward a closet, Barra looked after him unhappily. The heavy power and control circlet was unnecessary in the Residence, for amplifiers installed in the building took care of all requirements. But outside, in the village and fields, a portable source of power and control was indispensable and this heavy gold cap was the best device he had been able to find.

Even so, he hated to wear the circlet. The massive crystals mounted on their supporting points weighed a couple of pounds by themselves and though the gold insulating supports were designed as finely as possible, the metal was still massive and heavy. It was a definite strain on his neck muscles to wear the thing and he always got a headache from it.

For an instant, envy of the powerful psionics crossed his mind. There were, he knew, those who required no control or power devices, being able to govern and direct psionic forces without aid. But his powers, though effective as any, required amplification and when he went out of the Residence it was essential that he have the cap with him.

Proper and forceful handling of the things of the Estates, both animate and inanimate, demanded considerable psionic power and this made the large red power crystal at the center of his cap most necessary.

Besides, simultaneous control problems could be difficult--sometimes even almost impossible--without the co-ordinating crystals which were inset at the periphery of the headband.

And there was the possibility that he might meet some trespassing lacklander who might have to be impressed with the resources of the master of Kira Barra. He knew of more than one instance wherein a Master Protector had been overcome by some predatory lackland wanderer, who had then managed by one means or another to secure his own accession to the estates of his victim. He smiled grimly.

Carelessness could be costly. He had proved that to his brother.

Kio Barra still remembered the first time he had quarreled violently with Boemar. He still remembered the gentle, sympathetic smile and the sudden, twisting agony that had shot through him as his power crystal overloaded. The flare of energy had left him incapable of so much as receiving a strongly driven thought for many days.

He laughed. But, poor, soft fool that he had been, Boemar had carefully nursed his brother's mind back to strength again.

Yes, Boemar had been a powerful man, but a very unwise one. And he had forgotten the one great strength of his weaker brother--a strength that had grown as Leuwan aged. And so, it was Leuwan who was Kio Barra.

[Illustration]

But such a thing would never again happen at Kira Barra. With his controls and amplifiers, he was more than a match for the most powerful of the great psionics--so long as they didn't meet him with affectionate sympathy.

He stood silently as the servitor put the cap on his head and placed the cloak about his shoulders. Then, tucking his heavy duty distorter under his arm, he turned toward the outer door. The control jewels on his cap burned with inner fire as he raised himself a few inches from the floor and floated out toward the dock.

* * * * *

Not far from the forest shaded village of Tibara, logs had been lashed together to form a pier which jutted from the shore and provided a mooring for the hollowed logs used by men of the village in harvesting the fish of the lake. Several boats nested here, their bows pointing toward the fender logs of the pier. More were drawn up on the gravel of the shore, where they lay, bottoms upward, that they might dry and be cleaned.

A few villagers squatted by their boats and near the pier. Others were by the nets which had been spread over the gravel to dry.

One large section of the pier was vacant. Always, this area was reserved for the use of the Lord of the Mountain Lake.

As Barra's boat sped through the water, he concentrated his attention on the logs of the pier, urging his boat to increasing speed. The sharp prow rose high in the water, a long vee of foam extending from it, to spread out far behind the racing boat.

As the bow loomed almost over the floating logs, Barra abruptly transferred his focus of attention to his right rear, pulling with all the power of the boat's drive crystals. The craft swung violently, throwing a solid sheet of water over pier and shore, drenching the logs and the men about them.

Then the bow settled and the boat lay dead in the water, less than an inch from the pier's fender logs.

Barra studied the space between boat and logs for an instant, then nodded in satisfaction. It was an adequate landing by anyone's standards.

His tension somewhat relieved, he raised himself from the boat and hovered over the dock.

Sternly, he looked at the villagers who were now on their feet, brushing water from their heads and faces. They ceased their movements, eying him apprehensively and he motioned imperiously toward the boat.

"Secure it!"

The jewels of his control cap glowed briefly, amplifying and radiating the thought.

The villagers winced, then two of them moved to obey the command. Barra turned his attention away and arrowed toward the screen of trees which partially concealed the village proper.

As he dropped to the ground in the clearing before the headman's hut, men and women looked at him, then edged toward their homes. He ignored them, centering his attention on the headman himself.

The man had gotten to his feet and was anxiously studying his master's face.

For a few seconds, Barra examined the man. He was old. He had been headman of the village under the old Master Protector, his father--and his brother had seen no reason for change, allowing the aging headman to remain in charge of the welfare of his people.

But this was in the long ago. Both of the older Kio Barra had been soft, slack men, seeking no more than average results. He, Leuwan, was different--more exacting--more demanding of positive returns from the Estates.

Oh, to be sure, Kira Barra had somehow prospered under the soft hands of his predecessors, despite their coddling of the subhuman pseudomen, but there had been many laxities which had infuriated Leuwan, even when he was a mere youth. He frowned thoughtfully.

Of course, if those two hadn't been so soft and tolerant, he would have been something other than Lord of the Mountain Lake. He would have had to find other activities elsewhere. He dropped the line of thought.

This was not taking care of the situation.

He put his full attention on the man before him, driving a demand with full power of cap amplifier.

* * * * *

"Why are all your people idling away their time? Where are your herdsmen and guards?"

The headman's face tensed with effort. He waved a hand southward and made meaningless noises. Faintly, the thought came through to Barra.

"In south forest, with herd. Not idle, is rest day. Few work."

Barra looked angrily at the man. Did this fool actually think he could evade and lie his way out of the trouble his obvious failure to supervise had brought? He jabbed a thumb northward.

"What about that herd drifting toward the north river?" The two green communicator crystals gleamed with cold fire.

The headman looked confused. "Not north," came the blurred thought. "No herd north. All south forest, near swamp. One-hand boys watch. Some guard. Is rest day."

Unbelievingly Barra stared at the pseudoman. He was actually persisting in his effort to lie away his failure. Or was he attempting some sort of defiance? Had his father and brother tolerated such things as this, or was this something new, stemming from the man's age? Or, perhaps, he was trying the temper of the Master Protector, to see how far he could go in encroaching on authority.

He would deal with this--and now!

Abruptly, he turned away, to direct his attention to the central surrogate. It was equipped with a projector crystal.

The air in the clearing glowed and a scene formed in the open space. Unmistakably, it was the northern part of Kira Barra. The lake was shown, and sufficient landmarks to make the location obvious, even to a pseudoman. Carefully, Barra prevented any trace of the blank, swirling null from intruding on the scene. Perhaps the subhuman creature before him knew something of its properties, but there was no point in making these things too obvious.

He focused the scene on the stream and brought the approaching herd into the picture, then he flashed in his own face, watching. And he brought the view down closely enough to indicate that no human creature was near the herd. Finally, he turned his attention to the headman again.

"There was the herd. Where were your people?"

The old man shook his head incredulously, then turned toward one of the few men who still remained in the clearing.

He made a series of noises and the other nodded. There were more of the growls and hisses, then the headman waved a hand southward and the other nodded again and turned away, to run into the trees and disappear.

The headman faced Barra again.

"Send man," he thought laboriously. "Be sure herd is still south." He pointed toward the area where the projection had been.

"That not herd," he thought. "That other herd. Never see before."

* * * * *

Barra scowled furiously.

"You incapable imbecile! You dare to call your master a liar?"

He swung about, his furious gaze scanning the village. The pile of stones he had noticed before caught his attention. He focused on it.

A few stones rose into the air and flew toward the headman.

The old man faced about, his eyes widening in sudden fear. He dodged one of the flying stones, then turned to flee.

Barra flicked a second control on him briefly and the flight was halted.

More stones flew, making thudding sounds as they struck, then sailing away, to gain velocity before they curved back, to strike again.

At last, Barra turned from the litter of rock about the formless mass on the ground. He stared around the village, the fury slowly ebbing within him.

A few faces could be seen, peeping from windows and from between trees. He motioned.

"All villagers," he ordered. "Here before me. Now!" He waited impatiently as people reluctantly came from their huts and out of the trees, to approach the clearing.

At last, the villagers were assembled. Barra looked them over, identifying each as he looked at him. Apart from the others, one of the younger herd guards stood close to his woman. Barra looked at him thoughtfully.

This man, he had noted, was obeyed by both herds and herdsmen. He had seen him at work, as he had seen all the villagers, and obviously, the man was capable of quick decisions--as quick, that was, as any pseudoman could be. He pointed.

"This village needs a new headman," he thought peremptorily. "You will take charge of it."

The man looked toward the huddled mass in the center of the litter of rocks, then looked back at his woman. A faint wave of reluctance came to Barra, who stared sternly.

"I said you are the new headman," he thought imperiously. "Take charge." He waved a hand.

"And get this mess cleaned up. I want a neat village from now on."

As the man lowered his head submissively, Barra turned away, rose from the ground, and drifted majestically toward the lake shore. He could check on the progress of the village from his view crystal back at the Residence.

The situation had been taken care of and there was no point in remaining in the depressing atmosphere of the village for too long.

Besides, there was that adventure projection he hadn't finished. Perhaps it would be of interest now.

* * * * *

As the projection faded, Barra looked around the study, then got out of his chair and picked the crystal from its pedestal. He stood, looking at it approvingly for a few seconds, then went over to the cabinet and set it back in its case. For a time, he looked at the rest of the assortment.

Finally, he shook his head. Some of them, he would sell unscanned. The others--well, they could wait.

Yes, he thought, the record crystals had better be left alone for a while. He hadn't finished his inspection of the Estates and the situation at Tibara might not be an isolated case. It would be well to make a really searching inspection. He sighed.

In fact, it might be well to make frequent searching inspections.

Shortly after his accession to the Estates, he had seen to the defense of Kira Barra. He smiled wryly as he thought of the expense he had incurred in securing all those power and control crystals to make up his surrogate installations. But they had been well worth it.

He had been most thorough then, but that had been some time ago. His last full inspection had been almost a year ago. Lately he had been satisfying himself with spot inspections, not really going over the Estates from border to border.

Of course, the spot inspections had been calculated to touch the potential trouble spots and they had been productive of results, but there might still be hidden things he should know about. This would have to be looked into.

He turned and went back to his chair, causing it to swivel around and face the view crystal.

There was that matter of Tibara, as far as that went. Possibly it would be well to count that herd and identify the animals positively.

Maybe the pasturage was getting poor and he would have to instruct the new headman to move to better lands. Those strays had looked rather thin, now that he thought of it.

Maybe some of the other long-necks had strayed from the main herd and he would have to have the headman send out guards to pick them up and bring them in.

He concentrated on the viewer, swinging its scan over to the swamp where he had driven that small herd.

They were still there, wallowing in the shallow water and grazing on the lush vegetation. He smiled. It would be several days before their feeble minds threw off the impression he had forced on them that this was their proper feeding place.

Idly, he examined the beasts, then he leaned forward, studying them more critically. They weren't the heavy, fat producers of meat normal to the Tibara herd. Something was wrong.

These were the same general breed as the Tibara long-necks, to be sure, but either their pasturage had been unbelievably bad or they had been recently run--long and hard. They looked almost like draft beasts.

He frowned. If these were from the Tibara herd, he'd been missing something for quite a while.

Thoughtfully, he caused the scan to shift. As he followed a small river, he noted groups of the huge, greenish gray beasts as they grazed on the tender rock ferns. Here and there, he noted herdsmen and chore boys either watching or urging the great brutes about with their noisemakers, keeping the herd together. He examined the scene critically, counting and evaluating. Finally, he settled back in his chair.

The herd was all here--even to the chicks. And they were in good shape. He smiled wryly.

Those brutes over in the swamp really didn't belong here, then. They must have drifted into the Estates from the null, and been on their way back. The headman-- He shrugged.

"Oh, well," he told himself, "it was time I got a new headman for Tibara, anyway. And the discipline there will be tighter from now on."

* * * * *

He started to shift scan again, then sat up. The view was pulsing.

As he watched, the scan shifted automatically, to pick up the eastern border of the Estates. Stretching across the landscape was a thin line of draft saurians, each with its driver straddling its neck. The train had halted and a heavily armored riding lizard advanced toward the surrogate. Its rider was facing the hidden crystals.

As Barra focused on him, the man nodded.

"Master Protector?"

"That is correct." Barra activated his communicators. "I am Kio Barra, Master of the Estates Kira Barra."

The other smiled. "I am Dar Makun, independent caravan master," he announced. "The null turbulence forced me off route. Lost a few carriers and several days of time. I'd like to request permission to pass over your land. And perhaps you could favor me by selling some long-necks to fill my train again. The brutes I've got left are a little overloaded."

Barra considered. It was not an unusual request, of course. Certain caravans habitually came through, to do business with the Estates. Others were often detoured by the northern null and forced to come through Kira Barra.

Of course, the masters of the caravans were lacklanders, but they had given little trouble in the past. And this one seemed to be a little above the average if anything. In his own way, he was a man of substance, for an owner master was quite different from someone who merely guided another's train for hire.

The northern null was a menace, Barra thought, but it did have this one advantage. The regular caravans, of course, passed with the courtesy of the Estates, doing business on their way. But these others paid and their pasturage and passage fees added to the income of the Estates.

In this case, the sale of a few draft saurians could be quite profitable. He shifted the view crystals to allow two-way vision.

"To be sure." He waved a hand. "Direct your train due west to the second river. Cross that, then follow it southward. I will meet you at the first village you come to and we can kennel your slaves there and put your beasts to pasture under my herdsmen. From there, it is a short distance to the Residence."

"Thank you." Dar Makun nodded again, then turned and waved an arm. Faintly, Barra caught the command to proceed.

He watched for a few minutes and examined the long train as it moved over the rolling land and lumbered into a forest. Then he shifted his scan to continue his inspection of the rest of the lands. It would be several hours before that caravan could reach Tibara and he could scan back and note its progress as he wished.

He relaxed in his chair, watching the panorama as the Estates unrolled before him. Now and then, he halted the steady motion of the scanner, to examine village or herd closely. Then he nodded in satisfaction and continued his inspection.

The Estates, he decided, were in overall good condition. Of course, there were a few corrections he would have to have made in the days to come, but these could be taken care of after the departure of the caravan.

There was that grain field over in the Zadabar section, for example. That headman would have to be straightened out. He smiled grimly. Maybe it would be well to create a vacancy in that village. But that could wait for a few days.

He directed the scan back to the eastern section, tracing the route he had given the caravan master. At last, the long line of saurians came into view and he watched their deceptively awkward gait as the alien crawled through a forest and came out into deep grass.

They were making far better progress than he had thought they would and he would have to get ready if he planned to be in Tibara when they arrived.

He was more careful of his dress than usual. This time, he decided, he'd want quite a few protective devices. One could never be quite sure of these caravan masters.

Of course, so long as they could plainly see the futility of any treacherous move, they were good company and easy people to deal with, but it would be most unwise to give one of them any opening. It just might be he would be the one who was tired of wandering.

He waited patiently as his slave attached his shield brooches and placed his control cap on his head, then he reached into the casket the man held for him and took out a pair of paralysis rings, slipping one on each of his middle fingers. At last, he dismissed the man.

He floated out of the building and let himself down on the cushions in the rear of his speedboat. Critically, he examined the condition of the craft. His yardboys had cleaned everything up, he noted. The canopy was down, leaving the lines of the boat clean and sharp.

He turned his attention to the power crystal and the boat drew out of its shelter, gained speed, and cut through the water to the distant shoreline.

With only part of his mind concentrated on controlling the boat, Barra looked across the lake. It was broad in expanse, dotted with islands, and rich in marine life.

Perhaps he might persuade this Dar Makun to pick up a few loads of dried lake fish, both for his own rations and for sale along the way to his destination. Some of the warehouses, he had noted, were well stocked and he'd have to arrange for some shipments soon.

* * * * *

The boat was nearing Tibara pier. He concentrated on setting it in close to the dock, then made his way to the eastern edge of the village, summoning the headman as he passed through the village center.

His timing had been good. The head of the long train was nearly across the wide grassland. For a moment, the thought crossed his mind that he might go out and meet the caravan master. But he discarded it. It would be somewhat undignified for the master of the estate to serve as a mere caravan guide. He stood, waiting.

He could see Dar Makun sitting between the armor fins of his riding lizard. The reptile was one of the heavily armored breed he had considered raising over in the northwest sector.

They were, he had been told, normally dryland creatures. Such brutes should thrive over in the flats, where the long-necks did poorly. He would have to consider the acquisition of some breeding stock.

The caravan master drew his mount to a halt and drifted toward the trees. Barra examined the man closely as he approached.

He was a tall, slender man, perfectly at ease in his plain trail clothing. A few control jewels glinted from his fingers and he wore a small shield brooch, but there was no heavy equipment. His distorter staff, Barra noted, was a plain rod, tipped by a small jewel. Serviceable, to be sure, but rather short in range. Barra's lip curled a trifle.

This man was not of really great substance, he decided. He probably had his entire wealth tied up in this one caravan and depended on his fees and on the sale of some few goods of his own to meet expenses.

As Dar Makun dropped to the ground near him, Barra nodded.

"I have instructed my headman to attend to your drivers and beasts," he said. "You have personal baggage?"

The other smiled. "Thank you. I'll have one of the boys bring my pack while the drivers pull up and unload. We can make our stack here, if you don't mind."

As Barra nodded in agreement, Dar Makun turned, waving. He drew a deep breath and shouted loudly, the sounds resembling those which Barra had often heard from his slaves. The Master Protector felt a twinge of disgust.

Of course, several of the caravan masters who did regular business at Kira Barra shouted at their slaves at times. But somehow, he had never become used to it. He much preferred to do business with those few who handled their pseudomen as they did their draft beasts--quietly, and with the dignity befitting the true race.

He waited till Dar Makun had finished with his growls and hisses. One of the caravan drivers had swung down and was bringing a fiber cloth bundle toward them. Barra looked at it in annoyance.

"This," he asked himself, "is his baggage?" He recovered his poise and turned to Dar Makun.

"He can put it in the boat," he told the man. "I'll have one of my people pick it up for you when we get to the island. Now, if you'll follow me, the pier is over this way." He turned and floated toward the dock.

* * * * *

As they pulled out into the lake, Dar Makun settled himself in the cushions.

"I never realized what a big lake this is," he remarked. "I've always made the northern swing through this part of the continent. Oh, I've seen the lake region from the hills, of course, but--" He looked at the water thoughtfully.

"You have quite a lot of fresh-water fish in there?"

Barra nodded. "We get a harvest."

Dar Makun closed his eyes, then opened them again. "I might deal with you for some of those," he commented. "People out west seem to like fresh-water stuff." He looked at Barra closely.

"I'll have to open my cargo for you," he went on. "Might be a few items you'd be interested in."

Barra nodded. "It's possible," he said. "I always need something around the place." He speeded the boat a little.

The boat came to the dock and Barra guided his guest into the Residence and on into the study, where he activated the view crystal.

"There's still light enough for you to get a look at some of the herds," he told Dar Makun. "I believe you said you might need some more draft beasts."

Makun watched as the hills of Kira Barra spread out in the air before him.

"It's a good way to locate the herds and make a few rough notes," he admitted. "Of course, I'll have to get close to the brutes in order to really choose, though."

"Oh?"

"Fact. You see, these big lizards aren't all alike. Some of 'em are really good. Some of 'em just don't handle. A few of 'em just lie down when you drop the first sling on 'em." Makun nodded toward the projection.

"That big fellow over there, for instance," he went on. "Of course, he might slim down and make a good carrier. But usually, if they look like a big pile of meat, that's all they're good for. A lot of 'em can't even stand the weight of a man on their necks. Breaks 'em right down."

"A good carrier can handle a dozen tons without too much trouble, but some of these things have it tough to handle their own weight on dry land and you have to look 'em over pretty closely to be sure which is which. Can't really judge by a projection."

Barra looked at the man with slightly increased respect. At least, he knew something about his business. He shifted the viewer to the swamp.

Of course, he thought, there were draft animals over in the western sector. But this small herd was convenient.

"Well," he said, "I've got this little herd over here. They got away some time ago and lost a lot of weight before I rounded them up again."

Makun examined the projection with increased interest.

"Yeah," he remarked. "I'd like to get out there in the morning and look those fellows over. I just might get the five I need right out there. Might even pick up a spare or two."

* * * * *

The swamp was a backwater of the lake, accessible by a narrow channel. Barra slowed the boat, easing it along through the still water. Here, the channel was clear, he knew, and it would soon widen. But there were some gravel bars a little farther along that could be troublesome if one were careless. And his attention was divided. He glanced at his companion.

Makun leaned against the cushions, looking at the thick foliage far overhead. Then he turned his attention to the banks of the channel. A long, greenish shape was sliding out of the water. He pointed.

"Have many of those around here?"

"Those vermin?" Barra looked at the amphibian. "Not too many, but I could do with less of them."

He picked up his distorter from the rack beside him and pointed it ahead of the boat. The sapphire glowed.

There was a sudden, violent thrashing in the foliage on the bank. The slender creature reared into the air, tooth-studded jaws gaping wide.

It rose above the foliage, emitting a hissing bellow. Then it curled into a ball and hung suspended in the air for an instant before it dropped back into the shrubbery with a wet plop.

Barra put the jewel-tipped rod back in its hanger.

"I don't like those nuisances," he explained. "They can kill a slave if he gets careless. And they annoy the stock." He tilted his head forward.

"There's the herd," he went on, "at the other end of this open water. I'll run up close and you can look them over if you wish."

Makun looked around, then shrugged. "Not necessary. I'll go ahead from here. Won't take me too long."

He lifted himself into the air and darted toward one of the huge saurians. Barra watched as he slowed and drifted close to the brute's head, then hovered.

A faint impression of satisfaction radiated from his mind as he drifted along the length of the creature. He went to another, then to another.

At last, he returned to the boat.

"Funny thing," he commented. "A couple of my own carriers seem to have wandered clear through that null and mixed with your herd." He smiled.

"Stroke of luck. Too bad the rest didn't manage to stay with 'em, but you can't have everything. I'll pay you trespass fees on those two, of course, then I'd like to bargain with you for about four more to go with 'em. Got them all picked out and I can cut 'em out and drive them over to the train soon's we settle the arrangements."

Barra frowned.

"Now, wait a minute," he protested. "Of course, I'll bargain with you for any or all of this herd. But I'm in the breeding and raising business, remember. I certainly can't give away a couple of perfectly good beasts on someone's simple say-so. I'd like a little proof that those two belong to your train before I just hand them over."

"Well, now, if it comes to that, I could prove ownership. Legally, too. After all, I've worked those critters quite a while and any competent psionic could--" Makun looked at Barra thoughtfully.

"You know, I'm not just sure I like having my word questioned this way. I'm not sure I like this whole rig-out. Seems to me there's a little explaining in order about now--and kind of an apology, too. Then maybe we can go ahead and talk business."

"I don't see any need for me to explain anything. And I certainly don't intend to make a apology of any kind. Not to you. I merely made a reasonable request. After all, these brutes are on my land and in my herd. I can find no mark of identification on them, of any kind." Barra shrugged.

"As a matter of fact, I don't even know yet which two you are trying to claim. All I ask is indication of which ones you say are yours and some reasonable proof that they actually came from your train. Certainly, a mere claim of recognition is ... well, you'll have to admit, it's a little thin."

* * * * *

Makun looked at him angrily.

"Now, you pay attention to me. And pay attention good. I'm not stupid and I'm not blind. I can see all those jewels you're loaded down with and I know why you're wearing them. They tell me a lot about you, you can be sure of that. Don't think I haven't noticed that patronizing air of yours, and don't think I've liked it. I haven't and I don't.

"I know you're scared. I know you're worried to death for fear I'm going to pull something on you. I spotted that the first time I talked to you." He paused.

"Oh, I've been trying to ignore it and be decent, but I've had about enough. I've been in this caravan business for a long time. I've dealt square and I'm used to square dealing. Now, you've been putting out a lot of side thoughts about thievery and I don't appreciate being treated like some sneak thief. I'm not about to get used to the idea, either.

"Now, you'd better get the air cleared around here and then we can talk business. Otherwise, there's going to be a lot of trouble."

Barra felt a surge of fury rising above his fear. This lacklander clown actually dared to try to establish domination over a member of the ruling class? He breathed deeply.

"I don't have--"

"All right, listen to me, you termite. You've come way too far out of your hole. Now, you just better crawl back in there fast, before I turn on the lights and burn your hide off."

The surge of mental power blazing at Barra was almost a physical force. He cringed away from it, his face wrinkling in an agony of fright. Makun looked at him contemptuously.

"All right. Now, I'll tell you--"

Smoothly, Barra's hand went to the haft of his distorter. The jewel seemed to rise of its own accord as it blazed coldly.

For an infinitesimal time, Makun's face reflected horrified comprehension before it melted into shapelessness.

Barra put the distorter back in its rack, looking disgustedly at the mess on the cushions. There was nothing for it, he thought. He'd have to destroy those, too. Cleaning was out of the question. He shook his head.

Like all these strong types, this Makun had neglected a simple principle. With fear as his constant companion, Barra had been forced to learn to live with it.

Extreme mental pressure was merely another form of fright. It could paralyze a braver soul--and often did. It merely made Barra miserably uncomfortable without disturbing his control. And the hatred that was always in him was unimpaired--even amplified by the pounding terror.

The more thoroughly Barra was frightened, the more effectively he attacked.

He leaned back in his seat, letting the drumming of his heart subside. Eventually, he would recover enough to guide the boat out of the swamp and back to the Residence.

Tomorrow? Well, he would have to inventory the freight the man had carried. He would have to check those draft beasts. Perhaps he could discern the hidden identification Makun had mentioned.

And he would have to make disposition of some twenty slaves. He summoned up a smile.

Now that he thought of it, this affair could be turned to profit. After all, Dar Makun had been diverted from his route and he had lost some of his train. And caravans had been known to disappear in the vicinity of turbulent nulls.

All he had to do was deny knowledge of the fate of Dar Makun's caravan if there were any inquiry. Oh, certainly, he could tell any inquirer, Dar Makun had arrived. He had stayed overnight and then taken his departure, saying something about cutting around the null and back to his normal, northern swing.

He was feeling better now. He turned his attention to the control crystal and the boat swung about, to make its way back toward the lake.

* * * * *

It took longer than he had thought it would. It was evening of the day after the death of Dar Makun when Barra turned in his seat and raised his hand, then waved it in a wide circle.

A quickly directed thought halted his mount and he looked about once more, at the thick forest.

This clearing was as close to the village of Celdalo as he wanted to come. The villagers never came into this heavy screen of trees, but beyond the forest, there might be some who would watch and wonder. He smiled grimly.

Of course, it didn't make too much difference what slaves might think--if they could think at all, but there was no reason to leave unnecessary traces of the day's work.

He swung about in his cushions and looked back at the line of draft beasts. They were swinging out of line now, to form a semicircle, facing the trees ahead.

He impressed an order on his mount to stand, then lifted himself out of the cushioned seat between the armor fins. For a few seconds, he hovered, looking down at the beast he had been riding.

Yes, he thought, he would do well to raise a few of these creatures. They were tractable and comfortable to ride. A good many caravan masters might be persuaded to get rid of their less comfortable mounts in exchange for one of these, once they had tried a day's march.

One by one, the big saurians came to the forest edge and entered the clearing, then crouched, to let their drivers swing to the ground. Barra looked at the lead driver.

"Make your cargo stack over here," he ordered, "at this side of the clearing. You will wait here for your master."

The man looked confused. A vague, questioning thought came from him. It wasn't really a coherent thought, but just an impression of doubt--uncertainty. Barra frowned impatiently.

It had been much the same when he had ordered this man to load up back at Tibara. Perhaps it was no wonder Dar Makun had been forced to learn vocalization if this was the best slave he could find to develop into his headman.

Carefully, he formed a projection. It showed the carriers gathering in their unloading circles. He made one of the projections turn and drop its head over another's back. The wide mouth opened and stubby, peg teeth gripped the handling loop of a cargo sling. Then the long-neck swiveled back, to repeat the performance.

Barra watched as the man before him nodded in obedient understanding. He shot out a sharp, peremptory order.

"Do it, then! Do it as shown."

The man made noises, then turned, shouting at the other drivers.

Barra watched as the stack of cargo grew. At last, the final sling was positioned and a heavy cloth cover was dropped over the great piles. Barra looked at the headman.

"Bring your drivers close," he ordered. "I have something for them to see."

Again, there was the moment of confusion, but this time the man had gathered the main sense of the command. He turned again, shouting.

The drivers looked at each other questioningly, then moved slowly forward, to form a tight group before Barra, who watched until they were in satisfactory position.

He concentrated on the group for a few seconds, starting the formation of a projection to his left.

As the air glowed and started to show form, the eyes of the drivers swung toward it. Barra smiled tightly and swung his distorter up. The crystal flamed as he swept it across the group of slaves.

He kept the power on, sweeping the distorter back and forth until all that remained was a large pool of slime which thinned, then oozed into the humus. At last, he tucked the rod back under his arm and examined the scene.

There was the pile of goods. There were the carrier beasts. But no man or pseudoman remained of the caravan. His smile broadened.

Once he had sorted this cargo and moved it to the Residence and to various warehouses about the Estates, all traces of Dar Makun and his train would be gone.

To be sure, a few villages would find that their herds had increased, but this was nothing to worry about. He sighed.

It had been a hard day and it would be a hard night's work. He would have to forget his dignity for the time and do real labor. But this was necessity. And there was plenty of profit in it as well.

So far as the rest of the world might know, Dar Makun and his caravan had left Kira Barra to cut back to the northern swing. And the turbulent null had swallowed them without trace.

He turned away. He would have to bring work boats in to the nearby beach. Their surrogates were already attuned and ready, and one of them had been equipped with an auxiliary power crystal. He would need that.

As the boats arrived at village piers, the various headmen would merely follow instructions as given by the boat's surrogates. He would be done with this operation in a few hours.

* * * * *

The days went on, became weeks, then hands of weeks. Little by little, Barra changed his attitude toward caravan masters. Once, he had been cautious about dealing with them, allowing only a chosen few to do business within his borders.

Now, however, he had found a whole, new source of income. And a new sense of power had come to him. Caravans were more than welcome at Kira Barra.

He leaned back on his new chair, enjoying the complete ease with which it instantly shaped to fit his body. It was precisely like hovering a short distance above the floor, yet there was no strain of concentration on some control unit. He allowed himself to relax completely and turned his attention to the viewer crystal.

It was new, too. The old one of his father's which he had brought to the new Residence had seemed quite inadequate when the Residence was redone. This new viewer had been designed for professional use. It was a full two feet in diameter and could fill thousands of cubic feet with solid projection.

Animals, trees, pseudomen, all could be brought before him as though physically present in the study. Too, it was simpler than the old one and much more accurate in its control. He sighed.

The Estates had prospered. Of course, he had been cautious. Many caravans had come to Kira Barra and left again, their masters highly pleased with the fair dealings of the Estates. Several had returned, time and time again.

There had been others who had come through during times when the null was in turbulence and it was from these that he had taken his harvest. He had been particular in his choices, making careful evaluation before taking any action.

By this time, his operation was faultless--a smooth routine which admitted of no error. He smiled as he remembered his fumbling efforts with the first caravan and his halting improvements when he had dealt with the next. What were those fellows' names?

He shrugged. He could remember that first fellow practically begging him to take action and he could remember his own frightened evaluation of the situation after the first step. He had gone over a whole, long line of alternative choices, rejecting them one by one until the inevitable, ideal method of operation had come out. He smiled.

When he had finally settled on his general method, it had been elegantly simple. But it had been very nearly perfect. Basically, he was still using the same plan.

Now, of course, it was smoother and even more simplified. There were two general routines involved.

Most caravan masters were treated with the greatest of consideration. They were allowed to pass through the Estates with only nominal fees and invited to avail themselves of the courtesy of the Estates at any time in the future. If trades with the Estates were involved, the fees were waived, of course. And many of them had returned, bringing goods and information, as well as taking away the produce of the Estates.

Then, there were those caravans which came during turbulences in the null and which seemed worthwhile to the now practiced eyes of Kio Barra. These were the ones ripe for harvest. Their owners had been offered the courtesy of the Estates--and more.

They had been taken for sightseeing tours--perhaps of the lake--perhaps to see valuable carrier stock which could be had at bargain rates.

Then, in complete privacy, a distorter beam had made neat disposition of them.

Their goods had been distributed through the various warehouses and later disposed of through the safe channels which Barra had carefully cultivated. Their slaves, of course, had been eliminated.

Barra regretted this waste of valuable property, but this way there could be no leak of information and no inquiry could be successful.

There had been an inquiry at one time, but that had been in the earlier days.

The inquirer had gone away with no suspicion in his mind. He had examined the null from the hills and had agreed with Kio Barra that it was indeed a menace. He had listened sympathetically to Barra's rueful comments about slaves and stock which had drifted into the null, never to be heard from again.

Barra activated the view crystal. It was time for another inspection of the Estates.

* * * * *

The projection formed and Barra was suddenly in a wood, looking across a wide field. Grain waved in the breeze and here and there, the silhouettes of both long-neck and fin-back could be seen, half hidden by grass and trees.

The scanner progressed, crossing the field and continuing to another forest, operating on the route impressed on it. Barra relaxed as he watched. As the scan progressed through field, swamp and forest, he nodded in satisfaction. The Estates were in far better shape than ever before.

Suddenly, he halted the scan, looking critically at the scene. He was in the central clearing of Tibara. And the village didn't match with the standards he wanted.

He looked critically at the huts. They were becoming run-down. It had been too long since the roof thatches had been replaced. Uprights were bending a little here, a trifle out of plumb there.

There were broken stones again in the well curb and the pile of stone brought for repair wasn't neatly stacked. He frowned.

This was not the first time he'd had to take a firm hand in Tibara. Of course, he had replaced headmen in other villages--more than once in some cases. But Tibara was working on its third headman. There was something really wrong in that village.

To be sure, Tibara was the village where most caravan slaves were quartered. A lodge had been built there for that purpose and it was in frequent use. Naturally, it was maintained by the villagers. But that was even less excuse for shoddiness. This should be the neatest, best kept village in all Kira Barra. It wasn't.

The frown deepened. This time, Tibara was going to be cleaned up, and he'd keep his attention on it. The village would stay clean if the villagers had to spend every second of their time on it when they weren't taking care of their herds, their boats, and their guest lodge.

And there'd be no slacking in those other areas, either.

He looked around the clearing. There were, he was forced to admit, no idlers about at the moment. The only people he could see were women and children. And the women were busily occupied.

Again, he studied the scene. The men would be coming in from their fields and from the lake in another hour. He would examine a few other villages, then return his attention to Tibara.

* * * * *

Wearily, Retonga, headman of Tibara, pulled himself to a sitting position. He looked over to the other side of the room. Mir was already on her feet. She smiled at him uncertainly.

"It's morning," she said. "Rest day, at last."

"Yes." Retonga closed his eyes for an instant. It had been bad for her, too, he knew. He'd probably been pretty hard to live with these past few days. He sighed.

"Rest day," he mused. "But it means nothing. There's still work. There's always work these days." He got to his feet.

"I wish I were just a herd boy--in some other village." He went to the door and looked out.

Someone had disturbed the pile of building stones. Children had been playing in the clearing the night before and the earth was scuffed up. Bits of wood and cloth lay scattered here and there.

He looked at the houses. Folshan's roof was sagging a trifle, he noticed. And there were a couple of dolls lying outside his door. He shook his head and went out into the clearing.

Old Tamiso was squatting by the well. Retonga walked over to him.

"Your stone pile," he said. "A few of the stones are scattered."

The old man looked over, then shrugged.

"I just picked this one out," he explained. "When I get it laid, I'll have to get another. I'll straighten the pile when I finish here."

Retonga smiled wearily. "And if the master sees your pile now?"

Tamiso pushed himself to his feet, rubbing his back thoughtfully.

"Yes," he said. "The master can give great pain, and it seems he is always watching these days." He walked over to the stones.

For a moment, Retonga watched as he rearranged his pile, then he turned, tilting his head back.

"Awaken," he shouted. "For the sun looks down and shall he find us asleep?"

A head poked out of a door.

"It's a rest day. We'll be at it soon enough, but what's the hurry?"

Retonga shook his head. "I know it's rest day. You know it's rest day. But there's one who forgets these things. Remember the other evening?"

Folshan winced and Retonga pointed.

"Better get those dolls picked up. And there's that roof of yours. I'll give you a hand with it."

Folshan came out of his hut, then looked back.

"No," he said slowly. "You're headman. Remember how that happened? Let the master catch you helping with the work and we'll need yet another headman." He shook his head.

"This time, it could be me." He bent over to pick up the toys his daughter had left.

"Kina," he called, "tell Chama to keep her toys picked up, or she might be needing a new father." He turned again.

"I'll get Kesonta to help with that roof. It'll be straight in an hour or so."

Retonga looked after him for a moment, then caught the eyes of a couple of the women. He made a sweeping motion toward the earth of the clearing, then walked back to his own door.

[Illustration]

He turned, inspecting each detail of the village.

"Let's see. Is there anything else for the master to find wrong?" Again, he examined each house closely.

At last, he turned away, walking toward a path.

"He'll probably be looking at the waterfront, too," he told himself, "and at the lodge."

He walked slowly along the path, checking the forest floor as he went. As he got to the beach, he looked toward the pier, then winced.

A few hundred yards out in the lake, a high wedge of water was sweeping toward him. At the apex of the vee, he could see the shape of a boat, its bow riding high over the water.

"Oh, no," he groaned to himself. "Trouble again!" He waited.

As the wave splashed to the pier, he dashed forward to secure the boat. Kio Barra merely glanced at him. Briefly, he caught the impression of a wide field. A line of great beasts were crossing it, their long necks bobbing as they walked. He nodded in understanding.

A caravan was coming in. That would be trouble, of course, but of minor nature. He turned, to follow the glittering figure as it floated toward the path and on, into the village.

* * * * *

As the caravan came to a stop, Naran's beast bent its knees and crouched. He swung himself to the ground.

He was getting the hang of this, he told himself. At first, he had been forced to fight an almost uncontrollable compulsion to float down normally, but now it seemed quite sensible to grab the heavy fiber strands and swing forward till his feet were solidly on the ground. He spun about.

"All right," he shouted. "Take your reins. Form your unloading circles on me. We'll be here for a day or two."

He watched as the slings were lifted from the brutes' backs, then turned his attention to the man who was greeting Dar Girdek.

So this was the Lord of the Mountain Lake. He shook his head. The fellow glittered almost from head to foot. Naran examined the jewelry appraisingly. He wore a fourth-order cap. They didn't make them any heavier than that one. And if there was a device that had been left out, he had never heard of it.

In addition, he could identify three heavy-duty shields, a power levitator, a handful of destructor and paralysis rings, and a projector medallion capable of forming several hundred cubic feet of solid, detailed illusion. He shook his head.

This man must have spent the entire income of his estate for several years in assembling this array. There was enough there to outfit a battle group of competent psionics.

"If this guy needs all that stuff just to get by, he's as near to psionic zero as you can get," Naran told himself. "Either that, or he's loaded with a power compulsion that's never been equalled." He frowned.

"Or both," he added thoughtfully.

He looked again at the blaze of jewelry.

Faintly, he could sense the sour feel of fear. It acted as a carrier for a mixture of hatred, envy, and contemptuous hauteur. Naran whistled softly. There was more, too. He wished he dared try a probe, but with all that arsenal of psionic crystalware, it would be unwise.

"Hit those shields of his and I'd bounce off with a noise like a million bells," he thought. He turned away.

He'd have to keep his own mind fully hooded around here. He looked back again, glancing at the distorter rod Barra carried. His eyes widened a little.

"Given adequate drive, that thing would stop a Fifth Planet battleship." He grinned.

"Arm a couple of hundred men with those things and they could go out and take the Fifth apart, bit by bit. Then we wouldn't have to worry about those people and their mechanical gadgets."

He dragged his attention back to the business at hand, tapping in on Dar Girdek's thoughts.

"... And we can tour the Estates later today," Barra was saying. "I may be able to show you some worthwhile goods, as well as a few good draft beasts to carry them."

Naran risked a light probe, taking advantage of Barra's diverted attention.

He had been right, he thought. It was the "or both." He shook his head. The guy was almost pathetic. Obviously, he wanted to be the greatest man on the planet. And equally obviously, without his amplifier jewels, he'd be little stronger psionically than one of Dar Girdek's drivers.

As Dar Girdek followed his host toward the village, Naran turned his attention back to his drivers. He would have to make camp and then get together with that village headman. There'd be plenty of arrangements they would have to make.

He was surprised at the arrangements Retonga had already made. There wasn't much question about it, the entertainment of caravans was familiar business with this headman. He knew all the problems--and their answers.

Of course, Dar Girdek had told him about the hospitality of Kira Barra, but this had to be seen to be believed. He spent his first really restful night in weeks.

The next morning, he walked slowly along the path to the drivers' lodge, paying little attention to his surroundings. Somehow, in spite of the reception given the caravan, he was uneasy.

He recalled his conversation with Retonga the night before.

The man had asked questions about the conditions of the trail. He had been curious about the treatment of the drivers by the master of the train. Then he had shaken his head, looking out over his village.

"It is far different here. This is an estate of death and terror, and our master is the very lord of these. I was a child when his father died, but I think things were different then." He had looked searchingly at Naran.

"I've never mentioned these things before," he went on. "But there's something--" He had looked down at the ground, then up again.

"Our master became Kio through the death of his brother," he went on, "and it was through the deaths of other headmen that I was placed in charge of this village." He had glanced back into the door of his hut.

"I had no part in causing those deaths. The life of a headman here in Tibara is short and none but a fool would fight for this position of mine. It is not a good one. The master's demands are heavy and his hand is even heavier."

This didn't match with the reputation of Kio Barra as a considerate host--a fair man to do business with. It made him wonder.

Had his brother actually ever left this place? But if not, where were his drivers? What had happened to his train of draft brutes? How had the cargo he carried been disposed of?

Oh, of course, he knew there were caravan masters who would accept freight and ask a minimum of questions. Goods could be disposed of. And this was a breeding estate. The slaves? He shook his head. Too simple!

He brought himself back to the present, looking thoughtfully at the drivers' lodge ahead of him. Then he probed gently, trying to establish rapport with Dar Girdek. The man could be in real danger.

He frowned and probed with more force. There was nothing. The frown deepened.

After his talk with Retonga, he had established rapport with the caravan master, but the older man had attached no importance to his suspicions.

"No," he had thought back, "you are seeing a robber behind every rock now. Kio Barra is a tough master, of course. He's got a big estate here, and he really keeps it up to the mark. He's a good host and a really good man to deal with--liberal trader. Remember, I know this guy. I've been here before." There had been the impression of a smile.

"Besides, this guy's harmless, remember? Sure, he's a businessman. But if he should try anything violent, I could take care of him without taking time out to think about it." A final, dismissing thought had come.

"Look, forget about it, will you? If you had to suspect someone of dirty work, pick on some of those northerners. Kio Barra's too well known for fair dealing. I'll make a deal with him, then we can go up to the northern swing and really look around to see if we can find any trace of that caravan of your brother's."

Naran kicked at the trail. Dar Girdek was a good trader and a successful caravan master. He knew goods and their value, and he was expert in handling beasts and drivers. But he had never been too sensitive. And he'd absolutely refused to wear a probe amplifier.

"Look," he'd thought disgustedly, "how would you like to do business with some guy that wore a great, big, yellow headlight to tell you he wanted to poke around in your mind?"

Naran put his foot on the lowest rung of the short ladder leading to the lodge door.

Unless he was badly mistaken, he knew now where his brother had gone. And now Dar Girdek had joined him. The details? He shrugged.

They were unimportant. But what was next? What would be the next step in Barra's plans? And what could be done about this guy? He climbed the ladder and went into the lodge.

Of course, if the Council found out about this, they could deal with the situation. All they'd need would be a little proof and Kio Barra would be well and promptly taken care of. But how would someone get word out?

The estate was loaded with surrogates, he knew that. A caravan--even a single man--would find it impossible to either enter or leave without the knowledge and consent of the Master Protector. He smiled.

He could just visualize Kio Barra letting anyone out with proof of his activities. The smile faded.

A distant projection? There were those surrogates again. They were broad tuned and he knew it. They'd flare like a field of beacons.

Of course, he could get out a flash appeal and it would be heard. He grinned.

Now, there was a nice way to commit suicide. There'd be no time for help to arrive, he was sure of that. And no shield would stand up under that heavy-duty distorter, even if Barra could only summon a minimum of power to operate it. He shook his head, looking around the room.

* * * * *

Drivers were beginning to stir and get to their feet. Naran looked at the flunky.

"Better get with it, Bintar," he said. "Going to be a bunch of hungry men around you in a couple of minutes."

"Yeah." The man started out the door, yawning. "Got to eat, if we don't do anything else." He climbed down the ladder.

Naran glanced at the drivers.

"Soon's we've eaten," he said, "I'd like to check up on the long-necks. See whether they've wandered during the night. I'd hate to have them get mixed up with the village herd."

A driver looked around at him.

"Aw," he protested, "the master probably pinned 'em down good before he left. Besides, he can identify 'em anyway. They won't go far--not with those herd boys running around."

"Sure," Naran told him. "The master would really like spending half a day cutting out his long-necks from the village herd. And how about that Master Protector? What would he think of our caravan?"

The other looked at him disgustedly. "Aw, who cares about that? Why worry about what one of them witchmen thinks about another? Long's we don't get twisted around, what's the difference?"

Naran growled to himself. He'd blundered on that one. There was no answer to that argument that he could present. He had learned to understand--and in some measure sympathize with--the deep-seated resentment of the non-psi for the psionic. The non-psionics felt they were just as good men as anyone, yet here were these psionics with their incomprehensible powers. And there was nothing to be done about it except obey.

Of course, they didn't like it--or their masters.

As far as that went, the caravan herd was unimportant now. The only trouble was Retonga. If the herds were mixed, he would be in real trouble.

"Well," he said aloud, "I'm not about to get the master to spinning. Long's we keep him happy, we'll all be a lot better off. As I said, right after breakfast. I want everyone out on the herd." He started to turn away.

"Aagh," growled the other. "Why don't you face it? You're just one of those guys likes to toss orders around and make people jump. It's about time someone showed you a few things."

Naran turned back. Rosel had been resentful ever since the caravan had formed. He had expected to be lead driver on this trip and he'd made no effort to hide his fury and disappointment at being displaced in favor of a newcomer.

For an instant, Naran considered. There was no point in continuing his masquerade any further. Dar Girdek was gone and he'd have to take the caravan back anyway--if he could work his way out of here, past Barra.

If he couldn't get out--if he joined his brother and Dar Girdek--it would make no difference what the caravan drivers thought.

He could put this man in his place right now. Then, he could give him the job of lead driver.

But there was something else to think of. If he got the train out of here, he would have to work with this guy. And there would always be an even greater resentment added to the normal fear and hatred of the psionic. That could demoralize the whole train. Naran sighed.

Rosel had put his feelings in the open now and Naran would have to play out the role he had assumed.

He crossed the room to confront Rosel. Abruptly, he thrust a hand out. The other made a grab for it and Naran moved smoothly forward, locking the grasping hand.

Quickly he extended a leg and threw Rosel over it. As the man hit the floor, Naran retained his grip and brought his other hand over, twisting the man's arm. His foot went out, to smack into the man's face, pinning him to the floor. Slowly, he put pressure on the prisoned hand.

"Once more," he said coldly, "I'm going to have everyone out on the herd right after breakfast. Now, do you want to go out and work with 'em, or do I keep winding up on this thing and then have 'em load you up with the rest of the spare gear?"

"Aw, look." Rosel's voice was muffled. "Didn't mean a thing, I was just making a crack."

"Yeah, sure." Naran's voice was scornful. "Just having a little fun before breakfast. Now you listen to me. So long as I'm lead driver, you're going to do what I say--when I say it. If you give me any more trouble, I'll pull your head off and make you carry it under one arm. Got it?"

"Ow! Yeah, I got it. You're the lead driver."

Naran released his pressure and stepped back.

"All right," he said. "Let's forget it. Now, we'll get breakfast over with and then we'll take care of the long-necks. You take the drivers out, Rosel. I'm going to make some arrangements in the village. Be with you later." He swung away.

* * * * *

Barra looked at his reflection with satisfaction. It was too bad, he thought, that he didn't have some companion to appreciate his wealth and power. He examined his equipment carefully.

Everything was clean. Everything was in order. There was no device lacking.

Proudly, he looked down at the huge, yellow pendant he was wearing for the first time. It was funny, he thought, that he had never considered a probe unit before. Now that he thought of it, this was a most satisfactory device. Now, he could look into his villagers' minds and see clearly what lay there. Even, he could get some ideas of the intentions of visiting caravan masters.

Fitting the device and becoming familiar with it had been hard work, of course, but he had mastered it. And today, he could wear the jewel and use it. It would make the day's work easier.

He activated his levitator, floated to his boat, and pulled it away from its shelter, setting the course toward Tibara.

The hard part of this operation was over, he thought. The rest was simple routine.

This caravan master had given him a bit more trouble than some of the others, but his final reaction had been just like all the others. He smiled.

That flash of incredulity, followed by sudden, horrified comprehension, then blankness, was becoming perfectly familiar. In fact, even this was simple routine.

He wondered if he might be able to extend just a little. Perhaps he could operate on a wider scale. There should be some way he could work out to take over a neighboring estate and go from there.

Surely, there must be some outlet for his abilities, beyond mere increase in the wealth of Kira Barra. And there must be some way to gain a companion of sorts. He would have to think that over.

He swung the boat to the pier and floated away, grandly ignoring the pseudomen who hurried to secure his lines.

He examined the village with approval as he stood in the center of the clearing. There had been a great improvement since he had taken that headman in hand. Perhaps this fellow would be satisfactory--might even learn to take some pride in the appearance of his village--if, that is, a pseudoman were capable of pride.

He looked over toward the headman's hut.

The fellow had come out, followed by the lead driver of the caravan. Good, that would save the trouble of hunting the fellow out.

He concentrated on the caravan slave.

"Your master has decided to remain at the Residence for a time," he thought confidently. "You may have your drivers load up and move to a more permanent location."

The answering thought was unexpectedly distinct.

"This location looks as though it were designed for a caravan's stay. Where's Dar Girdek?"

Barra looked at the man in surprise. What was this? This fellow didn't think like any pseudoman. Had Dar Girdek somehow managed to persuade a halfman to act as his lead driver? But why?

He drew back a little, tensing. There was something wrong here.

"Now, look," persisted the man before him. "I'd like to see Dar Girdek. I'd like to know why I haven't been able to get in touch with him this morning."

Barra blinked, then activated the new probe. He would have to find out what this man knew--how much others might know. Abruptly, he felt a violent return of the fear sickness which had temporarily subsided with the death of Dar Girdek.

The probe was met by an impenetrable barrier. Barra's eyes widened. This man was no halfman, either. He was one of the great psionics. Frantically, Barra's thought retraced the past.

Was this an investigator from the Council? Was he, Kio Barra, suspect? But how had any leak occurred? The fear grew, till he could almost smell the sour stench of it. And with it, came a buoying lift of pure fury.

This man may have unmasked him, to be sure. The Council might even now be sending men to take him, but this spy would never know the results of his work. He would profit nothing here.

He flipped the distorter from under his arm.

* * * * *

As the Master Protector started to raise his distorter, Naran felt a sharp twinge of regret. He had resigned himself to this, and had made his preparations, but he hated to leave Barra to someone else. Of course, the man had no chance now. The disturbance he had keyed himself to make if he were hit with a distorter would be heard by every scholar in Ganiadur, and by half the Council. But--

Suddenly, he felt a sort of pity for the killer before him. The guy wasn't really altogether to blame. He'd been living for all these years with everything against him.

Born into a psionic family, he had been the family skeleton--a thing of disgrace--to be hidden from the rest of the world and given tolerant protection.

And when this barely tolerated being had managed somehow to gain power and get amplifying devices? Well--

The crystal was leveled at him now. He looked at it indifferently, thinking of the man who held it.

"Poor, lonesome weakling!"

Abruptly, the clearing was lit up by a blinding red glare. Naran closed his eyes against the searing light. Seconds went by and he opened his eyes again, looking about the village in confusion.

Had he somehow managed to retain full consciousness of ego, even after being reduced by a distorter beam? Was there a release into some other state of being? He had felt no--

He looked at Kio Barra. The man stood, slack-faced, still holding his distorter rod, but gradually allowing it to sag toward the ground. Naran shook his head.

"Now, what goes on?"

He probed at the man's mind.

There was consciousness. The man could think, but the thoughts were dim and blurred, with no trace of psionic carrier. The control and amplifier jewels he wore had lost their inner fire--were merely dull, lifeless reflectors of the sunlight. This man could do no more toward bringing life to the jewels than could the village headman--perhaps, even less.

Naran looked at him in unbelieving confusion, then turned as a sudden, screaming thought struck his mind.

"A stinking, high-nosed witchman! And we thought he was one of us! Ate with him. Argued with him. Even fought with him. I've got to get away. Got to!"

There was desperation in the thought. And there were hatred overtones, which blended, then swelled.

As the terrorized ululation went on, Naran swung his head, locating the source. He'd have to do something about that--fast. The fellow would really demoralize the caravan now--even infect the big saurians--cause a stampede.

This guy had some power of projection and his terror was intensifying it till anyone could receive the disturbing impulses, even though complete understanding might be lacking.

Naran lifted himself from the ground, arrowing rapidly toward the caravan, his mind already forming the thoughts which he hoped would soothe the frantic fear and--at least to some degree--allay the frenzy of hatred that swelled and became stronger and stronger.

Barra could wait.

* * * * *

As Barra swung his distorter to bear, he concentrated on the violent pulse needed to trigger the jewel, his mind closed to all else. He turned his attention on his target.

Suddenly, he recognized the curiously tender expression which had formed on the face of the man before him.

Frantically, he tried to revise his thoughts--to recall the blaze of energy he had concentrated to build up.

It was too late.

With a sense of despair, he recognized the sudden, lifting, twisting agony that accompanied the flare of the overloaded power crystal. For an eternal instant, his universe was a blinding, screaming, red nightmare.

The flare died and he watched dully as the unharmed man before him looked about unbelievingly, then looked back to carefully examine him.

"Oh," he told himself dully. "I suppose they'll take care of me, but what of it? They'll put me somewhere. I'll lose everything. It'll be just like the place Boemar thought of sending me, when I--"

Furiously, he tried to summon some tiny bit of energy to activate the distorter.

Nothing happened.

The man whose pity had destroyed him suddenly frowned, then turned and darted away. Dully, Barra watched him, then he turned, to look around the village. His face contorted in new terror.

Some of the village men were moving toward him, curious expressions on their faces. He backed away from them and turned.

A few more had moved to block his path.

They were grunting and hissing to each other. Barra looked from face to face, then looked over toward the well.

There were men over there, too, by the pile of stones. The old man who worked on the retaining walls of the village had picked up some of his building material.

He stood, eying Barra calculatingly, a stone poised in each hand.

THE END

Contents

IMPACT

By IRVING E. COX, Jr.

They were languorous, anarchic, shameless in their pleasures ... were they lower than man ... or higher?

Over the cabin 'phone, Ann's voice was crisp with anger. "Mr. Lord, I must see you at once."

"Of course, Ann." Lord tried not to sound uncordial. It was all part of a trade agent's job, to listen to the recommendations and complaints of the teacher. But an interview with Ann Howard was always so arduous, so stiff with unrelieved righteousness. "I should be free until--"

"Can you come down to the schoolroom, Mr. Lord?"

"If it's necessary. But I told you yesterday, there's nothing we can do to make them take the lessons."

"I understand your point of view, Mr. Lord." Her words were barely civil, brittle shafts of ice. "However, this concerns Don; he's gone."

"Gone? Where?"

"Jumped ship."

"Are you sure, Ann? How long ago?"

"I rather imagined you'd be interested," she answered with smug satisfaction. "Naturally you'll want to see his note. I'll be waiting for you."

The 'phone clicked decisively as she broke the connection. Impotent fury lashed Lord's mind--anger at Don Howard, because the engineer was one of his key men; and, childishly, anger at Don's sister because she was the one who had broken the news. If it had come from almost anyone else it would, somehow, have seemed less disastrous. Don's was the fourth desertion in less than a week, and the loss of trained personnel was becoming serious aboard the Ceres. But what did Ann Howard expect Lord to do about it? This was a trading ship; he had no military authority over his crew.

As Lord stood up, his desk chair collapsed with a quiet hiss against the cabin wall, and, on greased tubes, the desk dropped out of sight beneath the bunk bed, giving Lord the luxury of an uncluttered floor space eight feet square. He had the only private quarters on the ship--the usual distinction reserved for a trade agent in command.

From a narrow wardrobe, curved to fit the projectile walls of the ship, Lord took a lightweight jacket, marked with the tooled shoulder insignia of command. He smiled a little as he put it on. He was Martin Lord, trade agent and heir to the fabulous industrial-trading empire of Hamilton Lord, Inc.; yet he was afraid to face Ann Howard without the visible trappings of authority.

* * * * *

He descended the spiral stairway to the midship airlock, a lead-walled chamber directly above the long power tubes of the Ceres. The lock door hung open, making an improvised landing porch fifty feet above the charred ground. Lord paused for a moment at the head of the runged landing ladder. Below him, in the clearing where the ship had come down, he saw the rows of plastic prefabs which his crew had thrown up--laboratories, sleeping quarters, a kitchen, and Ann Howard's schoolroom.

Beyond the clearing was the edge of the magnificent forest which covered so much of this planet. Far away, in the foothills of a distant mountain range, Lord saw the houses of a village, gleaming in the scarlet blaze of the setting sun. A world at peace, uncrowded, unscarred by the feverish excavation and building of man. A world at the zenith of its native culture, about to be jerked awake by the rude din of civilization. Lord felt a twinge of the same guilt that had tormented his mind since the Ceres had first landed, and with an effort he drove it from his mind.

He descended the ladder and crossed the clearing, still blackened from the landing blast; he pushed open the sliding door of the schoolroom. It was large and pleasantly yellow-walled, crowded with projectors, view-booths, stereo-miniatures, and picture books--all the visual aids which Ann Howard would have used to teach the natives the cultural philosophy of the Galactic Federation. But the rows of seats were empty, and the gleaming machines still stood in their cases. For no one had come to Ann's school, in spite of her extravagant offers of trade goods.

Ann sat waiting, ramrod straight, in front of a green-tinged projectoscope. She made no compromise with the heat, which had driven the men to strip to their fatigue shorts. Ann wore the full, formal uniform. A less strong-willed woman might have appeared wilted after a day's work. Ann's face was expressionless, a block of cold ivory. Only a faint mist of perspiration on her upper lip betrayed her acute discomfort.

"You came promptly, Mr. Lord." There was a faint gleam of triumph in her eyes. "That was good of you."

She unfolded her brother's note and gave it to Lord. It was a clear, straight-forward statement of fact. Don Howard said he was deserting the mission, relinquishing his Federation citizenship. "I'm staying on this world; these people have something priceless, Ann. All my life I've been looking for it, dreaming of it. You wouldn't understand how I feel, but nothing else--nothing else--matters, Ann. Go home. Leave these people alone. Don't try to make them over."

The last lines rang in sympathy with Lord's own feelings, and he knew that was absurd. Changes would have to be made when the trade city was built. That was Lord's business. Expansion and progress: the lifeblood of the Federation.

"What do you want me to do?" he demanded.

"Go after Don and bring him back."

"And if he refuses--"

"I won't leave him here."

"I have no authority to force him against his will, Ann."

"I'm sure you can get help from this--" her lip curled "--this native girl of yours. What's her name?"

"Niaga."

"Oh, yes; Niaga. Quaint, isn't it?" She smiled flatly.

He felt an almost irresistible urge to smash his fist into her jaw. Straight-laced, hopelessly blind to every standard but her own--what right did Ann have to pass judgment on Niaga? It was a rhetorical question. Ann Howard represented the Federation no less than Lord did himself. By law, the teachers rode every trading ship; in the final analysis, their certification could make or break any new planetary franchise.

* * * * *

"Niaga has been very helpful, Ann; cooperative and--"

"Oh, I'm sure she has, Mr. Lord."

"I could threaten to cut off Don's bonus pay, I suppose, but it wouldn't do much good; money has no meaning to these people and, if Don intends to stay here, it won't mean much to him, either."

"How you do it, Mr. Lord, is not my concern. But if Don doesn't go home with us--" She favored him with another icy smile. "I'm afraid I'll have to make an adverse report when you apply for the franchise."

"You can't, Ann!" Lord was more surprised than angry. "Only in the case of a primitive and belligerent culture--"

"I've seen no evidence of technology here." She paused. "And not the slightest indication that these people have any conception of moral values."

"Not by our standards, no; but we've never abandoned a planet for that reason alone."

"I know what you're thinking, Mr. Lord. Men like you--the traders and the businessmen and the builders--you've never understood a teacher's responsibility. You make the big noise in the Federation; but we hold it together for you. I'm not particularly disturbed by the superficials I've seen here. The indecent dress of these people, their indolent villages, their congenital irresponsibility--all that disgusts me, but it has not affected my analysis. There's something else here--something far more terrible and more dangerous for us. I can't put it in words. It's horrible and it's deadly; it's the reason why our men have deserted. They've had attractive women on other worlds--in the trade cities, anything money could buy--but they never jumped ship before."

"A certain percentage always will, Ann." Lord hoped he sounded reassuring, but he felt anything but reassured himself. Not because of what she said. These naive, altogether delightful people were harmless. But could the charming simplicity of their lives survive the impact of civilization? It was this world that was in danger, not by any stretch of the imagination the Federation.

* * * * *

As the thought occurred to him, he shrank from it with a kind of inner terror. It was heresy. The Federation represented the closest approximation of perfection mortal man would ever know: a brotherhood of countless species, a union of a thousand planets, created by the ingenuity and the energy of man. The Pax Humana; how could it be a threat to any people anywhere?

"That would be my recommendation." Suddenly Ann's self-assurance collapsed. She reached for his hand; her fingers were cold and trembling. "But, if you bring Don back, I--I won't report against a franchise."

"You're offering to make a deal? You know the penalty--"

"Collusion between a trade agent and the teacher assigned to his ship--yes, I know the law, Mr. Lord."

"You're willing to violate it for Don? Why? Your brother's a big boy now; he's old enough to look after himself."

Ann Howard turned away from him and her voice dropped to a whisper. "He isn't my brother, Mr. Lord. We had to sign on that way because your company prohibits a man and wife sailing in the same crew."

In that moment she stripped her soul bare to him. Poor, plain, conscientious Ann Howard! Fighting to hold her man; fighting the unknown odds of an alien world, the stealthy seduction of an amoral people. Lord understood Ann, then, for the first time; he saw the shadow of madness that crept across her mind; and he pitied her.

"I'll do what I can," he promised.

As he left the schoolroom she collapsed in a straight-backed chair--thin and unattractive, like Ann herself--and her shoulders shook with silent, bitter grief.

* * * * *

Martin Lord took the familiar path to Niaga's village. The setting sun still spread its dying fire across the evening sky, but he walked slowly through the deep, quiet shadows of the forest. He came to the stream where he had met Niaga; he paused to dip his sweat-smeared face into the cool water cascading over a five foot fall.

A pleasant flood of memory crowded his mind. When he had first met Niaga, almost a week before, she had been lying on the sandy bank of the stream, idly plaiting a garland of red and blue flowers. Niaga! A copper-skinned goddess, stark naked and unashamed in the bright spot light of sun filtered through the trees. Languorous, laughing lips; long, black hair loosely caught in a net of filmy material that hung across her shoulder.

The feeling of guilt and shame had stabbed at Lord's mind. He had come, unasked, into an Eden. He didn't belong here. His presence meant pillage, a rifling of a sacred dream. The landing had been a mistake.

Oddly enough, the Ceres had landed here entirely by chance, the result of a boyish fling at adventure.

Martin Lord was making a routine tour of representative trade cities before assuming his vice-presidency in the central office of Hamilton Lord, Inc. It had been a family custom for centuries, ever since the first domed ports had been built on Mars and Venus.

Lord was twenty-six and, like all the family, tall, slim, yellow-haired. As the Lords had for generations, Martin had attended the Chicago University of Commerce for four years, and the Princeton Graduate School in Interstellar Engineering four more--essential preparations for the successful Federation trader. In Chicago Martin had absorbed the basic philosophy of the Federation: the union of planets and diverse peoples, created by trade, was an economy eternally prosperous and eternally growing, because the number of undiscovered and unexploited planets was infinite. The steady expansion of the trade cities kept demand always one jump ahead of supply; every merchant was assured that this year's profits would always be larger than last. It was the financial millennium, from which depression and recession had been forever eliminated. At Princeton Lord had learned the practical physics necessary for building, servicing and piloting the standard interstellar merchant ships.

Martin Lord's tour of the trade cities completed his education. It was his first actual contact with reality. The economy of progress, which had seemed so clear-cut in the Chicago lecture halls, was translated into a brawling, vice-ridden, frontier city. In the older trade cities, the culture of man had come to dominate the occupied worlds. No trace of what alien peoples had been or had believed survived, except as museum oddities.

This, Lord admitted to himself, was conquest, by whatever innocuous name it passed. But was it for good or evil? In the first shock of reality, Martin Lord had doubted himself and the destiny of the Federation. But only for a moment. What he saw was good--he had been taught to believe that--because the Federation was perfection.

But the doubt, like a cancer, fed and grew in the darkness of Lord's soul.

* * * * *

On the home trip a mechanical defect of the calibration of the time-power carried the Ceres off its course, light years beyond the segment of the Galaxy occupied by the Federation.

"We've burned out a relay," Don Howard reported.

"Have we replacements?" Lord asked.

"It's no problem to fix. But repairs would be easier if we could set the ship down somewhere."

Lord glanced at the unknown sun and three satellite planets which were plotted electronically on his cabin scanning screen. His pulse leaped with sudden excitement. This was his first--and last--chance for adventure, the only interstellar flight he would command in his lifetime. When he returned to earth, he would be chained for the rest of his days to a desk job, submerged in a sea of statistical tables and financial statements.

"Run an atmosphere analysis on those three worlds, Mr. Howard," he said softly.

Driven by its auxiliary nuclear power unit, the ship moved closer to the new solar system. In half an hour Don Howard brought Lord the lab report. Two of the planets were enveloped in methane, but the third had an earth-normal atmosphere. Lord gave the order for a landing, his voice pulsing with poorly concealed, boyish pleasure.

The Ceres settled on a hilltop, its cushioning rockets burning an improvised landing area in the lush foliage. As the airlock swung open, Lord saw half a dozen golden-skinned savages standing on the edge of the clearing. As nearly as he could judge, they were men; but that was not too surprising, because a number of planets in the Federation had evolved sentient species which resembled man. The savages were unarmed and nearly naked--tall, powerfully built men; they seemed neither awed nor frightened by the ship.

Over the circle of scorched earth Lord heard the sound of their voices. For a fleeting second the words seemed to make sense--a clear, unmistakable welcome to the new world.

But communication was inconceivable. This planet was far beyond the fringe of the Federation. Lord was letting his imagination run away with him.

He flung out his arms in a universally accepted gesture of open-handed friendship. At once the talk of the natives ceased. They stood waiting silently on the burned ground while the men unwound the landing ladder.

* * * * *

Lord made the initial contact himself. The techniques which he had learned in the University of Commerce proved enormously successful. Within ten minutes rapport was established; in twenty the natives had agreed to submit to the linguistic machines. Lord had read accounts of other trailblazing commercial expeditions; and he knew he was establishing a record for speed of negotiation.

The savages were quite unfrightened as the electrodes were fastened to their skulls, entirely undisturbed by the whir of the machine. In less than an hour they were able to use the common language of the Federation. Another record; most species needed a week's indoctrination.

Every new development suggested that these half-naked primitives--with no machine civilization, no cities, no form of space flight--had an intellectual potential superior to man's. The first question asked by one of the broad-shouldered savages underscored that conclusion.

"Have you come to our world as colonists?"

No mumbo-jumbo of superstition, no awe of strangers who had suddenly descended upon them from the sky. Lord answered, "We landed in order to repair our ship, but I hope we can make a trade treaty with your government."

For a moment the six men consulted among themselves with a silent exchange of glances. Then one of them smiled and said, "You must visit our villages and explain the idea of trade to our people."

"Of course," Lord agreed. "If you could serve as interpreters--"

"Our people can learn your language as rapidly as we have, if we can borrow your language machine for a time."

Lord frowned. "It's a rather complex device, and I'm not sure--you see, if something went wrong, you might do a great deal of harm."

"We would use it just as you did; we saw everything you turned to make it run." One of the golden-skinned primitives made a demonstration, turning the console of dials with the ease and familiarity of a semantic expert. Again Lord was impressed by their intelligence--and vaguely frightened.

"You could call this the first trade exchange between your world and ours," another savage added. "Give us the machine; we'll send you fresh food from the village."

The argument was logical and eventually the natives had their way. Perhaps it was Ann Howard's intervention that decided the point. She vehemently disapproved; a gift of techniques should be withheld until she had examined their cultural traditions. But Martin Lord was a trade agent, and he had no intention of allowing his mission to be wrecked by the ephemeral doubts of a teacher. Here at the onset was the time to make it clear that he was in command. He gave the natives the machine.

As the six men trudged across the burned earth carrying the heavy apparatus easily on their shoulders, Lord wondered if either he or Ann Howard had much to do with the negotiations. He had an unpleasant feeling that, from the very beginning, the natives had been in complete control of the situation.

* * * * *

Less than an hour after the six men had departed, a band of natives emerged from the forest bearing gifts of food--straw baskets heaped with fruit, fresh meat wrapped in grass mats, hampers of bread, enormous pottery jars filled with a sweet, cold, milky liquid. Something very close to the miraculous had occurred. Every native had learned to use the Federation language.

A kind of fiesta began in the clearing beside the Ceres. The natives built fires to cook the food. The women, scantily dressed if they were clothed at all, danced sensuously in the bright sunlight to a peculiarly exotic, minor-keyed music played on reed and percussion instruments. Laughing gaily, they enticed members of Lord's crew to join them.

The milky drink proved mildly intoxicating--yet different from the stimulants used in the Federation. Lord drank a long draught from a mug brought him by one of the women. The effect was immediate. He felt no dulling of his reason, however; no loss of muscular control, but instead a stealthy relaxation of mental strain joined with a satisfying sense of physical well-being. A subtle shifting in prospective, in accepted values.

The savage feast, which grew steadily more boisterous, Lord would have called an orgy under other circumstances. The word did occur to him, but it seemed fantastically inapplicable. Normally the behavior of his men would have demanded the severest kind of disciplinary action. But here the old code of rules simply didn't apply and he didn't interfere with their enjoyment.

The afternoon sun blazed in the western sky; heat in shimmering waves hung over the clearing. Lord went into the ship and stripped off his uniform; somehow the glittering insignia, the ornamental braid, the stiff collar--designed to be impressive symbols of authority--seemed garish and out of place. Lord put on the shorts which he wore when he exercised in the capsule gym aboard ship.

Outside again, he found that most of the men had done the same thing. The sun felt warm on his skin; the air was comfortably balmy, entirely free of the swarms of flies and other insects which made other newly contacted frontier worlds so rugged.

As he stood in the shelter of the landing ladder and sipped a second mug of the white liquor, Lord became slowly aware of something else. Divested of their distinguishing uniforms, he and his crew seemed puny and ill-fed beside the natives. If physique were any index to the sophistication of a culture--but that was a ridiculous generalization!

He saw Ann Howard coming toward him through the crowd--stern-faced, hard-jawed, stiffly dignified in her uniform. The other women among the crew had put on their lightest dress, but not Ann. Lord was in no frame of mind, just then, to endure an interview with her. He knew precisely what she would say; Ann was a kind of walking encyclopedia of the conventions.

Lord slid out of sight in the shadow of the ship, but Ann had seen him. He turned blindly into the forest, running along the path toward the village.

In a fern-banked glen beside the miniature waterfall he had met Niaga.

* * * * *

No woman he had ever known seemed so breathtakingly beautiful. Her skin had been caressed by a lifetime's freedom in the sun; her long, dark hair had the sheen of polished ebony; and in the firm, healthy curves of her body he saw the sensuous grace of a Venus or an Aphrodite.

She stood up slowly and faced him, smiling; a bright shaft of sunlight fell on the liquid bow of her lips. "I am Niaga," she said. "You must be one of the men who came on the ship."

"Martin Lord," he answered huskily. "I'm the trade agent in command."

"I am honored." Impulsively she took the garland of flowers which she had been making and put it around his neck. When she came close, the subtle perfume of her hair was unmistakable--like the smell of pine needles on a mountain trail; new grass during a spring rain; or the crisp, winter air after a fall of snow. Perfume sharply symbolic of freedom, heady and intoxicating, numbing his mind with the ghosts of half-remembered dreams.

"I was coming to your ship with the others," she said, "but I stopped here to swim, as I often do. I'm afraid I stayed too long, day-dreaming on the bank; time means so little to us." Shyly she put her hand in his. "But, perhaps, no harm is done, since you are still alone. If you have taken no one else, will I do?"

"I--I don't understand."

"You are strangers; we want you to feel welcome."

"Niaga, people don't--that is--" He floundered badly. Intellectually he knew he could not apply the code of his culture to hers; emotionally it was a difficult concept to accept. If his standards were invalid, his definitions might be, too. Perhaps this society was no more primitive than--No! A mature people would always develop more or less the same mechanical techniques, and these people had nothing remotely like a machine.

"You sent us a gift," she said. "It is only proper for us to return the kindness."

"You have made a rather miraculous use of the language machine in a remarkably short period of time."

"We applied it to everyone in the village. We knew it would help your people feel at ease, if we could talk together in a common tongue."

"You go to great pains to welcome a shipload of strangers."

"Naturally. Consideration for others is the first law of humanity." After a pause, she added very slowly, with her eyes fixed on his, "Mr. Lord, do you plan to make a colony here?"

"Eventually. After we repair the ship, I hope to negotiate a trade treaty with your government."

"But you don't intend to stay here yourself?"

"I couldn't."

"Have we failed in our welcome? Is there something more--"

"No, Niaga, nothing like that. I find your world very--very beautiful." The word very inadequately expressed what he really felt. "But I'm not free to make the choice."

She drew in her breath sharply. "Your people, then, hold you enslaved?"

He laughed--uneasily. "I'm going home to manage Hamilton Lord; it's the largest trading company in the Federation. We have exclusive franchises to develop almost five hundred planets. It's my duty, Niaga; my responsibility; I can't shirk it."

"Why not--if you wanted to?"

"Because I'm Martin Lord; because I've been trained--No, it's something I can't explain. You'll just have to take my word for it. Now tell me: how should I go about negotiating a treaty with your people?"

"You spoke of the government, Martin Lord; I suppose you used the word in a symbolic sense?"

"Your chieftain; your tribal leader--whatever name you have for them."

* * * * *

Her big, dark eyes widened in surprise. "Then you meant actual men? It's a rather unusual use of the word, isn't it? For us, government is a synonym for law."

"Of course, but you must have leaders to interpret it and enforce it."

"Enforce a law?" This seemed to amuse her. "How? A law is a statement of a truth in human relationship; it doesn't have to be enforced. What sane person would violate a truth? What would you do, Martin Lord, if I told you we had no government, in your sense of the word?"

"You can't be that primitive, Niaga!"

"Would it be so terribly wrong?"

"That's anarchy. There'd be no question, then, of granting us a trade franchise; we'd have to set up a trusteeship and let the teachers run your planet until you had learned the basic processes of social organization."

Niaga turned away from him, her hands twisted together. She said, in a soft whisper that was flat and emotionless, "We have a council of elders, Martin Lord. You can make your treaty with them." Then, imperceptibly, her voice brightened. "It will take a week or more to bring the council together. And that is all to the good; it will give your people time to visit in our villages and to get better acquainted with us."

* * * * *

Niaga left him, then; she said she would go to the village and send out the summons for the council. By a roundabout path, Lord returned to the clearing around the Ceres. The forest fascinated him. It was obviously cultivated like a park, and he was puzzled that a primitive society should practice such full scale conservation. Normally savages took nature for granted or warred against it.

He came upon a brown gash torn in a hillside above the stream, a place where natives were apparently working to build up the bank against erosion. In contrast to the beauty that surrounded it, the bare earth was indescribably ugly, like a livid scar in a woman's face. In his mind Lord saw this scar multiplied a thousand times--no, a million times--when the machines of the galaxy came to rip out resources for the trade cities. He envisioned the trade cities that would rise against the horizon, the clutter of suburban subdivisions choking out the forests; he saw the pall of industrial smoke that would soil the clean air, the great machines clattering over asphalt streets.

For the first time he stated the problem honestly, to himself: this world must be saved exactly as it was. But how? How could Lord continue to represent Hamilton Lord, Inc., as a reputable trade agent, and at the same time save Niaga's people from the impact of civilization?

It was sunset when he returned to the Ceres. On the clearing the festivities were still going on, but at a slower pace. Ann Howard was waiting for Lord at the door of his cabin. She registered her official disapproval of the revelry, which Lord had expected, and then she added,

"We can't make a treaty with them; these people have no government with the authority to deal with us."

"You're wrong, Ann; there's a council of elders--"

"I beg to differ, Mr. Lord." Her lips made a flat, grim line against her teeth. "This afternoon I made a point of talking to every native in the clearing. Their idea of government is something they call the law of humanity. Whether it is written down or not, I have no way of knowing; but certainly they have no such thing as a central authority. This rather indicates a teacher trusteeship for the planet, I believe."

"You've made a mistake, Ann; I'll have to check for myself."

Lord and Ann Howard moved together through the clearing and he began to talk to the natives. In each case he elicited the same information that Ann had given him. The mention of a governing council seemed to amuse the savages. Lord and Ann were still conducting their puzzling inquest when Niaga returned from the village. She said that the council had been called and would meet within a week.

"There seems to be some difference of opinion," Ann told her coldly, "between you and your people."

"Yes," Lord added uncertainly, "I've been asking about the council and--"

"But you didn't phrase your question clearly," Niaga put in smoothly. "We're not quite used to using your words yet with your definitions." To make her point, she called the same natives whom Ann and Lord had questioned, and this time, without exception, they reversed their testimony. Lord was willing to believe the language had caused the difficulty. Niaga's people were entirely incapable of deception; what reason would they have had?

* * * * *

From that hour, the clearing was never altogether free of native guests. They deluged Lord's crew with kindness and entertainment. Lord never left the ship, day or night, without having Niaga slip up beside him and put her arm through his. Because Ann Howard had made her objections so clear, the native women, in an effort to please the teacher, had taken to wearing more clothing than they were accustomed to. But they rejected the sack-like plastics which Ann dispensed in the schoolroom and put on the mist-like, pastel-colored netting which they used normally to decorate their homes. If anything, the addition of clothing made the women more attractive than ever.

The scientists among Lord's men analyzed the planetary resources and found the planet unbelievably rich in metals; the botanists determined that the seeds for the exotic fruits and flowers were exportable. All told, Niaga's world could develop into the richest franchise in the Federation.

Niaga took Lord to visit the villages which were close to the landing site. Each town was exactly like its neighbors, a tiny cluster of small, yellow-walled, flat-roofed houses nestled among the tall trees close to a cleared farmland which was worked co-operatively by everyone in the village. No single town was large, yet judging from the number that he saw, Lord estimated the planetary population in the billions.

Continuously Niaga tried to persuade him to stay and build a colony in the new world. Lord knew that the other natives were being as persuasive with the rest of the crew. And the temptation was very real: to trade the energetic, competitive, exhausting routine that he knew for the quiet peace and relaxation here.

As the days passed the rigid scheduling of exploratory activities, always practiced by a trade mission, began to break down. The charming savages of this new world put no monetary value on time, and something of their spirit began to infect Lord's crew. They stopped bucking for overtime; most of them applied for accumulated sick leave--so they could walk in the forest with the native women, or swim in the forest pools. Even Lord found time to relax.

One afternoon, after a swim with Niaga, they lay in the warm sun on the grassy bank of a stream. Niaga picked a blue, delicately scented water lily, and gently worked it into his hair. Slowly she bent her face close until her lips brushed his cheek.

"Must you really go away when the treaty is made?"

"I'm a Lord, Niaga."

"Does that matter? If you like it here--"

"Niaga, I wish--I wish--" He shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

"Why is it so important for you to build your trade cities?"

As he sought for words to answer her question, the spell of her presence was broken. He saw her for what she was: an extremely beautiful woman, sensuously very lovely, yet nonetheless a primitive--a forlorn child without any conception of the meaning of civilization. "We keep our union of planets economically sound," he explained patiently, "and at peace by constantly expanding--"

"I have visited the schoolroom your teacher has put up beside the ship. I have seen her models of the many machines your people know how to build. But why do you do it, Martin Lord?"

"The machines make our lives easier and more comfortable; they--"

"More comfortable than this?" She gestured toward the stream and the cultivated forest.

"Your world moves at the pace of a walk, Niaga; with our machines, you could rise above your trees, reach your destination in minutes--when now it takes you days."

"And miss all the beauty on the way. What point is there in saving time, and losing so much that really matters? Do your machines give you anything--you as a person, Martin Lord--that you couldn't have here without them?"

* * * * *

The question was unanswerable. It symbolized the enormous gulf that lay between Niaga and himself. More than that, Lord saw clearly that the trade cities would destroy her world utterly. Neither Niaga nor her way of life could survive the impact of civilization. And the exotic charm, the friendly innocence was worth saving. Somehow Lord had to find a way to do it.

* * * * *

Lord was by no means surprised when the first three men jumped ship and went to live in one of the quiet villages. Subconsciously he envied them; subconsciously he wished he had the courage to make the same decision. Although Ann Howard demanded it, Lord couldn't seriously consider taking measures to stop further desertions.

When Don Howard jumped ship, he brought the issue to a head. Ann maneuvered Lord so that he would have to take a stand. What and how, he didn't know.

It was the first time since the landing that Niaga had not been waiting outside the ship for Lord. At his request she had gone to the village to find what progress had been made in calling the council of elders. Lord knew where to find her, but after his talk with Ann he walked slowly along the forest path. He stopped to dip his face into the stream where he had first met Niaga. Anything to put off the showdown. Lord was trying desperately to understand and evaluate his own motivation.

He accepted the fact that he had not stopped the desertions because, if enough men jumped ship, the Ceres would be unable to take off again. Lord could then have embraced Niaga's temptation without having to make the decision for himself. But that was a coward's way out and no solution. There would always be people like Ann Howard who would not accept the situation. They would eventually make radio communication with the Federation, and the location of Niaga's world would no longer be a secret.

Fundamentally that was the only thing that counted: to preserve this world from the impact of civilization.

Then suddenly, as he listened to the music of the stream, Lord saw how that could be done. Ann Howard had offered him a deal; she would keep her word. Everything hinged on that.

Don Howard had to be brought back--if persuasion failed, then by force.

Martin Lord ran back to the clearing. From a supply shed he took a pair of deadly atomic pistols. Their invisible, pin-point knife of exploding energy could slice through eighteen feet of steel, transform a mountain into a cloud of radioactive dust.

He ran through the forest to the village. As usual, the children were playing games on the grass, while the adults lounged in front of their dwellings or enjoyed community singing and dancing to the pulsing rhythm of their music. The sound of gaiety suddenly died as Lord walked between the rows of houses.

Strange, he thought; they seemed to guess what was in his mind. Niaga ran from the quiet crowd and took his hand.

"No, Martin Lord; you must not interfere!"

"Where's Howard?"

"He is a free man; he has a right to choose--"

"I'm going to take him back." He drew one of his guns. She looked at him steadily, without fear, and she said,

"We made you welcome; we have given you our friendship, and now you--"

He pushed her aside brutally because her gentleness, her lack of anger, tightened the constriction of his own sense of guilt. Lord fired his weapon at the trunk of a tree. The wood flamed red for a moment and the sound of the explosion rocked the air, powdering the grass with black ash.

"This is the kind of power controlled by men," he said. His voice was harsh, shrill with shame and disgust for the role he had to play. "I shall use this weapon to destroy your homes--each of them, one by one--unless you surrender Don Howard to me."

As he turned the pistol slowly toward the closest yellow wall, Niaga whispered, "Violence is a violation of the law of humanity. We offered Don Howard sanctuary and peace--as we offer it to all of you. Stay with us, Martin Lord; make your home here."

He clenched his jaw. "I want Don and I want him now!"

"But why must you go back? Your world is powerful; your world is enormous with cities and machines. But what does it hold for you as a man, Martin Lord? Here we give you the dreams of your own soul, peace and beauty, laughter and dignity."

"Surrender, Don!" Although he was vaguely aware of it, he had no time to consider consciously the strangely sophisticated wording of her argument. When she continued to talk in the same gentle voice, the temptation caressed his mind like a narcotic; against his will, the tension began to wash from his muscles. Driven by a kind of madness to escape the sound of her voice, he pulled the trigger. The yellow wall exploded. Concussion throbbed in his ears, deafening him--but he still heard her whisper in the depths of his soul, like the music of a forest stream.

* * * * *

Then, at the end of the village street, he saw Don Howard coming out of one of the houses with his hands held high.

"You win, Lord; leave them alone."

It was victory, but Lord felt no triumph--only a crushing bitterness. He motioned Howard to take the path back to the ship. To Niaga he said,

"If your council of elders ever gets around to meeting, you might tell them that, as far as I'm concerned, you've already signed the trade treaty with me. We're leaving in the morning to register the franchise."

"You'd break your own law? You said the negotiations had to be--"

"Our men will come shortly to build the first trade city. I advise you not to resist them; they'll be armed with guns more powerful than mine."

She reached for his hand, but Lord turned away from her quickly so that she could not again open the raw wound of shame in his soul. He followed Don Howard into the forest.

"You won't get away with it, Lord," Howard said grimly. "No trade agent can impose a treaty--"

"Would a trusteeship be any better?"

"Lord, no!"

"There are only two alternatives, and a Hamilton Lord trade city is by far the better."

"Yes--for Hamilton Lord."

"No, for these people. Don't forget, I'll be running Hamilton Lord. The exclusive franchise will keep out the other traders, and I can see to it that our trade city does no harm. We've a thousand planets in the Federation; who's going to know if one of the cities doesn't really function?"

"I get it. But why the hell did you have to bring me back?"

"To make a deal with--with your wife."

After a long pause, Don Howard said wearily, "If Hamilton Lord can sacrifice the richest franchise in the galaxy, I suppose I can do my bit, too."

At dawn the Ceres departed. Lord drove his men to work throughout the night stowing the prefabs and the trade goods aboard the ship. Just before the power tubes stabbed the launching fire into the earth, a delegation of villagers came into the clearing. Niaga led them and she spoke to Lord at the foot of the landing ladder.

"We still want you to stay among us, Martin Lord; we have come again to offer--"

"It is impossible!"

She put her arms around his neck and drew his lips against hers. The temptation washed over his mind, shattering his resolution and warping his reason. This was what he wanted: the golden dream of every man. But for Lord only one idea held fast. Niaga's primitive, naive world had to be preserved exactly as it was. If he gave in to the dream, he would destroy it. Only in the central office of Hamilton Lord could he do anything to save what he had found here. He wrenched himself free of her arms.

"It's no use, Niaga."

She knew that she had lost, and she moved away from him. One of the other golden-skinned savages pushed a small, carved box into his hands.

"A parting gift," Niaga said. "Open it when you are aboard your ship, Martin Lord."

Long after the Ceres had blasted off, he sat alone in his cabin looking at the box--small, delicately carved from a strange material, like a soft plastic. It seemed somehow alive, throbbing with the memory of the dream he had left behind.

With a sigh he opened the box. A billow of white dust came from it. The box fell apart and the pieces, like disintegrating gelatine, began to melt away. A printed card, made of the same unstable material, lay in Lord's hand.

"You have three minutes, Martin Lord," he read. "The drug is painless, but before it wipes memory from the minds of you and your crew, I want you to understand why we felt it necessary to do this to you.

"When you first landed, we realized that you came from a relatively immature culture because you made no response to our telepathy of welcome. We did our best after that to simplify your adjustment to our way of life, because we knew you would have to stay among us. Of course, we never really learned your language; we simply gave you the illusion that we had. Nor is there any such thing as a council of elders; we had to invent that to satisfy you. We truly wanted you to stay among us. In time you could have grown up enough--most of you--to live with us as equals. We knew it would be disastrous for you to carry back to your world your idea of how we live. We are the tomorrow of your people; you must grow up to us. There is no other way to maturity. We could not, of course, keep you here against your will. Nor could we let you go back, like a poison, into your world. We could do nothing else but use this drug. The impact of civilization upon a primitive people like yours...."

The words hazed and faded as the note disintegrated. Lord felt a moment of desperate yearning, a terrible weight of grief. With an effort he pushed himself from his chair and pulled open the door into the corridor. He had to order the ship back while he could still remember; he had to find Niaga and tell her ...

... tell her. Tell whom? Tell what? Lord stood in the corridor staring blankly at the metal wall. He was just a little puzzled as to why he was there, what he had meant to do. He saw Ann Howard coming toward him.

"Did you notice the lurch in the ship, Mr. Lord?" she asked.

"Yes, I suppose I did." Was that why he had left his cabin?

"I thought we were having trouble with the time-power calibration, but I checked with Don and he says everything's all right." She glanced through the open door of his cabin at the electronic pattern on the scanning screen. "Well, we'll be home in another twenty hours, Mr. Lord. It's a pity we didn't contact any new planets on this mission. It would have been a good experience for you."

"Yes, I rather hoped so, too."

He went back to his desk. Strange, he couldn't remember what it was he had wanted to do. He shrugged his shoulders and laughed a little to himself. It definitely wouldn't do--not at all--for a Lord to have lapses of memory.

THE END

Contents

THE CRACK OF DOOM

BY ROBERT CROMIE

PREFACE

The rough notes from which this narrative has been constructed were given to me by the man who tells the story. For obvious reasons I have altered the names of the principals, and I hereby pass on the assurance which I have received, that the originals of such as are left alive can be found if their discovery be thought desirable. This alteration of names, the piecing together of somewhat disconnected and sometimes nearly indecipherable memoranda, and the reduction of the mass to consecutive form, are all that has been required of me or would have been permitted to me. The expedition to Labrador mentioned by the narrator has not returned, nor has it ever been definitely traced. He does not undertake to prove that it ever set out. But he avers that all which is hereafter set down is truly told, and he leaves it to mankind to accept the warning which it has fallen to him to convey, or await the proof of its sincerity which he believes the end of the century will produce.

ROBERT CROMIE.

BELFAST, May, 1895.

CHAPTER I.

THE UNIVERSE A MISTAKE!

"The Universe is a mistake!"

Thus spake Herbert Brande, a passenger on the Majestic, making for Queenstown Harbour, one evening early in the past year. Foolish as the words may seem, they were partly influential in leading to my terrible association with him, and all that is described in this book.

Brande was standing beside me on the starboard side of the vessel. We had been discussing a current astronomical essay, as we watched the hazy blue line of the Irish coast rise on the horizon. This conversation was interrupted by Brande, who said, impatiently:

"Why tell us of stars distant so far from this insignificant little world of ours--so insignificant that even its own inhabitants speak disrespectfully of it--that it would take hundreds of years to telegraph to some of them, thousands to others, and millions to the rest? Why limit oneself to a mere million of years for a dramatic illustration, when there is a star in space distant so far from us that if a telegram left the earth for it this very night, and maintained for ever its initial velocity, it would never reach that star?"

He said this without any apparent effort after rhetorical effect; but the suddenness with which he had presented a very obvious truism in a fresh light to me made the conception of the vastness of space absolutely oppressive. In the hope of changing the subject I replied:

"Nothing is gained by dwelling on these scientific speculations. The mind is only bewildered. The Universe is inexplicable."

"The Universe!" he exclaimed. "That is easily explained. The Universe is a mistake!"

"The greatest mistake of the century, I suppose," I added, somewhat annoyed, for I thought Brande was laughing at me.

"Say, of Time, and I agree with you," he replied, careless of my astonishment.

I did not answer him for some moments.

This man Brande was young in years, but middle-aged in the expression of his pale, intellectual face, and old--if age be synonymous with knowledge--in his ideas. His knowledge, indeed, was so exhaustive that the scientific pleasantries to which he was prone could always be justified, dialectically at least, by him when he was contradicted. Those who knew him well did not argue with him. I was always stumbling into intellectual pitfalls, for I had only known him since the steamer left New York.

As to myself, there is little to be told. My history prior to my acquaintance with Brande was commonplace. I was merely an active, athletic Englishman, Arthur Marcel by name. I had studied medicine, and was a doctor in all but the degree. This certificate had been dispensed with owing to an unexpected legacy, on receipt of which I determined to devote it to the furtherance of my own amusement. In the pursuit of this object, I had visited many lands and had become familiar with most of the beaten tracks of travel. I was returning to England after an absence of three years spent in aimless roaming. My age was thirty-one years, and my salient characteristic at the time was to hold fast by anything that interested me, until my humour changed. Brande's conversational vagaries had amused me on the voyage. His extraordinary comment on the Universe decided me to cement our shipboard acquaintance before reaching port.

"That explanation of yours," I said, lighting a fresh cigar, and returning to a subject which I had so recently tried to shelve, "isn't it rather vague?"

"For the present it must serve," he answered absently.

To force him into admitting that his phrase was only a thoughtless exclamation, or induce him to defend it, I said:

"It does not serve any reasonable purpose. It adds nothing to knowledge. As it stands, it is neither academic nor practical."

Brande looked at me earnestly for a moment, and then said gravely:

"The academic value of the explanation will be shown to you if you will join a society I have founded; and its practicalness will soon be made plain whether you join or not."

"What do you call this club of yours?" I asked.

"We do not call it a club. We call it a Society--the Cui Bono Society," he answered coldly.

"I like the name," I returned. "It is suggestive. It may mean anything--or nothing."

"You will learn later that the Society means something; a good deal, in fact."

This was said in the dry, unemotional tone which I afterwards found was the only sign of displeasure Brande ever permitted himself to show. His arrangements for going on shore at Queenstown had been made early in the day, but he left me to look for his sister, of whom I had seen very little on the voyage. The weather had been rough, and as she was not a good sailor, I had only had a rare glimpse of a very dark and handsome girl, whose society possessed for me a strange attraction, although we were then almost strangers. Indeed, I regretted keenly, as the time of our separation approached, having registered my luggage (consisting largely of curios and mementoes of my travels, of which I was very careful) for Liverpool. My own time was valueless, and it would have been more agreeable to me to continue the journey with the Brandes, no matter where they went.

There was a choppy sea on when we reached the entrance to the harbour, so the Majestic steamed in between the Carlisle and Camden forts, and on to the man-of-war roads, where the tender met us. By this time, Brande and his sister were ready to go on shore; but as there was a heavy mail to be transhipped, we had still an hour at our disposal. For some time we paced the deck, exchanging commonplaces on the voyage and confidences as to our future plans. It was almost dark, but not dark enough to prevent us from seeing those wonderfully green hills which landlock the harbour. To me the verdant woods and hills were delightful after the brown plains and interminable prairies on which I had spent many months. As the lights of Queenstown began to speck the slowly gathering gloom, Miss Brande asked me to point out Rostellan Castle. It could not be seen from the vessel, but the familiar legend was easily recalled, and this led us to talk about Irish tradition with its weird romance and never failing pathos. This interested her. Freed now from the lassitude of sea-sickness, the girl became more fascinating to me every moment. Everything she said was worth listening to, apart from the charming manner in which it was said.

To declare that she was an extremely pretty girl would not convey the strange, almost unearthly, beauty of her face--as intellectual as her brother's--and of the charm of her slight but exquisitely moulded figure. In her dark eyes there was a sympathy, a compassion, that was new to me. It thrilled me with an emotion different from anything that my frankly happy, but hitherto wholly selfish life had known. There was only one note in her conversation which jarred upon me. She was apt to drift into the extraordinary views of life and death which were interesting when formulated by her eccentric brother, but pained me coming from her lips. In spite of this, the purpose I had contemplated of joining Brande's Society--evoked as it had been by his own whimsical observation--now took definite form. I would join that Society. It would be the best way of keeping near to Natalie Brande.

Her brother returned to us to say that the tender was about to leave the ship. He had left us for half an hour. I did not notice his absence until he himself announced it. As we shook hands, I said to him:

"I have been thinking about that Society of yours. I mean to join it."

"I am very glad," he replied. "You will find it a new sensation, quite outside the beaten track, which you know so well."

There was a shade of half-kindly contempt in his voice, which missed me at the moment. I answered gaily, knowing that he would not be offended by what was said in jest:

"I am sure I shall. If all the members are as mad as yourself, it will be the most interesting experience outside Bedlam that any man could wish for."

I had a foretaste of that interest soon.

As Miss Brande was walking to the gangway, a lamp shone full upon her gypsy face. The blue-black hair, the dark eyes, and a deep red rose she wore in her bonnet, seemed to me an exquisite arrangement of harmonious colour. And the thought flashed into my mind very vividly, however trivial it may seem here, when written down in cold words: "The queen of women, and the queen of flowers." That is not precisely how my thought ran, but I cannot describe it better. The finer subtleties of the brain do not bear well the daylight of language.

Brande drew her back and whispered to her. Then the sweet face, now slightly flushed, was turned to me again.

"Oh, thank you for that pretty thought," she said with a pleasant smile. "You are too flattering. The 'queen of flowers' is very true, but the 'queen of women!' Oh, no!" She made a graceful gesture of dissent, and passed down the gangway.

As the tender disappeared into the darkness, a tiny scrap of lace waved, and I knew vaguely that she was thinking of me. But how she read my thought so exactly I could not tell.

That knowledge it has been my fate to gain.

CHAPTER II.

A STRANGE EXPERIMENT.

Soon after my arrival in London, I called on Brande, at the address he had given me in Brook Street. He received me with the pleasant affability which a man of the world easily assumes, and his apology for being unable to pass the evening with me in his own house was a model of social style. The difficulty in the way was practically an impossibility. His Society had a meeting on that evening, and it was imperative that he should be present.

"Why not come yourself?" he said. "It is what we might call a guest night. That is, visitors, if friends of members, are admitted, and as this privilege may not be again accorded to outsiders, you ought to come before you decide finally to join us. I must go now, but Natalie" (he did not say "Miss Brande") "will entertain you and bring you to the hall. It is very near--in Hanover Square."

"I shall be very glad indeed to bring Miss Brande to the hall," I answered, changing the sentence in order to correct Brande's too patronising phrase.

"The same thing in different words, is it not? If you prefer it that way, please have it so." His imperturbability was unaffected.

Miss Brande here entered the room. Her brother, with a word of renewed apology, left us, and presently I saw him cross the street and hail a passing hansom.

"You must not blame him for running off," Miss Brande said. "He has much to think of, and the Society depends almost wholly on himself."

I stammered out that I did not blame him at all, and indeed my disclaimer was absolutely true. Brande could not have pleased me better than he had done by relieving us of his company.

Miss Brande made tea, which I pretended to enjoy in the hope of pleasing her. Over this we talked more like old and well proven friends than mere acquaintances of ten days' standing. Just once or twice the mysterious chord which marred the girl's charming conversation was touched. She immediately changed the subject on observing my distress. I say distress, for a weaker word would not fittingly describe the emotion I felt whenever she blundered into the pseudo-scientific nonsense which was her brother's favourite affectation. At least, it seemed nonsense to me. I could not well foresee then that the theses which appeared to be mere theoretical absurdities, would ever be proven--as they have been--very terrible realities. On subjects of ordinary educational interest my hostess displayed such full knowledge of the question and ease in dealing with it, that I listened, fascinated, as long as she chose to continue speaking. It was a novel and delightful experience to hear a girl as handsome as a pictorial masterpiece, and dressed like a court beauty, discourse with the knowledge, and in the language, of the oldest philosopher. But this was only one of the many surprising combinations in her complex personality. My noviciate was still in its first stage.

The time to set out for the meeting arrived all too soon for my inclination. We decided to walk, the evening being fine and not too warm, and the distance only a ten minutes' stroll. At a street crossing, we met a crowd unusually large for that neighbourhood. Miss Brande again surprised me. She was watching the crowd seething and swarming past. Her dark eyes followed the people with a strange wondering, pitying look which I did not understand. Her face, exquisite in its expression at all times, was now absolutely transformed, beatified. Brande had often spoken to me of mesmerism, clairvoyance, and similar subjects, and it occurred to me that he had used his sister as a medium, a clairvoyante. Her brain was not, therefore, under normal control. I determined instantly to tell him on the first opportunity that if he did not wish to see the girl permanently injured, he would have to curtail his hypnotic influence.

"It is rather a stirring sight," I said so sharply to Miss Brande that she started. I meant to startle her, but did not succeed as far as I wished.

"It is a very terrible sight," she answered.

"Oh, there is no danger," I said hastily, and drew her hand over my arm.

"Danger! I was not thinking of danger."

As she did not remove her hand, I did not infringe the silence which followed this, until a break in the traffic allowed us to cross the street. Then I said:

"May I ask what you were thinking of just now, Miss Brande?"

"Of the people--their lives--their work--their misery!"

"I assure you many are very happy," I replied. "You take a morbid view. Misery is not the rule. I am sure the majority are happy."

"What difference does that make?" the girl said with a sigh. "What is the end of it all--the meaning of it all? Their happiness! Cui Bono?"

We walked on in silence, while I turned over in my mind what she had said. I could come to no conclusion upon it save that my dislike for her enigmatic aberrations was becoming more intense as my liking for the girl herself increased. To change the current of her thoughts and my own, I asked her abruptly:

"Are you a member of the Cui Bono Society?"

"I! Oh, no. Women are not allowed to join--for the present."

"I am delighted to hear it," I said heartily, "and I hope the rule will continue in force."

She looked at me in surprise. "Why should you mind? You are joining yourself."

"That is different. I don't approve of ladies mixing themselves up in these curious and perhaps questionable societies."

My remark amused her. Her eyes sparkled with simple fun. The change in her manner was very agreeable to me.

"I might have expected that." To my extreme satisfaction she now looked almost mischievous. "Herbert told me you were a little--"

"A little what?"

"Well, a little--you won't be vexed? That is right. He said a little--mediæval."

This abated my appreciation of her sense of humour, and I maintained a dignified reticence, which unhappily she regarded as mere sullenness, until we reached the Society's room.

The place was well filled, and the company, in spite of the extravagantly modern costumes of the younger women, which I cannot describe better than by saying that there was little difference in it from that of ordinary male attire, was quite conventional in so far as the interchange of ordinary courtesies went. When, however, any member of the Society mingled with a group of visitors, the conversation was soon turned into a new channel. Secrets of science, which I had been accustomed to look upon as undiscoverable, were bandied about like the merest commonplaces of education. The absurdity of individuality and the subjectivity of the emotions were alike insisted on without notice of the paradox, which to me appeared extreme. The Associates were altruistic for the sake of altruism, not for the sake of its beneficiaries. They were not pantheists, for they saw neither universal good nor God, but rather evil in all things--themselves included. Their talk, however, was brilliant, and, with allowance for its jarring sentiments, it possessed something of the indefinable charm which followed Brande. My reflections on this identity of interest were interrupted by the man himself. After a word of welcome he said:

"Let me show you our great experiment; that which touches the high-water mark of scientific achievement in the history of humanity. It is not much in itself, but it is the pioneer of many marvels."

He brought me to a metal stand, on which a small instrument constructed of some white metal was placed. A large number of wires were connected with various portions of it, and these wires passed into the side-wall of the building.

In appearance, this marvel of micrology, so far as the eye-piece and upper portions went, was like an ordinary microscope, but its magnifying power was to me unbelievable. It magnified the object under examination many thousand times more than the most powerful microscope in the world.

I looked through the upper lens, and saw a small globe suspended in the middle of a tiny chamber filled with soft blue light, or transparent material. Circling round this globe four other spheres revolved in orbits, some almost circular, some elliptical, some parabolic. As I looked, Brande touched a key, and the little globules began to fly more rapidly round their primary, and make wider sweeps in their revolutions. Another key was pressed, and the revolving spheres slowed down and drew closer until I could scarcely distinguish any movement. The globules seemed to form a solid ball.

"Attend now!" Brande exclaimed.

He tapped the first key sharply. A little grey cloud obscured the blue light. When it cleared away, the revolving globes had disappeared.

"What do you think of it?" he asked carelessly.

"What is it? What does it mean? Is it the solar system or some other system illustrated in miniature? I am sorry for the misadventure."

"You are partly correct," Brande replied. "It is an illustration of a planetary system, though a small one. But there was no misadventure. I caused the somewhat dangerous result you witnessed, the wreckage not merely of the molecule of marsh gas you were examining--which any educated chemist might do as easily as I--but the wreckage of its constituent atoms. This is a scientific victory which dwarfs the work of Helmholtz, Avogadro, or Mendelejeff. The immortal Dalton himself" (the word "immortal" was spoken with a sneer) "might rise from his grave to witness it."

"Atoms--molecules! What are you talking about?" I asked, bewildered.

"You were looking on at the death of a molecule--a molecule of marsh gas, as I have already said. It was caused by a process which I would describe to you if I could reduce my own life work--and that of every scientific amateur who has preceded me since the world began--into half a dozen sentences. As that would be difficult, I must ask you to accept my personal assurance that you witnessed a fact, not a fiction of my imagination."

"And your instrument is so perfect that it not only renders molecules and atoms but their diffusion visible? It is a microscopic impossibility. At least it is amazing."

"Pshaw!" Brande exclaimed impatiently. "My instrument does certainly magnify to a marvellous extent, but not by the old device of the simple microscope, which merely focussed a large area of light rays into a small one. So crude a process could never show an atom to the human eye. I add much to that. I restore to the rays themselves the luminosity which they lost in their passage through our atmosphere. I give them back all their visual properties, and turn them with their full etheric blaze on the object under examination. Great as that achievement is, I deny that it is amazing. It may amaze a Papuan to see his eyelash magnified to the size of a wire, or an uneducated Englishman to see a cheese-mite magnified to the size of a midge. It should not amaze you to see a simple process a little further developed."

"Where does the danger you spoke of come in?" I asked with a pretence of interest. Candidly, I did not believe a single word that Brande had said.

"If you will consult a common text-book on the physics of the ether," he replied, "you will find that one grain of matter contains sufficient energy, if etherised, to raise a hundred thousand tons nearly two miles. In face of such potentiality it is not wise to wreck incautiously even the atoms of a molecule."

"And the limits to this description of scientific experiment? Where are they?"

"There are no limits," Brande said decisively. "No man can say to science 'thus far and no farther.' No man ever has been able to do so. No man ever shall!"

CHAPTER III.

"IT IS GOOD TO BE ALIVE."

Amongst the letters lying on my breakfast-table a few days after the meeting was one addressed in an unfamiliar hand. The writing was bold, and formed like a man's. There was a faint trace of a perfume about the envelope which I remembered. I opened it first.

It was, as I expected, from Miss Brande. Her brother had gone to their country place on the southern coast. She and her friend, Edith Metford, were going that day. Their luggage was already at the station. Would I send on what I required for a short visit, and meet them at eleven o'clock on the bridge over the Serpentine? It was enough for me. I packed a large portmanteau hastily, sent it to Charing Cross, and spent the time at my disposal in the park, which was close to my hotel.

Although the invitation I had received gave me pleasure, I could not altogether remove from my mind a vague sense of disquietude concerning Herbert Brande and his Society. The advanced opinions I had heard, if extreme, were not altogether alarming. But the mysterious way in which Brande himself had spoken about the Society, and the still more mysterious air which some of the members assumed when directly questioned as to its object, suggested much. Might it not be a revolutionary party engaged in a grave intrigue--a branch of some foreign body whose purpose was so dangerous that ordinary disguises were not considered sufficiently secure? Might they not have adopted the jargon and pretended to the opinions of scientific faddists as a cloak for designs more sinister and sincere? The experiment I witnessed might be almost a miracle or merely a trick. Thinking it over thus, I could come to no final opinion, and when I asked myself aloud, "What are you afraid of?" I could not answer my own question. But I thought I would defer joining the Society pending further information.

A few minutes before eleven, I walked towards the bridge over the Serpentine. No ladies appeared to be on it. There were only a couple of smartly dressed youths there, one smoking a cigarette. I sauntered about until one of the lads, the one who was not smoking, looked up and beckoned to me. I approached leisurely, for it struck me that the boy would have shown better breeding if he had come toward me, considering my seniority.

"I am sorry I did not notice you sooner. Why did you not come on when you saw us?" the smallest and slimmest youth called to me.

"In the name of--Miss--Miss--" I stammered.

"Brande; you haven't forgotten my name, I hope," Natalie Brande said coolly. "This is my friend, Edith Metford. Metford, this is Arthur Marcel."

"How do you do, Marcel? I am glad to meet you; I have heard 'favourable mention' of you from the Brandes," the second figure in knickerbockers said pleasantly.

"How do you do, sir--madam--I mean--Miss--" I blundered, and then in despair I asked Miss Brande, "Is this a tableau vivant? What is the meaning of these disguises?" My embarrassment was so great that my discourteous question may be pardoned.

"Our dress! Surely you have seen women rationally dressed before!" Miss Brande answered complacently, while the other girl watched my astonishment with evident amusement.

This second girl, Edith Metford, was a frank, handsome young woman, but unlike the spirituelle beauty of Natalie Brande. She was perceptibly taller than her friend, and of fuller figure. In consequence, she looked, in my opinion, to even less advantage in her eccentric costume, or rational dress, than did Miss Brande.

"Rationally dressed! Oh, yes. I know the divided skirt, but--"

Miss Metford interrupted me. "Do you call the divided skirt atrocity rational dress?" she asked pointedly.

"Upon my honour I do not," I answered.

These girls were too advanced in their ideas of dress for me. Nor did I feel at all at my ease during this conversation, which did not, however, appear to embarrass them. I proposed hastily to get a cab, but they demurred. It was such a lovely day, they preferred to walk, part of the way at least. I pointed out that there might be drawbacks to this amendment of my proposal.

"What drawbacks?" Miss Metford asked.

"For instance, isn't it probable we shall all be arrested by the police?" I replied.

"Rubbish! We are not in Russia," both exclaimed.

"Which is lucky for you," I reflected, as we commenced what was to me a most disagreeable walk. I got them into a cab sooner than they wished. At the railway station I did not offer to procure their tickets. To do so, I felt, would only give offence. Critical glances followed us as we went to our carriage. Londoners are becoming accustomed to varieties, if not vagaries, in ladies' costumes, but the dress of my friends was evidently a little out of the common even for them. Miss Metford was just turning the handle of a carriage door, when I interposed, saying, "This is a smoking compartment."

"So I see. I am going to smoke--if you don't object?"

"I don't suppose it would make any difference if I did," I said, with unconscious asperity, for indeed this excess of free manners was jarring upon me. The line dividing it from vulgarity was becoming so thin I was losing sight of the divisor. Yet no one, even the most fastidious, could associate vulgarity with Natalie Brande. There remained an air of unassumed sincerity about herself and all her actions, including even her dress, which absolutely excluded her from hostile criticism. I could not, however, extend that lenient judgment to Miss Metford. The girls spoke and acted--as they had dressed themselves--very much alike. Only, what seemed to me in the one a natural eccentricity, seemed in the other an unnatural affectation.

I saw the guard passing, and, calling him over, gave him half-a-crown to have the compartment labelled, "Engaged."

Miss Brande, who had been looking out of the window, absently asked my reason for this precaution. I replied that I wanted the compartment reserved for ourselves. I certainly did not want any staring and otherwise offensive fellow-passengers.

"We don't want all the seats," she persisted.

"No," I admitted. "We don't want the extra seats. But I thought you might like the privacy."

"The desire for privacy is an archaic emotion," Miss Metford remarked sententiously, as she struck a match.

"Besides, it is so selfish. We may be crowding others," Miss Brande said quietly.

I was glad she did not smoke.

"I don't want that now," I said to a porter who was hurrying up with a label. To the girls I remarked a little snappishly, "Of course you are quite right. You must excuse my ignorance."

"No, it is not ignorance," Miss Brande demurred. "You have been away so much. You have hardly been in England, you told me, for years, and--"

"And progress has been marching in my absence," I interrupted.

"So it seems," Miss Metford remarked so significantly that I really could not help retorting with as much emphasis, compatible with politeness, as I could command:

"You see I am therefore unable to appreciate the New Woman, of whom I have heard so much since I came home."

"The conventional New Woman is a grandmotherly old fossil," Miss Metford said quietly.

This disposed of me. I leant back in my seat, and was rigidly silent.

Miles of green fields stippled with daisies and bordered with long lines of white and red hawthorn hedges flew past. The smell of new-mown hay filled the carriage with its sweet perfume, redolent of old associations. My long absence dwindled to a short holiday. The world's wide highways were far off. I was back in the English fields. My slight annoyance passed away. I fell into a pleasant day-dream, which was broken by a soft voice, every undulation of which I already knew by heart.

"I am afraid you think us very advanced," it murmured.

"Very," I agreed, "but I look to you to bring even me up to date."

"Oh, yes, we mean to do that, but we must proceed very gradually."

"You have made an excellent start," I put in.

"Otherwise you would only be shocked."

"It is quite possible." I said this with so much conviction that the two burst out laughing at me. I could not think of anything more to add, and I felt relieved when, with a warning shriek, the train dashed into a tunnel. By the time we had emerged again into the sunlight and the solitude of the open landscape I had ready an impromptu which I had been working at in the darkness. I looked straight at Miss Metford and said:

"After all, it is very pleasant to travel with girls like you."

"Thank you!"

"You did not show any hysterical fear of my kissing you in the tunnel."

"Why the deuce would you do that?" Miss Metford replied with great composure, as she blew a smoke ring.

When we reached our destination I braced myself for another disagreeable minute or two. For if the great Londoners thought us quaint, surely the little country station idlers would swear we were demented. We crossed the platform so quickly that the wonderment we created soon passed. Our luggage was looked after by a servant, to whose care I confided it with a very brief description. The loss of an item of it did not seem to me of as much importance as our own immediate departure.

Brande met us at his hall door. His house was a pleasant one, covered with flowering creeping plants, and surrounded by miniature forests. In front there was a lake four hundred yards in width. Close-shaven lawns bordered it. They were artificial products, no doubt, but they were artificial successes--undulating, earth-scented, fresh rolled every morning. Here there was an isolated shrub, there a thick bank of rhododendrons. And the buds, bursting into floral carnival, promised fine contrasts when their full splendour was come. The lake wavelets tinkled musically on a pebbly beach.

Our host could not entertain us in person. He was busy. The plea was evidently sincere, notwithstanding that the business of a country gentleman--which he now seemed to be--is something less exacting than busy people's leisure. After a short rest, and an admirably-served lunch, we were dismissed to the woods for our better amusement.

Thereafter followed for me a strangely peaceful, idyllic day--all save its ending. Looking back on it, I know that the sun which set that evening went down on the last of my happiness. But it all seems trivial now.

My companions were accomplished botanists, and here, for the first time, I found myself on common ground with both. We discussed every familiar wild flower as eagerly as if we had been professed field naturalists. In walking or climbing my assistance was neither requisitioned nor required. I did not offer, therefore, what must have been unwelcome when it was superfluous.

We rested at last under the shade of a big beech, for the afternoon sun was rather oppressive. It was a pleasant spot to while away an hour. A purling brook went babbling by, singing to itself as it journeyed to the sea. Insects droned about in busy flight. There was a perfume of honeysuckle wafted to us on the summer wind, which stirred the beech-tree and rustled its young leaves lazily, so that the sunlight peeped through the green lattice-work and shone on the faces of these two handsome girls, stretched in graceful postures on the cool sward below--their white teeth sparkling in its brilliance, while their soft laughter made music for me. In the fulness of my heart, I said aloud:

"It is a good thing to be alive."

CHAPTER IV.

GEORGE DELANY--DECEASED.

"It is a good thing to be alive," Natalie Brande repeated slowly, gazing, as it were, far off through her half-closed eyelids. Then turning to me and looking at me full, wide-eyed, she asked: "A good thing for how many?"

"For all; for everything that is alive."

"Faugh! For few things that are alive. For hardly anything. You say it is a good thing to be alive. How often have you said that in your life?"

"All my life through," I answered stoutly. My constitution was a good one, and I had lived healthily, if hardily. I voiced the superfluous vitality of a well nourished body.

"Then you do not know what it is to feel for others."

There was a scream in the underwood near us. It ended in a short, choking squeak. The girl paled, but she went on with outward calm.

"That hawk or cat feels as you do. I wonder what that young rabbit thinks of life's problem?"

"But we are neither hawks nor cats, nor even young rabbits," I answered warmly. "We can not bear the burthens of the whole animal world. Our own are sufficient for us."

"You are right. They are more than sufficient."

I had made a false move, and so tried to recover my lost ground. She would not permit me. The conversation which had run in pleasant channels for two happy hours was ended. Thenceforth, in spite of my obstructive efforts, subjects were introduced which could not be conversed on but must be discussed. On every one Miss Brande took the part of the weak against the strong, oblivious of every consideration of policy and even ethics, careful only that she championed the weak because of their weakness. Miss Metford abetted her in this, and went further in their joint revolt against common sense. Miss Brande was argumentative, pleading. Miss Metford was defiant. Between the two I fared ill.

Of course the Woman question was soon introduced, and in this I made the best defence of time-honoured customs of which I was capable. But my outworks fell down as promptly before the voices of these young women as did the walls of Jericho before the blast of a ram's horn. Nothing that I had cherished was left to me. Woman no longer wanted man's protection. ("Enslavement" they called it.) Why should she, when in the evolution of society there was not now, or presently would not be, anything from which to protect her? ("Competing slaveowners" was what they said.) When you wish to behold protectors you must postulate dangers. The first are valueless save as a preventive of the second. Both evils will be conveniently dispensed with. All this was new to me, most of my thinking life having been passed in distant lands, where the science of ethics is codified into a simple statute--the will of the strongest.

When my dialectical humiliation was within one point of completion, Miss Metford came to my rescue. For some time she had looked on at my discomfiture with a good-natured neutrality, and when I was metaphorically in my last ditch, she arose, stretched her shapely figure, flicked some clinging grass blades from her suit, and declared it was time to return. Brande was a man of science, but as such he was still amenable to punctuality in the matter of dinner.

On the way back I was discreetly silent. When we reached the house I went to look for Herbert Brande. He was engaged in his study, and I could not intrude upon him there. To do so would be to infringe the only rigid rule in his household. Nor had I an opportunity of speaking to him alone until after dinner, when I induced him to take a turn with me round the lake. I smoked strong cigars, and made one of these my excuse.

The sun was setting when we started, and as we walked slowly the twilight shadows were deepening fast by the time we reached the further shore. Brande was in high spirits. Some new scientific experiment, I assumed, had come off successfully. He was beside himself. His conversation was volcanic. Now it rumbled and roared with suppressed fires. Anon, it burst forth in scintillating flashes and shot out streams of quickening wit. I have been his auditor in the three great epochs of his life, but I do not think that anything that I have recollected of his utterances equals the bold impromptus, the masterly handling of his favourite subject, the Universe, which fell from him on that evening. I could not answer him. I could not even follow him, much less suppress him. But I had come forth with a specific object in view, and I would not be gainsaid. And so, as my business had to be done better that it should be done quickly. Taking advantage of a pause which he made, literally for breath, I commenced abruptly:

"I want to speak to you about your sister."

He turned on me surprised. Then his look changed to one of such complete contempt, and withal his bearing suggested so plainly that he knew beforehand what I was going to say, that I blurted out defiantly, and without stopping to choose my words:

"I think it an infernal shame that you, her brother, should allow her to masquerade about with this good-natured but eccentric Metford girl--I should say Miss Metford."

"Why so?" he asked coldly.

"Because it is absurd; and because it isn't decent."

"My dear Abraham," Brande said quietly, "or is your period so recent as that of Isaac or Jacob? My sister pleases herself in these matters, and has every right to do so."

"She has not. You are her brother."

"Very well, I am her brother. She has no right to think for herself; no right to live save by my permission. Then I graciously permit her to think, and I allow her to live."

"You'll be sorry for this nonsense sooner or later--and don't say I didn't warn you." The absolute futility of my last clause struck me painfully at the moment, but I could not think of any way to better it. It was hard to reason with such a man, one who denied the fundamental principles of family life. I was thinking over what to say next, when Brande stopped and put his hand, in a kindly way, upon my shoulder.

"My good fellow," he said, "what does it matter? What do the actions of my sister signify more than the actions of any other man's sister? And what about the Society? Have you made up your mind about joining?"

"I have. I made it up twice to-day," I answered. "I made it up in the morning that I would see yourself and your Society to the devil before I would join it. Excuse my bluntness; but you are so extremely candid yourself you will not mind."

"Certainly, I do not mind bluntness. Rudeness is superfluous."

"And I made it up this evening," I said, a little less aggressively, "that I would join it if the devil himself were already in it, as I half suspect he is."

"I like that," Brande said gravely. "That is the spirit I want in the man who joins me."

To which I replied: "What under the sun is the object of this Society of yours?"

"Proximately to complete our investigations--already far advanced--into the origin of the Universe."

"And ultimately?"

"I cannot tell you now. You will not know that until you join us."

"And if your ultimate object does not suit me, I can withdraw?"

"No, it would then be too late."

"How so? I am not morally bound by an oath which I swear without full knowledge of its consequences and responsibilities."

"Oath! The oath you swear! You swear no oath. Do you fancy you are joining a society of Rechabites or Carmelites, or mediæval rubbish of that kind. Don't keep so painstakingly behind the age."

I thought for a moment over what this mysterious man had said, over the hidden dangers in which his mad chimeras might involve the most innocent accomplice. Then I thought of that dark-eyed, sweet-voiced, young girl, as she lay on the green grass under the beech-tree in the wood and out-argued me on every point. Very suddenly, and, perhaps, in a manner somewhat grandiose, I answered him:

"I will join your Society for my own purpose, and I will quit it when I choose."

"You have every right," Brande said carelessly. "Many have done the same before you."

"Can you introduce me to any one who has done so?" I asked, with an eagerness that could not be dissembled.

"I am afraid I can not."

"Or give me an address?"

"Oh yes, that is simple." He turned over a note-book until he found a blank page. Then he drew the pencil from its loop, put the point to his lips, and paused. He was standing with his back to the failing light, so I could not see the expression of his mobile face. When he paused, I knew that no ordinary doubt beset him. He stood thus for nearly a minute. While he waited, I watched a pair of swans flit ghost-like over the silken surface of the lake. Between us and a dark bank of wood the lights of the house flamed red. The melancholy even-song of a blackbird wailed out from a shrubbery beside us. Then Herbert Brande wrote in his note-book, and tearing out the page, he handed it to me, saying: "That is the address of the last man who quitted us."

The light was now so dim I had to hold the paper close to my eyes in order to read the lines. They were these--

GEORGE DELANY, Near Saint Anne's Chapel, Woking Cemetery.

CHAPTER V.

THE MURDER CLUB.

"Delany was the last man who quitted us--you see I use your expression again. I like it," Brande said quietly, watching me as he spoke.

I stood staring at the slip of paper which I held in my hand for some moments before I could reply. When my voice came back, I asked hoarsely:

"Did this man, Delany, die suddenly after quitting the Society?"

"He died immediately. The second event was contemporaneous with the first."

"And in consequence of it?"

"Certainly."

"Have all the members who retired from your list been equally short-lived?"

"Without any exception whatever."

"Then your Society, after all your high-flown talk about it, is only a vulgar murder club," I said bitterly.

"Wrong in fact, and impertinent in its expression. It is not a murder club, and--well, you are the first to discover its vulgarity."

"I call things by their plain names. You may call your Society what you please. As to my joining it in face of what you have told me--"

"Which is more than was ever told to any man before he joined--to any man living or dead. And more, you need not join it yet unless you still wish to do so. I presume what I have said will prevent you."

"On the contrary, if I had any doubt, or if there was any possibility of my wavering before this interview, there is none now. I join at once."

He would have taken my hand, but that I could not permit. I left him without another word, or any form of salute, and returned to the house. I did not appear again in the domestic circle that evening, for I had enough upon my mind without further burdening myself with social pretences.

I sat in my room and tried once more to consider my position. It was this: for the sake of a girl whom I had only met some score of times; who sometimes acted, talked, dressed after a fashion suggestive of insanity; who had glorious dark eyes, a perfect figure, and an exquisitely beautiful face--but I interrupt myself. For the sake of this girl, and for the manifestly impossible purpose of protecting her from herself as well as others, I had surrendered myself to the probable vengeance of a band of cut-throats if I betrayed them, and to the certain vengeance of the law if I did not. Brande, notwithstanding his constant scepticism, was scrupulously truthful. His statement of fact must be relied upon. His opinions were another matter. As nothing practical resulted from my reflections, I came to the conclusion that I had got into a pretty mess for the sake of a handsome face. I regretted this result, but was glad of the cause of it. On this I went to bed.

Next morning I was early astir, for I must see Natalie Brande without delay, and I felt sure she would be no sluggard on that splendid summer day. I tried the lawn between the house and the lake shore. I did not find her there. I found her friend Miss Metford. The girl was sauntering about, swinging a walking-cane carelessly. She was still rationally dressed, but I observed with relief that the rational part of her costume was more in the nature of the divided skirt than the plain knickerbockers of the previous day. She accosted me cheerfully by my surname, and not to be outdone by her, I said coolly:

"How d'ye do, Metford?"

"Very well, thanks. I suppose you expected Natalie? You see you have only me."

"Delighted," I was commencing with a forced smile, when she stopped me.

"You look it. But that can't be helped. Natalie saw you going out, and sent me to meet you. I am to look after you for an hour or so. You join the Society this evening, I hear. You must be very pleased--and flattered."

I could not assent to this, and so remained silent. The girl chattered on in her own outspoken manner, which, now that I was growing accustomed to it, I did not find as unpleasant as at first. One thing was evident to me. She had no idea of the villainous nature of Brande's Society. She could not have spoken so carelessly if she shared my knowledge of it. While she talked to me, I wondered if it was fair to her--a likeable girl, in spite of her undesirable affectations of advanced opinion, emancipation or whatever she called it--was it fair to allow her to associate with a band of murderers, and not so much as whisper a word of warning? No doubt, I myself was associating with the band; but I was not in ignorance of the responsibility thereby incurred.

"Miss Metford," I said, without heeding whether I interrupted her, "are you in the secret of this Society?"

"I? Not at present. I shall be later on."

I stopped and faced her with so serious an expression that she listened to me attentively.

"If you will take my earnest advice--and I beg you not to neglect it--you will have nothing to do with it or any one belonging to it."

"Not even Brande--I mean Natalie? Is she dangerous?"

I disregarded her mischief and continued: "If you can get Miss Brande away from her brother and his acquaintances," (I had nearly said accomplices,) "and keep her away, you would be doing the best and kindest thing you ever did in your life."

Miss Metford was evidently impressed by my seriousness, but, as she herself said very truly, it was unlikely that she would be able to interfere in the way I suggested. Besides, my mysterious warning was altogether too vague to be of any use as a guide for her own action, much less that of her friend. I dared not speak plainer. I could only repeat, in the most emphatic words, my anxiety that she would think carefully over what I had said. I then pretended to recollect an engagement with Brande, for I was in such low spirits I had really little taste for any company.

She was disappointed, and said so in her usual straightforward way. It was not in the power of any gloomy prophecy to oppress her long. The serious look which my words had brought on her face passed quickly, and it was in her natural manner that she bade me good-morning, saying:

"It is rather a bore, for I looked forward to a pleasant hour or two taking you about."

I postponed my breakfast for want of appetite, and, as Brande's house was the best example of Liberty Hall I had ever met with, I offered no apology for my absence during the entire day when I rejoined my host and hostess in the evening. The interval I spent in the woods, thinking much and deciding nothing.

After dinner, Brande introduced me to a man whom he called Edward Grey. Natalie conducted me to the room in which they were engaged. From the mass of correspondence in which this man Grey was absorbed, and the litter of papers about him, it was evident that he must have been in the house long before I made his acquaintance.

Grey handed me a book, which I found to be a register of the names of the members of Brande's Society, and pointed out the place for my signature.

When I had written my name on the list I said to Brande: "Now that I have nominated myself, I suppose you'll second me?"

"It is not necessary," he answered; "you are already a member. Your remark to Miss Metford this morning made you one of us. You advised her, you recollect, to beware of us."

"That girl!" I exclaimed, horrified. "Then she is one of your spies? Is it possible?"

"No, she is not one of our spies. We have none, and she knew nothing of the purpose for which she was used."

"Then I beg to say that you have made a d--d shameful use of her."

In the passion of the moment I forgot my manners to my host, and formed the resolution to denounce the Society to the police the moment I returned to London. Brande was not offended by my violence. There was not a trace of anger in his voice as he said:

"Miss Metford's information was telepathically conveyed to my sister."

"Then it was your sister--"

"My sister knows as little as the other. In turn, I received the information telepathically from her, without the knowledge of either. I was just telling Grey of it when you came into the room."

"And," said Grey, "your intention to go straight from this house to Scotland Yard, there to denounce us to the police, has been telepathically received by myself."

"My God!" I cried, "has a man no longer the right to his own thoughts?"

Grey went on without noticing my exclamation: "Any overt or covert action on your part, toward carrying out your intention, will be telepathically conveyed to us, and our executive--" He shrugged his shoulders.

"I know," I said, "Woking Cemetery, near Saint Anne's Chapel. You have ground there."

"Yes, we have to dispense with--"

"Say murder."

"Dispense with," Grey repeated sharply, "any member whose loyalty is questionable. This is not our wish; it is our necessity. It is the only means by which we can secure the absolute immunity of the Society pending the achievement of its object. To dispense with any living man we have only to will that he shall die."

"And now that I am a member, may I ask what is this object, the secret of which you guard with such fiendish zeal?" I demanded angrily.

"The restoration of a local etheric tumour to its original formation."

"I am already weary of this jargon from Brande," I interrupted. "What do you mean?"

"We mean to attempt the reduction of the solar system to its elemental ether."

"And you will accomplish this triviality by means of Huxley's comet, I suppose?"

I could scarcely control my indignation. This fooling, as I thought it, struck me as insulting. Neither Brande nor Grey appeared to notice my keen resentment. Grey answered me in a quiet, serious tone.

"We shall attempt it by destroying the earth. We may fail in the complete achievement of our design, but in any case we shall at least be certain of reducing this planet to the ether of which it is composed."

"Of course, of course," I agreed derisively. "You will at least make sure of that. You have found out how to do it too, I have no doubt?"

"Yes," said Grey, "we have found out."

CHAPTER VI.

A TELEPATHIC TELEGRAM.

I left the room and hurried outside without any positive plan for my movements. My brain was in such a whirl I could form no connected train of thought. These men, whose conversation was a jargon fitting only for lunatics, had proved that they could read my mind with the ease of a telegraph operator taking a message off a wire. That they, further, possessed marvellous, if not miraculous powers, over occult natural forces could hardly be doubted. The net in which I had voluntarily entangled myself was closing around me. An irresistible impulse to fly--to desert Natalie and save myself--came over me. I put this aside presently. It was both unworthy and unwise. For whither should I fly? The ends of the earth would not be far enough to save me, the depths of the sea would not be deep enough to hide me from those who killed by willing that their victim should die.

On the other hand, if my senses had only been hocussed, and Messrs. Brande and Grey were nothing better than clever tricksters, the park gate was far enough, and the nearest policeman force enough, to save me from their vengeance. But the girl--Natalie! She was clairvoyante. They practised upon her. My diagnosis of the strange seeing-without-sight expression of her eyes was then correct. And it was clear to me that whatsoever or whomsoever Brande and Grey believed or disbelieved in, they certainly believed in themselves. They might be relied on to spare nothing and no one in their project, however ridiculous or mad their purpose might be. What then availed my paltry protection when the girl herself was a willing victim, and the men omnipotent? Nevertheless, if I failed eventually to serve her, I could at least do my best.

It was clear that I must stand by Natalie Brande.

While I was thus reflecting, the following conversation took place between Brande and Grey. I found a note of it in a diary which Brande kept desultorily. He wrote this up so irregularly no continuous information can be gleaned from it as to his life. How the diary came into my hands will be seen later. The memorandum is written thus:--

Grey--Our new member? Why did you introduce him? You say he cannot help with money. It is plain he cannot help with brains.

Brande--He interests Natalie. He is what the uneducated call good-natured. He enjoys doing unselfish things, unaware that it is for the selfish sake of the agreeable sensation thereby secured. Besides, I like him myself. He amuses me. To make him a member was the only safe way of keeping him so much about us. But Natalie is the main reason. I am afraid of her wavering in spite of my hypnotic influence. In a girl of her intensely emotional nature the sentiment of hopeless love will create profound melancholy. Dominated by that she is safe. It seems cruel at first sight. It is not really so. It is not cruel to reconcile her to a fate she cannot escape. It is merciful. For the rest, what does it matter? It will be all the same in--

Grey--This day six months.

Brande--I believe I shivered. Heredity has much to answer for.

That is the whole of the entry. I did not read the words until the hand that wrote them was dust.

Natalie professed some disappointment when I announced my immediate return to town. I was obliged to manufacture an excuse for such a hasty departure, and so fell back on an old engagement which I had truly overlooked, and which really called me away. But it would have called long enough without an answer if it had not been for Brande himself, his friend Grey, and their insanities. My mind was fixed on one salient issue: how to get Natalie Brande out of her brother's evil influence. This would be better compassed when I myself was outside the scope of his extraordinary influence. And so I went without delay.

For some time after my return to London, I went about visiting old haunts and friends. I soon tired of this. The haunts had lost their interest. The friends were changed, or I was changed. I could not resume the friendships which had been interrupted. The chain of connection had been broken and the links would not weld easily. So, after some futile efforts to return to the circle I had long deserted, I desisted and accepted my exclusion with serenity. I am not sure that I desired the old relationships re-established. And as my long absence had prevented any fresh shoots of friendship being grafted, I found myself alone in London. I need say no more.

One evening I was walking through the streets in a despondent mood, as had become my habit. By chance I read the name of a street into which I had turned to avoid a more crowded thoroughfare. It was that in which Miss Metford lived. I knew that she had returned to town, for she had briefly acquainted me with the fact on a postcard written some days previously.

Here was a chance of distraction. This girl's spontaneous gaiety, which I found at first displeasing, was what I wanted to help me to shake off the gloomy incubus of thought oppressing me. It was hardly within the proprieties to call upon her at such an hour, but it could not matter very much, when the girl's own ideas were so unconventional. She had independent means, and lived apart from her family in order to be rid of domestic limitations. She had told me that she carried a latch-key--indeed she had shown it to me with a flourish of triumph--and that she delighted in free manners. Free manners, she was careful to add, did not mean bad manners. To my mind the terms were synonymous. When opposite her number I decided to call, and, having knocked at the door, was told that Miss Metford was at home.

"Hallo, Marcel! Glad to see you," she called out, somewhat stridently for my taste. Her dress was rather mannish, as usual. In lieu of her out-door tunic she wore a smoking-jacket. When I entered she was sitting in an arm-chair, with her feet on a music-stool. She arose so hastily that the music-stool was overturned, and allowed to lie where it fell.

"What is the matter?" she asked, concerned. "Have you seen a ghost?"

"I think I have seen many ghosts of late," I said, "and they have not been good company. I was passing your door, and I have come in for comfort."

She crossed the room and poured out some whisky from a decanter which was standing on a side-board. Then she opened a bottle of soda-water with a facility which suggested practice. I was relieved to think that it was not Natalie who was my hostess. Handing me the glass, she said peremptorily:

"Drink that. That is right. Give me the glass. Now smoke. Do I allow smoking here? Pah! I smoke here myself."

I lit a cigar and sat down beside her. The clouds began to lift from my brain and float off in the blue smoke wreaths. We talked on ordinary topics without my once noticing how deftly they had been introduced by Miss Metford. I never thought of the flight of time until a chime from a tiny clock on the mantelpiece--an exquisite sample of the tasteful furniture of the whole room--warned me that my visit had lasted two hours. I arose reluctantly.

She rallied me on my ingratitude. I had come in a sorry plight. I was now restored. She was no longer useful, therefore I left her. And so on, till I said with a solemnity no doubt lugubrious:

"I am most grateful, Miss Metford. I cannot tell you how grateful I am. You would not understand--"

"Oh, please leave my poor understanding alone, and tell me what has happened to you. I should like to hear it. And what is more, I like you." She said this so carelessly, I did not feel embarrassed. "Now, then, the whole story, please." Saying which, she sat down again.

"Do you really know nothing more of Brande's Society than you admitted when I last spoke to you about it?" I asked, without taking the chair she pushed over to me.

"This is all I know," she answered, in the rhyming voice of a young pupil declaiming a piece of a little understood and less cared for recitation. "The society has very interesting evenings. Brande shows one beautiful experiments, which, I daresay, would be amazingly instructive if one were inclined that way, which I am not. The men are mostly long-haired creatures with spectacles. Some of them are rather good-looking. All are wholly mad. And my friend--I mean the only girl I could ever stand as a friend--Natalie Brande, is crazy about them."

"Nothing more than that?"

"Nothing more."

The clock now struck the hour of nine, the warning chime for which had startled me.

"Is there anything more than that?" Miss Metford asked with some impatience.

I thought for a moment. Unless my own senses had deceived me that evening in Brande's house, I ran a great risk of sharing George Delany's fate if I remained where I was much longer. And suppose I told her all I knew, would not that bring the same danger upon her too? So I had to answer:

"I cannot tell you. I am a member now."

"Then you must know more than any mere outsider like myself. I suppose it would not be fair to ask you. Anyhow, you will come back and see me soon. By the way, what is your address?"

I gave her my address. She wrote it down on a silver-cased tablet, and remarked:

"That will be all right. I'll look you up some evening."

As I drove to my hotel, I felt that the mesmeric trick, or whatever artifice had been practised upon me by Brande and Grey, had now assumed its true proportion. I laughed at my fears, and was thankful that I had not described them to the strong-minded young woman to whose kindly society I owed so much. What an idiot she would have thought me!

A servant met me in the hall.

"Telegram, sir. Just arrived at this moment."

I took the telegram, and went upstairs with it unopened in my hand. A strange fear overcame me. I dared not open the envelope. I knew beforehand who the sender was, and what the drift of the message would be. I was right. It was from Brande.

"I beg you to be more cautious. Your discussion with Miss M. this evening might have been disastrous. I thought all was over at nine o'clock.

"BRANDE."

I sat down stupefied. When my senses returned, I looked at the table where I had thrown the telegram. It was not there, nor in the room. I rang for the man who had given it to me, and he came immediately.

"About that telegram you gave me just now, Phillips--"

"I beg your pardon, sir," the man interrupted, "I did not give you any telegram this evening."

"I mean when you spoke to me in the hall."

"Yes, sir. I said 'good-night,' but you took no notice. Excuse me, sir, I thought you looked strange."

"Oh, I was thinking of something else. And I remember now, it was Johnson who gave me the telegram."

"Johnson left yesterday, sir."

"Then it was yesterday I was thinking of. You may go, Phillips."

So Brande's telepathic power was objective as well as subjective. My own brain, unaccustomed to be impressed by another mind "otherwise than through the recognised channels of sense," had supplied the likeliest authority for its message. The message was duly delivered, but the telegram was a delusion.

CHAPTER VII.

GUILTY!

As to protecting Natalie Brande from her brother and the fanatics with whom he associated, it was now plain that I was powerless. And what guarantee had I that she herself was unaware of his nefarious purpose; that she did not sympathise with it? This last thought flashed upon me one day, and the sting of pain that followed it was so intolerable, I determined instantly to prove its falsity or truth.

I telegraphed to Brande that I was running down to spend a day or two with him, and followed my message without waiting for a reply. I have still a very distinct recollection of that journey, notwithstanding much that might well have blotted it from my memory. Every mile sped over seemed to mark one more barrier passed on my way to some strange fate; every moment which brought me nearer this incomprehensible girl with her magical eyes was an epoch of impossibility against my ever voluntarily turning back. And now that it is all over, I am glad that I went on steadfastly to the end.

Brande received me with the easy affability of a man to whom good breeding had ceased to be a habit, and had become an instinct. Only once did anything pass between us bearing on the extraordinary relationship which he had established with me--the relation of victor and victim, I considered it. We had been left together for a few moments, and I said as soon as the others were out of hearing distance:

"I got your message."

"I know you did," he replied. That was all. There was an awkward pause. It must be broken somehow. Any way out of the difficulty was better than to continue in it.

"Have you seen this?" I asked, handing Brande a copy of a novel which I had picked up at a railway bookstall. When I say that it was new and popular, it will be understood that it was indecent.

He looked at the title, and said indifferently: "Yes, I have seen it, and in order to appreciate this class of fiction fairly, I have even tried to read it. Why do you ask?"

"Because I thought it would be in your line. It is very advanced." I said this to gain time.

"Advanced--advanced? I am afraid I do not comprehend. What do you mean by 'advanced'? And how could it be in my line. I presume you mean by that, on my plane of thought?"

"By 'advanced,' I mean up-to-date. What do you mean by it?"

"If I used the word at all, I should mean educated, evolved. Is this evolved? Is it even educated? It is not always grammatical. It has no style. In motive, it ante-dates Boccaccio."

"You disapprove of it."

"Certainly not."

"Then you approve it, notwithstanding your immediate condemnation?"

"By no means. I neither approve nor disapprove. It only represents a phase of humanity--the deliberate purpose of securing money or notoriety to the individual, regardless of the welfare of the community. There is nothing to admire in that. It would be invidious to blame it when the whole social scheme is equally wrong and contemptible. By the way, what interest do you think the wares of any literary pander, of either sex, could possess for me, a student--even if a mistaken one--of science?"

"I did not think the book would possess the slightest interest for you, and I suppose you are already aware of that?"

"Ah no! My telepathic power is reserved for more serious purposes. Its exercise costs me too much to expend it on trifles. In consequence I do not know why you mentioned the book."

To this I answered candidly, "I mentioned it in order to get myself out of a conversational difficulty--without much success."

Natalie was reserved with me at first. She devoted herself unnecessarily to a boy named Halley who was staying with them. Grey had gone to London. His place was taken by a Mr. Rockingham, whom I did not like. There was something sinister in his expression, and he rarely spoke save to say something cynical, and in consequence disagreeable. He had "seen life," that is, everything deleterious to and destructive of it. His connection with Brande was clearly a rebound, the rebound of disgust. There was nothing creditable to him in that. My first impression of him was thus unfavourable. My last recollection of him is a fitting item in the nightmare which contains it.

The youth Halley would have interested me under ordinary circumstances. His face was as handsome and refined as that of a pretty girl. His figure, too, was slight and his voice effeminate. But there my own advantage, as I deemed it, over him ceased. Intellectually, he was a pupil of Brande's who did his master credit. Having made this discovery I did not pursue it. My mind was fixed too fast upon a definite issue to be more than temporarily interested in the epigrams of a peachy-cheeked man of science.

The afternoon was well advanced before I had an opportunity of speaking to Natalie. When it came, I did not stop to puzzle over a choice of phrases.

"I wish to speak to you alone on a subject of extreme importance to me," I said hurriedly. "Will you come with me to the sea-shore? Your time, I know, is fully occupied. I would not ask this if my happiness did not depend upon it."

The philosopher looked on me with grave, kind eyes. But the woman's heart within her sent the red blood flaming to her cheeks. It was then given to me to fathom the lowest depth of boorish stupidity I had ever sounded.

"I don't mean that," I cried, "I would not dare--"

The blush on her cheek burnt deeper as she tossed her head proudly back, and said straight out, without any show of fence or shadow of concealment:

"It was my mistake. I am glad to know that I did you an injustice. You are my friend, are you not?"

"I believe I have the right to claim that title," I answered.

"Then what you ask is granted. Come." She put her hand boldly into mine. I grasped the slender fingers, saying:

"Yes, Natalie, some day I will prove to you that I am your friend."

"The proof is unnecessary," she replied, in a low sad voice.

We started for the sea. Not a word was spoken on the way. Nor did our eyes meet. We were in a strange position. It was this: the man who had vowed he was the woman's friend--who did not intend to shirk the proof of his promise, and never did gainsay it--meant to ask the woman, before the day was over, to clear herself of knowingly associating with a gang of scientific murderers. The woman had vaguely divined his purpose, and could not clear herself.

When we arrived at the shore we occupied ourselves inconsequently. We hunted little fishes until Natalie's dainty boots were dripping. We examined quaint denizens of the shallow water until her gloves were spoilt. We sprang from rock to rock and evaded the onrush of the foaming waves. We made aqueducts for inter-communication between deep pools. We basked in the sunshine, and listened to the deep moan of the sounding sea, and the solemn murmur of the shells. We drank in the deep breath of the ocean, and for a brief space we were like happy children.

The end came soon to this ephemeral happiness. It was only one of those bright coins snatched from the niggard hand of Time which must always be paid back with usurious charges. We paid with cruel interest.

Standing on a flat rock side by side, I nerved myself to ask this girl the same question I had asked her friend, Edith Metford, how much she knew of the extraordinary and preposterous Society--as I still tried to consider it--which Herbert Brande had founded. She looked so frank, so refined, so kind, I hardly dared to put my brutal question to an innocent girl, whom I had seen wince at the suffering of a maimed bird, and pale to the lips at the death-cry of a rabbit. This time there was no possibility of untoward consequence in the question save to myself--for surely the girl was safe from her own brother. And I myself preferred to risk the consequences rather than endure longer the thought that she belonged voluntarily to a vile murder club. Yet the question would not come. A simple thing brought it out. Natalie, after looking seaward silently for some minutes, said simply:

"How long are we to stand here, I wonder?"

"Until you answer this question. How much do you know about your brother's Society, which I have joined to my own intense regret?"

"I am sorry you regret having joined," she replied gravely.

"You would not be sorry," said I, "if you knew as much about it as I do," forgetting that I had still no answer to my question, and that the extent of her knowledge was unknown to me.

"I believe I do know as much as you." There was a tremor in her voice and an anxious pleading look in her eyes. This look maddened me. Why should she plead to me unless she was guilty? I stamped my foot upon the rock without noticing that in so doing I kicked our whole collection of shells into the water.

There was something more to ask, but I stood silent and sullen. The woods above the beach were choral with bird-voices. They were hateful to me. The sea song of the tumbling waves was hideous. I cursed the yellow sunset light glaring on their snowy crests. A tiny hand was laid upon my arm. I writhed under its deadly if delicious touch. But I could not put it away, nor keep from turning to the sweet face beside me, to mark once more its mute appeal--now more than mere appeal; it was supplication that was in her eyes. Her red lips were parted as though they voiced an unspoken prayer. At last a prayer did pass from them to me.

"Do not judge me until you know me better. Do not hate me without cause. I am not wicked, as you think. I--I--I am trying to do what I think is right. At least, I am not selfish or cruel. Trust me yet a little while."

I looked at her one moment, and then with a sob I clasped her in my arms, and cried aloud:

"My God! to name murder and that angel face in one breath! Child, you have been befooled. You know nothing."

For a second she lingered in my embrace. Then she gently put away my arms, and looking up at me, said fearlessly but sorrowfully:

"I cannot lie--even for your love. I know all."

CHAPTER VIII.

THE WOKING MYSTERY.

She knew all. Then she was a murderess--or in sympathy with murderers. My arms fell from her. I drew back shuddering. I dared not look in her lying eyes, which cried pity when her base heart knew no mercy. Surely now I had solved the maddening puzzle which the character of this girl had, so far, presented to me. Yet the true solution was as far from me as ever. Indeed, I could not well have been further from it than at that moment.

As we walked back, Natalie made two or three unsuccessful attempts to lure me out of the silence which was certainly more eloquent on my part than any words I could have used. Once she commenced:

"It is hard to explain--"

I interrupted her harshly. "No explanation is possible."

On that she put her handkerchief to her eyes, and a half-suppressed sob shook her slight figure. Her grief distracted me. But what could I say to assuage it?

At the hall door I stopped and said, "Good-bye."

"Are you not coming in?"

There was a directness and emphasis in the question which did not escape me.

"I?" The horror in my own voice surprised myself, and assuredly did not pass without her notice.

"Very well; good-bye. We are not exactly slaves of convention here, but you are too far advanced in that direction even for me. This is your second startling departure from us. I trust you will spare me the humiliation entailed by the condescension of your further acquaintance."

"Give me an hour!" I exclaimed aghast. "You do not make allowance for the enigma in which everything is wrapped up. I said I was your friend when I thought you of good report. Give me an hour--only an hour--to say whether I will stand by my promise, now that you yourself have claimed that your report is not good but evil. For that is really what you have protested. Do I ask too much? or is your generosity more limited even than my own?"

"Ah, no! I would not have you think that. Take an hour, or a year--an hour only if you care for my happiness."

"Agreed," said I. "I will take the hour. Discretion can have the year."

So I left her. I could not go indoors. A roof would smother me. Give me the open lawns, the leafy woods, the breath of the summer wind. Away, then, to the silence of the coming night. For an hour leave me to my thoughts. Her unworthiness was now more than suspected. It was admitted. My misery was complete. But I would not part with her; I could not. Innocent or guilty, she was mine. I must suffer with her or for her. The resolution by which I have abided was formed as I wandered lonely through the woods.

When I reached my room that night I found a note from Brande. To receive a letter from a man in whose house I was a guest did not surprise me. I was past that stage. There was nothing mysterious in the letter, save its conclusion. It was simply an invitation to a public meeting of the Society, which was to be held on that day week in the hall in Hanover Square, and the special feature in the letter--seeing that it did not vanish like the telegram, but remained an ordinary sheet of paper--lay in its concluding sentence. This urged me to allow nothing to prevent my attendance. "You will perhaps understand thereafter that we are neither political plotters nor lunatics, as you have thought."

Thought! The man's mysterious power was becoming wearisome. It was too much for me. I wished that I had never seen his face.

As I lay sleepless in my bed, I recommenced that interminable introspection which, heretofore, had been so barren of result. It was easy to swear to myself that I would stand by Natalie Brande, that I would never desert her. But how should my action be directed in order that by its conduct I might prevail upon the girl herself to surrender her evil associates? I knew that she regarded me with affection. And I knew also that she would not leave her brother for my sake. Did she sympathise with his nefarious schemes, or was she decoyed into them like myself?

Decoyed! That was it!

I sprang from the bed, beside myself with delight. Now I had not merely a loophole of escape from all these miseries; I had a royal highway. Fool, idiot, blind mole that I was, not to perceive sooner that easy solution of the problem! No wonder that she was wounded by my unworthy doubts. And she had tried to explain, but I would not listen! I threw myself back and commenced to weave all manner of pleasant fancies round the salvation of this girl from her brother's baneful influence, and the annihilation of his Society, despite its occult powers, by mine own valour. The reaction was too great. Instead of constructing marvellous counterplots, I fell sound asleep.

Next day I found Natalie in a pleasant morning-room to which I was directed. She wore her most extreme--and, in consequence, most exasperating--rational costume. When I entered the room she pushed a chair towards me, in a way that suggested Miss Metford's worst manner, and lit a cigarette, for the express purpose, I felt, of annoying me.

"I have come," I said somewhat shamefacedly, "to explain."

"And apologise?"

"Yes, to apologise. I made a hideous mistake. I have suffered for it as much as you could wish."

"Wish you to suffer!" She flung away her cigarette. Her dark eyes opened wide in unassumed surprise. And that curious light of pity, which I had so often wondered at, came into them. "I am very sorry if you have suffered," she said, with convincing earnestness.

"How could I doubt you? Senseless fool that I was to suppose for one moment that you approved of what you could not choose but know--"

At this her face clouded.

"I am afraid you are still in error. What opinion have you formed which alters your estimate of me?"

"The only opinion possible: that you have unwillingly learned the secret of your brother's Society; but, like myself--you see no way to--to--"

"To what purpose?"

"To destroy it."

"I am not likely to attempt that."

"No, it would be impossible, and the effort would cost your life."

"That is not my reason." She arose and stood facing me. "I do not like to lose your esteem. You know already that I will not lie to retain it. I approve of the Society's purpose."

"And its actions?"

"They are inevitable. Therefore I approve also of its actions. I shall not ask you to remain now, for I see that you are again horrified; as is natural, considering your knowledge--or, pardon me for saying so, your want of knowledge. I shall be glad to see you after the lecture to which you are invited. You will know a little more then; not all, perhaps, but enough to shake your time-dishonoured theories of life--and death."

I bowed, and left the room without a word. It was true, then, that she was mad like the others, or worse than mad--a thousand times worse! I said farewell to Brande, as his guest, for the last time. Thenceforward I would meet him as his enemy--his secret enemy as far as I could preserve my secrecy with such a man; his open enemy when the proper time should come.

In the railway carriage I turned over some letters and papers which I found in my pockets, not with deliberate intention, but to while away the time. One scrap startled me. It was the sheet on which Brande had written the Woking address, and on reading it over once more, a thought occurred to me which I acted on as soon as possible. I could go to Woking and find out something about the man Delany. So long as my inquiries were kept within the limits of the strictest discretion, neither Brande nor any of his executive could blame me for seeking convincing evidence of the secret power they claimed.

On my arrival in London, I drove immediately to the London Necropolis Company's station and caught the funeral train which runs to Brookwood cemetery. With Saint Anne's Chapel as my base, I made short excursions hither and thither, and stood before a tombstone erected to the memory of George Delany, late of the Criminal Investigation Department, Scotland Yard. This was a clue which I could follow, so I hurried back to town and called on the superintendent of the department.

Yes, I was told, Delany had belonged to the department. He had been a very successful officer in ferreting out foreign Anarchists and evil-doers. His last movement was to join a Society of harmless cranks who met in Hanover Square. No importance was attached to this in the department. It could not have been done in the way of business, although Delany pretended that it was. He had dropped dead in the street as he was leaving his cab to enter the office with information which must have appeared to him important--to judge from the cabman's evidence as to his intense excitement and repeated directions for faster driving. There was an inquest and a post-mortem, but "death from natural causes" was the verdict. That was all. It was enough for me.

I had now sufficient evidence, and was finally convinced that the Society was as dangerous as it was demented.

CHAPTER IX.

CUI BONO?

When I arrived at the Society's rooms on the evening for which I had an invitation, I found them pleasantly lighted. The various scientific diagrams and instruments had been removed, and comfortable arm-chairs were arranged so that a free passage was available, not merely to each row, but to each chair. The place was full when I entered, and soon afterwards the door was closed and locked. Natalie Brande and Edith Metford were seated beside each other. An empty chair was on Miss Metford's right. She saw me standing at the door and nodded toward the empty seat which she had reserved for me. When I reached it she made a movement as if to forestall me and leave me the middle chair. I deprecated this by a look which was intentionally so severe that she described it later as a malignant scowl.

I could not at the moment seat myself voluntarily beside Natalie Brande with the exact and final knowledge which I had learnt at Scotland Yard only one week old. I could not do it just then, although I did not mean to draw back from what I had undertaken--to stand by her, innocent or guilty. But I must have time to become accustomed to the sensation which followed this knowledge. Miss Metford's fugitive attempts at conversation pending the commencement of the lecture were disagreeable to me.

There was a little stir on the platform. The chairman, in a few words, announced Herbert Brande. "This is the first public lecture," he said, "which has been given since the formation of the Society, and in consequence of the fact that a number of people not scientifically educated are present, the lecturer will avoid the more esoteric phases of his subject, which would otherwise present themselves in his treatment of it, and confine himself to the commonplaces of scientific insight. The title of the lecture is identical with that of our Society--Cui Bono?"

Brande came forward unostentatiously and placed a roll of paper on the reading-desk. I have copied the extracts which follow from this manuscript. The whole essay, indeed, remains with me intact, but it is too long--and it would be immaterial--to reproduce it all in this narrative. I cannot hope either to reproduce the weird impressiveness of the lecturer's personality, his hold over his audience, or my own emotions in listening to this man--whom I had proved, not only from his own confession, but by the strongest collateral evidence, to be a callous and relentless murderer--to hear him glide with sonorous voice and graceful gesture from point to point in his logical and terrible indictment of suffering!--the futility of it, both in itself and that by which it was administered! No one could know Brande without finding interest, if not pleasure, in his many chance expressions full of curious and mysterious thought. I had often listened to his extemporaneous brain pictures, as the reader knows, but I had never before heard him deliberately formulate a planned-out system of thought. And such a system! This is the gospel according to Brande.

"In the verbiage of primitive optimism a misleading limitation is placed on the significance of the word Nature and its inflections. And the misconception of the meaning of an important word is as certain to lead to an inaccurate concept as is the misstatement of a premise to precede a false conclusion. For instance, in the aphorism, variously rendered, 'what is natural is right,' there is an excellent illustration of the misapplication of the word 'natural.' If the saying means that what is natural is just and wise, it might as well run 'what is natural is wrong,' injustice and unwisdom being as natural, i.e., a part of Nature, as justice and wisdom. Morbidity and immorality are as natural as health and purity. Not more so, but not less so. That 'Nature is made better by no mean but Nature makes that mean,' is true enough. It is inevitably true. The question remains, in making that mean, has she really made anything that tends toward the final achievement of universal happiness? I say she has not.

"The misuse of a word, it may be argued, could not prove a serious obstacle to the growth of knowledge, and might be even interesting to the student of etymology. But behind the misuse of the word 'natural' there is a serious confusion of thought which must be clarified before the mass of human intelligence can arrive at a just appreciation of the verities which surround human existence, and explain it. To this end it is necessary to get rid of the archaic idea of Nature as a paternal, providential, and beneficent protector, a successor to the 'special providence,' and to know the true Nature, bond-slave as she is of her own eternal persistence of force; that sole primary principle of which all other principles are only correlatives; of which the existence of matter is but a cognisable evidence.

"The optimist notion, therefore, that Nature is an all-wise designer, in whose work order, system, wisdom, and beauty are prominent, does not fare well when placed under the microscope of scientific research.

"Order?

"There is no order in Nature. Her armies are but seething mobs of rioters, destroying everything they can lay hands on.

"System?

"She has no system, unless it be a reductio ad absurdum, which only blunders on the right way after fruitlessly trying every other conceivable path. She is not wise. She never fills a pail but she spills a hogshead. All her works are not beautiful. She never makes a masterpiece but she smashes a million 'wasters' without a care. The theory of evolution--her gospel--reeks with ruffianism, nature-patented and promoted. The whole scheme of the universe, all material existence as it is popularly known, is founded upon and begotten of a system of everlasting suffering as hideous as the fantastic nightmares of religious maniacs. The Spanish Inquisitors have been regarded as the most unnatural monsters who ever disgraced the history of mankind. Yet the atrocities of the Inquisitors, like the battlefields of Napoleon and other heroes, were not only natural, but they have their prototypes in every cubic inch of stagnant water, or ounce of diseased tissue. And stagnant water is as natural as sterilised water; and diseased tissue is as natural as healthy tissue. Wholesale murder is Nature's first law. She creates only to kill, and applies the rule as remorselessly to the units in a star-drift as to the tadpoles in a horse-pond.

"It seems a far cry from a star-drift to a horse-pond. It is so in distance and magnitude. It is not in the matter of constituents. In ultimate composition they are identical. The great nebula in Andromeda is an aggregation of atoms, and so is the river Thames. The only difference between them is the difference in the arrangement and incidence of these atoms and in the molecular motion of which they are the first but not the final cause. In a pint of Thames water, we know that there is bound up a latent force beside which steam and electricity are powerless in comparison. To release that force it is only necessary to apply the sympathetic key; just as the heated point of a needle will explode a mine of gunpowder and lay a city in ashes. That force is asleep. The atoms which could give it reality are at rest, or, at least, in a condition of quasi-rest. But in the stupendous mass of incandescent gas which constitutes the nebula of Andromeda, every atom is madly seeking rest and finding none; whirling in raging haste, battling with every other atom in its field of motion, impinging upon others and influencing them, being impinged upon and influenced by them. That awful cauldron exemplifies admirably the method of progress stimulated by suffering. It is the embryo of a new Sun and his planets. After many million years of molecular agony, when his season of fission had come, he will rend huge fragments from his mass and hurl them helpless into space, there to grow into his satellites. In their turn they may reproduce themselves in like manner before their true planetary life begins, in which they shall revolve around their parent as solid spheres. Follow them further and learn how beneficent Nature deals with them.

"After the lapse of time-periods which man may calculate in figures, but of which his finite mind cannot form even a true symbolic conception, the outer skin of the planet cools--rests. Internal troubles prevail for longer periods still; and these, in their unsupportable agony, bend and burst the solid strata overlying; vomit fire through their self-made blow-holes, rear mountains from the depths of the sea, then dash them in pieces.

"Time strides on austere.

"The globe still cools. Life appears upon it. Then begins anew the old strife, but under conditions far more dreadful, for though it be founded on atomic consciousness, the central consciousness of the heterogeneous aggregation of atoms becomes immeasurably more sentient and susceptible with every step it takes from homogenesis. This internecine war must continue while any creature great or small shall remain alive upon the world that bore it.

"By slow degrees the mighty milestones in the protoplasmic march are passed. Plants and animals are now busy, murdering and devouring each other--the strong everywhere destroying the weak. New types appear. Old types disappear. Types possessing the greatest capacity for murder progress most rapidly, and those with the least recede and determine. The neolithic man succeeds the palæolithic man, and sharpens the stone axe. Then to increase their power for destruction, men find it better to hunt in packs. Communities appear. Soon each community discovers that its own advantage is furthered by confining its killing, in the main, to the members of neighbouring communities. Nations early make the same discovery. And at last, as with ourselves, there is established a race with conscience enough to know that it is vile, and intelligence enough to know that it is insignificant.[1] But what profits this? In the fulness of its time the race shall die. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness which, in this obscure corner, has for a brief space broken the silence of the Universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. Life and death and love, stronger than death, will be as though they never had been. Nor will anything that is be better or be worse for all that the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless generations to effect.

[1] From this sentence to the end of the paragraph Brande draws freely, for the purpose of his own argument, on Mr. Balfour's "Naturalism and Ethics."--Ed.

"The roaring loom of Time weaves on. The globe cools out. Life mercifully ceases from upon its surface. The atmosphere and water disappear. It rests. It is dead.

"But for its vicarious service in influencing more youthful planets within its reach, that dead world might as well be loosed at once from its gravitation cable and be turned adrift into space. Its time has not yet come. It will not come until the great central sun of the system to which it belongs has passed laboriously through all his stages of stellar life and died out also. Then when that dead sun, according to the impact theory, blunders across the path of another sun, dead and blind like himself, its time will come. The result of that impact will be a new star nebula, with all its weary history before it; a history of suffering, in which a million years will not be long enough to write a single page.

"Here we have a scientific parallel to the hell of superstition which may account for the instinctive origin of the smoking flax and the fire which shall never be quenched. We know that the atoms of which the human body is built up are atoms of matter. It follows that every atom in every living body will be present in some form at that final impact in which the solar system will be ended in a blazing whirlwind which will melt the earth with its fervent heat. There is not a molecule or cell in any creature alive this day which will not in its ultimate constituents endure the long agony, lasting countless æons of centuries, wherein the solid mass of this great globe will be represented by a rush of incandescent gas, stupendous in itself, but trivial in comparison with the hurricane of flame in which it will be swallowed up and lost.

"And when from that hell a new star emerges, and new planets in their season are born of him, and he and they repeat, as they must repeat, the ceaseless, changeless, remorseless story of the universe, every atom in this earth will take its place, and fill again functions identical with those which it, or its fellow, fills now. Life will reappear, develop, determine, to be renewed again as before. And so on for ever.

"Nature has known no rest. From the beginning--which never was--she has been building up only to tear down again. She has been fabricating pretty toys and trinkets, that cost her many a thousand years to forge, only to break them in pieces for her sport. With infinite painstaking she has manufactured man only to torture him with mean miseries in the embryonic stages of his race, and in his higher development to madden him with intellectual puzzles. Thus it will be unto the end--which never shall be. For there is neither beginning nor end to her unvarying cycles. Whether the secular optimist be successful or unsuccessful in realising his paltry span of terrestrial paradise, whether the pæans he sings about it are prophetic dithyrambs or misleading myths, no Christian man need fear for his own immortality. That is well assured. In some form he will surely be raised from the dead. In some shape he will live again. But, Cui bono?"

CHAPTER X.

FORCE--A REMEDY.

"Get me out of this, I am stifled--ill," Miss Metford said, in a low voice to me.

As we were hurrying from the room, Brande and his sister, who had joined him, met us. The fire had died out of his eyes. His voice had returned to its ordinary key. His demeanour was imperturbable, sphinx-like. I murmured some words about the eloquence of the lecture, but interrupted myself when I observed his complete indifference to my remarks, and said,

"Neither praise nor blame seems to affect you, Brande."

"Certainly not," he answered calmly. "You forget that there is nothing deserving of either praise or blame."

I knew I could not argue with him, so we passed on. Outside, I offered to find a cab for Miss Metford, and to my surprise she allowed me to do so. Her self-assertive manner was visibly modified. She made no pretence of resenting this slight attention, as was usual with her in similar cases. Indeed, she asked me to accompany her as far as our ways lay together. But I felt that my society at the time could hardly prove enlivening. I excused myself by saying candidly that I wished to be alone.

My own company soon became unendurable. In despair I turned into a music hall. The contrast between my mental excitement and the inanities of the stage was too acute, so this resource speedily failed me. Then I betook myself to the streets again. Here I remembered a letter Brande had put into my hand as I left the hall. It was short, and the tone was even more peremptory than his usual arrogance. It directed me to meet the members of the Society at Charing Cross station at two o'clock on the following day. No information was given, save that we were all going on a long journey; that I must set my affairs in such order that my absence would not cause any trouble, and the letter ended, "Our experiments are now complete. Our plans are matured. Do not fail to attend."

"Fail to attend!" I muttered. "If I am not the most abject coward on the earth I will attend--with every available policeman in London." The pent-up wrath and impotence of many days found voice at last. "Yes, Brande," I shouted aloud, "I will attend, and you shall be sorry for having invited me."

"But I will not be sorry," said Natalie Brande, touching my arm.

"You here!" I exclaimed, in great surprise, for it was fully an hour since I left the hall, and my movements had been at haphazard since then.

"Yes, I have followed you for your own sake. Are you really going to draw back now?"

"I must."

"Then I must go on alone."

"You will not go on alone. You will remain, and your friends shall go on without you--go to prison without you, I mean."

"Poor boy," she said softly, to herself. "I wonder if I would have thought as I think now if I had known him sooner? I suppose I should have been as other women, and their fools' paradise would have been mine--for a little while."

The absolute hopelessness in her voice pierced my heart. I pleaded passionately with her to give up her brother and all the maniacs who followed him. For the time I forgot utterly that the girl, by her own confession, was already with them in sympathy as well as in deed.

She said to me: "I cannot hold back now. And you? You know you are powerless to interfere. If you will not come with me, I must go alone. But you may remain. I have prevailed on Herbert and Grey to permit that."

"Never," I answered. "Where you go, I go."

"It is not really necessary. In the end it will make no difference. And remember, you still think me guilty."

"Even so, I am going with you--guilty."

Now this seemed to me a very ordinary speech, for who would have held back, thinking her innocent? But Natalie stopped suddenly, and, looking me in the face, said, almost with a sob:

"Arthur, I sometimes wish I had known you sooner. I might have been different." She was silent for a moment. Then she said piteously to me: "You will not fail me to-morrow?"

"No, I will not fail you to-morrow," I answered.

She pressed my hand gratefully, and left me without any explanation as to her movements in the meantime.

I hurried to my hotel to set my affairs in order before joining Brande's expedition. The time was short for this. Fortunately there was not much to do. By midnight I had my arrangements nearly complete. At the time, the greater part of my money was lying at call in a London bank. This I determined to draw in gold the next day. I also had at my banker's some scrip, and I knew I could raise money on that. My personal effects and the mementos of my travels, which lay about my rooms in great confusion, must remain where they were. As to the few friends who still remained to me, I did not write to them. I could not well describe a project of which I knew nothing, save that it was being carried out by dangerous lunatics, or, at least, by men who were dangerous, whether their madness was real or assumed. Nor could I think of any reasonable excuse for leaving England after so long an absence without a personal visit to them. It was best, then, to disappear without a word. Having finished my dispositions, I changed my coat for a dressing-gown and sat down by the window, which I threw open, for the summer night was warm. I sat long, and did not leave my chair until the morning sun was shining on my face.

When I got to Charing Cross next day, a group of fifty or sixty people were standing apart from the general crowd and conversing with animation. Almost the whole strength of the Society was assembled to see a few of us off, I thought. In fact, they were all going. About a dozen women were in the party, and they were dressed in the most extravagant rational costumes. Edith Metford was amongst them. I drew her aside, and apologised for not having called to wish her farewell; but she stopped me.

"Oh, it's all right; I am going too. Don't look so frightened."

This was more than I could tolerate. She was far too good a girl to be allowed to walk blindfold into the pit I had digged for myself with full knowledge. I said imperatively:

"Miss Metford, you shall not go. I warned you more than once--and warned you, I firmly believe, at the risk of my life--against these people. You have disregarded the advice which it may yet cost me dear to have given you."

"To tell you the truth," she said candidly, "I would not go an inch if it were not for yourself. I can't trust you with them. You'd get into mischief. I don't mean with Natalie Brande, but the others; I don't like them. So I am coming to look after you."

"Then I shall speak to Brande."

"That would be useless. I joined the Society this morning."

This she said seriously, and without anything of the spirit of bravado which was one of her faults. That ended our dispute. We exchanged a meaning look as our party took their seats. There was now, at any rate, one human being in the Society to whom I could speak my mind.

We travelled by special train. Our ultimate destination was a fishing village on the southern coast, near Brande's residence. Here we found a steam yacht of about a thousand tons lying in the harbour with steam up.

The vessel was a beautiful model. Her lines promised great speed, but the comfort of her passengers had been no less considered by her builder when he gave her so much beam and so high a freeboard. The ship's furniture was the finest I had ever seen, and I had crossed every great ocean in the world. The library, especially, was more suggestive of a room in the British Museum than the batch of books usually carried at sea. But I have no mind to enter on a detailed description of a beautiful pleasure ship while my story waits. I only mention the general condition of the vessel in evidence of the fact which now struck me for the first time--Brande must have unlimited money. His mode of life in London and in the country, notwithstanding his pleasant house, was in the simplest style. From the moment we entered his special train at Charing Cross, he flung money about him with wanton recklessness.

As we made our way through the crowd which was hanging about the quay, an unpleasant incident occurred. Miss Brande, with Halley and Rockingham, became separated from Miss Metford and myself and went on in front of us. We five had formed a sub-section of the main body, and were keeping to ourselves when the unavoidable separation took place. A slight scream in front caused Miss Metford and myself to hurry forward. We found the others surrounded by a gang of drunken sailors, who had stopped them. A red-bearded giant, frenzied with drink, had seized Natalie in his arms. His abettor, a swarthy Italian, had drawn his knife, and menaced Halley and Rockingham. The rest of the band looked on, and cheered their chiefs. Halley was white to the lips; Rockingham was perfectly calm, or, perhaps, indifferent. He called for a policeman. Neither interfered. I did not blame Rockingham; he was a man of the world, so nothing manly could be expected of him. But Halley's cowardice disgusted me.

I rushed forward and caught the Italian from behind, for his knife was dangerous. Seizing him by the collar and waist, I swung him twice, and then flung him from me with all my strength. He spun round two or three times, and then collided with a stack of timber. His head struck a beam, and he fell in his tracks without a word. The red-haired giant instantly released Natalie and put up his hands. The man's attitude showed that he knew nothing of defence. I swept his guard aside, and struck him violently on the neck close to the ear. I was a trained boxer; but I had never before struck a blow in earnest, or in such earnest, and I hardly knew my own strength. The man went down with a grunt like a pole-axed ox, and lay where he fell. To a drunken sailor lad, who seemed anxious to be included in this matter, I dealt a stinging smack on the face with my open hand that satisfied him straightway. The others did not molest me. Turning from the crowd, I found Edith Metford looking at me with blazing eyes.

"Superb! Marcel, I am proud of you!" she cried.

"Oh! Edith, how can you say that?" Natalie Brande exclaimed, still trembling. "Such dreadful violence! The poor men knew no better."

"Poor fiddlesticks! It is well for you that Marcel is a man of violence. He's worth a dozen sheep like--"

"Like whom, Miss Metford?" Rockingham asked, glaring at her so viciously that I interposed with a hasty entreaty that all should hurry to the ship. I did not trust the man.

Miss Metford was not so easily suppressed. She said leisurely, "I meant to say like you, and this over-nervous but otherwise admirable boy. If you think 'sheep' derogatory, pray make it 'goats.'"

I hurried them on board. Brande welcomed us at the gangway. The vessel was his own, so he was as much at home on the ship as in his country house. I had an important letter to write, and very little time for the task. It was not finished a moment too soon, for the moment the last passenger and the last bale of luggage was on board, the captain's telegraph rang from the bridge, and the Esmeralda steamed out to sea. My letter, however, was safe on shore. The land was low down upon the horizon before the long summer twilight deepened slowly into night. Then one by one the shadowy cliffs grew dim, dark, and disappeared. We saw no more of England until after many days of gradually culminating horror. The very night which was our first at sea did not pass without a strange adventure, which happened, indeed, by an innocent oversight.

CHAPTER XI.

MORITURI TE SALUTANT.

We had been sitting on deck chairs smoking and talking for a couple of hours after the late dinner, which was served as soon as the vessel was well out to sea, when Brande came on deck. He was hailed with enthusiasm. This did not move him, or even interest him. I was careful not to join in the acclamations produced by his presence. He noticed this, and lightly called me recalcitrant. I admitted the justice of the epithet, and begged him to consider it one which would always apply to me with equal force. He laughed at this, and contrasted my gloomy fears with the excellent arrangements which he had made for my comfort. I asked him what had become of Grey. I thought it strange that this man should be amongst the absentees.

"Oh, Grey! He goes to Labrador."

"To Labrador! What takes him to Labrador?"

"The same purpose which takes us to the Arafura Sea," Brande answered, and passed on.

Presently there was a slight stir amongst the people, and the word was passed round that Brande was about to undertake some interesting experiment for the amusement of his guests. I hurried aft along with some other men with whom I had been talking, and found Miss Brande and Miss Metford standing hand in hand. Natalie's face was very white, and the only time I ever saw real fear upon it was at that moment. I thought the incident on the quay had unnerved her more than was apparent at the time, and that she was still upset by it. She beckoned to me, and when I came to her she seized my hand. She was trembling so much her words were hardly articulate. Miss Metford was concerned for her companion's nervousness; but otherwise indifferent; while Natalie stood holding our hands in hers like a frightened child awaiting the firing of a cannon.

"He's going to let off something, a rocket, I suppose," Miss Metford said to me. "Natalie seems to think he means to sink the ship."

"He does not mean to do so. He might, if an accident occurred."

"Is he going to fire a mine?" I asked.

"No, he is going to etherize a drop of water." Natalie said this so seriously, we had no thought of laughter, incongruous as the cause of her fears might seem.

At that moment Brande addressed us from the top of the deckhouse, and explained that, in order to illustrate on a large scale the most recent discovery in natural science, he was about to disintegrate a drop of water, at present encased in a hollow glass ball about the size of a pea, which he held between his thumb and forefinger. An electric light was turned upon him so that we could all see the thing quite plainly. He explained that there was a division in the ball; one portion of it containing the drop of water, and the other the agent by which, when the dividing wall was eaten through by its action, the atoms of the water would be resolved into the ultimate ether of which they were composed. As the disintegrating agent was powerless in salt water, we might all feel assured that no great catastrophe would ensue.

Before throwing the glass ball overboard, a careful search for the lights of ships was made from east to west, and north to south.

There was not a light to be seen anywhere. Brande threw the ball over the side. We were going under easy steam at the time, but the moment he left the deckhouse "full speed ahead" was rung from the bridge, and the Esmeralda showed us her pace. She literally tore through the water when the engines were got full on.

Before we had gone a hundred yards a great cry arose. A little fleet of French fishing-boats with no lights up had been lying very close to us on the starboard bow. There they were, boatfuls of men, who waved careless adieus to us as we dashed past.

Brande was moved for a moment. Then he shrugged his shoulders and muttered, "It can't be helped now." We all felt that these simple words might mean much. To test their full portent I went over to him, Natalie still holding my hand with trembling fingers.

"Can't you do anything for them?" I asked.

"You mean, go back and sink this ship to keep them company?"

"No; but warn them to fly."

"It would be useless. In this breeze they could not sail a hundred yards in the time allowed, and three miles is the nearest point of safety. I could not say definitely, as this is the first time I have ever tried an experiment so tremendous; but I believe that if we even slowed to half speed, it would be dangerous, and if we stopped, the Esmeralda would go to the bottom to-night, as certainly as the sun will rise to-morrow."

Natalie moaned in anguish on hearing this. I said to her sternly:

"I thought you approved of all these actions?"

"This serves no purpose. These men may not even have a painless death, and the reality is more awful than I thought."

Every face was turned to that point in the darkness toward which the foaming wake of the Esmeralda stretched back. Not a word more was spoken until Brande, who was standing, watch in hand, beside the light from the deckhouse, came aft and said:

"You will see the explosion in ten seconds."

He could not have spoken more indifferently if the catastrophe he had planned was only the firing of a penny squib.

Then the sea behind us burst into a flame, followed by the sound of an explosion so frightful that we were almost stunned by it. A huge mass of water, torn up in a solid block, was hurled into the air, and there it broke into a hundred roaring cataracts. These, in the brilliant search light from the ship which was now turned upon them full, fell like cataracts of liquid silver into the seething cauldron of water that raged below. The instant the explosion was over, our engines were reversed, and the Esmeralda went full speed astern. The waves were still rolling in tumultuous breakers when we got back. We might as well have gone on.

The French fishing fleet had disappeared.

I could not help saying to Brande before we turned in:

"You expect us, I suppose, to believe that the explosion was really caused by a drop of water?"

"Etherized," he interrupted. "Certainly I do. You don't believe it--on what grounds?"

"That it is unbelievable."

"Pshaw! You deny a fact because you do not understand it. Ignorance is not evidence."

"I say it is impossible."

"You do not wish to believe it possible. Wishes are not proofs."

Without pursuing the argument, I said to him:

"It is fortunate that the accident took place at sea. There will be no inquests."

"Oh! I am sorry for the accident. As for the men, they might have had a worse fate. It is better than living in life-long misery as they do. Besides, both they and the fishes that will eat them will soon be numbered amongst the things that have been."

CHAPTER XII.

"NO DEATH--SAVE IN LIFE."

For some days afterwards our voyage was uneventful, and the usual shipboard amusements were requisitioned to while away the tedious hours. The French fishing fleet was never mentioned. We got through the Bay with very little knocking about, and passed the Rock without calling. I was not disappointed, for there was slight inducement for going ashore, oppressed as I was with the ever-present incubus of dread. At intervals this feeling became less acute, but only to return, strengthened by its short absences. After a time my danger sense became blunted. The nervous system became torpid under continuous stress, and refused to pass on the sensations with sufficient intensity to the brain; or the weary brain was asleep at its post and did not heed the warnings. I could think no more.

And this reminds me of something which I must tell about young Halley. For several days after the voyage began, the boy avoided me. I knew his reason for doing this. I myself did not blame him for his want of physical courage, but I was glad that he himself was ashamed of it.

Halley came to me one morning and said:

"I wish to speak to you, Marcel. I must speak to you. It is about that miserable episode on the evening we left England. I acted like a cad. Therefore I must be a cad. I only want to tell you that I despise myself as much as you can. And that I envy you. I never thought that I should envy a man simply because he had no nervous system."

"Who is this man without a nervous system of whom you speak?" I asked coldly. I was not sorry that I had an opportunity of reading him a lesson which might be placed opposite the many indignities which had been put upon me, in the form mainly of shoulder shrugs, brow elevations, and the like.

"You, of course. I mean no offence--you are magnificent. I am honest in saying that I admire you. I wish I was like you in height, weight, muscle--and absence of nervous system."

"You would keep your own brain, I suppose?" I asked.

"Yes, I would keep that."

"And I will keep my own nervous system," I replied. "And the difference between mine and yours is this: that whereas my own danger sense is, or was, as keen as your own, I have my reserve of nerve force--or had it--which might be relied on to tide me over a sudden emergency. This reserve you have expended on your brain. There are two kinds of cowards; the selfish coward who cares for no interest save his own; the unselfish coward who cares nothing for himself, but who cannot face a danger because he dare not. And there are two kinds of brave men; the nerveless man you spoke of, who simply faces danger because he does not appreciate it, and the man who faces danger because, although he fears it he dares it. I have no difficulty in placing you in this list."

"You place me--"

"A coward because you cannot help it. You are merely out of harmony with your environment. You ought to bring a supply of 'environment' about with you, seeing that you cannot manufacture it off-hand like myself. I wish to be alone. Good-day."

"Before I go, Marcel, I will say this." There were tears in his eyes. "These people do not really know you, with all their telepathic power. You are not--not--"

"Not as great a fool as they think. Thank you. I mean to prove that to them some day."

With that I turned away from him, although I felt that he would have gladly stayed longer with me.

While the Esmeralda was sweeping over the long swells of the Mediterranean, I heard Brande lecture for the second time. It was a fitting interlude between his first and third addresses. I might classify them thus--the first, critical; the second, constructive; the third, executive. His third speech was the last he made in the world.

We were assembled in the saloon. It would have been pleasanter on the upper deck, owing to the heat, but the speaker could not then have been easily heard in the noise of the wind and waves. I could scarcely believe that it was Brande who arose to speak, so changed was his expression. The frank scepticism, which had only recently degenerated into a cynicism, still tempered with a half kindly air of easy superiority, was gone. In its place there was a look of concentrated and relentless purpose which dominated the man himself and all who saw him. He began in forcible and direct sentences, with only a faintly reminiscent eloquence which was part of himself, and from which he could not without a conscious effort have freed his style. But the whole bearing of the man had little trace in it of the dilettante academician whom we all remembered.

"When I last addressed this Society," he began, "I laboured under a difficulty in arriving at ultimate truth which was of my own manufacture. I presupposed, as you will remember, the indestructibility of the atom, and, in logical consequence I was bound to admit the conservation of suffering, the eternity of misery. But on that evening many of my audience were untaught in the rudiments of ultimate thought, and some were still sceptical of the bona fides of our purpose, and our power to achieve its object. To them, in their then ineptitude, what I shall say now would have been unintelligible. For in the same way that the waves of light or sound exceeding a certain maximum can not be transferred to the brain by dull eyes and ears, my thought pulsations would have escaped those auditors by virtue of their own irresponsiveness. To-night I am free from the limitation which I then suffered, because there are none around me now who have not sufficient knowledge to grasp what I shall present.

"You remember that I traced for you the story of evolution in its journey from the atom to the star. And I showed you that the hypothesis of the indestructibility of the atom was simply a creed of cruelty writ large. I now proceed on the lines of true science to show you how that hypothesis is false; that as the atom is destructible--as you have seen by our experiments (the last of which resulted in a climax not intended by me)--the whole scheme of what is called creation falls to pieces. As the atom was the first etheric blunder, so the material Universe is the grand etheric mistake.

"In considering the marvellous and miserable succession of errors resulting from the meretricious atomic remedy adopted by the ether to cure its local sores, it must first be said of the ether itself that there is too much of it. Space is not sufficient for it. Thus, the particles of ether--those imponderable entities which vibrate through a block of marble or a disc of hammered steel with only a dulled, not an annihilated motion, are by their own tumultuous plenty packed closer together than they wish. I say wish, for if all material consciousness and sentiency be founded on atomic consciousness, then in its turn atomic consciousness is founded upon, and dependent on, etheric consciousness. These particles of ether, therefore, when too closely impinged upon by their neighbours, resent the impact, and in doing so initiate etheric whirlwinds, from whose vast perturbances stupendous drifts set out. In their gigantic power these avalanches crush the particles which impede them, force the resisting medium out of its normal stage, destroy the homogeneity of its constituents, and mass them into individualistic communities whose vibrations play with greater freedom when they synchronise. The homogeneous etheric tendencies recede and finally determine.

"Behold a miracle! An atom is born!

"By a similar process--which I may liken to that of putting off an evil day which some time must be endured--the atoms group themselves into molecules. In their turn the molecules go forth to war, capturing or being captured; the vibrations of the slaves always being forced to synchronise with those of their conquerors. The nucleus of the gas of a primal metal is now complete, and the foundation of a solar system--paltry molecule of the Universe as it is--is laid. Thereafter, the rest is easily followed. It is described in your school books, and must not occupy me now.

"But one word I will interpolate which may serve to explain a curious and interesting human belief. You are aware of how, in times past, men of absolutely no scientific insight held firmly to the idea that an elixir of life and a philosopher's stone might be discovered, and that these two objects were nearly always pursued contemporaneously. That is to my mind an extraordinary example of the force of atomic consciousness. The idea itself was absolutely correct; but the men who followed it had slight knowledge of its unity, and none whatever of its proper pursuit. They would have worked on their special lines to eternity before advancing a single step toward their object. And this because they did not know what life was, and death was, and what the metals ultimately signified which they, blind fools, so unsuccessfully tried to transmute. But we know more than they. We have climbed no doubt in the footholds they have carved, and we have gained the summit they only saw in the mirage of hope. For we know that there is no life, no death, no metals, no matter, no emotions, no thoughts; but that all that we call by these names is only the ether in various conditions. Life! I could live as long as this earth will submit to human existence if I had studied that paltry problem. Metals! The ship in which you sail was bought with gold manufactured in my crucibles.

"The unintelligent--or I should say the grossly ignorant--have long held over the heads of the pioneers of science these two great charges: No man has ever yet transmuted a metal; no man has ever yet proved the connecting link between organic and inorganic life. I say life, for I take it that this company admits that a slab of granite is as much alive as any man or woman I see before me. But I have manufactured gold, and I could have manufactured protoplasm if I had devoted my life to that object. My studies have been almost wholly on the inorganic plane. Hence the 'philosopher's stone' came in my way, but not the 'elixir of life.' The molecules of protoplasm are only a little more complex than the molecules of hydrogen or nitrogen or iron or coal. You may fuse iron, vaporise water, intermix the gases; but the molecules of all change little in such metamorphosis. And you may slay twenty thousand men at Waterloo or Sedan, or ten thousand generations may be numbered with the dust, and not an ounce of protoplasm lies dead. All molecules are merely arrangements of atoms made under different degrees of pressure and of different ages. And all atoms are constructed of identical constituents--the ether, as I have said. Therefore the ether, which was from the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, which is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, is the origin of force, of matter, of life.

"It is alive!

"Its starry children are so many that the sands of the sea-shore may not be used as a similitude for their multitude; and they extend so far that distance may not be named in relation to them. They are so high above us and so deep below us that there is neither height nor depth in them. There is neither east nor west in them, nor north and south in them. Nor is there beginning or end to them. Time drops his scythe and stands appalled before that dreadful host. Number applies not to its eternal multitudes. Distance is lost in boundless space. And from all the stars that stud the caverns of the Universe, there swells this awful chorus: Failure! failure and futility! And the ether is to blame!

"Heterogeneous suffering is more acute than homogeneous, because the agony is intensified by being localised; because the comfort of the comfortable is purchasable only by the multiplied misery of the miserable; because aristocratic leisure requires that the poor should be always with it. There is, therefore, no gladness without its overbalancing sorrow. There is no good without intenser evil. There is no death save in life.

"Back, then, from this ill-balanced and unfair long-suffering, this insufficient existence. Back to Nirvana--the ether! And I will lead the way.

"The agent I will employ has cost me all life to discover. It will release the vast stores of etheric energy locked up in the huge atomic warehouse of this planet. I shall remedy the grand mistake only to a degree which it would be preposterous to call even microscopic; but when I have done what I can, I am blameless for the rest. In due season the whole blunder will be cured by the same means that I shall use, and all the hideous experiment will be over, and everlasting rest or quasi-rest will supersede the magnificent failure of material existence. This earth, at least, and, I am encouraged to hope, the whole solar system, will by my instrumentality be restored to the ether from which it never should have emerged. Once before, in the history of our system, an effort similar to mine was made, unhappily without success.

"This time we shall not fail!"

A low murmur rose from the audience as the lecturer concluded, and a hushed whisper asked:

"Where was that other effort made?"

Brande faced round momentarily, and said quietly but distinctly:

"On the planet which was where the Asteroids are now."

CHAPTER XIII.

MISS METFORD'S PLAN.

We coaled at Port Said like any ordinary steamer. Although I had more than once made the Red Sea voyage, I had never before taken the slightest interest in the coaling of the vessel on which I was a passenger. This time everything was different. That which interested me before seemed trivial now. And that which had before seemed trivial was now absorbing. I watched the coaling--commonplace as the spectacle was--with vivid curiosity. The red lights, the sooty demons at work, every bag of coals they carried, and all the coal dust clouds they created, were fitting episodes in a voyage such as ours. We took an enormous quantity of coal on board. I remained up most of the night in a frame of mind which I thought none might envy. I myself would have made light of it had I known what was still in store for the Esmeralda and her company. It was nearly morning when I turned in. When I awoke we were nearing the Red Sea.

On deck, the conversation of our party was always eccentric, but this must be said for it: there was sometimes a scintillating brilliance in it that almost blinded one to its extreme absurdity. The show of high spirits which was very general was, in the main, unaffected. For the rest it was plainly assumed. But those who assumed their parts did so with a histrionic power which was all the more surprising when it is remembered that the origin of their excellent playing was centred in their own fears. I preserved a neutral attitude. I did not venture on any overt act of insubordination. That would have only meant my destruction, without any counter-balancing advantage in the way of baulking an enterprise in which I was a most unwilling participator. And to pretend what I did not feel was a task which I had neither stomach to undertake nor ability to carry out successfully. In consequence I kept my own counsel--and that of Edith Metford.

Brande was the most easily approached maniac I had ever met. His affability continued absolutely consistent. I took advantage of this to say to him on a convenient opportunity: "Why did you bring these people with you? They must all be useless, and many of them little better than a nuisance!"

"Marcel, you are improving. Have you attained the telepathic power? You have read my mind." This was said with a pleasant smile.

"I can not read your mind," I answered; "I only diagnose."

"Your diagnosis is correct. I answer you in a sentence. They are all sympathetic, and human sympathy is necessary to me until my purpose is fulfilled."

"You do not look to me for any measure of this sympathy, I trust?"

"I do not. You are antipathetic."

"I am."

"But necessary, all the same."

"So be it, until the proper time shall come."

"It will never come," Brande said firmly.

"We shall see," I replied as firmly as himself.

Next evening as we were steaming down the blue waters--deep blue they always seemed to me--of the Red Sea, I was sitting on the foredeck smoking and trying to think. I did not notice how the time passed. What seemed to me an hour at most, must have been three or four. With the exception of the men of the crew who were on duty, I was alone, for the heat was intense, and most of our people were lying in their cabins prostrated in spite of the wind-sails which were spread from every port to catch the breeze. My meditations were as usual gloomy and despondent. They were interrupted by Miss Metford. She joined me so noiselessly that I was not aware of her presence until she laid her hand on my arm. I started at her touch, but she whispered a sharp warning, so full of suppressed emotion that I instantly recovered a semblance of unconcern.

The girl was very white and nervous. This contrast from her usual equanimity was disquieting. She clung to me hysterically as she gasped:

"Marcel, it is a mercy I have found you alone, and that there is one sane man in this shipful of lunatics."

"I am afraid you are not altogether right," I said, as I placed a seat for her close to mine. "I can hardly be sane when I am a voluntary passenger on board this vessel."

"Do you really think they mean what they say?" she asked hurriedly, without noticing my remark.

"I really think they have discovered the secret of extraordinary natural forces, so powerful and so terrible that no one can say what they may or may not accomplish. And that is the reason I begged you not to come on this voyage."

"What was the good of asking me not to come without giving me some reason?"

"Had I done so, they might have killed you as they have done others before."

"You might have chanced that, seeing that it will probably end that way."

"And they would certainly have killed me."

"Ah!"

I wondered at the sudden intensity of the girl's sharp gasp when I said this, and marvelled too, how she, who had always been so mannish, nestled close to me and allowed her head to sink down on my shoulder. I pitied the strong-willed, self-reliant nature which had given way under some strain of which I had yet to be told. So I stooped and touched her cheek with my lips in a friendly way, at which she looked up to me with half-closed eyes, and whispered in a voice strangely soft and womanish for her:

"If they must kill us, I wish they would kill us now."

I stroked her soft cheek gently, and urged a less hopeless view. "Even if the worst come, we may as well live as long as we can."

Whereupon to my surprise she, having shot one quick glance into my eyes, put my arm away and drew her chair apart from mine. Her head was turned away from me, but I could not but notice that her bosom rose and fell swiftly. Presently she faced round again, lit a cigarette, put her hands in the pocket of her jacket, and her feet on another chair, and said indifferently:

"You are right. Even if the worst must come, we may as well live as long as we can."

This sudden change in her manner surprised me. I knew I had no art in dealing with women, so I let it pass without comment, and looked out at the glassy sea.

After some minutes of silence, the girl spoke to me again.

"Do you know anything of the actual plans of these maniacs?"

"No. I only know their preposterous purpose."

"Well, I know how it is to be done. Natalie was restless last night--you know that we share the same cabin--and she raved a bit. I kept her in her berth by sheer force, but I allowed her to talk."

This was serious. I drew my chair close to Miss Metford's and whispered, "For heaven's sake, speak low." Then I remembered Brande's power, and wrung my hands in helpless impotence. "You forget Brande. At this moment he is taking down every word we say."

"He's doing nothing of the sort."

"But you forget--"

"I don't forget. By accident I put morphia in the tonic he takes, and he is now past telepathy for some hours at least. He's sound asleep. I suppose if I had not done it by accident he would have known what I was doing, and so have refused the medicine. Anyhow, accident or no accident, I have done it."

"Thank God!" I cried.

"And this precious disintegrating agent! They haven't it with them, it seems. To manufacture it in sufficient quantity would be impossible in any civilised country without fear of detection or interruption. Brande has the prescription, formula--what do you call it?--and if you could get the paper and--"

"Throw it overboard!"

"Rubbish! They would work it all out again."

"What then?" I whispered.

"Steal the paper and--wouldn't it do to put in an extra x or y, or stick a couple of additional figures into any suitable vacancy? Don't you think they'd go on with the scheme and--"

"And?"

"And make a mess of it!"

"Miss Metford," I said, rising from my chair, "I mean Metford, I know you like to be addressed as a man--or used to like it."

"Yes, I used to," she assented coldly.

"I am going to take you in my arms and kiss you."

"I'm hanged if you are!" she exclaimed, so sharply that I was suddenly abashed. My intended familiarity and its expression appeared grotesque, although a few minutes before she was so friendly. But I could not waste precious time in studying a girl's caprices, so I asked at once:

"How can I get this paper?"

"I said steal it, if you recollect." Her voice was now hard, almost harsh. "You can get it in Brande's cabin, if you are neither afraid nor jealous."

"I am not much afraid, and I will try it. What do you mean by jealous?"

"I mean, would you, to save Natalie Brande--for they will certainly succeed in blowing themselves up, if nobody else--consent to her marrying another man, say that young lunatic Halley, who is always dangling after her when you are not?"

"Yes," I answered, after some thought. For Halley's attentions to Natalie had been so marked, the plainly inconsequent mention of him in this matter did not strike me. "If that is necessary to save her, of course I would consent to it. Why do you ask? In my place you would do the same."

"No. I'd see the ship and all its precious passengers at the bottom of the sea first."

"Ah! but you are not a man."

"Right! and what's more, I'm glad of it." Then looking down at the rational part of her costume, she added sharply, "I sha'n't wear these things again."

CHAPTER XIV.

ROCKINGHAM TO THE SHARKS.

At one o'clock in the morning I arose, dressed hurriedly, drew on a pair of felt slippers, and put a revolver in my pocket. It was then time to put Edith Metford's proposal to the proof, and she would be waiting for me on deck to hear whether I had succeeded in it. We had parted a couple of hours before on somewhat chilling terms. I had agreed to follow her suggestion, but I could not trouble my tired brain by guesses at the cause of her moods.

It was very dark. There was only enough light to enable me to find my way along the corridor, off which the state-rooms occupied by Brande and his immediate lieutenants opened. All the sleepers were restless from the terrible heat. As I stole along, a muffled word, a sigh, or a movement in the berths, made me pause at every step with a beating heart. Having listened till all was quiet, I moved on again noiselessly. I was almost at the end of the corridor. So intent had I been on preserving perfect silence, it did not sooner occur to me that I was searching for any special door. I had forgotten Brande's number!

I could no more think of it than one can recall the name of a half-forgotten acquaintance suddenly encountered in the street. It might have been fourteen, or forty-one; or a hundred and fifty. Every number was as likely as it was unlikely. I tried vainly to concentrate my mind. The result was nothing. The missing number gave no clue. To enter the wrong room in that ship at that hour meant death for me. Of that I was certain. To leave the right room unentered gave away my first chance in the unequal battle with Brande. Then, as I knew that my first chance would probably be my last, if not availed of, I turned to the nearest door and quietly tried the handle. The door was not locked. I entered the state-room.

"What do you want?" It was Halley's voice that came from the berth.

"Pardon me," I whispered, "a mistake. The heat, you know. Went on deck, and have blundered into your room."

"Oh, all right. Who are you?"

"Brande."

"Good-night. You did not blunder far;" this sleepily.

I went out and closed the door quietly. I had gained something. I was within one door of my destination, for I knew that Halley was berthed between Rockingham and Brande. But I did not know on which side Brande's room was, and I dared not ask. I tried the next door going forward. It opened like the other. I went in.

"Hallo there!" This time no sleepy or careless man challenged me. It was Rockingham's voice.

"May I not enter my own room?" I whispered.

"This is not your room. You are?" Rockingham sprang up in his berth, but before he could leave it I was upon him.

"I am Arthur Marcel. And this iron ring which I press against your left ear is the muzzle of my revolver. Speak, move, breathe above your natural breath and your brains go through that porthole. Now, loose your hold of my arm and come with me."

"You fool!" hissed Rockingham. "You dare not fire. You know you dare not."

He was about to call out, but my left hand closed on his throat, and a gurgling gasp was all that issued from him.

I laid down the revolver and turned the ear of the strangling man close to my mouth. I had little time to think; but thought flies fast when such deadly peril menaces the thinker as that which I must face if I failed to make terms with the man who was in my power. I knew that notwithstanding his intensely disagreeable nature, if he gave his promise either by spoken word or equivalent sign, I could depend upon him. There were no liars in Brande's Society. But the word I could not trust him to say. I must have his sign. I whispered:

"You know I do not wish to kill you. I shall never have another happy day if you force me to it. I have no choice. You must yield or die. If you will yield and stand by me rather than against me in what shall follow, choose life by taking your right hand from my wrist and touching my left shoulder. I will not hurt you meanwhile. If you choose death, touch me with your left."

The sweat stood on my forehead in big beads as I waited for his choice. It was soon made. He unlocked his left hand and placed it firmly on my right shoulder.

He had chosen death.

So the man was only a physical coward--or perhaps he had only made a choice of alternatives.

I said slowly and in great agony, "May God have mercy on your soul--and mine!" on which the muscles in my left arm stiffened. The big biceps--an heirloom of my athletic days--thickened up, and I turned my eyes away from the dying face, half hidden by the darkness. His struggles were very terrible, but with my weight upon his lower limbs, and my grasp upon his windpipe, that death-throe was as silent as it was horrible. The end came slowly. I could not bear the horror of it longer. I must finish it and be done with it. I put my right arm under the man's shoulders and raised the upper part of his body from the berth. Then a desperate wrench with my left arm, and there was a dull crack like the snapping of a dry stick. It was over. Rockingham's neck was broken.

I wiped away the bloody froth that oozed from the gaping mouth, and tried to compose decently the contorted figure. I covered the face. Then I started on my last mission, for now I knew the door. I had bought the knowledge dearly, and I meant to use it for my own purpose, careless of what violence might be necessary to accomplish my end.

When I entered Brande's state-room I found the electric light full on. He was seated at a writing-table with his head resting on his arms, which hung crossways over the desk. The sleeper breathed so deeply it was evident that the effect of the morphia was still strong upon him. One hand clutched a folded parchment. His fingers clasped it nervelessly, and I had only to force them open one by one in order to withdraw the manuscript. As I did this, he moaned and moved in his chair. I had no fear of his awaking. My hand shook as I unfolded the parchment which I unconsciously handled as carefully as though the thing itself were as deadly as the destruction which might be wrought by its direction.

To me the whole document was a mass of unintelligible formulæ. My rusty university education could make nothing of it. But I could not waste time in trying to solve the puzzle, for I did not know what moment some other visitor might arrive to see how Brande fared. I first examined with a pocket microscope the ink of the manuscript, and then making a scratch with Brande's pen on a page of my note-book, I compared the two. The colours were identical. It was the same ink.

In several places where a narrow space had been left vacant, I put 1 in front of the figures which followed. I had no reason for making this particular alteration, save that the figure 1 is more easily forged than any other, and the forgery is consequently more difficult to detect. My additions, when the ink was dry, could only have been discovered by one who was informed that the document had been tampered with. It was probable that a drawer which stood open with the keys in the lock was the place where Brande kept this paper; where he would look for it on awaking. I locked it in the drawer and put the keys into his pocket.

There was something still to do with the sleeping man, whose brain compassed such marvellous powers. His telepathic faculty must be destroyed. I must keep him seriously ill, without killing him. As long as he remained alive his friends would never question his calculations, and the fiasco which was possible under any circumstances would then be assured. I had with me an Eastern drug, which I had bought from an Indian fakir once in Murzapoor. The man was an impostor, whose tricks did not impose on me. But the drug, however he came by it, was reliable. It was a poison which produced a mild form of cerebritis that dulled but did not deaden the mental powers. It acted almost identically whether administered sub-cutaneously or, of course in a larger dose, internally. I brought it home with the intention of giving it to a friend who was interested in vivisection. I did not think that I myself should be the first and last to experiment with it. It served my purpose well.

The moment I pricked his skin, Brande moved in his seat. My hand was on his throat. He nestled his head down again upon his arms, and drew a deep breath. Had he moved again that breath would have been his last. I had been so wrought upon by what I had already done that night, I would have taken his life without the slightest hesitation, if the sacrifice seemed necessary.

When my operation was over, I left the room and moved silently along the corridor till I came to the ladder leading to the deck. Edith Metford was waiting for me as we had arranged. She was shivering in spite of the awful heat.

"Have you done it?" she whispered.

"I have," I answered, without saying how much I had done. "Now you must retire--and rest easy. The formula won't work. I have put both it and Brande himself out of gear."

"Thank God!" she gasped, and then a sudden faintness came over her. It passed quickly, and as soon as she was sufficiently restored, I begged her to go below. She pleaded that she could not sleep, and asked me to remain with her upon the deck. "It would be absurd to suppose that either of us could sleep this night," she very truly said. On which I was obliged to tell her plainly that she must go below. I had more to do.

"Can I help?" she asked anxiously.

"No. If you could, I would ask you, for you are a brave girl. I have something now to get through which is not woman's work."

"Your work is my work," she answered. "What is it?"

"I have to lower a body overboard without anyone observing me."

There was no time for discussion, so I told her at once, knowing that she would not give way otherwise. She started at my words, but said firmly:

"How will you do that unobserved by the 'watch'? Go down and bring up your--bring it up. I will keep the men employed." She went forward, and I turned again to the companion.

When I got back to Rockingham's cabin I took a sheet of paper and wrote, "Heat--Mad!" making no attempt to imitate his writing. I simply scrawled the words with a rough pen in the hope that they would pass as a message from a man who was hysterical when he wrote them. Then I turned to the berth and took up the body. It was not a pleasant thing to do. But it must be done.

I was a long time reaching the deck, for the arms and legs swung to and fro, and I had to move cautiously lest they should knock against the woodwork I had to pass. I got it safely up and hurried aft with it. Edith, I knew, would contrive to keep the men on watch engaged until I had disposed of my burden. I picked up a coil of rope and made it fast to the dead man's neck. Taking one turn of the rope round a boat-davit, I pushed the thing over the rail. I intended to let go the rope the moment the weight attached to it was safely in the sea, and so lowered away silently, paying out the line without excessive strain owing to the support of the davit round which I had wound it. I had not to wait so long as that, for just as the body was dangling over the foaming wake of the steamer, a little streak of moonlight shot out from behind a bank of cloud and lighted the vessel with a sudden gleam. I was startled by this, and held on, fearing that some watching eye might see my curious movements. For a minute I leaned over the rail and watched the track of the steamer as though I had come on deck for the air. There was a quick rush near the vessel's quarter. Something dark leaped out of the water, and there was a sharp snap--a crunch. The lower limbs were gone in the jaws of a shark. I let go the rope in horror, and the body dropped splashing into that hideous fishing-ground. Sick to death I turned away.

"Get below quickly," Edith Metford said in my ear. "They heard the splash, slight as it was, and are coming this way." Her warning was nearly a sob.

We hurried down the companion as fast as we dared, and listened to the comments of the watch above. They were soon satisfied that nothing of importance had occurred, and resumed their stations.

Before we parted on that horrible night, Edith said in a trembling voice, "You have done your work like a brave man."

"Say rather, like a forger and murderer," I answered.

"No," she maintained. "Many men before you have done much worse in a good cause. You are not a forger. You are a diplomat. You are not a murderer. You are a hero."

But I, being new to this work of slaughter and deception, could only deprecate her sympathy and draw away. I felt that my very presence near her was pollution. I was unclean, and I told her that I was so. Whereupon, without hesitation, she put her arms round my neck, and said clinging closely to me:

"You are not unclean--you are free from guilt. And--Arthur--I will kiss you now."

CHAPTER XV.

"IF NOT TOO LATE!"

When I came on deck next morning the coast of Arabia was rising, a thin thread of hazy blue between the leaden grey of the sea and the soft grey of the sky. The morning was cloudy, and the blazing sunlight was veiled in atmospheric gauze. I had hardly put my foot on deck when Natalie Brande ran to meet me. I hung back guiltily.

"I thought you would never come. There is dreadful news!" she cried.

I muttered some incoherent words, to which she did not attend, but went on hurriedly:

"Rockingham has thrown himself overboard in a hysterical fit, brought on by the heat. The sailors heard the splash--"

"I know they did." This escaped me unawares, and I instantly prevaricated, "I have been told about that."

"Do you know that Herbert is ill?"

I could have conscientiously answered this question affirmatively also. Her sudden sympathy for human misadventure jarred upon me, as it had done once before, when I thought of the ostensible object of the cruise. I said harshly:

"Then Rockingham is at rest, and your brother is on the road to it." It was a brutal speech. It had a very different effect to that which I intended.

"True," she said. "But think of the awful consequences if, now that Rockingham is gone, Herbert should be seriously ill."

"I do think of it," I said stiffly. Indeed, I could hardly keep from adding that I had provided for it.

"You must come to him at once. I have faith in you." This gave me a twinge. "I have no faith in Percival" (the ship's doctor).

"You are nursing your brother?" I said with assumed carelessness.

"Of course."

"What is Percival giving him?"

She described the treatment, and as this was exactly what I myself would have prescribed to put my own previous interference right, I promised to come at once, saying:

"It is quite evident that Percival does not understand the case."

"That is exactly what I thought," Natalie agreed, leading me to Brande's cabin. I found his vitality lower than I expected, and he was very impatient. The whole purpose of his life was at stake, dependent on his preserving a healthy body, on which, in turn, a vigorous mind depends.

"How soon can you get me up?" he asked sharply, when my pretended examination was over.

"I should say a month at most."

"That would be too long," he cried. "You must do it in less."

"It does not depend on me--"

"It does depend on you. I know life itself. You know the paltry science of organic life. I have had no time for such trivial study. Get me well within three days, or--"

"I am attending."

"By the hold over my sister's imagination which I have gained, I will kill her on the fourth morning from now."

"You will--not."

"I tell you I will," Brande shrieked, starting up in his berth. "I could do it now."

"You could--not."

"Man, do you know what you are saying? You to bandy words with me! A clod-brained fool to dare a man of science! Man of science forsooth! Your men of science are to me as brain-benumbed, as brain-bereft, as that fly which I crush--thus!"

The buzzing insect was indeed dead. But I was something more than a fly. At last I was on a fair field with this scientific magician or madman. And on a fair field I was not afraid of him.

"You are agitating yourself unnecessarily and injuriously," I said in my best professional manner. "And if you persist in doing so you will make my one month three."

In a voice of undisguised scorn, Brande exclaimed, without noticing my interruption:

"Bearded by a creature whose little mind is to me like the open page of a book to read when the humour seizes me." Then with a fierce glance at me he cried:

"I have read your mind before. I can read it now."

"You can--not."

He threw himself back in his berth and strove to concentrate his mind. For nearly five minutes he lay quite still, and then he said gently:

"You are right. Have you, then, a higher power than I?"

"No; a lower!"

"A lower! What do you mean?"

"I mean that I have merely paralysed your brain--that for many months to come it will not be restored to its normal power--that it will never reach its normal power again unless I choose."

"Then all is lost--lost--lost!" he wailed out. "The end is as far off, and the journey as long, and the way as hard, as if I had never striven. And the tribute of human tears will be exacted to the uttermost. My life has been in vain!"

The absolute agony in his voice, the note of almost superhuman suffering and despair, was so intense, that, without thinking of what it was this man was grieving over, I found myself saying soothingly:

"No, no! Nothing is lost. It is only your own overstrained nervous system which sends these fantastic nightmares to your brain. I will soon make you all right if you will listen to reason."

He turned to me with the most appealing look which I had ever seen in human eyes save once before--when Natalie pleaded with me.

"I had forgotten," he said, "the issue now lies in your hands. Choose rightly. Choose mercy."

"I will," I answered shortly, for his request brought me back with a jerk to his motive.

"Then you will get me well as soon as your skill can do it?"

"I will keep you in your present condition until I have your most solemn assurance that you will neither go farther yourself nor instigate others to go farther with this preposterous scheme of yours."

"Bah!" Brande ejaculated contemptuously, and lay back with a sudden content. "My brain is certainly out of order, else I should not have forgotten--until your words recalled it--the Labrador expedition."

"The Labrador expedition?"

"Yes. On the day we sailed for the Arafura Sea, Grey started with another party for Labrador. If we fail to act before the 31st December, in the year 1900, he will proceed. And the end of the century will be the date of the end of the earth. I will signal to him now."

His face changed suddenly. For a moment I thought he was dead. Then the dreadful fact came home to me. He was telegraphing telepathically to Grey. So the murder that was upon my soul had been done in vain. Then another life must be taken. Better a double crime than one resultless tragedy. I was spared this.

Brande opened his eyes wearily, and sighed as if fatigued. The effort, short as it was, must have been intense. He was prostrated. His voice was low, almost a whisper, as he said:

"You have succeeded beyond belief. I cannot even signal him, much less exchange ideas." With that he turned his face from me, and instantly fell into a deep sleep.

I left the cabin and went on deck. As usual, it was fairly sprinkled over with the passengers, but owing to the strong head-wind caused by the speed of the steamer, there was a little nook in the bow where there was no one to trouble me with unwelcome company.

I sat down on an arm of the starboard anchor and tried to think. The game which seemed so nearly won had all to be played over again from the first move. If I had killed Brande--which surely would have been justifiable--the other expedition would go on from where he left off. And how should I find them? And who would believe my story when I got back to England?

Brande must go on. His attempt to wreck the earth, even if the power he claimed were not overrated, would fail. For if the compounds of a common explosive must be so nicely balanced as they require to be, surely the addition of the figures which I had made in his formula would upset the balance of constituents in an agent so delicate, though so powerful, as that which he had invented. When the master failed, it was more than probable that the pupil would distrust the invention, and return to London for fresh experiments. Then a clean sweep must be made of the whole party. Meantime, it was plain that Brande must be allowed the opportunity of failing. And this it would be my hazardous duty to superintend.

I returned to Brande's cabin with my mind made up. He was awake, and looked at me eagerly, but waited for me to speak. Our conversation was brief, for I had little sympathy with my patient, and the only anxiety I experienced about his health was the hope that he would not die until he had served my purpose.

"I have decided to get you up," I said curtly.

"You have decided well," he answered, with equal coldness.

That was the whole interview--on which so much depended.

After this I did not speak to Brande on any subject but that of his symptoms, and before long he was able to come on deck. The month I spoke of as the duration of his illness was an intentional exaggeration on my part.

Rockingham was forgotten with a suddenness and completeness that was almost ghastly. The Society claimed to have improved the old maxim to speak nothing of the dead save what is good. Of the dead they spoke not at all. It is a callous creed, but in this instance it pleased me well.

We did not touch at Aden, and I was glad of it. The few attractions of the place, the diving boys and the like, may be a relief in ordinary sea voyages, but I was too much absorbed in my experiment on Brande to bear with patience any delay which served to postpone the crisis of my scheme. I had treated him well, so far as his bodily health went, but I deliberately continued to tamper with his brain, so that any return of his telepathic power was thus prevented. Indeed, Brande himself was not anxious for such return. The power was always exercised at an extreme nervous strain, and it was now, he said, unnecessary to his purpose.

In consequence of this determination, I modified the already minute doses of the drug I was giving him. This soon told with advantage on his health. His physical improvement partly restored his confidence in me, so that he followed my instructions faithfully. He evidently recognised that he was in my power; that if I did not choose to restore him fully no other man could.

Of the ship's officers, Anderson, who was in command, and Percival, the doctor, were men of some individuality. The captain was a good sailor and an excellent man of business. In the first capacity, he was firm, exacting, and scrupulously conscientious. In the second, his conscience was more elastic when he saw his way clear to his own advantage. He had certain rigid rules of conduct which he prided himself on observing to the letter, without for a moment suspecting that their raison d'etre lay in his own interests. His commercial morality only required him to keep within the law. His final contract with myself was, I admit, faithfully carried out, but the terms of it would not have discredited the most predatory business man in London town.

Percival was the opposite pole of such a character. He was a clever man, who might have risen in his profession but for his easy-going indolence. I spent many an hour in his cabin. He was a sportsman and a skilled raconteur. His anecdotes helped to while the weary time away. He exaggerated persistently, but this did not disturb me. Besides, if in his narratives he lengthened out the hunt a dozen miles and increased the weight of the fish to an impossible figure, made the brace a dozen and the ten-ton boat a man-of-war, it was not because he was deliberately untruthful. He looked back on his feats through the telescope of a strongly magnifying memory. It was more agreeable to me to hear him boast his prowess than have him inquire after the health and treatment of my patient Brande. On this matter he was naturally very curious, and I very reticent.

That Brande did not entirely trust me was evident from his confusion when I surprised him once reading his formula. His anxiety to convince me that it was only a commonplace memorandum was almost ludicrous. I was glad to see him anxious about that document. The more carefully he preserved it, and the more faithfully he adhered to its conditions, the better for my experiment. A sense of security followed this incident. It did not last long. It ended that evening.

After a day of almost unendurable heat, I went on deck for a breath of air. We were well out in the Indian Ocean, and soundings were being attempted by some of our naturalists. I sat alone and watched the sun sink down into the glassy ocean on which our rushing vessel was the only thing that moved. As the darkness of that hot, still night gathered, weird gleams of phosphorus broke from the steamer's bows and streamed away behind us in long lines of flashing spangles. Where the swell caused by the passage of the ship rose in curling waves, these, as they splashed into mimic breakers, burst into showers of flamboyant light. The water from the discharge-pipe poured down in a cascade, that shone like silver. Every turn of the screw dashed a thousand flashes on either side, and the heaving of the lead was like the flight of a meteor, as it plunged with a luminous trail far down into the dark unfathomable depths below.

My name was spoken softly. Natalie Brande stood beside me. The spell was complete. The unearthly glamour of the magical scene had been compassed by her. She had called it forth and could disperse it by an effort of her will. I wrenched my mind free from the foolish phantasmagoria.

"I have good news," Natalie said in a low voice. Her tones were soft, musical; her manner caressing. Happiness was in her whole bearing, tenderness in her eyes. Dread oppressed me. "Herbert is now well again."

"He has been well for some time," I said, my heart beating fast.

"He is not thoroughly restored even yet. But this evening he was able to receive a message from me by the thought waves. He thinks you are plotting injury to him. His brain is not yet sufficiently strong to show how foolish this fugitive fancy is. Perhaps you would go to him. He is troubling himself over this. You can set his mind at rest."

"I can--and will--if I am not too late," I answered.

CHAPTER XVI.

£5000 TO DETAIN THE SHIP.

Brande was asleep when I entered his cabin. His writing-table was covered with scraps of paper on which he had been scribbling. My name was on every scrap, preceded or followed by an unfinished sentence, thus: "Marcel is thinking-- When I was ill, Marcel thought-- Marcel means to--" All these I gathered up carefully and put in my pocket. Then I inoculated him with as strong a solution of the drug I was using on him as was compatible with the safety of his life. Immediate danger being thus averted, I determined to run no similar risk again.

For many days after this our voyage was monotonous. The deadly secret shared by Edith Metford and myself drew us gradually nearer to each other as time passed. She understood me, or, at least, gave me the impression that she understood me. Little by little that capricious mood which I have heretofore described changed into one of enduring sympathy. With one trivial exception, this lasted until the end. But for her help my mind would hardly have stood the strain of events which were now at hand, whose livid shadows were projected in the rising fire of Brande's relentless eyes.

Brande appeared to lose interest gradually in his ship's company. He became daily more and more absorbed in his own thoughts. Natalie was ever gentle, even tender. But I chafed at the impalpable barrier which was always between us. Sometimes I thought that she would willingly have ranged herself on my side. Some hidden power held her back. As to the others, I began to like the boy Halley. He was lovable, if not athletic. His devotion to Natalie, which never waned, did not now trouble me. It was only a friendship, and I welcomed it. Had it been anything more, it was not likely that he would have prevailed against the will of a man who had done murder for his mistress. We steamed through the Malay Archipelago, steering north, south, east, west, as if at haphazard, until only the navigating officers and the director of the Society knew how our course lay. We were searching for an island about the bearings of which, it transpired, some mistake had been made. I do not know whether the great laureate ever sailed these seas. But I know that his glorious islands of flowers and islands of fruit, with all their luscious imagery, were here eclipsed by our own islands of foliage. The long lagoons, the deep blue bays, the glittering parti-coloured fish that swam in visible shoals deep down amidst the submerged coral groves over which we passed, the rich-toned sea-weeds and brilliant anemones, the yellow strands and the steep cliffs, the riotous foliage that swept down from the sky to the blue of the sea; all these natural beauties seemed to cry to me with living voices--to me bound on a cruise of universal death.

After a long spell of apparently aimless but glorious steaming, a small island was sighted on our port bow. The Esmeralda was steered directly for it, and we dropped anchor in a deep natural harbour on its southern shore. Preparations for landing had been going on during the day, and everything was ready for quitting the ship.

It was here that my first opportunity for making use of the gold I had brought with me occurred. Anderson was called up by Brande, who made him a short complimentary speech, and finished it by ordering his officer to return to England, where further instructions would be given him. This order was received in respectful silence. Captain Anderson had been too liberally treated to demur if the Esmeralda had been ordered to the South Pole.

Brande went below for a few minutes, and as soon as he had disappeared I went forward to Anderson and hailed him nervously, for there was not a moment to spare.

"Anderson," I said hurriedly, "you must have noticed that Mr. Brande is an eccentric--"

"Pardon me, sir; it is not my business to comment upon my owner."

"I did not ask you to comment upon him, sir," I said sharply. "It is I who shall comment upon him, and it is for you to say whether you will undertake to earn my money by waiting in this harbour till I am ready to sail back with you to England."

"Have you anything more to say, sir?" Anderson asked stiffly.

"I presume I have said enough."

"If you have nothing more to say I must ask you to leave the bridge, and if it were not that you are leaving the ship this moment, I would caution you not to be impertinent to me again."

He blew his whistle, and a steward ran forward.

"Johnson, see Mr. Marcel's luggage over the side at once." To me he said shortly: "Quit my ship, sir."

This trivial show of temper, which, indeed, had been provoked by my own hasty speech, turned my impatience into fury.

"Before I quit your ship," I said, with emphasis, "I will tell you how you yourself will quit it. You will do so between two policemen if you land in England, and between two marines if you think of keeping on the high seas. Before we started, I sent a detailed statement of this ship, the nature of this nefarious voyage, and the names of the passengers--or as many as I knew--to a friend who will put it in proper hands if anything befalls me. Go back without me and explain the loss of that French fishing fleet which was sunk the very night we sailed. It is an awkward coincidence to be explained by a man who returns from an unknown voyage having lost his entire list of passengers. You cannot be aware of what this man Brande intends, or you would at least stand by us as long as your own safety permitted. In any case you cannot safely return without us."

Anderson, after reflecting for a moment, apologised for his peremptory words, and agreed to stand by night and day, with fires banked, until I, and all whom I could prevail upon to return with me, got back to his vessel. There was no danger of his running short of coal. A ship that was practically an ocean liner in coal ballast would be a considerable time in burning out her own cargo. But he insisted on a large money payment in advance. I had foolishly mentioned that I had a little over £5000 in gold. This he claimed on the plea that "in duty to himself"--a favourite phrase of his--he could not accept less. But I think his sense of duty was limited only by the fact that I had hardly another penny in the world. Under the circumstances he might have waived all remuneration. As he was firm, and as I had no time to haggle, I agreed to give him the money. Our bargain was only completed when Brande returned to the deck.

It was strange that on an island like that on which we were landing there should be a regular army of natives waiting to assist us with our baggage, and the saddled horses which were in readiness were out of place in a primeval wilderness. An Englishman came forward, and, saluting Brande, said all was ready for the start to the hills. This explained the puzzle. An advance agent had made everything comfortable. For Brande, his sister, and Miss Metford the best appointed horses were selected. I, as physician to the chief, had one. The main body had to make the journey on foot, which they did by very easy stages, owing to the heat and the primitive track which formed the only road. Their journey was not very long--perhaps ten miles in a direct line.

Mounted as we were, it was often necessary to stoop to escape the dense masses of parasitic growth which hung in green festoons from every branch of the trees on either side. Under this thick shade all the riotous vegetation of the tropics had fought for life and struggled for light and air till the wealth of their luxuriant death had carpeted the underwood with a thick deposit of steaming foliage. As we ascended the height, every mile in distance brought changes in the botanical growths, which might have passed unnoticed by the ordinary observer or ignorant pioneer. All were noted and commented on by Brande, whose eye was still as keen as his brain had once been brilliant. His usual staid demeanour changed suddenly. He romped ahead of us like a schoolboy out for a holiday. Unlike a schoolboy, however, he was always seeking new items of knowledge and conveying them to us with unaffected pleasure. He was more like a master who had found new ground and new material for his class. Natalie gave herself up like him to this enjoyment of the moment. Edith Metford and I partly caught the glamour of their infectious good-humour. But with both of us it was tempered by the knowledge of what was in store.

When we arrived at our destination we dismounted, at Brande's request, and tied our horses to convenient branches. He went forward, and, pushing aside the underwood with both hands, motioned to us to follow him till he stopped on a ledge of rock which overtopped a hollow in the mountain. The gorge below was the most beautiful glade I ever looked upon.

It was a paradise of foliage. Here and there a fallen tree had formed a picturesque bridge over the mountain stream which meandered through it. Far down below there was a waterfall, where gorgeous tree-ferns rose in natural bowers, while others further still leant over the lotus-covered stream, their giant leaves trailing in the slow-moving current. Tangled masses of bracken rioted in wild abundance over a velvety green sod, overshadowed by waving magnolias. Through the trees bright-plumaged birds were flitting from branch to branch in songless flight, flashing their brilliant colours through the sunny leaves. In places the water splashed over moss-grown rocks into deep pools. Every drifting spray of cloud threw over the dell a new light, deepening the shadows under the great ferns.

It was here in this glorious fairyland; here upon this island, where before us no white foot had ever trod; whose nameless people represented the simplest types of human existence, that Herbert Brande was to put his devilish experiment to the proof. I marvelled that he should have selected so fair a spot for so terrible a purpose. But the papers which I found later amongst the man's effects on the Esmeralda explain much that was then incomprehensible to me.

Our camp was quickly formed, and our life was outwardly as happy as if we had been an ordinary company of tourists. I say outwardly, because, while we walked and climbed and collected specimens of botanical or geological interest, there remained that latent dread which always followed us, and dominated the most frivolous of our people, on all of whom a new solemnity had fallen. For myself, the fact that the hour of trial for my own experiment was daily drawing closer and more inevitable, was sufficient to account for my constant and extreme anxiety.

Brande joined none of our excursions. He was always at work in his improvised laboratory. The boxes of material which had been brought from the ship nearly filled it from floor to roof, and from the speed with which these were emptied, it was evident that their contents had been systematised before shipment. In place of the varied collection of substances there grew up within the room a cone of compound matter in which all were blended. This cone was smaller, Brande admitted, than what he had intended. The supply of subordinate fulminates, though several times greater than what was required, proved to be considerably short. But as he had allowed himself a large margin--everything being on a scale far exceeding the minimum which his calculations had pointed to as sufficient--this deficiency did not cause him more than a temporary annoyance. So he worked on.

When we had been three weeks on the island I found the suspense greater than I could bear. The crisis was at hand, and my heart failed me. I determined to make a last appeal to Natalie, to fly with me to the ship. Edith Metford would accompany us. The rest might take the risk to which they had consented.

I found Natalie standing on the high rock whence the most lovely view of the dell could be obtained, and as I approached her silently she was not aware of my presence until I laid my hand on her shoulder.

"Natalie," I said wistfully, for the girl's eyes were full of tears, "do you mind if I withdraw now from this enterprise, in which I cannot be of the slightest use, and of which I most heartily disapprove?"

"The Society would not allow you to withdraw. You cannot do so without its permission, and hope to live within a thousand miles of it," she answered gravely.

"I should not care to live within ten thousand miles of it. I should try to get and keep the earth's diameter between myself and it."

She looked up with an expression of such pain that my heart smote me. "How about me? I cannot live without you now," she said softly.

"Don't live without me. Come with me. Get rid of this infamous association of lunatics, whose object they themselves cannot really appreciate, and whose means are murder--"

But there she stopped me. "My brother could find me out at the uttermost ends of the earth if I forsook him, and you know I do not mean to forsake him. For yourself--do not try to desert. It would make no difference. Do not believe that any consideration would cause me willingly to give you a moment's pain, or that I should shrink from sacrificing myself to save you." With one of her small white hands she gently pressed my head towards her. Her lips touched my forehead, and she whispered: "Do not leave me. It will soon be over now. I--I--need you."

As I was returning dejected after my fruitless appeal to Natalie, I met Edith Metford, to whom I had unhappily mentioned my proposal for an escape.

"Is it arranged? When do we start?" she asked eagerly.

"It is not arranged, and we do not start," I answered in despair.

"You told me you would go with her or without her," she cried passionately. "It is shameful--unmanly."

"It is certainly both if I really said what you tell me. I was not myself at the moment, and my tongue must have slandered me. I stay to the end. But you will go. Captain Anderson will receive you--"

"How am I to be certain of that?"

"I paid him for your passage, and have his receipt."

"And you really think I would go and leave--leave--"

"Natalie? I think you would be perfectly justified."

At this the girl stamped her foot passionately on the ground and burst into tears. Nor would she permit any of the slight caresses I offered. I thought her old caprices were returning. She flung my arm rudely from her and left me bewildered.

CHAPTER XVII.

"THIS EARTH SHALL DIE."

My memory does not serve me well in the scenes which immediately preceded the closing of the drama in which Brande was chief actor. It is doubtless the transcendental interest of the final situation which blunts my recollection of what occurred shortly before it. I did not abate one jot of my determination to fight my venture out unflinching, but my actions were probably more automatic than reasoned, as the time of our last encounter approached. On the whole, the fight had been a fair one. Brande had used his advantage over me for his own purpose as long as it remained with him. I used the advantage as soon as it passed to me for mine. The conditions had thus been equalised when, for the third and last time, I was to hear him address his Society.

This time the man was weak in health. His vitality was ebbing fast, but his marvellous inspiration was strong within him, and, supported by it, he battled manfully with the disease which I had manufactured for him. His lecture-room was the fairy glen; his canopy the heavens.

I cannot give the substance of this address, or any portion of it, verbatim as on former occasions, for I have not the manuscript. I doubt if Brande wrote out his last speech. Methodical as were his habits it is probable that his final words were not premeditated. They burst from him in a delirium that could hardly have been studied. His fine frenzy could not well have originated from considered sentences, although his language, regarded as mere oratory, was magnificent. It was appalling in the light through which I read it.

He stood alone upon the rock which overtopped the dell. We arranged ourselves in such groups as suited our inclinations, upon some rising ground below. The great trees waved overhead, low murmuring. The waterfall splashed drearily. Below, not a whisper was exchanged. Above, the man poured out his triumphant death-song in sonorous periods. Below, great fear was upon all. Above, the madman exulted wildly.

At first his voice was weak. As he went on it gained strength and depth. He alluded to his first address, in which he had hinted that the material Universe was not quite a success; to his second, in which he had boldly declared it was an absolute failure. This, his third declaration, was to tell us that the remedy as far as he, a mortal man, could apply it, was ready. The end was at hand. That night should see the consummation of his life-work. To-morrow's sun would rise--if it rose at all--on the earth restored to space.

A shiver passed perceptibly over the people, prepared as they were for this long foreseen announcement. Edith Metford, who stood by me on my left, slipped her hand into mine and pressed my fingers hard. Natalie Brande, on my right, did not move. Her eyes were dilated and fixed on the speaker. The old clairvoyante look was on her face. Her dark pupils were blinded save to their inward light. She was either unconscious or only partly conscious. Now that the hour had come, they who had believed their courage secure felt it wither. They, the people with us, begged for a little longer time to brace themselves for the great crisis--the plunge into an eternity from which there would be no resurrection, neither of matter nor of mind.

Brande heeded them not.

"This night," said he, with culminating enthusiasm, "the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, shall dissolve. To this great globe itself--this paltry speck of less account in space than a dew-drop in an ocean--and all its sorrow and pain, its trials and temptations, all the pathos and bathos of our tragic human farce, the end is near. The way has been hard, and the journey overlong, and the burden often beyond man's strength. But that long-drawn sorrow now shall cease. The tears will be wiped away. The burden will fall from weary shoulders. For the fulness of time has come. This earth shall die! And death is peace.

"I stand," he cried out in a strident voice, raising his arm aloft, "I may say, with one foot on sea and one on land, for I hold the elemental secret of them both. And I swear by the living god--Science incarnate--that the suffering of the centuries is over, that for this earth and all that it contains, from this night and for ever, Time will be no more!"

A great cry rose from the people. "Give us another day--only another day!"

But Brande made answer: "It is now too late."

"Too late!" the people wailed.

"Yes, too late. I warned you long ago. Are you not yet ready? In two hours the disintegrating agent will enter on its work. No human power could stop it now. Not if every particle of the material I have compounded were separated and scattered to the winds. Before I set my foot upon this rock I applied the key which will release its inherent energy. I myself am powerless."

"Powerless," sobbed the auditors.

"Powerless! And if I had ten thousand times the power which I have called forth from the universal element, I would use it towards the issue I have forecast."

Thereupon he turned away. Doom sounded in his words. The hand of Death laid clammy fingers on us. Edith Metford's strength failed at last. It had been sorely tested. She sank into my arms.

"Courage, true heart, our time has come," I whispered. "We start for the steamer at once. The horses are ready." My arrangements had been already made. My plan had been as carefully matured as any ever made by Brande himself.

"How many horses?"

"Three. One for you; another for Natalie; the third for myself. The rest must accept the fate they have selected."

The girl shuddered as she said, "But your interference with the formula? You are sure it will destroy the effect?"

"I am certain that the particular result on which Brande calculates will not take place. But short of that, he has still enough explosive matter stored to cause an earthquake. We are not safe within a radius of fifty miles. It will be a race against time."

"Natalie will not come."

"Not voluntarily. You must think of some plan. Your brain is quick. We have not a moment to lose. Ah, there she is! Speak to her."

Natalie was crossing the open ground which led from the glen to Brande's laboratory. She did not observe us till Edith called to her. Then she approached hastily and embraced her friend with visible emotion. Even to me she offered her cheek without reserve.

"Natalie," I said quickly, "there are three horses saddled and waiting in the palm grove. The Esmeralda is still lying in the harbour where we landed. You will come with us. Indeed, you have no choice. You must come if I have to carry you to your horse and tie you to the saddle. You will not force me to put that indignity upon you. To the horses, then! Come!"

For answer she called her brother loudly by his name. Brande immediately appeared at the door of his laboratory, and when he perceived from whom the call had come he joined us.

"Herbert," said Natalie, "our friend is deserting us. He must still cling to the thought that your purpose may fail, and he expects to escape on horseback from the fate of the earth. Reason with him yet a little further."

"There is no time to reason," I interrupted. "The horses are ready. This girl (pointing as I spoke to Edith Metford) takes one, I another, and you the third--whether your brother agrees or not."

"Surely you have not lost your reason? Have you forgotten the drop of water in the English Channel?" Brande said quietly.

"Brande," I answered, "the sooner you induce your sister to come with me the better; and the sooner you induce these maniac friends of yours to clear out the better, for your enterprise will fail."

"It is as certain as the law of gravitation. With my own hand I mixed the ingredients according to the formula."

"And," said I, "with my own hand I altered your formula."

Had Brande's heart stopped beating, his face could not have become more distorted and livid. He moved close to me, and, glaring into my eyes, hissed out:

"You altered my formula?"

"I did," I answered recklessly. "I multiplied your figures by ten where they struck me as insufficient."

"When?"

I strode closer still to him and looked him straight in the eyes while I spoke.

"That night in the Red Sea, when Edith Metford, by accident, mixed morphia in your medicine. The night I injected a subtle poison, which I picked up in India once, into your blood while you slept, thereby baffling some of the functions of your extraordinary brain. The night when in your sleep you stirred once, and had you stirred twice, I would have killed you, then and there, as ruthlessly as you would kill mankind now. The night I did kill your lieutenant, Rockingham, and throw his body overboard to the sharks."

Brande did not speak for a moment. Then he said in a gentle, uncomplaining voice:

"So it now devolves on Grey. The end will be the same. The Labrador expedition will succeed where I have failed." To Natalie: "You had better go. There will only be an explosion. The island will probably disappear. That will be all."

"Do you remain?" she asked.

"Yes. I perish with my failure."

"Then I perish with you. And you, Marcel, save yourself--you coward!"

I started as if struck in the face. Then I said to Edith: "Be careful to keep to the track. Take the bay horse. I saddled him for myself, but you can ride him safely. Lose no time, and ride hard for the coast."

"Arthur Marcel," she answered, so softly that the others did not hear, "your work in the world is not yet over. There is the Labrador expedition. Just now, when my strength failed, you whispered 'courage.' Be true to yourself! Half an hour is gone."

At length some glimmer of human feeling awoke in Brande. He said in a low, abstracted voice: "My life fittingly ends now. To keep you, Natalie, would only be a vulgar murder." The old will power seemed to come back to him. He looked into the girl's eyes, and said slowly and sternly: "Go! I command it."

Without another word he turned away from us. When he had disappeared into the laboratory, Natalie sighed, and said dreamily:

"I am ready. Let us go."

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE FLIGHT.

I led the girls hurriedly to the horses. When they were mounted on the ponies, I gave the bridle-reins of the bay horse--whose size and strength were necessary for my extra weight--to Edith Metford, and asked her to wait for me until I announced Brande's probable failure to the people, and advised a sauve qui peut.

Hard upon my warning there followed a strange metamorphosis in the crowd, who, after the passing weakness at the lecture, had fallen back into stoical indifference, or it may have been despair. The possibility of escape galvanized them into the desire for life. Cries of distress, and prayers for help, filled the air. Men and women rushed about like frightened sheep without concert or any sensible effort to escape, wasting in futile scrambles the short time remaining to them. For another half hour had now passed, and in sixty minutes the earthquake would take place.

"Follow us!" I shouted, as with my companions I rode slowly through the camp. "Keep the track to the sea. I shall have the steamer's boats ready for all who may reach the shore alive."

"The horses! Seize the horses!" rose in a loud shout, and the mob flung themselves upon us, as though three animals could carry all.

When I saw the rush, I called out: "Sit firm, Natalie; I am going to strike your horse." Saying which I struck the pony a sharp blow with my riding-whip crossways on the flank. It bounded like a deer, and then dashed forward down the rough pathway.

"Now you, Edith!" I struck her pony in the same way; but it only reared and nearly threw her. It could not get away. Already hands were upon both bridle-reins. There was no help for it. I pulled out my revolver and fired once, twice, and thrice--for I missed the second shot--and then the maddened animal sprang forward, released from the hands that held it.

It was now time to look to myself. I was in the midst of a dozen maniacs mad with fear. I kicked in my spurs desperately, and the bay lashed out his hind feet. One hoof struck young Halley on the forehead. He fell back dead, his skull in fragments. But the others refused to break the circle. Then I emptied my weapon on them, and my horse plunged through the opening, followed by despairing execrations. The moment I was clear, I returned my revolver to its case, and settled myself in the saddle, for, borne out of the proper path as I had been, there was a stiff bank to leap before I could regain the track to the shore. Owing to the darkness the horse refused to leap, and I nearly fell over his head. With a little scrambling I managed to get back into my seat, and then trotted along the bank for a hundred yards. At this point the bank disappeared, and there was nothing between me now and the open track to the sea.

Once upon the path, I put the bay to a gallop, and very soon overtook a man and a woman hurrying on. They were running hand in hand, the man a little in front dragging his companion on by force. It was plain to me that the woman could not hold out much longer. The man, Claude Lureau, hailed me as I passed.

"Help us, Marcel. Don't ride away from us."

"I cannot save both," I answered, pulling up.

"Then save Mademoiselle Véret. I'll take my chance."

This blunt speech moved me, the more especially as the man was French. I could not allow him to point the way of duty to me--an Englishman.

"Assist her up, then. Now, Mademoiselle, put your arms round me and hold hard for your life. Lureau, you may hold my stirrup if you agree to loose it when you tire."

"I will do so," he promised.

Hampered thus, I but slowly gained on Natalie and Edith, whose ponies had galloped a mile before they could be stopped.

"Forward, forward!" I shouted when within hail. "Don't wait for me. Ride on at top speed. Lash your ponies with the bridle-reins."

We were all moving on now at an easy canter, for I could not go fast so long as Lureau held my stirrup, and the girls in front did not seem anxious to leave me far behind. Besides, the tangled underwood and overhanging creepers rendered hard riding both difficult and dangerous. The ponies were hard held, but notwithstanding this my horse fell back gradually in the race, and the hammering of the hoofs in front grew fainter. The breath of the runner at my stirrup came in great sobs. He was suffocating, but he struggled on a little longer. Then he threw up his hand and gasped:

"I am done. Go on, Marcel. You deserve to escape. Don't desert the girl."

"May God desert me if I do," I answered. "And do you keep on as long as you can. You may reach the shore after all."

"Go on--save her!" he gasped, and then from sheer exhaustion fell forward on his face.

"Sit still, Mademoiselle," I cried, pulling the French girl's arms round me in time to prevent her from throwing herself purposely from the horse. Then I drove in my spurs hard, and, being now released from Lureau's grasp, I overtook the ponies.

For five minutes we all rode on abreast. And then the darkness began to break, and a strange dawn glimmered over the tree-tops, although the hour of midnight was still to come. A wild, red light, like that of a fiery sunset in a hazy summer evening, spread over the night sky. The quivering stars grew pale. Constellation after constellation, they were blotted out until the whole arc of heaven was a dull red glare. The horses were dismayed by this strange phenomenon, and dashed the froth from their foaming muzzles as they galloped now without stress of spur at their best speed. Birds that could not sing found voice, and chattered and shrieked as they dashed from tree to tree in aimless flight. Enormous bats hurtled in the air, blinded by the unusual light. From the dense undergrowth strange denizens of the woods, disturbed in their nightly prowl, leaped forth and scurried squealing between the galloping hoofs, reckless of anything save their own fear. Everything that was alive upon the island was in motion, and fear was the motor of them all.

So far, we saw no natives. Their absence did not surprise me, for I had no time for thought. It was explained later.

Edith Metford's pony soon became unmanageable in its fright. I unbuckled one spur and gave it to her, directing her to hold it in her hand, for of course she could not strap it to her boot, and drive it into the animal when he swerved. She took the spur, and as her pony, in one of his side leaps, nearly bounded off the path, she struck him hard on the ribs. He bolted and flew on far ahead of us.

The light grew stronger.

But that the rays were red, it would now have been as bright as day. We were chasing our shadows, so the light must be directly behind us. Mademoiselle Véret first noticed this, and drew my attention to it. I looked back, and my heart sank at the sight. In the terror it inspired, I regretted having burthened myself with the girl I had sworn to save.

The island was on fire!

"It is the end of the world," Mademoiselle Véret said with a shudder. She clung closer to me. I could feel her warm breath upon my cheek. The unmanly regret, which for a moment had touched me, passed.

The ponies now seemed to find out that their safety lay in galloping straight on, rather than in scared leaps from side to side. They stretched themselves like race horses, and gave my bay, with his double burthen, a strong lead. The pace became terrible considering the nature of the ground we covered.

At last the harbour came in view. But my horse, I knew, could not last another mile, and the shore was still distant two or three. I spurred him hard and drew nearly level with the ponies, so that my voice could be heard by both their riders.

"Ride on," I shouted, "and hail the steamer, so that there may be no delay when I come up. This horse is blown, and will not stand the pace. I am going to ease him. You will go on board at once, and send the boat back for us." Then I eased the bay, but in spite of this I immediately overtook Edith Metford, who had pulled up.

My reproaches she cut short by saying, "If that horse does the distance at all it will be by getting a lead all the way. And I am going to give it to him." So we started together.

Natalie was waiting for us a little further on. I spoke to her, but she did not answer. From the moment that Brande had commanded her to accompany us, her manner had remained absolutely passive. What I ordered, she obeyed. That was all. Instead of being alarmed by the horrors of the ride, she did not seem to be even interested. I had not leisure, however, to reflect on this. For the first time in the whole race she spoke to us.

"Would it not be better if Edith rode on?" she said. "I can take her place. It seems useless to sacrifice her. It does not matter to me. I cannot now be afraid."

"I am afraid; but I remain," Edith said resolutely.

The ground under us began to heave. Whole acres of it swayed disjointed. We were galloping on oscillating fragments, which trembled beneath us like floating logs under boys at play. To jump these cracks--sometimes an upward bank, sometimes a deep drop, in addition to the width of the seam, had to be taken--pumped out the failing horses, and the hope that was left to us disappeared utterly.

The glare of the red light behind waxed fiercer still, and a low rumbling as of distant thunder began to mutter round us. The air became difficult to breathe. It was no longer air, but a mephitic stench that choked us with disgusting fumes. Then a great shock shook the land, and right in front of us a seam opened that must have been fully fifteen feet in width. Natalie was the first to see it. She observed it too late to stop.

In the same mechanical way as she had acted before, she settled herself in the saddle, struck the pony with her hand, and raced him at the chasm. He cleared it with little to spare. Edith's took it next with less. Then my turn came. Before I could shake up my tired horse, Mademoiselle Véret said quickly:

"Monsieur has done enough. He will now permit me to alight. This time the horse cannot jump over with both."

"He shall jump over with both, Mademoiselle, or he shall jump in," I answered. "Don't look down when we are crossing."

The horse just got over, but he came to his knees, and we fell forward over his shoulder. The girl's head struck full on a slab of rock, and a faint moan was all that told me she was alive as I arose half stunned to my feet. My first thought was for the horse, for on him all depended. He was uninjured, apparently, but hardly able to stand from the shock and the stress of fatigue.

Edith Metford had dismounted and caught him; she was holding the bridle in her left hand, and winced as if in pain when I accidentally brushed against her right shoulder. I tied the horse to a young palm, and begged the girl to ride on. She obeyed me reluctantly. Natalie had to assist her to remount, so she must have been injured. When I saw her safely in her saddle, I ran back to Mademoiselle Véret.

The chasm was fast widening. From either side great fragments were breaking off and falling in with a roar of loose rocks crashing together, till far down the sound was dulled into a hollow boom. This ended in low guttural, which growled up from an abysmal depth. Mademoiselle Véret, or her dead body, lay now on the very edge of the seam, and I had to harden my heart before I could bring myself to venture close to it. But I had given my word, and there were no conditions in the promise when I made it.

I was spared the ordeal. Just as I stepped forward, the slab of rock on which the girl lay broke off in front of me, and, tipping up, overturned itself into the chasm. Far below I could see the shimmer of the girl's dress as her body went plunging down into that awful pit. And remembering her generous courage and offer of self-sacrifice, I felt tears rise in my eyes. But there was no time for tears.

I leaped on the bay, and got him into something approaching a gallop, shouting at the others to keep on, for they were now returning. When I came up with them, Edith Metford said with a shiver:

"The girl?"

"Is at the bottom of the pit. Ride on."

We gained the shore at last; and our presence there produced the explanation of the absence of the natives on the pathway to the sea. They were there before us. Lying prostrate on the beach in hundreds, they raised their bodies partly from the sands, like a resurrection of the already dead, and there then rang out upon the night air a sound such as my ears had never before heard in my life, such as, I pray God, they may never listen to again. I do not know what that dreadful death-wail meant in words, only that it touched the lowest depths of human horror. All along the beach that fearful chorus of the damned wailed forth, and echoed back from rock and cliff. The cry for mercy could not be mistaken--the supplication blended with despair. They were praying to us--their evil spirits, for this wrong had been wrought them by our advent, if not by ourselves.

I cannot dwell upon the scene. I could not describe it. I would not if I could.

The steamer was still in her berth; her head was pointed seawards. Loud orders rang over the water. The roar of the chain running out through the hawse-hole and the heavy splash could not be mistaken. Anderson had slipped his cable. Then the chime of the telegraph on the bridge was followed almost instantly by the first smashing stroke of the propeller.

The Esmeralda was under weigh!

CHAPTER XIX.

THE CATASTROPHE.

The Esmeralda was putting out to sea when I thought of a last expedient to draw the attention of her captain. Filling my revolver with cartridges which I had loose in my pockets, I fired all the chambers as fast as I could snap the trigger.

My signals were heard, and Anderson proved true to his bargain. He immediately reversed his engines, and, when he had backed in as close as he thought safe, sent a boat ashore for us. We got into it without any obstruction from the cowering natives, who only shrank from us in horror, now that their prayers had failed to move us. The moment our boat was made fast to the steamer's davit ropes and we were pulled out of the water, "full speed ahead" was rung from the bridge. We were raised to the deck while the vessel was getting up speed.

I crawled up the ladder to the bridge feebly, for I was becoming stiff from the bruises of the fall from my horse. Anderson received me coldly, and listened indifferently to my thanks. An agreement such as ours hardly prepared me for his loyalty.

"Oh, as to that," he interrupted, "when I make a bargain my word is my bond. On this occasion I am inclined to think the indenture will be a final one."

His bargain was a hard one, but, having made it, he abided faithfully by its conditions. He was honest, therefore, in his own way.

"How far can you get out in fifteen minutes?" I asked.

"We may make six or seven knots. But what is the good of that? There will be an earthquake on that island on a liberal scale--on such a scale that this ship would have very little chance in the wave that will follow us if we were fifty miles at sea."

"You have taken every precaution, of course--"

Anderson here looked at me contemptuously, and, with an air of sarcastic admiration, he said:

"You have guessed it at the first try. That is precisely what I have done."

"Pshaw! don't take offence at trifles at a time like this," I said testily. "If you knew as much about that earthquake as I do, you would be in no humour for bandying phrases."

"Might I ask how much you do know about it? You could not have foreseen the trouble more clearly if you had made it yourself."

"I did not make it myself, but I know the means which the man who did employed, and but for me that earthquake would have wrecked this earth."

Anderson made no direct answer to this, but he said earnestly:

"You will now go below, sir. You are done up. Roberts will take you to the doctor."

"I am not done up, and I mean to see it out," I retorted doggedly. My nervous system was completely unhinged, and a fit of stupid obstinacy came on me which rendered any interference with my actions intolerable.

"Then you cannot see it out upon my bridge," Anderson said. The determined tone in which he spoke only added to my impotent wrath.

"Very well, I will return to the deck, and if any of your men should attempt to interfere with me he will do so at his peril." With that, I slung my revolver round so as to have it ready to my hand. I was beside myself. My conduct was already bad enough, but I made it worse before I left the bridge.

"And if you, Anderson, disobey my orders--my orders, do you hear?--an explosion such as took place in the middle of the English channel shall take place in the middle of this ship."

"For God's sake leave the bridge. I want my wits about me, and I have no intention of earning another exhibition of your devilries."

"Then be careful not to trouble me again." Thus after having passed through much danger with a spirit not unbecoming--as I hope--an English gentleman, I acted, when the worst was passed, like a peevish schoolboy. I am ashamed of my conduct in this small matter, and trust it will pass without much notice in the narrative of events of greater moment.

On deck, Natalie Brande, Edith Metford, and Percival were standing together, their eyes fixed on the island. Edith's face was deathly white, even in the ruddy glow which was now over land and sea. When I saw her pallor, my evil temper passed away.

"It would be impossible for you to be quite well," I said to her anxiously; "but has anything happened since I left you? You are very pale."

"Oh no," she answered, "I'm all right; a little faint after that ride. I shall be better soon."

Natalie turned her weird eyes on me and said in the hollow voice we had heard once before--when she spoke to us on the island--"That is her way of telling you that your horse broke her right arm when she caught him for you. She held him, you remember, with her left hand. The doctor has set the limb. She will not suffer long."

"Heaven help us, this awful night," Edith cried. "How do you know that, Natalie?"

"I know much now, but I shall know more soon." After this she would not speak again.

With every pound of steam on that the Esmeralda's boilers would bear without bursting, we were now plunging through the great rollers of the Arafura Sea. Everything had indeed been done to put the vessel in trim. She was cleared for action, so to speak. And a gallant fight she made when the issue was knit. When the hour of midnight must be near at hand, I looked at my watch. It was one minute to twelve o'clock.

Thirty seconds more!

The stupendous corona of flame which hung over the island was pierced by long lines of smoke that stretched far above the glare and clutched with sooty fingers at the stars, now fitfully coming back to view at our distance. The rumbling of internal thunder waxed louder.

Fifteen seconds now!

Fearful peals rent the atmosphere. Vast tongues of flame protruded heavenward. The elements must be melting in that fervent heat. The blazing bowels of the earth were pouring forth.

Twelve, midnight!

A reverberation thundered out which shook the solid earth, and a roaring hell-breath of flame and smoke belched up so awful in its dread magnificence that every man who saw it and lived to tell his story might justly have claimed to have seen perdition. In that hurricane of incandescent matter the island was blotted out for ever from the map of this world.

Notwithstanding the speed of the Esmeralda she was a sloth when compared with the speed of the wave from such an earthquake. From the glare of the illumination to perfect darkness the contrast was sudden and extreme. But the blackness of the ocean was soon whitened by the snowy plumes of the avalanche of water which was now racing us, far astern as yet, but gaining fast. I, who had no business about the ship requiring my presence in any special part, decided to wait on deck and lash myself to the forward, which would be practically the lee-side of a deckhouse. Edith Metford we prevailed on to go below, that she might not run the risk of further injury to her fractured arm. As she left us she whispered to me, "So Natalie will be with you at the end, and I--" a sob stopped her. And it came into my mind at that moment that this girl had acted very nobly, and that I had hardly appreciated her and all that she had done for me.

Natalie refused to leave the deck. I lashed her securely beside me. Together we awaited the end. When the roar of the following wave came close, so close that the voices of the officers of the ship could be no longer heard, Natalie spoke. The hollow sound was no longer in her voice. Her own soft sweet tones had come back.

"Arthur," she asked, "is this the end?"

"I fear it is," I answered, speaking close to her ear so that she might hear.

"Then we have little time, and I have something which I must say, which you must promise me to remember when--when--I am no longer with you."

"You will be always with me while we live. I think I deserve that at last."

"Yes, you deserve that and more. I will be with you while I live, but that will not be for long."

I was about to interrupt her when she put her soft little hand upon my lips and said:

"Listen, there is very little time. It is all a mistake. I mean Herbert was wrong. He might as well have let me have my earthly span of happiness or folly--call it what you will."

"You see that now--thank God!"

"Yes, but I see it too late, I did not know it until--until I was dead. Hush!" Again I tried to interrupt her, for I thought her mind was wandering. "I died psychically with Herbert. That was when we first saw the light on the island. Since then I have lived mechanically, but it has only been life in so low a form that I do not now know what has happened between that time and this. And I could not now speak as I am speaking save by a will power which is costing me very dear. But it is the only voice you could hear. I do not therefore count the cost. My brother's brain so far overmatched my own that it first absorbed and finally destroyed my mental vitality. This influence removed, I am a rudderless ship at sea--bound to perish."

"May his torments endure for ever. May the nethermost pit of hell receive him!" I said with a groan of agony.

But Natalie said: "Hush! I might have lingered on a little longer, but I chose to concentrate the vital force which would have lasted me a few more senile years into the minutes necessary for this message from me to you--a message I could not have given you if he were not dead. And I am dying so that you may hear it. Dying! My God! I am already dead."

She seemed to struggle against some force that battled with her, and the roar of many waters was louder around us before she was able to speak again.

"Bend lower, Arthur; my strength is failing, and I have not yet said that for which I am here. Lower still.

"I said it is all a mistake--a hideous mistake. Existence as we know it is ephemeral. Suffering is ephemeral. There is nothing everlasting but love. There is nothing eternal but mind. Your mind is mine. Your love is mine. Your human life may belong to whomsoever you will it. It ought to belong to that brave girl below. I do not grudge it to her, for I have you. We two shall be together through the ages--for ever and for ever. Heart of my heart, you have striven manfully and well, and if you did not altogether succeed in saving my flesh from premature corruption, be satisfied in that you have my soul. Ah!"

She pressed her hands to her head as if in dreadful pain. When she spoke again her voice came in short gasps.

"My brain is reeling. I do not know what I am saying," she cried, distraught. "I do not know whether I am saying what is true or only what I imagine to be true. I know nothing but this. I was mesmerised. I have been so for two years. But for that I would have been happy in your love--for I was a woman before this hideous influence benumbed me. They told me it was only a fool's paradise that I missed. But I only know that I have missed it. Missed it--and the darkness of death is upon me."

She ceased to speak. A shudder convulsed her, and then her head sank gently on my shoulder.

At that moment the great wave broke over the vessel, whirling her helpless like a cork on the ripples of a mill pond; lashing her with mighty strokes; sweeping in giant cataracts from stern to stem; smashing, tearing everything; deluging her with hissing torrents; crushing her with avalanches of raging foam. Then the ocean tornado passed on and left the Esmeralda behind, with half the crew disabled and many lost, her decks a mass of wreckage, her masts gone. The crippled ship barely floated. When the last torrent of spray passed, and I was able to look to Natalie, her head had drooped down on her breast. I raised her face gently and looked into her wide open eyes.

She was dead.

CHAPTER XX.

CONCLUSION.

Taking up my girl's body in my arms, I stumbled over the wreck-encumbered deck, and bore it to the state-room she had occupied on the outward voyage. Percival was too busy attending to wounded sailors to be interrupted. His services, I knew, were useless now, but I wanted him to refute or corroborate a conviction which my own medical knowledge had forced upon me. The thought was so repellent, I clung to any hope which might lead to its dispersion. I waited alone with my dead.

Percival came after an hour, which seemed to me an eternity. He stammered out some incoherent words of sympathy as soon as he looked in my face. But this was not the purpose for which I had detached him from his pressing duties elsewhere. I made a gesture towards the dead girl. He attended to it immediately. I watched closely and took care that the light should be on his face, so that I might read his eyes rather than listen to his words.

"She has fainted!" he exclaimed, as he approached the rigid figure. I said nothing until he turned and faced me. Then I read his eyes. He said slowly: "You are aware, Marcel, that--that she is dead?"

"I am."

"That she has been dead--several hours?"

"I am."

"But let me think. It was only an hour--"

"No; do not think," I interrupted. "There are things in this voyage which will not bear to be thought of. I thank you for coming so soon. You will forgive me for troubling you when you have so much to do elsewhere. And now leave us alone. I mean, leave me alone."

He pressed my hand, and went away without a word. I am that man's friend.

They buried her at sea.

I was happily unconscious at the time, and so was spared that scene. Edith Metford, weak and suffering as she was, went through it all. She has told me nothing about it, save that it was done. More than that I could not bear. And I have borne much.

The voyage home was a dreary episode. There is little more to tell, and it must be told quickly. Percival was kind, but it distressed me to find that he now plainly regarded me as weak-minded from the stress of my trouble. Once, in the extremity of my misery, I began a relation of my adventures to him, for I wanted his help. The look upon his face was enough for me. I did not make the same mistake again.

To Anderson I made amends for my extravagant display of temper. He received me more kindly than I expected. I no longer thought of the money that had passed between us. And, to do him tardy justice, I do not think he thought of it either. At least he did not offer any of it back. His scruples, I presume, were conscientious. Indeed, I was no longer worth a man's enmity. Sympathy was now the only indignity that could be put upon me. And Anderson did not trespass in that direction. My misery was, I thought, complete. One note must still be struck in that long discord of despair.

We were steaming along the southern coast of Java. For many hours the rugged cliffs and giant rocks which fence the island against the onslaught of the Indian Ocean had passed before us as in review, and we--Edith Metford and I--sat on the deck silently, with many thoughts in common, but without the interchange of a spoken word. The stern, forbidding aspect of that iron coast increased the gloom which had settled on my brain. Its ramparts of lonely sea-drenched crags depressed me below the mental zero that was now habitual with me. The sun went down in a red glare, which moved me not. The short twilight passed quickly, but I noticed nothing. Then night came. The restless sea disappeared in darkness. The grand march past of the silent stars began. But I neither knew nor cared.

A soft whisper stirred me.

"Arthur, for God's sake rouse yourself! You are brooding a great deal too much. It will destroy you."

Listlessly I put my hand in hers, and clasped her fingers gently.

"Bear with me!" I pleaded.

"I will bear with you for ever. But you must fight on. You have not won yet."

"No, nor ever shall. I have fought my last fight. The victory may go to whosoever desires it."

On this she wept. I could not bear that she should suffer from my misery, and so, guarding carefully her injured arm, I drew her close to me. And then, out of the darkness of the night, far over the solitude of the sea, there came to us the sound of a voice. That voice was a woman's wail. The girl beside me shuddered and drew back. I did not ask her if she had heard. I knew she had heard.

We arose and stood apart without any explanation. From that moment a caress would have been a sacrilege. I did not hear that weird sound again, nor aught else for an hour or more save the bursting of the breakers on the crags of Java.

I kept no record of the commonplaces of our voyage thereafter. It only remains for me to say that I arrived in England broken in health and bankrupt in fortune. Brande left no money. His formula for the transmutation of metals is unintelligible to me. I can make no use of it.

Edith Metford remains my friend. To part utterly after what we have undergone together is beyond our strength. But between us there is a nameless shadow, reminiscent of that awful night in the Arafura Sea, when death came very near to us. And in my ears there is always the echo of that voice which I heard by the shores of Java when the misty borderland between life and death seemed clear.

My story is told. I cannot prove its truth, for there is much in it to which I am the only living witness. I cannot prove whether Herbert Brande was a scientific magician possessed of all the powers he claimed, or merely a mad physicist in charge of a new and terrible explosive; nor whether Edward Grey ever started for Labrador. The burthen of the proof of this last must be borne by others--unless it be left to Grey himself to show whether my evidence is false or true. If it be left to him, a few years will decide the issue.

I am content to wait.

THE END.

Contents

NO PETS ALLOWED

by M. A. CUMMINGS

He didn't know how he could have stood the four months there alone. She was company and one could talk to her ...

I can't tell anyone about it. In the first place, they'd never believe me. And, if they did, I'd probably be punished for having her. Because we aren't allowed to have pets of any kind.

It wouldn't have happened, if they hadn't sent me way out there to work. But, you see, there are so many things I can't do.

I remember the day the Chief of Vocation took me before the council.

"I've tried him on a dozen things," he reported. People always talk about me as if I can't understand what they mean. But I'm really not that dumb.

"There doesn't seem to be a thing he can do," the Chief went on. "Actually, his intelligence seems to be no greater than that which we believe our ancestors had, back in the twentieth century."

"As bad as that?" observed one of the council members. "You do have a problem."

"But we must find something for him to do," said another. "We can't have an idle person in the State. It's unthinkable."

"But what?" asked the Chief. "He's utterly incapable of running any of the machines. I've tried to teach him. The only things he can do, are already being done much better by robots."

There was a long silence, broken at last by one little, old council member.

"I have it," he cried. "The very thing. We'll make him guard of the Treasure."

"But there's no need of a guard. No one will touch the Treasure without permission. We haven't had a dishonest person in the State for more than three thousand years."

"That's it, exactly. There aren't any dishonest people, so there won't be anything for him to do. But we will have solved the problem of his idleness."

"It might be a solution," said the Chief. "At least, a temporary one. I suppose we will have to find something else later on. But this will give us time to look for something."

So I became guard of the Treasure. With a badge. And nothing to do--unless you count watching the Key. The gates were kept locked, just as they were in the old days, but the large Key hung beside them. Of course, no one wanted to bother carrying it around. It was too heavy. The only ones who ever used it, anyway, were members of the council. As the man said, we haven't had a dishonest person in the State for thousands of years. Even I know that much.

Of course, this left me with lots of time on my hands. That's how I happened to get her in the first place. I'd always wanted one, but pets were forbidden. Busy people didn't have time for them. So I knew I was breaking the Law. But I figured that no one would ever find out.

First I fixed a place for her, and made a brush screen, so that she couldn't be seen by anyone coming to the gates. Then, one night, I sneaked into the forest and got her.

It wasn't so lonely after that. Now I had something to talk to. She was small when I got her--it would be too dangerous to go near a full grown one--but she grew rapidly. That was because I caught small animals and brought them to her. Not having to depend on what she could catch, she grew almost twice as fast as usual, and was so sleek and pretty. Really, she was a pet to be proud of.

I don't know how I could have stood the four months there alone, if I hadn't her to talk to. I don't think she really understood me, but I pretended she did, and that helped.

Every three or four weeks, three of the council members came to take a part of the Treasure, or to add to it. Always three of them.

That's why I was so surprised one day, to see one man coming by himself. It was Gremm, the little old member, who had recommended that I be given this job. I was happy to see him, and we talked for a while, mostly about my work, and how I liked it. I almost told him about my pet, but I didn't, because he might be angry at me for breaking the Law.

Finally, he asked me to give him the Key.

"I've been sent to get something from the Treasure," he explained.

I was unhappy to displease him, but I said, "I can't let you have it. There must be three members. You know that."

"Of course, I know it. But something came up suddenly, so they sent me alone. Now, let me have it."

I shook my head. That was the one order they had given me--never to give the Key to any one person who came alone.

Gremm became quite angry.

"You idiot," he shouted. "Why do you think I had you put out here? It was so I could get in there and help myself to the Treasure."

"But that would be dishonest. And there are no dishonest people in the State."

"For three thousand years. I know." His usually kind face had an ugly look I had never seen before. "But I'm going to get part of that Treasure. And it won't do you any good to report it, because no one is going to take the word of a fool like you, against a respected council member. They'll think you are the dishonest one. Now, give me that Key!"

It's a terrible thing to disobey a council member. But if I obeyed him, I would be disobeying all the others. And that would be worse.

"No!" I shouted.

He threw himself upon me. For his size and age, he was very strong--stronger, even, than I. I fought as hard as I could, but I knew I wouldn't be able to keep him away from the Key for very long. And if he took the Treasure, I would be blamed. The council would have to think a new punishment for dishonesty. Whatever it was, it would be terrible, indeed.

He drew back and rushed at me. Just as he hit me, my foot caught upon a root, and I fell. His rush carried him past me, and he crashed through the brush screen beside the path. I heard him scream twice, then there was silence.

I was bruised all over, but I managed to pull myself up and take away what was left of the screen. There was no sign of Gremm, but my beautiful pet was waving her pearl-green feelers as she always did in thanks for a good meal.

That's why I can't tell anyone what happened. No one would believe that Gremm would be dishonest. And I can't prove it, because she ate the proof.

Even if I did tell them, no one is going to believe that a fly-catcher plant--even a big one like mine--would actually be able to eat a man.

So they think that Gremm disappeared. And I'm still out here--with her. She's grown so much larger now, and more beautiful than ever.

But I hope she hasn't developed a taste for human flesh. Lately, when she stretches out her feelers, it seems that she's trying to reach me.

Contents

MONKEY ON HIS BACK

By Charles V. De Vet

Under the cloud of cast-off identities lay the shape of another man-- was it himself?

He was walking endlessly down a long, glass-walled corridor. Bright sunlight slanted in through one wall, on the blue knapsack across his shoulders. Who he was, and what he was doing here, was clouded. The truth lurked in some corner of his consciousness, but it was not reached by surface awareness.

The corridor opened at last into a large high-domed room, much like a railway station or an air terminal. He walked straight ahead.

At the sight of him a man leaning negligently against a stone pillar, to his right but within vision, straightened and barked an order to him, "Halt!" He lengthened his stride but gave no other sign.

Two men hurried through a doorway of a small anteroom to his left, calling to him. He turned away and began to run.

Shouts and the sound of charging feet came from behind him. He cut to the right, running toward the escalator to the second floor. Another pair of men were hurrying down, two steps at a stride. With no break in pace he veered into an opening beside the escalator.

At the first turn he saw that the aisle merely circled the stairway, coming out into the depot again on the other side. It was a trap. He glanced quickly around him.

At the rear of the space was a row of lockers for traveler use. He slipped a coin into a pay slot, opened the zipper on his bag and pulled out a flat briefcase. It took him only a few seconds to push the case into the compartment, lock it and slide the key along the floor beneath the locker.

There was nothing to do after that--except wait.

The men pursuing him came hurtling around the turn in the aisle. He kicked his knapsack to one side, spreading his feet wide with an instinctive motion.

Until that instant he had intended to fight. Now he swiftly reassessed the odds. There were five of them, he saw. He should be able to incapacitate two or three and break out. But the fact that they had been expecting him meant that others would very probably be waiting outside. His best course now was to sham ignorance. He relaxed.

He offered no resistance as they reached him.

They were not gentle men. A tall ruffian, copper-brown face damp with perspiration and body oil, grabbed him by the jacket and slammed him back against the lockers. As he shifted his weight to keep his footing someone drove a fist into his face. He started to raise his hands; and a hard flat object crashed against the side of his skull.

The starch went out of his legs.

"Do you make anything out of it?" the psychoanalyst Milton Bergstrom, asked.

John Zarwell shook his head. "Did I talk while I was under?"

"Oh, yes. You were supposed to. That way I follow pretty well what you're reenacting."

"How does it tie in with what I told you before?"

Bergstrom's neat-boned, fair-skinned face betrayed no emotion other than an introspective stillness of his normally alert gaze. "I see no connection," he decided, his words once again precise and meticulous. "We don't have enough to go on. Do you feel able to try another comanalysis this afternoon yet?"

"I don't see why not." Zarwell opened the collar of his shirt. The day was hot, and the room had no air conditioning, still a rare luxury on St. Martin's. The office window was open, but it let in no freshness, only the mildly rank odor that pervaded all the planet's habitable area.

"Good." Bergstrom rose. "The serum is quite harmless, John." He maintained a professional diversionary chatter as he administered the drug. "A scopolamine derivative that's been well tested."

The floor beneath Zarwell's feet assumed abruptly the near transfluent consistency of a damp sponge. It rose in a foot-high wave and rolled gently toward the far wall.

Bergstrom continued talking, with practiced urbanity. "When psychiatry was a less exact science," his voice went on, seeming to come from a great distance, "a doctor had to spend weeks, sometimes months or years interviewing a patient. If he was skilled enough, he could sort the relevancies from the vast amount of chaff. We are able now, with the help of the serum, to confine our discourses to matters cogent to the patient's trouble."

The floor continued its transmutation, and Zarwell sank deep into viscous depths. "Lie back and relax. Don't ..."

The words tumbled down from above. They faded, were gone.

Zarwell found himself standing on a vast plain. There was no sky above, and no horizon in the distance. He was in a place without space or dimension. There was nothing here except himself--and the gun that he held in his hand.

A weapon beautiful in its efficient simplicity.

He should know all about the instrument, its purpose and workings, but he could not bring his thoughts into rational focus. His forehead creased with his mental effort.

Abruptly the unreality about him shifted perspective. He was approaching--not walking, but merely shortening the space between them--the man who held the gun. The man who was himself. The other "himself" drifted nearer also, as though drawn by a mutual attraction.

The man with the gun raised his weapon and pressed the trigger.

With the action the perspective shifted again. He was watching the face of the man he shot jerk and twitch, expand and contract. The face was unharmed, yet it was no longer the same. No longer his own features.

The stranger face smiled approvingly at him.

"Odd," Bergstrom said. He brought his hands up and joined the tips of his fingers against his chest. "But it's another piece in the jig-saw. In time it will fit into place." He paused. "It means no more to you than the first, I suppose?"

"No," Zarwell answered.

He was not a talking man, Bergstrom reflected. It was more than reticence, however. The man had a hard granite core, only partially concealed by his present perplexity. He was a man who could handle himself well in an emergency.

Bergstrom shrugged, dismissing his strayed thoughts. "I expected as much. A quite normal first phase of treatment." He straightened a paper on his desk. "I think that will be enough for today. Twice in one sitting is about all we ever try. Otherwise some particular episode might cause undue mental stress, and set up a block." He glanced down at his appointment pad. "Tomorrow at two, then?"

Zarwell grunted acknowledgment and pushed himself to his feet, apparently unaware that his shirt clung damply to his body.

The sun was still high when Zarwell left the analyst's office. The white marble of the city's buildings shimmered in the afternoon heat, squat and austere as giant tree trunks, pock-marked and gray-mottled with windows. Zarwell was careful not to rest his hand on the flesh searing surface of the stone.

The evening meal hour was approaching when he reached the Flats, on the way to his apartment. The streets of the old section were near-deserted. The only sounds he heard as he passed were the occasional cry of a baby, chronically uncomfortable in the day's heat, and the lowing of imported cattle waiting in a nearby shed to be shipped to the country.

All St. Martin's has a distinctive smell, as of an arid dried-out swamp, with a faint taint of fish. But in the Flats the odor changes. Here is the smell of factories, warehouses, and trading marts; the smell of stale cooking drifting from the homes of the laborers and lower class techmen who live there.

Zarwell passed a group of smaller children playing a desultory game of lic-lic for pieces of candy and cigarettes. Slowly he climbed the stairs of a stone flat. He prepared a supper for himself and ate it without either enjoyment or distaste. He lay down, fully clothed, on his bed. The visit to the analyst had done nothing to dispel his ennui.

The next morning when Zarwell awoke he lay for a moment, unmoving. The feeling was there again, like a scene waiting only to be gazed at directly to be perceived. It was as though a great wisdom lay at the edge of understanding. If he rested quietly it would all come to him. Yet always, when his mind lost its sleep-induced lethargy, the moment of near understanding slipped away.

This morning, however, the sense of disorientation did not pass with full wakefulness. He achieved no understanding, but the strangeness did not leave as he sat up.

He gazed about him. The room did not seem to be his own. The furnishings, and the clothing he observed in a closet, might have belonged to a stranger.

He pulled himself from his blankets, his body moving with mechanical reaction. The slippers into which he put his feet were larger than he had expected them to be. He walked about the small apartment. The place was familiar, but only as it would have been if he had studied it from blueprints, not as though he lived there.

The feeling was still with him when he returned to the psychoanalyst.

The scene this time was more kaleidoscopic, less personal.

A village was being ravaged. Men struggled and died in the streets. Zarwell moved among them, seldom taking part in the individual clashes, yet a moving force in the conflict.

The background changed. He understood that he was on a different world.

Here a city burned. Its resistance was nearing its end. Zarwell was riding a shaggy pony outside a high wall surrounding the stricken metropolis. He moved in and joined a party of short, bearded men, directing them as they battered at the wall with a huge log mounted on a many-wheeled truck.

The log broke a breach in the concrete and the besiegers charged through, carrying back the defenders who sought vainly to plug the gap. Soon there would be rioting in the streets again, plundering and killing.

Zarwell was not the leader of the invaders, only a lesser figure in the rebellion. But he had played a leading part in the planning of the strategy that led to the city's fall. The job had been well done.

Time passed, without visible break in the panorama. Now Zarwell was fleeing, pursued by the same bearded men who had been his comrades before. Still he moved with the same firm purpose, vigilant, resourceful, and well prepared for the eventuality that had befallen. He made his escape without difficulty.

He alighted from a space ship on still another world--another shift in time--and the atmosphere of conflict engulfed him.

Weary but resigned he accepted it, and did what he had to do ...

Bergstrom was regarding him with speculative scrutiny. "You've had quite a past, apparently," he observed.

Zarwell smiled with mild embarrassment. "At least in my dreams."

"Dreams?" Bergstrom's eyes widened in surprise. "Oh, I beg your pardon. I must have forgotten to explain. This work is so routine to me that sometimes I forget it's all new to a patient. Actually what you experienced under the drug were not dreams. They were recollections of real episodes from your past."

Zarwell's expression became wary. He watched Bergstrom closely. After a minute, however, he seemed satisfied, and he let himself settle back against the cushion of his chair. "I remember nothing of what I saw," he observed.

"That's why you're here, you know," Bergstrom answered. "To help you remember."

"But everything under the drug is so ..."

"Haphazard? That's true. The recall episodes are always purely random, with no chronological sequence. Our problem will be to reassemble them in proper order later. Or some particular scene may trigger a complete memory return.

"It is my considered opinion," Bergstrom went on, "that your lost memory will turn out to be no ordinary amnesia. I believe we will find that your mind has been tampered with."

"Nothing I've seen under the drug fits into the past I do remember."

"That's what makes me so certain," Bergstrom said confidently. "You don't remember what we have shown to be true. Conversely then, what you think you remember must be false. It must have been implanted there. But we can go into that later. For today I think we have done enough. This episode was quite prolonged."

"I won't have any time off again until next week end," Zarwell reminded him.

"That's right." Bergstrom thought for a moment. "We shouldn't let this hang too long. Could you come here after work tomorrow?"

"I suppose I could."

"Fine," Bergstrom said with satisfaction. "I'll admit I'm considerably more than casually interested in your case by this time."

A work truck picked Zarwell up the next morning and he rode with a tech crew to the edge of the reclam area. Beside the belt bringing ocean muck from the converter plant at the seashore his bulldozer was waiting.

He took his place behind the drive wheel and began working dirt down between windbreakers anchored in the rock. Along a makeshift road into the badlands trucks brought crushed lime and phosphorus to supplement the ocean sediment. The progress of life from the sea to the land was a mechanical process of this growing world.

Nearly two hundred years ago, when Earth established a colony on St. Martin's, the land surface of the planet had been barren. Only its seas thrived with animal and vegetable life. The necessary machinery and technicians had been supplied by Earth, and the long struggle began to fit the world for human needs. When Zarwell arrived, six months before, the vitalized area already extended three hundred miles along the coast, and sixty miles inland. And every day the progress continued. A large percentage of the energy and resources of the world were devoted to that essential expansion.

The reclam crews filled and sodded the sterile rock, planted binding grasses, grain and trees, and diverted rivers to keep it fertile. When there were no rivers to divert they blasted out springs and lakes in the foothills to make their own. Biologists developed the necessary germ and insect life from what they found in the sea. Where that failed, they imported microorganisms from Earth.

Three rubber-tracked crawlers picked their way down from the mountains until they joined the road passing the belt. They were loaded with ore that would be smelted into metal for depleted Earth, or for other colonies short of minerals. It was St. Martin's only export thus far.

Zarwell pulled his sun helmet lower, to better guard his hot, dry features. The wind blew continuously on St. Martin's, but it furnished small relief from the heat. After its three-thousand-mile journey across scorched sterile rock, it sucked the moisture from a man's body, bringing a membrane-shrinking dryness to the nostrils as it was breathed in. With it came also the cloying taste of limestone in a worker's mouth.

Zarwell gazed idly about at the other laborers. Fully three-quarters of them were beri-rabza ridden. A cure for the skin fungus had not yet been found; the men's faces and hands were scabbed and red. The colony had grown to near self-sufficiency, would soon have a moderate prosperity, yet they still lacked adequate medical and research facilities.

Not all the world's citizens were content.

Bergstrom was waiting in his office when Zarwell arrived that evening.

He was lying motionless on a hard cot, with his eyes closed, yet with his every sense sharply quickened. Tentatively he tightened small muscles in his arms and legs. Across his wrists and thighs he felt straps binding him to the cot.

"So that's our big, bad man," a coarse voice above him observed caustically. "He doesn't look so tough now, does he?"

"It might have been better to kill him right away," a second, less confident voice said. "It's supposed to be impossible to hold him."

"Don't be stupid. We just do what we're told. We'll hold him."

"What do you think they'll do with him?"

"Execute him, I suppose," the harsh voice said matter-of-factly. "They're probably just curious to see what he looks like first. They'll be disappointed."

Zarwell opened his eyes a slit to observe his surroundings.

It was a mistake. "He's out of it," the first speaker said, and Zarwell allowed his eyes to open fully.

The voice, he saw, belonged to the big man who had bruised him against the locker at the spaceport. Irrelevantly he wondered how he knew now that it had been a spaceport.

His captor's broad face jeered down at Zarwell. "Have a good sleep?" he asked with mock solicitude. Zarwell did not deign to acknowledge that he heard.

The big man turned. "You can tell the Chief he's awake," he said. Zarwell followed his gaze to where a younger man, with a blond lock of hair on his forehead, stood behind him. The youth nodded and went out, while the other pulled a chair up to the side of Zarwell's cot.

While their attention was away from him Zarwell had unobtrusively loosened his bonds as much as possible with arm leverage. As the big man drew his chair nearer, he made the hand farthest from him tight and compact and worked it free of the leather loop. He waited.

The big man belched. "You're supposed to be great stuff in a situation like this," he said, his smoke-tan face splitting in a grin that revealed large square teeth. "How about giving me a sample?"

"You're a yellow-livered bastard," Zarwell told him.

The grin faded from the oily face as the man stood up. He leaned over the cot--and Zarwell's left hand shot up and locked about his throat, joined almost immediately by the right.

The man's mouth opened and he tried to yell as he threw himself frantically backward. He clawed at the hands about his neck. When that failed to break the grip he suddenly reversed his weight and drove his fist at Zarwell's head.

Zarwell pulled the struggling body down against his chest and held it there until all agitated movement ceased. He sat up then, letting the body slide to the floor.

The straps about his thighs came loose with little effort.

The analyst dabbed at his upper lip with a handkerchief. "The episodes are beginning to tie together," he said, with an attempt at nonchalance. "The next couple should do it."

Zarwell did not answer. His memory seemed on the point of complete return, and he sat quietly, hopefully. However, nothing more came and he returned his attention to his more immediate problem.

Opening a button on his shirt, he pulled back a strip of plastic cloth just below his rib cage and took out a small flat pistol. He held it in the palm of his hand. He knew now why he always carried it.

Bergstrom had his bad moment. "You're not going to ..." he began at the sight of the gun. He tried again. "You must be joking."

"I have very little sense of humor," Zarwell corrected him.

"You'd be foolish!"

Bergstrom obviously realized how close he was to death. Yet surprisingly, after the first start, he showed little fear. Zarwell had thought the man a bit soft, too adjusted to a life of ease and some prestige to meet danger calmly. Curiosity restrained his trigger finger.

"Why would I be foolish?" he asked. "Your Meninger oath of inviolable confidence?"

Bergstrom shook his head. "I know it's been broken before. But you need me. You're not through, you know. If you killed me you'd still have to trust some other analyst."

"Is that the best you can do?"

"No." Bergstrom was angry now. "But use that logical mind you're supposed to have! Scenes before this have shown what kind of man you are. Just because this last happened here on St. Martin's makes little difference. If I was going to turn you in to the police, I'd have done it before this."

Zarwell debated with himself the truth of what the other had said. "Why didn't you turn me in?" he asked.

"Because you're no mad-dog killer!" Now that the crisis seemed to be past, Bergstrom spoke more calmly, even allowed himself to relax. "You're still pretty much in the fog about yourself. I read more in those comanalyses than you did. I even know who you are!"

Zarwell's eyebrows raised.

"Who am I?" he asked, very interested now. Without attention he put his pistol away in a trouser pocket.

Bergstrom brushed the question aside with one hand. "Your name makes little difference. You've used many. But you are an idealist. Your killings were necessary to bring justice to the places you visited. By now you're almost a legend among the human worlds. I'd like to talk more with you on that later."

While Zarwell considered, Bergstrom pressed his advantage. "One more scene might do it," he said. "Should we try again--if you trust me, that is?"

Zarwell made his decision quickly. "Go ahead," he answered.

All Zarwell's attention seemed on the cigar he lit as he rode down the escalator, but he surveyed the terminal carefully over the rim of his hand. He spied no suspicious loungers.

Behind the escalator he groped along the floor beneath the lockers until he found his key. The briefcase was under his arm a minute later.

In the basement lave he put a coin in the pay slot of a private compartment and went in.

As he zipped open the briefcase he surveyed his features in the mirror. A small muscle at the corner of one eye twitched spasmodically. One cheek wore a frozen quarter smile. Thirty-six hours under the paralysis was longer than advisable. The muscles should be rested at least every twenty hours.

Fortunately his natural features would serve as an adequate disguise now.

He adjusted the ring setting on the pistol-shaped instrument that he took from his case, and carefully rayed several small areas of his face, loosening muscles that had been tight too long. He sighed gratefully when he finished, massaging his cheeks and forehead with considerable pleasure. Another glance in the mirror satisfied him with the changes that had been made. He turned to his briefcase again and exchanged the gun for a small syringe, which he pushed into a trouser pocket, and a single-edged razor blade.

Removing his fiber-cloth jacket he slashed it into strips with the razor blade and flushed it down the disposal bowl. With the sleeves of his blouse rolled up he had the appearance of a typical workman as he strolled from the compartment.

Back at the locker he replaced the briefcase and, with a wad of gum, glued the key to the bottom of the locker frame.

One step more. Taking the syringe from his pocket, he plunged the needle into his forearm and tossed the instrument down a waste chute. He took three more steps and paused uncertainly.

When he looked about him it was with the expression of a man waking from a vivid dream.

"Quite ingenious," Graves murmured admiringly. "You had your mind already preconditioned for the shot. But why would you deliberately give yourself amnesia?"

"What better disguise than to believe the part you're playing?"

"A good man must have done that job on your mind," Bergstrom commented. "I'd have hesitated to try it myself. It must have taken a lot of trust on your part."

"Trust and money," Zarwell said drily.

"Your memory's back then?"

Zarwell nodded.

"I'm glad to hear that," Bergstrom assured him. "Now that you're well again I'd like to introduce you to a man named Vernon Johnson. This world ..."

Zarwell stopped him with an upraised hand. "Good God, man, can't you see the reason for all this? I'm tired. I'm trying to quit."

"Quit?" Bergstrom did not quite follow him.

"It started on my home colony," Zarwell explained listlessly. "A gang of hoods had taken over the government. I helped organize a movement to get them out. There was some bloodshed, but it went quite well. Several months later an unofficial envoy from another world asked several of us to give them a hand on the same kind of job. The political conditions there were rotten. We went with him. Again we were successful. It seems I have a kind of genius for that sort of thing."

He stretched out his legs and regarded them thoughtfully. "I learned then the truth of Russell's saying: 'When the oppressed win their freedom they are as oppressive as their former masters.' When they went bad, I opposed them. This time I failed. But I escaped again. I have quite a talent for that also.

"I'm not a professional do-gooder." Zarwell's tone appealed to Bergstrom for understanding. "I have only a normal man's indignation at injustice. And now I've done my share. Yet, wherever I go, the word eventually gets out, and I'm right back in a fight again. It's like the proverbial monkey on my back. I can't get rid of it."

He rose. "That disguise and memory planting were supposed to get me out of it. I should have known it wouldn't work. But this time I'm not going to be drawn back in! You and your Vernon Johnson can do your own revolting. I'm through!"

Bergstrom did not argue as he left.

Restlessness drove Zarwell from his flat the next day--a legal holiday on St. Martin's. At a railed-off lot he stopped and loitered in the shadow of an adjacent building watching workmen drilling an excavation for a new structure.

When a man strolled to his side and stood watching the workmen, he was not surprised. He waited for the other to speak.

"I'd like to talk to you, if you can spare a few minutes," the stranger said.

Zarwell turned and studied the man without answering. He was medium tall, with the body of an athlete, though perhaps ten years beyond the age of sports. He had a manner of contained energy. "You're Johnson?" he asked.

The man nodded.

Zarwell tried to feel the anger he wanted to feel, but somehow it would not come. "We have nothing to talk about," was the best he could manage.

"Then will you just listen? After, I'll leave--if you tell me to."

Against his will he found himself liking the man, and wanting at least to be courteous. He inclined his head toward a curb wastebox with a flat top. "Should we sit?"

Johnson smiled agreeably and they walked over to the box and sat down.

"When this colony was first founded," Johnson began without preamble, "the administrative body was a governor, and a council of twelve. Their successors were to be elected biennially. At first they were. Then things changed. We haven't had an election now in the last twenty-three years. St. Martin's is beginning to prosper. Yet the only ones receiving the benefits are the rulers. The citizens work twelve hours a day. They are poorly housed, poorly fed, poorly clothed. They ..."

Zarwell found himself not listening as Johnson's voice went on. The story was always the same. But why did they always try to drag him into their troubles?

Why hadn't he chosen some other world on which to hide?

The last question prompted a new thought. Just why had he chosen St. Martin's? Was it only a coincidence? Or had he, subconsciously at least, picked this particular world? He had always considered himself the unwilling subject of glib persuaders ... but mightn't some inner compulsion of his own have put the monkey on his back?

"... and we need your help." Johnson had finished his speech.

Zarwell gazed up at the bright sky. He pulled in a long breath, and let it out in a sigh.

"What are your plans so far?" he asked wearily.

Contents

TEST ROCKET!

By JACK DOUGLAS

It's amazing how much you can learn about absolute strangers if you just stop to think about the kind of an animal they'll put in a ...

Captain Baird stood at the window of the laboratory where the thousand parts of the strange rocket lay strewn in careful order. Small groups worked slowly over the dismantled parts. The captain wanted to ask but something stopped him. Behind him Doctor Johannsen sat at his desk, his gnarled old hand tight about a whiskey bottle, the bottle the doctor always had in his desk but never brought out except when he was alone, and waited for Captain Baird to ask his question. Captain Baird turned at last.

"They are our markings?" Captain Baird asked. It was not the question. Captain Baird knew the markings of the Rocket Testing Station as well as the doctor did.

"Yes," the doctor said, "they are our markings. Identical. But not our paint."

Captain Baird turned back to the window. Six months ago it had happened. Ten minutes after launching, the giant test rocket had been only a speck on the observation screen. Captain Baird had turned away in disgust.

"A mouse!" the captain had said, "unfortunate a mouse can't observe, build, report. My men are getting restless, Johannsen."

"When we are ready, Captain," the doctor had said.

It was twelve hours before the urgent call from Central Control brought the captain running back to the laboratory. The doctor was there before him. Professor Schultz wasted no time, he pointed to the instrument panel. "A sudden shift, see for yourself. We'll miss Mars by a million and a quarter at least."

Two hours later the shift in course of the test rocket was apparent to all of them and so was their disappointment.

* * * * *

"According to the instruments the steering shifted a quarter of an inch. No reason shows up," Professor Schultz said.

"Flaw in the metal?" Doctor Johannsen said.

"How far can it go?" Captain Baird asked.

Professor Schultz shrugged. "Until the fuel runs out, which is probably as good as never, or until the landing mechanism is activated by a planet-sized body."

"Course? Did you plot it?" The doctor asked.

"Of course I did," Professor Schultz said, "as close as I can calculate it is headed for Alpha Centauri."

Captain Baird turned away. The doctor watched him.

"Perhaps you will not be quite so hasty with your men's lives in the future, Captain?" the doctor said.

Professor Schultz was spinning dials. "No contact," the professor said, "No contact at all."

That had been six months ago. Three more test rockets had been fired successfully before the urgent report came through from Alaskan Observation Post No. 4. A rocket was coming across the Pole.

The strange rocket was tracked and escorted by atomic armed fighters all the way to the Rocket Testing Station where it cut its own motors and gently landed. In the center of a division of atomic-armed infantry the captain, the doctor, and everyone else, waited impatiently. There was an air of uneasiness.

"You're sure it's not ours?" Captain Baird asked.

The doctor laughed. "Identical, yes, but three times the size of ours."

"Perhaps one of the Asian ones?"

"No, it's our design, but too large, much too large."

Professor Schultz put their thoughts into words. "Looks like someone copied ours. Someone, somewhere. It's hard to imagine, but true nevertheless."

They waited two weeks. Nothing happened. Then a radiation-shielded team went in to examine the rocket. Two more weeks and the strange rocket was dismantled and spread over the field of the testing station. The rocket was dismantled and the station had begun to talk to itself in whispers and look at the sky.

Captain Baird stood now at the window and looked out at the dismantled rocket. He looked but his mind was not on the parts of the rocket he could see from the window.

"The materials, they're not ours?" the captain asked.

"Unknown here," the doctor said.

The captain nodded. "Those were our instruments?"

"Yes." The doctor still held the whiskey bottle in a tight grip.

"They sent them back," the captain said.

* * * * *

The doctor crashed the bottle hard against the desk top. "Ask it, Captain, for God's sake!!"

The captain turned to face the doctor directly. "It was a man, a full grown man."

The doctor sighed as if letting the pent-up steam of his heart escape. "Yes, it is a man. It breathes, it eats, it has all the attributes of a man. But it is not of our planet."

"Its speech ..." the captain began.

"That isn't speech, Captain," the doctor broke in, breaking in sharply, "It's only sound." The doctor stopped; he examined the label of his bottle of whiskey very carefully. A good brand of whiskey. "He seems quite happy in the storeroom. You know, Captain, what puzzled me at first? He can't read. He can't read anything, not even the instruments in that ship. In fact he shows no interest in his rocket at all."

The captain sat down now. He sat at the desk and faced the doctor. "At least they had the courage to send a man, not a mouse. Doctor, a man."

The doctor stared at the captain, his hand squeezing and unsqueezing on the whiskey bottle. "A man who can't read his own instruments?" The doctor laughed. "Perhaps you too have failed to see the point? Like that stupid general who sits out there waiting for the men from somewhere to invade?"

"Don't you think it's a possibility?"

The doctor nodded. "A very good possibility, Captain, but they will not be men." The doctor seemed to pause and lean forward. "That rocket, Captain, is a test rocket. A test rocket just like ours!"

Then the doctor picked up his whiskey bottle at last and poured two glasses.

"Perhaps a drink, Captain?"

The captain was watching the sky outside the window.

THE END

Contents

THE RED HELL OF JUPITER

By Paul Ernst

What is the mystery centered in Jupiter's famous "Red Spot"? Two fighting Earthmen, caught by the "Pipe-men" like their vanished comrades, soon find out.

CHAPTER I

The Red Spot

Commander Stone, grizzled chief of the Planetary Exploration Forces, acknowledged Captain Brand Bowen's salute and beckoned him to take a seat.

Brand, youngest officer of the division to wear the triple-V for distinguished service, sat down and stared curiously at his superior. He hadn't the remotest idea why he had been recalled from leave: but that it was on a matter of some importance he was sure. He hunched his big shoulders and awaited orders.

"Captain Bowen," said Stone. "I want you to go to Jupiter as soon as you can arrange to do so, fly low over the red area in the southern hemisphere, and come back here with some sort of report as to what's wrong with that infernal death spot."

He tapped his radio stylus thoughtfully against the edge of his desk.

"As you perhaps know, I detailed a ship to explore the red spot about a year ago. It never came back. I sent another ship, with two good men in it, to check up on the disappearance of the first. That ship, too, never came back. Almost with the second of its arrival at the edge of the red area all radio communication with it was cut off. It was never heard from again. Two weeks ago I sent Journeyman there. Now he has been swallowed up in a mysterious silence."

An exclamation burst from Brand's lips. Sub-Commander Journeyman! Senior officer under Stone, ablest man in the expeditionary forces, and Brand's oldest friend!

Stone nodded comprehension of the stricken look on Brand's face. "I know how friendly you two were," he said soberly. "That's why I chose you to go and find out, if you can, what happened to him and the other two ships."

Brand's chin sank to rest on the stiff high collar of his uniform.

"Journeyman!" he mused. "Why, he was like an older brother to me. And now ... he's gone."

* * * * *

There was silence in Commander Stone's sanctum for a time. Then Brand raised his head.

"Did you have any radio reports at all from any of the three ships concerning the nature of the red spot?" he inquired.

"None that gave definite information," replied Stone. "From each of the three ships we received reports right up to the instant when the red area was approached. From each of the three came a vague description of the peculiarity of the ground ahead of them: it seems to glitter with a queer metallic sheen. Then, from each of the three, as they passed over the boundary--nothing! All radio communication ceased as abruptly as though they'd been stricken dead."

He stared at Brand. "That's all I can tell you, little enough, God knows. Something ominous and strange is contained in that red spot: but what its nature may be, we cannot even guess. I want you to go there and find out."

Brand's determined jaw jutted out, and his lips thinned to a purposeful line. He stood to attention.

"I'll be leaving to-night, sir. Or sooner if you like. I could go this afternoon: in an hour--"

"To-night is soon enough," said Stone with a smile. "Now, who do you want to accompany you?"

Brand thought a moment. On so long a journey as a trip to Jupiter there was only room in a space ship--what with supplies and all--for one other man. It behooved him to pick his companion carefully.

"I'd like Dex Harlow," he said at last. "He's been to Jupiter before, working with me in plotting the northern hemisphere. He's a good man."

"He is," agreed Stone, nodding approval of Brand's choice. "I'll have him report to you at once."

He rose and held out his hand. "I'm relying on you, Captain Bowen," he said. "I won't give any direct orders: use your own discretion. But I would advise you not to try to land in the red area. Simply fly low over it, and see what you can discern from the air. Good-by, and good luck."

Brand saluted, and went out, to go to his own quarters and make the few preparations necessary for his sudden emergency flight.

* * * * *

The work of exploring the planets that swung with Earth around the sun was still a new branch of the service. Less than ten years ago, it had been, when Ansen devised his first crude atomic motor.

At once, with the introduction of this tremendous new motive power, men had begun to build space ships and explore the sky. And, as so often happens with a new invention, the thing had grown rather beyond itself.

Everywhere amateur space flyers launched forth into the heavens to try their new celestial wings. Everywhere young and old enthusiasts set Ansen motors into clumsily insulated shells and started for Mars or the moon or Venus.

The resultant loss of life, as might have been foreseen, was appalling. Eager but inexperienced explorers edged over onto the wrong side of Mercury and were burned to cinders. They set forth in ships that were badly insulated, and froze in the absolute zero of space. They learned the atomic motor controls too hastily, ran out of supplies or lost their courses, and wandered far out into space--stiff corpses in coffins that were to be buried only in time's infinity.

To stop the foolish waste of life, the Earth Government stepped in. It was decreed that no space ship might be owned or built privately. It was further decreed that those who felt an urge to explore must join the regular service and do so under efficient supervision. And there was created the Government bureau designated as the Planetary Exploration Control Board, which was headed by Commander Stone.

* * * * *

Under this Board the exploration of the planets was undertaken methodically and efficiently, with a minimum of lives sacrificed.

Mercury was charted, tested for essential minerals, and found to be a valueless rock heap too near the sun to support life.

Venus was visited and explored segment by segment; and friendly relations were established with the rather stupid but peaceable people found there.

Mars was mapped. Here the explorers had lingered a long time: and all over this planet's surface were found remnants of a vast and intricate civilization--from the canals that laced its surface, to great cities with mighty buildings still standing. But of life there was none. The atmosphere was too rare to support it; and the theory was that it had constantly thinned through thousands of years till the last Martian had gasped and died in air too attenuated to support life even in creatures that must have grown greater and greater chested in eons of adaptation.

Then Jupiter had been reached: and here the methodical planet by planet work promised to be checked for a long time to come. Jupiter, with its mighty surface area, was going to take some exploring! It would be years before it could be plotted even superficially.

* * * * *

Brand had been to Jupiter on four different trips; and, as he walked toward his quarters from Stone's office, he reviewed what he had learned on those trips.

Jupiter, as he knew it, was a vast globe of vague horror and sharp contrasts.

Distant from the sun as it was, it received little solar heat. But, with so great a mass, it had cooled off much more slowly than any of the other planets known, and had immense internal heat. This meant that the air--which closely approximated Earth's air in density--was cool a few hundred yards up from the surface of the planet, and dankly hot close to the ground. The result, as the cold air constantly sank into the warm, was a thick steamy blanket of fog that covered everything perpetually.

Because of the recent cooling, life was not far advanced on Jupiter. Too short a time ago the sphere had been but a blazing mass. Tropical marshes prevailed, crisscrossed by mighty rivers at warmer than blood heat. Giant, hideous fernlike growths crowded one another in an everlasting jungle. And among the distorted trees, from the blanket of soft white fog that hid all from sight, could be heard constantly an ear-splitting chorus of screams and bellows and whistling snarls. It made the blood run cold just to listen--and to speculate on what gigantic but tiny-brained monsters made them.

Now and then, when Brand had been flying dangerously low over the surface, a wind had risen strong enough to dispel the fog banks for an instant; and he had caught a flash of Jovian life. Just a flash, for example, of a monstrous lizard-like thing too great to support its own bulk: or a creature all neck and tail, with ridges of scale on its armored hide and a small serpentine head weaving back and forth among the jungle growths.

* * * * *

Occasionally he had landed--always staying close to the space ship, for Jupiter's gravity made movement a slow and laborious process, and he didn't want to be caught too far from security. At such times he might hear a crashing and splashing and see a reptilian head loom gigantically at him through the fog. Then he would discharge the deadly explosive gun which was Earth's latest weapon, and the creature would crash to the ground. The chorus of hissings and bellowings would increase as he hastened slowly and laboriously back to the ship, indicating that other unseen monsters of the steamy jungle had flocked to tear the dead giant to pieces and bolt it down.

Oh, Jupiter was a nice planet! mused Brand. A sweet place--if one happened to be a two-hundred-foot snake or something!

He had always thought the entire globe was in that new, raw, marshy state. But he had worked only in one comparatively small area of the northern hemisphere; had never been within thirty thousand miles of the red spot. What might lie in that ominous crimson patch, he could not even guess. However, he reflected, he was soon to find out, though he might never live to tell about it.

Shrugging his shoulders, he turned into the fifty story building in which was his modest apartment. There he found, written by the automatic stylus on his radio pad, the message: "Be with you at seven o'clock. Best regards, and I hope you strangle. Dex Harlow."

* * * * *

Dex Harlow was a six-foot Senior Lieutenant who had been on many an out-of-the-way exploratory trip. Like Brand he was just under thirty and perpetually thirsting for the bizarre in life. He was a walking document of planetary activity. He was still baked a brick red from a trip to Mercury a year before: he had a scar on his forehead, the result of jumping forty feet one day on the moon when he'd meant to jump only twenty; he was minus a finger which had been irreparably frost-bitten on Mars; and he had a crumpled nose that was the outcome of a brush with a ten-foot bandit on Venus who'd tried to kill him for his explosive gun and supply of glass, dyite-containing cartridges.

He clutched Brand's fingers in a bone-mangling grip, and threw his hat into a far corner.

"You're a fine friend!" he growled cheerfully. "Here I'm having a first rate time for myself, swimming and planing along the Riviera, with two more weeks leave ahead of me--and I get a call from the Old Man to report to you. What excuse have you for your crime?"

"A junket to Jupiter," said Brand. "Would you call that a good excuse?"

"Jupiter!" exclaimed Dex. "Wouldn't you know it? Of course you'd have to pick a spot four hundred million miles away from all that grand swimming I was having!"

"Would you like to go back on leave, and have me choose someone else?" inquired Brand solemnly.

"Well, no," said Dex hastily. "Now that I'm here, I suppose I might as well go through with it."

Brand laughed. "Try and get you out of it! I know your attitude toward a real jaunt. And it's a real jaunt we've got ahead of us, too, old boy. We're going to the red spot. Immediately."

* * * * *

Dex's sandy eyebrows shot up. "The red spot! That's where Coblenz and Heiroy were lost!"

"And Journeyman," added Brand. "He's the latest victim of whatever's in the hell-hole."

Dex whistled. "Journeyman too! Well, all I've got to say is that whatever's there must be strong medicine. Journeyman was a damn fine man, and as brave as they come. Have you any idea what it's all about?"

"Not an idea. Nobody has. We're to go and find out--if we can. Are you all ready?"

"All ready," said Dex.

"So am I. We'll start at eleven o'clock in one of the Old Man's best cruisers. Meanwhile, we might as well go and hunt up a dinner somewhere, to fortify us against the synthetic pork chops and bread we'll be swallowing for the next fortnight."

They went out; and at ten minutes of eleven reported at the great space ship hangars north of New York, with their luggage, a conspicuous item of which was a chess board to help while away the long, long days of spacial travel. Brand then paused a little while for a final check-up on directions.

They clambered into the tiny control room and shut the hermetically sealed trap-door. Brand threw the control switch and precisely at eleven o'clock the conical shell of metal shot heavenward, gathering such speed that it was soon invisible to human eyes. He set their course toward the blazing speck that was Jupiter, four hundred million miles away; and then reported their start by radio to Commander Stone's night operator.

The investigatory expedition to the ominous red spot of the giant of the solar system was on.

CHAPTER II

The Pipe-like Men

Brand began to slacken speed on the morning of the thirteenth day (morning, of course, being a technical term: there are no horizons in space for the sun to rise over). Jupiter was still an immense distance off; but it took a great while to slow the momentum of the space ship, which, in the frictionless emptiness of space, had been traveling faster and faster for nearly three hundred hours.

Behind them was the distant ball of sun, so far off that it looked no larger than a red-hot penny. Before them was the gigantic disk of Jupiter, given a white tinge by the perpetual fog blankets, its outlines softened by its thick layer of atmosphere and cloud banks. Two of its nine satellites were in sight at the moment, with a third edging over the western rim.

"Makes you think you're drunk and seeing triple, doesn't it?" commented Dex, who was staring out the thick glass panel beside Brand. "Nine moons! Almost enough for one planet!"

Brand nodded abstractly, and concentrated on the control board. Rapidly the ship rocketed down toward the surface. The disk became a whirling, gigantic plate; and then an endless plain, with cloud formations beginning to take on definite outline.

"About to enter Jupiter's atmosphere." Brand spoke into the radio transmitter. Over the invisible thread of radio connection between the space ship and Earth, four hundred million miles behind, flashed the message.

"All right. For God's sake, be careful," came the answer, minutes later. "Say something at least every half hour, to let us know communication is unbroken. We will sound at ten second intervals."

The sounding began: peep, a shrill little piping noise like the fiddle of a cricket. Ten seconds later it came again: peep. Thereafter, intermittently, it keened through the control room--a homely, comforting sound to let them know that there was a distant thread between them and Earth.

* * * * *

Lower the shell rocketed. The endless plain slowly ceased its rushing underneath them as they entered the planet's atmosphere and began to be pulled around with it in its revolution. Far to the west a faint red glow illumined the sky.

The two men looked at each other, grimly, soberly.

"We're here," said Dex, flexing the muscles of his powerful arms.

"We are," said Brand, patting the gun in his holster.

The rapid dusk of the giant planet began to close in on them. The thin sunlight darkened; and with its lowering, the red spot of Jupiter glared more luridly ahead of them. Silently the two men gazed at it, and wondered what it held.

They shot the space ship toward it, and halted a few hundred miles away. Watery white light from the satellites, "that jitter around in the sky like a bunch of damned waterbugs," as Dex put it, was now the sole illumination.

They hung motionless in their space shell, to wait through the five-hour Jovian night for the succeeding five hours of daylight to illumine a slow cruise over the red area that, in less than a year, had swallowed up three of Earth's space ships. And ever as they waited, dozing a little, speculating as to the nature of the danger they faced, the peep, peep of the radio shrilled in their ears to tell them that there was still a connection--though a very tenuous one--with their mother planet.

* * * * *

"Red spot ten miles away," said Brand in the transmitter. "We're approaching it slowly."

The tiny sun had leaped up over Jupiter's horizon; and with its appearance they had sent the ship planing toward their mysterious destination. Beneath them the fog banks were thinning, and ahead of them were no clouds. For some reason there was a clarity unusual to Jupiter's atmosphere in the air above the red section.

"Red spot one mile ahead, altitude forty thousand feet," reported Brand.

He and Dex peered intently through the port glass panel. Ahead and far below, their eyes caught an odd metallic sheen. It was as though the ground there were carpeted with polished steel that reflected red firelight.

Tense, filled with an excitement that set their pulses pounding wildly, they angled slowly down, nearer to the edge of the vast crimson area, closer to the ground. The radio keened its monotonous signal.

Brand crawled to the transmitter, laboriously, for his body tipped the scales here at nearly four hundred pounds.

"We can see the metallic glitter that Journeyman spoke of," he said. "No sign of life of any kind, though. The red glow seems to flicker a little."

Closer the ship floated. Closer. To right and left of them for vast distances stretched the red area. Ahead of them for hundreds of miles they knew it extended.

"We're right on it now," called Brand. "Right on it--we're going over the edge--we're--"

Next instant he was sprawling on the floor, with Dex rolling helplessly on top of him, while the space ship bounced up twenty thousand feet as though propelled by a giant sling.

* * * * *

The peep, peep of the radio signalling stopped. The space ship rolled helplessly for a moment, then resumed an even keel. Brand and Dex gazed at each other.

"What the hell?" said Dex.

He started to get to his feet, put all his strength into the task of moving his Jupiter-weighted body, and crashed against the top of the control room.

"Say!" he sputtered, rubbing his head. "Say, what is this?"

Brand, profiting by his mistake, rose more cautiously, shut off the atomic motor, and approached a glass panel again. "God knows what it is," he said with a shrug. "Somehow, with our passing into the red area, the pull of gravity has been reduced by about ten, that's all."

"Oh, so that's all, is it? Well, what's happened to old Jupe's gravity?"

Again Brand shrugged. "I haven't any idea. Your guess is as good as mine."

He peered down through the panel, and stiffened in surprise.

"Dex!" he cried. "We're moving! And the motor is shut off!"

"We're drawing down closer to the ground, too," announced Dex, pointing to their altimeter. "Our altitude has been reduced five thousand feet in the last two minutes."

Quickly Brand turned on the motor in reverse. The space ship, as the rushing, reddish ground beneath indicated, continued to glide forward as though pulled by an invisible rope. He turned on full power. The ship's progress was checked a little. A very little! And the metallic red surface under them grew nearer as they steadily lost altitude.

"Something seems to have got us by the nose," said Dex. "We're on our way to the center of the red spot, I guess--to find whatever it was that Journeyman found. And the radio communication his been broken somehow...."

Wordlessly, they stared out the panel, while the shell, quivering with the strain of the atomic motor's fight against whatever unseen force it was that relentlessly drew them forward, bore them swiftly toward the heart of the vast crimson area.

* * * * *

"Look!" cried Brand.

For over an hour the ship had been propelled swiftly, irresistibly toward the center of the red spot. It had been up about forty thousand feet. Now, with a jerk that sent both men reeling, it had been drawn down to within fifteen thousand feet of the surface; and the sight that was now becoming more and more visible was incredible.

Beneath was a vast, orderly checkerboard. Every alternate square was covered by what seemed a jointless metal plate. The open squares, plainly land under cultivation, were surrounded by gleaming fences that hooked each metal square with every other one of its kind as batteries are wired in series. Over these open squares progressed tiny, two legged figures, for the most part following gigantic shapeless animals like figures out of a dream. Ahead suddenly appeared the spires and towers of an enormous city!

Metropolis and cultivated land! It was as unbelievable, on that raw new planet, as such a sight would have been could a traveler in time have observed it in the midst of a dim Pleistocene panorama of young Earth.

It was instantly apparent that the city was their destination. Rapidly the little ship was rushed toward it; and, realizing at last the futility of its laboring, Brand cut off the atomic motor and let the shell drift.

Over a group of squat square buildings their ship passed, decreasing speed and drifting lower with every moment. The lofty structures that were the nucleus of the strange city loomed closer. Now they were soaring slowly down a wide thoroughfare; and now, at last, they hovered above a great open square that was thronged with figures.

Lower they dropped. Lower. And then they settled with a slight jar on a surface made of reddish metal; and the figures rushed to surround them.

* * * * *

Looking out the glass panel at these figures, both Brand and Dex exclaimed aloud and covered their eyes for a moment to shut out the hideous sight of them. Now they examined them closely.

Manlike they were: and yet like no human being conceivable to an Earth mind. They were tremendously tall--twelve feet at least--but as thin as so many animated poles. Their two legs were scarce four inches through, taper-less, boneless, like lengths of pipe; and like two flexible pipes they were joined to a slightly larger pipe of a torso that could not have been more than a foot in diameter. There were four arms, a pair on each side of the cylindrical body, that weaved feebly about like lengths of rubber hose.

Set directly on the pipe-like body, as a pumpkin might be balanced on a pole, was a perfectly round cranium in which were glassy, staring eyes, with dull pupils like those of a sick dog. The nose was but a tab of flesh. The mouth was a minute, circular thing, soft and flabby looking, which opened and shut regularly with the creature's breathing. It resembled the snout-like mouth of a fish, of the sucker variety; and fish-like, too, was the smooth and slimy skin that covered the beanpole body.

* * * * *

Hundreds of the repulsive things, there were. And all of them shoved and crowded, as a disorderly mob on Earth might do, to get close to the Earthmen's ship. Their big dull eyes peered in through the glass panels, and their hands--mere round blobs of gristle in the palms of which were set single sucker disks--pattered against the metal hull of the shell.

"God!" said Brand with a shudder. "Fancy these things feeling over your body...."

"They're hostile, whatever they are," said Dex. "Look out: that one's pointing something at you!"

One of the slender, tottering creatures had raised an arm and leveled at Brand something that looked rather like an elongated, old-fashioned flashlight. Brand involuntarily ducked. The clear glass panel between them and the mob outside gave him a queasy feeling of being exposed to whatever missile might lurk in the thing's tube.

"What do we do now?" demanded Dex with a shaky laugh. "You're chief of this expedition. I'm waiting for orders."

"We wait right here," replied Brand. "We're safe in the shell till we're starved out. At least they can't get in to attack us."

But it developed that, while the slimy looking things might not be able to get in, they had ways of reaching the Earthmen just the same!

* * * * *

The creature with the gun-like tube extended it somewhat further toward Brand.

Brand felt a sharp, unpleasant tingle shoot through his body, as though he had received an electric shock. He winced, and cried out at the sudden pain of it.

"What's the matter--" Dex began. But hardly had the words left his mouth when he, too, felt the shock. A couple of good, hearty Earth oaths exploded from his lips.

The repulsive creature outside made an authoritative gesture. He seemed to be beckoning to them, his huge dull eyes glaring threateningly at the same moment.

"Our beanpole friend is suggesting that we get out of the shell and stay awhile," said Dex with grim humor. "They seem anxious to entertain us--ouch!"

As the two men made no move to obey the beckoning gesture, the creature had raised the tube again; and again the sharp, unpleasant shock shot through them.

"What the devil are we going to do?" exclaimed Brand. "If we go out in that mob of nightmare things--it's going to be messy. As long as we stay in the shell we have some measure of protection."

"Not much protection when they can sting us through metal and glass at will," growled Dex. "Do you suppose they can turn the juice on harder? Or is that bee-sting their best effort?"

As though in direct answer to his words, the blob-like face of the being who seemed in authority convulsed with anger and he raised the tube again. This time the shock that came from it was sufficient to throw the two men to the floor.

"Well, we can't stay in the ship, that's certain," said Brand. "I guess there's only one thing to do."

Dex nodded. "Climb out of here and take as many of these skinny horrors with us into hell as we can," he agreed.

Once more the shock stung them, as a reminder not to keep their captors waiting. With their shoulders bunched for abrupt action, and their guns in hand, the two men walked to the trap-door of the ship. They threw the heavy bolts, drew a deep breath--and flung open the door to charge unexpectedly toward the thickest mass of creatures that surrounded the ship!

* * * * *

In a measure their charge was successful. Its very suddenness caught some of the tall monstrosities off guard. Half a dozen of them stopped the fragile glass bullets to writhe in horrible death on the red metal paving of the square. But that didn't last long.

In less than a minute, thin, clammy arms were winding around the Earthmen's wrists, and their guns were wrenched from them. And then started a hand-to-hand encounter that was all the more hideous for being so unlike any fighting that might have occurred on Earth.

With a furious growl Dex charged the nearest creature, whose huge round head swayed on its stalk of a body fully six feet above his own head. He gathered the long thin legs in a football grip, and sent the thing crashing full length on its back. The great head thumped resoundingly against the metal paving, and the creature lay motionless.

For an instant Dex could only stare at the thing. It had been so easy, like overcoming a child. But even as that thought crossed his mind, two of the tall thin figures closed in behind him. Four pairs of arms wound around him, feebly but tenaciously, like wet seaweed.

They began to constrict and wind tighter around him. He tore at them, dislodged all but two. His sturdy Earth leg went back to sweep the stalk-like legs of his attackers from under them. One of the things went down, to twist weakly in a laborious attempt to rise again. But the other, by sheer force of height and reach, began to bear Dex down.

Savagely he laced out with his fists, battering the pulpy face that was pressing down close to his. The big eyes blinked shut, but the four hose-like arms did not relax their clasp. Dex's hands sought fiercely for the thing's throat. But it had no throat: the head, set directly on the thin shoulders, defied all throttling attempts.

* * * * *

Then, just as Dex was feeling that the end had come, he felt the creature wrench from him, and saw it slide in a tangle of arms and legs over the smooth metal pavement. He got shakily to his feet, to see Brand standing over him and flailing out with his fists at an ever tightening circle of towering figures.

"Thanks," panted Dex. And he began again, tripping the twelve-foot things in order to get them down within reach, battering at the great pulpy heads, fighting blindly in that expressed craving to take as many of the creatures into hell with him as he could manage. Beside him fought Brand, steadily, coolly, grim of jaw and unblinking of eye.

Already the struggle had gone on far longer than they had dreamed it might. For some reason the grotesque creatures delayed killing them. That they could do so any time they pleased, was certain: if the monsters could reach them with their shock-tubes through the double insulated hull of the space ship, they could certainly kill them out in the open.

Yet they made no move to do so. The deadly tubes were not used. The screeching gargoyles, instead, devoted all their efforts to merely hurling their attenuated bodies on the two men as though they wished to capture them alive.

Finally, however, the nature of the battle changed. The tallest of the attackers opened his tiny mouth and piped a signal. The ring of weaving tall bodies surrounding the two opened and became a U. The creatures in the curve of the U raised their shock-tubes and, with none of their own kind behind the victims to share in its discharge, released whatever power it was that lurked in them.

The shock was terrific. Without the glass and metal of the ship to protect them, out in the open and defenceless, Brand and Dex got some indication of its real power.

Writhing and twitching, feeling as though pierced by millions of red hot needles, they went down. A swarm of pipe-like bodies smothered them, and the fight was over.

CHAPTER III

The Coming of Greca

The numbing shock from the tubes left the Earthmen's bodies almost paralyzed for a time; but their brains were unfogged enough for them to observe only too clearly all that went on from the point of their capture.

They were bound hand and foot. At a piping cry from the leader, several of the gangling figures picked them up in reedy arms and began to walk across the square, away from the ship. Brand noticed that his bearers' arms trembled with his weight: and sensed the flabbiness of the substance that took the place in them of good solid muscle. Physically these things were soft and ineffectual indeed. They had only the ominous tubes with which to fight.

The eery procession, with the bound Earthmen carried in the lead, wound toward a great building fringing the square. In through the high arched entrance of this building they went, and up a sloping incline to its tower-top. Here, in a huge bare room, the two were unceremoniously dumped to the floor.

While three of the things stood guard with the mysterious tubes, another unbound them. A whole shower of high pitched, piping syllables was hurled at them, speech which sounded threatening and contemptuous but was otherwise, of course, entirely unintelligible, and then the creatures withdrew. The heavy metal door was slammed shut, and they were alone.

Brand drew a long breath, and began to feel himself all over for broken bones. He found none; he was still nerve-wracked from that last terrific shock, but otherwise whole and well.

"Are you hurt, Dex?" he asked solicitously.

"I guess not," replied Dex, getting uncertainly to his feet. "And I'm wondering why. It seems to me the brutes were uncommonly considerate of us--and I'm betting the reason is one we won't like!"

Brand shrugged. "I guess we'll find out their intentions soon enough. Let's see what our surroundings look like."

They walked to the nearest window-aperture, and gazed out on a startling and marvelous scene.

* * * * *

Beneath their high tower window, extending as far as the eye could reach, lay the city, lit by the reddish glare of the peculiar metal with which its streets were paved. For the most part the metropolis consisted of perfectly square buildings pierced by many windows to indicate that each housed a large number of inmates. But here and there grotesque turrets lanced the sky, and symbolic domes arched above the surrounding flat metal roofs.

One building in particular they noticed. This was an enormous structure in the shape of a half-globe that reared its spherical height less than an eighth of a mile from the building they were in. It was situated off to their right at the foot of a vast, high-walled enclosure whose near end seemed to be formed by the right wall of their prison. They could only see it by leaning far out of the window; and it would not have come to their attention at all had they not heard it first--or, rather, heard the sound of something within it: for from it came a curious whining hum that never varied in intensity, something like the hum of a gigantic dynamo, only greater and of a more penetrating pitch.

"Sounds as though it might be some sort of central power station," said Brand. "But what could it supply power for?"

"Give it up," said Dex. "For their damned shock-tubes, perhaps, among other things--"

He broke off abruptly as a sound of sliding bolts came from the doorway. The two men whirled around to face the door, their fists doubling instinctively against whatever new danger might threaten them.

* * * * *

The door was opened and two of their ugly, towering enemies came in, their tubes held conspicuously before them. Behind came another figure; and at sight of this one, so plainly not of the race of Jupiter, the Earthmen gasped with wonder.

They saw a girl who might have come from Earth, save that she was taller than most Earth women--of a regal height that reached only an inch or two below Brand's own six foot one. She was beautifully formed, and had wavy dark hair and clear light blue eyes. A sort of sandal covered each small bare foot; and a gauzy tunic, reaching from above the knee to the shoulder, only half shielded her lovely figure.

She was bearing a metal container in which was a mess of stuff evidently intended as food. The guards halted and stepped aside to let her pass into the room. Then they backed out, constantly keeping Dex and Brand covered with the tubes, and closed and barred the door.

The girl smiled graciously at the admiration in the eyes of both the men--a message needing no inter-planetary interpretation. She advanced, and held the metal container toward them.

"Eat," she said softly. "It is good food, and life giving."

* * * * *

For an instant Brand was dumbfounded. For here was language he could understand--which was incredible on this far-flung globe. Then he suddenly comprehended why her sentences were so intelligible.

She was versed in mental telepathy. And versed to a high degree! He'd had some experience with telepathy on Venus; but theirs was a crude thought-speech compared to the fluency possessed by the beautiful girl before him.

"Who are you?" he asked wonderingly.

"I am Greca"--it was very hard to grasp names or abstract terms--"of the fourth satellite."

"Then you are not of these monsters of Jupiter?"

"Oh, no! I am their captive, as are all my people. We are but slaves of the tall ones."

Brand glanced at Dex. "Here's a chance to get some information, perhaps," he murmured.

Dex nodded; but meanwhile the girl had caught his thought. She smiled--a tragic, wistful smile.

"I shall be happy to tell you anything in my power to tell," she informed him. "But you must be quick. I can only remain with you a little while."

She sat down on the floor with them--the few bench-like things obviously used by the tall creatures as chairs were too high for them--and with the informality of adversity the three captives began to talk. Swiftly Brand got a little knowledge of Greca's position on Jupiter, and of the racial history that led up to it.

* * * * *

Four of the nine satellites of Jupiter were now the home of living beings. But two only, at the dawn of history as Greca knew it, had been originally inhabited. These were the fourth and the second.

On the fourth there dwelt a race, "like me," as Greca put it--a kindly, gentle people content to live and let live.

On the second had been a race of immensely tall, but attenuated and physically feeble things with great heads and huge dull eyes and characters distinguished mainly for cold-blooded savagery.

The inhabitants of the fourth satellite had remained in ignorance of the monsters on the second till one day "many, many ages ago," a fleet of clumsy ships appeared on the fourth satellite. From the ships had poured thousands of pipe-like creatures, armed with horrible rods of metal that killed instantly and without a sound. The things, it seemed, had crowded over the limits of their own globe, and had been forced to find more territory.

They had made captive the entire population of the satellite. Then--for like all dangerous vermin they multiplied rapidly--they had overflowed to the first and fifth satellites--the others were uninhabitable--and finally to the dangerous surface of Jupiter itself. Everywhere they had gone, they had taken droves of Greca's people to be their slaves, "and the source of their food," added Greca, with a shudder; a statement that was at the moment unintelligible to the two men.

* * * * *

Brand stared sympathetically at her. "They treat them very badly?" he asked gently.

"Terribly! Terribly!" said Greca, shuddering again.

"But you seem quite privileged," he could not help saying.

She shook her dainty head pathetically. "I am of high rank among my people. I am a priestess of our religion, which is the religion of The Great White One who rules all the sky everywhere. The Rogans" (it was the best translation Brand could make of her mental term for the slimy tall things that held them captive) "--the Rogans hold my fate over the heads of my race. Should they rebel, I would be thrown to the monster in the pen. Of course the Rogans could crush any revolt with their terrible tubes, but they do not want to kill their slaves if they can help it. They find it more effective to hold their priestesses in hostage."

Brand turned from personal history to more vital subjects.

"Why," he asked Greca, "are the shining red squares of metal laid everywhere over this empire of the Rogans?"

"To make things light," was the reply. "When the Rogans first came to this mighty sphere, they could hardly move. Things are so heavy here, somehow. So their first thought was to drive my enslaved people to the casting and laying of the metal squares and the metal beams that connect them, in order to make things weigh less."

"But how do the plates function?"

* * * * *

Greca did not know this, save vaguely. She tried to express her little knowledge of the scientific achievements of the savage Rogans. After some moments Brand turned to Dex and said:

"As near as I can get it, the Rogans, by this peculiar red metal alloy, manage to trap and divert the permanent lines of force, the magnetic field, of Jupiter itself. So the whole red spot is highly magnetized, which somehow upsets natural gravitational attraction. I suppose it is responsible for the discoloration of the ground, too."

He turned to question the girl further about this, but she had got nervously to her feet already.

"I'll be taken away soon," she said. "I was brought in here only to urge you to eat the food. I must be interpreter, since the Rogans speak not with the mind, and I know their hateful tongue."

"Why are they so anxious for us to eat?" demanded Dex with an uneasy frown.

"So you will be strong, and endure for a long time the--the ordeal they have in store for you," faltered the girl at last. "They intend to force from you the secret of the power that drove your ship here, so they too may have command of space."

"But I don't understand," frowned Brand. "They must already have a means of space navigation. They came here to Jupiter from the satellites."

"Their vessels are crude, clumsy things. The journey from the nearest satellite is the limit of their flying range. They have nothing like your wonderful little ships, and they want to know how to build and power them."

* * * * *

She gazed sorrowfully at them and went on: "You see, yours is the fourth space ship to visit their kingdom; and that makes them fearful because it shows they are vulnerable to invasion. They want to stop that by invading your planet first. Besides their fear, there is their greed. Their looking-tubes reveal that yours is a fruitful and lovely sphere, and they are insatiable in their lust for new territories. Thus they plan to go to your planet as soon as they are able, and kill or enslave all the people there as they have killed and enslaved my race."

"They'll have a job on their hands trying to do that!" declared Dex stoutly.

But Brand paled. "They can do it!" he snapped. "Look at those death-tubes of theirs. We have no arms to compete with that." He turned to Greca. "So the Rogans plan to force the secret of our motors from us by torture?"

She nodded, and caught his hand in hers.

"Yes. They will do with you as they did with the six who came before you--and who died before surrendering the secret."

"So! We know now what happened to Journeyman and the others!" burst out Dex. "I'll see 'em in hell before I'll talk!"

"And me," nodded Brand. "But that doesn't cure the situation. As long as ships disappear in this red inferno, so long will the Old Man keep sending others to find out what's wrong. The Rogans will capture them as easily as they captured us. And eventually someone will happen along who'll weaken under torture. Then--"

* * * * *

He stopped. A dread vision filled his mind of Earth depopulated by the feebly ferocious Rogans, of rank on rank of Earth's vast armies falling in stricken rows at the shock of the Rogans' tubes.

Greca caught the vision. She nodded. "Yes, that is what would happen if they found ways of reaching your globe."

"But, God, Brand, we can't allow that!" cried Dex. "We've got to find a way to spike the guns of these walking gas-pipes, somehow!"

Brand sighed heavily. "We are two against hundreds of thousands. We are bare-handed, and the Rogans have those damned tubes. Anyway, we are on the verge of death at this very moment. What under heaven can we do to spike their guns?"

He was silent a moment: and in the silence the steady hum from the domed building outside came to his ears.

"What's in that big, round topped building, Greca?" he asked quietly.

"I do not know, exactly," replied the girl. "There is some sort of machinery in it, and to it go connecting beams from all the square metal plates everywhere. That is all I know."

Brand started to question her further, but her time was up. The two guards poked their loathsome pumpkin heads in the doorway and contemptuously beckoned her out. She answered resignedly, in the piping Rogan tongue, and went with them. But she turned to wave shyly, commiseratingly at the two men; and the expression in her clear blue eyes as they rested on Brand made his heart contract and then leap on with a mighty bound.

"We have in ally in her," murmured Brand. "Though God only knows if that will mean anything to us...."

CHAPTER IV

In the Tower

"What I can't figure out," said Dex, striding up and down the big bare room, "is why we're needed to tell them about the atomic motor. They've got our ship, and three others besides. I should think they could learn about the motor just by taking it apart and studying it."

Brand grinned mirthlessly, recalling the three years of intensive study it had taken him to learn the refinements of atomic motive power. "If you'd ever qualified as a space navigator, Dex, you'd know better. The Rogans are an advanced race; their control of polar magnetism and the marvelously high-powered telescopes Greca mentions prove that; but I doubt if they could ever analyze that atomic motor with no hint as to how it works."

Silence descended on them again, in which each was lost in his own thoughts.

How many hours had passed, the Earthmen did not know. They had spent the time in fruitless planning to escape from their tower room and go back to the ship again. Though how they could get away in the ship when the Rogans seemed able to propel it where-ever they wished against the utmost power of their motor, they did not attempt to consider.

One of Jupiter's short nights had passed, however--a night weirdly made as light as day by red glares from the plates, which seemed to store up sunlight, among their other functions--and the tiny sun had risen to slant into their window at a sharp angle.

Suddenly they heard the familiar drawing of the great bolts outside their door. It was opened, and a dozen or more of the Rogans came in, with Greca cowering piteously in their midst and attempting to communicate her distress to Brand.

* * * * *

At the head of the little band of Rogans was one the prisoners had not seen before. He was of great height, fully two feet taller than the others; and he carried himself with an air that proclaimed his importance.

The tall one turned to Greca and addressed a few high-pitched, squeaky words to her. She shook her head; whereupon, at a hissed command, two of the Rogans caught her by the wrists and dragged her forward.

"They have come to question you," Greca lamented to Brand. "And they want to do it through me. But I will not! I will not!"

Brand smiled at her though his lips were pale.

"You are powerless to struggle," he said. "Do as they ask. You cannot help us by refusing, and, in any case, I can promise that they won't learn anything from us."

The tall Rogan teetered up to the prisoners on his gangling legs, and stared icily at them. Crouched beside him, her lovely body all one mute appeal to the Earthmen to forgive her for the part she was forced to play, was Greca.

At length the Rogan leader spoke. He addressed his sibilant words to Greca, though his stony eyes were kept intently on the Earthmen.

"He says," exclaimed Greca telepathically, "to inform you first that he is head of all the Rogan race on this globe, and that all on this globe must do as he commands."

Brand nodded to show he understood the message.

"He says he is going to ask you a few questions, and that you are to answer truthfully if you value your lives:"

"First, he wants to know what the people of your world are like. Are they all the same as you?"

* * * * *

Dex started to reply to that; but Brand flung him a warning look. "Tell him we are the least of the Earth people," he answered steadily. "Tell him we are of an inferior race. Most of those on Earth are giants five times as large as we are, and many times more powerful."

Greca relayed the message in the whistling, piping Rogan tongue. The tall one stared, then hissed another sentence to the beautiful interpreter.

"He wants to know," said Greca, "if there are cities on your globe as large and complete as this one."

"There are cities on Earth that make this look like a--a--" Brand cast about for understandable similes--"like a collection of animal burrows."

"He says to describe your planet's war weapons," was the next interpretation. And here Brand let himself go.

With flights of fancy he hadn't known he was capable of, he described great airships, steered automatically and bristling with guns that discharged explosives powerful enough to kill everything within a range of a thousand miles. He told of billions of thirty-foot giants sheathed in an alloy that would make them invulnerable to any feeble rays the Rogans might have developed. He touched on the certain wholesale death that must overtake any hostile force that tried to invade the planet.

"The Rogan shock-tubes are toys compared with the ray-weapons of Earth," he concluded. "We have arms that can nullify the effects of yours and kill at the same instant. We have--"

But here the Rogan leader turned impatiently away. Greca had been translating sentence by sentence. Now the tall one barked out a few syllables in a squeaky voice.

"He says he knows you are lying," sighed Greca. "For if you on Earth have tubes more effective than theirs why weren't you equipped with them on your expedition here to the red kingdom?"

Brand bit his lips. "Check," he muttered. "The brute has a brain in that ugly head."

* * * * *

The Rogan leader spoke for a long time then; and at each singsong word, Greca quivered as though lashed by a whip. At length she turned to Brand.

"He has been telling what his hordes can do, answering your boasts with boasts of his own. His words are awful! I won't tell you all he said. I will only say that he is convinced his shock-tubes are superior to any Earth arms, and that he states he will now illustrate their power to you to quell your insolence. I don't know what he means by that...."

But she and the Earthmen were soon to find out.

The Rogan leader stepped to the window and arrogantly beckoned Brand and Dex to join him there. They did; and the leader gazed out and down as though searching for something.

He pointed. The two Earthmen followed his leveled arm with their eyes and saw, a hundred yards or so away, a bent and dreary figure trudging down the metal paving of the street. It was a figure like those to be seen on Earth, which placed it as belonging to Greca's race.

The tall leader drew forth one of the shock-tubes. Seen near at hand, it was observed to be bafflingly simple in appearance. It seemed devoid of all mechanism--simply a tube of reddish metal with a sort of handle formed of a coil of heavy wire.

The Rogan pointed the tube at the distant figure.

Greca screamed, and screamed again. Coincident with her cry, as though the sound of it had felled him, the distant slave dropped to the pavement.

* * * * *

That was all. The tube had merely been pointed: as far as Brand could see, the Rogan's "hand" had not moved on the barrel of the tube, nor even constricted about the coil of wire that formed its handle. Yet that distant figure had dropped. Furthermore, fumes of greasy black smoke now began to arise from the huddled body; and in less than thirty seconds there was left no trace of it on the gleaming metal pavement.

"So that's what those things are like at full power!" breathed Dex. "My God!"

The Rogan leader spoke a few words. Greca, huddled despairingly on the floor, crushed by this brutal annihilation of one of her country-men before her very eyes, did not translate. But translation was unnecessary. The Rogan's icy, triumphant eyes, the very posture of his grotesque body, spoke for him.

"That," he was certainly saying, "is what will happen to any on your helpless planet who dare oppose the Rogan will!"

He whipped out a command to the terror-stricken girl. She rose from her crouching position on the floor; and at length formulated the Rogan's last order:

"You will explain the working of the engine that drove your space ship here."

Dex laughed. It was a short bark of sound, totally devoid of humor, but very full of defiance. Brand thrust his hands into the pockets of his tunic, spread his legs apart, and began to whistle.

* * * * *

A quiver that might have been of anger touched the Rogan leader's repulsive little mouth. He glared balefully at the uncowed Earthmen and spoke again, evidently repeating his command. The two turned their backs to him to indicate their refusal to obey.

At that, the tall leader pointed to Dex. In an instant three of the guards had wound their double pairs of arms around his struggling body. Brand sprang to help him, but a touch of the mysterious discharge from the leader's tube sent him writhing to the floor.

"It's no use, Brand," said Dex steadily. He too had stopped struggling, and now stood quietly in the slimy coils of his captors' arms. "I might as well go along with them and get it over with. I probably won't see you again. Good luck!"

He was borne out of the room. The Rogan leader turned to Brand and spoke.

"He says that if your comrade does not tell him what he wants to know, your turn will come next," sobbed Greca. "Oh! Why does not The Great White One strike these monsters to the dust!"

She ran to Brand and pressed her satiny cheek to his. Then she was dragged roughly away.

The great door clanged shut. The heavy outer fastenings clicked into place. Dex had gone to experience whatever it was that Journeyman and the rest had experienced in this red hell. And Brand was left behind to reflect on what dread torments this might comprise; and to pray desperately that no matter what might be done to his shrinking body he would be strong enough to refuse to betray his planet.

CHAPTER V

The Torture Chamber

Swiftly Dex was carried down the long ramp to the ground floor, the arms of his captors gripping him with painful tightness. Heading the procession was the immensely tall, gangling Rogan leader, clutching Greca by the wrist and dragging her indifferently along to be his mouthpiece.

They did not stop at the street level; they continued on down another ramp, around a bend, descending an even steeper incline toward the bowels of Jupiter. Their descent ended at last before a huge metal barrier which, at a signal from the leader, drew smoothly up into the ceiling to disclose a gigantic, red-lit chamber underlying the foundations of the building.

In fear and awe, Dex gazed around that huge room.

It resembled in part a nightmare rearrangement of such a laboratory as might be found on Earth; and in part a torture chamber such as the most ferocious of savages might have devised had they been scientifically equipped to add contrivances of supercivilization to the furthering of their primitive lust for cruelty.

There were great benches--head-high to the Earthman--to accommodate the height of the Rogan workmen. There were numberless metal instruments, and glass coils, and enormous retorts; and in one corner an orange colored flame burnt steadily on a naked metal plate, seeming to have no fuel or other source of being.

There was a long rack of cruelly pointed and twisted instruments. Under this was a row of long, delicate pincers, with coils on the handles to indicate that they might be heated to fiendish precision of temperatures. There were gleaming metal racks with calibrated slide-rods and spring dials to denote just what pull was being exerted on whatever unhappy creature might be stretched taut on them. There were tiny cones of metal whose warped, baked appearance testified that they were little portable furnaces that could be placed on any desired portion of the anatomy, to slowly bake the selected disk of flesh beneath them.

* * * * *

Dex shuddered; and a low moan came from Greca, whose clear blue eyes had rested on the contents of this vast room before in her capacity as hostage and interpreter for the inhuman Rogans.

And now another sense of Dex's began to register perception on his brain.

A peculiar odor came to his nostrils. It was a musky, fetid odor, like that to be smelled in an animal cage; but it was sharper, more acrid than anything he had ever smelled on Earth. It smelled--ah, he had it!--reptilian. As though somewhere nearby a dozen titanic serpents were coiled ready to spring!

Looking about, Dex saw a six-foot square door of bars in one wall of the laboratory--like the barred entrance to a prison cell. It was from the interstices of this door that the odor seemed to emanate; but he had no chance to make sure, for now the Rogan leader approached him.

"I will first show you," he said, through his mouthpiece, Greca, "what happens to those who oppose our orders. We have a slave who tried to run away into the surrounding jungles three suns ago...."

A man was dragged into the chamber. He was slightly taller and more stockily muscled than an Earthman might be; but otherwise, in facial conformation and general appearance, he might have come here straight from New York City. Dex felt a great pang of sympathy for him. He was so plainly one of humankind, despite the fact that he had been born on a sphere four hundred million miles from Dex's.

The fellow was paralyzed with horror. His eyes, wide and glazed, darted about the torture room like those of a trapped animal. And yet he made no move to break away from the clutch of the two Rogans who held him. He knew he was helpless, that wild-eyed glance told Dex. Knew it so thoroughly that not even his wildest terror could inspire him to try to make a break for freedom, or strike back at the implacable Rogan will.

* * * * *

At a nod from the leader, the man was stripped to the waist. Here Dex started in amazement. The man's broad chest was seamed and crisscrossed by literally hundreds of tiny lateral scars, some long healed, and some fresh incisions.

He was dragged to a metal plate set upright in the wall, and secured to it by straps of metal. Evidently the miserable being knew what this portended, for he began to scream--a monotonous, high-pitched shriek that didn't stop till he was out of breath.

The Rogan leader stared at him icily, then depressed a small lever set in the wall beside him. The plate against which the captive was bound began to shine softly with a blue light. The slave twisted in his bonds, screaming again. Rhythmic shudders jerked at his limbs. His lips turned greenish white. The shudders grew more pronounced till it seemed as though he were afflicted with a sort of horrible St. Vitus dance. Then the tall Rogan pulled back the lever. The slave hung away from his supporting shackles, limp and unconscious.

Dex moistened his lips. An electric shock? No, it was something more terrible than that. Some other manifestation of the magnetic power the Rogans had harnessed--a current, perhaps, that depolarized partly the atoms of the body structure? He could only guess. But the convulsed face of the unfortunate victim showed that the torment, whatever it was, was devilish to the last degree!

"That will be the next to the last fate reserved for you," the Rogan informed Dex, through Greca. "Death follows soon after that--but not too soon for you to see and feel what waits for you behind the barred door!" And he nodded toward the cage-entrance affair, from which came the musky, reptilian stench.

"Now that you have seen something of what will happen to you if you refuse to tell us what we want to know, we shall proceed," said the leader.

* * * * *

He pointed toward one of the gargantuan work benches, and two of the Rogans slid down from it a contrivance that looked familiar to Dex. An instant's scrutiny showed him why it was familiar: it was a partly dismantled atomic motor.

In spite of the ordeal that faced him, Dex felt a thrill of elation as he looked at the motor. In its scattered state, it told a mute story: a story of long and intensive study by the Rogans, which had yielded them no results! Only too obviously, the intricate secret of atomic power had not let itself be solved.

On the heels of the elation that filled his heart, came a sickening realization of his dilemma. He could not have told the Rogans what they wanted to know even if he had wished to! He himself didn't know the principles of the atomic engine. As Brand had remarked, he was no space navigator; he was simply a prosaic lieutenant, competent only at fighting, not at all versed in science.

He knew, though, that it would do no good to assert his ignorance to the Rogans. They simply wouldn't believe him.

"You will rebuild this engine for us," ordered the tall leader, "showing us the purpose of each part, and how the power is extracted from the fuel. After that you will set it running for us, and instruct us in its control."

Dex braced himself. His final moment had come.

By way of indicating his refusal he looked away from the dismantled motor and said nothing. The Rogan repeated his command. Dex made no move. Then the leader acted.

He said something to the Rogan guards who had been standing by all this while, alert against an outbreak from their prisoner. Dex was caught up, carried to one of the metal racks, and thrown down on its calibrated bed. Loops of metal, like handcuffs, were snapped around his wrists and ankles; and a metal hoop was clamped over his throat, pinning him to the torture rack. Resistance would have been useless, and Dex submitted quietly.

* * * * *

The contrivance, with him on it, was wheeled toward the barred door. It was halted at a spot marked on the floor, about thirty feet from the bars. The Rogan leader stepped alongside the rack, with Greca trembling beside him.

Dex closed his eyes for a moment, grimly marshaling strength of will to go through the trial that was just beginning.

The Rogan leader depressed another lever in the rock wall. The barred door slid slowly up, to reveal the receding darknesses of some great cave, or room, that adjoined the laboratory. Dex rolled his eyes so that he could watch the doorway; and, in a cold perspiration, waited for whatever might appear.

It was not long in coming!

The reptilian smell suddenly grew stronger. There was a booming hiss, a savage bellowing. A clattering of vast scales rattled out as some body weighing many tons was dragged over rock flooring. Then, before Dex's staring eyes appeared a huge, wedge-shaped head, at sight of which he bit his lips to keep from crying aloud.

Often enough he had seen one of those terrific heads looming in the fog of the northern hemisphere of Jupiter. He did not know the genus of the vast monster that bore it, but he did know it for the fiercest of the lizard giants that roamed the Jovian jungles. A creature larger than a terrestrial whale, with great long neck and heavy long tail dragging yards behind it, it would find the puny bulk of a man nothing but a morsel in its jaws!

Again the gigantic thing hissed and bellowed. And then its huge head came through the six-foot door and its neck uncoiled to send the gaping jaws within a foot of Dex. There it struggled to reach him, prevented by the small doorway that restrained the bulk of its enormous body, its head only inches away from the cleverly measured spot to which the metal rack had been wheeled.

* * * * *

Dex stared, hypnotized, into the dull, stony eyes of the beast, gasping for breath in the stench of its exhalations. The jaws snapped shut, fanning his cheek. He fought for self-control. Steady! Steady! The slimy Rogans had no intention of feeding him to the thing yet. Not till they had made more determined efforts to wring from him the secret of the motor. They were just prefacing actual physical torture with hellish mental torture, that was all.

That he was right in his guess was proved in a few moments. He heard a louder hiss from the great lizard so near him. Opening his eyes, he saw the Rogan leader in the process of forcing the serpentine neck to withdraw foot by foot back into the doorway, using his shock-tube as a sort of distant prod.

The monster swayed its ugly flat head back and forth, hissing deafeningly at the sting of the tube, now and again lunging with its vast unseen body at the too narrow entrance that kept it from entering the laboratory. Dex could hear the foundation walls of the building creak at the onslaught of that tremendous weight.

If it would only break through! he thought savagely. But it wasn't going to. In a short while it was cowed by the deadly tube, and withdrew its head awkwardly from the chamber. The barred door slid down into place: and the Rogan leader once more turned his attention to his prisoner.

"You will be wheeled within reach of the creature as the last step of your fate," Dex was informed. "Meanwhile, we shall start with something less deadly...."

A cogged wheel beside him was turning a notch. Dex felt the sliding bed of the rack crawl slightly under him. Intolerable tension was suddenly placed on his arms and legs. The leader stared at a spring dial; and moved the wheel another notch. The rack expanded again, stretching Dex's body till his joints cracked.

"You will tell us what we want to know," said the Rogan, glaring coldly down at him.

Dex compressed his lips stubbornly. He couldn't tell them if he wanted to, and, by God, he wouldn't if he could.

Another notch, the wheel was turned; and in spite of himself a groan escaped Dex's lips. One more notch, while the metal slide-rods beneath him lengthened a fraction of an inch....

CHAPTER VI

The Inquisition

Blind, animal fear caught Dex and shook him in its grip. Then rage filled his heart, driving out the fear as a gale dissipates fog. With pain-dimmed eyes he glared at the gangling, hateful figure that gazed down on him with icy eyes. If he could only blast that monstrous, physically feeble but mentally ferocious thing to bits! Annihilate it! Blow it to the four corners of Jupiter! And all the other Rogans with it!

And with this thought he suddenly saw, through the red mists of rage, the shock-tube that was dangling indifferently from the Rogan leader's hand.

Instantly the red mists began to clear away. Another change took place in the tortured lieutenant's mind. The blind hot rage faded into more deadly, cold wrath. A plan began to bud into thought. It was a futile plan, really. It could not possibly accomplish anything vital. But it might give him a chance for a little revenge before his life was snuffed out--might give him a chance to strike a blow for the dead Journeyman and the other gallant explorers who had perished here in this chamber before him.

He closed his eyes to hide the hate and calculation in them. The tall Rogan leaned lower over the rack.

"You are ready to do as I command?" he demanded.

"Yes," whispered Dex. "Yes."

In the beautiful Greca's eyes, as she translated his assent, was horror. But then, faintly, her mind caught the thought that lay beneath the Earthman's apparent surrender. She veiled her own eyes with long lashes, lest they betray the captive's plan to the alert Rogan. Her lips moved silently; perhaps she was praying to her Great White One.

* * * * *

"Release him," the Rogan ordered, triumph in his bird-like, shrill voice. The metal hoops were unfastened. Dex stretched his outraged body, wincing with the pain of movement; then felt life and strength returning to him.

"Come with us to the motor," commanded the Rogan, his dull eyes glinting in anticipation of learning the coveted secret that should add one more planet to the Rogan's tyranny.

Dex walked to the dismantled atomic engine with him. He walked slowly, pretending more stiffness and weakness than he really owned to. No use in letting his captors know that his resilient muscles were so quickly throwing off the torment of the rack.

As he walked he kept his gaze covertly on that shock-tube that dangled in the leader's grasp. The rest of the guard had none; they had laid their weapons down on a far bench on their entrance to the chamber, depending on the one with which their leader was armed.

Eagerly the Rogans crowded around Dex and the motor that had thus far baffled them. They bent down from their twelve-foot heights to bring their staring goggle-eyes closer to the lesson in atomic motive power, till Dex was in a sort of small dome of Rogans, with their long, pipe-like legs forming the wall around him, and their thin torsos inclining forward to make a curved ceiling over him.

The Rogan leader drew Greca within the circle to interpret the Earthman's explanations.

Dex moved a trifle, to bring himself nearer the tall leader. Again he glanced covertly at the shock-tube.

"The first thing to tell about our motor," said Dex, stalling for time, "is that it utilizes the breaking up of the atom as its source of power."

* * * * *

He edged closer to the Rogan leader.

"You see those electrodes?" he said, pointing to two copper castings in a chamber between the fuel tank and the small but enormously powerful turbine that whirled with the released atomic energy. The Rogan leader blinked assent. His small, horrible mouth was pursed with his concentration of thought.

"The electrodes partially break down the atoms of fuel passing from the tank," explained Dex, desperately attempting scientific phraseology for a matter as far over his head as the remote stars. He raised his hand a trifle, bringing it nearer the Rogan's tube....

"Is that the outlet from the tank?" inquired the Rogan, pointing with the tube, and so raising it out of Dex's reach.

"Yes," mumbled Dex, sick with disappointment: he'd been on the point of leaping for the weapon. He sidled close again. Greca bit her lips lest she cry out with suspense.

"The partially disintegrated atoms pass into the turbine chamber," he went on, "and are there completely broken down by heat, which has been generated by the explosive energy of the atoms passing in before them."

"I warn you to speak true," said the leader, suddenly removing his gaze from the specimen motor and staring icily down at Dex. Dex's hand dropped abruptly from its place near the tube. Again his fingers had come within a foot of it.

* * * * *

"We will get ahead faster," piped the Rogan, an edge of suspicion sounding in his shrill voice, "if I conduct the explanation. I will ask questions for you to answer. What is the fuel used?"

"Powdered zinc," Dex answered promptly. No harm in admitting that. The Rogans must already know it; zinc was common to Jupiter, as Earth spectroscopes had showed long since; and they had no doubt analyzed it by now. The chances were that the leader was merely testing him, to see if he were sincere in his ostensible surrender.

That his guess was right, he read in the fishy, dull eyes. The Rogan leader nodded at his answer, and some of the lurking suspicion in his gaze died down.

"How is it prepared?"

Now this marked the beginning of the end, Dex knew. The preparation of the powdered metal was half the secret of atomic power--and Dex hadn't the faintest idea what it was! This questions-and-answers affair was going to pin him down in short order!

"How is it prepared?" repeated the Rogan leader inexorably. "Tell us, or--"

But at that instant Dex attained his objective.

Once more his hand had crawled slowly toward the tube--till, once more, it was within reach. Then, more bold as his position grew more desperate, he straightened up--and, with a lightning move, had wrenched it from the sucker-disk that held it!

He shouted his triumph. He had it! Now let the devils put him back on the torture bed if they could! Now let them try to make him betray his planet!

* * * * *

There was an alarmed squeak from the Rogan leader, and in an instant the huge laboratory was in an uproar. The Rogan guards whipped their hose-like arms toward the Earthman. Dex, with a sweep of his hands, knocked the pipe-stem legs of two of the guards from under them, leaped over their bodies, and stood at bay in a corner--guarding the bench on which the guards had laid their tubes when they filed into the laboratory.

The air resounded with the shrill calls of the excited Rogans. Then they began to close in on him, all the while eyeing the tube in his hand with terror written large on their hideous faces.

Dex's eyes blazed with the light of vengeful exultation. For the death of Journeyman and the rest, for the coming inevitable death of himself and Brand, he was going to pay--at least in part--with the captured tube of death in his hand! It was a lovely thought, and for a few seconds he delayed acting in order to savor it.

Then, with a smile of pure happiness, he leveled the tube at the nearest Rogan in order to shrivel him to nothingness as he had seen the slave shrivelled in the street.

The Rogan did not fall! Full in the face of the death tube he teetered forward, his arms reaching savagely toward the Earthman.

Dex stared incredulously. Cold fear crept into his heart. He pointed the tube more accurately, and squeezed harder on the coil handle. Still nothing happened. The Rogans warily drew closer.

* * * * *

Perspiration began to trickle down Dex's cheeks. In God's name, why didn't the tube work? He had thought all he had to do was point it and squeeze down on the handle. But evidently there was more to the trick than that!

He groaned. He had staged all this elaborate play for a weapon as useless to his untrained mind as one of Earth's explosive guns, with the safety-lock clamped on, would have been to an abysmal Venusian savage!

By now the nearest Rogan was within reaching distance of him. One of its two pairs of slimy arms uncoiled toward him. The other pair strained to reach around him and get to the weapons on the bench by his side.

With a cry, Dex dashed the useless shock-tube down on the reaching arms. As long as he didn't know how to work it anyway, he might as well use it as a club.

The Rogan squeaked with pain; the arms recoiled. Dex jerked the tube back over his shoulder for another blow....

There was a shriek from the doomed wretch fastened to the metal plate. The slave that had been tortured before Dex's eyes as an object lesson! He had been returned to consciousness a short time since, and had been writhing and shuddering against the plate.

Dex flashed a glance at him over his shoulder, as he shrieked, and cried aloud himself at what he saw.

* * * * *

The tortured slave was rapidly disappearing! Another shriek left his lips, to be broken off halfway. In an instant nothing was left of the struggling body but a wisp of greasy black smoke!

Dex stared stupidly at the tube in his hand. Then, as a squeak of agony sounded from a Rogan in front of him, his mind grasped what had happened. Somehow its mechanism had been jarred into functioning when he dashed it against the groping arm. In some way its death dealing power had been unleashed. With a cry of exultation, Dex began to use it!

The Rogan in front of him, squealing, collapsed on the floor, dwindling swiftly into nothingness. Dex turned the mysterious death against another teetering creature. It too went up in oleaginous smoke.

The Rogan leader came next. Dex whirled the tube in his direction, and saw him go down. Then he sprang to annihilate still another grotesque monster who had almost reached the bench on which were the other tubes. He shouted and raved as this fourth Rogan crumbled. Torture him, would they! Plan to capture Earth, would they! He'd kill off the whole damned population with this tube!

The Rogan survivors, squeaking in panic, gave over their attempts to retrieve the tubes. They dove for various hiding places--under benches, behind retorts, anywhere to get away from the terror running amuck in their midst. And after them sprang Dex, mad with his sudden miraculous success, to ferret them out one by one and blow them into hell with their own horrible death-engine.

* * * * *

In his ecstasy of rage, Dex overlooked the Rogan leader. He had seen that attenuated monstrosity go down, and had assumed he was dead. But such was not the case. In the corner Dex had vacated when he sprang after the fleeing guard, the tall leader twisted feebly and sat up.

One of his four arms was missing, a smoking stump showing where the annihilating ray from the tube had blasted it off at the shoulder. But he was far from being dead. With cold purpose in his great staring eyes, he moved snakily toward the bench Dex had now left unguarded.

The Earthman got another Rogan; whirled to track down still another. Promptly the leader sank motionless to the floor. The Rogan leader continued his crawling. He reached the bench, fumbled up and along its surface for the nearest tube.

Dex, unconscious of the sure fate gathering behind him to strike him down, dashed past a great glass tank behind which Greca was huddling in mortal fear, and charged down on two more of the squeaking guards.

Then, suddenly, some sixth sense warned him that something was wrong. He whirled toward the corner he had left.

The Rogan leader, two of his surviving arms propping feebly against the bench, was pointing a shock-tube squarely at him!

* * * * *

Dex fell to the floor to escape the first discharge of the tube, and leveled his own. He felt the thing grow hot in his hand, saw a blinding blue-white fire leap into being in the space between them as the rays from the two tubes met and absorbed each other. He shifted, to get out of the line and blast the creature he had too hastily reckoned as dead. But he was not quick enough. A fraction before him, the Rogan leader shifted.

Dex felt a terrible burning sensation all over his body, as the ray from his tube met the conflicting ray less squarely, and allowed a little of it to reach him. He shrieked as the slave had shrieked when he felt the annihilating current from the plate sweeping through his body.

A black fog seemed to close in around the Earthman's senses. He crashed to the floor, with a glimpse of the leering triumph on the Rogan's face as the last picture to stamp itself in his failing consciousness.

The tall Rogan, obviously in great agony from his blasted arm, squeaked a faint command. The four guards who were left issued fearfully from their hiding places and came to him.

He pointed his tube at Dex Harlow, lying unconscious on the floor. There he hesitated an instant, his soft little mouth slobbering in his rage and pain. Then he let the tube sink slowly off its line.

He gave another command. The four guards picked the Earthman up and carried him to the metal torture-plate on which the slave had met his death. The tall leader's eyes gleamed with vicious hatred as the limp body was fastened to the metal.

Mouthing and squealing with the pain of his seared arm-stump, he wobbled toward the lever, a mere turn of which would readily convert the plate into a bed of agony.

CHAPTER VII

In the Power-House

Alone in the prison room, after Dex had been dragged away to be subjected to the Rogan inquisition, Brand gnawed at his fingers and paced distractedly up and down the stone flooring. For a while he had no coherent thought at all; only the realization that his turn came next, and that the Rogans would leave no refinement of torment untried in their effort to wring from him the secret of the atomic engine.

He went to the window, and absent-mindedly stared out. The whining hum from the great domed building off to the right, like the high-pitched droning of a swarm of gargantuan bees, came to his ears. He listened more intently, and leaned out of the window to look at the building.

Under that dome, it came to him again, was, in all probability, the mainspring of the Rogan mechanical power. If only he could get in there and look around! He might do some important damage; he might be able to harass the enemy materially before the time came for him to die.

He leaned farther out of the window, and examined the hundred feet or so of sheer wall beneath him. He saw, scrutinizing it intently, that the stone blocks that composed it were not smooth cut, but rough hewn, with the marks of the cutters' chisels plainly in evidence. Also there was a considerable ridge between each layer of blocks where the Rogans' mortar had squeezed out in the process of laying the wall.

Never in sanity would a man have thought of the thing Brand considered then. To attempt to clamber down that blank wall, with only the slight roughness of the protruding layers of mortar to hang on to, was palpable suicide!

* * * * *

Brand shrugged. He observed that to a man already condemned to death, the facing of probable suicide shouldn't mean much.

With scarcely an increase in the beating of his heart, he swung one leg out over the broad sill. If he fell, he escaped an infinitely worse death; if he didn't fall, he might somehow win his way into that domed building whence the hum came.

Cautiously, clutching at the rough stone with finger tips that in a moment or two became raw and bleeding masses, he began his slow descent. As he worked his way down, he slanted to the right, toward the near wall of the retaining yard whose end was formed by the round structure that was his goal.

Beneath him and to the left the broad street swarmed with figures: the tall ones of the Rogans and the shorter, sturdier ones of slaves. Any one of those dozens of grotesque pedestrians might glance up, see him, and pick him off with the deadly tubes. Under his fingers the mortar crumbled and left him hanging, more than once, by one hand. For fully five minutes his life hung by a thread apt to be severed at any time. But--he made it. Helped by the decreased gravity of the red spot, and released from inhibiting fear by the fact that he was already, figuratively, a dead man, he performed the incredible.

With a last slithering step downward, he landed lightly on the near wall of the enclosure, and started along its broad top toward his objective.

Now he was in plain sight of any one who might be looking out the windows of the tower building or from the dome ahead of him; but this was a chance he had to take, and at least he was concealed from the swarms in the street. Making no effort to hide himself by crawling along the top of the wall, he straightened up and began to run toward the giant dome.

* * * * *

Hardly had he gone a dozen steps when he suddenly understood the meaning of the high-walled enclosure to his right!

Off in a far corner rose a slate colored mound that at first glance he had taken for a great heap of inanimate dirt. The mound began to move toward him--and metamorphosed into an animal, a thing that made Brand blink his eyes to see if he were dreaming, and then stop, appalled, to look at it.

He saw a body that dwarfed the high retaining walls to comparative insignificance. It had a tree-like tail that dragged behind it; and a thirty-foot, serpentine neck at the end of which was a head like a sugar barrel that split into cavernous jaws lined with backward-pointing teeth. Two eyes were set wide apart in the enormous head, eyes that were dead and cold and dull, yet glinting with senseless ferocity. It was the sort of thing one sees in delirium.

With increasing energy the creature made for him, till finally it was approaching his sector of the wall at a lumbering run that was rapid for all its ungainliness.

It was apparent at a glance that the snaky neck, perched atop the lofty shoulder structure, would raise the head with its gaping jaws to his level on the wall! Brand ran. And after him thudded the gigantic lizard, its neck arching up and along the wall to reach him.

A scant five yards ahead of the snapping jaws, Brand reached his goal, the dome, and clambered over its curved, metal roof away from the monster's maw.

He stopped to pant for breath and wipe the sweat from his streaming face. "Thank God it didn't get me," he breathed, looking back at the bellowing terror that had pursued him. "Wonder why it's there? It's too ferocious to be tamed and used in any way: it must be kept as a threat to hold the slaves in hand. It certainly looks well fed...."

He shuddered; then he began to explore the dome of the building for a means of entrance.

* * * * *

There was no opening in the roof. A solid sheet of reddish metal, like a titanic half-eggshell, it glittered under him in an unbroken piece.

He crept down its increasingly precipitous edge till he reached a sort of cornice that formed a jutting circle of stone around it. There he leaned far over and saw, about ten feet below him, a round opening like a big port-hole. From it were streaming waves of warm, foul air, from which he judged it to be a ventilator outlet.

He scrambled over the edge of the cornice, hung at arm's length, and swung himself down into the opening. And there, perched high up under the roof, he looked down at an enigmatic, eery scene.

That the structure was indeed a strange sort of power-house was instantly made evident. But what curious, mysterious, and yet bewilderingly simple machinery it held!

In the center was a titanic coil of reddish metal formed by a single cable nearly a yard through. Around this, at the four corners of the compass, were set coils that were identical in structure but a trifle smaller. From the smaller coils to the larger streamed, unceasingly, blue waves of light like lightning bolts.

Along a large arc of the wall was a stone slab set with an endless array of switches and insulated control-buttons. Gauges and indicators of all kinds, whose purpose could not even be guessed at, were lined above and below, all throbbing rhythmically to the leap of the electric-blue rays between the monster coils.

* * * * *

Almost under Brand's perch a great square beam of metal came through the building wall from outside, to be split into multitudinous smaller beams that were hooked up with the bases of the coils. Across from him, disappearing out through the opposite wall, was an identical beam.

"The terminals for the metal plate system that extends over the whole red spot," murmured Brand. "This building is important. But what can I do to throw sand in the gears before I'm caught and killed...?"

He surveyed the great round room below him more thoroughly. Now he saw, right in the center of the huge control board, a solitary lever, that seemed a sort of parent to all the other levers and switches. It was flanked by a perfect army of gauges and indicators; and was covered by a glass bell which was securely bolted to the rock slab.

"That looks interesting," Brand told himself. "I'd like to see that closer, if I can climb down from here without being observed.... Why"--he broke off--"where is everybody!"

For the first time, in the excitement and concentration of his purpose, the emptiness of the place struck him. There was no sign of light in the great building--no workmen or slaves anywhere. There was just the great coils, with the streamers of blue light bridging them and emitting the high-pitched, monotonous hum audible outside the dome, and the complicated control board with its quivering indicator needles and mysterious levers. That was all.

"Must be out to lunch," muttered Brand, his eyes going fascinatedly toward that solitary, parent lever under its glass bell. "Well, it gives me a chance to try some experiments, anyway."

* * * * *

It was about fifty feet from his perch to the floor; but a few feet to one side was a metal beam that extended up to help support the trussed weight of the roof. He jumped for this, and quickly slid down it.

He started on a run for the control board; but almost immediately he stopped warily to listen: it seemed to him that he had caught, faintly, the squeaking, high tones of Rogan conversation.

Miraculously, the sound seemed to come from a blank wall to his left. He crept forward to investigate....

The mystery was solved before he had gone very far. There was an opening in the wall leading off to an annex of some kind outside the dome building. The opening was concealed by a set-back, so that at first glance it had seemed part of the wall itself. From this opening drifted the chatter of Rogans.

Brand stole closer, finally venturing to peer into the room beyond from an angle where he himself could not be seen. And he found that his whimsical reference to "lunch" had contained a ghastly element of fact!

In that annex were several dozen of the teetering, attenuated Rogans, and an equal number of slaves. And the relation of the slaves and the Rogans was one that made Brand's skin crawl.

Each Rogan had stripped the tunic from the chest of his slave. Now, as Brand watched, each drew a keen blade from his belt, and made a shallow gash in the shrinking flesh. There were a few stifled screams--some of the slaves were women--but for the most part the slashing was endured in stoical silence. When red drops began to ooze forth, the Rogans stooped and applied their horrible little mouths to the incisions....

"The slimy devils!" Brand whispered hoarsely, at sight of that dreadful feeding. "The inhuman, monstrous vermin!"

But now one or two of the Rogans had begun to utter squeaks of satiation; and Brand hastened away from there and toward the control board again. He hadn't an idea of what he might accomplish when he reached it; he didn't know but that a touch of the significant looking parent-lever might blast him to bits; but he did know that he was going to raise absolute hell with something, somewhere, if he possibly could.

* * * * *

Swiftly he approached the great master-lever, protected by its bell of glass. (At least it looked like glass, for it was crystal clear and reflected gleamingly the blue light from the nearby coils). He tapped it experimentally with his knuckles....

At once pandemonium reigned in the great vaulted building. There was a siren-like screaming from a device he noticed for the first time attached under the domed roof. A clanging alarm split the air from half a dozen gongs set around the upper walls.

Squealing shouts sounded behind Brand. He whirled, and saw the Rogans, interrupted in their terrible meal, pouring in from the annex and racing toward him. Rage and fear distorted their hideous faces as they pointed first to the big lever and then at the escaped Earthman. They redoubled their efforts to get at him, their long unsteady legs covering the distance in great bounds.

Brand swore. Was he to be caught again before he had accomplished a certain thing? When he had already managed to win clear to his objective?

He hammered at the glass bell with his fists, but realized with the first blow that he was only wasting time trying to crack it bare-handed. He glanced quickly about and saw a metal bar propped up against the control board near him.

* * * * *

He sprang for it, grasped it as a club, and returned to the glass bell. Raising his arms high, he brought the thick metal bar down on the glass with all his strength.

With a force that almost wrenched his arms from their sockets, the bar rebounded from the glass bell, leaving it uncracked.

"Unbreakable!" groaned Brand.

Desperately he tried again, whirling the bar high over his head and bringing it smashing down. The result was the same as before as far as breaking the bell was concerned. But--a little trickle of crushed rock came from around the bolts in the slab to which the bell was fastened.

A third time be brought the bar down. The glass bell sagged a bit sway from the slab....

He had no chance for more assaults on it. The nearest Rogans had leaped for him. Slimy arms were coiling around him, while the loathsome sucker-disks tore at his unprotected face and throat.

Savagely Brand lashed out with the bar. It caved in a pair of the long, skinny legs, bringing a bloated round head down within reach. He smashed it with the bar, exulting grimly as the blow crumpled bone and flesh almost down to the little mouth which was yet carmine from its recent feeding.

The process seemed a sound one to Brand, unable as he was to reach the Rogans' heads that towered six feet above his own. Methodically, swinging the bar with the weight of his body behind it, he repeated the example. First a crash of the bar against a pair of legs, then the crushing in of the Rogan's head when he toppled with agonized squeals to the floor.

Again and again he crushed the life out of a Rogan with his one-two swing of the deadly bar. They were thinning down, now. They were wavering in their charges against the comparatively insignificant being from another planet who was defending himself so fiercely.

* * * * *

Finally one of their number turned and ran toward an exit, waving his four arms and adding his high-pitched alarms to the incessant ringing of the gongs and shrieks of the warning siren up under the roof. The rest rushed the Earthman in a body.

Steadily, almost joyfully, Brand fought on. He had expected to be annihilated by one of the Rogan shock-tubes long before now; but as yet there was no sign of any. Either these Rogan workmen were not privileged to carry the terrible things, or they were too occupied to think of going and getting them; anyhow, Brand was left free to wield his bar and continue crushing out the lives of the two-legged vermin that attacked him.

With almost a shock of surprise, he saw finally that he had battered their number down to three. At that he took the offensive himself. He rammed the bluntly pointed end of the bar almost through one writhing torso, broke the back of a second with a whistling blow, and tripped and exterminated the third almost in as many seconds. The creatures, without their death-tubes, were as helpless as crippled rats!

Panting, he turned again toward the loosened glass bell, and battered at it with the precious bar. Gradually the bolts that held it to the stone slab were wrenched out, till only one supported it. But at this point, from half a dozen set-back doorways, streams of infuriated Rogans began pouring into the building and toward him.

The one that had fled had come back with help.

CHAPTER VIII

Tremendous Odds

Like living spokes of a half-wheel, with the Earthman as the hub, the Rogans converged toward Brand, a howling roar outside indicating that there were hundreds more waiting to jam into the dome as soon as they were able. There were still no shock-tubes in evidence: evidently the worker who had gone for help had gathered the first Rogan citizens he had encountered on the streets. But the very numbers of the mob spelled defeat for Brand.

However, there was still the great lever behind him to yank away from its switch-socket. The glass bell was almost off now. With a last mad blow, he knocked loose the remaining bolt that held it. The bell clattered to the floor.

A concerted shriek came from the crowding Rogans as they saw the Earthman's hand close on the lever. Whatever effect the throwing of that master-switch could have, there was no doubt that they were extremely anxious to prevent it!

And now, in the rear of the crowding columns, appeared Rogans taller than the others, with an authoritative air, who waved before them, eager to unleash their power, batteries of the death-tubes.

Resigning himself to annihilation in the next instant, Brand pulled down hard on the lever.

* * * * *

The effect wrought by the throwing of that great switch was almost indescribable.

In a flash, as though all had been struck at once by a giant's hand, every Rogan in the mob shot toward the floor, long thin legs caving under him as if turned to water. Writhing feebly, they endeavored to get up, but could not; and, still weakly ferocious, began to creep toward the Earthman like huge-headed worms.

Brand himself had been thrown to the floor with the falling of that switch. He had felt as though an invisible ocean had been poured on him, weighting him down intolerably. To move arms or legs required enormous effort; and to get up on his feet again was like rising under a two-hundred-pound pack.

The movement of the switch, he saw, had cut off the gravity reducing apparatus of the Rogans--whatever that might consist of. They were now, abruptly, subjected to the full force of gravity exerted by Jupiter's great mass. They could no more stand erect on their tottering, lofty legs than they could fly.

But, though greatly handicapped by the gravity pull, they were still not entirely helpless. Like huge, long insects they continued to worm their way toward Brand, using their four arms and their boneless legs to help urge them over the flooring. And in their rear the Rogan guards struggled to lift their tubes and level them at the escaped prisoner.

Prompt to avoid that, Brand went down on his hands and knees. Thus he was shielded by the foremost crawling Rogans: the ones in the rear, with the tubes, could not raise themselves high enough to bore down over their fellows' heads at the Earthman.

Squatting on his knees, Brand awaited the first resolute crawlers. And, on his knees, whirling the now thrice weighty bar at heads that were conveniently low enough to be accessible, he began his last stand.

* * * * *

On the Rogans came, evidently determined, at any sacrifice of life, to get the Earthman away from that vital control board. And to right and left, crouching low to escape the tubes of the guards slowly crawling forward from the rear, Brand laid about him with the bar.

He got a little sick at the havoc he was wreaking on these slow-moving, gravity-crippled things: but remembrance of their grisly feeding habits, and the torture they must by now have inflicted on Dex, kept him flailing down on soft heads with undiminished effort.

With the gravity pull what it was, the Earthman was immeasurably stronger than any individual Rogan. For a time the contest was all in his favor. It was like killing slugs in a rose garden!

Nevertheless, these slugs were, after all, twelve feet long and possessed of intelligence, besides being hundreds in number. After a while the tide of battle began to turn in their favor.

Brand began to feel his arms ache burningly with the sustained effort of wielding a weapon that now weighed about twenty-five pounds. He knew he couldn't keep up the terrific strain much longer. And, in addition, he could see that the armed Rogans in the rear were steadily forging ahead among the unarmed attackers, till they soon must be in a position to blast him with their weapons.

Brand brought down his bar, with failing force but still deadly effect, on the loathsome face of the nearest Rogan, grunting with satisfaction as he saw it crumple into a shapeless mass. He thrust it, spear-like, into another face, and another.

Then, abruptly, he found himself weaponless.

Raising it high to bring it down on an attacker who was almost about to seize him, he felt the metal bar turn white hot, and dropped it with a cry as it seared the skin from the palms of his hands. Some Rogan guard in the rear had managed to train his tube on the bar; and in the instant of its rising had almost melted it.

* * * * *

Weaponless and helpless, Brand crawled slowly back before the tortuously advancing mob, keeping close enough to them to be shielded from the tubes of the rear guards. Without his club he knew the end was a matter of seconds.

He had an impulse to leap full into the mass of repulsive, crawling bodies and die fighting as his fists battered at the gruesome faces. But a second impulse, and a stronger one, was the blind instinct to preserve his life as long as possible.

Hesitantly, almost reluctantly, acting on the primitive instinct of self-preservation, he continued to back away from the advancing horde; away from the switch and toward the rear of the dome.

With the instant of his withdrawal, a Rogan turned toward the lever to push it back up into contact and release the red kingdom from the burden of Jupiter's unendurable gravity. And now ensued a curious struggle. The lever, placed for the convenience of creatures twelve feet or more tall, was about five feet from the floor. And the Rogan couldn't reach it!

* * * * *

Stubbornly he heaved and writhed in an effort to raise his inordinately heavy body from the floor to a point where one of the weaving arms could reach the switch. But the pipe-stem legs would not bear its weight. Each time it nearly reached the lever, only to fall feebly back again in a snarl of tangled limbs.

Meanwhile, Brand had flashed a quick look back over his shoulder to see, in the wall behind him, a metal door he hadn't noticed before. He found time for a flashing instant to wonder why there were no Rogans entering from that doorway, too; but it was a vain wonder, and it faded from his mind as the ever advancing, groping monsters before him kept crowding him back.

Instinctively he changed his course a trifle, to edge toward the metal door. Perhaps, behind it, there was sanctuary for a few moments. Perhaps he could force it open, spring out, and bar it again in the faces of the pursuing mob. It sounded improbable, but at least it offered him a slim chance where before no chance had seemed possible.

He reached the door at last, fumbled behind him and felt, high over his head, a massive sliding bolt.

* * * * *

In the spot Brand had left, the struggle to throw the gravity-lever back into closed contact position went on. The Rogan who was fruitlessly trying to reach up to it paused and said something to one near him. That one halted, and began to crawl toward him.

The two of them tried to reach it, one bracing the other and helping him pry his body up from the implacable pull of Jupiter's uninsulated mass. The top Rogan reached a little higher. The flesh sucker-disk that served as a hand almost grasped the lever, but failed by only a few inches.

A third Rogan crawled up. And now, with two arching their backs to help the other, the thing was done. The hose-like, groping arm went up and pushed the lever back into place.

The blue streamer began to hum and crackle from coil to coil again. The invisible weight that pressed down was released as once more the giant planet's gravity was nullified. The Rogans got eagerly to their feet and began to race toward Brand in their normal long bounds.

Brand, just cautiously rising, when the power went back on, found himself leaping five feet into the air with the excess of his muscular effort. And in that leap he saw the Rogans in the rear straighten up and point their tubes. However, also in that leap, his fumbling hand shot back the bolt that securely shut the metal door.

With a shout of defiance he jumped out of the door and slammed it shut after him, feeling it grow searing hot an instant later under the impact of the rays from the tubes that had been trained on him.

A stinging shock reached him through the metal, flinging him to the ground. He rolled out of its range and leaped to his feet to race away from there. Then, with a gasp, he flattened his body back against the wall of the dome building.

He was in the enclosure that held the gigantic, lizard-like thing that had nearly got him on his escape from the tower room.

He wheeled frantically to go back and face the Rogan death-tubes. Anything rather than wait while that mammoth heap of tiny-brained ferocity ran him down and tore him to shreds! But even as he turned, he heard the bolt shoot home on the inside of the door; heard vengeful squeals of triumph from his pursuers.

* * * * *

At the other end of the enclosure, near the foot of the tower building, the great lizard eyed him unblinkingly, its tremendous jaws gaping to reveal a cavernous mouth that was hideously lined with bright orange colored membrane. Then, squatting lower with every step it took, like a mountainous cat about to spring on its prey, it began to stalk on its tree-like legs toward the tiny creature that had leaped into its yard with it.

Brand whirled this way and that, mechanically seeking a way out. There was none. The walls of the great enclosure were not like the wall of the tower. Here were no rough hewn stones, with protruding ridges of mortar set between. These walls were as smooth as glass, and just as smooth was the curved wall of the dome building behind him.

The monstrous beast stalked nearer, almost on its belly now. As it advanced, the great tail stirred up a cloud of reddish dust, and left behind it a round deep depression in a surface already crisscrossed with a multitude of similar depressions. A bellowing hiss came from its gaping mouth, and it increased its pace to a thunderous, waddling rush.

CHAPTER IX

Into the Enclosure

In the torture chamber Dex wavered slowly back to consciousness to get the growing impression that he was being immersed in a bath of liquid fire. Burning, intolerable pain assailed him with increasing intensity as his senses clarified.

At last he groaned and opened his eyes, for the moment not knowing where he was nor how he had come to be there. He saw strange torture instruments and tall monstrosities with pumpkin-shaped heads surrounding him closely in a semicircle, and staring at him out of great, dull eyes.

Remembrance came back with a rush, and he gathered his muscles to spring at the hateful figures. But he could not move. At waist and throat, at wrists and ankles, were hoops of metal. He closed his eyes again while the burning waves of invisible fire shot through him recurrently from head to foot.

Dully he wondered that he was still alive. His last recollection had been of the Rogan leader pointing his shock-tube full at him, his shapeless countenance working with murderous fury. However, alive he was; and most unenviably so!

His hands, circumscribed to a few inches of movement by the bonds on his wrists, felt the smooth substance at his back. And with a thrill of horror he realized his position: he was crucified against the metal slab on which the slave had writhed in agony a short half hour ago.

Again he strained and tugged, vainly, to get free. Off to one side, pressed back against a huge glass experimental tank, he saw the beautiful Greca, her eyes wide with horror; and caught her frantic pleading message to her "Great White One."

* * * * *

The Rogan leader, squealing and grimacing, advanced toward the victim on the metal plate. One of the long arms went out and a sucker-disk was pressed to Dex's cheek. Dex quivered at the loathsome contact of that soft and slimy substance; then set his jaws to keep from groaning as the disk was jerked away, to carry with it a fragment of skin and flesh.

Gingerly, the tall leader felt the twitching, blackened stump of his blasted arm. Dex grinned mirthlessly at that: he'd struck one or two blows in his own defense, anyhow!

At sight of the Earthman's grin, an expression of defiance and grim joy that needed no interpreting to be understandable, the Rogan leader fairly danced with rage. His long arm went out to the switch beside the plate, and pulled it down another notch--just a little, not nearly to the current that had torn at the slave.

At the increased torment resulting from that slight movement of the regulating lever, Dex yelled aloud in spite of all his will power. It seemed as though his whole body were about to burst into self-generated flame. Every cell and fiber of him seemed on the verge of flying apart. He could feel his eyes start from his head, could feel every hair on his scalp stand up as though discharging electric sparks.

A minute or two of that and he would go mad! He cried out again, and twisted helplessly in his bonds. And then the terrible torture stopped.

The Rogan had not touched the switch--yet whatever sort of current it was that charged the plate was abruptly clicked off, as though someone at a distance had cut a wire or thrown a master-switch.

* * * * *

Simultaneously with its ceasing, an invisible, crushing sea seemed to envelope everything. Dex felt his body sag against his metal bonds as if it had been changed to lead.

Before him the Rogans, who had been crowding closer to watch gloatingly each grimace he made, shot doorward as though their pipe-stem legs had been swept from under them. The leader fell on the stump of his seared arm and, a deafening squeal of rage and pain came from his little mouth. His tube fell from his grasp and rolled over the floor half a dozen yards away from him.

Amazed, observing the stricken creatures only dimly through a haze of pain, Dex saw them struggle vainly to get up again, and heard them chattering excitedly to themselves. For the moment, in the face of this queer phenomenon, the prisoner seemed to be forgotten. And Dex was quick to seize the momentary advantage.

"Greca!" he called. "The tube! There--on the floor!"

The girl raised her head quickly, and followed his imploring gaze. Laboriously she started for the tube. At the same instant the Rogan leader began to feel around him for his lost weapon. Not finding it, he raised his head and glanced about for it. He saw the girl making her way toward it and, with a squeak of terror, began to crawl toward it himself.

* * * * *

He was not quick enough. The girl, though not nearly as active under the increased pull of gravity as a person of Earth might be, was yet more agile than the Rogans. And she was the faster mover in this tortuous, snail-like race. While the Rogan leader was still several feet away, she retrieved the shock-tube.

"Kill him!" begged Dex. "And all the rest of the filthy creatures!"

With feminine horror of the thing that faced her, Greca hesitated an instant--a hesitation almost long enough to be fatal. Then, just as the Rogan leader was reaching savagely out for her, she leveled the tube at him and turned it to its full power.

One last thin squeal came from the Rogan's mouth, a squeal that cracked abruptly at its height. What had been its gangling body drifted up in inky smoke.

"The others!" called Dex. "Quick! Before they get their weapons--"

Greca swept the death-tube in a short arc in front of her, over the bodies of the remaining Rogans, as if spraying plants with a hose. One after another, toppling in swift succession like grotesque falling dominoes, the creatures sagged to the floor and melted away. That one small part of Jupiter's red spot, at least, was cleared of Rogan population.

* * * * *

Long shudders racked Greca's body, and her lips were a bloodless line in her pallid face. But she did not go into womanly hysterics or swoon at the slaughter it had been her lot to inflict. Moving as quickly as she could, she went to the metal slab and began, with shaking fingers, to undo the fastenings that held Dex prisoner.

"Good girl," said Dex, patting her satiny bare shoulder as he stood free again. "You're a sport and a gentleman. You don't understand the terms? They're Earth words, Greca, that carry the highest praise a man can give a woman. But let's get out of here before another gang comes and takes us again. Where can we hide?"

"I don't know any hiding places," confessed Greca despairingly. "The Rogans swarm everywhere. We will be seen the moment we try to leave here."

"Well, we'll hunt for a hole, anyway," said Dex. He essayed to walk. What with the tendency of his muscles to jerk and collapse with the aftermath of the torture he had endured, and the sudden and inexplicable increase in gravity that bore him down, he made heavy going of it. "First we'll go up and get Brand."

"Yes, yes," said Greca, a soft glow in her clear blue eyes. "Let us go quickly."

She started toward the door, panting with the effort of moving. But Dex halted an instant, to stoop and pick up another of the tubes.

"We might as well have one of these apiece," he said. "You've proved you have the grit to use one; and maybe the dirty rats will think twice about rushing us if we each have a load of death in our hands."

* * * * *

They made their way out of the torture laboratory, and up the incline to the street level. And it was just as they reached this that the burden of gravity under which they staggered was lifted from their shoulders as quickly as it had descended on them.

Dex raised his arms just in time to fend his body from a collision with the wall in front of him. "Now what!" he exclaimed.

Greca lifted her hand for silence, inclined her head, and listened intently. As she did so, Dex heard the same noise her quick ears had caught an instant before his: a distant pandemonium of ringing gongs and siren shrieks, and squealing cries of a multitude of agitated Rogans.

"What the devil--" began Dex. But again Greca raised her hand to silence him, and listened once more. As she listened, her sea-blue eyes grew wider and wider with horror. Then, frantically, she began to race down a long corridor away from the street door.

Dex hastened to follow her. "What is it?" he demanded, when he had caught up to her flying little feet. "This is not the way up to the room where Brand--"

"Your friend is not there," she interrupted. She explained swiftly, distractedly: "From the shouts of the Rogans I learn that he got into the great dome building, somehow, and then was driven into the pen of the...."

Dex could not get the next term she used. But her telepathic message of the peril she mentioned formed in his mind clearly enough.

He got a flashing brain picture of a great, high-walled yard with a monster in it of the kind he had caught a close-range glimpse a short while before. Also, he saw a blurred, tiny figure, running from wall to wall, that was Greca's imagining of Brand and his efforts to escape the enormous beast.

"Good heavens!" groaned Dex. "Penned in with one of the things they showed me while I was stretched on the rack! Are you sure, Greca?"

She nodded, and tried to run faster. "This way," she gasped, turning down a passage to the left that ended in a massive metal door. "This leads to the enclosure. Oh, if only we can be in time!"

Her slim fingers tore at a massive bolt that secured the door. "Here," said Dex, wrenching it open for her. And they stepped out into thin sunlight, onto a hard surface of reddish ground that was crisscrossed with innumerable rounded furrows like the tracks old-fashioned, fifty-passenger airplane wheels used to make on soft landing fields.

* * * * *

Greca shrieked, and pointed to the far end of the enclosure. Down there, flattened against the wall of the dome building, was Brand. And waddling toward him with a tread that caused the ground to quiver, was a mate to the hideous creature the Rogans had used to terrify Dex in the torture chamber.

Dex leveled the tube he was carrying, swore, hit it frenziedly against his hand. "How do you work this damned thing, Greca--Oh! Like that! There--see if that puts a sting in your hide!"

The distant monster stopped its advance toward Brand. A raw white spot as big as a dinner plate leaped into being on one of its enormous hind legs. It whirled with an ear-splitting hiss, to see what thing was causing such pain in its rear. The frightful head whipped back at the end of the long neck, to nuzzle at the seared spot. Then the giant lizard turned toward Brand again.

A second time Dex pressed the central coil that formed the handle of the tube, as Greca had showed him how to do. A second time the ray shot down the field to flick a chunk of flesh weighing many pounds from the monster's flank. And this time it definitely abandoned the quarry behind it. With a scream like the keening of a dozen steam whistles, it charged back over its tracks toward the distant pigmies that were inflicting such exasperating punishment on it.

Dex swept the tube before him in a short half-circle. A smoking gash appeared suddenly in the vast fore-quarters of the monster. It stopped abruptly, its clawed feet plowing along the ground with the force of its momentum. An instant it stood there. Then, with its head swinging from side to side and lowered so that its looped neck dragged on the reddish, dusty ground, it began to back away from the source of its hurt, bellowing and hissing its rage and bewilderment.

"Brand!" shouted Dex. "This end! Run, while I hold the thing off!"

Brand began to race down the long enclosure, ten feet to a leap. The great lizard darted after him, like a cat after an escaping mouse; but a flick of the tube sent it bellowing and screaming back to its corner.

"Dex!" gasped Brand. "Thank God!"

For a moment he leaned, white and shaken, against the wall. Then Greca caught his hand in both of hers, and Dex put his arm supportingly around his shoulder. They retreated back through the doorway behind them, and slid the bolt across the metal door.

CHAPTER X

The "Tank Scheme"

"Thank God you came when you did," repeated Brand. Then, with a moment in which, figuratively, to get his feet back on earth, the wonder of Dex's appearance struck him.

"How did you manage to get away?" he asked. "I was sure--I thought--when they dragged you out of the tower room I wouldn't see you again--"

Rapidly Dex gave an account of his ordeal in the torture chamber, telling Brand in a few words how he had attempted to win free of the Rogans, how he had almost succeeded, only to be caught again and clamped to the death-plate on the wall.

"But just as the big fellow was about to cook me for good and all," he concluded, "something happened to the current, and to the gravity at the same time--"

"That was when I pulled the lever in the dome building!" exclaimed Brand.

He told of what had befallen him in the Rogan power-house. "That lever, Dex!" he said swiftly. "It's the keynote of the whole business. It absolutely controls the pull of gravity, and Lord knows what else besides. If we could only get at it again! Perhaps we could not only shut it off so that Jupiter's pull would function again, but also reverse the process so its gravity would be increased! Think what that would mean! Every Rogan in the red empire stretched out and immovable, possibly crushed in by his own weight!"

"It's a wonderful thought," sighed Dex; while Greca's eyes glowed with a sudden hope for her enslaved race, "but I don't see how we could ever--"

He stopped; and glanced in alarm down the passage behind them. Greca and Brand, hearing the same soft noise, whirled to look, too.

* * * * *

Far down the passage, just sneaking around the bend, was a group of Rogan guards, each armed with a death-tube.

"Back to the pen!" cried Brand.

He slid the bolt, and jerked the door open. They rushed into the walled enclosure again, the slamming of the door behind them cutting off the enraged squeals of the Rogans.

"This isn't going to mean anything but a short delay, I'm afraid," said Brand, clenching his fists in an agony of futility. "They'll be in here in a minute, and get us like trapped rats."

"Not before we get a lot of them," said Dex grimly.

"But that isn't enough, man! We don't want to die, no matter how decently we do it. We've won free, and stayed free this long; now, somehow, we've got to reach our ship and get back to Earth to warn them of the danger that hides here for our planet!"

He strode tensely up and down, smacking his fist into his palm. "The lever!" he exclaimed. "That lever! It's our only answer! If we could get to it.... But how can we? We couldn't break into the dome, now the Rogans are on the watch for us, with anything less than a charge of explosives. Or a tank. God, how I'd like to have an old-fashioned, fifty-ton army tank here now!"

Greca exclaimed aloud as Brand's fleeting mental picture of one of Earth's unwieldy, long-discarded war tanks registered on her brain.

"There is the great beast there," she said hesitantly, pointing a slim forefinger at the huge lizard that had backed into a far corner and was regarding them out of dull, savage eyes. Then she shook her head. "But that is impossible. Impossible!"

* * * * *

The men stared at her, with dawning realization in their minds. Then they gazed at each other.

"Of course," said Brand. "Of course! Greca, you're marvelous! Wish we had a tank? Why, we've got one! A four-legged mountain of meat that ought to be able to plow through the side of that dome like a battering ram through cardboard!"

"But it's not possible," replied Greca, her head dropping dejectedly. "My people, as driven slaves, till the fields with great animals that were trapped in the surrounding jungles. They harness other great animals to haul burdens. But none of the beasts are like this one. This kind cannot be tamed or harnessed. It is too ferocious. It is used only as a scourge of fear, to crush us into complete submission."

"Can't be tamed?" Brand said. "We'll see about that! Come on, Dex."

"Just a minute," said Dex. He flattened against the wall, motioning them to do the same. Then he leveled his tube at the door.

Slowly, cautiously, the door began to swing back; and the Rogan that Dex had heard fumbling with the bolt stuck his huge head out to locate the escaped prisoners.

Dex pressed the release coil of his tube. Without a sound, the Rogan slumped to the ground, a smoking cavity in its shoulders at the spot where its head had been set. In an instant the body, too, disappeared; an upward coiling wisp of black smoke marking its vanishing.

Another Rogan, tiptoeing out, met the same fate; and another. And then the door was banged shut again, and the bolt ground into place on the inside.

"That'll teach 'em to be careful how they try to rush us from that door," said Dex, through set teeth. "Now let's see if that tank scheme of ours can be worked."

* * * * *

He picked up a tube dropped by one of the Rogans, and handed it to Brand; showing him which coil to press to get full force, as Greca had in turn informed him.

"Down the field," commanded Brand. "We'll go about thirty yards apart, and try to herd this brute back through the walls of the dome building. Once it's inside, we'll try to rush to the lever before the Rogans can down us, and jam the thing past its terminal peg and into reverse action. I don't know that there is a reverse to it--but we can try.

"Greca dear,"--the girl started at the warmth of his thought, and a faint pink rose to her pale cheeks--"you'd better stay by my side. Your place as hostage-priestess of your people wouldn't save you if those devils catch you now. Besides, you can keep your tube leveled at the doorway as we go, and discourage any Rogans who might pluck up courage to try coming out again."

They started down the field toward the nightmare thing that snarled and hissed in its corner. On one side of the big enclosure walked Brand, with Greca close beside him, glancing continuously over her shoulder at the rear door, and holding her tube in readiness to check any charge the Rogans might attempt to make from the tower building. On the other side, keeping an equal pace, advanced Dex.

With tubes of death as whips, and with death for themselves set as the stake for which they gambled, they went about their attempt to drive the brainless monster before them through the solid wall of the dome building. And there followed what was probably the strangest animal act the universe has ever witnessed.

* * * * *

The first thing to do was to rout the enormous lizard out of the corner where sullen fear had sent it squatting. Dex contrived to do that by standing next to the wall at its side, and sending a searing ray that just touched the scaly, tremendously thick hide. The monster bellowed deafeningly, and, with a spot smoking on its flank, waddled sideways to the center of the field. Its head and swaying long neck faced the Earthmen and its back was against the wall of the dome building. To that extent, at least, they had the creature placed; but they soon found that the struggle had only just begun.

Brand got far enough around to focus his tube on the tip of the huge tail, in an effort to swing the gigantic thing about. There was an unearthly shriek from the colossal beast, and a foot and a half of its tail disappeared.

"Careful," called Dex, his jaw set and grim as the monster lashed out in its wrath. "If you bore in too long with that tube there'll be nothing left of our tank but a cloud of smoke."

Brand nodded, wordlessly, walking on the balls of his feet like a boxer, holding himself ready to swerve the thing should it charge them. Which--next instant--it did!

With a whistling bellow it gathered its tons of weight and thundered with incredible quickness at the gnats that were stinging its flanks and tail.

Desperately Brand played the tube across the vast chest, scoring a smouldering gash in the scale-covered flesh just above the gash Dex had seared a few moments before.

"Sorry, old fellow," Brand muttered to the screaming beast. "We hate to bait you like this, but it has to be done. Come on, now, through that wall behind you, and give us a chance at the lever."

* * * * *

But through the wall behind it the vast creature, not unnaturally, refused to go! It darted from side to side. Backward and forward. Up to the wall, only to back bewilderedly away from it. And constantly the tubes flicked their blistering, maddening rays along its monstrous sides and tail, as the Earthmen tried to guide it into the wall.

"Hope there's enough left of it to do the trick," said Brand, white-lipped. The monster was smoking in a dozen spots now, and several of the hump-like scales on its back had been burned away till the vast spine looked like a giant saw that was missing a third of its teeth. "God, I'm thinking we'll kill it before we can drive it through that wall!"

Greca nodded soberly, keeping her eyes on the distant door to their rear. Twice that door had been opened, and twice she had directed the death rays into its opening to mow down the gangling figures behind it. But she had said nothing of this to her man. He was busy enough with his own task!

"The door to the dome--" Dex shouted suddenly.

But Brand merely nodded, even as a discharge from his tube annihilated the Rogan that had appeared in the doorway before them. He had seen that door stealthily opening even before Dex had.

"It had better be soon, Dex!" he called. "Rogans in front of us--Rogans behind us--and--look out! On your side of the fence, there!"

Dex whirled in time to pick off a grotesque, pipe-like figure that had suddenly appeared on the broad wall of the enclosure. Then he turned to the frenzied problem of driving the monster through the building wall.

"The thing's going mad, Brand!" he cried, his voice high-pitched and brittle. "Watch out!"

* * * * *

It was only too evident that his statement was true. The baited monster, harried blindly this way and that, hounded against the blank wall behind it by something that bit chunks of living flesh out of its legs and sides, was losing whatever instinctive mental balance it had ever had. Its dimly functioning brain, probably no larger than a walnut in that gigantic skull, ceased more and more to guide it.

With a rasping scream that set the Earthmen's teeth on edge, it charged for the wall on Dex's side. Dex just managed to swerve it with a blast from the tube so prolonged that half its great lower jaw fell away.

At this the titanic thing went wholly, colossally mad! It whirled toward Brand, jerking around again as a searing on that side jarred its dull sensory nerves, then headed at last straight toward the stone wall of the dome building.

With the rays from both tubes flicking it like monstrous spurs, it charged insanely toward the bulge of the circular wall. With all its tons and tons of weight it crashed against the stonework. There was a thunderous crackling noise, and the wall sagged in perceptibly, while the metal roof bent to accommodate the new curvature of its supporting beams.

The monstrous lizard, jerked off its huge legs by the impact, staggered up and retreated toward the two men. But again the maddening pain in its hindquarters sent it careening toward the building wall. This time it raised high up on its hind legs in a blind effort to climb over it. "God, it must be five stories tall!" ejaculated Brand. Thunderingly its forelegs came down on the edge of the roof.

* * * * *

There was another deafening crash of stone and shrieking of torn metal. Just under the cornice, the wall sagged away from the roof and the top rows of heavy stone blocks slithered inward.

"Again!" shouted Brand.

His tube was pointing almost continuously now at the metal door leading from the dome building. The Rogans inside, at the shocks that were battering down a section of their great building, were all trying to get out to the yard at once. In a stream they rushed for the doorway. And in loathsome heaps they fell at the impact of the ray and shriveled to nothingness on the bombarded threshold.

"Once more--" Brand repeated, his voice hoarse and tense.

And as though the monster heard and understood, it rushed again with all its vast weight and force against the wall in a mad effort to escape the things that were blasting the living flesh from its colossal framework.

This charge was the last. With a roaring crash a section of the building thirty yards across went back and down, leaving the massive roof to sag threateningly on its battered truss-work.

* * * * *

It was as though the side of an ant-heap had been ripped away. Inside the domed building hundreds of Rogans ran this way and that on their elongated legs, squealing in their staccato, high-pitched tongue.

With blind fury the mad monster charged in through the gaping hole it had battered for itself. In all directions the Rogans scattered. Then an authoritative tall figure with a tube in each of its four sucker-disks, whipped out a command and pointed to the great coils which lay immediately in the berserk monster's path.

The command restored some sort of order. Losing their fear of the beast in their greater fear of the damage it might do, the Rogans massed to stop it before it could demolish the Rogan heart of power.

At this point Brand saw an opening of the kind he had been praying for. The Rogans had retreated before the terrific charge of the monster in such a way that the space between its vast bulk and the control board was clear.

"After me!" he shouted to Dex. "One of us has got to reach that lever while the creature's still there to shield us!"

The two Earthmen dashed through the jagged hole in the wall and raced to the control board just as the huge lizard, a smoking mass, sank to the floor. Brand gazed almost fearfully at the lever-slot.

Was there a reverse to the gravity-control action? There was room in the slot for the lever to be pulled down below the neutral point, if that meant anything....

* * * * *

Behind them the great bulk of the dead lizard was disappearing with incredible quickness under the rays of the tubes directed on it. Now the pumpkin-shaped heads on the opposite side were visible through a fleeting glimpse of a skeleton that was like the framework of a skyscraper. And now the colossal bones themselves were melting, while over everything hung a pall of greasy black smoke.

"Hurry, for God's sake!" gasped Dex.

Brand threw down the lever till it stuck. At once that invisible ocean poured crushingly over them, throwing them to their knees and sweeping the Rogans flat on their hideous faces just as half a hundred tubes were flashing down to point at the Earthmen.

"More--if you can!" grated Dex, whirling this way and that and spraying the massed Rogans with his death-dealing tube. Dozens went up in smoke under that discharge; but other dozens remained to raise themselves laboriously and slowly level their suddenly ponderous weapons at the Earthmen.

Brand set his jaw and threw all his weight on the lever. It bent a little, caught at the neutral point--and then jammed down an appreciable distance beyond it.

* * * * *

Instantly the blue streamers, that had stopped their humming progress from coil to coil with the movement of the switch to neutral, started again in reversed direction. And instantly the invisible ocean pressed down with appalling, devastating force.

Greca and Brand and Dex were flattened to the floor as if by blankets of lead. And the scattered Rogans about them ceased all movement whatever.

"Oh," sobbed Greca, fighting for breath. "Oh!"

"We can't stand this," panted Dex. "We've fixed the Rogans, all right. But we've fixed ourselves, too! That lever has to go up a bit."

Brand nodded, finding his head almost too heavy for his neck to move. Sweat beaded his forehead--sweat that trickled heavily off his face like drops of liquid metal.

With a tremendous struggle he got to his knees beneath the master-switch. There he found it impossible to raise his arms; but, leaning back against the control board and so getting a little support, he contrived to lift his body up enough to touch the down-slanting lever with his head and move it back along its slot a fraction of an inch. The giant coils hummed a note lower; and some of the smashing weight was relieved.

"That does it, I think," Brand panted, his voice husky with exhaustion and triumph.

He began to crawl laboriously toward the nearest street exit. "On our way!" he said vibrantly. "To the space ship! We leave for Earth at once!"

* * * * *

Slowly, fighting the sagging weight of their bodies, the two Earthmen inched their way to the street, helping Greca as they went. Among the sprawled forms of the Rogans they crept, with great dull eyes rolling helplessly to observe their progress, and with feeble squeals of rage and fear and malediction following their slow path.

On the street a strange and terrible sight met their eyes.

Strewn over the metal paving like wheat stalks crushed flat by a hurricane, were thousands of Rogans. Not a muscle of their pipe-like arms or legs could they move. But the gravity that crushed them rigidly to the ground did not quite hold motionless the shorter and more sturdily built slaves.

Among the thousands of squealing, panting Rogans that lay as though paralyzed on the metal paving, crawled equal thousands of Greca's enslaved people. Their eyes flamed with fanatic hate. And methodically--not knowing what had caused their loathed masters to be stricken helpless, and not caring as long as they were helpless--the slaves were seeking out the shock-tubes that here and there had fallen from the clutch of Rogan guards. Already many had found them; and everywhere gangling, slimy bodies were melting in oily black smoke that almost instantly vanished in thin air.

As it was in these streets and in the great square in the center of which rested the Earthmen's ship, just so, they knew, was it being repeated all over the red empire. Slowly crawling, fiercely exulting slaves were exterminating the tyrannous things that had held them so long in dreadful bondage! Before the sun should set on another flashing Jovian day there would be no Rogan left in the red spot.

* * * * *

"And so it ends," said Brand with a great sigh. He moved over beside Greca, and touched her lovely bare shoulders. They were shaking convulsively, those shoulders; and she had buried her face in her hands to keep from gazing at the ghastly carnage.

Brand pressed her to him. "It's terrible--yes. But think what it means! The knell of all the Rogans been sounded to-day. As soon as the secret of these death-tubes has been analyzed by our science and provided against, my friend and I will return from Earth with a force that shall clear the universe of the slimy devils. Meanwhile, your people are safe here; with the gravity what it is, no Rogan attacking hordes can land."

They crawled tortuously over the square to the space ship. Brand turned again to Greca; and now in his eyes was a look that needed no language of mind or tongue for its complete expression.

"Will you come to Earth with me, Greca, and stay by my side till we return to set your people in power again?"

Greca shook her head, slowly, reluctantly. "My people need leaders now. I must stay and help direct them in their new freedom. But you--you'll come back with the others from Earth?"

"Try and stop him!" grinned Dex. "And try and stop me, too! From what I know now of the way they grow 'em on your satellite"--his eyes rested on Greca's beauty with an admiration that turned her to rosy confusion--"I'd say I'd found the ideal spot to settle down in!"

Brand laughed. "He's answered for me too. And now, a salute that is used on Earth to express a promise...." He kissed her--to her utter astonishment and perplexity, but to her dawning pleasure. "Good-by for a little while."

The two Earthmen hoisted themselves heavily over the sill of the control room of their ship, and crawled inside.

They secured the trap-door, and turned on the air-rectifiers. Brand moved to the controls, waved to Greca, who was smiling at him through the glass panel, and pointed the ship on its triumphant, four hundred million mile journey home.

Contents

THE OUTBREAK OF PEACE

By H. B. FYFE

When properly conducted, a diplomatic mission can turn the most smashing of battle-successes into a fabulous Pyrrhic victory.

It was a great pity, Space Marshal Wilbur Hennings reflected, as he gazed through the one-way glass of the balcony door, that the local citizens had insisted upon decorating the square before their capitol with the hulk of the first spaceship ever to have landed on Pollux V.

A hundred and fifty years probably seemed impressive to them, amid the explosive spread of Terran colonies and federations. Actually, in the marshal's opinion, it was merely long enough to reveal such symbols as more than antiquated but less than historically precious.

"I presume you plan to have me march past that heap!" he complained, tugging at the extremely "historical" sword that completed the effect of his dazzling white and gold uniform.

Commodore Miller, his aide, stiffened nervously.

"Around to the right of it, sir," he gestured. "As you see, the local military are already keeping the route clear of onlookers. We thought it would be most impressive if your party were to descend the outer stairway from the palace balcony here ... to heighten the importance of--"

"To draw out the pomp and circumstance of opening the conference?"

"Well, sir ... and then across the square to the conference hall of the capitol, outside which you will pause for a few gracious words to the crowd--"

"And that will probably be my last opportunity to enjoy the morning sunlight. Oh, well, it seems much too bright here in any case."

The commodore absently reached out to adjust a fold of his chief's sky-blue sash, and the marshal as absently parried the gesture.

"I shall be hardly less than half an hour crossing the square," he predicted sourly. "With the cheering throngs they have undoubtedly arranged, and the sunlight reflecting from all that imitation marble, it will be no place to collect one's thoughts."

* * * * *

He turned back to the huge chamber constituting the "office" of the suite supplied by his Polluxian hosts. The skeleton staff of men and women remaining occupied chairs and benches along only one wall, since the bulk of the delegation had been sent out to make themselves popular with the local populace.

Hennings presumed the bulk of the local populace to consist of Polluxians assigned to making themselves popular with his Ursan Federation delegation. His people would be listening politely to myriad reasons why the Polluxians had a natural right to occupy all the star systems from here to Castor, a dozen light-years farther from Terra. No one would mention the true motive--their illogical choice in naming themselves the Twin Empire.

"Well, now!" he said crisply. "Once more over the main points of the situation! No, commodore, not the schedule of experts that will accompany me to the table; I rely upon you to have perfected that. But have there been any unforeseen developments in the actual fighting?"

A cluster of aides, mostly in uniform but including a few in discreetly elegant civilian attire, moved forward. Each was somehow followed within arm's reach by an aide of his own, so that the advance presented overtones of a small sortie.

Hennings first nodded to the first, a youngish man whose air suggested technical competence more than the assurance of great authority. The officer placed his brief case upon the glistening surface of a large table and touched a switch on the flap.

"It's as well to be sure, sir," the commodore approved. "Our men have been unable to detect any devices, but the walls may have ears."

"They won't scan through this scrambler, sir," asserted the young officer.

Hennings accepted a seat at the table and looked up to one of the others.

"Mirelli's Star," an older officer reported briskly. "The same situation prevails, with both sides having landed surface troops in force on Mirelli II, Mirelli III, and Mirelli V, the fourth planet being inhabited by a partly civilized, nonhuman race protected under the Terran Convention."

"Recent engagements?"

"No, sir. Maneuvering continues, but actual encounters have declined in frequency. Casualties are modest and evenly matched. General Nilssen on Mirelli III continues to receive Polluxian agents seeking his defection."

"I never thought to ask," murmured Hennings. "Is he really a distant connection of the Polluxian Nilssen family?"

"It is improbable, sir, but they are polite enough to accept the pretense. Of course, he rejects every offer in a very high-minded manner, and seems to be making an adequate impression of chivalry."

He stepped back at Henning's nod, to be replaced by another officer.

"One minor space skirmish in the Agohki system to report, sir. The admiral in command appears to have recouped after the error of two days ago, when that Polluxian detachment was so badly mauled. He arranged the capture of three of our cruisers."

"Was that not a trifle rash?" demanded Hennings.

"Intelligence is inclined to think not, sir. The ships were armed only with weapons listed as general knowledge items. The crews were not only trained in prisoner-of-war tactics, but also well supplied with small luxuries. The Polluxian fleet in that system is known to have been in space for several months, so a friendly effect is anticipated."

Hennings considered the condensed report proffered for his perusal. He noted that the Polluxians had been quite gentlemanly about notifying Ursan headquarters of the capture and of the complete lack of casualties. He also saw that while the message was ostensibly directed to the Federation flagship, it had been beamed in such fashion as to be conveniently intercepted at the secret Ursan Federation headquarters on Agohki VII.

"That was a bit rude of them," he commented. "We have never dragged their secrets into the open."

"On the other hand, sir," the commodore suggested, "it may be an almost sophisticated method of permitting us to enjoy our superior finesse."

"I am just as pleased to have the reminder," said Hennings. "It will serve to alert us all the more when we sit down with them over there."

An elegant civilian, a large man with patient, drooping features, stated that nothing had occurred to change the economic situation. Another reported that unofficial channels of information were holding up as well as could be expected. A uniformed officer summarized the battle situation in two more star systems.

"Those are positions we actually desire to hold, are they not?" Hennings asked. "Is action to be taken there?"

"Plans call for local civilian riots at the height of the conference, sir."

"But ... can we lay no groundwork sooner than that? Sometime in the foreseeable future, at least! Take it up with Propaganda, Blauvelt! It seems to me that the briefing mentioned an indigenous race on one of these planets--"

Blauvelt dropped his eyes momentarily, equivalent in that gathering to a blush of intense embarrassment. Hennings coughed apologetically.

"Well, now, I should not pry into arrangements I must later be able to deny convincingly with a clear conscience. I can only plead, my dear Blauvelt, the tenseness of the past several days."

The officer murmured inaudibly, fumbled with his papers, and edged to the rear rank. Someone, at Commodore Miller's fluttering, obtained a vacuum jug of ice water and a glass for the marshal, but Hennings chose instead to produce a long cigar from a pocket concealed beneath his resplendent collection of medals.

"My apologies to all of you," he said thoughtfully. "I fear that any of you who may expect contact with the local population had better see Dr. Ibn Talal about the hypnosis necessary to counteract my little indiscretion. And now--what remains?"

"Nothing but the prisoner exchange, sir," Commodore Miller announced after collecting the eyes of the principal officers.

Hennings got his cigar going. He listened to confirmation of a previous report that a massive exchange of "sick and wounded" prisoners had been accomplished, and learned that the Ursans now suspected that they had accepted unknowingly about as many secret agents as they had sent the Polluxians.

"Oh, well!" he sighed. "As long as the amenities were preserved! We must be as friendly as possible about that sort of thing, or run the risk of antagonizing them."

Seeing that the commodore was tense with impatience, the marshal rose to his feet. An aide deftly received the cigar for disposal, and the party drifted expectantly toward the balcony doors.

From among that part of the staff which would remain to man headquarters, an officer was dispatched to alert the Polluxian honor guard.

* * * * *

One more touch before the die is cast, thought the marshal, as two young officers opened the balcony doors to admit the blare of trumpets.

Cheers rolled successively across the square, rising like distant waves from somewhere beneath the gigantic banner that draped the capitol opposite with fiery letters spelling out "PEACE CONFERENCE."

With a dramatic gesture, Hennings held up the sheaf of reports they had just reviewed. Smiles disappeared in response to his own serious mien.

"So much for the hostilities!" he snapped. He tossed the reports to the officer who would remain in charge. "Now for the actual war!"

Pivoting on his heel, he led them smartly out to the ornate balcony stairway that curved down into the sea of cheering Polluxians.

THE END

Contents

MASTER OF NONE

BY NEIL GOBLE

The advantages of specialization are so obvious that, today, we don't even know how to recognize a competent syncretist!

Freddy the Fish glanced at the folded newspaper beside him on the bench. A little one-column headline caught his eye:

MYSTERIOUS SIGNALS FROM OUTER SPACE

"Probably from Cygnus," he said.

Freddy mashed a peanut, popped the meat into his mouth, and tossed the shell to the curb in front of his bench. He munched and idly watched two sparrows arguing over the discarded delicacy; the victor flitted to the head of a statue, let go a triumphant dropping onto the marble nose, and hopped to a nearby branch.

"Serves him right," Freddy said. He yawned and rubbed the stubble on his chin. Not yet long enough for scissors, he decided. He pulled his feet up on the bench, twisting in an effort to get comfortable. The sun was in his eyes, so he reclaimed the discarded newspaper and spread it over his face. His eyes momentarily focused on MYSTERIOUS SIGNALS FROM OUTER SPACE, right over his nose.

"Sure, Cygnus," he muttered, and closed his eyes and dropped off to sleep.

When he was awakened, it was by an excited hand shaking his shoulder and a panting, "Freddy! Freddy! Lookit the Extra just came out!"

Freddy slowly sat up, ascertained the identity of the intruder and the fact that the sun was setting, and said, "Good evening, Willy. Please stop rattling that paper in my face."

"But just read it, Freddy," Willy shrieked, waving the paper so frantically that Freddy couldn't make out the big black headline. "'Positive contact from another planet,' the guy was yellin'. They put out an Extra so I snitched one from the boy. Read it to me, huh, Freddy? I'm dyin' o' curious."

"So give it here and I'll read it for you. Quit shakin' it or you'll tear it all up," Freddy snorted.

"Read it to me, huh, Freddy," Willy said, handing over the paper. "I don't know no one else that reads so good."

Freddy studied the headline and the first paragraph silently, then whistled lightly and lowered the paper.

"Y'know, Willy," he said, "the last thing I read before I dropped off a while ago was about these signals. But the funny thing is, I'd just assumed they were from Cygnus."

"What's a Cygnus, Freddy?" Willy asked, still pop-eyed. "A smoke? A dame? Or you mean like from Hunger?"

"Cygnus, my boy," Freddy explained patronizingly, "is a constellation within which there are two colliding galaxies. These colliding galaxies produce the most powerful electromagnetic radiations in the universe--an undecillion watts!"

"What's an undecillion?"

"An undecillion is ten raised to the 36th power," Freddy sighed, fearing that he wasn't getting through to Willy.

"No foolin'? What's a watt ... aw, you're pullin' my leg again, Freddy, talkin' riddles. Where'd ya ever learn to talk that way anyhow!"

"Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford, Georgia Tech, Oklahoma. Picked up a little here, a little there," Freddy said, reflecting on his indiscriminate past.

"Aw, cut it out, Freddy! C'mon, read it to me. Betcha can't! Where'd ya say it was from? Cygnus?"

"Not Cygnus. Ganymede." Freddy cleared his throat and rattled the newspaper authoritatively. "Washington: White House sources declared today that intelligent beings on a Jupiter moon have contacted the United States government. While the contents of the message have been made secret, the White House emphasized the message was friendly."

Freddy continued, "The signals, which were intercepted yesterday, were decoded this morning by a team of government scientists and cryptographers who had been at the task all night. While officials were noncommittal about the nature of the message contained in the signals, they declared, 'We are authorized to state that the received message was friendly and appears to represent a sincere attempt by another race of intelligent beings to contact the people of Earth. A reply message is being formulated.' Officials further explained that the possibility of the signal's being a hoax has been thoroughly investigated and that there is no doubt whatsoever that the message is a genuine interspatial communication from intelligent beings on Ganymede. Ganymede is one of twelve moons of the planet Jupiter, and is larger than the planet Mercury."

Freddy stopped.

"Ain't there any more?" Willy whined.

"The rest of it is about how far away Ganymede is, and its relative density and mass and stuff. You wouldn't be interested, Willy."

"Oh. I guess not." Willy helped himself to a peanut. "What's it mean, Freddy?"

"Nothing much, Willy. Just that there's people somewhere besides here on Earth, and they called us on the phone."

"Whadd'ya know about that!" Willy gasped. "I didn't even know they was other people!" He stared with disbelief at the paper.

"I don't suppose anyone knew."

"How d'ya suppose they knew?" Willy asked. "I mean, that we was here, if we didn't know they was there?"

"I've been wondering about that, Willy. You know that last rocket we shot?"

"From Cape Carnival you mean?"

"Yeh. It was supposed to go into orbit around Jupiter. I wouldn't be surprised if maybe it didn't land on Ganymede; the people there could have examined it, figured out where it came from, and then radioed us on the same frequency the rocket transmitter used. Paper doesn't say that, of course, but it's a reasonable hypothesis."

"Freddy, I think you must be a genius or sumpin'."

Freddy smiled and stretched out to sleep again as Willy wandered off, staring blankly at the newspaper.

* * * * *

Carlton Jones, America's Number One personnel specialist, scowled at the pamphlet on his desk.

SECRET, it said in big red letters across the top and bottom. Special Instructions for Operation Space Case, said the smaller letters across the middle of the top sheet.

"Now I ask you, Dwindle," Jones said to his clerkish aide, "where, in this worldful of specialists, am I going to find someone with a well-rounded education? Much less one who'll take a chance on a flier like this?"

"Gosh, Mr. Jones, I just wouldn't know," Dwindle blinked. "Have you tried looking through your files?"

"Have I tried looking through my files," Jones sighed, looking at the ceiling light. "Dwindle, my files include every gainfully employed person in the United States of America and its possessions. Millions of them. One doesn't just browse through the files looking for things."

"Oh," Dwindle said. "I'm kinda new at this specialty," he explained.

"Yes, Dwindle. However," Jones continued, "one does make IBM runouts to find things."

"Hey, that's great!" Dwindle said, brightening. "Why don't you try making an IBM runout?"

"I did, Dwindle. Please let me finish? Our instructions call for finding a person with a well-rounded education. More specifically, a person who is capable of intelligently discussing and explaining some two dozen major 'fields of knowledge.' Plus, of course, at least a passing acquaintance with some one or two hundred minor fields of knowledge.

"So I set Mathematics into the IBM sorter. Mathematics is one of the major fields of knowledge, you see."

"Yeh," Dwindle acknowledged.

"So I took the few million mathematicians' cards which I got--good mathematicians and bad mathematicians, but at least people who can get their decimals in the right place. I set the IBM sorter for Biology, and ran the mathematicians' cards through. So I got several thousand mathematician-biologists."

"That's pretty sharp!" Dwindle exclaimed with a twinkle. "Whoever thought of that!"

"Please, Dwindle," Jones moaned, pressing his palms to his eyes. "Next I sorted according to Geology. Three hundred cards came through. Three hundred people in America who know their math, biology and geology!"

"That doesn't sound like so many to me," Dwindle said hesitantly, as if wondering what there was to get so excited about.

"And of those three hundred, do you know how many understand, even vaguely, Electronics? Twelve. And of those twelve, guess how many have an adequate background in History and Anthropology? Much less an understanding of eighteen other fields?"

"Not very many, I'll bet," Dwindle replied smartly.

"None! Not even one! I tried running the cards through in every order imaginable. We've bred a race of specialists and there's not a truly educated man among us!"

"Say, you know what I bet? Even if you did find a guy who's like what all you said ..."

"Go ahead, Dwindle."

"... I bet he wouldn't even go up there to Ganymede. I sure wouldn't! I'd be scared to death," Dwindle chattered, waving his finger. "How's he gonna get back, even if he gets there O.K.? Couldn't anyone fool me with a bunch of pretty talk; I know the government doesn't have a rocket that could take off again after it got there. Gotta have launching pads and computers and all that stuff. Government ever think about that?"

Jones held his head in anguish. "Dwindle, why don't you be a good boy and run along to the snack bar for a coffee break? And bring me some aspirin when you come back."

* * * * *

Freddy the Fish, Willy and Oscar Fronk were occupying the same bench, a comradeship made necessary by the overpopulation of the park on such a glorious day. Oscar was surveying the passing girls and scouting for worthwhile cigarette stubs. Willy was admiring a hovering beetle's power of flight, and Freddy was reading a discarded copy of Scientific American.

The beetle landed on Willy's sleeve and promptly located a gaping tear in the fabric, through which bare arm showed. Willy raised his other hand menacingly.

"Don't," Freddy barked, causing Willy to jump with enough force to dislodge the beetle.

"Aw, Freddy," Willy whined, "why dintcha lemme kill it? What good's a stupid bug?"

"That would have been a rather unfortunate kill, Willy, by your bare hand on your bare arm. You must learn to be cognizant of our insect friends and insect enemies."

"So what's he, poison or sumpin'?"

"Unpleasant, at least," Freddy said. "That was a blister beetle; smash it on your arm and you'll grow a nice welt. A member of the Meloidae family."

"You mean bugs have families and all, too?" Willy asked.

"Beetle 'families' are groupings of similar species of insects," Freddy explained. "Not actually kinfolk. For instance, this beetle is related to the Lytta vesicatoria of southern Europe, more commonly known as the--" Freddy glanced out of the corner of his eye at Oscar, hoping to shield the next bit of information from his perverted brain, and whispered the name.

Willy's eyes widened. "Hey, Oscar," he hollered, jumping up. "You hear what Freddy said? That bug I almost swatted's practically a Spanish Fly!"

"Which way'd he go?" Oscar squeaked, allowing his collection of stubs to scatter as he hopped around, looking on and under and behind the bench for the escaping insect.

"Hold it, hold it," Freddy commanded, trying to restore order. "I said it's like it, not IS it. It doesn't have what it takes, so skip it, huh?"

Willy and Oscar sat down again. "Freddy," Willy sighed with adoration, "how'd ya ever get so smart? I mean, bein' a bum and all?"

"I keep telling you guys; I went to nothing but the finest universities. Well, except toward the end, when I was getting desperate, I guess I wasn't so choosy."

"Aw, g'wan now, Freddy. Collitches cost money, and you're as poor as the rest of us. Bummin' for a cuppa coffee, and all the time talking about Yale, and Oxford, and Hah-vad."

"What would you say, Willy, if I told you that once I belonged to the richest family in Mississippi?"

"I'd say Mississippi was a pretty poor state," Willy said, and Oscar giggled.

"I once was Frederik Van Smelt, spoiled son of the wealthy shrimp and oyster scion. And there's nothing as bad, my father said, as spoiled Smelt. He disowned me, of course. I owned six Cadillacs--one right after the other, I wrecked them all. I traveled all over the world and probably counteracted a billion dollars' worth of foreign aid. I was kicked out of the best schools in the world."

"How come if you're so smart you flunked out of all them schools?" Oscar asked.

"Me? Flunked out? I never made less than an A in any course I took during my eight years at war with college. I was expelled from nine schools and barely escaped the highway patrol when I was bootlegging at Oklahoma University!"

"Freddy," Willy said, "you're lyin' like a dog, butcha make it sound s' real!"

* * * * *

Jones squirmed uncomfortably in his seat in the briefing room, phrasing and rephrasing his thoughts. It seemed that no matter which arrangement of words he chose, it still was going to be obvious that he'd flopped. He re-examined his fingernails and selected one which was still long enough to chew.

General Marcher concluded his current appraisal of the situation and began calling on the various individuals with whom certain phases of OPERATION SPACE CASE had been entrusted. Jones groaned as each arose and gave favorable progress reports.

"The pod is completed and has been tested, sir. It will by no means be plush, but it will be sufficiently comfortable even for the long voyage to Ganymede."

"The guidance system is perfected to the extent that we need."

"There are no further deceleration problems to be solved."

"The crash program has been approved for the two-way rocket; it is on the drawing board and current estimates are that the envoy can be brought back in three years."

"Ganymede has replied to our last message; a suitable artificial environment will be available for the envoy."

"Personnel Specialist Jones?"

Carlton gave his chin a final sweaty rub and slowly rose to his feet. "General Marcher, sir," he choked, "I'm ... we're ... experiencing a little difficulty finding a volunteer, so far--"

"Negative perspiration on that count, Jones," the Project Officer interrupted. "The draft has never been abolished; we can grab anyone you put your finger on! Now, who will it be?"

"Sir, it doesn't seem to be that so much as ... well ... sir, has any consideration been given to perhaps sending a delegation rather than a single envoy?"

The general smiled broadly. "Now, that is more like it! I take it you mean you have a number of equally-qualified persons who have expressed an intense desire to go to Ganymede, and there is no way to impartially select one of these men over the others? This is commendable. However, our space limitation clearly precludes sending more than one person. I'm afraid you will just have to make your choice from a hat."

Jones turned a trifle redder. "That's not exactly the problem, either, sir."

The general's smile wilted and became a frozen frown. "Just exactly what are you trying to say, Jones?"

"There's no one who can meet the qualifications, sir," Jones said, feeling sick at his stomach.

"Are you telling me that in the entire United States, there is not one person who has a basic understanding of the twenty-four major fields?"

"I'm afraid that's right, sir."

"See me after the briefing, Jones. I'm certain that the Foremost Personnel Specialist in the United States must have some further ideas on this matter."

Jones sank slowly back into his seat and covered his face with his hands. "I'm a goner," he whispered to himself. "Jones, you can be replaced."

Dwindle, sitting on his left, suddenly punched him vigorously in the ribs. "Say, Mr. Jones," he rattled, "I just thought of a great idea."

"Tell it to the general," Jones moaned. "Maybe then he'll realize what a handicap I've been working under."

* * * * *

"Hi ya, Freddy," Willy said, sitting down on the bench and helping himself to some peanuts. "Workin' a crossword puzzle?"

Freddy pocketed his pencil stub and laid aside the newspaper. "Naw, not this time. Just playing around with one of those 'We're looking for bright young men' ads."

"Freddy! Y'ain't thinkin' a gettin' a JOB?"

"Nothing like that," Freddy laughed. "Just, exercising my mind. Filling out one of those little tests they always have. Helps keep a fella sharp, you know."

"Yeh, I seen the kind. Like what has pictures and you're supposed to find things wrong in the picture like dames with beards and dogs with six feet?"

"Kinda like that, only this one's all written and is a little tougher. You're supposed to send the answers in and whoever has good answers gets to take a tougher test and whoever does good on that test gets the job. Probably selling neckties on the corner or something."

"No kiddin'. That what it says?"

"Just says 'handsome rewards,' but that's probably close to it."

"You gonna send it in?" Willy asked.

"Naw, I just fill 'em out for fun, like I said. Can you imagine me peddling neckties on the corner?"

"Then how d'ya know if you got the right answers?"

"Hell, I know the answers," Freddy bragged. "Like I said, this is just exercise. Mental gymnastics. Like this last one; it was pretty tough compared to most of them. Had some questions about things I hadn't even thought about since college, things I'd forgotten I knew. What good's an education if you forget what things you know?"

"That's why I never bothered," Willy agreed. "'Cause I never could remember things so good."

"No, Willy. You've got it all wrong. I still know it, I just didn't know I know it."

"Aw, Freddy," Willy said unhappily. "You're pullin' my leg again!"

"Suit yourself," Freddy smiled. "Hold down the bench for me, O.K.? I'll be right back."

Willy watched Freddy until he went into the little brick building in the center of the park, and then grabbed Freddy's newspaper and scampered over to Oscar's bench.

"Hey, you know how Freddy's always talkin' big about how much he knows," Willy said breathlessly. "I got an idea how to call his bluff. He filled out one of these tests and says he knows all the answers. Let's send it in and see if he's as smart as he says!"

"Yeh! That's great, Willy!" Then Oscar's face darkened. "Wonder where we can steal a stamp?"

* * * * *

"That was a pretty good idea of mine, about advertising in the paper, wasn't it, Mr. Jones?" Dwindle, America's Number One Personnel Specialist, asked his surly assistant.

"Yes, Dwindle."

Jones stared gloomily out the fourteenth story window into the park, where the local bums were loafing and sleeping and feeding peanuts to the pigeons. He was nauseated with the prospect of having to address his new boss as "Mr. Dwindle," and was toying with the idea of abandoning his specialty completely to join the ranks of the happy, carefree unemployed. He watched as two uniformed policemen approached one of the less wholesome-appearing characters.

"No, I don't suppose I could tolerate being in and out of jail every week on a vagrancy charge," he told himself. But then he smiled bitterly as he thought of the strange parallel between the policemen arresting the bum and other officials, elsewhere in the United States, tapping respectable citizens on the shoulder at this very moment.

"Dwindle, do you really think it was wise to issue warrants to arrest all those persons who scored perfect on the first test? How many did you say there were?"

"Only a hundred or so," Dwindle smiled sweetly. "And besides, they're not being arrested. General Marcher explained to you that they are being drafted into the service of the government. Honestly, sometimes I think you worry too much."

Jones turned back to the window, brooding over Dwindle's transformation. "Maybe so," he sighed, watching the newly-arrested vagrant pointing an accusing finger toward one of the other bums.

* * * * *

Willy strained and twisted, trying to reclaim his arm from the policeman's grip.

"Honest, you guys. I didn't know it was against the law. Aw, I figgered it was against the rules mebbe to send in somebody else's answers, but we wuz only makin' a joke, Oscar 'n' me. Oscar's the one who actual put it in the mailbox and stole the stamp! I bet he's the one you're after!"

"Now calm down, Willy," the beefy policeman coaxed. "No one's broken any law. Nobody's under arrest. We just want to chat a minute with whoever it was filled out that test."

"Yeh, Willy," the second policeman broke in, "if you didn't do it, and I believe you when you say you didn't, then who did?"

"What's it to ya?" Willy asked, his mouth twitching nervously.

The first policeman glanced at the second and then back at Willy. "Well, it's like this, Willy," he said. "Whoever filled out those answers got every one of them right. The people who run the contest want to meet the guy, see? And they asked us to help find him because we know you people better than anyone else does. See? That's all!"

"Yeh," said the second. "That's all. Now who did it?"

Willy stood with his jaw drooping for a moment. "You mean he got ever' last one of 'em right?" he asked. "Freddy was always braggin' about his brains, but me 'n' Oscar figgered he was makin' most of it up."

"Freddy who? Freddy the Fish you mean?"

"Yeh, Freddy." Willy perked up and turned toward Freddy's bench. "Hey, Freddy! Hey, you know that test you took in the newspaper that you didn't know I sent in? You won the contest or sumpin'! Hey, that's great!"

* * * * *

Jones and Dwindle watched the draftees file into the examination room.

"I still don't see how this is going to solve the problem," Jones frowned.

"I believe it will," Dwindle contradicted him. "Specialists in each of the major fields have been consulted, and each provided fifty questions."

"The hardest questions they could think up, I imagine."

"No, not at all. The purpose is to provide comprehensive coverage of each field. And each question is of the type that, if the examinee knows the answer, it can be reasonably assumed that he knows quite a bit in that particular phase of the field. For instance, if he knows what enzyme is associated with the stomach, he probably knows what enzyme is associated with the liver."

"I know one big problem you're going to run into," Jones sulked. "Just like the IBM cards. You're going to find one guy who clobbers the Electronics part of the test but completely busts out in History and everything else."

"I don't think so," Dwindle said. "The preliminary test will have taken care of that. It was designed so that, in order to answer every question right, a person would have to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of all twenty-four major fields."

As Jones was considering whether it would be better to slit his own throat or Dwindle's, General Marcher entered the room and approached.

"Excellent. Excellent," the general declared. "A very distinguished-looking group you've assembled here, Dwindle. Hello, Jones."

"Yes, sir," Dwindle said, "with the possible exception of the seedy chap in the rear."

Jones looked to the rear of the room, and his eyes bugged.

Freddy the Fish, clean-shaven but tattered, was alternately wetting the pencil lead in his mouth and eating peanuts.

"That's the bum who feeds sparrows in the park!" Jones gasped. "How did he get out of jail so quick? I saw a couple of policemen haul him off just a day or so ago."

"This is where they hauled him to," General Marcher said. "It just so happens that he answered every question right on the preliminary examination. He says his name's Freddy Smith, although I doubt that he could prove it."

"He says he never had a father," Dwindle added. "Says his family was too poor."

Jones stared at General Marcher, then stared at Dwindle, then turned and stared at Freddy the Fish, who had just left his seat and was ambling toward the trio.

"Looks like he's throwing in the towel," Jones, said happily. "He's bringing his paper with him."

"Maybe he just wants clarification on a question," Dwindle said.

"I'm all done," Freddy said. "Who gets this?"

"Go ahead, Dwindle," Carlton Jones smirked. "Grade the man's paper. He's all done."

Dwindle smiled uncertainly. "You're allowed all the time you need, Mr. Smith."

"Oh, that's O.K. I'm done."

Dwindle produced his red pencil and the answer sheet which had 1,200 small circles punched in it. He sat down, placed the key over the test paper, and began searching for white spaces showing through.

* * * * *

"That's the last one, sir," Dwindle said six hours later as he added the one hundred twelfth graded test to the neat stack at the left of his desk. He stared through the thousand-plus holes in the answer key as if expecting the holes to shift.

"And still no change in the standings?" General Marcher asked again.

"Mr. Smith still has the best grade," Dwindle answered.

"The percentages again?" the general asked.

"Over all, ninety-six per cent for Mr. Smith," Dwindle said for the fourth time. "His lowest percentage in any one category was eighty per cent. The next highest score was by Dr. Schmelling, who had seventy-eight per cent, but he failed in six categories. The third highest score was by Dr. Ranson, seventy-six per cent, failing in seven categories. The fourth highest score was--"

"Enough. Enough," General Marcher interrupted. "I think we've found our man, don't you, Dwindle?"

"I hope we don't have to use pressure, sir," Dwindle replied.

Jones turned from the window, from which he was observing the bums in the park. "How can you possibly consider such a thing," he blurted, "as to send a penniless, unemployed, dirty, ragged tramp to Ganymede as the United States' Number One emissary?"

"Jones, perhaps I'd best clarify a point or two for you," General Marcher said in measured tones. "We've been searching the nation over, seeking a man who can fulfill our exacting requirements. We have found that man. There is no doubt in my mind that Mr. Smith possesses the greatest single store of knowledge about this planet and its people. So far as I'm concerned, which is considerable, it doesn't matter that this man has chosen the way of a philosopher instead of seeking an occupation. It doesn't matter that he lacks the necessary status to be listed on your IBM cards. It doesn't matter that you failed to find this man, because Dwindle succeeded. And, it doesn't matter whether I ever see you again!"

"Yes, sir," Jones said, and picked up his hat and left.

"Now, back to the business at hand, Dwindle. You say these prospects don't know the reasons behind the test?"

"That is correct, sir. I feared there might be some temptation for the prospects to not do their best, if they knew that success might result in their being removed from the face of the Earth."

"Wise. Then I suggest we approach Mr. Smith on the idea, cautiously, to determine his sentiments. If he doesn't want to go, of course, we've got to draft him."

* * * * *

Freddy cracked the peanut, put half in his mouth and tossed the other half to the sparrows.

"I might be going away for a while, Willy," he said, ending a rather long silence.

"You ain't gettin' a job, are ya Freddy?"

"Watch yer language," Oscar scolded.

"Naw, not really a job. At least not the kind you think of. Sort of an all-expense-paid vacation, with a change of scenery."

"Ya ain't had a run-in with the bulls, have ya?" the stricken Willy asked.

"Me? You know me better, Willy. Nothing like that. And I'm not even sure the thing will pan out, but you know all those newspaper stories about messages from another planet?"

"Yeh! Yeh! Ya read it to me!" Willy jabbered excitedly.

"And that test I took that you sent in and the fellas talked to me about?"

"Yeh! Say, I hope that didn't make you trouble, Freddy, 'cuz me 'n' Oscar was just kinda jokin', see, and--"

"It's O.K., Willy. Well, one of the fellas I talked to was General Marcher, who's been mentioned in the newspaper stories in connection with ... here, Willy, take these," he interrupted himself when he saw the two men approaching. "See that new guy at the bench over yonder? Give him these peanuts. I think he'd like to feed my sparrows while I'm gone. Name's Jones, and he'll probably be around for a spell."

Freddy stood up to greet the two arrivals.

"Hello, general," he said, tipping his battered cap. "It's about the trip to Ganymede, I suppose?"

Contents

UNTHINKABLE

By ROG PHILLIPS

If Nature suddenly began to behave differently, what we consider obvious and elementary today might become--unthinkable.

In the story THE DESPOILERS in the October 1947 Amazing Stories I raised the question, "Is there anything absolutely beyond human comprehension?" In that story I gave humanity a thousand years to give birth to one man who could comprehend the incomprehensible.

The incomprehensible is harder to portray in a story than is merely the unknown. If we denote anything incomprehensible by the symbol X, we can describe what X is to a certain extent by knowing what it is not. We can, gradually, gain a certain insight into what it is by comparing it to what IS comprehensible.

In the last analysis the universe of normalcy is incomprehensible. We have made progress in comprehending it because we have isolated it into small bundles of events that can be dealt with by the human intellect.

We have arrived at certain basic pictures of the behavior of the incomprehensible. We have found a certain stability existing in the picture we have built up. We have searched the heavens and found that stars are made up of the same elements as the Earth--with a few exceptions. And with those exceptions we have brought them into the framework of our picture of the Universe by postulating "dense matter."

We have, slowly, come to the belief that the same laws operate throughout the entire Universe, just as they do here on the Earth. This is the Uniformity Postulate.

In that story THE DESPOILERS the Uniformity Postulate was not denied. The incomprehensible in that story was the mind of a Despoiler. It, to the human mind, was incomprehensible; and to the Despoiler, the human mind was incomprehensible.

Each viewed the Universe differently due to a difference in whatever lies at the foundations of the thinking processes. In other words, uniformity of the principle of thought was denied there.

Both the Despoilers and Man had mechanical civilization and science, but due to their different minds neither could comprehend completely the viewpoint of the other ON THE SAME THING. Each had applied his REASON to the disorder of nature and constructed what to him was a REASONABLE PICTURE.

The type of mentality I attributed to the Despoiler may be impossible. It may be that if the human race eventually reaches out and encounters other intelligent races it will find that the basic principles which result in thought as we know it are the ONLY basic principles that can give rise to thinking intelligence, so that wherever we find civilization we will find creatures that think the same as we do, and have seen the same pattern in nature that we have.

There is another possibility besides the encountering of incomprehensible minds. That is the possibility of encountering incomprehensible "islands" of reality.

One thing we have discovered about nature that makes such "islands" possible--or that makes it possible WE are living in such an "island"--is that matter has a habit of "reacting" to some types of energy patterns, and "totally ignoring" others.

Perhaps you can better understand what I mean by the following analogous position: Kah is an intelligent entity fixed at a certain point. He can only derive a picture of reality from what he sees. He can only see a foot in front of him. In all his existence he has seen only one type of thing--rocks about an inch in diameter. He therefore concludes that all reality is rocks an inch in diameter.

He is unable ever to learn that he is situated at a place where the one-inch rocks leave a screen with seven-eighths-inch holes that let every smaller pebble and all the sand through, and that seven-eighths-inch screen is the catch-all for a higher screen with one-inch holes that kept everything larger from coming through.

His Universe is brought to him by selective screening. He rationalizes what his Universe presents him, and postulates that ALL reality is identical to what he can experience. He can NOT conceive of what is utterly beyond his range of experience and imagination--which is merely the re-arrangement of reality or of thoughts derived from reality.

We are perhaps in much that same position. To be sure, our telescopes bring us data from stars that are so far away the human race will never reach them--but is not our telescope a "screen" that brings us only the one-inch rocks?

There may be and probably is a vast realm of reality co-existent with the reality we know, right around us; but it is "screened" from us. It may be possible that we know less than ten percent of actual reality around us due to the screening of our senses and our instruments that blocks completely, or permits to pass completely, every energy pattern that can't pass through the "holes" of our "screen."

Going back to Kah, the one-inch-rock-universe observer, suppose that in one batch of dirt dumped at the head of the screening system there happened to be no one-inch rocks at all? Or, more closely to the story you are about to read, suppose, with his mind deeply grooved with the tracks of the one-inch rocks, he were to move to a vantage point where there were no one-inch rocks, but larger or smaller ones?

He would immediately find nature behaving according to an utterly strange pattern, BUT he could only sort the incoming sensations according to the neural grooves already built up in his mind! In his mind he could only see one-inch rocks or nothing, and since what he would see would obviously be something, it would either seem nothing to him, or one-inch rocks behaving strangely.

His instruments and his mind would interpret by the old gradations and scales and concepts. His Universe would still be made of nothing but one-inch rocks, to him, but its behavior would be strange.

Perhaps slowly, like a newborn child making sense out of its surroundings, or a foreigner slowly making sense out of our language, he would penetrate to the new reality with his mind. Perhaps in the very process his being would change its structure.

In the end he would be in a unique position. He would have the memories of one Reality, and the experiences of a new one. He would have the language of the old with which to describe the new to his old companions. Could he do it so they would comprehend it?

It would do him no good simply to invent new words to describe something beyond the experience of his old companions. He would have to describe something beyond their experience with words and sentences they had created to describe only what they had gained from their own experience! How could he hope to make them gain a true understanding of it?

He might tell them simply and truthfully everything he experienced--and it might come out utter nonsense! It probably would. Unless he could bring back some of the evidence, either intentionally or unwittingly.

At first that evidence might present a pattern of utter nonsense and contradiction with known thought patterns and concepts. It might present seemingly normal events in nonsense sequences. It might present impossible events in seemingly normal sequences. It might even present disjointed events in sequence.

What it would present would be only what the screen of the senses and the screen of the mind could accept. Underneath would be a perfectly orderly pattern of events of some sort, behaving according to different natural laws in conflict with those we have existed under. Slowly we might penetrate to an understanding of them, but not at first, because at first they would be completely UNTHINKABLE.

In this story, UNTHINKABLE, an attempt has been made to depict such a conflict of nature and human mentality. It is not the ordinary science fiction attempt. It is not new laws working in harmony with old, or new discoveries that fit into the old pattern. It is, if you please, an utterly alien bit of reality in conflict with the old.

The story cannot but be inadequate. It is the froth and foam of the struggle. It is the parts that fit into the words and phrases and sentences. You won't like it at all--unless you have the type of mind that can reach a little way beyond experience. And though what you may "see" may have no counterpart in all reality, if this story serves to expand your mental horizons, it has at least found an excuse for being written.

--ROG PHILLIPS

Dr. Nale Hargrave tossed his spotless grey hat expertly across the six feet of space between him and the coat tree, humming the while a currently popular tune whose only words he could remember were "Feemo fimo fujo, the flumy fwam to fwojo."

His eyes rested self-congratulatingly on the hat after it came to a safe stop, then turned to beam an instant at his receptionist before he continued on to his office.

She smiled after him with an affectionate, indulgent look, gave him as long as it took her to powder her nose and tuck a few stray hairs into place, then pressed the buzzer that signaled to quarantine that the doctor was ready to screen the crew of the U triple S Endore.

The Endore had arrived during the night. Usually crews that had to wait hours before passing through psych raised a big fuss. Quarantine wasn't exactly designed for comfort. A man couldn't be expected to enjoy sitting on a bench and reading a worn-out magazine after looking forward to visiting his old haunts on Earth after months or years in space. His only thought was to get through the red tape and step through the door on the other side of which lay freedom of expression and freedom from space discipline--and girls.

That was the usual result of forced delay in quarantine. The crew of the Endore hadn't let a peep out of them.

Martha Ryan, the receptionist, glanced knowingly at the closed door. She knew that Nale was sitting at his desk, his legs crossed carelessly, his long fingers holding the report on the Endore and the report of the psych observer. He was probably frowning slightly over the unusual behavior of the crew.

She had her own list of names of the crew on the desk before her. Heading the list was the name, Comdr. Hugh Dunnam. Dr. Nale would ordinarily call him first. Next would come any of the crew that the commander reported unbalanced, followed by the rest of the crew.

Sometimes when the psych observer's report was unfavorable to the whole crew he called some crew member at random before calling the top name.

It didn't surprise her, therefore, when the intercom came to life and Dr. Nale's voice pleasantly asked for a name two-thirds of the way down on the list of forty names--Ren Gravenard, spaceman/2d cls.

Martha's pencil followed the list down, making a light check after the name while she dialed quarantine to send in the man.

In her mind's eye she could visualize the lifted eyebrows of the day shift guards as they glanced over the huddled crew. She could see their suddenly changed attitude toward the crew, their new caution as they opened the heavy wire door and led the man out. She could see, too, the worried frown of Comdr. Dunnam, whoever he was, as he realized what that meant--to have a crew member precede him.

She could see, too, Dunnam's probable warning look to spaceman Gravenard to keep mum and play his cards close.

That was the trouble with crews of ships when they thought they might be held up by psych over something. They invariably overplayed their innocence right from the start.

The side door from quarantine opened. Two guards entered, preceding and following the first victim warily. Martha sized Ren Gravenard up closely while her face assumed the careful, welcoming smile that often brought attempts at dating.

Ren Gravenard was no different in appearance than a million like him. He was average in everything including his type of character.

"You are Ren Gravenard?" she asked.

He nodded without speaking.

Martha pressed the button that told Doctor Nale the first one had arrived, got his O.K. signal, and motioned Gravenard and the guards toward the inner door with a sweep of long yellow pencil in perfectly manicured fingers.

As the three passed into the private office she made a slow dash after the spaceman's name preparatory to writing his destination when he came out. It would be "obs" or "O.K."

Then she glanced at her wrist watch. Its hands pointed to six after nine. Two hours and fifty-four minutes later Ren Gravenard had still not come out. And in her two years as receptionist for Dr. Nale Hargrave, Martha Ryan had never known him to spend more than twenty minutes with any subject....

Her manicured nail pressed the buzzer three times to signal she was going to lunch. Giving Dr. Nale a full minute to make any request, without receiving any, she opened the door to the corridor and left.

* * * * *

When she returned an hour later she was surprised to see the door to Dr. Hargrave's inner office open and Dr. John Bemis, the chief of the psych staff, at the desk.

"Come in, Miss Ryan," Dr. Bemis said, accenting his invitation with a wave of his hand.

He waited until she had come in and closed the door behind her before continuing.

"There's something's happened," he said gravely. "I don't know just what, and maybe I don't exactly WANT to know."

Dr. Bemis spread his hands in an all inclusive gesture.

"The universe is a big place," he said. "I suppose we should have expected that sooner or later we'd run into something a little outside normal experience."

He shook his head slowly, looking up at the ceiling as though trying to pierce it and see beyond. When he continued, his voice was sharp and businesslike.

"Tell me exactly what you saw, thought, and felt this morning. Every detail, however unimportant you might think it."

"There's really very little to tell," Martha said, surprised and alarmed. "There was this crew of the Endore in quarantine when I came to work this morning. They were unusual in that they didn't complain about having to wait, indicating a guilt feeling in the crew. Dr. Hargrave asked to see a common spaceman first. That proved he recognized this. The name of the spaceman he saw is Ren Gravenard, who was brought in at a little after nine and was still in there when I left at twelve."

She looked keenly at Dr. Bemis. Something was so radically wrong somewhere that she didn't have the courage to even ask him. She just waited.

"Dr. Hargrave has been taken to observation," he said without warning. "So has the crew of the Endore. I--ah--believe you may take an indefinite leave from the office until further notice. With full pay, of course."

"Dr. Hargrave?" Martha asked, not hearing the last.

"Yes!" Dr. Bemis's voice changed from harsh tenseness to contriteness. "I'm sorry, Miss Ryan, but I feel it inadvisable to discuss it just now. All I can say is that full quarantine measures are now in force as of fifteen minutes ago. There will be no landing or taking off from Earth until it is lifted; and within this area the same quarantine applies."[1]

Martha Ryan hesitated, then turned and left. Dr. Bemis watched her go. After the door closed behind her he did a very peculiar thing. He took a gun out of his coat pocket and shot himself through the head. After that he went to a mirror on the wall, dressed the wounds carefully, wincing at the bite of the alcohol in the raw flesh, and, after drinking several glasses of water, returned to Dr. Hargrave's desk.

* * * * *

He sat there, drumming his fingers on the walnut surface, his eyes closed as if he were listening to something very far away. A buzzer under his desk gave three short buzzes. He reached over and deflected the toggle on the intercom.

"Back already, Martha?" he said cheerily. "Any more left on your list for the Endore?"

Martha checked her list. There had been two left when she went to lunch. They had been checked off, too, while she was gone.

"That's all, Dr. Nale," she said.

"Good," came his voice through the intercom. "Think I'll go out and have something to eat myself."

The click of the intercom was followed at once by the opening of the inner office door. Martha's eyes watched Dr. Nale Hargrave as he walked through the office and out into the corridor.

Her eyes remained on the exit after he had gone, a faint frown creasing the smooth skin above her eyes. She had an IRRATIONAL impression that she had seen Dr. Bemis, the super, instead of Dr. Nale, and with his head bandaged clumsily.

She dismissed this with a pout and took a book out of a drawer to do her afternoon reading.

The buzzer on her desk buzzed a warning. She laid the book flat as the inner office door opened and Dr. Nale escorted Ren Gravenard out into the waiting room.

Martha glanced at her watch. It was ten after nine. Four minutes! She expected the nod from Dr. Nale. Her pencil wrote an O.K. after the dash she had drawn four minutes ago.

"Thank you doctor," Ren Gravenard was saying heartily. The two guards left by the side door back to quarantine.

Dr. Nale went over and bent close to Martha's ear.

"As your psychiatrist," he said pseudo-seriously, "I can advise you that unless you kiss me I am going to feel quite frustrated."

"Oh, that would never do!" Martha laughed, and kissed him.

She jerked back, startled. There was the sound of a shot from the inner office. The door was still open. Martha and Dr. Nale looked through the door, horrified.

Ren Gravenard was standing in the middle of the inner office dropping a flat automatic into his side pocket. There was an ugly wound on either side of his head from a bullet that had passed directly through his brain.

He smiled at them disarmingly, "It's quite all right. You see, it couldn't possibly do me any harm because I'm waiting for the elevator."

"Oh," they said, relieved. They bent and kissed each other again while Ren Gravenard went over to the mirror on the wall and dressed the wounds, wincing from the raw touch of the alcohol on wounded bone and flesh.

The outer door opened and two men came in with a wicker basket.

Dr. Nale pointed over in the corner where one of the guards lay dead.

"What happened to him, Doc?" one of the men asked.

"He got shot through the head," Dr. Hargrave explained. "One of the men off the Endore did it. They're all being taken over to observation. I think I'll have to go over with them. I'm beginning to get an inkling of what's going on, and I'm very much afraid of what I think it is."

The two men set the basket down and lifted the wicker lid. Dr. Bemis came out of the inner office and laid down in the corner. The two men waited until he had settled himself, then lifted him into the basket.

Dr. Hargrave held open the outer door for them. He returned to the desk beside Martha and took a gun out of his coat pocket. He pointed it at her, frowned in indecision, then slowly, with perspiration standing out on his forehead, pulled out the clip and emptied the barrel of the gun.

"Good for you," Martha said. She picked up her book and started reading. Dr. Hargrave put the gun back in his pocket and went to the door.

"Take a few days off starting tomorrow," he said before going out. "I'm going to be slowly going crazy trying to figure this mess out. That's why I insisted to Dr. Bemis that I be confined with the crew of the Endore--just in case."

His heels made loud noises on the marble floor of the corridor. He pushed through the revolving doors to the sidewalk.

There was an argument going on between a small newsboy and an elderly gentlemen type of man.

"I tell you there's only two pennies," the boy insisted.

"There's four," the man insisted just as strongly. "See?"

He pried open the boy's fingers and looked.

"Sorry," he said. "You're right." His hand went into his pocket to make up the deficit.

"Hey! Wait a minute," the boy said. "I was wrong. You gave me two pennies too much."

A small pudgy finger took two of the pennies. The boy glanced at the others to make sure the right number were left.

Nale was close enough to see what happened. He saw the pennies taken from what seemed to be seven or eight in the boy's palm. When the two were taken away there seemed to be a slight blur--and there was only a solitary penny left.

He didn't wait. The paper boy and the customer were still patiently arguing as he climbed into his car and drove away. He drove slowly with his foot close to the brakes.

Although his eyes were warily watching each car on the street, his mind was busy. He was trying to figure out who had been shot.

"It might even have been me!" he thought. And there was no way of knowing.

He drove the car another block. There was doubt growing in his mind. On a sudden impulse he pulled the car over to the curb and stopped the motor. Getting out, he started walking rapidly. There would be three miles of walking before he reached observation, but it would be safer to walk.

A block further he stopped abruptly in surprise. The spaceport observation hospital was just in front of him.

"I should have guessed," he muttered as he pushed through the heavy doors. "The speedometer, of course. Naturally it would go first."

* * * * *

Martha Ryan saw the door close on Dr. Hargrave, then started reading again. She finished the page and turned it over. The first few words of the opposite side of the sheet showed the continuity to be difficult.

Thinking she might have turned two sheets by mistake, she turned back one. It was still wrong. She sighed exasperatedly. She distinctly remembered that she had been on page twenty-five, so the next page should be twenty-six. Since it hadn't been, she would have to look for twenty-six.

She looked through the book, page by page, and it wasn't there. Getting over her exasperation she made a game of it. Finally she developed to the stage where she would open the book at random, note the number of the page, close the book, and then try to find that page she had just seen.

It was a very peculiar book. She found that, (a) she could find any page number she wasn't looking for, and (b) any page number she looked for was not in the book, even though it had been a moment before.

Resting thoughtfully for several minutes on this achievement of deduction she decided to try another experiment. She counted the number of sheets of paper in the book and wrote the number down. It was one hundred twenty-four.

Then she counted them again. There were one hundred eighty-six. She counted them five more times, making seven times she had counted them. She got nine different numbers of sheets in the book. She decided she couldn't get nine different numbers after counting only seven times, and counted the numbers. There were five. She closed her eyes and counted to ten rapidly, then counted them again. There were fourteen.

She held out her hands. She had seven fingers on her right hand and three on her left. She chuckled dryly and thought, "Well, anyway there are ten altogether." She counted them to be sure, and there were thirteen.

Pursing her lips stubbornly she held up two fingers and counted them. There were two. She held them rigid and closed her eyes, counting rapidly to ten. Opening her eyes she looked cautiously at the upraised fingers. There were two.

She raised a third finger to join the other two, and there were five upraised fingers. Not only that, there were seven of them clenched. She closed her eyes and counted to ten quickly, then opened them. There were three upraised fingers. She counted the clenched ones and there were two. Relieved, she checked on the upraised fingers again--and there were seven.

She gave up in disgust. Deciding she ought to go home she stood up and started to cross to the coat tree.

The door to the corridor opened and Ren Gravenard stepped in.

"Hello!" Martha said in surprise. "I thought you were sent to observation."

"I was," Ren said. "That's where I am now, but when there are forty of you, you can sort of get lost in the group and wind up anywhere you want to."

"Well, I'm glad you're here," Martha said dryly. "Maybe you can explain a few things."

Ren grinned crookedly.

"Suppose I do the explaining over something to eat," he said. "I almost stopped and had something on the way over here, but I wanted to wait and eat with you. Do you mind?"

"Of course not," Martha frowned. She was taking a closer look at this spaceman second class. He had a nice way of smiling at her. His eyes had depths she hadn't noticed before.

* * * * *

The illogical thought came to her that maybe now that things didn't behave the way they should, maybe he and his fellow spacemen were the only ones that knew what it was all about.

"All this," Martha waved her hand vaguely. "It must have been caused by something about the Endore, mustn't it?"

Ren nodded, holding the door open for her. They walked along the corridor to the revolving doors, his hand tucked protectively under her arm.

"Is it mental?" Martha asked when they were on the sidewalk.

"No," Ren answered. "But let's wait until we eat. I'm starved to death. If you run into any trouble I'll help you out. You see, I know how to work things."

"Like finding page twenty-six in the book I'm reading?" Martha asked.

"That's simple," Ren said. "All you have to do is look for page twenty-nine and you'll run across page twenty-six right away. Things like that are mental, partly. I mean, you have to have the right attitude to get results you want."

"I don't understand," Martha said.

"Well, it's like this," Ren explained. "If you're looking for page twenty-six it won't be one of the first two pages you look at, regardless of where you open the book. But after you've looked at three of them you've passed the page you want unless you're not looking for it. If you're not looking for it you REACH the right page."

"But why page twenty-nine to find twenty-six?" Martha persisted.

"It has to do with the new arithmetic," Ren said.

"Oh," Martha said dully. "So that's the whole trouble with everything."

"No, that's only part of it," Ren said. "But here's a good place to eat." He guided her through the door.

An hour later Ren lit a cigarette and took a long drag on it, his eyes looking longingly into Martha's. He exhaled the smoke in a long white plume. Then he began talking.

"I don't know whether you read it on the report sheet or not, but the trip of the Endore began from this same spaceport two years ago. The observatory on Pluto had reported a free planet passing within two hundred quadrillion miles of the solar system. The Endore was assigned the task of landing on it, if feasible.

"I had been a member of the crew for only four months when the Endore turned outward from its position just the other side of Mars' orbit."

Ren smiled apologetically.

"I hadn't exactly planned on being a spaceman, second class. I don't know whether you know the system, but whether you do or not, it should suffice to say that I had studied for five years to become a research scientist, and failed. I decided to take out my disappointment by joining up for two years. I planned on making another try at research when I got out.

"Everything went along fine on the trip out. We were a very congenial crew with a fine, human commander. He made it a point to get personally acquainted with every member of the crew eventually. He seemed to take a particular liking to me for some reason. By the time we were half-way out to Metapor, as we found out it was called later, I was an unofficial first mate or something with free run of the pilot room and the instruments.

"I had guessed by now that when I enlisted they looked up my record and passed the word along to Commander Dunnam to sell me on the idea of a career as a spaceman.

"At any rate, I was in an ideal position to see all that went on first hand. We were within three hundred thousand miles of Metapor when we got the first indication of the change in metaphysics. I discovered it myself. I was helping the astrogator get the constants for the planet ..."

* * * * *

"Take a look at the gravy board, Ren," Ford Gratrick, the astrogator said. "What's she say?"

Ren looked at the fine black pointer on the gravity potentiometer. It pointed to a spot just two marks above the number ten on the dial.

"Ten and two tenths," Ren read.

"That can't be right," Ford frowned. "At this distance that would make this baby a super."

He came over and looked himself. While he was looking the pointer moved up to twenty and then down to six tenths.

"Must be out of order," Ford muttered. "Well, this'll give you experience with emergency equipment. Break out the manual gravy dish, Ren."

It was a fine coil spring in a glass tube. Other glass tubes fastened on, to make the length almost ten feet. At one g the spring with its weight would stretch out to the bottom. From there to a ten thousandth of a g the spring rose up to a point half-way.

Ren put it together speedily, placing it in the wall clamps designed to hold it. The glass itself was graduated with the scale of gravity strength. The cylindrical weight at the free end of the spring had a line on it that would coincide with the proper reading.

In practice it vibrated up and down so that it had to be read by estimation of the half-way point of the up and down motion.

Ren and Ford watched the red weight with its black line. It moved slowly and uniformly from the bottom to the top of the scale, from a full g to ten thousandth of a g, and back down again.

Meanwhile the gravity potentiometer (gravy board) was changing its reading constantly and erratically.

Ford licked his lips nervously and said, "Don't know what the old man'll say about this, but it looks like all we can say is that the thing has gravity."

"Why not call him and let him see for himself?" Ren asked.

Ford looked out the viewport at the round object in the distance and shook his head.

"I've got a hunch he knows it already," he said slowly. "The ship is probably on a nonsense track and the automatic tracker is either trying to find out what the law of gravity is, or is exploring for clues to light aberration. One gets you ten he'll give me a buzz in another minute."

He was right. The phone rang almost at once. It was Hugh Dunnam himself, asking for the gravy reading.

"You'll have to see it to believe it," Ford Gratrick said over the phone. "The manual swing is uniform over the whole range. The gravy board can't make up its mind where to settle at. It tries this and that reading."

He listened briefly. "Yes, sir," he said, and hung up. "He wants you in the pilot room, Ren," he added.

Ren started out of the central instrument room through the axis tube.

"Better be careful," Ford shouted after him. "No telling how this gravitation will behave. Don't let it slam you against anything."

Ren heard his words. He had a sudden, crazy thought that it was his own voice, and that he, as he sped along through the ship, was in reality Ford Gratrick. The thought startled him. He promptly forgot it.

There was a frown of concentration on his face. He was trying to visualize a gravity pull whose intensity was not a single-valued pressure but a uniform continuum of pressure values from a minimum to a maximum.

It was like--well, like having an air pressure in a car tire that wasn't thirty pounds or thirty-two pounds, but every value from zero to thirty-five pounds.

It was like transforming the points and intervals on a line to a domain where there had previously been only points!

* * * * *

Hugh Dunnam was waiting for him when he arrived in the pilot room. His iron grey hair was mussed from exasperated hair-pulling. He jabbed a finger in the direction of the automatic pilot without speaking.

Ren saw that it had been cut out. The first mate was controlling the ship manually. The robot mechanism was still turning out its data sheets, however. In five minutes Ren saw that the only consistent detail was the distance of the ship from the planet.

Commander Dunnam watched him silently for several minutes. Finally Ren laid down the data sheets and looked at him with a slow smile.

"Well?" Dunnam asked.

"It reminds me of a kid I knew quite well when I was in grade school," Ren said. "He was an incurable liar, so you could never take anything he said, but always had to figure out the truth yourself and act on it regardless of what he might claim to be the truth."

"You mean the instruments have all become liars?" Hugh Dunnam asked, amazed at the idea.

"No," Ren replied. "I don't think that. I think nature is the liar, in a way. I mean she is according to our standards. We'll have to outguess her, that's all."

"Now you're cooking," Hugh exclaimed. "What would you suggest?"

"We know this planet has gravity," Ren replied. "There's no way of knowing how much or how little. Suppose we kill our tangential speed and just fall in? The gravity will take care of that, regardless of its value or set of values."

"But we'll crash!" Hugh objected.

Ren took one of the report sheets and figured rapidly on its back.

"Unless I'm radically wrong," he said, "our speed of impact will be every speed from zero to a thousand miles a minute. Not only that, no matter how we try to land that will be the set of values for our speed. Naturally the thousand miles a minute will smash us flat, but the zero speed will let us down easy."

"And so?" Hugh asked suspiciously.

"No matter how we go in," Ren smiled, "we'll smash the ship and kill everybody--and we'll land safely."

"Are you crazy?" Hugh snorted.

"I--I'm not quite sure," Ren said seriously. "I think that we've run across a bit of matter that works from different basics than what we are used to. You might call it a different metaphysics. That's what it really amounts to."

A pain of remembrance appeared on his face.

"That's why I didn't get my degree," he said softly. "I insisted that it might be possible there were no absolute rules underlying all reality, but only relative rules that might be changeable. In other words, I questioned the validity of asserting that natural law was universal. They flunked me in stability."

"Yes, I know," Commander Dunnam said sympathetically. "One of the most unjust rules of modern education in the opinion of many, but no way of changing it unless the educators themselves did it. Since they all passed O.K. in stability, they think everyone else should. Maybe they're afraid they would be considered unstable if they wanted to make such a major change."

* * * * *

Ren glanced toward the screen that showed the magnified image of the interstellar wanderer, and back again to the commander.

"Of course," he said, "I'm trying to use ordinary basics transposed onto the basics of this system, which is wrong. Or it may be right. It might be better if we just turned around and went back. There's no way of knowing ahead of time whether we'd be killed on landing or not."

"Look, Ren," the commander said seriously. "I like you. You--you're just about like my son would have been today if he had lived. I'm just a spaceman. I depend on instruments. They don't work here. All of us are just as helpless as if we didn't know the first thing about our trade. We can't go back without landing on this stray planet. If we tried to tell them the reasons, I'd be retired and the whole crew would be stuck on various routine tub runs. Suppose you unofficially take charge. If we get killed--we all expect to end that way in our trade. If we don't, we'll be able to take back something with us to prove what we've run into. Maybe it will vindicate you and make you a reputation. You'll get all the credit I can turn your way."

"Thank you, sir," Ren said, his voice choked with gratitude. In his heart he knew that he would have sold his soul to the devil for this coming experience that had been given him without his asking.

He had spent years preparing for this--years that his teachers had felt were wasted. He had explored all the crazy systems of logic abandoned in the march of progress. He had even devised systems of his own, synthesized from undefined symbols according to strange patterns outside the field of logic.

Yes. He felt that even if the basics of natural law in operation here were purely nonsense laws, he would be able to penetrate to a rational manipulation and control of things. Perhaps he might even set up the pattern operating, and join it in some way with so-called normal science.

Commander Dunnam came to attention, a twinkle in his eyes.

"At your command, sir," he said, saluting.

"Not that," Ren objected. "Let me just play the part of a scientist under your command, whose part it is to advise only."

"No," Hugh Dunnam said. "Until we leave this part of space you're in sole command. Call it what you want--a hunch maybe; but I feel that there is a purpose in things, and it wasn't chance that gave you the type of mind you have and threw you under my command on this trip."

"Very well, sir," Ren said, returning the salute. He smiled. Behind his smile his analytical mind was working rapidly.

"The commander's reactions are not normal," his thoughts said. "They could not be dictated by anything in his past. Therefore they are dictated by something outside him--something on that planet below!"

It was a wild conjecture. The more he thought of it the more certain Ren became that there was some intelligence down there that had already made contact with the minds in the ship.

Strangely, this didn't alarm him. He felt that "it" was friendly. He felt that "it" had plumbed the minds of all on board and chosen him to take over and lead the others.

Eagerly he "listened," but no faintest whisper or flavor of thought came to support his feeling of an alien contact. In spite of this he went ahead with his study of things with a confidence that "something" was watching and would see them through all right.

* * * * *

His eyes turned again to the image of the cold planet below. That image returned his stare blankly, its inscrutable surface devoid of any hint of mystery.

"I'd suggest we keep circling the planet until I have a chance to form a few definite conclusions," Ren said. "If that can't be done I'd suggest we retreat far enough so we can."

"Yes sir," Commander Dunnam said quietly. He repeated the suggestion in the form of an order to the first mate.

Ren studied the image of the planet. He left the pilot room and wandered over the ship aimlessly. He talked to the members of the crew he ran into.

He slept at his usual time. He ate his meals as usual. He stopped talking to the crew and just wandered about, occasionally going to the pilot room and studying the strange sphere of matter.

After three days he ordered the ship dropped to an orbit about five thousand miles from the surface. Almost as soon as the ship reached its new orbit changes began to be noticed.

Ren had the commander issue an order that every crew member was to report all unusual happenings within the ship. Twenty-four hours later he issued an order that each crew member was to write out a brief report of his movements during the past twenty-four hours as he remembered them.

Ren studied these reports. And gradually he was building up a picture that was wilder than the wildest of fantastic imaginative creation.

He and Commander Dunnam had grown very close to each other. Finally Ren broke his long silence and talked to him about what he was discovering. They were in the dining room. Crew members were eating their "evening" meal. They listened as Ren tried to explain.

"I think I've formed a few permanent conclusions about things here," Ren began. "They aren't an EXPLANATION of things, but just a description of the way things are behaving. I'll try to make it clear as I go along."

He chewed his food slowly while trying to think of a good way to begin.

"Take any number, for example," he said. "Take the number five. Back on Earth you can count five apples and say there are five apples. You can count out five eggs and place them in a box, and say there are the same number of eggs as there are apples. There are five of each. Actually that isn't true. There aren't five of either. There is no such thing as the number five. The number is a mental thing, a concept. The apples have a basic property which would more accurately be called a 'fiveness'. The eggs also have a basic property called a 'fiveness', and the fiveness of the eggs and the fiveness of the apples are NOT the same. They are peculiar to each group. The human race invented a concept called the number five, and formulated a theory that all fivenesses belong to a class, called the number five. In nature this theory acted as though it were true. If you have five apples and five eggs you have ten objects. A fiveness placed with another fiveness makes a tenness. So arithmetic merely describes the behavior of a basic property of reality in a consistent manner. Arithmetic is NOT a basic law. It's merely a DESCRIPTION of a basic law.

"That basic doesn't seem to hold where we are now. But there are other basic things that seem to be violated here, too, and will probably be violated even more when and if we land on this planet.

"I've pretty well concluded that number doesn't exist here in the same way it does ordinarily. Take the strength of gravity, for example. Instead of being a single value it is equally a broad range of values, and is all of them at the same time. How that can be I don't know.

* * * * *

"It's the same way with the number of objects. Instead of having five fingers I have three, four, five, six and so on, fingers all at the same time. But my mind can't see that. It can only grasp a single number. My eyes look at my fingers and see the many simultaneous numbers of fingers, but my mind can't grasp that, so it conjures up a single number at random. It RATIONALIZES what it gets, and so we have a real problem--the devising of some method of helping the mind deal with what it can't grasp because it hasn't the equipment to grasp it as it really is.

"There are sixty of us on board--or rather, there WERE sixty. Now there are three, four, and so on, to some number above sixty. The last report handed in by the crew shows eighty-three men on board! I can't prove it, because if I handed you the report sheets you would count more or less than that number.

"So what we must realize is that now there isn't any NUMBER of crew members, but a 'something else' that is different than a number, corresponding to an INTERVAL of numbers. It is real. It's a metaphysical basic for this part of space around this planet.

"It's subtle, too. For example, right now there may be more than one me on this ship, depending on whether there are more than sixty people on board or not. I don't quite understand about that yet. There are a lot of things I don't understand about it. If there is more than one of any person on board, is it a reality, or is it a trick of rationalization of the mind to fit something utterly incomprehensible into at least a semblance of something comprehensible? If it is the latter, then why do the two who are supposedly the same person hand in DIFFERENT reports on what the supposedly one person did, and why do the reports check with other reports?

"I have a theory which might account for part of all this. Our ship and all in it belongs to the universe of the metaphysics we know of and use as the thought process. It is hovering on the borders of a region containing this planet we are to land on--a region operating on other basics. In some way both sets of basics operate in either conflict or compromise. Besides mental confusion there is actual physical confusion.

"But maybe it's better that way. If we make the transition in steps the actual noumenal confusion may guide our minds correctly into a correct understanding of the new basics of this system by the time we land."

Ford Gratrick had come into the dining room unnoticed at the beginning of this. He spoke now.

"Then you claim that the laws of nature are different here than we are accustomed to, and that our minds are not equipped to deal with them?" he asked.

Ren frowned. Not at the words but at something he had not mentioned, about people and identities.

"They are different, yes," Ren returned. "But as to our minds dealing with them--human minds have dealt with things without truly comprehending them since the dawn of time."

"Things that were sane," Ford said.

"These are sane, too," Ren said, studying Ford keenly from hidden eyes. "They're just sane in a different way."

"So is a crazy man," Ford almost sneered openly. "I think we've seen enough to make it obvious we should get away from here while we can."

There was a murmur among the men at the tables that agreed with what Ford had said.

"We may do that," Ren said, ignoring the signs of almost open defiance patent in Ford's tone and manner, and in the men's muttered approval of what he had said. "But we won't until we're sure it's suicide to go down there and land. Don't you realize that we have something here which may be unique in the universe? This space wanderer won't be close enough to the solar system for exploration more than two or three years. Then it will be gone. There may never be another opportunity to study something like it."

"Which is a good thing," Ford snorted. "If you decide to drop the ship any closer to this mad planet you're going to have trouble with the men."

"Meaning you've been talking to them?" Commander Hugh Dunnam asked softly.

"Talking WITH them," Ford Gratrick said, matching Hugh's softness. "Don't try to put me in the position of being a leader of any rebellion that might develop. I'll confess quite frankly, though, that I want no part of landing on this God-forsaken hunk of matter, and a good many of the crew agree on that. It's suicidal. Frankly, sir, I think you must be under some kind of spell to turn your command over to a spaceman second class as you did."

* * * * *

Ren's scalp crawled. This had been exactly what he himself had felt! So others besides him had "felt" that alien contact from below! On impulse he made up his mind.

"Before anyone says something they might regret later," he cut in, "let me say that I've made up my mind that it's too dangerous to land. The effects we experience up here would probably be increased beyond conception down there. Our thought processes are being affected in ways we can't understand. It's possible that if we landed the ship would behave so differently that it would be impossible to get away. So, give me another two days of study in this orbit and then we'll go back to the solar system."

While Ren was talking he had a curious feeling, far back in the depths of his mind. It was as though a section of the bank of a stream had broken off and dropped into the stream.

Irrational. There had been so many such feelings that crept to the borders of consciousness and faded away without meaning anything.

Time! Ren felt that time was all he needed to get to the bottom of it. He compared himself to a newborn babe coming into the world. For the first few months things come and go in meaningless fashion. Slowly the mind makes order out of them. The oft-repeated patterns become clear first, then more obscure ones. Finally the baby is able to understand the apparently senseless sequence of events.

Ren felt that the results would be the same here if he were given half a chance ... but Ford Gratrick was right, too. It concerned more than the mind. It struck at the roots of reality that had been used in the principle of the ship's operation--and there was no way of knowing the ship would operate once it landed.

* * * * *

Ren Gravenard flicked the ashes from the end of his cigarette off the edge of the table onto the floor. Martha's eyes took this in and slowly lost their faraway look.

"I'm trying to make clear, Martha," Ren said gravely, "the emergence into consciousness of the things going on around us. There was no way yet for us to suspect their full activity--their inroads. Things were going on that we simply could not see or sense in any way because we didn't yet have the faculty of grasping them. They made their impression and were lost in a hodge-podge of neural channels already deeply grooved in the normal way, so that when they got close enough to the conscious mind to be sensed, they were distorted beyond any semblance of the true reality."

"I can see that," Martha said, her eyes brooding. "But DID you find a living, intelligent creature or race on Metapor?"

Ren nodded. "I'm coming to that later," he said. "Be patient and let me take things in order. That's the only way you can understand when I tell you about--her."

His eyes studied the glowing coal at the end of the cigarette. He lifted the white cylinder to his lips and sucked in. Dropping the cigarette on the floor and stepping on it, he let the grey smoke seep from his mouth and nostrils.

Traffic sounds came through the window. A murmur of voices drifted over the two as they sat there, quietly.

"I've tried to bring you up to the point where I began to suspect," Ren continued. "I described the feeling I had that was something like watching a large chunk of the bank of a stream break away, starting first as a jagged crack in the turf, with it widening slowly at first, then faster, until the broken chunk becomes a separate THING, dissociated from the bank. It breaks away, drops into the stream--and vanishes; while the bank itself remains, enclosing and containing the rushing stream.

"I didn't realize then what that feeling meant. I had felt it in varied shades before. It rose almost into consciousness, then, like the broken section of the bank itself, it would drop away and dissolve in the swirling stream of mind.

"Sitting there at the table in the ship's dining room, suddenly I suspected what that feeling really sprung from. I got my first inkling of what intervalness instead of numberness really meant.

"For an insane period I was two people, both the same person and yet not a person--and even not two, or even one, but a 'something' that contained in the logical sense all of those, as a class contains the members of the class.

"Remember that I said I was making a little speech, sitting there, that assured Ford Gratrick and the members of the crew present in the room that we weren't going to risk landing, but get away in a couple of days.

"At the same time, while I was talking, I was experiencing this strange feeling. It was quite clear, for a few seconds. I was two Ren Gravenards, saying two different things. The two of me were very close. But while I talked they separated distinctly as the bank of the stream and the chunk are suddenly not one, but two.

"It was not me alone. Every man in that room was doing the same. The ship itself was doing it--and suddenly ..."

* * * * *

"Before anyone says something they might regret," Hugh Dunnam, the commander, said in a quiet warning voice, "get this straight, all of you. This is a government ship. I'm an officer of the Earth Space Fleet and my command is law. I have a right temporarily to promote any member of my crew to complete command of the ship with power equal to mine or even greater than mine. If Ren Gravenard says we go down, we go down even if it seems certain we'll all be killed. You have a choice of certain but honorable death, and equally certain but dishonorable death. Or you have a choice between an uncertain but honorable death if death it is, and certain but dishonorable death as a coward and a traitor. Let's not have any more thoughts of insubordination. You, Ford Gratrick, under a stricter commander, would already be on the way to the brig."

Ford looked at Hugh Dunnam through slitted eyes, his face expressionless. Suddenly he smiled.

"You forget, sir," he said smoothly. "Under a less human commander I would have kept my thoughts to myself."

* * * * *

"I was sitting there, Martha," Ren said. "Trying to grab hold of the strange 'split' in things. It's even more mixed up than I pictured it. I had a feeling of BEING both Hugh Dunnam and myself, and also of being myself on a 'something' drifting apart from all I could see. At the same time there was a feeling of two separate things now existing on the ship. Those two things might be called a composite of each of the two forces that began their existence at that moment--the forces obedient to the commander, and me; and the forces that were to side in with Ford Gratrick."

"In a way numberness in any group depends on the independent unity of each member of the group. Put a thousand drops of water in a glass and you don't have a thousand drops of water but a teaspoon or so of water. It would be impossible to take a drop of water out and definitely say that it was one of the drops you had put in. And if you changed all the water back into drops you might have more or less than the thousand you put in.

"But water is a fluid. A human being is not. In some inexplicable way, however, I was becoming more and more like the drop of water after it is dropped into a large volume of water. I was 'spreading', while all the time seeming to be just my normal self.

"I think I was beginning dimly to see the new metaphysical basics that were to make the whole thing sensible and manipulable. At least, I had already realized that it was different than would be, for example, the difference in operational principle of a gas engine and an electric transformer.

"If you've ever studied any abstract mathematical system you'll be able to understand how the changing of one basic axiom can alter the whole structure almost beyond recognition. Suppose that change in a basic axiom were not a clean change, but that for a time both the axiom and its alternative were to be used interchangeably and unpredictably. You would have results that were double-valued. You would have contradictory results following from whatever you began with until the old axiom got weeded out entirely.

"Perhaps you can see that well enough to understand everything. I hope so, Martha. If you can I can skip the landing. We DID land. We crashed, and we landed safely. We also did something else. I think that when they check the records they'll find that the Endore also came back to Earth and reported that it hadn't actually landed on Metapor. It did all those things--returned over a year ago, landed safely, and was crushed in landing. If you could see HOW it could do all those things--it's like the page in a book; you pass it if you look for it, and find it if you don't look for it.

"It's happening here on Earth right now and will keep on happening until the old basics that contradict the new ones are no longer operating. You see, Martha, we knew that would happen. That's why we came back. The new system is so much more perfect than the old. SHE taught it to us when we landed. Ford Gratrick and his fellow objectors were killed in the ship that crashed. They also were on the ship that came back to Earth. They're alive and they're dead."

Martha's face was a mask of confusion. She was trying to understand and not knowing how. Ren saw this and tried again.

"Suppose we try from this angle," he said patiently. "If a car is going ten miles an hour it will be ten miles farther on at the end of an hour. If it goes twenty miles an hour it will be twenty miles farther on. But suppose it goes both ten miles an hour and twenty miles an hour. At the end of an hour it will be ten miles and twenty miles along, and according to what the Earth is used to it would have to become two cars to do that.

"If it went every speed from zero to twenty miles an hour it would have to become an infinite number of cars, and occupy every position from the starting point to a twenty-mile distance at the end of an hour. That would be the conventional conclusion to the abstract problems. With the new basics it does just that--except that it is still just one car, and yet never was just one car and never will be. It CAN'T be, because there is no such thing, in the new system, as a one thing.

"I myself am not Ren Gravenard, only Ren Gravenard, or anything else that your old ideas can conceive of. You'll see, Martha. The whole world will see soon, just as I did after we had been on Metapor a short while and had gotten the contradictions out of my mind and my structure."

"Then what are you?" Martha asked tensely.

"I'm the crew of the Endore," Ren said softly. "I'm Ren Gravenard here and now because that is the only thing you can accept at present. I'm--Her, the incomprehensible."

A question rose in Martha's mind. She drew back from the question as from the brink of the Abyss, yet felt drawn magnetically toward it. Ren watched and knew what that question would be. She opened her lips.

"Who--am I?" she asked.

"Look at your hands," Ren said.

Martha looked down at her hands resting on the edge of the table. They were large, gnarled, strong--the hands of a man. She flexed them. They were smooth and skillful.

Wonderingly she raised her eyes to look at her companion across the table. Her companion was--herself and she was Ren Gravenard. Anything else would have been--unthinkable.

THE END

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In 2027 A.D., just seventy-five years after the first space flight, a dangerous disease was brought to Earth which wiped out almost a million lives before a cure was found. Immediately an elaborate quarantine procedure was developed to take care of any possible eventuality. This also included the psych screening routine to check on the sanity and normalcy of returning space crews.

One feature of emergency quarantine was the creation of the spaceport zone, an area with a radius of fifty miles about the spaceport, which during quarantine was to be blocked off with nothing permitted to go either in or out.

For all-out quarantine as in this present case, a temporary planet quarantine was to be imposed, preventing the landing or taking off of any space ship at all.

Other measures would take effect if and when they became necessary, such as national quarantine, continent quarantine, and even harsh measures if they became necessary.--ED.

Contents

THE WAR OF THE WENUSES

by C. L. GRAVES AND E. V. LUCAS

BOOK I.

The Coming of the Wenuses.

"JUST BEFORE THE BATTLE, MOTHER."

No one would have believed in the first years of the twentieth century that men and modistes on this planet were being watched by intelligences greater than woman's and yet as ambitious as her own. With infinite complacency maids and matrons went to and fro over London, serene in the assurance of their empire over man. It is possible that the mysticetus does the same. Not one of them gave a thought to Wenus as a source of danger, or thought of it only to dismiss the idea of active rivalry upon it as impossible or improbable. Yet across the gulf of space astral women, with eyes that are to the eyes of English women as diamonds are to boot-buttons, astral women, with hearts vast and warm and sympathetic, were regarding Butterick's with envy, Peter Robinson's with jealousy, and Whiteley's with insatiable yearning, and slowly and surely maturing their plans for a grand inter-stellar campaign.

The pale pink planet Wenus, as I need hardly inform the sober reader, revolves round the sun at a mean distance of [character: Venus sigil] vermillion miles. More than that, as has been proved by the recent observations of Puits of Paris, its orbit is steadily but surely advancing sunward. That is to say, it is rapidly becoming too hot for clothes to be worn at all; and this, to the Wenuses, was so alarming a prospect that the immediate problem of life became the discovery of new quarters notable for a gentler climate and more copious fashions. The last stage of struggle-for-dress, which is to us still remote, had embellished their charms, heightened their heels and enlarged their hearts. Moreover, the population of Wenus consisted exclusively of Invisible Men--and the Wenuses were about tired of it. Let us, however, not judge them too harshly. Remember what ruthless havoc our own species has wrought, not only on animals such as the Moa and the Maori, but upon its own inferior races such as the Wanishing Lady and the Dodo Bensonii.

The Wenuses seem to have calculated their descent with quite un-feminine accuracy. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have witnessed their preparations. Similarly pigs, had they wings, might fly. Men like Quellen of Dresden watched the pale pink planet--it is odd, by the way, that for countless centuries Wenus has been the star of Eve--evening by evening growing alternately paler and pinker than a literary agent, but failed to interpret the extraordinary phenomena, resembling a series of powder puffs, which he observed issuing from the cardiac penumbra on the night of April 1st, 1902. At the same time a great light was remarked by Idos of Yokohama and Pegadiadis of Athens.

The storm burst upon us six weeks later, about the time of the summer sales. As Wenus approached opposition, Dr. Jelli of Guava set the wires of the astronomical exchange palpitating with the intelligence of a huge explosion of laughing gas moving risibly towards the earth. He compared it to a colossal cosmic cachinnation. And, in the light of subsequent events, the justice of the comparison will commend itself to all but the most sober readers.

Had it not been for my chance meeting with Swears, the eminent astronomer and objurgationist, this book would never have been written. He asked me down to our basement, which he rents from me as an observatory, and in spite of all that has happened since I still remember our wigil very distinctly. (I spell it with a "w" from an inordinate affection for that letter.) Swears moved about, invisible but painfully audible to my naked ear. The night was very warm, and I was very thirsty. As I gazed through the syphon, the little star seemed alternately to expand and contract, and finally to assume a sort of dual skirt, but that was simply because my eye was tired. I remember how I sat under the table with patches of green and crimson swimming before my eyes. Grotesque and foolish as this may seem to the sober reader, it is absolutely true.

Swears watched till one, and then he gave it up. He was full of speculations about the condition of Wenus. Swears' language was extremely sultry.

"The chances against anything lady-like on Wenus," he said, "are a million to one."

Even Pearson's Weekly woke up to the disturbance at last, and Mrs. Lynn Linton contributed an article entitled "What Women Might Do" to the Queen. A paper called Punch, if I remember the name aright, made a pun on the subject, which was partially intelligible with the aid of italics and the laryngoscope. For my own part, I was too much occupied in teaching my wife to ride a Bantam, and too busy upon a series of papers in Nature on the turpitude of the classical professoriate of the University of London, to give my undivided attention to the impending disaster. I cannot divide things easily; I am an indivisible man. But one night I went for a bicycle ride with my wife. She was a Bantam of delight, I can tell you, but she rode very badly. It was starlight, and I was attempting to explain the joke in the paper called, if I recollect aright, Punch. It was an extraordinarily sultry night, and I told her the names of all the stars she saw as she fell off her machine. She had a good bulk of falls. There were lights in the upper windows of the houses as the people went to bed. Grotesque and foolish as this will seem to the sober reader, it is absolutely true. Coming home, a party of bean-feasters from Wimbledon, Wormwood Scrubs, or Woking passed us, singing and playing concertinas. It all seemed so safe and tranquil. But the Wenuses were even then on their milky way.

II.

THE FALLING STAR.

Then came the night of the first star. It was seen early in the morning rushing over Winchester; leaving a gentle frou-frou behind it. Trelawny, of the Wells' Observatory, the greatest authority on Meteoric Crinolines, watched it anxiously. Winymann, the publisher, who sprang to fame by the publication of The War of the Worlds, saw it from his office window, and at once telegraphed to me: "Materials for new book in the air." That was the first hint I received of the wonderful wisit.

I lived in those days at 181a Campden Hill Gardens. It is the house opposite the third lamp-post on the right as you walk east. It was of brick and slate, with a party-wall, and two spikes were wanting to the iron railings. When the telegram came I was sitting in my study writing a discussion on the atomic theory of Krelli of Balmoral. I at once changed the Woking jacket in which I was writing for evening dress--which wanted, I remember, a button--and hastened to the Park. I did not tell my wife anything about it. I did not care to have her with me. In all such adventures I find her more useful as a sentimental figure in the background--I, of course, allow no sentiment in the foreground--than an active participant.

On the way I met Swears, returning from breakfast with our mutual friend, Professor Heat Ray Lankester--they had had Lee-Metford sardines and Cairns marmalade, he told me,--and we sought the meteor together.

Find it we did in Kensington Gardens. An enormous dimple had been made by the impact of the projectile, which lay almost buried in the earth. Two or three trees, broken by its fall, sprawled on the turf. Among this débris was the missile; resembling nothing so much as a huge crinoline. At the moment we reached the spot P.C. A581 was ordering it off; and Henry Pearson, aged 28 (no fixed abode), and Martha Griffin, aged 54, of Maybury Tenements, were circulating among the crowd offering matches for sale. They have nothing to do with this story, but their names and addresses make for verisimilitude; or at least, I hope so. In case they do not, let me add that Mary Griffin wore a blue peignoir which had seen better days, and Herbert Pearson's matches struck everywhere except on the box.

With a mental flash we linked the Crinoline with the powder puffs on Wenus. Approaching it more nearly, we heard a hissing noise within, such as is made by an ostler, or Mr. Daimler grooming his motor car.

"Good heavens!" said Swears, "there's a horse in it. Can't you hear? He must be half-roasted."

So saying he rushed off, fraught with pity, to inform the Secretary of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; while I hurried away to tell Pendriver the journalist, proposing in my own mind, I recollect, that he should give me half the profits on the article.

Pendriver the journalist, so called to distinguish him from Hoopdriver the cyclist, was working in his garden. He does the horticultural column for one of the large dailies.

"You've read about the disturbances in Venus?" I cried.

"What!" said Pendriver. He is as deaf as the Post, the paper he writes for.

"You've read about Venus?" I asked again.

"No," he said, "I've never been to Venice."

"Venus!" I bawled, "Venus!"

"Yes," said Pendriver, "Venus. What about it?"

"Why," I said, "there are people from Venus in Kensington Gardens."

"Venus in Kensington Gardens!" he replied. "No, it's not Venus; it's the Queen."

I began to get angry.

"Not the statue," I shouted. "Wisitors from Wenus. Make copy. Come and see! Copy! Copy!"

The word "copy" galvanised him, and he came, spade and all. We quickly crossed the Park once more. Pendriver lives to the west of it, in Strathmore Gardens, and has a special permit from his landlord to dig. We did not, for sufficient reasons, converse much. Many persons were now hastening towards the strange object. Among them I noticed Jubal Gregg the butcher (who fortunately did not observe me--we owed him a trifle of eighteen shillings, and had since taken to Canterbury lamb from the Colonial Meat Stores), and a jobbing gardener, whom I had not recently paid. I forget his name, but he was lame in the left leg: a ruddy man.

Quite a crowd surrounded the Crinoline when we arrived, and in addition to the match-vendors already mentioned, there was now Giuseppe Mandolini, from Leather Lane, with an accordion and a monkey. Monkeys are of course forbidden in Kensington Gardens, and how he eluded the police I cannot imagine. Most of the people were staring quietly at the Crinoline, totally unaware of its significance. Scientific knowledge has not progressed at Kensington by the same leaps and bounds as at Woking. Extra-terrestrial had less meaning for them than extra-special.

We found Swears hard at work keeping the crowd from touching the Crinoline. With him was a tall, red-haired man, who I afterwards learnt was Lee-Bigge, the Secretary of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He had a summons and several officials with him, and was standing on the Crinoline, bellowing directions in a clear, rich voice, occasionally impeded by emotion, like an ox with a hiccough.

As soon as Swears saw me, he asked me to bring a policeman to assist him to keep back the crowd; and I went away, proud to be so honoured, to find one. I was unsuccessful. P.C. A581 had gone off duty; but another constable, I was told, had been seen, an hour or so earlier, asleep against the railings,--it was a baker's boy who told me, just back from delivering muffins in St. Mary Abbot's Terrace,--and had since wandered in the direction of the Albert Hall. I followed, but could not see him in any of the areas, and therefore returned slowly by way of Queen's Gate, Cromwell Road, Earl's Court Road, and Kensington High Street, hoping to meet another; and as it was then about noon, I entered an A.B.C. and had half a pork-pie and a bucket of Dr. Jaeger's Vi-cocolate. I remember the circumstance distinctly, because feeling rather hungry and wishing to vary the menu, I asked the girl for half a veal-and-ham pie and she brought me the balance of the original pasty; and when I remonstrated, she said that her directors recognised no essential difference between veal-and-ham and pork.

III.

THE CRINOLINE EXPANDS.

When I returned to the Gardens the sun was at his zenith. The crowd around the Crinoline had increased and some sort of a struggle seemed to be going on. As I drew near I heard Lee-Bigge's voice:

"Keep back! keep back!"

A boy came running towards me.

"It's a-movin'," he said to me as he passed; "a-blowin' and a-blowin' out. Now we shan't be long!" Passing on, I saw that it was indeed expanding. The ribs were more distended and the covering more tightly stretched. The hissing had ceased and a creaking noise had taken its place. There was evidently great pressure within. Once something resembling an en tout cas was thrust through the top, making what was presumably an attempt to dislodge Lee-Bigge, and then suddenly the Crinoline burst, revealing a wision of ultra-mundane loveliness.

I shall not attempt exhaustively to describe the indescribable. It is enough to assure the sober reader that, grotesque and foolish as it may seem, this is absolutely true, and to record that after the glimpse I had of the Wenuses emerging from the Crinoline in which they had come to the earth from their planet, a kind of fascination paralysed my actions. All other men in the crowd seemed to be similarly affected. We were battle-grounds of love and curiosity. For the Wenuses were gorgeous: that is the sum of the matter.

Those who have never seen a living Wenus (there is a specimen in fairly good spirits in the Natural History Museum) can scarcely imagine the strange beauty of their appearance. The peculiar W-shaped mouth, the incessant nictitation of the sinister eyelid, the naughty little twinkle in the eye itself, the glistening glory of the arms, each terminating in a fleshy digitated Handling Machine resembling more than anything else a Number 6 glove inflated with air (these members, by the way, have since been named rather aptly by that distinguished anatomist and original dog, Professor Howes, the hands)--all combined to produce an effect akin to stupefaction. I stood there ecstatic, unprogressive, immoderate; while swiftly and surely ungovernable affection for all Wenuses gripped me.

Meanwhile I heard inarticulate exclamations on all sides.

"Shameless hussies!" cried a woman near me.

"By Jove, that's something like!" said a young man who had been reading Captain Coe's finals, swinging round towards the Crinoline, with one foot arrested in mid-air.

My inclination when I recovered partial self-possession was to make instantly for the Crinoline and avow my devotion and allegiance, but at that moment I caught the eye of my wife, who had followed me to the Park, and I hastily turned my back on the centre of attraction. I saw, however, that Pendriver was using his spade to cleave his way to the Wenuses; and Swears was standing on the brink of the pit transfixed with adoration; while a young shopman from Woking, in town for the day, completely lost his head. It came bobbing over the grass to my very feet; but I remembered the experiences of Pollock and the Porroh man and let it go.

The news of our visitors seemed to have spread by some subtle magic, for in every direction I could see nothing but running men, some with women pulling at their sleeves and coat-tails to detain them, advancing by great strides towards us. Even a policeman was among them, rubbing his eyes. My wife broke through the crowd and grasped me firmly by the arm.

"Pozzy," she said, "this is my opportunity and I mean to use it. I was kept doing nothing between pages 68 and 296 of the other book, and this time I mean to work. Look at these fools rushing to their doom. In another moment they will be mashed, mashed to jelly; and you too, unless I prevent it. I know what these Wenuses are. Haven't I had a scientific training? You will be mashed, I tell you--mashed!"

So saying she banged on the ground with her umbrella, which, I remember now with sorrow, we had bought the week before at Derry and Toms' for five-and-eleven-three.

Meanwhile a few of the men had to some extent recovered, and headed by the R.S.P.C.A. Secretary had formed a deputation, and were busy talking on their fingers to the Wenuses. But the Wenuses were too much occupied in dropping into each other's eyes something from a bright flask, which I took to be Beggarstaffs' Elect Belladonna, to heed them.

I turned in response to a tug at my swallow-tails from my wife, and when I looked again a row of Wenuses with closed lids stood before the Crinoline. Suddenly they opened their eyes and flashed them on the men before them. The effect was instantaneous. The deputation, as the glance touched them, fell like skittles--viscous, protoplasmic masses, victims of the terrible Mash-Glance of the Wenuses.

I attributed my own escape to the prompt action of my wife, who stood before and shielded me, for upon women the Mash-Glance had no effect. The ray must have missed me only by a second, for my elbow which was not wholly covered by my wife's bulk was scorched, and my hat has never since recovered its pristine gloss. Turning, I saw a bus-driver in Knightsbridge leap up and explode, while his conductor clutched at the rail, missed it and fell overboard; farther still, on the distant horizon, the bricklayers on a gigantic scaffolding went off bang against the lemon-yellow of the sky as the glance reached them, and the Bachelors' Club at Albert Gate fell with a crash. All this had happened with such swiftness, that I was dumbfounded. Then, after a few moments, my wife slowly and reluctantly stepped aside and allowed me to survey the scene. The Wenuses, having scored their first victory, once more had retired into the recesses of the Crinoline. The ground for some distance was littered with the bodies of the mashed; I alone among men stood erect, my conscious companions being a sprinkling of women, pictures of ungovernable fury.

Yet my feeling was not one of joy at my escape. Strange mind of man!--instead, even with the Wenuses' victims lying all around me, my heart went out to the Crinoline and its astral occupants. I, too, wished to be mashed. And suddenly I was aware that my wife knew that I was thinking thus. With an effort I turned and began a stumbling run through the Park.

IV.

HOW I REACHED HOME.

I remember nothing of my flight, except the stress of blundering against trees and stumbling over the railings. To blunder against some trees is very stressful. At last I could go no further: I had run full tilt into a gasworks. I fell and lay still.

I must have remained there some time.

Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came--Beer. It was being poured down my throat by my cousin's man, and I recollect thinking that he must have used the same can with which he filled the lamps. How he got there I cannot pretend to tell.

"What news from the park?" said I.

"Eh!" said my cousin's man.

"What news from the Park?" I said.

"Garn! 'oo yer getting at?" said my cousin's man. "Aint yer just been there?" (The italics are his own.) "People seem fair silly abart the Pawk. Wot's it all abart?"

"Haven't you heard of the Wenuses?" said I. "The women from Wenus?" "Quite enough," said my cousin's man, and laughed.

I felt foolish and angry.

"You'll hear more yet," I said, and went on my way.

Judging by the names of the streets, I seemed to be at Kennington, and it was an hour after dawn, and my collar had burst away from its stud. But I had ceased to feel fear. My terror had fallen from me like a bath towel. Three things struggled for the possession of my mind: the beauty of Kennington, the whereabouts of the Wenuses, and the wengeance of my wife. In spite of my cousin's man's beer, which I could still taste, I was ravenously hungry; so, seeing no one about, I broke into a chemist's shop and stayed the pangs on a cake of petroleum soap, some Parrish's food, and a box of menthol pastilles, which I washed down with a split ammoniated quinine and Condy. I then stole across the road, and dragging the cushions from a deserted cab (No. 8648) into the cab shelter, I snatched a few more hours of restless sleep.

When I woke I found myself thinking consecutively, a thing I do not remember to have done since I killed the curate in the other book. In the interim my mental condition had been chaotic, asymptotic. But during slumber my brain, incredible as it may seem, stimulated and clarified by the condiments of which I had partaken, had resumed its normal activity. I determined to go home.

Resolving at any cost to reach Campden Hill Gardens by a sufficiently circuitous route, I traversed Kennington Park Road, Newington Butts, Newington Causeway, Blackman Street, and the Borough High Street, to London Bridge. Crossing the bridge, I met a newspaper boy with a bundle of papers, still wet from the press. They were halfpenny copies of the Star, but he charged me a penny for mine. The imposition still rankles.

From it I learned that a huge cordon of police, which had been drawn round the Crinoline, had been mashed beyond recognition, and two regiments of Life Guards razed to the ground, by the devastating Glance of the Wenuses. I passed along King William Street and Prince's Street to Moorgate Street. Here I met another newspaper boy, carrying the Pall Mall Gazette. I handed him a threepenny bit; but though I waited for twenty minutes, he offered me no change. This will give some idea of the excitement then beginning to prevail. The Pall Mall had an article on the situation, which I read as I climbed the City Road to Islington. It stated that Mrs. Pozzuoli, my wife, had constituted herself Commander-in-Chief, and was busy marshalling her forces. I was relieved by the news, for it suggested that my wife was fully occupied. Already a good bulk of nursemaids and cooks, enraged at the destruction of the Scotland Yard and Knightsbridge heroes by the Wenuses' Mash-Glance, had joined her flag. It was, said the Pall Mall, high time that such an attack was undertaken, and since women had been proved to be immune to the Mash-Glance, it was clearly their business to undertake it.

Meanwhile, said the Pall Mall, nothing could check the folly of the men. Like moths to a candle, so were they hastening to Kensington Gardens, only to be added to the heap of mashed that already had accumulated there.

So far, the P.M.G. But my mother, who was in the thick of events at the time, has since given me fuller particulars. Notwithstanding, my mother tells me, the fate of their companions, the remainder of the constabulary and military forces stationed in London hastened to the Park, impelled by the fearful fascination, and were added to the piles of mashed.

Afterwards came the Volunteers, to a man, and then the Cloth. The haste of most of the curates, and a few bishops whose names have escaped me, was, said my mother, cataclysmic. Old dandies with creaking joints tottered along Piccadilly to their certain doom; young clerks in the city, explaining that they wished to attend their aunt's funeral, crowded the omnibuses for Kensington and were seen no more; while my mother tells me that excursion trains from the country were arriving at the principal stations throughout the day, bearing huge loads of provincial inamorati.

A constant stream of infatuated men, flowing from east to west, set in, and though bands of devoted women formed barriers across the principal thoroughfares for the purpose of barring their progress, no perceptible check was effected. Once, a Judge of notable austerity was observed to take to a lamp-post to avoid detention by his wife: once, a well-known tenor turned down by a by-street, says my mother, pursued by no fewer than fifty-seven admirers burning to avert his elimination. Members of Parliament surged across St. James' Park and up Constitution Hill.

Yet in every walk of life, says my mother, there were a few survivors in the shape of stolid, adamantine misogynists.

Continuing my journey homewards, I traversed Upper Street, Islington, and the Holloway Road to Highgate Hill, which I ascended at a sharp run. At the summit I met another newspaper boy carrying a bundle of Globes, one of which I purchased, after a hard-driven bargain, for two shillings and a stud from the shirt-front of my evening dress, which was beginning to show signs of ennui. I leaned against the wall of the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institute, to read it. The news was catastrophic. Commander Wells of the Fire Brigade had, it stated, visited Kensington Gardens with two manuals, one steam engine, and a mile of hose, in order to play upon the Crinoline and its occupants. Presuming on the immunity of persons bearing his name during the Martian invasion, the gallant Commander had approached too near and was in a moment reduced to salvage.

Pondering on this news, I made for Parliament Hill, by way of West Hill and Milfield Lane. On the top I paused to survey London at my feet, and, to get the fullest benefit of the invigorating breeze, removed my hat. But the instant I did so, I was aware of a sharp pain on my scalp and the aroma of singed hair. Lifting my hand to the wounded place, I discovered that I had been shaved perfectly clean, as with a Heat Razor. The truth rushed upon me: I had come within the range of the Mash-Glance, and had been saved from total dissolution only by intervening masonry protecting my face and body.

To leave the Hill was the work of an instant. I passed through John Street to Hampstead Road, along Belsize Avenue and Buckland Crescent to Belsize Road, and so to Canterbury Road and Kilburn Lane. Here I met a fourth newspaper boy loaded with copies of the St. James' Gazette. He offered me one for seven-and-sixpence, or two for half a sovereign, but it seemed to me I had read enough.

Turning into Ladbroke Grove Road I quickly reached Notting Hill, and stealthily entered my house in Campden Hill Gardens ten minutes later.

BOOK II.

London under the Wenuses.

THE DEATH OF THE EXAMINER.

My first act on entering my house, in order to guard against any sudden irruption on the part of my wife, was to bolt the door and put on the chain. My next was to visit the pantry, the cellar, and the larder, but they were all void of food and drink. My wife must have been there first. As I had drunk nothing since I burgled the Kennington chemist's, I was very thirsty, though my mind was still hydrostatic. I cannot account for it on scientific principles, but I felt very angry with my wife. Suddenly I was struck by a happy thought, and hurrying upstairs I found a bottle of methylated spirits on my wife's toilet-table. Strange as it may seem to the sober reader, I drank greedily of the unfamiliar beverage, and feeling refreshed and thoroughly kinetic, settled down once more to an exhaustive exposure of the dishonest off-handedness of the external Examiners at University College. I may add that I had taken the bread-knife (by Mappin) from the pantry, as it promised to be useful in the case of unforeseen Clerical emergencies. I should have preferred the meat-chopper with which the curate had been despatched in The War of the Worlds, but it was deposited in the South Kensington Museum along with other mementoes of the Martian invasion. Besides, my wife and I had both become Wegetarians.

The evening was still, and though distracted at times by recollections of the Wenuses, I made good progress with my indictment. Suddenly I was conscious of a pale pink glow which suffused my writing-pad, and I heard a soft but unmistakable thud as of a pinguid body falling in the immediate vicinity.

Taking off my boots, I stole gently down to the scullery and applied the spectroscope to the keyhole. To my mingled amazement and ecstasy, I perceived a large dome-shaped fabric blocking up the entire back garden. Roughly speaking, it seemed to be about the size of a full-grown sperm whale. A faint heaving was perceptible in the mass, and further evidences of vitality were forthcoming in a gentle but pathetic crooning, as of an immature chimæra booming in the void. The truth flashed upon me in a moment. The Second Crinoline had fallen in my back garden.

My mind was instantly made up. To expose myself unarmed to the fascination of the Wonderful Wisitors would have irreparably prejudiced the best interests of scientific research. My only hope lay in a complete disguise which should enable me to pursue my investigations of the Wenuses with the minimum amount of risk. A student of the humanities would have adopted a different method, but my standpoint has always been dispassionate, anti-sentimental. My feelings towards the Wenuses were, incredible as it may seem, purely Platonic. I recognised their transcendental attractions, but had no desire to succumb to them. Strange as it may seem, the man who succumbs rarely if ever is victorious in the long run. To disguise my sex and identity--for it was a priori almost impossible that the inhabitants of Wenus had never heard of Pozzuoli--would guard me from the jellifying Mash-Glance of the Wenuses. Arrayed in feminine garb I could remain immune to their malignant influences.

With me, to think is to act; so I hastily ran upstairs, shaved off my moustache, donned my wife's bicycle-skirt, threw her sortie de bal round my shoulders, borrowed the cook's Sunday bonnet from the servants' bedroom, and hastened back to my post of observation at the scullery door.

Inserting a pipette through the keyhole and cautiously applying my eye, I saw to my delight that the Crinoline had been elevated on a series of steel rods about six feet high, and that the five Wenuses who had descended in it were partaking of a light but sumptuous repast beneath its iridescent canopy. They were seated round a tripod imbibing a brown beverage from small vessels resembling the half of a hollow sphere, and eating with incredible velocity a quantity of tiny round coloured objects--closely related, as I subsequently had occasion to ascertain, to the Bellaria angelica,--which they raised to their mouths with astonishing and unerring aim in the complex Handling-Machines, or Tenticklers, which form part of their wonderful organism.

Belonging as they undoubtedly do to the order of the Tunicates, their exquisitely appropriate and elegant costume may be safely allowed to speak for itself. It is enough, however, to note the curious fact that there are no buttons in Wenus, and that their mechanical system is remarkable, incredible as it may seem, for having developed the eye to the rarest point of perfection while dispensing entirely with the hook. The bare idea of this is no doubt terribly repulsive to us, but at the same time I think we should remember how indescribably repulsive our sartorial habits must seem to an intelligent armadillo.

Of the peculiar coralline tint of the Wenuses' complexion, I think I have already spoken. That it was developed by their indulgence in the Red Weed has been, I think, satisfactorily proved by the researches of Dr. Moreau, who also shows that the visual range of their eyes was much the same as ours, except that blue and yellow were alike to them. Moreau established this by a very pretty experiment with a Yellow Book and a Blue Book, each of which elicited exactly the same remark, a curious hooting sound, strangely resembling the ut de poitrine of one of Professor Garner's gorillas.

After concluding their repast, the Wenuses, still unaware of my patient scrutiny, extracted, with the aid of their glittering tintackles, a large packet of Red Weed from a quasi-marsupial pouch in the roof of the Crinoline, and in an incredibly short space of time had rolled its carmine tendrils into slim cylinders, and inserted them within their lips. The external ends suddenly ignited as though by spontaneous combustion; but in reality that result was effected by the simple process of deflecting the optic ray. Clouds of roseate vapour, ascending to the dome of the canopy, partially obscured the sumptuous contours of these celestial invaders; while a soft crooning sound, indicative of utter contentment, or as Professor Nestlé of the Milky Ray has more prosaically explained it, due to expiration of air preparatory to the suctional operation involved in the use of the Red Weed, added an indescribable glamour to the enchantment of the scene.

Humiliating as it may seem to the scientific reader, I found it impossible to maintain a Platonic attitude any longer; and applying my mouth to the embouchure of the pipette, warbled faintly in an exquisite falsetto:

"Ulat tanalareezul Savourneen Dheelish tradioun marexil Vi-Koko for the hair. I want yer, ma honey."

The effect was nothing short of magical. The rhythmic exhalations ceased instanteously, and the tallest and most fluorescent of the Wenuses, laying aside her Red Weed, replied in a low voice thrilling with kinetic emotion:

"Phreata mou sas agapo!"

The sentiment of these remarks was unmistakable, though to my shame I confess I was unable to fathom their meaning, and I was on the point of opening the scullery door and rushing out to declare myself, when I heard a loud banging from the front of the house.

I stumbled up the kitchen stairs, hampered considerably by my wife's skirt; and, by the time I had reached the hall, recognised the raucous accents of Professor Tibbles, the Classical Examiner, shouting in excited tones:

"Let me in, let me in!"

I opened the door as far as it would go without unfastening the chain, and the Professor at once thrust in his head, remaining jammed in the aperture.

"Let me in!" he shouted. "I'm the only man in London besides yourself that hasn't been pulped by the Mash-Glance."

He then began to jabber lines from the classics, and examples from the Latin grammar.

A sudden thought occurred to me. Perhaps he might translate the observation of the Wenus. Should I use him as an interpreter? But a moment's reflection served to convince me of the danger of such a plan. The Professor, already exacerbated by the study of the humanities, was in a state of acute erethism. I thought of the curate, and, maddened by the recollection of all I had suffered, drew the bread-knife from my waist-belt, and shouting, "Go to join your dead languages!" stabbed him up to the maker's name in the semi-lunar ganglion. His head drooped, and he expired.

I stood petrified, staring at his glazing eyes; then, turning to make for the scullery, was confronted by the catastrophic apparition of the tallest Wenus gazing at me with reproachful eyes and extended tentacles. Disgust at my cruel act and horror at my extraordinary habiliments were written all too plainly in her seraphic lineaments. At least, so I thought. But it turned out to be otherwise; for the Wenus produced from behind her superlatively radiant form a lump of slate which she had extracted from the coal-box.

"Decepti estis, O Puteoli!" she said.

"I beg your pardon," I replied; "but I fail to grasp your meaning."

"She means," said the Examiner, raising himself for another last effort, "that it is time you changed your coal merchant," and so saying he died again.

I was thunderstruck: the Wenuses understood coals!

And then I ran; I could stand it no longer. The game was up, the cosmic game for which I had laboured so long and strenuously, and with one despairing yell of "Ulla! Ulla!" I unfastened the chain, and, leaping over the limp and prostrate form of the unhappy Tibbles, fled darkling down the deserted street.

II.

THE MAN AT UXBRIDGE ROAD.

At the corner a happy thought struck me: the landlord of the "Dog and Measles" kept a motor car. I found him in his bar and killed him. Then I broke open the stable and let loose the motor car. It was very restive, and I had to pat it. "Goo' Tea Rose," I said soothingly, "goo' Rockefeller, then." It became quiet, and I struck a match and started the paraffinalia, and in a moment we were under weigh.

I am not an expert motist, although at school I was a fairly good hoop-driver, and the pedestrians I met and overtook had a bad time. One man said, as he bound up a punctured thigh, that the Heat Ray of the Martians was nothing compared with me. I was moting towards Leatherhead, where my cousin lived, when the streak of light caused by the Third Crinoline curdled the paraffin tank. Vain was it to throw water on the troubled oil; the mischief was done. Meanwhile a storm broke. The lightning flashed, the rain beat against my face, the night was exceptionally dark, and to add to my difficulties the motor took the wick between its teeth and fairly bolted.

No one who has never seen an automobile during a spasm of motor ataxy can have any idea of what I suffered. I held the middle of the way for a few yards, but just opposite Uxbridge Road Station I turned the wheel hard a-port, and the motor car overturned. Two men sprang from nowhere, as men will, and sat on its occiput, while I crawled into Uxbridge Road Station and painfully descended the stairs.

I found the platform empty save for a colony of sturdy little newsboys, whose stalwart determination to live filled me with admiration, which I was enjoying until a curious sibillation beneath the bookstall stirred me with panic.

Suddenly, from under a bundle of British Weeklies, there emerged a head, and gradually a man crawled out. It was the Artilleryman.

"I'm burning hot," he said; "it's a touch of--what is it?--erethism."

His voice was hoarse, and his Remarks, like the Man of Kent's, were Rambling.

"Where do you come from?" he said.

"I come from Woking," I replied, "and my nature is Wobbly. I love my love with a W because she is Woluptuous. I took her to the sign of the Wombat and read her The War of the Worlds, and treated her to Winkles, Winolia and Wimbos. Her name is Wenus, and she comes from the Milky Way."

He looked at me doubtfully, then shot out a pointed tongue.

"It is you," he said, "the man from Woking. The Johnny what writes for Nature. By the way," he interjected, "don't you think some of your stuff is too--what is it?--esoteric? The man," he continued, "as killed the curate in the last book. By the way, it was you as killed the curate?"

"Artilleryman," I replied, "I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little meat-chopper. And you, I presume, are the Artilleryman who attended my lectures on the Eroticism of the Elasmobranch?"

"That's me," he said; "but Lord, how you've changed. Only a fortnight ago, and now you're stone-bald!"

I stared, marvelling at his gift of perception.

"What have you been living on?" I asked.

"Oh," he said, "immature potatoes and Burgundy" (I give the catalogue so precisely because it has nothing to do with the story), "uncooked steak and limp lettuces, precocious carrots and Bartlett pears, and thirteen varieties of fluid beef, which I cannot name except at the usual advertisement rates."

"But can you sleep after it?" said I.

"Blimy! yes," he replied; "I'm fairly--what is it?--eupeptic."

"It's all over with mankind," I muttered.

"It is all over," he replied. "The Wenuses 'ave only lost one Crinoline, just one, and they keep on coming; they're falling somewhere every night. Nothing's to be done. We're beat!"

I made no answer. I sat staring, pulverised by the colossal intellectuality of this untutored private. He had attended only three of my lectures, and had never taken any notes.

"This isn't a war," he resumed; "it never was a war. These 'ere Wenuses they wants to be Mas, that's the long and the short of it. Only----"

"Yes?" I said, more than ever impressed by the man's pyramidal intuition.

"They can't stand the climate. They're too--what is it?--exotic."

We sat staring at each other.

"And what will they do?" I humbly asked, grovelling unscientifically at his feet.

"That's what I've been thinking," said the gunner. "I ain't an ornamental soldier, but I've a good deal of cosmic kinetic optimism, and it's the cosmic kinetic optimist what comes through. Now these Wenuses don't want to wipe us all out. It's the women they want to exterminate. They want to collar the men, and you'll see that after a bit they'll begin catching us, picking the best, and feeding us up in cages and men-coops."

"Good heavens!" I exclaimed; "but you are a man of genius indeed," and I flung my arms around his neck.

"Steady on!" he said; "don't be so--what is it?--ebullient."

"And what then?" I asked, when my emotion had somewhat subsided.

"Then," said he, "the others must be wary. You and I are mean little cusses: we shall get off. They won't want us. And what do we do? Take to the drains!" He looked at me triumphantly.

Quailing before his glory of intellect, I fainted.

"Are you sure?" I managed to gasp, on recovering consciousness.

"Yes," he said, "sewer. The drains are the places for you and me. Then we shall play cricket--a narrow drain makes a wonderful pitch--and read the good books--not poetry swipes, and stuff like that, but good books. That's where men like you come in. Your books are the sort: The Time Machine, and Round the World in Eighty Days, The Wonderful Wisit, and From the Earth to the Moon, and----"

"Stop!" I cried, nettled at his stupidity. "You are confusing another author and myself."

"Was I?" he said, "that's rum, but I always mix you up with the man you admire so much--Jools Werne. And," he added with a sly look, "you do admire him, don't you?"

In a flash I saw the man plain. He was a critic. I knew my duty at once: I must kill him. I did not want to kill him, because I had already killed enough--the curate in the last book, and the Examiner and the landlord of the "Dog and Measles" in this,--but an author alone with a critic in deserted London! What else could I do?

He seemed to divine my thought.

"There's some immature champagne in the cellar," he said.

"No," I replied, thinking aloud; "too slow, too slow."

He endeavoured to pacify me.

"Let me teach you a game," he said.

He taught me one--he taught me several. We began with "Spadille," we ended with "Halma" and "Snap," for parliament points. That is to say, instead of counters we used M.Ps. Grotesque and foolish as this will seem to the sober reader, it is absolutely true. Strange mind of man! that, with our species being mashed all around, we could sit following the chance of this painted pasteboard.

Afterwards we tried "Tiddleywinks" and "Squails," and I beat him so persistently that both sides of the House were mine and my geniality entirely returned. He might have been living to this hour had he not mentioned something about the brutality of The Island of Dr. Moreau. That settled it. I had heard that absurd charge once too often, and raising my Blaisdell binaural stethoscope I leaped upon him. With one last touch of humanity, I turned the orbicular ivory plate towards him and struck him to the earth.

At that moment fell the Fourth Crinoline.

III.

THE TEA-TRAY IN WESTBOURNE GROVE.

My wife's plan of campaign was simple but masterly. She would enlist an army of enormous bulk, march on the Wenuses in Westbourne Grove, and wipe them from the face of the earth.

Such was my wife's project. My wife's first step was to obtain, as the nucleus of attack, those women to whom the total loss of men would be most disastrous. They flocked to my wife's banner, which was raised in Regent's Park, in front of the pavilion where tea is provided by a maternal County Council.

My mother, who joined the forces and therefore witnessed the muster, tells me it was a most impressive sight. My wife, in a nickel-plated Russian blouse, trimmed with celluloid pom-pons, aluminium pantaloons, and a pair of Norwegian Skis, looked magnificent.

An old Guard, primed with recent articles from the Queen by Mrs. Lynn Linton, marched in a place of honour; and a small squadron of confirmed misogynists, recruited from the Athenaeum, the Travellers' and the Senior United Service Clubs, who professed themselves to be completely Mash-proof, were in charge of the ambulance. The members of the Ladies' Kennel Club, attended by a choice selection of carefully-trained Chows, Schipperkes, Whippets and Griffons, garrisoned various outposts.

The Pioneers joined my wife's ranks with some hesitation. The prospects of a world depleted of men did not seem (says my mother) to fill them with that consternation which was evident in my wife and her more zealous lieutenants. But after a heated discussion at the Club-house, which was marked by several resignations, it was decided to join in the attack. A regiment of Pioneers therefore, marching to the battle-chant of Walt Whitman's "Pioneers, O Pioneers!" brought up (says my mother) the rear.

The march of my wife's troops was a most impressive sight. Leaving Regent's Park by the Clarence Gate, they passed down Upper Baker Street, along Marylebone Road into Edgware Road. Here the troops divided. One detachment hastened to Queen's Road, by way of Praed Street, Craven Road, Craven Hill, Leinster Terrace and the Bayswater Road, with the purpose of approaching Whiteley's from the South; the other half marched direct to Westbourne Grove, along Paddington Green Road to Bishop's Road.

Thus, according to my wife's plan, the Wenuses would be between the two wings of the army and escape would be impossible.

Everything was done as my wife had planned. The two detachments reached their destination almost simultaneously. My wife, with the northern wing, was encamped in Bishop's Road, Westbourne Grove and Pickering Place. My mother, with the southern wing (my wife shrewdly kept the command in the family), filled Queen's Road from Whiteley's to Moscow Road. My mother, who has exquisite taste in armour, had donned a superb Cinque-Cento cuirass, a short Zouave jacket embroidered with sequins, accordion-pleated bloomers, luminous leggings, brown Botticelli boots and one tiger-skin spat.

Between the two hosts was the empty road before the Universal Provider's Emporium. The Wenuses were within the building. By the time my wife's warriors were settled and had completed the renovation of their toilets it was high noon.

My wife had never imagined that any delay would occur: she had expected to engage with the enemy at once and have done with it, and consequently brought no provisions and no protection from the sun, which poured down a great bulk of pitiless beams.

The absence of Wenuses and of any sound betokening their activity was disconcerting. However, my wife thought it best to lay siege to Whiteley's rather than to enter the establishment.

The army therefore waited.

The heat became intense. My wife and her soldiers began to feel the necessity for refreshment. My wife is accustomed to regular meals. The sun grew in strength as the time went on, and my wife gave the order to sit at ease, which was signalled to my mother. My mother tells me that she was never so pleased in her life.

One o'clock struck; two o'clock; three o'clock; and still no Wenuses. Faint sounds were now audible from the crockery department, and then a hissing, which passed by degrees into a humming, a long, loud droning noise. It resembled as nearly as anything the boiling of an urn at a tea-meeting, and awoke in the breasts of my wife and her army an intense and unconquerable longing for tea, which was accentuated as four o'clock was reached. Still no Wenuses. Another hour dragged wearily on, and the craving for tea had become positively excruciating when five o'clock rang out.

At that moment, the glass doors of the crockery department were flung open, and out poured a procession of Wenuses smiling, said my mother, with the utmost friendliness, dressed as A.B.C. girls, and bearing trays studded with cups and saucers.

With the most seductive and ingratiating charm, a cup was handed to my wife. What to do she did not for the moment know. "Could such a gift be guileless?" she asked herself. "No." And yet the Wenuses looked friendly. Finally her martial spirit prevailed and my wife repulsed the cup, adjuring the rank and file to do the same. But in vain. Every member of my wife's wing of that fainting army greedily grasped a cup. Alas! what could they know of the deadly Tea-Tray of the Wenuses? Nothing, absolutely nothing, such is the disgraceful neglect of science in our schools and colleges. And so they drank and were consumed.

Meanwhile my mother, at the head of the south wing of the army, which had been entirely overlooked by the Wenuses, stood watching the destruction of my wife's host--a figure petrified with alarm and astonishment. One by one she watched her sisters in arms succumb to the awful Tea-Tray.

Then it was that this intrepid woman rose to her greatest height.

"Come!" she cried to her Amazons. "Come! They have no more tea left. Now is the moment ripe."

With these spirited words, my mother and her troops proceeded to charge down Queen's Road upon the unsuspecting Wenuses.

But they had reckoned without the enemy.

The tumult of the advancing host caught the ear of the Wonderful Wisitors, and in an instant they had extracted glittering cases of their crimson cigarettes from their pockets, and lighting them in the strange fashion I have described elsewhere, they proceeded to puff the smoke luxuriously into the faces of my mother and her comrades.

Alas! little did these gallant females know of the horrible properties of the Red Weed. How could they, with our science-teaching in such a wretched state?

The smoke grew in volume and density, spread and spread, and in a few minutes the south wing of my wife's army was as supine as the north.

How my wife and mother escaped I shall not say. I make a point of never explaining the escape of my wife, whether from Martians or Wenuses; but that night, as Commander-in-Chief, she issued this cataleptic despatch:

"The Wenuses are able to paralyse all but strong-minded women with their deadly Tea-Tray. Also they burn a Red Weed, the smoke of which has smothered our troops in Westbourne Grove. No sooner have they despoiled Whiteley's than they will advance upon Jay's and Marshall and Snelgrove's. It is impossible to stop them. There is no safety from the Tea-Tray and the Red Weed but in instant flight."

That night the world was again lit by a pale pink flash of light. It was the Fifth Crinoline.

IV.

WRECKAGE.

The general stampede that ensued on the publication of my wife's despatch is no fit subject for the pen of a coherent scientific writer. Suffice it to say, that in the space of twenty-four hours London was practically empty, with the exception of the freaks at Barnum's, the staff of The Undertakers' Gazette, and Mrs. Elphinstone (for that, pace Wilkie Collins, was the name of the Woman in White), who would listen to no reasoning, but kept calling upon "George," for that was the name of my cousin's man, who had been in the service of Lord Garrick, the Chief Justice, who had succumbed to dipsomania in the previous invasion.

Meantime the Wenuses, flushed with their success in Westbourne Grove, had carried their devastating course in a south-easterly direction, looting Marshall and Snelgrove's, bearing away the entire stock of driving-gloves from Sleep's and subjecting Redfern's to the asphyxiating fumes of the Red Weed.

It is calculated that they spent nearly two days in Jay's, trying on all the costumes in that establishment, and a week in Peter Robinson's. During these days I never quitted Uxbridge Road Station, for just as I was preparing to leave, my eye caught the title on the bookstall of Grant Allen's work, The Idea of Evolution! and I could not stir from the platform until I had skimmed it from cover to cover.

Wearily mounting the stairs, I then turned my face westward. At the corner of Royal Crescent, just by the cabstand, I found a man lying in the roadway. His face was stained with the Red Weed, and his language was quite unfit for the columns of Nature.

I applied a limp lettuce to his fevered brow, took his temperature with my theodolite, and pressing a copy of Home Chat into his unresisting hand, passed on with a sigh. I think I should have stayed with him but for the abnormal obtusity of his facial angle.

Turning up Clarendon Road, I heard the faint words of the Wenusberg music by Wagner from a pianoforte in the second story of No. 34. I stepped quickly into a jeweller's shop across the road, carried off eighteen immature carats from a tray on the counter, and pitched them through the open window at the invisible pianist. The music ceased suddenly.

It was when I began to ascend Notting Hill that I first heard the hooting. It reminded me at first of a Siren, and then of the top note of my maiden aunt, in her day a notorious soprano vocalist. She subsequently emigrated to France, and entered a nunnery under the religious name of Soeur Marie Jeanne. "Tul-ulla-lulla-liety," wailed the Voice in a sort of superhuman jodel, coming, as it seemed to me, from the region of Westminster Bridge.

The persistent ululation began to get upon my nerves. I found, moreover, that I was again extremely hungry and thirsty. It was already noon. Why was I wandering alone in this derelict city, clad in my wife's skirt and my cook's Sunday bonnet?

Grotesque and foolish as it may seem to the scientific reader, I was entirely unable to answer this simple conundrum. My mind reverted to my school days. I found myself declining musa. Curious to relate, I had entirely forgotten the genitive of ego.... With infinite trouble I managed to break into a vegetarian restaurant, and made a meal off some precocious haricot beans, a brace of Welsh rabbits, and ten bottles of botanic beer.

Working back into Holland Park Avenue and thence keeping steadily along High Street, Notting Hill Gate, I determined to make my way to the Marble Arch, in the hopes of finding some fresh materials for my studies in the Stone Age.

In Bark Place, where the Ladies' Kennel Club had made their vast grand-stand, were a number of pitiful vestiges of the Waterloo of women-kind. There was a shattered Elswick bicycle, about sixteen yards and a half of nun's veiling, and fifty-three tortoise-shell side-combs. I gazed on the débris with apathy mingled with contempt. My movements were languid, my plans of the vaguest. I knew that I wished to avoid my wife, but had no clear idea how the avoiding was to be done.

BUBBLES.

From Orme Square, a lean-faced, unkempt and haggard waif, I drifted to Great Orme's Head and back again. Senile dementia had already laid its spectral clutch upon my wizened cerebellum when I was rescued by some kindly people, who tell me that they found me scorching down Hays Hill on a cushion-tired ordinary. They have since told me that I was singing "My name is John Wellington Wells, Hurrah!" and other snatches from a pre-Wenusian opera.

These generous folk, though severely harassed by their own anxieties, took me in and cared for me. I was a lonely man and a sad one, and they bored me. In spite of my desire to give public expression to my gratitude, they have refused to allow their names to appear in these pages, and they consequently enjoy the proud prerogative of being the only anonymous persons in this book. I stayed with them at the Bath Club for four days, and with tears parted from them on the spring-board. They would have kept me for ever, but that would have interfered with my literary plans. Besides, I had a morbid desire to gaze on the Wenuses once more.

And so I went out into the streets again, guided by the weird Voice, and viâ Grafton Street, Albemarle Street, the Royal Arcade, Bond Street, Burlington Gardens, Vigo Street and Sackville Street, Piccadilly, Regent Street, Pall Mall East, Cockspur Street and Whitehall, steadily wheeled my way across Westminster Bridge.

There were few people about and their skins were all yellow. Lessing, presumably in his Laocoon, has attributed this to the effects of sheer panic; but Carver's explanation, which attributes the ochre-like tint to the hypodermic operation of the Mash-Glance, seems far more plausible. For myself I abstain from casting the weight of my support in either scale, because my particular province is speculative philosophy and not comparative dermatology.

As I passed St. Thomas's Hospital, the tullululation grew ever louder and louder. At last the source of the sound could no longer be disguised. It proceeded without doubt from the interior of some soap works just opposite Doulton's. The gate was open and a faint saponaceous exhalation struck upon my dilated nostrils. I have always been peculiarly susceptible to odours, though my particular province is not Osmetics but speculative philosophy, and I at once resolved to enter. Leaning my bicycle against the wall of the archway, I walked in, and was immediately confronted by the object of my long search.

There, grouped picturesquely round a quantity of large tanks, stood the Wenuses, blowing assiduously through pellucid pipettes and simultaneously chanting in tones of unearthly gravity a strain poignantly suggestive of baffled hopes, thwarted aspirations and impending departure. So absorbed were they in their strange preparations, that they were entirely unconscious of my presence. Grotesque and foolish as this may seem to the infatuated reader, it is absolutely true.

Gradually from out the troubled surface of the tanks there rose a succession of transparent iridescent globules, steadily waxing in bulk until they had attained a diameter of about sixteen feet. The Wenuses then desisted from their labours of inflation, and suddenly plunging into the tanks, reappeared inside these opalescent globules. I can only repeat that speculative philosophy, and not sapoleaginous hydro-dynamics, is my particular forte, and would refer doubtful readers, in search of further information, to the luminous hypothesis advanced by Professor Cleaver of Washington to account for the imbullification of the Wenuses.[1]

Never shall I forget the touching scene that now unfolded itself before my bewildered eyes. Against a back ground of lemon-coloured sky, with the stars shedding their spiritual lustre through the purple twilight, these gorgeous creatures, each ensphered in her beatific bubble, floated tremulously upward on the balmy breeze. In a moment it all flashed upon me. They were passing away from the scene of their brief triumph, and I, a lonely and dejected scientist, saw myself doomed to expiate a moment's madness in long years of ineffectual speculation on the probable development of Moral Ideas.

My mind reverted to my abandoned arguments, embodied in the article which lay beneath the selenite paperweight in my study in Campden Hill Gardens. Frenzied with despair, I shot out an arm to arrest the upward transit of the nearest Wenus, when a strange thing occurred.

"At last!" said a voice.

I was startled. It was my wife, accompanied by Mrs. Elphinstone, my cousin's man, my mother, the widow of the landlord of the "Dog and Measles," Master Herodotus Tibbles in deep mourning, and the Artillery-man's brother from Beauchamp's little livery stables.

I shot an appealing glance to the disappearing Wenus. She threw me a kiss. I threw her another.

My wife took a step forward, and put her hand to my ear. I fell.

[Footnote 1: Cleaver in a subsequent Memoir [Sonnenschein, London, pp. xiv., 954, 20 in. x 8-1/2, price £2 2s. net] has made out, reluctantly and against the judgment of his firm, that the basic material of the globules, the peculiar tenacity of which was due to some toughening ingredient imported by the Wisitors from their planet, was undoubtedly that indispensable domestic article which is alleged to "save rubbing."]

APPENDIX A.

My mother, whose vigilance during the Wenuses' invasion has been throughout of the greatest assistance to me, kept copies of the various papers of importance which commented upon that event. From them I am enabled, with my mother's consent, to supplement the allusions to contemporary journalism in the body of my history with the following extracts:--

The Times, or, as it is better known, the Thunder Child of Printing House Square, said:

"The Duke of Curzon's statesmanlike reply in the House of Lords last night to the inflammatory question or string of questions put by Lord Ashmead with reference to our planetary visitors will go far to mitigate the unreasoning panic which has laid hold of a certain section of the community. As to the methods by which it has been proposed to confront and repel the invaders, the Duke's remark, 'that the use of dynamite violated the chivalrous instincts which were at the root of the British Nature,' called forth loud applause. The Foreign Secretary, however, showed that, while deprecating senseless panic, he was ready to take any reasonable steps to allay the natural anxiety of the public, and rising later on in the evening, he announced that a Royal Commission had been appointed, on which Lord Ashmead, Dr. Joseph Parker (of the City Temple), and Mr. Hall Caine, representing the Isle of Man, had consented to serve, and would be dispatched without delay to Kensington Gardens to inquire into the cause of the visit, and, if possible, to induce the new comers to accept an invitation to tea on the Terrace. By way of supplementing these tranquillizing assurances, we may add that we have the authority of the best scientific experts, including Dr. Moreau, Professor Sprudelkopf of Carlsbad, and Dr. Fountain Penn of Philadelphia, for asserting that no animate beings could survive their transference from the atmosphere of Venus to that of our planet for more than fourteen days. It is to be hoped, therefore, that the members of the Royal Commission may be successful in impressing upon our aërial visitors the imperative necessity of a speedy return. In these negotiations it is anticipated that the expressive pantomime of Dr. Parker, and Mr. Hall Caine's mastery of the Manx dialect, will be of the greatest possible assistance."

To the Daily Telegraph Sir Edwin Arnold contributed a poem entitled "Aphrodite Anadyomené; or, Venus at the Round Pond." My mother can remember only the last stanza, which ran as follows:

"Though I fly to Fushiyama, Steeped in opalescent Karma, I shall ne'er forget my charmer, My adorable Khansamah. Though I fly to Tokio, Where the sweet chupatties blow, I shall ne'er forget thee, no! Yamagata, daimio."

A shilling testimonial to the Wenuses was also started by the same journal, in accordance with the precedent furnished by the similar treatment of the Graces, and an animated controversy raged in its correspondence columns with reference to mixed bathing at Margate, and its effect on the morality of the Wenuses.

A somewhat painful impression was created by the publication of an interview with a well-known dramatic critic in the periodical known as Great Scott's Thoughts. This eminent authority gave it as his unhesitating opinion that the Wenuses were not fit persons to associate with actors, actresses, or dramatic critics, and that if, as was announced, they had been engaged at Covent Garden to lend realistic verisimilitude to the Venusberg scene in Tannhäuser, it was his firm resolve to give up his long crusade against Ibsen, emigrate to Norway, and change his name to that of John Gabriel Borkman. A prolonged sojourn in Poppyland, however, resulted in the withdrawal of this dreadful threat, and, some few weeks after the extinction of the Wenuses, his reconciliation with the dramatic profession was celebrated at a public meeting, where, after embracing all the actor-managers in turn, he was presented by them with a magnificent silver butter-boat, filled to the brim with melted butter ready for immediate use.

APPENDIX B.

My mother has obtained permission from the Laureate's publishers to reprint the following stanzas from "The Pale Pink Raid":--

"Wrong? O of coarse it's heinous, But we're going, girls, you just bet! Do they think that the Wars of Wenus Can be stopped by an epithet? When the henpecked Earth-men pray us To join them at afternoon tea, Not rhyme nor reason can stay us From flying to set them free.

* * * * *

"When the men on that hapless planet, Handsome and kind and true, Cry out, 'Hurry up!' O hang it! What else can a Wenus do? I suppose it was rather bad form, girls, But really we didn't care, For our planet was growing too warm, girls, And we wanted a change of air.

* * * * *

"Mrs. Grundy may go on snarling, But still, at the Judgment Day, The author of England's Darling I think won't give us away. We failed, but we chose to chance it, And as one of the beaten side, I'd rather have made that transit Than written Jameson's Ride!"

THE END.

Contents

NATIVE SON

By T. D. Hamm

Tommy hated Earth, knowing his mother might go home to Mars without him. Worse, would a robot secretly take her place?...

Tommy Benton, on his first visit to Earth, found the long-anticipated wonders of twenty-first-century New York thrilling the first week, boring and unhappy the second week, and at the end of the third he was definitely ready to go home.

The never-ending racket of traffic was torture to his abnormally acute ears. Increased atmospheric pressure did funny things to his chest and stomach. And quick and sure-footed on Mars, he struggled constantly against the heavy gravity that made all his movements clumsy and uncoordinated.

The endless canyons of towering buildings, with their connecting Skywalks, oppressed and smothered him. Remembering the endless vistas of rabbara fields beside a canal that was like an inland sea, homesickness flooded over him.

He hated the people who stared at him with either open or hidden amusement. His Aunt Bee, for instance, who looked him up and down with frank disapproval and said loudly, "For Heavens sake, Helen! Take him to a good tailor and get those bones covered up!"

Was it his fault he was six inches taller than Terran boys his age, and had long, thin arms and legs? Or that his chest was abnormally developed to compensate for an oxygen-thin atmosphere? I'd like to see her, he thought fiercely, out on the Flatlands; she'd be gasping like a canal-fish out of water.

Even his parents, happily riding the social merry-go-round of Terra, after eleven years in the Martian flatlands, didn't seem to understand how he felt.

"Don't you like Earth, Tommy?" queried his mother anxiously.

"Oh ... it's all right, I guess."

"... 'A nice place to visit' ..." said his father sardonically.

"... 'but I wouldn't live here if they gave me the place!' ..." said his mother, and they both burst out laughing for no reason that Tommy could see. Of course, they did that lots of times at home and Tommy laughed with them just for the warm, secure feeling of belonging. This time he didn't feel like laughing.

"When are we going home?" he repeated stubbornly.

His father pulled Tommy over in the crook of his arm and said gently, "Well, not right away, son. As a matter of fact, how would you like to stay here and go to school?"

Tommy pulled away and looked at him incredulously.

"I've been to school!"

"Well, yes," admitted his father. "But only to the colony schools. You don't want to grow up and be an ignorant Martian sandfoot all your life, do you?"

"Yes, I do! I want to be a Martian sandfoot. And I want to go home where people don't look at me and say, 'So this is your little Martian!'"

Benton, Sr., put his arm around Tommy's stiffly resistant shoulders. "Look here, old man," he said persuasively. "I thought you wanted to be a space engineer. You can't do that without an education you know. And your Aunt Bee will take good care of you."

Tommy faced him stubbornly. "I don't want to be any old spaceman. I want to be a sandfoot like old Pete. And I want to go home."

Helen bit back a smile at the two earnest, stubborn faces so ridiculously alike, and hastened to avert the gathering storm.

"Now look, fellows. Tommy's career doesn't have to be decided in the next five minutes ... after all, he's only ten. He can make up his mind later on if he wants to be an engineer or a rabbara farmer. Right now, he's going to stay here and go to school ... and I'm staying with him."

Resolutely avoiding both crestfallen faces, Helen, having shepherded Tommy to bed, returned to the living room acutely conscious of Big Tom's bleak, hurt gaze at her back.

"Helen, you're going to make a sissy out of the boy," he said at last. "There isn't any reason why he can't stay here at home with Bee."

Helen turned to face him.

"Earth isn't home to Tommy. And your sister Bee told him he ought to be out playing football with the boys instead of hanging around the house."

"But she knows the doctor said he'd have to take it easy for a year till he was accustomed to the change in gravity and air-pressure," he answered incredulously.

"Exactly. She also asked me," Helen went on grimly, "if I thought he'd be less of a freak as he got older."

Tom Benton swore. "Bee always did have less sense than the average hen," he gritted. "My son a freak! Hell's-bells!"

Tommy, arriving at the hall door in time to hear the tail-end of the sentence, crept back to bed feeling numb and dazed. So even his father thought he was a freak.

* * * * *

The last few days before parting was one of strain for all of them. If Tommy was unnaturally subdued, no one noticed it; his parents were not feeling any great impulse toward gaiety either.

They all went dutifully sight-seeing as before; they saw the Zoo, and went shopping on the Skywalks, and on the last day wound up at the great showrooms of "Androids, Inc."

Tommy had hated them on sight; they were at once too human and too inhuman for comfort. The hotel was full of them, and most private homes had at least one. Now they saw the great incubating vats, and the processing and finally the showroom where one of the finished products was on display as a maid, sweeping and dusting.

"There's one that's a dead-ringer for you, Helen. If you were a little better looking, that is." Tommy's dad pretended to compare them judicially. Helen laughed, but Tommy looked at him with a resentfulness. Comparing his mother to an Android....

"They say for a little extra you can get an exact resemblance. Maybe I'd better have one fixed up like you to take back with me," Big Tom added teasingly. Then as Helen's face clouded over, "Oh, hon, you know I was only kidding. Let's get out of here; this place gives me the collywobbles. Besides, I've got to pick up my watch."

But his mother's face was still unhappy and Tommy glowered sullenly at his father's back all the way to the watch-shop.

It was a small shop, with an inconspicuous sign down in one corner of the window that said only, "KRUMBEIN--watches," and was probably the most famous shop of its kind in the world. Every spaceman landing on Terra left his watch to be checked by the dusty, little old man who was the genius of the place. Tommy ranged wide-eyed about the clock and chronometer crammed interior. He stopped fascinated before the last case. In it was a watch ... but, what a watch! Besides the regulation Terran dial, it had a second smaller dial that registered the corresponding time on Mars. Tommy's whole heart went out to it in an ecstasy of longing. He thought wistfully that if you could know what time it was there, you could imagine what everyone was doing and it wouldn't seem so far away. Haltingly, he tried to explain.

"Look, Mom," he said breathlessly. "It's almost five o'clock at home. Douwie will be coming up to the barn to be fed. Gosh, do you suppose old Pete will remember about her?"

His mother smiled at him reassuringly. "Of course he will, silly. Don't forget he was the one who caught and tamed her for you."

Tommy gulped as he thought of Douwie. Scarcely as tall as himself; the big, rounded, mouselike ears, and the flat, cloven pads that could carry her so swiftly over the sandy Martian flatlands. One of the last dwindling herds of native Martian douwies, burden-carriers of a vanished race, she had been Tommy's particular pride and joy for the last three years.

Behind him, Tommy heard his mother murmur under her breath, "Tom ... the watch; could we?"

And his Dad regretfully, "It's a pretty expensive toy for a youngster, Helen. And even a rabbara raiser's bank account has limits."

"Of course, dear; it was silly of me." Helen smiled a little ruefully. "And if Mr. Krumbein has your watch ready, we must go. Bee and some of her friends are coming over, and it's only a few hours 'till you ... leave."

Big Tom squeezed her elbow gently, understandingly, as she blinked back quick tears. Trailing after them, Tommy saw the little by-play and his heart ached. The guilt-complex building up in him grew and deepened.

He knew he had only to say, "Look, I don't mind staying. Aunt Bee and I will get along swell," and everything would be all right again. Then the terror of this new and complex world--as it would be without a familiar face--swept over him and kept him silent.

His overwrought feelings expressed themselves in a nervously rebelling stomach, culminating in a disgraceful moment over the nearest gutter. The rest of the afternoon he spent in bed recuperating.

In the living room Aunt Bee spoke her mind in her usual, high-pitched voice.

"It's disgraceful, Helen. A boy his age.... None of the Bentons ever had nerves."

His mother's reply was inaudible, but on the heels of his father's deeper tones, Aunt Bee's voice rose in rasping indignation.

"Well! I never! And from my own brother, too. From now on don't come to me for help with your spoiled brat. Good-bye!"

The door slammed indignantly, his mother chuckled, and there was a spontaneous burst of laughter. Tommy relaxed and lay back happily. Anyway, that was the last of Aunt Bee!

* * * * *

The next hour or two passed in a flurry of ringing phones, people coming and going, and last-minute words and reminders. Then suddenly it was time to leave. Dad burst in for a last quick hug and a promise to send him pictures of Douwie and her foal, due next month; Mother dropped a hasty kiss on his hair and promised to hurry back from the Spaceport. Then Tommy was alone, with a large, painful lump where his heart ought to be.

The only activity was the almost noiseless buzzing as the hotel android ran the cleaner over the living room. Presently even that ceased, and Tommy lay relaxed and inert, sleepily watching the curtains blow in and out at the open window. Thirty stories above the street the noises were pleasantly muffled and remote, and his senses drifted aimlessly to and fro on the tides of half-sleep.

Drowsily his mind wandered from the hotel's android servants ... to the strictly utilitarian mechanical monstrosity at home, known affectionately as "Old John" ... to the android showroom where they had seen the one that Dad said looked like Mother....

He jolted suddenly, sickeningly awake. Suppose, his mind whispered treacherously, suppose that Dad had ordered one to take Mom's place ... not on Mars, but here while she returned to Mars with him. Suppose that instead of Mom he discovered one of those Things ... or even worse, suppose he went on from day to day not even knowing....

It was a bad five minutes; he was wet with perspiration when he lay back on his pillows, a shaky smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He had a secret defense against the Terror. He giggled a little at the thought of what Aunt Bee would say if she knew.

And what had brought him back from the edge of hysteria was the triumphant knowledge that with the abnormally acute hearing bred in the thin atmosphere of Mars, no robot ever created could hide from him the infinitesimal ticking of the electronic relays that gave it life. Secure at last, his overstrung nerves relaxed and he slid gratefully over the edge of sleep.

He woke abruptly, groping after some vaguely remembered sound. A soft clicking of heels down the hall.... Of course, his mother back from the Spaceport! Now she would be stopping at his door to see if he were asleep. He lay silently; through his eyelashes he could see her outlined in the soft light from the hall. She was coming in to see if he was tucked in. In a moment he would jump up and startle her with a hug, as she leaned over him. In a moment....

Screaming desperately, he was out of bed, backing heedlessly across the room. He was still screaming as the low sill of the open window caught him behind the knees and toppled him thirty stories to the street.

Alone in the silent room, Helen Benton stood dazed, staring blindly at the empty window.

Tommy's parting gift from his father slid from her hand and lay on the carpet, still ticking gently.

It was 9:23 on Mars.

The End

Contents

WIZARD

By Laurence Mark Janifer

Although the Masquerade itself, as a necessary protection against non-telepaths, was not fully formulated until the late years of the Seventeenth Century, groups of telepaths-in-hiding existed long before that date. Whether such groups were the results of natural mutations, or whether they came into being due to some other cause, has not yet been fully determined, but that a group did exist in the district of Offenburg, in what is now Prussia, we are quite sure. The activities of the group appear to have begun, approximately, in the year 1594, but it was not until eleven years after that date that they achieved a signal triumph, the first and perhaps the last of its kind until the dissolution of the Masquerade in 2103.

--Excerpt from "A Short History of the Masquerade," by A. Milge, Crystal 704-54-368, Produced 2440.

Jonas came over the hill whistling as if he had not a care in the world--which was not even approximately true, he reflected happily. The state of complete and utter quiet was both foreign and slightly repugnant to him; he was never more pleased than when he had a job in hand, a job that involved a slight and unavoidable risk.

This time, of course, the risk was more than slight. Why, he thought happily, it was even possible for him to get killed, and most painfully, too! With a great deal of pleasure, he stood for a second at the crest of the hill, his hands on his hips, looking down at the town of Speyer as it baked in the May afternoon sunlight.

"Behold the Tortoise: He maketh no progress unless he sticketh out his neck." But he maketh very little progress unless he pick the right time and place to "sticketh out his neck"--which can be quite a sticky problem for a man in a medieval culture!

Jonas did not, in spite of his pose, look like the typical hero of folk tale or scribe's tome; he was not seven feet tall, for instance, nor did he have a handsome, lovesome face with flashing blue eyes, or a broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted marvel of a figure. He was, instead, somewhat shorter than the average of men in Europe in 1605 and for some time thereafter. He had small, almost hidden eyes that seemed to see a great deal, but failed completely to make a fuss about the fact. And while his figure was just a trifle dumpy, his face completed the rhyme by being extraordinarily lumpy. The nose, as a matter of strict truth, was hard to distinguish from the other contusions, swellings and marks that covered the head.

Nor, of course, did he carry the sword of a great hero, or a noble. Jonas had no von to stick on his name, and he had never thought it worth his while to claim one and accept the tiny risk of disclosure. After all, a noble was only a man like other men.

And, besides, Jonas knew perfectly well that he had no need of a sword.

His adventures, too, were a little out of the common run of tales. Jonas had, he thought regretfully, few duels to look forward to, and he had even fewer to look back on. And, as a maid is won by face, figure and daring, and a wife by riches, position or prospects, there was a notable paucity of lissome ladies in Jonas' career.

All in all, he thought sadly, he was not a usual hero.

But he refused to let the thought spoil his enjoyment. After all, he was a hero, though of his own unique kind; there was no denying that. And, in his own way, he had his reward. He took one hand off his hip to scratch at the top of his head, wondering briefly if he had managed to pick up lice in the last town he had visited, and he took another look at the city.

Speyer seemed a lot better, at first glance, than some of the other places Jonas had visited. For one thing, it had a full town hall, built--no less--of honest stone, and probably a relict of the Roman times. There was the parish church, of course, a good solid wooden structure, and a collection of houses strung along the dirt paths of the town. The houses of the rich were, naturally, wooden; the poor built of baked mud. There were a great many baked-mud structures, and only one wooden one, besides the church, that Jonas could see.

The paths were winding, but comparatively free from slop. That was pleasing, he told himself. And the buildings themselves, wood, mud and stone, clustered in the valley below him as if they were afraid, and needed each other's protection.

Which, in a way, they did. Jonas reflected on that a trifle grimly, thinking of the Holy Inquisition with its hierarchy of priests and lay folk, busily working in Speyer just as it worked in every other town throughout Offenburg, and throughout the civilized world.

Ordinarily, he would not have given it a thought, beyond a passing sigh for the ways of the world; he had other business. But now--

He grinned to himself, and the grin turned to a laugh as he started down the hill. The grislier methods of the Inquisitorial process were well-known to him by reputation, and soon he might be testing them out for himself. There was absolutely no way to be sure.

That thought pleased him greatly; after all, he told himself, there was nothing like a little danger to spice the boring business of living. By the time he reached the bottom of the hill, he was whistling loudly.

* * * * *

He stopped at the first house, a mud construction with a badly-carpentered wooden door and a single bare window that looked out on the street. It smelled, but Jonas went up to the door bravely and knocked.

There was no answer. He went on whistling "Fortuna plango vulnera" under his breath, and after a time he knocked again.

This time he heard movement inside the house, and nodded to himself in a satisfied fashion. But almost a minute passed before the head of an old woman showed itself at the window. She was really extraordinarily ugly, he thought. She wore a bonnet that did nothing whatever to enhance her doubtful, wrinkled charms, or to conceal them; and besides, it was dirty.

"Nobody's here," she said in the voice of a very venomous toad. "Go away."

Jonas smiled at her. It was an effort. "Madam--" he began politely.

"Nobody's home," she repeated, drawing slightly back from the window. "You go away, now."

"Ah," Jonas said pleasantly. "But you're home, aren't you?"

The old woman frowned at him suspiciously. "Now," she said vaguely. "Well."

"This is your house?" he said. "The house where you live?"

"Never saw you before," the old woman said.

"That's right," Jonas said equably.

"You come to turn me out?" she demanded. Her eyebrows--which were almost as big and black as her ancient mustache--came down over glittering little eyes. "I hold this house free and proper," she said in a determined roar, "and nobody can take it from me. It belongs to me, and to my children, and to their children, and to the children of those children--"

The catalogue seemed likely to go on forever. "Exactly," Jonas said hastily.

"Well, then," the old woman said, and started to draw back.

Jonas gestured lazily with one hand. "Wait," he said. "I am not going to take your house away from you, madam. I am only here to ask you a question."

"Question?" she said. "You come from Herr Knupf? I'm an old woman but I do no wrong, and there is no one can accuse me of heresy. I am in church every week, and more than once; I keep peace with my neighbors and there's none can say a mystery about me--"

The woman, Jonas thought, was full to the eyebrows with words. Probably, he told himself, trying to be fair, she didn't have anyone to talk to, until a stranger came along.

He sighed briefly. "I do not come from the Inquisitor," he said truthfully, "nor is my question one that should cause you alarm."

The old woman pondered for a minute. She leaned her elbows on the window sill, getting them muddy. But that, Jonas thought, didn't seem to matter to this creature, apparently.

"Ask," she said at last.

Jonas put on his most pleasant expression. "Madam," he said, "I wish to know if there be any family in this town to give room to a wayfarer--understanding, of course, that the wayfarer would insist on paying. Paying well," he added.

The old woman blinked. "You looking for an inn?" she said. "An inn in this town?" The idea appeared to strike her as the very height of idiocy. She covered her face with her hands and shook. After a second Jonas discovered that she was laughing. He waited patiently until the fit had left her.

"Not an inn," he said. "There is no inn here, I know. But a family willing to take in a stranger--"

"Strangers are seldom here," she said. "Herr Knupf watches his flock with zeal."

Which meant, Jonas reflected, that he was in a fair way to get himself burned as a heretic unless he watched his step carefully. "Herr Knupf's fame has reached my own country, far away," he said with some truth. "Nevertheless, a family which--"

"Wait," she said. "You have said that you will pay well. Yet you do not appear rich."

Jonas understood. Fishing in his sewn pocket, he withdrew a single, shiny coin. "I also wish," he said smoothly, "to pay for any help I may receive--such as the answering of an innocent question, a question in which the respected Inquisitor Knupf can have no interest whatever."

The old woman's eyes went to the coin and stayed there. "Well," she said. "It is said that the family called Scharpe has a house too large for them, now that the elder son is gone; there is only the man, his wife and a daughter. It is said that the man is in need of money; he would accept payment, were it generous, in return for sharing room in his house."

"I would be most grateful," Jonas murmured. He passed the coin over; the old woman's hand snatched it and closed on it. "Where might I find this family?" he said.

"It is now late in the afternoon," the old woman said. "Perhaps they are at home. You will see a path which takes you to the left; follow it until you reach the last house. Knock at the door."

"I shall," Jonas said, "and many thanks."

The old woman, still clutching her coin, disappeared from the window as if someone had yanked her back. Jonas turned with relief and got back on the path, but it stank quite as badly as the house had.

He endured the stench--heroically.

* * * * *

Scharpe proved to be a barrel-shaped man who was unaccountably cheerless, as if the inside structure had been carefully removed, and then replaced by sawdust, Jonas thought. Even the offer of seven kroner for a single week's stay failed to produce the delirious joy Jonas had expected.

"The money is needed," Scharpe said in a dour, bass voice, staring off past Jonas' left ear at the darkening sky. "And for the money, you will be welcome. I must take your word that you are not dangerous; I can only pray that you do not betray that trust."

It was far from a warm welcome, but Jonas was satisfied with it. "I shall work to do you good," he said, "and not evil."

"Stranger," Scharpe said, "work for your own good; do nothing for me. This is an accursed family; there is no good to be done to me, or my wife or child."

Jonas tried to look reassuring. He thought of several things to say about the sunny side of life, and decided on none or them. "My sympathy--" he began.

"Your sympathy may endanger you," Scharpe said. "My son is gone; I pray that there is an end to it."

Jonas peered once into the mind of the man, and recoiled violently; but he had enough, in that one glimpse, to tell him the reason for Scharpe's misery. And it was quite reason enough, he thought.

"Herr Knupf--"

"We do not mention that name," Scharpe said. "My wife has resigned herself to what has happened; I am not so wise."

"I promise you," Jonas said earnestly, "that you will be in no danger from me. No, more: that I will help you out of your difficulties, and ensure your peace."

"Then you are an angel from Heaven," Scharpe said bitterly. "There is no other help, while the Inquisitor remains and our sons become suspect to his rages."

Jonas shook his head. "There is help," he said, "and you will find it. Your son is gone; accused, questioned, confessed and burnt. But there will be no more."

Scharpe looked at him for a long time. "Come with me," he said at last, and led the way into his mud house. Inside, there was only one large room, but it seemed spacious enough for four. Three pallets lay against the far right wall, a single one against the left. Scharpe went to the back of the house, near the single bed. "This will be yours," he said, "while you are with us. It is poor but it is all we can offer."

"I am honored," Jonas said.

"Here we are alone," Scharpe went on, his voice lowering. "My wife and daughter have gone to visit a neighbor, for they have not yet closed us off entirely from all human contact."

He grimaced. Jonas peered into the mind again, very gently, but the mad roiling of pain and memory there was too strong for him, and he returned.

"If you have anything to say to me," Scharpe said, "tell me now. No one can hear us, not Herr Knupf himself."

"To say to you?"

"Regarding your plan," Scharpe said. "Surely you have a plan. And if I may play any part in it--"

Jonas blinked. "Plan?" he said.

"Of course," Scharpe said. "You speak of an end to troubles, an end to the Inquisition and the burnings, an end to the question. And so you must have a plan for ridding us of Herr Knupf; one which you will tell me."

Jonas shook his head. "I have no plan," he said.

"It means danger," Scharpe pressed him. "But I do not mind danger, in such a cause. I am not vengeful, but my son was no wizard. Yet the Inquisitor took him and had a confession from him; you know well the worth of such confessions. And soon there will be others, for when the curse strikes a family it does not stop with one member." He tightened his lips. "It is not for myself I am afraid," he said.

Jonas nodded. "Were there such a plan," he said, "be assured I would tell you."

"But--"

"There is none," Jonas said. "Herr Knupf shall remain, for all that I can do, while the earth remains."

Scharpe opened his mouth, shut it again, and then shrugged. "I see," he said at last. "You do not trust me. Perhaps you are wise. I might talk foolishly; I am an old man; older, in this last month, than in all my other years."

"Believe me," Jonas began. "I--"

"Let it be," Scharpe said quietly. "I believe you. If that is what you want, I believe you." He shrugged again, moving out toward the door of the hut. "And, in any case," he said, "the money is needed. For there are fines to pay, and costs of the Inquisition."

"I understand," Jonas said helplessly.

Scharpe turned and looked him full in the face. In the big man's eyes, bitterness and hopelessness glittered. "I am sure you do," he said, and turned again toward the door.

* * * * *

The others he met only briefly. Frau Scharpe was a little woman with the face of a walnut, who looked as if she had never really been cheerful. Her son's death, he saw when he looked into her mind, had not come as a surprise to her; it was one more unhappy event, in a lifetime in which she had expected nothing else. Unhappiness, she told herself, was her portion in this life; in the Life Above, things would be different.

Jonas had met the type before, and was uninterested in going further. But Ilse Scharpe was something else entirely. She did not say a word to him, coming into the house that evening, a pace behind her mother, like an obedient slave. She was about seventeen, and her mind was as fresh and clean and pretty as her face and figure. Jonas started musing on Heroes again, but he never had the chance to make a move toward her. She had a very nice smile, and from memories in the others' minds he could hear her voice, low and quiet and entirely satisfactory.

Jonas sighed. The job, he told himself sternly, came first. And afterward--

Though, come to think of it, there wouldn't be an afterward.

The evening meal was simple. There was a single dish of meat and some sort of beans; after it had been eaten, and the darkness outside grew to full night, it was time to retire. Jonas went over to his pallet, removed his jerkin and shoes, and lay down. He heard the others readying themselves for sleep, but he did not look into their minds. Soon they were asleep and breathing heavily.

But Jonas stayed awake for a while.

"It's really too bad we can't work this sort of thing at a distance," Claerten's voice said suddenly. "But then, none of us has ever met the man, and you can't read a mind if you haven't had some physical contact with the man who owns it."

"It is too bad," Jonas agreed politely. Five hundred miles away Claerten chuckled, and the linkage of minds transmitted the amusement to Jonas.

"You don't think so, at any rate," the director said. "You're having adventures--and a fine time. It's the sort of thing you like, after all."

Jonas shrugged mentally. "I suppose so," he said. "I like to work on my own, do my own job--"

"And it's got you into trouble before," Claerten said. "But you can't afford any mistakes this time."

"I know the risk perfectly well," Jonas thought back.

Claerten's thought carried a wry echo. "You know the risk to yourself," he told Jonas, "and you've accepted that. You rather like it, as a matter of fact. But you haven't thought of the risk to the rest of us--and to the town you're in."

Jonas sent a thought of uncertainty: "What?"

Claerten transmitted the entire picture in one sudden blow: the chance that Jonas would not be killed immediately, but would be discovered; the chance that the Inquisitor would get from him the secret of the Brotherhood--

"That's impossible," Jonas said.

Claerten sounded resigned. "Nothing's impossible," he said. "And if the secret is let out--why, the Brotherhood is finished. Finished before it's barely started. Because you can read a man's mind doesn't mean you can defeat him, Jonas."

"But you know what he's going to do--"

"And if he's got you in a wooden house and he's going to burn it down, what good does your knowledge do you?"

"But you can transmit false thoughts--"

"And confuse him," Claerten said. "Fine. Fine. If you've ever met the man before. And suppose you haven't? Then you can't transmit a thing to him; you're trapped in the house, remember, and the fire's started. What good's your telepathy?"

"But--"

"It's a sense," Claerten said. "Like any other sense. But it isn't magic any more than your eyes are magic. They're ... given by God, if you like; they grow, they develop. So the ability to read minds, to transmit thought is given by God. No one knows why or how. Fifteen of us have developed it; fifteen who are members of the Brotherhood. But there are others--"

"Of course," Jonas thought impatiently. "I know all that."

"You know a great deal," Claerten said, "which I sometimes find it necessary to bring to your attention."

"I've done all right," Jonas thought sullenly.

Claerten agreed. "Of course you have," he thought, "but you're not the most careful of men; and great care is needed. The Brotherhood must grow. This new sense is of great value; perhaps we can learn to teach it to others in time, though we have had little success with that. But at the least we can maintain our numbers, pass the gift on to our children--"

"If it is possible," Jonas said.

"We must try," Claerten said. "And your job is enormously important."

"I know that," Jonas thought wearily.

"You have accomplished the first step," Claerten said. "Do nothing rash."

"Of course not."

"You will not accept help--"

"I will not," Jonas thought.

"Very well, then," Claerten thought. There was the ghost of another idea; Jonas caught it.

"I know perfectly well that you wouldn't have sent me if there were any other available member," he thought. "There is no need to remind me."

"I'm sorry," Claerten thought. He radiated caution, worry, patience; Jonas turned in the bed and cut off from the director with a grunt. He was tired; long-distance linkages were a drain on the body's energy, even when the person involved was easy to visualize. But Claerten had insisted on intermittent contact.

If there were such a thing as total contact, constant contact over a period of days, Jonas thought, Claerten would use me for a puppet, a veritable Punch among men; he would override me and take me over the way a traveling entertainer rules his jointed dolls.

And that would be a fine thing for a hero, wouldn't it?

He grimaced in the darkness. Constant contact was simply impossible; any reaching out used energy, and linking up for a long period simply burned the body up like a long starvation; it was as bad as a penance.

Jonas was thankful for that.

And for the rest--well, he thought resignedly, what was a hero without a quest? And what was a quest without someone to set it?

But that the someone had to be Claerten, with his caution and his old-woman worry--

Jonas sighed and set about the business of falling asleep.

* * * * *

The days passed slowly, with great boredom. Jonas made contact twice with Claerten, who told him over and over to wait, to do nothing: "The next move is coming soon; do nothing to hurry it. You can only upset the natural course of events."

"Which is unwise," Jonas thought bitterly, "and risky, and very probably impious as well."

"As for the piety," Claerten thought, "I leave that to the priests and the women. But wisdom and caution are my task, Jonas, as they must be yours."

"I--"

"You are a hero, out on an adventure," Claerten thought witheringly. "But set your course with sense, travel it with caution; you will the more certainly arrive."

"Philosophy for a dull plodder," Jonas thought.

"Philosophy for one of the Brotherhood," Claerten thought back. "We are tiny as yet; we have no force. You can add to that force, add greatly; but you must be wise."

"I must be slow, you mean."

"I mean what I have told you," Claerten thought. "And--one more thing, Jonas."

"Yes?"

"The daughter," Claerten thought. "I have seen her in your mind. Ignore the wench. Is she worth what your task is worth?"

"I never--"

"Then my caution is unnecessary," Claerten thought. "But, in the unlikely case that she might tempt you to folly--remember it."

Jonas, who disliked irony, sighed and cut off.

That was the third night. During the days he had done the things he had planned; he did no work with the Scharpes, but let them find him, when they returned to the hut of an evening, reciting strange words. Once he built a small outdoor fire and walked around it, widdershins, for several minutes. Then he put the fire out and went inside. He wasn't sure whether or not anyone was watching him, that time.

But sooner or later it had to happen.

And it happened, as Jonas had suspected it would, through the wife. Mrs. Scharpe came back to the hut early one day, threw a frightened glance at Jonas sitting in a corner doing nothing at all, and left.

He hardly needed to see into her mind to know where she was going.

And twenty minutes later two men came to the hut. They stood in the opened doorway, Mrs. Scharpe behind them twittering like an ancient bird, and Jonas watched them boredly. They were giants, for this part of the world, almost six feet tall, with great hands and jaws. One had black, coarse hair on his head and a stubble about his face; the other was bald as an egg.

"That's him," Mrs. Scharpe said--just a trifle hesitantly. "He's the one. He came to stay with us and we didn't know--"

The man with black hair said: "Uh. Gur."

"Herr Knupf said take him back," the bald one added.

"Herr Knupf?" Jonas said, entering the conversation with a light, pleasant tone.

"He's the ... the--" Mrs. Scharpe tried to get the word out, and then pushed by the two men and came into the hut. "I didn't want to but there's something strange, and we can't afford any suspicion, and--"

Jonas realized slowly that she was crying as she looked at him. "It's all right," he said uncomfortably.

"You're--"

"I'll be perfectly all right," Jonas said. He stood up. "This Herr Knupf," he said. "He wants to see me?"

"He said bring you along," the bald man told him.

The black-haired man nodded very slowly. "Gur," he said.

Jonas sighed and went forward to meet the two big men, leaving Mrs. Scharpe sobbing in the background. The poor woman felt terrible, he knew; but there was nothing he could do about that. "Then let us go," he said, and marched off. Feeling that one more effect wouldn't hurt, he led the way to the Town Hall; let them figure out how he had known just where to go, he thought.

Their minds were very, very boring, and quite blank. Herr Knupf, Jonas reflected, might be a definite relief.

* * * * *

First there was the cell, which was in the basement of the Town Hall. It was damp and the air was not too good, but there were compensations. Rats, for instance. Jonas told himself, after the first couple of hours, that he simply wouldn't have known what to do without the rats. Trying to trap and kill them, with no weapons beyond his bare hands--even an eating knife he had carried in his jerkin had been taken away, leaving him to the uncomfortable reflection that he was going to have to dine with his fingers--was a pastime that occupied him for several hours on the first day.

On the second day, the rats began to bore him. By that evening, they were annoying him, and when the third day dawned bright and warm--as near as he could tell from the tiny slip of window at the top of his cell--Jonas was telling himself that any move at all was a move in the right direction.

He set up a shout for one of the guards. The bald one had brought his meals every day, but the black-haired one was the man who checked his cell at night. For once, Jonas thought, he was lucky; the bald man appeared, after some fifteen minutes of screaming and cursing. Jonas was not at all sure whether the black-haired man understood language: there was little trace of it in his mind, and virtually nothing that might be called intelligence. With the bald man, at least, he could communicate.

"What's wanted?" the guard said sourly, staring through the bars.

Jonas smiled softly. "You know why I'm here, don't you?" he said in a voice as close to silky as he could make it.

"You?" the bald man said. "You're here. In a cell."

"That's right," Jonas said patiently. He rubbed at his face. "Do you know why I was put here?"

"You--cast spells. You make things happen."

"That's right," Jonas said, smiling again. "I'm a wizard. A warlock. That's what they say, isn't it?"

"You--make things happen," the bald man said.

But he had the basic idea; Jonas checked that in his mind. "Very well," he said. "Now, I wish to see Herr Knupf."

"The Inquisitor calls you when he wants you," the bald man said.

"Now," Jonas said.

"When he wants--"

"If I am a wizard," Jonas said, "I have powers. Strange powers. I could make you--" He reflected for a minute. "I could make you into a beetle, and squash you underfoot. As a matter of fact, I think I will." He gazed reflectively at the bald man, who gulped and turned a little pale.

"You ... you are in a cell," he said at last. "Locked up."

"Do you think that will stop me?" Jonas said. He came to the barred door, still smiling.

"You would not dare--"

"Why not?" Jonas asked. "What have I got to lose?"

He raised one hand, clawing the fingers slightly. He took a deep breath, as if he were about to spit out an incantation. His eyes glittered. The smile broadened.

A long second passed.

"I will tell the Inquisitor you wish to see him," the bald guard said.

Jonas relaxed and stepped back. "I shall be most grateful," he said formally. The guard turned and started to walk away. Five paces down the corridor, the walk turned into a run. Jonas watched him go, and then sat down on his louse-infested cot to await developments.

The minutes ticked by endlessly. He thought of trying to reach Claerten, but decided, not entirely with regret, that the contact would use up too much energy. And he needed all the energy he could conserve now. The second step had been taken--the fact that he sat in a cell in prison was proof of that.

The third step--the all-important final step--was about to begin.

* * * * *

Georg Knupf was a tall man with skin the color and apparent texture of good leather. He had a face like an eagle, and his eyes were ice-blue. He moved his thin, strong hands gently back and forth on the table that held his papers, inkstand and pen, and said in a voice like audible sandpaper: "You wanted to see me."

"True," Jonas said pleasantly. Knupf was sitting behind the table. Jonas had not been asked to sit; he remained standing, and he was reasonably sure that his feet were going to hurt in a minute. He tried not to let the thought disturb him.

The man's mind was like his office in the Town Hall: sparsely furnished, almost austere, but with all the necessaries laid out for easy access. Underneath the strength and iron of the mind Jonas caught the spark glowing, and nearly smiled. In spite of the reports, in spite of logic, there had been a chance the Brotherhood had guessed wrongly about this man.

Now that chance was gone, and the Brotherhood was right again.

"Not many ask to see me," Knupf said in the same voice. He went on looking at his hands. There was bitterness in his mind, bitterness that had changed to hate. "Their pleas tend to be exactly the opposite."

"I did not plead," Jonas pointed out. "It was necessary that I come to see you."

The question was, he told himself, exactly what were the Inquisitor's real beliefs? His public professions were well-known; Jonas searched and found the answer. Knupf was an honest man.

That, of course, made matters simpler.

"Necessary?" Knupf said, looking up for the first time. His gaze stabbed like a sword. He was uneasy, Jonas knew; with another mind probing his, he could not help but be uneasy. But he could not find a cause; it would never occur to him. And he controlled his feelings superbly.

"You believe that I am a wizard," Jonas said.

Knupf waited a bare second, and then nodded.

"I can do many things," Jonas went on. "It was necessary that I bring these to your attention--and prove to you that they are not wizardry, or magic."

"Many have told me," Knupf muttered, "that their feats were natural. It is a common defense."

"So I have heard," Jonas said easily. "But I shall prove what I say."

"I am under no compulsion to listen to you," Knupf said after a pause.

Jonas shrugged. His feet were beginning to hurt, he realized; he sighed briefly, but there was no time or attention to spare for them. "I could only see you by having myself accused of witchcraft," he said. "In that way, you would be forced to listen to me. You may listen now, or later at a full hearing of the Inquisitor's Court."

"And I am to take my choice?" Knupf said. He smiled briefly; his face remained cold. The strong hands moved on the tabletop.

"It is a matter of indifference to me," Jonas said. "But the wait becomes boring, after a time."

Knupf's eyebrows went up. "Boring is--hardly the word others would use."

"I am not like others," Jonas said. He wished for Claerten suddenly, but there was no way to reach him safely. He had to make his move alone.

Well, he told himself, that was what he had wanted.

"I can tell you what is in your mind," he said.

The words hung in the air of the room for a long time. At last Knupf nodded. "The Devil grants to many his power of seeing the minds of men," he said quietly.

"This is not Devil's work--as I shall prove," Jonas said. He shifted his feet. "But let me establish one point at a time, in the most scholastic manner; if you will permit."

"I permit," Knupf said. There was interest in his mind, overlaid with skepticism, of course, but interest all the same. That, Jonas thought, was a better sign than he had dared to hope for.

"Very well," he said. "Think of a word. Think of any single word. I shall tell it to you."

"As any wizard might do, who had the help of his lord the Devil," Knupf muttered. "Do you expect this to prove--"

"One thing at a time," Jonas said.

Knupf nodded. A second passed.

Jonas licked his lips. The possibilities paraded before him; on one hand, success. On the other there was the torture and death of the Inquisition. Jonas took a deep breath; there was no way to back out now. Heroism looked a little empty, though.

He closed his eyes. "Cabbages," he said.

Knupf neither applauded, nor looked surprised. "As I have said," he murmured, "that which the Devil can grant--" He paused and looked down at his hands. "Am I to take this as a confession?" he said. "Do you wish to hurry your own death?"

"I am no wizard," Jonas said.

"A stranger," Knupf said, "who enters a small city, is seen at mysterious undertakings, plucks words out of the center of a man's mind ... why, the picture is a classic one. Del Rio himself, Holzinger or any of the others could not describe a better."

"Yet all this was done to draw your attention, to fix it on what I have to tell you," Jonas said, shifting his feet again. "I am no wizard, but a man who may do certain things. And here is my proof: you may do the same yourself."

The silence was a long one, and at the end of it Knupf rose. He walked to the door of the room and opened it, and the bald-headed guard came in. "He has tried to tempt me to pact with Satan," the Inquisitor said.

"But--"

"Take him away."

* * * * *

Some day, Jonas thought, back in his cell, there would be a method of controlling minds that did not require the willing co-operation of the two parties. Some day the man who reads minds would be more than a passive onlooker.

But the talent was new; it needed practice, it needed training.

The cell grew dark as night came, and the dampness seemed to increase. Jonas heard squeaking and thought of the rats, but he couldn't even summon up enough energy to try for them. He sat crosslegged in a corner of the cell and closed his eyes.

He sighed once, deeply. This was what a hero came to, he told himself. This was the end of heroics and playing a lone hand. Why, if he had it to do over again, he would--

"You would do exactly the same thing," Claerten's voice said.

Jonas grinned suddenly, and sat straighter. "I should have known you'd be getting into contact sooner or later," he thought.

"I try to keep track of all our men," Claerten thought. "In a case like yours, I try harder."

"My foolishness," Jonas thought, "sometimes works to my benefit."

Claerten's thought was wry. "If you hadn't got impatient and tried to hurry things," his voice said in Jonas' mind, "you wouldn't be back in your cell now. There is a time and a place for your disclosure--"

"Another day in here would have driven me out of my wits," Jonas thought.

"Better out of your wits than dead," Claerten thought.

Jonas sighed.

"However," Claerten went on, "there is still a way out for you. I have read the situation in your mind, and your next move will have to be rather more spectacular than usual."

"So long as it works," Jonas said, "I will be satisfied."

"It will work," Claerten said. "At least--I think it will."

Another day dragged by. Jonas put in his time alternately going over the new plan and feeling more frightened than he had ever believed possible. Claerten reached him once, but the contact was weak and fleeting; the director hadn't enough strength to reach him again, at least not for a day or so. Jonas was exactly where he'd wanted to be: on his own.

He hated the idea.

Time passed, somehow. When morning dawned, Jonas awoke to find the door of his cell being unlocked. The bald man and the black-haired man were both there. He looked up at them with distaste.

Then he saw what was in their minds, and the distaste changed to fear.

"You have confessed," the bald one said. "It is necessary that you ratify your confession. Come with us."

Jonas knew what that meant: ratification of a free confession took place under torture. He wiped his face with one hand, but he hardly thought of escaping.

He had to go through with the plan.

The two guards came into the cell and gripped his arms. Jonas allowed himself to be carried out into the corridor, and down it to a great wooden door. The guards opened it, and dragged him through.

The torture chamber was brightly lit, with torches in brackets along the walls that gave off, by a small fraction, more light than smoke. In one corner the rack itself stood, and there were other tools of the trade scattered around the room.

Jonas found that he was sweating.

The guards brought him to the center of the room. Knupf was standing near him, a perfectly blank expression on his face. His voice was the same rough rasp, but it seemed almost mechanical.

"You have confessed to me," he said, "your heresy. Now, you will be made to ratify your confession. That done, your penalty will be exacted."

And the penalty, of course, would be death--death at the stake.

He forced himself to remain calm. Now was the time for his play. He took a deep breath and felt the strength in him gather to a single point and flow outward. The two men suddenly seemed to stagger; there was a second of confusion and they had let him go. He stood alone in the room. He turned and walked to the door, but he did not open it. Instead, he leaned against it.

He forced his voice into the patterns of calmness and ease. "Your men cannot touch me," he said.

"Wizard--"

"No," Jonas said. The confusion he was broadcasting kept the men from doing anything that required even a simple plan, but he couldn't keep it up for long. "A man like yourself, a man with a particular talent, given by God."

"The name of God--"

"I can say that name," Jonas told the Inquisitor. "No wizard may say it."

"It is a trick," Knupf said.

Jonas shook his head. "Not at all. I will ask you to do nothing against the Faith; I will merely ask you to test for yourself what I say."

"You are a heretic," Knupf said stubbornly. "I can not--"

"You can pray," Jonas said.

Knupf blinked. "Pray?" he said.

"Meditate on a prayer," Jonas said. "Keep your mind open, keep yourself ready for the gift of God. It will descend on you."

Knupf shook his head. "It is a trick--" he began.

"A trick?" Jonas said. "With the prayers of God and His Church?"

And that was the unanswerable question. For no wizard could use the name of God, no wizard could pray. So the Inquisition said; so Knupf said, so Knupf had to say, and so he had to believe.

Slowly, his mind opened and became receptive. The prayer hung in the air of the smoky room. Jonas slipped in--

"Now," he said quietly.

His control slipped. The two guards came toward him, overpowered and held him in a brief second--

"Wait," the Inquisitor said heavily. "Wait. Release him."

* * * * *

"And so," Claerten thought, "the job was accomplished."

"Naturally," Jonas thought.

Claerten's thought had an overtone of weariness. "There is no need to be smug," he told Jonas. "After all, you did not do the job yourself."

"Unimportant," Jonas thought. "The man is convinced; he can be trained further and join the Brotherhood."

"It will take time," Claerten said. "A few years, perhaps. But in the meantime there will be no trials in Speyer."

"No trials?" Jonas thought. "But ... oh. I see."

"Of course," Claerten thought. "Any man who considers himself a wizard will have his mind seen by the Inquisitor. And since there are no wizards--at least, none we have discovered--"

"The trials will cease," Jonas finished.

"And the Brotherhood has gained a new member," Claerten said. "A member with influence and power. It is an important step forward, Jonas."

"Of course," Jonas thought disinterestedly.

"Yet you seem bored by the matter," Claerten thought, puzzled. "I don't see ... oh. I see the woman in your mind. The daughter. And--"

"Now, stop it," Jonas thought. "Stop it. Cut off. After all," he finished, "there are times when even a hero wants a little privacy."

Postscript:

In 1605-1606 (in Offenburg) there were no executions....

--H. C. Lea, "Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft," Vol. III, p. 1148.

THE END

Contents

THE UNTOUCHABLE

By STEPHEN A. KALLIS

"You can see it--you can watch it--but mustn't touch!" And what could possibly be more frustrating ... when you need, most violently, to get your hands on it for just one second....

The man finally entered the office of General George Garvers. As the door closed behind him, he saw the general, who sprang from his chair to greet him.

"Max! You finally came."

"Got here as soon as I could. I wager half my time was taken up by the security check points. You are certainly isolated in here."

"All of that," agreed the general. "Have a seat, won't you?" he asked, indicating a chair.

His friend sank into it gratefully. "Now, what's this vital problem you called me about? You weren't too specific."

"No," said Garvers, "I wasn't. This is a security matter, after a fashion. It's vitally important that we get technical help on this thing, and since you and I are friends, I was asked to call you in."

"Well?"

"I'm afraid I'll have to make a story of it."

"Quite all right by me, but don't mind if I interject a question now and then. Mind if I smoke?"

"Go right ahead," said Garvers, fumbling out a lighter. "Just don't spill ashes on the rug.

"This all began on the Third of May. I was working here on some top-security stuff. I had suddenly got the feeling of being watched. I know it seems silly, what with all the check points that a potential spy would have to go through to get here, but that's just how I felt.

"Several times I glanced around the office, but of course it was empty. Then I began to think that it was my nerves."

"You always were a bit of a hypochondriac," observed his friend.

"Be that as it may," continued Garvers, "it was the only explanation I had at the time. Either someone was watching me, which seemed impossible, or I was beginning to crack under the strain.

"Well, I put my papers away and tried to take a short break. I was reaching into my drawer where I keep magazines when, so help me, a man stepped out of the wall into my office."

"What? It seems as if you just said a guy stepped out of the wall."

"That's just what I did say. It sounds crazy, but let me finish, will you? I'm not kidding, and I'll show you proof later if necessary.

"Anyway, this bird stepped straight out of the wall as if it had been a waterfall or something, but the wall itself was undamaged. The only proof I had that he had actually done it was the fact that he was in my office, but that was proof enough.

"To put it mildly, I was thunderstruck. After jumping to my feet, I could only stand there like an idiot. I was so shaken that I couldn't speak a word. But he spoke first.

"'General Garvers?' he asked, just as if he had run into me at a cocktail party or on the street.

"I told him he was correct, and asked him who he was and what he wanted. And how he got into my office.

"He identified himself as a Henry Busch and explained that he was acting in behalf of a good friend of his, the late Dr. Hymann Duvall. Have you ever heard of Duvall, Max?"

His friend twisted his face in thought. "Can't say that I have, off-hand. But the name seems to ring a bell somewhere."

"Well, anyway, he said that Duvall had perfected an invention of great national importance shortly before his death and asked Busch to deliver it to the government if anything should happen to him. Then Duvall died suddenly of a heart attack."

"And what was this invention?"

"Isn't it obvious? A machine that would enable a man to walk through walls. And Busch has no idea how the thing works, other than the general explanation that Duvall gave him. And Busch was poles apart from Duvall. They were friends from college, but not because of professional interests. It seems they were both doublecrossed by the same girl.

"Duvall was a brilliant but obscure nuclear and radiation physicist. He was one of those once-in-a-lifetime fellows like Tesla. He was so shy that he didn't bring himself to anybody's attention, save for a few papers he published in the smaller physical societies' magazines. It was only because he had inherited a considerable amount of money that he could do any research whatsoever."

"Hm-m-m. I seem to remember a paper about wave propagation in one of the quarterlies. Quite unorthodox, as I recall," said Max.

"Could be. But anyway, about Busch.

"Busch majored in psychology at college, but took special courses after he graduated and took a Master's in English. He has written two novels and three collections of poems under various pen names. At the time of Duvall's death, he was working on the libretto of an opera. He has had no technical training, unless you want to count a year of high school general science. So he wasn't too much help in explaining how Duvall's instrument works.

"And, just to make matters more juicy, Duvall kept no notes. He had total recall and a childlike fear of putting anything into writing that had not been experimentally verified."

"And this machine, how is it supposed to work?"

Garvers got up and began to pace. "According to Busch, Duvall devised the instrument after stumbling into an entirely new branch of physics.

"This device of Duvall's is a special case of a new theory of matter and energy. Matter is made up of subnuclear particles--electrons, protons and the like. However, Duvall said that these particles are in turn made up of much smaller particles grouped together in aggregate clouds. The size ratio of these particles to protons is somewhat like the ratio of an individual proton to a large star. They seem to be composed of tiny clots of energy from a fantastically complex energy system, in which electromagnetism is but a small part. Each energy-segment is represented by a different facet of each particle, and the arrangement of the individual particles to each other determines what super-particle they will form, such as an electron. Duvall called these sub-particles 'lems'.

"Busch says he was told that a field of a special nature could be generated so as to make the individual lems in the particles of matter rotate in a special way that would introduce a 'polarization field', as Duvall called it. This field seems to be connected somehow with gravity, but Busch wasn't told how.

"The upshot is that matter in the initial presence of the field is affected so that it is able to pass through ordinary matter--"

"Hold on," interrupted Max. "If a device can do that, then the user would immediately fall towards the center of the Earth."

"Just you hold on. You didn't let me finish. A single plane of atoms, at the base of the treated object is the point of contact. It remains partially unaffected because it is closest to the 'gravetostatic field center', which I guess is the Earth's center of attraction. This plane of 'semi-treated' atoms can be forced through an object, if it is moved horizontally, but its 'untreated' aspect prevents the subject wearing the device from falling through the floor.

"Busch demonstrated this device to me, turning it on and strolling through various objects in this room. Think of it! No soldier could be killed or held prisoner. And--"

"Now hang on," objected Max. "Let's not run away with ourselves. He may have perfected a device that would enable a soldier to avoid capture, but there would certainly be other ways to kill him than by bullets. Let's see now: suppose that the enemy shot a flamethrower at him. The burning materials might pass through him, but he would be cooked anyway. Or poison gas--"

"Hm-m-m. As far as gas goes, I suppose a gas mask would be necessary. Busch doesn't know about the breathing mechanism, except that he had to take breaths. But as far as fire or radiation goes, the man's protected. If the radiation is either harmful by nature or by amount, the field merely reflects it. It is something called the 'lemic stress' of the field that causes the phenomenon.

"That's why we need your help."

Max scratched his head thoughtfully. "I don't understand."

Garvers looked pained. "When Busch had finished his demonstration, he carelessly tossed the device on my desk. The thing skidded and hit my paperweight so that the switch was thrown on again. So now the device and my desk are both untouchable.

"Go over to the desk and try to touch it," said Garvers dryly.

His friend got up and ambled over to the desk. There he saw a small black box resting near a paperweight. Its toggle switch was at the "on" position, and it was lying on its side. He tried to pick the box up, but his hand slid effortlessly through it as if it were so much air.

"Well!" Max said. He passed his hand through the desk again. "Well, well. Are you sure Busch told you everything?"

"Busch! He honestly wants to help and we have taken him through the mill. Pentathol, scopolamine and the like; hypnotism and the polygraph. We've dug that man deeper than we have ever dug anybody before."

"And have you conducted any experiments of your own?"

"Certainly. That's what is so frustrating. We try to X ray the thing, and we don't get a thing. We bombarded it with every radiation we could think of, from radio to gamma and it just reflected them. We can detect no radiation coming out of it. Magnetic fields don't effect it, nor do heat and cold. Nuclear particles are ignored by it; it just sits there thumbing its nose at us. And we can't even wait for it to run down. According to Busch, the power requirements of the thing are funny and once the field is established, it takes no additional energy to maintain it. And the collapsing power remains indefinitely until it is time to turn the machine off, but it's unreachable by any means we have.

"It's pure frustration. There's no way we can analyze it until we can handle it, and no way we can handle it until we can turn it off. And there's no way we can turn it off until we have analyzed it. If it were alive, I'd think that it was laughing at us.

"Do you have any ideas?" asked Garvers hopefully.

"Nothing that would help a solution at present," said Max. "But do you remember the legend of King Tantalus?"

"Slightly. What about it?"

"Well ... if he were here," said Max thoughtfully, "he'd ... sympathize."

THE END

Contents

BREAD OVERHEAD

By FRITZ LEIBER

The Staff of Life suddenly and disconcertingly sprouted wings --and mankind had to eat crow!

As a blisteringly hot but guaranteed weather-controlled future summer day dawned on the Mississippi Valley, the walking mills of Puffy Products ("Spike to Loaf in One Operation!") began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas.

The walking mills resembled fat metal serpents, rather larger than those Chinese paper dragons animated by files of men in procession. Sensory robot devices in their noses informed them that the waiting wheat had reached ripe perfection.

As they advanced, their heads swung lazily from side to side, very much like snakes, gobbling the yellow grain. In their throats, it was threshed, the chaff bundled and burped aside for pickup by the crawl trucks of a chemical corporation, the kernels quick-dried and blown along into the mighty chests of the machines. There the tireless mills ground the kernels to flour, which was instantly sifted, the bran being packaged and dropped like the chaff for pickup. A cluster of tanks which gave the metal serpents a decidedly humpbacked appearance added water, shortening, salt and other ingredients, some named and some not. The dough was at the same time infused with gas from a tank conspicuously labeled "Carbon Dioxide" ("No Yeast Creatures in Your Bread!").

Thus instantly risen, the dough was clipped into loaves and shot into radionic ovens forming the midsections of the metal serpents. There the bread was baked in a matter of seconds, a fierce heat-front browning the crusts, and the piping-hot loaves sealed in transparent plastic bearing the proud Puffyloaf emblem (two cherubs circling a floating loaf) and ejected onto the delivery platform at each serpent's rear end, where a cluster of pickup machines, like hungry piglets, snatched at the loaves with hygienic claws.

A few loaves would be hurried off for the day's consumption, the majority stored for winter in strategically located mammoth deep freezes.

But now, behold a wonder! As loaves began to appear on the delivery platform of the first walking mill to get into action, they did not linger on the conveyor belt, but rose gently into the air and slowly traveled off down-wind across the hot rippling fields.

* * * * *

The robot claws of the pickup machines clutched in vain, and, not noticing the difference, proceeded carefully to stack emptiness, tier by tier. One errant loaf, rising more sluggishly than its fellows, was snagged by a thrusting claw. The machine paused, clumsily wiped off the injured loaf, set it aside--where it bobbed on one corner, unable to take off again--and went back to the work of storing nothingness.

A flock of crows rose from the trees of a nearby shelterbelt as the flight of loaves approached. The crows swooped to investigate and then suddenly scattered, screeching in panic.

The helicopter of a hangoverish Sunday traveler bound for Wichita shied very similarly from the brown fliers and did not return for a second look.

A black-haired housewife spied them over her back fence, crossed herself and grabbed her walkie-talkie from the laundry basket. Seconds later, the yawning correspondent of a regional newspaper was jotting down the lead of a humorous news story which, recalling the old flying-saucer scares, stated that now apparently bread was to be included in the mad aerial tea party.

The congregation of an open-walled country church, standing up to recite the most familiar of Christian prayers, had just reached the petition for daily sustenance, when a sub-flight of the loaves, either forced down by a vagrant wind or lacking the natural buoyancy of the rest, came coasting silently as the sunbeams between the graceful pillars at the altar end of the building.

Meanwhile, the main flight, now augmented by other bread flocks from scores and hundreds of walking mills that had started work a little later, mounted slowly and majestically into the cirrus-flecked upper air, where a steady wind was blowing strongly toward the east.

About one thousand miles farther on in that direction, where a cluster of stratosphere-tickling towers marked the location of the metropolis of NewNew York, a tender scene was being enacted in the pressurized penthouse managerial suite of Puffy Products. Megera Winterly, Secretary in Chief to the Managerial Board and referred to by her underlings as the Blonde Icicle, was dealing with the advances of Roger ("Racehorse") Snedden, Assistant Secretary to the Board and often indistinguishable from any passing office boy.

"Why don't you jump out the window, Roger, remembering to shut the airlock after you?" the Golden Glacier said in tones not unkind. "When are your high-strung, thoroughbred nerves going to accept the fact that I would never consider marriage with a business inferior? You have about as much chance as a starving Ukrainian kulak now that Moscow's clapped on the interdict."

* * * * *

Roger's voice was calm, although his eyes were feverishly bright, as he replied, "A lot of things are going to be different around here, Meg, as soon as the Board is forced to admit that only my quick thinking made it possible to bring the name of Puffyloaf in front of the whole world."

"Puffyloaf could do with a little of that," the business girl observed judiciously. "The way sales have been plummeting, it won't be long before the Government deeds our desks to the managers of Fairy Bread and asks us to take the Big Jump. But just where does your quick thinking come into this, Mr. Snedden? You can't be referring to the helium--that was Rose Thinker's brainwave."

She studied him suspiciously. "You've birthed another promotional bumble, Roger. I can see it in your eyes. I only hope it's not as big a one as when you put the Martian ambassador on 3D and he thanked you profusely for the gross of Puffyloaves, assuring you that he'd never slept on a softer mattress in all his life on two planets."

"Listen to me, Meg. Today--yes, today!--you're going to see the Board eating out of my hand."

"Hah! I guarantee you won't have any fingers left. You're bold enough now, but when Mr. Gryce and those two big machines come through that door--"

"Now wait a minute, Meg--"

"Hush! They're coming now!"

Roger leaped three feet in the air, but managed to land without a sound and edged toward his stool. Through the dilating iris of the door strode Phineas T. Gryce, flanked by Rose Thinker and Tin Philosopher.

The man approached the conference table in the center of the room with measured pace and gravely expressionless face. The rose-tinted machine on his left did a couple of impulsive pirouettes on the way and twittered a greeting to Meg and Roger. The other machine quietly took the third of the high seats and lifted a claw at Meg, who now occupied a stool twice the height of Roger's.

"Miss Winterly, please--our theme."

The Blonde Icicle's face thawed into a little-girl smile as she chanted bubblingly:

"Made up of tiny wheaten motes And reinforced with sturdy oats, It rises through the air and floats-- The bread on which all Terra dotes!"

* * * * *

"Thank you, Miss Winterly," said Tin Philosopher. "Though a purely figurative statement, that bit about rising through the air always gets me--here." He rapped his midsection, which gave off a high musical clang.

"Ladies--" he inclined his photocells toward Rose Thinker and Meg--"and gentlemen. This is a historic occasion in Old Puffy's long history, the inauguration of the helium-filled loaf ('So Light It Almost Floats Away!') in which that inert and heaven-aspiring gas replaces old-fashioned carbon dioxide. Later, there will be kudos for Rose Thinker, whose bright relays genius-sparked the idea, and also for Roger Snedden, who took care of the details.

"By the by, Racehorse, that was a brilliant piece of work getting the helium out of the government--they've been pretty stuffy lately about their monopoly. But first I want to throw wide the casement in your minds that opens on the Long View of Things."

Rose Thinker spun twice on her chair and opened her photocells wide. Tin Philosopher coughed to limber up the diaphragm of his speaker and continued:

"Ever since the first cave wife boasted to her next-den neighbor about the superior paleness and fluffiness of her tortillas, mankind has sought lighter, whiter bread. Indeed, thinkers wiser than myself have equated the whole upward course of culture with this poignant quest. Yeast was a wonderful discovery--for its primitive day. Sifting the bran and wheat germ from the flour was an even more important advance. Early bleaching and preserving chemicals played their humble parts.

"For a while, barbarous faddists--blind to the deeply spiritual nature of bread, which is recognized by all great religions--held back our march toward perfection with their hair-splitting insistence on the vitamin content of the wheat germ, but their case collapsed when tasteless colorless substitutes were triumphantly synthesized and introduced into the loaf, which for flawless purity, unequaled airiness and sheer intangible goodness was rapidly becoming mankind's supreme gustatory experience."

"I wonder what the stuff tastes like," Rose Thinker said out of a clear sky.

"I wonder what taste tastes like," Tin Philosopher echoed dreamily. Recovering himself, he continued:

"Then, early in the twenty-first century, came the epochal researches of Everett Whitehead, Puffyloaf chemist, culminating in his paper 'The Structural Bubble in Cereal Masses' and making possible the baking of airtight bread twenty times stronger (for its weight) than steel and of a lightness that would have been incredible even to the advanced chemist-bakers of the twentieth century--a lightness so great that, besides forming the backbone of our own promotion, it has forever since been capitalized on by our conscienceless competitors of Fairy Bread with their enduring slogan: 'It Makes Ghost Toast'."

"That's a beaut, all right, that ecto-dough blurb," Rose Thinker admitted, bugging her photocells sadly. "Wait a sec. How about?--

"There'll be bread Overhead When you're dead-- It is said."

* * * * *

Phineas T. Gryce wrinkled his nostrils at the pink machine as if he smelled her insulation smoldering. He said mildly, "A somewhat unhappy jingle, Rose, referring as it does to the end of the customer as consumer. Moreover, we shouldn't overplay the figurative 'rises through the air' angle. What inspired you?"

She shrugged. "I don't know--oh, yes, I do. I was remembering one of the workers' songs we machines used to chant during the Big Strike--

"Work and pray, Live on hay. You'll get pie In the sky When you die-- It's a lie!

"I don't know why we chanted it," she added. "We didn't want pie--or hay, for that matter. And machines don't pray, except Tibetan prayer wheels."

Phineas T. Gryce shook his head. "Labor relations are another topic we should stay far away from. However, dear Rose, I'm glad you keep trying to outjingle those dirty crooks at Fairy Bread." He scowled, turning back his attention to Tin Philosopher. "I get whopping mad, Old Machine, whenever I hear that other slogan of theirs, the discriminatory one--'Untouched by Robot Claws.' Just because they employ a few filthy androids in their factories!"

Tin Philosopher lifted one of his own sets of bright talons. "Thanks, P.T. But to continue my historical resume, the next great advance in the baking art was the substitution of purified carbon dioxide, recovered from coal smoke, for the gas generated by yeast organisms indwelling in the dough and later killed by the heat of baking, their corpses remaining in situ. But even purified carbon dioxide is itself a rather repugnant gas, a product of metabolism whether fast or slow, and forever associated with those life processes which are obnoxious to the fastidious."

Here the machine shuddered with delicate clinkings. "Therefore, we of Puffyloaf are taking today what may be the ultimate step toward purity: we are aerating our loaves with the noble gas helium, an element which remains virginal in the face of all chemical temptations and whose slim molecules are eleven times lighter than obese carbon dioxide--yes, noble uncontaminable helium, which, if it be a kind of ash, is yet the ash only of radioactive burning, accomplished or initiated entirely on the Sun, a safe 93 million miles from this planet. Let's have a cheer for the helium loaf!"

* * * * *

Without changing expression, Phineas T. Gryce rapped the table thrice in solemn applause, while the others bowed their heads.

"Thanks, T.P.," P.T. then said. "And now for the Moment of Truth. Miss Winterly, how is the helium loaf selling?"

The business girl clapped on a pair of earphones and whispered into a lapel mike. Her gaze grew abstracted as she mentally translated flurries of brief squawks into coherent messages. Suddenly a single vertical furrow creased her matchlessly smooth brow.

"It isn't, Mr. Gryce!" she gasped in horror. "Fairy Bread is outselling Puffyloaves by an infinity factor. So far this morning, there has not been one single delivery of Puffyloaves to any sales spot! Complaints about non-delivery are pouring in from both walking stores and sessile shops."

"Mr. Snedden!" Gryce barked. "What bug in the new helium process might account for this delay?"

Roger was on his feet, looking bewildered. "I can't imagine, sir, unless--just possibly--there's been some unforeseeable difficulty involving the new metal-foil wrappers."

"Metal-foil wrappers? Were you responsible for those?"

"Yes, sir. Last-minute recalculations showed that the extra lightness of the new loaf might be great enough to cause drift during stackage. Drafts in stores might topple sales pyramids. Metal-foil wrappers, by their added weight, took care of the difficulty."

"And you ordered them without consulting the Board?"

"Yes, sir. There was hardly time and--"

"Why, you fool! I noticed that order for metal-foil wrappers, assumed it was some sub-secretary's mistake, and canceled it last night!"

Roger Snedden turned pale. "You canceled it?" he quavered. "And told them to go back to the lighter plastic wrappers?"

"Of course! Just what is behind all this, Mr. Snedden? What recalculations were you trusting, when our physicists had demonstrated months ago that the helium loaf was safely stackable in light airs and gentle breezes--winds up to Beaufort's scale 3. Why should a change from heavier to lighter wrappers result in complete non-delivery?"

* * * * *

Roger Snedden's paleness became tinged with an interesting green. He cleared his throat and made strange gulping noises. Tin Philosopher's photocells focused on him calmly, Rose Thinker's with unfeigned excitement. P.T. Gryce's frown grew blacker by the moment, while Megera Winterly's Venus-mask showed an odd dawning of dismay and awe. She was getting new squawks in her earphones.

"Er ... ah ... er...." Roger said in winning tones. "Well, you see, the fact is that I...."

"Hold it," Meg interrupted crisply. "Triple-urgent from Public Relations, Safety Division. Tulsa-Topeka aero-express makes emergency landing after being buffeted in encounter with vast flight of objects first described as brown birds, although no failures reported in airway's electronic anti-bird fences. After grounding safely near Emporia--no fatalities--pilot's windshield found thinly plastered with soft white-and-brown material. Emblems on plastic wrappers embedded in material identify it incontrovertibly as an undetermined number of Puffyloaves cruising at three thousand feet!"

Eyes and photocells turned inquisitorially upon Roger Snedden. He went from green to Puffyloaf white and blurted: "All right, I did it, but it was the only way out! Yesterday morning, due to the Ukrainian crisis, the government stopped sales and deliveries of all strategic stockpiled materials, including helium gas. Puffy's new program of advertising and promotion, based on the lighter loaf, was already rolling. There was only one thing to do, there being only one other gas comparable in lightness to helium. I diverted the necessary quantity of hydrogen gas from the Hydrogenated Oils Section of our Magna-Margarine Division and substituted it for the helium."

"You substituted ... hydrogen ... for the ... helium?" Phineas T. Gryce faltered in low mechanical tones, taking four steps backward.

"Hydrogen is twice as light as helium," Tin Philosopher remarked judiciously.

"And many times cheaper--did you know that?" Roger countered feebly. "Yes, I substituted hydrogen. The metal-foil wrapping would have added just enough weight to counteract the greater buoyancy of the hydrogen loaf. But--"

"So, when this morning's loaves began to arrive on the delivery platforms of the walking mills...." Tin Philosopher left the remark unfinished.

"Exactly," Roger agreed dismally.

"Let me ask you, Mr. Snedden," Gryce interjected, still in low tones, "if you expected people to jump to the kitchen ceiling for their Puffybread after taking off the metal wrapper, or reach for the sky if they happened to unwrap the stuff outdoors?"

"Mr. Gryce," Roger said reproachfully, "you have often assured me that what people do with Puffybread after they buy it is no concern of ours."

"I seem to recall," Rose Thinker chirped somewhat unkindly, "that dictum was created to answer inquiries after Roger put the famous sculptures-in-miniature artist on 3D and he testified that he always molded his first attempts from Puffybread, one jumbo loaf squeezing down to approximately the size of a peanut."

* * * * *

Her photocells dimmed and brightened. "Oh, boy--hydrogen! The loaf's unwrapped. After a while, in spite of the crust-seal, a little oxygen diffuses in. An explosive mixture. Housewife in curlers and kimono pops a couple slices in the toaster. Boom!"

The three human beings in the room winced.

Tin Philosopher kicked her under the table, while observing, "So you see, Roger, that the non-delivery of the hydrogen loaf carries some consolations. And I must confess that one aspect of the affair gives me great satisfaction, not as a Board Member but as a private machine. You have at last made a reality of the 'rises through the air' part of Puffybread's theme. They can't ever take that away from you. By now, half the inhabitants of the Great Plains must have observed our flying loaves rising high."

Phineas T. Gryce shot a frightened look at the west windows and found his full voice.

"Stop the mills!" he roared at Meg Winterly, who nodded and whispered urgently into her mike.

"A sensible suggestion," Tin Philosopher said. "But it comes a trifle late in the day. If the mills are still walking and grinding, approximately seven billion Puffyloaves are at this moment cruising eastward over Middle America. Remember that a six-month supply for deep-freeze is involved and that the current consumption of bread, due to its matchless airiness, is eight and one-half loaves per person per day."

Phineas T. Gryce carefully inserted both hands into his scanty hair, feeling for a good grip. He leaned menacingly toward Roger who, chin resting on the table, regarded him apathetically.

"Hold it!" Meg called sharply. "Flock of multiple-urgents coming in. News Liaison: information bureaus swamped with flying-bread inquiries. Aero-expresslines: Clear our airways or face law suit. U. S. Army: Why do loaves flame when hit by incendiary bullets? U. S. Customs: If bread intended for export, get export license or face prosecution. Russian Consulate in Chicago: Advise on destination of bread-lift. And some Kansas church is accusing us of a hoax inciting to blasphemy, of faking miracles--I don't know why."

The business girl tore off her headphones. "Roger Snedden," she cried with a hysteria that would have dumfounded her underlings, "you've brought the name of Puffyloaf in front of the whole world, all right! Now do something about the situation!"

Roger nodded obediently. But his pallor increased a shade, the pupils of his eyes disappeared under the upper lids, and his head burrowed beneath his forearms.

"Oh, boy," Rose Thinker called gayly to Tin Philosopher, "this looks like the start of a real crisis session! Did you remember to bring spare batteries?"

* * * * *

Meanwhile, the monstrous flight of Puffyloaves, filling midwestern skies as no small fliers had since the days of the passenger pigeon, soared steadily onward.

Private fliers approached the brown and glistening bread-front in curiosity and dipped back in awe. Aero-expresslines organized sightseeing flights along the flanks. Planes of the government forestry and agricultural services and 'copters bearing the Puffyloaf emblem hovered on the fringes, watching developments and waiting for orders. A squadron of supersonic fighters hung menacingly above.

The behavior of birds varied considerably. Most fled or gave the loaves a wide berth, but some bolder species, discovering the minimal nutritive nature of the translucent brown objects, attacked them furiously with beaks and claws. Hydrogen diffusing slowly through the crusts had now distended most of the sealed plastic wrappers into little balloons, which ruptured, when pierced, with disconcerting pops.

Below, neck-craning citizens crowded streets and back yards, cranks and cultists had a field day, while local and national governments raged indiscriminately at Puffyloaf and at each other.

Rumors that a fusion weapon would be exploded in the midst of the flying bread drew angry protests from conservationists and a flood of telefax pamphlets titled "H-Loaf or H-bomb?"

Stockholm sent a mystifying note of praise to the United Nations Food Organization.

Delhi issued nervous denials of a millet blight that no one had heard of until that moment and reaffirmed India's ability to feed her population with no outside help except the usual.

Radio Moscow asserted that the Kremlin would brook no interference in its treatment of the Ukrainians, jokingly referred to the flying bread as a farce perpetrated by mad internationalists inhabiting Cloud Cuckoo Land, added contradictory references to airborne bread booby-trapped by Capitalist gangsters, and then fell moodily silent on the whole topic.

Radio Venus reported to its winged audience that Earth's inhabitants were establishing food depots in the upper air, preparatory to taking up permanent aerial residence "such as we have always enjoyed on Venus."

* * * * *

NewNew York made feverish preparations for the passage of the flying bread. Tickets for sightseeing space in skyscrapers were sold at high prices; cold meats and potted spreads were hawked to viewers with the assurance that they would be able to snag the bread out of the air and enjoy a historic sandwich.

Phineas T. Gryce, escaping from his own managerial suite, raged about the city, demanding general cooperation in the stretching of great nets between the skyscrapers to trap the errant loaves. He was captured by Tin Philosopher, escaped again, and was found posted with oxygen mask and submachine gun on the topmost spire of Puffyloaf Tower, apparently determined to shoot down the loaves as they appeared and before they involved his company in more trouble with Customs and the State Department.

Recaptured by Tin Philosopher, who suffered only minor bullet holes, he was given a series of mild electroshocks and returned to the conference table, calm and clear-headed as ever.

But the bread flight, swinging away from a hurricane moving up the Atlantic coast, crossed a clouded-in Boston by night and disappeared into a high Atlantic overcast, also thereby evading a local storm generated by the Weather Department in a last-minute effort to bring down or at least disperse the H-loaves.

Warnings and counterwarnings by Communist and Capitalist governments seriously interfered with military trailing of the flight during this period and it was actually lost in touch with for several days.

At scattered points, seagulls were observed fighting over individual loaves floating down from the gray roof--that was all.

A mood of spirituality strongly tinged with humor seized the people of the world. Ministers sermonized about the bread, variously interpreting it as a call to charity, a warning against gluttony, a parable of the evanescence of all earthly things, and a divine joke. Husbands and wives, facing each other across their walls of breakfast toast, burst into laughter. The mere sight of a loaf of bread anywhere was enough to evoke guffaws. An obscure sect, having as part of its creed the injunction "Don't take yourself so damn seriously," won new adherents.

The bread flight, rising above an Atlantic storm widely reported to have destroyed it, passed unobserved across a foggy England and rose out of the overcast only over Mittel-europa. The loaves had at last reached their maximum altitude.

The Sun's rays beat through the rarified air on the distended plastic wrappers, increasing still further the pressure of the confined hydrogen. They burst by the millions and tens of millions. A high-flying Bulgarian evangelist, who had happened to mistake the up-lever for the east-lever in the cockpit of his flier and who was the sole witness of the event, afterward described it as "the foaming of a sea of diamonds, the crackle of God's knuckles."

* * * * *

By the millions and tens of millions, the loaves coasted down into the starving Ukraine. Shaken by a week of humor that threatened to invade even its own grim precincts, the Kremlin made a sudden about-face. A new policy was instituted of communal ownership of the produce of communal farms, and teams of hunger-fighters and caravans of trucks loaded with pumpernickel were dispatched into the Ukraine.

World distribution was given to a series of photographs showing peasants queueing up to trade scavenged Puffyloaves for traditional black bread, recently aerated itself but still extra solid by comparison, the rate of exchange demanded by the Moscow teams being twenty Puffyloaves to one of pumpernickel.

Another series of photographs, picturing chubby workers' children being blown to bits by booby-trapped bread, was quietly destroyed.

Congratulatory notes were exchanged by various national governments and world organizations, including the Brotherhood of Free Business Machines. The great bread flight was over, though for several weeks afterward scattered falls of loaves occurred, giving rise to a new folklore of manna among lonely Arabian tribesmen, and in one well-authenticated instance in Tibet, sustaining life in a party of mountaineers cut off by a snow slide.

Back in NewNew York, the managerial board of Puffy Products slumped in utter collapse around the conference table, the long crisis session at last ended. Empty coffee cartons were scattered around the chairs of the three humans, dead batteries around those of the two machines. For a while, there was no movement whatsoever. Then Roger Snedden reached out wearily for the earphones where Megera Winterly had hurled them down, adjusted them to his head, pushed a button and listened apathetically.

After a bit, his gaze brightened. He pushed more buttons and listened more eagerly. Soon he was sitting tensely upright on his stool, eyes bright and lower face all a-smile, muttering terse comments and questions into the lapel mike torn from Meg's fair neck.

The others, reviving, watched him, at first dully, then with quickening interest, especially when he jerked off the earphones with a happy shout and sprang to his feet.

* * * * *

"Listen to this!" he cried in a ringing voice. "As a result of the worldwide publicity, Puffyloaves are outselling Fairy Bread three to one--and that's just the old carbon-dioxide stock from our freezers! It's almost exhausted, but the government, now that the Ukrainian crisis is over, has taken the ban off helium and will also sell us stockpiled wheat if we need it. We can have our walking mills burrowing into the wheat caves in a matter of hours!

"But that isn't all! The far greater demand everywhere is for Puffyloaves that will actually float. Public Relations, Child Liaison Division, reports that the kiddies are making their mothers' lives miserable about it. If only we can figure out some way to make hydrogen non-explosive or the helium loaf float just a little--"

"I'm sure we can take care of that quite handily," Tin Philosopher interrupted briskly. "Puffyloaf has kept it a corporation secret--even you've never been told about it--but just before he went crazy, Everett Whitehead discovered a way to make bread using only half as much flour as we do in the present loaf. Using this secret technique, which we've been saving for just such an emergency, it will be possible to bake a helium loaf as buoyant in every respect as the hydrogen loaf."

"Good!" Roger cried. "We'll tether 'em on strings and sell 'em like balloons. No mother-child shopping team will leave the store without a cluster. Buying bread balloons will be the big event of the day for kiddies. It'll make the carry-home shopping load lighter too! I'll issue orders at once--"

* * * * *

He broke off, looking at Phineas T. Gryce, said with quiet assurance, "Excuse me, sir, if I seem to be taking too much upon myself."

"Not at all, son; go straight ahead," the great manager said approvingly. "You're"--he laughed in anticipation of getting off a memorable remark--"rising to the challenging situation like a genuine Puffyloaf."

Megera Winterly looked from the older man to the younger. Then in a single leap she was upon Roger, her arms wrapped tightly around him.

"My sweet little ever-victorious, self-propelled monkey wrench!" she crooned in his ear. Roger looked fatuously over her soft shoulder at Tin Philosopher who, as if moved by some similar feeling, reached over and touched claws with Rose Thinker.

This, however, was what he telegraphed silently to his fellow machine across the circuit so completed:

"Good-o, Rosie! That makes another victory for robot-engineered world unity, though you almost gave us away at the start with that 'bread overhead' jingle. We've struck another blow against the next world war, in which--as we know only too well!--we machines would suffer the most. Now if we can only arrange, say, a fur-famine in Alaska and a migration of long-haired Siberian lemmings across Behring Straits ... we'd have to swing the Japanese Current up there so it'd be warm enough for the little fellows.... Anyhow, Rosie, with a spot of help from the Brotherhood, those humans will paint themselves into the peace corner yet."

Meanwhile, he and Rose Thinker quietly watched the Blonde Icicle melt.

Contents

SCRIMSHAW

by Murray Leinster

The old man just wanted to get back his memory--and the methods he used were gently hellish, from the viewpoint of the others....

Pop Young was the one known man who could stand life on the surface of the Moon's far side, and, therefore, he occupied the shack on the Big Crack's edge, above the mining colony there. Some people said that no normal man could do it, and mentioned the scar of a ghastly head-wound to explain his ability. One man partly guessed the secret, but only partly. His name was Sattell and he had reason not to talk. Pop Young alone knew the whole truth, and he kept his mouth shut, too. It wasn't anybody else's business.

The shack and the job he filled were located in the medieval notion of the physical appearance of hell. By day the environment was heat and torment. By night--lunar night, of course, and lunar day--it was frigidity and horror. Once in two weeks Earth-time a rocketship came around the horizon from Lunar City with stores for the colony deep underground. Pop received the stores and took care of them. He handed over the product of the mine, to be forwarded to Earth. The rocket went away again. Come nightfall Pop lowered the supplies down the long cable into the Big Crack to the colony far down inside, and freshened up the landing field marks with magnesium marking-powder if a rocket-blast had blurred them. That was fundamentally all he had to do. But without him the mine down in the Crack would have had to shut down.

The Crack, of course, was that gaping rocky fault which stretches nine hundred miles, jaggedly, over the side of the Moon that Earth never sees. There is one stretch where it is a yawning gulf a full half-mile wide and unguessably deep. Where Pop Young's shack stood it was only a hundred yards, but the colony was a full mile down, in one wall. There is nothing like it on Earth, of course. When it was first found, scientists descended into it to examine the exposed rock-strata and learn the history of the Moon before its craters were made. But they found more than history. They found the reason for the colony and the rocket landing field and the shack.

The reason for Pop was something else.

The shack stood a hundred feet from the Big Crack's edge. It looked like a dust-heap thirty feet high, and it was. The outside was surface moondust, piled over a tiny dome to be insulation against the cold of night and shadow and the furnace heat of day. Pop lived in it all alone, and in his spare time he worked industriously at recovering some missing portions of his life that Sattell had managed to take away from him.

He thought often of Sattell, down in the colony underground. There were galleries and tunnels and living-quarters down there. There were air-tight bulkheads for safety, and a hydroponic garden to keep the air fresh, and all sorts of things to make life possible for men under if not on the Moon.

But it wasn't fun, even underground. In the Moon's slight gravity, a man is really adjusted to existence when he has a well-developed case of agoraphobia. With such an aid, a man can get into a tiny, coffinlike cubbyhole, and feel solidity above and below and around him, and happily tell himself that it feels delicious. Sometimes it does.

But Sattell couldn't comfort himself so easily. He knew about Pop, up on the surface. He'd shipped out, whimpering, to the Moon to get far away from Pop, and Pop was just about a mile overhead and there was no way to get around him. It was difficult to get away from the mine, anyhow. It doesn't take too long for the low gravity to tear a man's nerves to shreds. He has to develop kinks in his head to survive. And those kinks--

The first men to leave the colony had to be knocked cold and shipped out unconscious. They'd been underground--and in low gravity--long enough to be utterly unable to face the idea of open spaces. Even now there were some who had to be carried, but there were some tougher ones who were able to walk to the rocketship if Pop put a tarpaulin over their heads so they didn't have to see the sky. In any case Pop was essential, either for carrying or guidance.

* * * * *

Sattell got the shakes when he thought of Pop, and Pop rather probably knew it. Of course, by the time he took the job tending the shack, he was pretty certain about Sattell. The facts spoke for themselves.

Pop had come back to consciousness in a hospital with a great wound in his head and no memory of anything that had happened before that moment. It was not that his identity was in question. When he was stronger, the doctors told him who he was, and as gently as possible what had happened to his wife and children. They'd been murdered after he was seemingly killed defending them. But he didn't remember a thing. Not then. It was something of a blessing.

But when he was physically recovered he set about trying to pick up the threads of the life he could no longer remember. He met Sattell quite by accident. Sattell looked familiar. Pop eagerly tried to ask him questions. And Sattell turned gray and frantically denied that he'd ever seen Pop before.

All of which happened back on Earth and a long time ago. It seemed to Pop that the sight of Sattell had brought back some vague and cloudy memories. They were not sharp, though, and he hunted up Sattell again to find out if he was right. And Sattell went into panic when he returned.

Nowadays, by the Big Crack, Pop wasn't so insistent on seeing Sattell, but he was deeply concerned with the recovery of the memories that Sattell helped bring back. Pop was a highly conscientious man. He took good care of his job. There was a warning-bell in the shack, and when a rocketship from Lunar City got above the horizon and could send a tight beam, the gong clanged loudly, and Pop got into a vacuum-suit and went out the air lock. He usually reached the moondozer about the time the ship began to brake for landing, and he watched it come in.

He saw the silver needle in the sky fighting momentum above a line of jagged crater-walls. It slowed, and slowed, and curved down as it drew nearer. The pilot killed all forward motion just above the field and came steadily and smoothly down to land between the silvery triangles that marked the landing place.

Instantly the rockets cut off, drums of fuel and air and food came out of the cargo-hatch and Pop swept forward with the dozer. It was a miniature tractor with a gigantic scoop in front. He pushed a great mound of talc-fine dust before him to cover up the cargo. It was necessary. With freight costing what it did, fuel and air and food came frozen solid, in containers barely thicker than foil. While they stayed at space-shadow temperature, the foil would hold anything. And a cover of insulating moondust with vacuum between the grains kept even air frozen solid, though in sunlight.

At such times Pop hardly thought of Sattell. He knew he had plenty of time for that. He'd started to follow Sattell knowing what had happened to his wife and children, but it was hearsay only. He had no memory of them at all. But Sattell stirred the lost memories. At first Pop followed absorbedly from city to city, to recover the years that had been wiped out by an axe-blow. He did recover a good deal. When Sattell fled to another continent, Pop followed because he had some distinct memories of his wife--and the way he'd felt about her--and some fugitive mental images of his children. When Sattell frenziedly tried to deny knowledge of the murder in Tangier, Pop had come to remember both his children and some of the happiness of his married life.

Even when Sattell--whimpering--signed up for Lunar City, Pop tracked him. By that time he was quite sure that Sattell was the man who'd killed his family. If so, Sattell had profited by less than two days' pay for wiping out everything that Pop possessed. But Pop wanted it back. He couldn't prove Sattell's guilt. There was no evidence. In any case, he didn't really want Sattell to die. If he did, there'd be no way to recover more lost memories.

Sometimes, in the shack on the far side of the Moon, Pop Young had odd fancies about Sattell. There was the mine, for example. In each two Earth-weeks of working, the mine-colony nearly filled up a three-gallon cannister with greasy-seeming white crystals shaped like two pyramids base to base. The filled cannister would weigh a hundred pounds on Earth. Here it weighed eighteen. But on Earth its contents would be computed in carats, and a hundred pounds was worth millions. Yet here on the Moon Pop kept a waiting cannister on a shelf in his tiny dome, behind the air-apparatus. It rattled if he shook it, and it was worth no more than so many pebbles. But sometimes Pop wondered if Sattell ever thought of the value of the mine's production. If he would kill a woman and two children and think he'd killed a man for no more than a hundred dollars, what enormity would he commit for a three-gallon quantity of uncut diamonds?

* * * * *

But he did not dwell on such speculation. The sun rose very, very slowly in what by convention was called the east. It took nearly two hours to urge its disk above the horizon, and it burned terribly in emptiness for fourteen times twenty-four hours before sunset. Then there was night, and for three hundred and thirty-six consecutive hours there were only stars overhead and the sky was a hole so terrible that a man who looked up into it--what with the nagging sensation of one-sixth gravity--tended to lose all confidence in the stability of things. Most men immediately found it hysterically necessary to seize hold of something solid to keep from falling upward. But nothing felt solid. Everything fell, too. Wherefore most men tended to scream.

But not Pop. He'd come to the Moon in the first place because Sattell was here. Near Sattell, he found memories of times when he was a young man with a young wife who loved him extravagantly. Then pictures of his children came out of emptiness and grew sharp and clear. He found that he loved them very dearly. And when he was near Sattell he literally recovered them--in the sense that he came to know new things about them and had new memories of them every day. He hadn't yet remembered the crime which lost them to him. Until he did--and the fact possessed a certain grisly humor--Pop didn't even hate Sattell. He simply wanted to be near him because it enabled him to recover new and vivid parts of his youth that had been lost.

Otherwise, he was wholly matter-of-fact--certainly so for the far side of the Moon. He was a rather fussy housekeeper. The shack above the Big Crack's rim was as tidy as any lighthouse or fur-trapper's cabin. He tended his air-apparatus with a fine precision. It was perfectly simple. In the shadow of the shack he had an unfailing source of extreme low temperature. Air from the shack flowed into a shadow-chilled pipe. Moisture condensed out of it here, and CO{2} froze solidly out of it there, and on beyond it collected as restless, transparent liquid air. At the same time, liquid air from another tank evaporated to maintain the proper air pressure in the shack. Every so often Pop tapped the pipe where the moisture froze, and lumps of water ice clattered out to be returned to the humidifier. Less often he took out the CO{2} snow, and measured it, and dumped an equivalent quantity of pale-blue liquid oxygen into the liquid air that had been purified by cold. The oxygen dissolved. Then the apparatus reversed itself and supplied fresh air from the now-enriched fluid, while the depleted other tank began to fill up with cold-purified liquid air.

Outside the shack, jagged stony pinnacles reared in the starlight, and craters complained of the bombardment from space that had made them. But, outside, nothing ever happened. Inside, it was quite different.

Working on his memories, one day Pop made a little sketch. It helped a great deal. He grew deeply interested. Writing-material was scarce, but he spent most of the time between two particular rocket-landings getting down on paper exactly how a child had looked while sleeping, some fifteen years before. He remembered with astonishment that the child had really looked exactly like that! Later he began a sketch of his partly-remembered wife. In time--he had plenty--it became a really truthful likeness.

The sun rose, and baked the abomination of desolation which was the moonscape. Pop Young meticulously touched up the glittering triangles which were landing guides for the Lunar City ships. They glittered from the thinnest conceivable layer of magnesium marking-powder. He checked over the moondozer. He tended the air apparatus. He did everything that his job and survival required. Ungrudgingly.

Then he made more sketches. The images to be drawn came back more clearly when he thought of Sattell, so by keeping Sattell in mind he recovered the memory of a chair that had been in his forgotten home. Then he drew his wife sitting in it, reading. It felt very good to see her again. And he speculated about whether Sattell ever thought of millions of dollars' worth of new-mined diamonds knocking about unguarded in the shack, and he suddenly recollected clearly the way one of his children had looked while playing with her doll. He made a quick sketch to keep from forgetting that.

There was no purpose in the sketching, save that he'd lost all his young manhood through a senseless crime. He wanted his youth back. He was recovering it bit by bit. The occupation made it absurdly easy to live on the surface of the far side of the Moon, whether anybody else could do it or not.

Sattell had no such device for adjusting to the lunar state of things. Living on the Moon was bad enough anyhow, then, but living one mile underground from Pop Young was much worse. Sattell clearly remembered the crime Pop Young hadn't yet recalled. He considered that Pop had made no overt attempt to revenge himself because he planned some retaliation so horrible and lingering that it was worth waiting for. He came to hate Pop with an insane ferocity. And fear. In his mind the need to escape became an obsession on top of the other psychotic states normal to a Moon-colonist.

But he was helpless. He couldn't leave. There was Pop. He couldn't kill Pop. He had no chance--and he was afraid. The one absurd, irrelevant thing he could do was write letters back to Earth. He did that. He wrote with the desperate, impassioned, frantic blend of persuasion and information and genius-like invention of a prisoner in a high-security prison, trying to induce someone to help him escape.

He had friends, of a sort, but for a long time his letters produced nothing. The Moon swung in vast circles about the Earth, and the Earth swung sedately about the Sun. The other planets danced their saraband. The rest of humanity went about its own affairs with fascinated attention. But then an event occurred which bore directly upon Pop Young and Sattell and Pop Young's missing years.

Somebody back on Earth promoted a luxury passenger-line of spaceships to ply between Earth and Moon. It looked like a perfect set-up. Three spacecraft capable of the journey came into being with attendant reams of publicity. They promised a thrill and a new distinction for the rich. Guided tours to Lunar! The most expensive and most thrilling trip in history! One hundred thousand dollars for a twelve-day cruise through space, with views of the Moon's far side and trips through Lunar City and a landing in Aristarchus, plus sound-tapes of the journey and fame hitherto reserved for honest explorers!

It didn't seem to have anything to do with Pop or with Sattell. But it did.

There were just two passenger tours. The first was fully booked. But the passengers who paid so highly, expected to be pleasantly thrilled and shielded from all reasons for alarm. And they couldn't be. Something happens when a self-centered and complacent individual unsuspectingly looks out of a spaceship port and sees the cosmos unshielded by mists or clouds or other aids to blindness against reality. It is shattering.

A millionaire cut his throat when he saw Earth dwindled to a mere blue-green ball in vastness. He could not endure his own smallness in the face of immensity. Not one passenger disembarked even for Lunar City. Most of them cowered in their chairs, hiding their eyes. They were the simple cases of hysteria. But the richest girl on Earth, who'd had five husbands and believed that nothing could move her--she went into catatonic withdrawal and neither saw nor heard nor moved. Two other passengers sobbed in improvised strait jackets. The first shipload started home. Fast.

The second luxury liner took off with only four passengers and turned back before reaching the Moon. Space-pilots could take the strain of space-flight because they had work to do. Workers for the lunar mines could make the trip under heavy sedation. But it was too early in the development of space-travel for pleasure-passengers. They weren't prepared for the more humbling facts of life.

Pop heard of the quaint commercial enterprise through the micro-tapes put off at the shack for the men down in the mine. Sattell probably learned of it the same way. Pop didn't even think of it again. It seemed to have nothing to do with him. But Sattell undoubtedly dealt with it fully in his desperate writings back to Earth.

* * * * *

Pop matter-of-factly tended the shack and the landing field and the stores for the Big Crack mine. Between-times he made more drawings in pursuit of his own private objective. Quite accidentally, he developed a certain talent professional artists might have approved. But he was not trying to communicate, but to discover. Drawing--especially with his mind on Sattell--he found fresh incidents popping up in his recollection. Times when he was happy. One day he remembered the puppy his children had owned and loved. He drew it painstakingly--and it was his again. Thereafter he could remember it any time he chose. He did actually recover a completely vanished past.

He envisioned a way to increase that recovery. But there was a marked shortage of artists' materials on the Moon. All freight had to be hauled from Earth, on a voyage equal to rather more than a thousand times around the equator of the Earth. Artists' supplies were not often included. Pop didn't even ask.

He began to explore the area outside the shack for possible material no one would think of sending from Earth. He collected stones of various sorts, but when warmed up in the shack they were useless. He found no strictly lunar material which would serve for modeling or carving portraits in the ground. He found minerals which could be pulverized and used as pigments, but nothing suitable for this new adventure in the recovery of lost youth. He even considered blasting, to aid his search. He could. Down in the mine, blasting was done by soaking carbon black--from CO{2}--in liquid oxygen, and then firing it with a spark. It exploded splendidly. And its fumes were merely more CO{2} which an air-apparatus handled easily.

He didn't do any blasting. He didn't find any signs of the sort of mineral he required. Marble would have been perfect, but there is no marble on the Moon. Naturally! Yet Pop continued to search absorbedly for material with which to capture memory. Sattell still seemed necessary, but--

Early one lunar morning he was a good two miles from his shack when he saw rocket-fumes in the sky. It was most unlikely. He wasn't looking for anything of the sort, but out of the corner of his eye he observed that something moved. Which was impossible. He turned his head, and there were rocket-fumes coming over the horizon, not in the direction of Lunar City. Which was more impossible still.

He stared. A tiny silver rocket to the westward poured out monstrous masses of vapor. It decelerated swiftly. It curved downward. The rockets checked for an instant, and flamed again more violently, and checked once more. This was not an expert approach. It was a faulty one. Curving surface-ward in a sharply changing parabola, the pilot over-corrected and had to wait to gather down-speed, and then over-corrected again. It was an altogether clumsy landing. The ship was not even perfectly vertical when it settled not quite in the landing-area marked by silvery triangles. One of its tail-fins crumpled slightly. It tilted a little when fully landed.

Then nothing happened.

Pop made his way toward it in the skittering, skating gait one uses in one-sixth gravity. When he was within half a mile, an air-lock door opened in the ship's side. But nothing came out of the lock. No space-suited figure. No cargo came drifting down with the singular deliberation of falling objects on the Moon.

It was just barely past lunar sunrise on the far side of the Moon. Incredibly long and utterly black shadows stretched across the plain, and half the rocketship was dazzling white and half was blacker than blackness itself. The sun still hung low indeed in the black, star-speckled sky. Pop waded through moondust, raising a trail of slowly settling powder. He knew only that the ship didn't come from Lunar City, but from Earth. He couldn't imagine why. He did not even wildly connect it with what--say--Sattell might have written with desperate plausibility about greasy-seeming white crystals out of the mine, knocking about Pop Young's shack in cannisters containing a hundred Earth-pounds weight of richness.

* * * * *

Pop reached the rocketship. He approached the big tail-fins. On one of them there were welded ladder-rungs going up to the opened air-lock door.

He climbed.

The air-lock was perfectly normal when he reached it. There was a glass port in the inner door, and he saw eyes looking through it at him. He pulled the outer door shut and felt the whining vibration of admitted air. His vacuum suit went slack about him. The inner door began to open, and Pop reached up and gave his helmet the practiced twisting jerk which removed it.

Then he blinked. There was a red-headed man in the opened door. He grinned savagely at Pop. He held a very nasty hand-weapon trained on Pop's middle.

"Don't come in!" he said mockingly. "And I don't give a damn about how you are. This isn't social. It's business!"

Pop simply gaped. He couldn't quite take it in.

"This," snapped the red-headed man abruptly, "is a stickup!"

Pop's eyes went through the inner lock-door. He saw that the interior of the ship was stripped and bare. But a spiral stairway descended from some upper compartment. It had a handrail of pure, transparent, water-clear plastic. The walls were bare insulation, but that trace of luxury remained. Pop gazed at the plastic, fascinated.

The red-headed man leaned forward, snarling. He slashed Pop across the face with the barrel of his weapon. It drew blood. It was wanton, savage brutality.

"Pay attention!" snarled the red-headed man. "A stickup, I said! Get it? You go get that can of stuff from the mine! The diamonds! Bring them here! Understand?"

Pop said numbly: "What the hell?"

The red-headed man hit him again. He was nerve-racked, and, therefore, he wanted to hurt.

"Move!" he rasped. "I want the diamonds you've got for the ship from Lunar City! Bring 'em!" Pop licked blood from his lips and the man with the weapon raged at him. "Then phone down to the mine! Tell Sattell I'm here and he can come on up! Tell him to bring any more diamonds they've dug up since the stuff you've got!"

He leaned forward. His face was only inches from Pop Young's. It was seamed and hard-bitten and nerve-racked. But any man would be quivering if he wasn't used to space or the feel of one-sixth gravity on the Moon. He panted:

"And get it straight! You try any tricks and we take off! We swing over your shack! The rocket-blast smashes it! We burn you down! Then we swing over the cable down to the mine and the rocket-flame melts it! You die and everybody in the mine besides! No tricks! We didn't come here for nothing!"

He twitched all over. Then he struck cruelly again at Pop Young's face. He seemed filled with fury, at least partly hysterical. It was the tension that space-travel--then, at its beginning--produced. It was meaningless savagery due to terror. But, of course, Pop was helpless to resent it. There were no weapons on the Moon and the mention of Sattell's name showed the uselessness of bluff. He'd pictured the complete set-up by the edge of the Big Crack. Pop could do nothing.

The red-headed man checked himself, panting. He drew back and slammed the inner lock-door. There was the sound of pumping.

Pop put his helmet back on and sealed it. The outer door opened. Outrushing air tugged at Pop. After a second or two he went out and climbed down the welded-on ladder-bars to the ground.

He headed back toward his shack. Somehow, the mention of Sattell had made his mind work better. It always did. He began painstakingly to put things together. The red-headed man knew the routine here in every detail. He knew Sattell. That part was simple. Sattell had planned this multi-million-dollar coup, as a man in prison might plan his break. The stripped interior of the ship identified it.

It was one of the unsuccessful luxury-liners sold for scrap. Or perhaps it was stolen for the journey here. Sattell's associates had had to steal or somehow get the fuel, and somehow find a pilot. But there were diamonds worth at least five million dollars waiting for them, and the whole job might not have called for more than two men--with Sattell as a third. According to the economics of crime, it was feasible. Anyhow it was being done.

Pop reached the dust-heap which was his shack and went in the air lock. Inside, he went to the vision-phone and called the mine-colony down in the Crack. He gave the message he'd been told to pass on. Sattell to come up, with what diamonds had been dug since the regular cannister was sent up for the Lunar City ship that would be due presently. Otherwise the ship on the landing strip would destroy shack and Pop and the colony together.

"I'd guess," said Pop painstakingly, "that Sattell figured it out. He's probably got some sort of gun to keep you from holding him down there. But he won't know his friends are here--not right this minute he won't."

A shaking voice asked questions from the vision-phone.

"No," said Pop, "they'll do it anyhow. If we were able to tell about 'em, they'd be chased. But if I'm dead and the shacks smashed and the cable burnt through, they'll be back on Earth long before a new cable's been got and let down to you. So they'll do all they can no matter what I do." He added, "I wouldn't tell Sattell a thing about it, if I were you. It'll save trouble. Just let him keep on waiting for this to happen. It'll save you trouble."

Another shaky question.

"Me?" asked Pop. "Oh, I'm going to raise what hell I can. There's some stuff in that ship I want."

He switched off the phone. He went over to his air apparatus. He took down the cannister of diamonds which were worth five millions or more back on Earth. He found a bucket. He dumped the diamonds casually into it. They floated downward with great deliberation and surged from side to side like a liquid when they stopped. One-sixth gravity.

Pop regarded his drawings meditatively. A sketch of his wife as he now remembered her. It was very good to remember. A drawing of his two children, playing together. He looked forward to remembering much more about them. He grinned.

"That stair-rail," he said in deep satisfaction. "That'll do it!"

He tore bed linen from his bunk and worked on the emptied cannister. It was a double container with a thermware interior lining. Even on Earth newly-mined diamonds sometimes fly to pieces from internal stress. On the Moon, it was not desirable that diamonds be exposed to repeated violent changes of temperature. So a thermware-lined cannister kept them at mine-temperature once they were warmed to touchability.

Pop packed the cotton cloth in the container. He hurried a little, because the men in the rocket were shaky and might not practice patience. He took a small emergency-lamp from his spare spacesuit. He carefully cracked its bulb, exposing the filament within. He put the lamp on top of the cotton and sprinkled magnesium marking-powder over everything. Then he went to the air-apparatus and took out a flask of the liquid oxygen used to keep his breathing-air in balance. He poured the frigid, pale-blue stuff into the cotton. He saturated it.

All the inside of the shack was foggy when he finished. Then he pushed the cannister-top down. He breathed a sigh of relief when it was in place. He'd arranged for it to break a frozen-brittle switch as it descended. When it came off, the switch would light the lamp with its bare filament. There was powdered magnesium in contact with it and liquid oxygen all about.

He went out of the shack by the air lock. On the way, thinking about Sattell, he suddenly recovered a completely new memory. On their first wedding anniversary, so long ago, he and his wife had gone out to dinner to celebrate. He remembered how she looked: the almost-smug joy they shared that they would be together for always, with one complete year for proof.

Pop reflected hungrily that it was something else to be made permanent and inspected from time to time. But he wanted more than a drawing of this! He wanted to make the memory permanent and to extend it--

If it had not been for his vacuum suit and the cannister he carried, Pop would have rubbed his hands.

* * * * *

Tall, jagged crater-walls rose from the lunar plain. Monstrous, extended inky shadows stretched enormous distances, utterly black. The sun, like a glowing octopod, floated low at the edge of things and seemed to hate all creation.

Pop reached the rocket. He climbed the welded ladder-rungs to the air lock. He closed the door. Air whined. His suit sagged against his body. He took off his helmet.

When the red-headed man opened the inner door, the hand-weapon shook and trembled. Pop said calmly:

"Now I've got to go handle the hoist, if Sattell's coming up from the mine. If I don't do it, he don't come up."

The red-headed man snarled. But his eyes were on the cannister whose contents should weigh a hundred pounds on Earth.

"Any tricks," he rasped, "and you know what happens!"

"Yeah," said Pop.

He stolidly put his helmet back on. But his eyes went past the red-headed man to the stair that wound down, inside the ship, from some compartment above. The stair-rail was pure, clear, water-white plastic, not less than three inches thick. There was a lot of it!

The inner door closed. Pop opened the outer. Air rushed out. He climbed painstakingly down to the ground. He started back toward the shack.

There was the most luridly bright of all possible flashes. There was no sound, of course. But something flamed very brightly, and the ground thumped under Pop Young's vacuum boots. He turned.

The rocketship was still in the act of flying apart. It had been a splendid explosion. Of course cotton sheeting in liquid oxygen is not quite as good an explosive as carbon-black, which they used down in the mine. Even with magnesium powder to start the flame when a bare light-filament ignited it, the cannister-bomb hadn't equaled--say--T.N.T. But the ship had fuel on board for the trip back to Earth. And it blew, too. It would be minutes before all the fragments of the ship returned to the Moon's surface. On the Moon, things fall slowly.

Pop didn't wait. He searched hopefully. Once a mass of steel plating fell only yards from him, but it did not interrupt his search.

When he went into the shack, he grinned to himself. The call-light of the vision-phone flickered wildly. When he took off his helmet the bell clanged incessantly. He answered. A shaking voice from the mining-colony panted:

"We felt a shock! What happened? What do we do?"

"Don't do a thing," advised Pop. "It's all right. I blew up the ship and everything's all right. I wouldn't even mention it to Sattell if I were you."

He grinned happily down at a section of plastic stair-rail he'd found not too far from where the ship exploded. When the man down in the mine cut off, Pop got out of his vacuum suit in a hurry. He placed the plastic zestfully on the table where he'd been restricted to drawing pictures of his wife and children in order to recover memories of them.

He began to plan, gloatingly, the thing he would carve out of a four-inch section of the plastic. When it was carved, he'd paint it. While he worked, he'd think of Sattell, because that was the way to get back the missing portions of his life--the parts Sattell had managed to get away from him. He'd get back more than ever, now!

He didn't wonder what he'd do if he ever remembered the crime Sattell had committed. He felt, somehow, that he wouldn't get that back until he'd recovered all the rest.

Gloating, it was amusing to remember what people used to call such art-works as he planned, when carved by other lonely men in other faraway places. They called those sculptures scrimshaw.

But they were a lot more than that!

THE END

Contents

THE MACHINE THAT SAVED THE WORLD

By Murray Leinster

They were broadcasts from nowhere--sinister emanations flooding in from space--smashing any receiver that picked them up. What defense could Earth devise against science such as this?

The first broadcast came in 1972, while Mahon-modified machines were still strictly classified, and the world had heard only rumors about them. The first broadcast was picked up by a television ham in Osceola, Florida, who fumingly reported artificial interference on the amateur TV bands. He heard and taped it for ten minutes--so he said--before it blew out his receiver. When he replaced the broken element, the broadcast was gone.

But the Communications Commission looked at and listened to the tape and practically went through the ceiling. It stationed a monitor truck in Osceola for months, listening feverishly to nothing.

Then for a long while there were rumors of broadcasts which blew out receiving apparatus, but nothing definite. Weird patterns appeared on screens high-pitched or deep-bass notes sounded--and the receiver went out of operation. After the ham operator in Osceola, nobody else got more than a second or two of the weird interference before blowing his set during six very full months of CC agitation.

Then a TV station in Seattle abruptly broadcast interference superimposed on its regular network program. The screens of all sets tuned to that program suddenly showed exotic, curiously curved, meaningless patterns on top of a commercial spectacular broadcast. At the same time incredible chirping noises came from the speakers, alternating with deep-bass hootings, which spoiled the ju-ju music of the most expensive ju-ju band on the air. The interference ended only with a minor break-down in the transmitting station. It was the same sort of interference that the Communications Commission had thrown fits about in Washington. It threw further fits now.

* * * * *

A month later a vision-phone circuit between Chicago and Los Angeles was unusable for ten minutes. The same meaningless picture-pattern and the same preposterous noises came on and monopolized the line. It ceased when a repeater-tube went out and a parallel circuit took over. Again, frantic agitation displayed by high authority.

Then the interference began to appear more frequently, though still capriciously. Once a Presidential broadcast was confused by interference apparently originating in the White House, and again a three-way top-secret conference between the commanding officers of three military departments ceased when the unhuman-sounding noises and the scrambled picture pattern inserted itself into the closed-circuit discussion. The conference broke up amid consternation. For one reason, military circuits were supposed to be interference-proof. For another, it appeared that if interference could be spotted to this circuit or this receiver it was likely this circuit or that receiver could be tapped.

For a third reason, the broadcasts were dynamite. As received, they were badly scrambled, but they could be straightened out. Even the first one, from Osceola, was cleaned up and understood. Enough so to make top authority tear its hair and allow only fully-cleared scientific consultants in on the thing.

The content of the broadcasts was kept considerably more secret than the existence of Mahon units and what they could do. And Mahon units were brand-new, then, and being worked with only at one research installation in the United States.

The broadcasts were not so closely confined. The same wriggly patterns and alien noises were picked up in Montevideo, in Australia, in Panama City, and in grimly embattled England. All the newspapers discussed them without ever suspecting that they had been translated into plain speech. They were featured as freak news--and each new account mentioned that the broadcast reception had ended with a break-down of the receiving apparatus.

Guarded messages passed among the high authorities of the nations that picked up the stuff. A cautious inquiry went even to the Compubs.

The Union of Communist Republics answered characteristically. It asked a question about Mahon units. There were rumors, it said, about a new principle of machine-control lately developed in the United States. It was said that machines equipped with the new units did not wear out, that they exercised seeming intelligence at their tasks, and that they promised to end the enormous drain on natural resources caused by the wearing-out and using-up of standard-type machinery.

The Compub Information Office offered to trade data on the broadcasts for data about the new Mahon-modified machines. It hinted at extremely important revelations it could make.

The rest of the world deduced astutely that the Compubs were scared, too. And they were correct.

* * * * *

Then, quite suddenly, a break came. All previous broadcast receptions had ended with the break-down of the receiving instrument. Now a communicator named Betsy, modified in the Mahon manner and at work in the research installation working with Mahon-modified devices, began to pick up the broadcasts consistently, keeping each one on its screen until it ended.

Day after day, at highly irregular intervals, Betsy's screen lighted up and showed the weird patterns, and her loudspeakers emitted the peepings and chirps and deep-bass hootings of the broadcasts. And the high brass went into a dither to end all dithers as tapes of the received material reached the Pentagon and were translated into intelligible speech and pictures.

* * * * *

This was when Metech Sergeant Bellews, in charge of the Rehab Shop at Research Installation 83, came into the affair. Specifically, he entered the picture when a young second lieutenant came to the shop to fetch him to Communications Center in that post.

The lieutenant was young and tall and very military. Sergeant Bellews was not. So he snorted, upon receipt of the message. He was at work on a vacuum cleaner at the moment--a Mahon-modified machine with a flickering yellow standby light that wavered between brightness and dimness with much more than appropriate frequency. The Rehabilitation Shop was where Mahon-modified machines were brought back to usefulness when somebody messed them up. Two or three machines--an electric ironer, for one--operated slowly and hesitantly. That was occupational therapy. A washing-machine churned briskly, which was convalescence. Others, ranging from fire-control computers to teletypes and automatic lathes, simply waited with their standby lights flickering meditatively according to the manner and custom of Mahon-modified machines. They were ready for duty again.

The young lieutenant was politely urgent.

"But I been there!" protested Sergeant Bellews. "I checked! It's a communicator I named Betsy. She's all right! She's been mishandled by the kinda halfwits Communications has around, but she's a good, well-balanced, experienced machine. If she's turning out broadcasts, it's because they're comin' in! She's all right!"

"I know," said the young lieutenant soothingly. His uniform and his manners were beautiful to behold. "But the Colonel wants you there for a conference."

"I got a communicator in the shop here," said Sergeant Bellews suspiciously. "Why don't he call me?"

"Because he wants to try some new adjustments on--ah--Betsy, Sergeant. You have a way with Mahon machines. They'll do things for you they won't do for anybody else."

Sergeant Bellews snorted again. He knew he was being buttered up, but he'd asked for it. He even insisted on it, for the glory of the Metallurgical Technicians' Corps. The big brass tended to regard Metechs as in some fashion successors to the long-vanished veterinary surgeons of the Farriers' Corps, when horses were a part of the armed forces. Mahon-modified machines were new--very new--but the top brass naturally remembered everything faintly analogous and applied it all wrong. So Sergeant Bellews conducted a one-man campaign to establish the dignity of his profession.

But nobody without special Metech training ought to tinker with a Mahon-modified machine.

"If he's gonna fool with Betsy," said the Sergeant bitterly, "I guess I gotta go over an' boss the job."

He pressed a button on his work-table. The vacuum cleaner's standby light calmed down. The button provided soothing sub-threshold stimuli to the Mahon unit, not quite giving it the illusion of operating perfectly--if a Mahon unit could be said to be capable of illusion--but maintaining it in the rest condition which was the foundation of Mahon-unit operation, since a Mahon machine must never be turned off.

The lieutenant started out of the door. Sergeant Bellews followed at leisure. He painstakingly avoided ever walking the regulation two paces behind a commissioned officer. Either he walked side by side, chatting, or he walked alone. Wise officers let him get away with it.

* * * * *

Reaching the open air a good twenty yards behind the lieutenant, he cocked an approving eye at a police-up unit at work on the lawn outside. Only a couple of weeks before, that unit had been in a bad way. It stopped and shivered when it encountered an unfamiliar object.

But now it rolled across the grass from one path-edge to another. When it reached the second path it stopped, briskly moved itself its own width sidewise, and rolled back. On the way it competently manicured the lawn. It picked up leaves, retrieved a stray cigarette-butt, and snapped up a scrap of paper blown from somewhere. Its tactile units touched a new-planted shrub. It delicately circled the shrub and went on upon its proper course.

* * * * *

Once, where the grass grew taller than elsewhere, it stopped and whirred, trimming the growth back to regulation height. Then it went on about its business as before.

Sergeant Bellews felt a warm sensation. That was a good machine that had been in a bad way and he'd brought it back to normal, happy operation. The sergeant was pleased.

The lieutenant turned into the Communications building. Sergeant Bellews followed at leisure. A jeep went past him--one of the special jeeps being developed at this particular installation--and its driver was talking to someone in the back seat, but the jeep matter-of-factly turned out to avoid Sergeant Bellews. He glowed. He'd activated it. Another good machine, gathering sound experience day by day.

He went into the room where Betsy stood--the communicator which, alone among receiving devices in the whole world, picked up the enigmatic broadcasts consistently. Betsy was a standard Mark IV communicator, now carefully isolated from any aerial. She was surrounded by recording devices for vision and sound, and by the most sensitive and complicated instruments yet devised for the detection of short-wave radiation. Nothing had yet been detected reaching Betsy, but something must. No machine could originate what Betsy had been exhibiting on her screen and emitting from her speakers.

Sergeant Bellews tensed instantly. Betsy's standby light quivered hysterically from bright to dim and back again. The rate of quivering was fast. It was very nearly a sine-wave modulation of the light--and when a Mahon-modified machine goes into sine-wave flicker, it is the same as Cheyne-Stokes breathing in a human.

He plunged forward. He jerked open Betsy's adjustment-cover and fairly yelped his dismay. He reached in and swiftly completed corrective changes of amplification and scanning voltages. He balanced a capacity bridge. He soothed a saw-tooth resonator. He seemed to know by sheer intuition what was needed to be done.

After a moment or two the standby lamp wavered slowly from near-extinction to half-brightness, and then to full brightness and back again. It was completely unrhythmic and very close to normal.

"Who done this?" demanded the sergeant furiously. "He had Betsy close to fatigue collapse! He'd ought to be court-martialed!"

He was too angry to notice the three civilians in the room with the colonel and the lieutenant who'd summoned him. The young officer looked uncomfortable, but the colonel said authoritatively:

"Never mind that, Sergeant. Your Betsy was receiving something. It wasn't clear. You had not reported, as ordered, so an attempt was made to clarify the signals."

"Okay, Colonel!" said Sergeant Bellews bitterly. "You got the right to spoil machines! But if you want them to work right you got to treat 'em right!"

"Just so," said the colonel. "Meanwhile--this is Doctor Howell, Doctor Graves, and Doctor Lecky. Sergeant Bellews, gentlemen. Sergeant, these are not MDs. They've been sent by the Pentagon to work on Betsy."

* * * * *

"Betsy don't need workin' on!" said Sergeant Bellews belligerently. "She's a good, reliable, experienced machine! If she's handled right, she'll do better work than any machine I know!"

"Granted," said the colonel. "She's doing work now that no other machine seems able to do--drawing scrambled broadcasts from somewhere that can only be guessed at. They've been unscrambled and these gentlemen have come to get the data on Betsy. I'm sure you'll cooperate."

"What kinda data do they want?" demanded Bellews. "I can answer most questions about Betsy!"

"Which," the colonel told him, "is why I sent for you. These gentlemen have the top scientific brains in the country, Sergeant. Answer their questions about Betsy and I think some very high brass will be grateful.

"By the way, it is ordered that from now on no one is to refer to Betsy or any work on these broadcasts, over any type of electronic communication. No telephone, no communicator, no teletype, no radio, no form of communication except viva voce. And that means you talking to somebody else, Sergeant, with no microphone around. Understand? And from now on you will not talk about anything at all except to these gentlemen and to me."

Sergeant Bellews said incredulously:

"Suppose I got to talk to somebody in the Rehab Shop. Do I signal with my ears and fingers?"

"You don't talk," said the colonel flatly. "Not at all."

Sergeant Bellews shook his head sadly. He regarded the colonel with such reproach that the colonel stiffened. But Sergeant Bellews had a gift for machinery. He had what amounted to genius for handling Mahon-modified devices. So long as no more competent men turned up, he was apt to get away with more than average.

The colonel frowned and went out of the room. The tall young lieutenant followed him faithfully. The sergeant regarded the three scientists with the suspicious air he displayed to everyone not connected with Mahon units in some fashion.

"Well?" he said with marked reserve. "What can I tell you first?"

Lecky was the smallest of the three scientists. He said ingratiatingly, with the faintest possible accent in his speech:

"The nicest thing you could do for us, Sergeant, would be to show us that this--Betsy, is it?--with other machines before her, has developed a contagious machine insanity. It would frighten me to learn that machines can go mad, but I would prefer it to other explanations for the messages she gives."

"Betsy can't go crazy," said Bellews with finality. "She's Mahon-controlled, but she hasn't got what it takes to go crazy. A Mahon unit fixes a machine so it can loaf and be a permanent dynamic system that can keep acquired habits of operatin'. It can take trainin'. It can get to be experienced. It can learn the tricks of its trade, so to speak. But it can't go crazy!"

"Too bad!" said Lecky. He added persuasively: "But a machine can lie, Sergeant? Would that be possible?"

Sergeant Bellews snorted in denial.

* * * * *

"The broadcasts," said Lecky mildly, "claim a remarkable reason for certainty about an extremely grave danger which is almost upon the world. If it's the truth, Sergeant, it is appalling. If it is a lie, it may be more appalling. The Joint Chiefs of Staff take it very seriously, in any case. They--"

"I got cold shivers," said Sergeant Bellews with irony. "I'm all wrought up. Huh! The big brass gets the yellin' yollups every so often anyhow. Listen to them, and nothin' happens except it's top priority top secret extra crash emergency! What do you want to know about Betsy?"

There was a sudden squealing sound from the communicator on which all the extra recording devices were focussed. Betsy's screen lighted up. Peculiarly curved patterns appeared on it. They shifted and changed. Noises came from her speaker. They were completely unearthly. Now they were shrill past belief, and then they were chopped into very small bits of sound, and again they were deepest bass, when each separate note seemed to last for seconds.

"You might," said Lecky calmly, "tell us from where your Betsy gets the signal she reports in this fashion."

There were whirrings as recorders trained upon Betsy captured every flickering of her screen and every peeping noise or deep-toned rumble. The screen-pattern changed with the sound, but it was not linked to it. It was a completely abnormal reception. It was uncanny. It was somehow horrible because so completely remote from any sort of human communication in the year 1972.

The three scientists watched with worried eyes. A communicator, even with a Mahon unit in it, could not originate a pattern like this! And this was not conceivably a distortion of anything transmitted in any normal manner in the United States of America, or the Union of Compubs, or any of the precariously surviving small nations not associated with either colossus.

"This is a repeat broadcast!" said one of the three men suddenly. It was Howell, the heavy-set man. "I remember it. I saw it projected--like this, and then unscrambled. I think it's the one where the social system's described--so we can have practice at trying to understand. Remember?"

* * * * *

Lecky said, as if the matter had been thrashed out often before:

"I do not believe what it says, Howell! You know that I do not believe it! I will not accept the theory that this broadcast comes from the future!"

The broadcast stopped. It stopped dead. Betsy's screen went blank. Her wildly fluctuating standby light slowed gradually to a nearly normal rate of flicker.

"That's not a theory," said Howell dourly. "It's a statement in the broadcast. We saw the first transmission of this from the tape at the Pentagon. Then we saw it with the high-pitched parts slowed down and the deep-bass stuff speeded up. Then it was a human voice giving data on the scanning pattern and then rather drearily repeating that history said that intertemporal communication began with broadcasts sent back from 2180 to 1972. It said the establishment of two-way communication was very difficult and read from a script about social history, to give us practice in unscrambling it. It's not a theory to say the stuff originates in the future. It's a statement."

"Then it is a lie," said Lecky, very earnestly. "Truly, Howell, it is a lie!"

"Then where does the broadcast come from?" demanded Howell. "Some say it's a Compub trick. But if they were true they'd hide it for use to produce chaos in a sneak attack. The only other theory--"

* * * * *

Graves, the man with the short moustache, said jerkily:

"No, Howell! It is not an extra-terrestrial creature pretending to be a man of our own human future. One could not sleep well with such an idea in his head. If some non-human monster could do this--"

"I do not sleep at all," said Lecky simply. "Because it says that two-way communication is to come. I can listen to these broadcasts tranquilly, but I cannot bear the thought of answering them. That seems to me madness!"

Sergeant Bellews said approvingly:

"You got something there! Yes, sir! Did you notice how Betsy's standby light was wabbling while she was bringin' in that broadcast? If she could sweat, she'd've been sweating!"

Lecky turned his head to stare at the sergeant.

"Machines," said Bellews profoundly, "act according to the golden rule. They do unto you as they would have you do unto them. You treat a machine right and it treats you right. You treat it wrong and it busts itself--still tryin' to treat you right. See?"

Lecky blinked.

"I do not quite see how it applies," he said mildly.

"Betsy's an old, experienced machine," said the sergeant. "A signal that makes her sweat like that has got something wrong about it. Any ordinary machine 'ud break down handlin' it."

Graves said jerkily:

"The other machines that received these broadcasts did break down, Sergeant. All of them."

"Sure!" said the sergeant with dignity. "O' course, who's broadcastin' may have been tinkerin' with their signal since they seen it wasn't gettin' through. Betsy can take it now, when younger machines with less experience can't. Maybe a micro-microwatt of signal. Then it makes her sweat. If she was broadcastin', with a hell of a lot more'n a micro-microwatt--it'd be bad! I bet you that every machine we make to broadcast breaks down! I bet--"

Howell said curtly:

"Reasonable enough! A signal to pass through time as well as space would be different from a standard wave-type! Of course that must be the answer."

Sergeant Bellews said truculently:

"I got a hunch that whoever's broadcastin' is busting transmitters right an' left. I never knew anything about this before, except that Betsy was pickin' up stuff that came from nowhere. But I bet if you look over the record-tapes you will find they got breaks where one transmitter switched off or broke down and another took over!"

Lecky's eyes were shining. He regarded Sergeant Bellews with a sort of tender respect.

"Sergeant Bellews," he said softly, "I like you very much. You have told us undoubtedly true things."

"Think nothin' of it," said the sergeant, gratified. "I run the Rehab Shop here, and I could show you things--"

"We wish you to," said Lecky. "The reaction of machines to these broadcasts is the one viewpoint we would never have imagined. But it is plainly important. Will you help us, Sergeant? I do not like to be frightened--and I am!"

"Sure, I'll help," said Sergeant Bellews largely. "First thing is to whip some stuff together so we can find out what's what. You take a few Mahon units, and install 'em and train 'em right, and they will do almost anything you've a mind for. But you got to treat 'em right. Machines work by the golden rule. Always! Come along!"

* * * * *

Sergeant Bellews went to the Rehab Shop, followed only by Lecky. All about, the sun shone down upon buildings with a remarkably temporary look about them, and on lawns with a remarkably lush look about them, and signboards with very black lettering on gray paint backgrounds. There was a very small airfield inside the barbed-wire fence about the post, and elaborate machine-shops, and rows and rows of barracks and a canteen and a USO theatre, and a post post-office. Everything seemed quite matter-of-fact.

Except for the machines.

They were the real reason for the existence of the post. The barracks and married-row dwellings had washing-machines which looked very much like other washing-machines, except that they had standby lights which flickered meditatively when they weren't being used.

* * * * *

The television receivers looked like other TV sets, except for minute and wavering standby lights which were never quite as bright or dim one moment as the next. The jeeps--used strictly within the barbed-wire fence around the post--had similar yellow glowings on their instrument-boards, and they were very remarkable jeeps. They never ran off the graveled roads onto the grass, and they never collided with each other, and it was said that the nine-year-old son of a lieutenant-colonel had tried to drive one and it would not stir. Its motor cut off when he forced it into gear. When he tried to re-start it, the starter did not turn. But when an adult stepped into it, it operated perfectly--only it braked and stopped itself when a small child toddled into its path.

There were some people who said that this story was not true, but other people insisted that it was. Anyhow the washing-machines were perfect. They never tangled clothes put into them. It was reported that Mrs. So-and-so's washing-machine had found a load of clothes tangled, and reversed itself and worked backward until they were straightened out.

Television sets turned to the proper channels--different ones at different times of day--with incredible facility. The smallest child could wrench at a tuning-knob and the desired station came on. All the operating devices of Research Installation 83 worked as if they liked to--which might have been alarming except that they never did anything of themselves. They initiated nothing. But each one acted like an old, favorite possession. They fitted their masters. They seemed to tune themselves to the habits of their owners. They were infinitely easy to work right, and practically impossible to work wrong.

Such machines, of course, had not been designed to cope with enigmatic broadcasts or for military purposes. But the jet-planes on the small airfield were very remarkable indeed, and the other and lesser devices had been made for better understanding of the Mahon units which made machines into practically a new order of creation.

* * * * *

Sergeant Bellews ushered Lecky into the Rehab Shop. There was the pleasant, disorderly array of devices with their wavering standby lights. They gave an effect of being alive, but somehow it was not disturbing. They seemed not so much intent as meditative, and not so much watchful as interested. When the sergeant and his guest moved past them, the unrhythmic waverings of the small yellow lights seemed to change hopefully, as if the machines anticipated being put to use. Which, of course, was absurd. Mahon machines do not anticipate anything. They probably do not remember anything, though patterns of operation are certainly retained in very great variety. The fact is that a Mahon unit is simply a device to let a machine stand idle without losing the nature of an operating machine.

The basic principle goes back to antiquity. Ships, in ancient days, had manners and customs individual to each vessel. Some were sweet craft, easily handled and staunch and responsive. Others were stubborn and begrudging of all helpfulness. Sometimes they were even man-killers. These facts had no rational explanation, but they were facts. In similarly olden times, particular weapons acquired personalities to the point of having personal names--Excalibur, for example.

Every fighting man knew of weapons which seemed to possess personal skill and ferocity. Later, workmen found that certain tools had a knack of fitting smoothly in the hand--seeming even to divine the grain of the wood they worked on. The individual characteristics of violins were notorious, so that a violin which sang joyously under the bow was literally priceless.

And all these things, as a matter of observation and not of superstition, kept their qualities only when in constant use. Let a ship be hauled out of water and remain there for a time, and she would be clumsy on return to her native element. Let a sword or tool stay unused, and it seemed to dull. In particular, the finest of violins lost its splendor of tone if left unplayed, and any violin left in a repair-shop for a month had to be played upon constantly for many days before its living tone came back.

* * * * *

The sword and the tool perhaps, but the ship and the violin certainly, acted as if they acquired habits of operation by being used, and lost them by disuse. When more complex machines were invented, such facts were less noticeable. True, no two automobiles ever handled exactly the same, and that was recognized. But the fact that no complex machine worked well until it had run for a time was never commented on, except in the observation that it needed to be warmed up. Anybody would have admitted that a machine in the act of operating was a dynamic system in a solid group of objects, but nobody reflected that a stopped machine was a dead thing. Nobody thought to liken the warming-up period for an aeroplane engine to the days of playing before a disuse-dulled violin regained its tone.

Yet it was obvious enough. A ship and a sword and a tool and a violin were objects in which dynamic systems existed when they were used, and in which they ceased to exist when use stopped. And nobody noticed that a living creature is an object which contains a dynamic system when it is living, and loses it by death.

For nearly two centuries quite complex machines were started, and warmed up, and used, and then allowed to grow cold again. In time the more complex machines were stopped only reluctantly. Computers, for example, came to be merely turned down below operating voltage when not in use, because warming them up was so difficult and exacting a task. Which was an unrecognized use of the Mahon principle. It was a way to keep a machine activated while not actually operating. It was a state of rest, of loafing, of idleness, which was not the death of a running mechanism.

The Mahon unit was a logical development. It was an absurdly simple device, and not in the least like a brain. But to the surprise of everybody, including its inventor, a Mahon-modified machine did more than stay warmed up. It retained operative habits as no complex device had ever done before. In time it was recognized that Mahon-modified machines acquired experience and kept it so long as the standby light glowed and flickered in its socket. If the lamp went out the machine died, and when reënergized was a different individual entirely, without experience.

Sergeant Bellews made such large-minded statements as were needed to brief Lecky on the work done in this installation with Mahon-controlled machines.

"They don't think," he explained negligently, "any more than dogs think. They just react--like dogs do. They get patterns of reaction. They get trained. Experienced. They get good! Over at the airfield they're walking around beaming happy over the way the jets are flyin' themselves."

Lecky gazed around the Rehab Shop. There were shelves of machines, duly boxed and equipped with Mahon units, but not yet activated. Activation meant turning them on and giving them a sort of basic training in the tasks they were designed to do. But also there were machines which had broken down--invariably through misuse, said Sergeant Bellews acidly--and had been sent to the Rehab Shop to be re-trained in their proper duties.

"Guys see 'em acting sensible and obediently," said Bellews with bitterness, "and expect 'em to think. Over at the jet-field they finally come to understand." His tone moderated. "Now they got jets that put down their own landing-gear, and holler when fuel's running low, and do acrobatics happy if you only jiggle the stick. They mighty near fly themselves! I tell you, if well-trained Mahon jets ever do tangle with old-style machines, it's goin' to be a caution to cats! It'll be like a pack of happy terriers pilin' into hamsters. It'll be murder!"

* * * * *

He surveyed his stock. From a back corner he brought out a small machine with an especially meditative tempo in its standby-lamp flicker. The tempo accelerated a little when he put it on a work-bench.

"They got batteries to stay activated with," he observed, "and only need real juice when they're workin'. This here's a play-back recorder they had over in Recreation. Some guys trained it to switch frequencies--speed-up and slow-down stuff. They laughed themselves sick! There used to be a tough guy over there,--a staff sergeant, he was--that gave lectures on military morals in a deep bass voice. He was proud of that bull voice of his. He used it frequently. So they taped him, and Al here--" the name plainly referred to the machine--"used to play it back switched up so he sounded like a squeaky girl. That poor guy, he liked to busted a blood-vessel when he heard himself speakin' soprano. He raised hell and they sent Al here to be rehabilitated. But I switched another machine for him and sent it back, instead. Of course, Al don't know what he's doing, but--"

* * * * *

He brought over another device, slightly larger and with a screen.

"Somebody had a bright notion with this one, too," he said. "They figured they'd scramble pictures for secret transmission, like they scramble voice. But they found they hadda have team-trained sets to work, an' they weren't interchangeable. They sent Gus here to be deactivated an' trained again. I kinda hate to do that. Sometimes you got to deactivate a machine, but it's like shooting a dog somebody's taught to steal eggs, who don't know it's wrong."

He bolted the two instruments together. He made connections with flexible cables and tucked the cable out of sight. He plugged in for power and began to make adjustments.

The small scientist asked curiously:

"What are you preparing, Sergeant?"

"These two'll unscramble that broadcast," said Sergeant Bellews, with tranquil confidence. "Al's learned how to make a tape and switch frequencies expert. Gus, here, he's a unscrambler that can make any kinda scanning pattern. Together they'll have a party doing what they're special trained for. We'll hook 'em to Betsy's training-terminals."

He regarded the two machines warmly. Connected, now, their standby lights flickered at a new tempo. They synchronized, and broke synchrony, and went back into elaborate, not-quite-resolvable patterns which were somehow increasingly integrated as seconds went by.

"Those lights look kinda nice, don't they?" asked the sergeant admiringly. "Makes you think of a coupla dogs gettin' acquainted when they're goin' out on a job of hunting or something."

But Lecky said abruptly, in amazement:

"But, Sergeant! In the Pentagon it takes days to unscramble a received broadcast such as Betsy receives! It requires experts--"

"Huh!" said Sergeant Bellews. He picked up the two machines. "Don't get me started about the kinda guys that wangle headquarters-company jobs! They got a special talent for fallin' soft. But they haven't necessarily got anything else!"

* * * * *

Lecky followed Sergeant Bellews as the sergeant picked up his new combination of devices and headed out of the Rehab Shop. Outside, in the sunshine, there were roarings to be heard. Lecky looked up. A formation of jets swam into view against the sky. A tiny speck, trailing a monstrous plume of smoke, shot upward from the jet-field. The formation tightened.

The ascending jet jiggled as if in pure exuberance as it swooped upward--but the jiggle was beautifully designed to throw standard automatic gunsights off.

A plane peeled off from the formation and dived at the ascending ship. There was a curious alteration in the thunder of motors. The rate-of-rise of the climbing jet dwindled almost to zero. Sparks shot out before it. They made a cone the diving ship could not avoid. It sped through them and then went as if disappointedly to a lower level. It stood by to watch the rest of the dog-fight.

"Nice!" said Sergeant Bellews appreciatively. "That's a Mahon jet all by itself, training against regular ships. They have to let it shoot star-bullets in training, or it'd get hot and bothered in a real fight when its guns went off."

The lower jet streaked skyward once more. Sparks sped from the formation. They flared through emptiness where the Mahon jet had been but now was not. It scuttled abruptly to one side as concerted streams of sparks converged. They missed. It darted into zestful, exuberant maneuverings, remarkably like a dog dashing madly here and there in pure high spirits. The formation of planes attacked it resolutely.

Suddenly the lone jet plunged into the midst of the formation, there were coruscations of little shooting stars, and one-two-three planes disgustedly descended to lower levels as out of action. Then the single ship shot upward, seemed eagerly to shake itself, plunged back--and the last ships tried wildly to escape, but each in turn was technically shot down.

The Mahon jet headed back for its own tiny airfield. Somehow, it looked as if, had it been a dog, it would be wagging its tail and panting happily.

"That one ship," said Lecky blankly, "it defeated the rest?"

"It's got a lot of experience," said the sergeant. "You can't beat experience."

He led the way into Communications Center. In the room where Betsy stood, Howell and Graves had been drawing diagrams at each other to the point of obstinacy.

"But don't you see?" insisted Howell angrily. "There can be no source other than a future time! You can't send short waves through three-dimensional space to a given spot and not have them interceptible between. Anyhow, the Compubs wouldn't work it this way! They wouldn't put us on guard! And an extra-terrestrial wouldn't pretend to be a human if he honestly wanted to warn us of danger! He'd tell us the truth! Physically and logically it's impossible for it to be anything but what it claims to be!"

Graves said doggedly:

"But a broadcast originating in the future is impossible!"

"Nothing," snapped Howell, "that a man can imagine is impossible!"

"Then imagine for me," said Graves, "that in 2180 they read in the history books about a terrible danger to the human race back in 1972, which was averted by a warning they sent us. Then, from their history-books, which we wrote for them, they learn how to make a transmitter to broadcast back to us. Then they tell us how to make a transmitter to broadcast ahead to them. They don't invent the transmitter. We tell them how to make it--via a history book. We don't invent it. They tell us--from the history book. Now imagine for me how that transmitter got invented!"

"You're quibbling," snapped Howell. "You're refusing to face a fact because you can't explain it. I say face the fact and then ask for an explanation!"

"Why not ask them," said Graves, "how to make a round square or a five-sided triangle?"

* * * * *

Sergeant Bellews pushed to a spot near Betsy. He put down his now-linked Mahon machines and began to move away some of the recording apparatus focused on Betsy.

"Hold on there!" said Howell in alarm. "Those are recorders!"

"We'll let 'em record direct," said the sergeant.

* * * * *

Lecky spoke feverishly in support of Bellews. But what he said was, in effect, a still-marveling description of the possibilities of Mahon-modified machines. They were, he said with ardent enthusiasm, the next step in the historic process by which successively greater portions of the cosmos enter into a symbiotic relationship with man. Domestic animals entered into such a partnership aeons ago. Certain plants--wheat and the like--even became unable to exist without human attention. And machines were wrought by man and for a long time served him reluctantly. Pre-Mahon machines were tamed, not domestic. They wore themselves out and destroyed themselves by accidents. But now there were machines which could enter into a truly symbiotic relationship with humanity.

"What," demanded Howell, "what in hell are you talking about?"

Lecky checked himself. He smiled abashedly:

"I think," he said humbly, "that I speak of the high destiny of mankind. But the part that applies at the moment is that Sergeant Bellews must not be interfered with."

He turned and ardently assisted Sergeant Bellews in making room for the just-brought devices. Sergeant Bellews led flexible cables from them to Betsy. He inserted their leads in her training-terminals. He made adjustments within.

It became notable that Betsy's standby light took up new tempos in its wavering. There were elaborate interweavings of rate and degree of brightening among the lights of all three instruments. There was no possible way to explain the fact, but a feeling of pleasure, of zestful stirring, was somehow expressed by the three machines which had been linked together into a cooperating group.

Sergeant Bellews eased himself into a chair.

"Now everything's set," he observed contentedly. "Remember, I ain't seen any of these broadcasts unscrambled. I don't know what it's all about. But we got three Mahon machines set up now to work on the next crazy broadcast that comes in. There's Betsy and these two others. And all machines work accordin' to the Golden Rule, but Mahon machines--they are honey-babes! They'll bust themselves tryin' to do what you ask 'em. And I asked these babies for plenty--only not enough to hurt 'em. Let's see what they turn out."

He pulled a pipe and tobacco from his pocket. He filled the pipe. He squeezed the side of the bowl and puffed as the tobacco glowed. He relaxed, underneath the wall-sign which sternly forbade smoking by all military personnel within these premises.

It was nearly three hours--but it could have been hundreds--before Betsy's screen lighted abruptly.

* * * * *

The broadcast came in; a new transmission. The picture-pattern on Betsy's screen was obviously not the same as other broadcasts from nowhere. The chirps and peepings and the rumbling deep sounds were not repetitions of earlier noise-sequences. It should have taken many days of finicky work by technicians at the Pentagon before the originally broadcast picture could be seen and the sound interpreted. But a play-back recorder named Al, and a picture-unscrambler named Gus were in closed-circuit relationship with Betsy. She received the broadcast and they unscrambled the sound and vision parts of it immediately.

The translated broadcast, as Gus and Al presented it, was calculated to put the high brass of the defense forces into a frenzied tizzy. The anguished consternation of previous occasions would seem like very calm contemplation by comparison. The high brass of the armed forces should grow dizzy. Top-echelon civilian officials should tend to talk incoherently to themselves, and scientific consultants--biologists in particular--ought to feel their heads spinning like tops.

The point was that the broadcast had to be taken seriously because it came from nowhere. There was no faintest indication of any signal outside of Betsy's sedately gray-painted case. But Betsy was not making it up. She couldn't. There was a technology involved which required the most earnest consideration of the message carried by it.

And this broadcast explained the danger from which the alleged future wished to rescue its alleged past. A brisk, completely deracialized broadcaster appeared on Gus's screen.

In clipped, oddly stressed, but completely intelligible phrases, he explained that he recognized the paradox his communication represented. Even before 1972, he observed, there had been argument about what would happen if a man could travel in time and happened to go back to an earlier age and kill his grandfather. This communication was an inversion of that paradox. The world of 2180 wished to communicate back in time and save the lives of its great-great-great-grandparents so that it--the world of 2180--would be born.

Without this warning and the information to be given, at least half the human race of 1972 was doomed.

In late 1971 there had been a mutation of a minor strain of staphylococcus somewhere in the Andes. The new mutation thrived and flourished. With the swift transportation of the period, it had spread practically all over the world unnoticed, because it produced no symptoms of disease.

Half the members of the human race were carriers of the harmless mutated staphylococcus now, but it was about to mutate again in accordance with Gordon's Law (the reference had no meaning in 1972) and the new mutation would be lethal. In effect, one human being in two carried in his body a semi-virus organization which he continually spread, and which very shortly would become deadly. Half the human race was bound to die unless it was instructed as to how to cope with it. Unless--

* * * * *

Unless the world of 2180 told its ancestors what to do about it. That was the proposal. Two-way communication was necessary for the purpose, because there would be questions to be answered, obscure points to be clarified, numerical values to be checked to the highest possible degree of accuracy.

Therefore, here were diagrams of the transmitter needed to communicate with future time. Here were enlarged diagrams of individual parts. The enigmatic parts of the drawing produced a wave-type unknown in 1972. But a special type of wave was needed to travel beyond the three dimensions of ordinary space, into the fourth dimension which was time. This wave-type produced unpredictable surges of power in the transmitter, wherefore at least six transmitters should be built and linked together so that if one ceased operation another would instantly take up the task.

* * * * *

The broadcast ended abruptly. Betsy's screen went blank. The colonel was notified. A courier took tapes to Washington by high-speed jet. Life in Research Establishment 83 went on sedately. The barracks and the married quarters and the residences of the officers were equipped with Mahon-modified machines which laundered diapers perfectly, and with dial telephones which always rang right numbers, and there were police-up machines which took perfect care of lawns, and television receivers tuned themselves to the customary channels for different hours with astonishing ease. Even jet-planes equipped with Mahon units almost landed themselves, and almost flew themselves about the sky in simulated combat with something very close to zest.

But the atmosphere in the room in Communications was tense.

"I think," said Howell, with his lips compressed, "that this answers all your objections, Graves. Motive--"

"No," said Lecky painfully. "It does not answer mine. My objection is that I do not believe it."

"Huh!" said Sergeant Bellews scornfully. "O' course, you don't believe it! It's phoney clear through!"

Lecky looked at him hopefully.

"You noticed something that we missed, Sergeant?"

"Hell, yes!" said Sergeant Bellews. "That transmitter diagram don't have a Mahon unit in it!"

"Is that remarkable?" demanded Howell.

"Remarkable dumb," said the sergeant. "They'd ought to know--"

The tall young lieutenant who earlier had fetched Sergeant Bellews to Communications now appeared again. He gracefully entered the room where Betsy waited for more broadcast matter. Her standby light flickered with something close to animation, and the similar yellow bulbs on Al and Gus responded in kind. The tall young lieutenant said politely:

"I am sorry, but pending orders from the Pentagon the colonel has ordered this room vacated. Only automatic recorders will be allowed here, and all records they produce will be sent to Washington without examination. It seems that no one on this post has the necessary clearance for this type of material."

Lecky blinked. Graves sputtered:

"But--dammit, do you mean we can work out a way to receive a broadcast and not be qualified to see it?"

"There's a common-sense view," said Sergeant Bellews oracularly, "and a crazy view, and there's what the Pentagon says, which ain't either." He stood up. "I see where I go back to my shop and finish rehabilitatin' the colonel's vacuum cleaner. You gentlemen care to join me?"

Howell said indignantly:

"This is ridiculous! This is absurd!"

"Uh-uh," said Sergeant Bellews benignly. "This is the armed forces. There'll be an order makin' some sort of sense come along later. Meanwhile, I can brief you guys on Mahon machines so you'll be ready to start up again with better information when a clearance order does come through. And I got some beer in my quarters behind the Rehab Shop. Come along with me!"

He led the way out of the room. The young lieutenant paused to close the door firmly behind him and to lock it. A bored private, with side-arms, took post before it. The lieutenant was a very conscientious young man.

But he did not interfere with the parade to Sergeant Bellews' quarters. The young lieutenant was very military, and the ways of civilians were not his concern. If eminent scientists chose to go to Sergeant Bellews' quarters instead of the Officers Club, to which their assimilated rank entitled them, it was strictly their affair.

* * * * *

They reached the Rehab Shop, and Sergeant Bellews went firmly to a standby-light-equipped refrigerator in his quarters. He brought out beer and deftly popped off the tops. The icebox door closed quietly.

"Here's to crime," said Sergeant Bellews amiably.

He drank. Howell sipped gloomily. Graves drank thoughtfully. Lecky looked anticipative.

"Sergeant," he said, "did I see a gleam in your eye just now?"

Sergeant Bellews reflected, gently shaking his opened beer-can with a rotary motion, for no reason whatever.

"Uh-uh," he rumbled. "I wouldn't say a gleam. But you mighta seen a glint. I got some ideas from what I seen during that broadcast. I wanna get to work on 'em. Here's the place to do the work. We got facilities here."

Howell said with precise hot anger:

"This is the most idiotic situation I have ever seen even in government service!"

"You ain't been around much," the sergeant told him kindly. "It happens everywhere. All the time. It ain't even a exclusive feature of the armed forces." He put down his beer-can and patted his stomach. "There's guys who sit up nights workin' out standard operational procedures just to make things like this happen, everywhere. The colonel hadda do what he did. He's got orders, too. But he felt bad. So he sent the lieutenant to tell us. He does the colonel's dirty jobs--and he loves his work."

* * * * *

He moved grandly toward the Rehab Shop proper, which opened off the quarters he lived in--very much as a doctor's office is apt to open off his living quarters.

"We follow?" asked Lecky zestfully. "You plan something?"

"Natural!" said Sergeant Bellews largely.

He led the way into the Rehab Shop, which was dark and shadowy, and only very dimly lighted by flickering, wavering lights of many machines waiting as if hopefully to be called on for action. There were the shelves of machines not yet activated. Sergeant Bellews led the way toward his desk. There was a vacuum cleaner on it, on standby. He put it down on the floor.

Lecky watched him with some eagerness. The others came in, Howell dourly and Graves wiping his moustache.

The sergeant considered his domain.

"We'll be happy to help you," said Lecky.

"Thanks," said the sergeant. "I'm under orders to help you, too, y'know. Just supposing you asked me to whip up something to analyze what Betsy receives, so it can be checked on that it is a new wave-type."

"Can you do that?" demanded Graves. "We were supposed to work on that--but so far we've absolutely nothing to go on!"

The sergeant waved his hand negligently.

"You got something now. Betsy's a Mahon-modified device. Every receiver that picked up one of those crazy broadcasts broke down before it was through. She takes 'em in her stride--especial with Al and Gus to help her. Wouldn't it be reasonable to guess that Mahon machines are--uh--especial adapted to handle intertemporal communication?"

"Very reasonable!" said Howell dourly. "Very! The broadcast said that the wave-type produced unpredictable surges of current. Ordinary machines do find it difficult to work with whatever type of radiation that can be."

"Betsy chokes off those surges," observed the sergeant. "With Gus and Al to help, she don't have no trouble. We hadn't ought to need to make any six transmitters if we put Mahon-unit machines together for the job!"

"Quite right," agreed Lecky, mildly. "And it is odd--"

"Yeah," said the sergeant. "It's plenty odd my great-great-great-grandkids haven't got sense enough to do it themselves!"

* * * * *

He went to a shelf and brought down a boxed machine,--straight from the top-secret manufactory of Mahon units. It had never been activated. Its standby light did not glow. Sergeant Bellews ripped off the carton and said reflectively:

"You hate to turn off a machine that's got its own ways of working. But a machine that ain't been activated has not got any personality. So you don't mind starting it up to turn it off later."

He opened the adjustment-cover and turned something on. The standby light glowed. Closely observed, it was not a completely steady glow. There were the faintest possible variations of brightness. But there was no impression of life.

Graves said:

"Why doesn't it flicker like the others?"

"No habits," said the sergeant. "No experience. It's like a newborn baby. It'll get to have personality after it's worked a while. But not now."

He went across the shop again. He moved out a heavy case, and twisted the release, and eased out a communicator of the same type--Mark IV--as Betsy back in the Communications room. Howell went to help him. Graves tried to assist. Lecky moved other things out of the way. They were highly eminent scientists, and Metech Sergeant Bellews was merely a non-commissioned officer in the armed forces. But he happened to have specialized information they had not. Quite without condescension they accepted his authority in his own field, and therefore his equality. As civilians they had no rank to maintain, and they disagreed with each other--and would disagree with the sergeant--only when they knew why. Which was one of the reasons why they were eminent scientists.

Sergeant Bellews brought out yet another box. He unrolled cables. He selected machines whose flickering lights seemed to bespeak eagerness to be of use. He coupled them to the newly unboxed machines, whose lights were vaguely steady.

"Training cables," he said over his shoulder. "You get one machine working right, and you hook it with another, and the new machine kinda learns from the old one. Kinda! But it ain't as good as real experience. Not at first."

* * * * *

Presently the lights of the newly energized machines began to waver in somewhat the manner of the ready-for-operation ones. But they did not give so clear an impression of personality.

"Look!" said Sergeant Bellews abruptly. "I got to check with you. The more I think, the more worried I get."

"You begin to believe the broadcasts come from the future?" demanded Graves. "And it worries you? But they do not speak of Mahon units--"

"I don't care where they come from," said the sergeant. "I'm worryin' about what they are! The guy in the broadcast--not knowing Mahon units--said we'd have to make half a dozen transmitters so they'd take over one after another as they blew out. You see what that means?"

Lecky said crisply:

"You pointed it out before. There is something in the wave-type which--you would say this, Sergeant!--which machines do not like. Is that the reasoning?"

"Uh-uh!" The sergeant scowled. "Machines work by the golden rule. They try to do unto you what they want you to do unto them. Likes an' dislikes don't matter. I mean that there's something about that wave-type that machines can't take! It busts them. If it sort of explodes surges of current in 'em--Look! Any running machine is a dynamic system in a object. A jet-plane operating is that. So's a water-spout. So's a communicator. But if you explode surges of heavy current in a dynamic system in a operating machine--things get messed up. The operating habit is busted to hell. I'm saying that if this wave-type makes crazy surges of current start up--why--if the surges are strong enough they'll bust not only a communicator but a jet-plane. Or a water-spout. Anything! See?"

* * * * *

Lecky blinked and suddenly went pale.

"But," said Howell reasonably, "you said that Betsy handled it. Especially well when linked with other Mahon machines."

"Yeah," said the sergeant.

"I think," observed Graves jerkily, "that you are preparing new machines, without developed--personalities, because you think that if they make this special-type wave they'll be broken."

"Yeah," said the sergeant, again. "The signal Betsy was amplifyin' coulda been as little as a micro-micro-watt. At its frequency an' type, she'd choke it down if it was more. But even a micro-micro-watt bothered Betsy until she got Al and Gus to help. She was fair screamin' for somebody to come help her hold it. But the three of them done all right."

Howell conceded the point.

"That seems sound reasoning."

"But you don't broadcast with a micro-micro-watt. You use a hell of a lot more power than that! The transmitter the guy in the screen said to make was a twenty-kilowatt job. Not too much for a broadcast of sine waves, but a hell of a lot to be turned loose, in waves that have Betsy hollerin' at the power she was handlin'!"

"It might break even the Mahon machines in this installation?" demanded Howell.

"You're gettin' warm," said the sergeant.

Graves said:

"You mean it might break all operating communicators in a very large area?"

"You're gettin' hot," said the sergeant grimly.

Lecky wetted his lips.

"I think," he said very carefully, "that you suspect it is a wave-type which will break any dynamic system, in any sort of object a dynamic system can exist in."

"Yeah," said the sergeant. He waited, looking at Lecky.

"And," said Lecky, "not only operating machines are dynamic systems. Living plants and animals are, too. So are men."

"That's what I'm drivin' at," said Sergeant Bellews.

"So you believe," said Lecky, very pale indeed, "that we have been given the circuit-diagram of a transmitter which will broadcast a wave-type which destroys dynamic systems--life as well as the operation of machines. Persons--in the future or an alien creature in a space-ship, or perhaps even the Compubs--are furnishing us with designs for transmitters of death, to be linked together so that if one fails the others will carry on. And they lure us to destroy ourselves by lying about who they are and what they propose."

"They're lyin'," said the sergeant. "They say they're in the future and they don't know a thing about Mahon units. Else they'd use 'em."

Lecky wetted his lips again.

"And--if they are not in the future, they are trying to get us to destroy ourselves because that would be safer and surer than trying to destroy us by--say--transmitters of death dropped upon us by parachute. Yet if we do not destroy ourselves, they will surely do that."

"If we don't bump ourselves off, it'll be because we got wise," acknowledged the sergeant. "If we get wise, we could bump them off by parachute-transmitter. So they'll beat us to it. They'll have to!"

"Yes," said Lecky. "They'll have to. It has always been said that a death-ray was impossible. This would be a death-broadcast. If we do not broadcast, they will--whoever they are. It is--" He smiled mirthlessly at the magnitude of his understatement. "It is urgent that we do something. What shall we do, Sergeant?"

* * * * *

A squadron of light tanks arrived at Research Installation 83 that afternoon, with a shipment of courier motorcycles. They had been equipped with Mahon units and went to the post to be trained.

The Pentagon was debating the development of a Mahon-modified guided missile, and a drone plane was under construction. But non-military items also arrived for activation and test. Automatic telephone switching systems, it appeared, could be made much simpler if they could be trained to do their work instead of built so they couldn't help it.

Passenger-cars other than jeeps showed promise. It had long been known that most accidents occurred with new cars, and that ancient jalopies were relatively safe even in the hands of juvenile delinquents. It was credible that part of the difference was in the operating habits of the cars.

It appeared that humanity was upon the threshold of a new era, in which the value of personality would reappear among the things taken for granted. Strictly speaking, of course, Mahon machines were not persons. But they reflected the personalities of their owners. It might again seem desirable to be a decent human being if only because machines worked better for them.

But it would be tragic if Mahon machines were used to destroy humankind with themselves! Sergeant Bellews would have raged at the thought of training a Mahon unit to guide an atom bomb. It would have to be--in a fashion--deceived. He even disliked the necessity he faced that afternoon while a courier winged his way to the Pentagon with the top-secret tapes Betsy and Al and Gus had made.

The Rehab Shop was equipped not only to recondition machines but to test them. One item of equipment was a generator of substitute broadcast waves. It could deliver a carrier-wave down to half a micro-micro-watt of any form desired, and up to the power of a nearby transmitter. It was very useful for calibrating communicators. But Sergeant Bellews modified it to allow of variations in type as well as frequency and amplitude.

"I'm betting," he grunted, "that there's different sorts of the wave-type those guys want us to broadcast. Like there's a spectrum of visible light. If we were color-blind and yellow'd bust things, they'd transmit in red that we could see, and they'd tell us to broadcast something in yellow that'd wipe us out. And we wouldn't have sense enough not to broadcast the yellow, because we wouldn't know the difference between it and red until we did broadcast. Then it'd be too late."

Howell watched with tight-clamped jaws. He had committed himself to the authenticity of the broadcasts claiming to be from a future time. Now he was shaken, but only enough to admit the need for tests. Graves sat unnaturally still. Lecky looked at Sergeant Bellews with a peculiarly tranquil expression on his face.

"Only," grunted the sergeant, "it ain't frequency we got to figure, but type. Nobody hardly uses anything but sine waves for communication, but I got to make this gadget turn out a freak wave-type by guess and golly. I got a sort of test for it, though."

* * * * *

He straightened up and connected a cable from the generator to the Mark IV communicator which was a factory twin of Betsy.

"I'm gonna feed this communicator half a micro-micro-watt of stuff like the broadcast--I think," he announced grimly. "I saw the diagrams of the transmitters they want us to make. I'm guessing the broadcast-wave they use is close to it but not exact. Close, because it's bad for machines. Not exact, because they're alive while they use it. I hope I don't hit anything on the nose. Okay?"

Lecky said gently:

"I have never been more frightened. Go ahead!"

Sergeant Bellews depressed a stud. The communicator's screen lighted up instantly. It was receiving the generator's minute output and accepted it as a broadcast. But the signal was unmodulated, so there was no image nor any sound.

* * * * *

The communicator's standby light flickered steadily.

Sergeant Bellews adjusted a knob on the generator. The communicator's standby flicker changed in amplitude. Bellews turned the knob back. He adjusted another control. The standby light wavered crazily.

Graves said nervously:

"I think I see. You are trying to make this communicator react as Betsy did. When it does, you will consider that your generator is creating a wave like the broadcasts from nowhere."

"Yeah," said Bellews. "It ain't scientific, but it's the best I can do."

He worked the generator-controls with infinite care. Once the communicator's standby light approached sine-wave modulation. He hastily shifted away from the settings which caused it. He muttered:

"Close!"

Then, suddenly, the communicator's lamp began to waver in an extraordinary, hysterical fashion. Sergeant Bellews turned down the volume swiftly. He wiped sweat off his forehead.

"I--I think I got the trick," he said heavily. "It's a hell of a wave-type! Are you guys game to feed it into this communicator's output amplifier?"

"I have six sets of cold chills running up and down my spine," said Lecky. "I think you should proceed."

Howell said angrily:

"It's got to be tried, hasn't it?"

"It's got to be tried," acknowledged Sergeant Bellews.

He shifted the generator's cable from the communicator's input to the feed-in for preamplified signal. The communicator's screen went dark. It no longer received a simulated broadcast signal. It was now signalling--calling. But the instant the new signal started out, the standby light flickered horribly. Sergeant Bellews grimly plugged in other machines--to the three scientists they looked like duplicates of Gus and Al--to closed-circuit relationship with Betsy's twin. The standby light calmed.

"Now we test," he said grimly. "Got a watch?"

Lecky extended his wrist.

"Watch it," said Sergeant Bellews.

He stepped up the output.

"My watch has stopped," said Lecky, through white lips.

Graves looked at his own watch. He shook it and held it to his ear. He looked sick. Howell growled and looked at his own.

"That wave stops watches," he admitted unwillingly.

"But not Mahon machines easy," said Sergeant Bellews heavily, "and not us. There was almost three micro-micro-watts goin' out then. That's three-millionths of a millionth of a ampere-second at one volt. We--"

* * * * *

His voice stopped, as if with a click. The screen of Betsy's factory-twin communicator lighted up. A man's face peered out of it. He was bearded and they could not see his costume, but he was frightened.

"What--what is this?" cried his voice shrilly from the speakers.

Sergeant Bellews said very sharply:

"Hey! You ain't the guy we've been talking to!"

The screen went dark. Sergeant Bellews put his hand over the microphone opening. He turned fiercely upon the rest.

"Look!" he snapped. "We were broadcastin' their trick wave--the wave they used to talk to us! And they picked it up! But they weren't expectin' it! They were set to pick up the wave they told us to transmit! See? That guy'll come back. He's got to! So we got to play along! He'll want to find out if we got wise and won't broadcast ourselves to death! If he finds out we know what we're doin', they'll parachute a transmitter down on us before we can do it to them! Back me up! Get set!"

He removed his hand from the microphone.

"Callin' 2180!" he chattered urgently. "Calling the guy that just contacted us! Come in, 2180! You're not the guy we've been talking to, but come in! Come in, 2180!"

Howell said stridently:

"But if that's 2180, how'd we parachute--".

Lecky clapped a hand over his mouth with a fierceness surprising in so small a man. He whispered desperately into Howell's ear. Graves absurdly began to bite his nails, staring at the communicator-screen. Sergeant Bellews continued his calling, ever more urgently.

His voice echoed peculiarly in the Rehab Shop. It seemed suddenly a place of resonant echoes. All the waiting, repaired, or to-be-rehabilitated machines appeared to listen with interest while Sergeant Bellews called:

"Come in, 2180! We been trying to reach you for a coupla weeks! We got somebody else instead of you, and they been talkin' to us, and they say that they're 3020 instead of 2180, but we've got to contact you! They don't know anything about that germ that's gonna mutate and bump us off! It's ancient history to them. We got to reach you! Come in, 2180!"

The flickering yellow lights of the machines wavered as if all the quasi-living machines were listening absorbedly. The Rehab Shop was full of shadows. And Sergeant Bellews sat before the dark-screened communicator with sweat on his face, calling cajolingly to nothingness to come in.

After five minutes the screen grew abruptly bright again. The brisk, raceless broadcaster of the earlier broadcast--not the bearded man--came back. He forced a smile:

"Ah! 1972! At last you reach us! But we did not hope you could make your transmitters so soon!"

"We tried to analyze your wave," said Sergeant Bellews, with every appearance of feverish relief, "but we only got it approximate. We tried callin' back with what we got, and we got through time, all right, but we contacted some guys in 3020 instead of you! We need to talk to you!--Can you give me the stuff about that bug that's gonna wipe out half of us? Quick? I got a recorder goin'."

* * * * *

The completely uncharacterizable man in the screen forced a second smile. He held something to his ear. It would be a tiny sound-receiver. Obviously the contact in time or place or nowhere was being viewed by others than the one man who appeared. He was receiving instructions.

"Ah!" he said brightly, "but now that you have the contact, you will not lose it again! Leave your controls where they are, and our learned men will tell your learned men all that they need to know. But--3020? You contacted 3020? That is not in our records of your time!"

He listened again to the thing at his ear. His expression became suddenly suspicious, as if someone had ordered that as well as the words which came next.

"We do not understand how you could contact a time a thousand years beyond us. It is possible that you attempt a joke. A--a kid, as you would say."

* * * * *

Sergeant Bellews beamed into the screen which so remarkably functioned as a transmitting-eye also.

"Hell!" he said cordially. "You know we wouldn't kid you! You or our great-great-great-grandchildren! We depend on you! We got to get you to tell us how not to get wiped out! In 3020 the whole business is forgotten. It's a thousand years old, to them! But they're passin' back some swell machinery--"

He turned his head as if listening to something the microphone could not pick up. But he looked appealingly at Lecky. Lecky nodded and moved toward the communicator.

"Look!" said Sergeant Bellews into the screen. "Here's Doc Lecky--one of our top guys. You talk to him."

He gave his seat to Lecky. Out of range of the communicator, he mopped his face. His shirt was soaked through by the sweat produced by the stress of the past few minutes. He shivered violently, and then clamped his teeth and fumbled out sheets of paper. He beckoned to Graves. Graves came.

"We--we got to give him a doctored circuit," whispered Sergeant Bellews desperately, "and it's got to be good--an' quick!"

Graves bent over the paper on which the sergeant dripped sweat. The sergeant murmured through now-chattering teeth what had to be devised, and at once. It must be the circuit-diagram for a transmitter to be given to the man whose face filled the screen. The transmitter must be of at least twenty-kilowatt power. It must be such a circuit as nobody had ever seen before.

It must be convincing. It should appear to radiate impossibly, or to destroy energy without radiation. But it must actually produce a broadcast signal of this exotic type--here the sergeant described with shaky precision the exact constants of the wave to be generated--and the broadcaster from nowhere must not be able to deduce those constants or that wave-type from the diagram until he had built the transmitter and tried it.

"I know it can't be done!" said the sergeant desperately. "I know it can't! But it's gotta be! Or they'll parachute a transmitter down on us sure."

Graves smiled a quick and nervous smile. He began to sketch a circuit. It was a wonderful thing. It was the product of much ingenuity and meditation. It had been devised--by himself--as a brain-teaser for the amusement of other high-level scientific brains. Mathematicians zestfully contrive problems to stump each other. Specialists in the higher branches of electronics sometimes present each other with diagrammed circuits which pretend to achieve the impossible. The problem is to find the hidden flaw.

Graves deftly outlined his circuit and began to fill in the details. Ostensibly, it was a circuit which consumed energy and produced nothing--not even heat. In a sense it was the exact opposite of a perpetual-motion scheme, which pretends to get energy from nowhere. This circuit pretended to radiate energy to nowhere, and yet to get rid of it.

* * * * *

Presently Lecky could be heard expostulating gently:

"But of course we are willing to give you the circuit by which we communicate with the year 3020! Naturally! But it seems strange that you suspect us! After all, if you do not tell us how to meet the danger your broadcasts have told of, you will never be born!"

Sergeant Bellews mopped his face and moved into the screen's field of vision.

"Doc," he said, laying a hand on Lecky's arm. "Doc Graves is sketchin' what they want right now. You want to come show it, Doc?"

Graves took Lecky's place. He spread out the diagram, finishing it as he talked. His nervous, faint smile appeared as the mannerism of embarrassment it was.

"There can be no radiation from a coil shaped like this," he said embarrassedly, "because of the Werner Principle.... Yet on examination ... input to the transistor series involves ... energy must flow ... and when this coil...."

His voice flowed on. He explained a puzzle, presenting it diffidently as he had presented it to other men in his own field. Then he had been playing--for fun. Now he played for perhaps the highest stakes that could be imagined.

He completed his diagram and, smiling nervously, held it up to the communicator-screen. It was instantly transmitted, of course. To nowhere. Which was most appropriate, because it pretended to be the diagram of a circuit sending radiation to the same place.

* * * * *

The face on the screen twitched, now. The hand with the tiny earphone was always at the ear of the man on the screen, so that he plainly did not speak one word without high authority.

"We will--examine this," he said. His voice was a full two tones higher than it had been. "If you have been--truthful we will give you the information you wish."

Click! The screen went dark. Lecky let out his breath. Sergeant Bellews threw off the transmission switch. He began to shake. Howell said indignantly:

"When I make a mistake, I admit it! That broadcast isn't from the future! If it hadn't been a lie, he'd have known he had to tell us what we wanted to know! He couldn't hold us up for terms! If he let us die he wouldn't exist!"

"Y-yeah," said Sergeant Bellews. "What I'm wonderin' is, did we fool him?"

"Oh, yes!" said Graves, with diffident confidence. "I don't know but three men in the world who could find the flaw in that circuit." He smiled faintly. "But it radiates all the energy that's fed into it." He turned to Sergeant Bellews. "You gave me the constants of a wave you wanted it to radiate. I fixed it. It will. But why that special type--that special wave?"

Sergeant Bellews pulled himself together.

"Because," he said grimly, "that was the wave they wanted us to broadcast. What I'm hoping is that you gave 'em a transmitter to do exactly the same thing as the one they designed for us. If they're fooled, they'll broadcast the wave they told us to broadcast. If it busts machines, it'll bust their machines. If it stops all dynamic systems dead--includin' men--they'll be stopped dead, too." Then he looked from one to another of the three scientists, each one reacting in his own special way. "Personally," said Sergeant Bellews doggedly, "I'm goin' to have a can of beer. Who'll join me?"

* * * * *

The world wagged on. The automatic monitors in Communications Center reported that another broadcast had been received by Betsy and undoubtedly unscrambled by Al and Gus, working as a team. The reported broadcast was, of course, an interception of the two-way talk from the Rehab Shop.

The tall young lieutenant, working with his eyes kept conscientiously shut, extracted the tapes and loaded them in a top-security briefcase. A second courier took off for Washington with them. There a certified, properly cleared major-general had them run off, and saw and heard every word of the conversation between the Rehab Shop and--nowhere. He howled with wrath.

Sergeant Bellews went into the guardhouse while plane-loads of interrogating officers flew from Washington. Howell and Graves and Lecky went under strict guard until they could be asked some thousands of variations of the question, "Why did you do it?" The high brass quivered with fury. They did not accept decisions made at non-commissioned-officer level.

Communication with their great-great-great-grandchildren, they considered, should have been begun with proper authority and under high-ranking auspices. They commanded that 2180 should immediately be re-contacted and properly authorized and good-faith conference begun all over again. The only trouble was that they could get no reply.

The dither was terrific and the tumult frantic. When, moreover, even Betsy remained silent, and Al and Gus had nothing to unscramble, the high brass built up explosive indignation. But it was confined to top-security levels.

The world outside the Pentagon knew nothing. Even at Research Installation 83 very, very few persons had the least idea what had taken place. The sun shone blandly upon manicured lawns, and the officers' children played vociferously, and washing-machines laundered diapers with beautiful efficiency, and vacuum cleaners and Mahon-modified jeeps performed their functions with an air of enthusiastic contentment. It seemed that a golden age approached.

It did. There were machines which were not merely possessions. Mahon-modified machines acquired reflections of the habits of the families which used them. An electric icebox acted as if it took an interest in its work. A vacuum cleaner seemed uncomfortable if it did not perform its task to perfection. It would seem as absurd to exchange an old, habituated family convenience as to exchange a member of the family itself. Presently there would be washing-machines cherished for their seeming knowledge of family-member individual preferences, and personal fliers respected for their conscientiousness, and one would relievedly allow an adolescent to drive a car if it were one of proven experience and sagacity....

* * * * *

The life of an ordinary person would be enormously enriched. A Mahon-modified machine would not even wear out. It took care of its own lubrication and upkeep--giving notice of its needs by the behavior of its standby-lamp. When parts needed replacement one would feel concern rather than irritation. There would be a personal relationship with the machines which so faithfully reflected one's personality.

And the machines would always, always, always act toward humans according to the golden rule.

But meanwhile the Rehab Shop was taken over by officers of rank. They tried frantically to resume the communication that had been broken off. Suspecting that Sergeant Bellews had shifted controls, they essayed to shift them back. The communicator which was Betsy's factory twin went into sine-wave standby-modulation, and suddenly smoked all over and was wrecked. The wave-generator went into hysterics and produced nothing whatever. Then there was nothing to do but pull Sergeant Bellews out of the clink and order him to do the whole business all over again.

"I can't," said Sergeant Bellews indignantly. "It can't be done. Those guys are busy buildin' a transmitter according to the diagram Doc Graves gave them. They won't pay no attention to anything until they'd tried to chat with their great-great-great-grand-children in 3120. They were phonys, anyhow! Pretendin' to be in 2180 and not knowin' what Mahon units could do!"

Lecky and Graves and Howell were even less satisfactory. They couldn't pretend even to try what the questioning-teams from the Pentagon wanted them to do. And Betsy remained silent, receiving nothing, and Gus and Al waited meditatively for something to unscramble, and nothing turned up.

And then, at 3:00 P.M. Greenwich mean time, on August 9, 1972, nearly every operating communicator in the fringe of free nations around the territory of the Union of Communist Republics--all communicators blew out.

There were only four men in the world who really knew why--Sergeant Bellews and Lecky and Graves and Howell. They knew that somewhere behind the Iron Curtain a twenty-kilowatt transmitter had been turned on. It produced a wave of the type and with the characteristics that would have been produced by a transmitter built from the diagram sent through Betsy and Al and Gus for people in the United States to build. Obviously, it had been built from Graves' diagram broadcast to somewhere else and it broadcast what the United States had been urged to broadcast.

* * * * *

It blew itself out instantly, of course. The wave it produced would stop any dynamic system at once, including its own. But it hit Stockholm and traffic jammed as the dynamic systems of cars in operation were destroyed. In Gibraltar, the signal-systems of the Rock went dead. All around the fringe of the armed Communist republics machines stopped and communications ended and very many persons with heart conditions died very quietly. Because their dynamic systems were least stable. But healthy people--like Mahon-modified machines--had great resistance ... outside the Iron Curtain.

There was, though, almost a vacuum of news and mechanical operations at the rim of a nearly perfect circle some four thousand miles in diameter, whose center was in a Compub research installation.

It was very bad. Such a panic as had never been known before swept the free world. Some mysterious weapon, it was felt, had been used to cripple those who would resist invasion, and the Compub armed forces would shortly be on the march, and Armageddon was at hand. The free world prepared to die fighting.

But war did not come. Nothing happened at all. In three days there were sketchy communications almost everywhere outside that monstrous circle of silence. But nothing came out of that circle. Nothing.

In two weeks, exploring parties cautiously crossed the barbed-wire frontier fences to find out what had happened. Those who went farthest came back shaken and sick. There were survivors in the Compubs, of course. Especially near the fringes of the circle. There were some millions of survivors. But there was no longer a nation to be called the Union of Communist Republics. There were only frightened, starving people trudging blindly away from cities that were charnel-houses and machines that would not run and trees and crops and grasses that were stark dead where they stood. It would be a long time before anybody would want to cross those lifeless plains and enter the places which once had been swarming hives of homes and people.

* * * * *

And presently, of course, Sergeant Bellews was let out of the guardhouse. He could not be charged with any crime. Nor could Graves nor Lecky nor Howell. They were asked, confidentially, to keep their mouths shut. Which they would have done anyhow. And Sergeant Bellews was asked with reluctant respectfulness, just what he thought had really happened.

"Some guys got too smart," he said, fuming. "A guy that'll broadcast a wave that'll wreck machines ... I haven't got any kinda use for him! Dammit, when a machine treats you accordin' to the golden rule, you oughta treat it the same way!"

There were other, also-respectful questions.

"How the hell would I know?" demanded Sergeant Bellews wrathfully. "It coulda been that we did make contact with 2180, and they were smart an' told the Compubs to try out what we told 'em. But I don't believe it. It coulda been a kinda monster from some other planet wanting us wiped out. But he learned him a lesson, if he did! And o' course, it coulda been the Compubs themselves, trying to fool us into committing suicide so they'd--uh--inherit the earth. I wouldn't know! But I bet there ain't any more broadcasts from nowhere!"

He was allowed to return to the Rehab Shop, and the flickering standby lights of many Mahon-modified machines seemed to glow more warmly as he moved among them.

And he was right about there not being any more broadcasts from nowhere.

There weren't.

Not ever.

THE END

Contents

SPIES DIE HARD!

By Arnold Marmor

Earth's espionage ring was a headache, so the Martian Security Chief offered ten thousand credits for a key agent. But even for a price--

"This man is a spy for Earth," a voice droned, as the telecaster vibrated and a photo of Harry Horn flashed on the screen. "Ten thousand credits for this man, dead or alive. Contact Lazar of the Security Police. Harry Horn. Thirty-four, five feet, eleven inches, one hundred and seventy-two pounds."

Lynn Brickel snapped off the humming machine. She frowned. Horn had been high in the Martian Security Police, one of Lazar's top men. Now Horn turned out to be a spy for Earth. Why hadn't she been told? Was Green losing his trust in her? Hadn't she helped McLean and Sanderson escape from Mars?

Her short tunic shimmered as she began to pace the floor. She stopped short as a hum splashed through the room. She went quickly to the door and pressed a red button on the wall.

But the vibration of the elevator did not reach her ears. Puzzled, she opened the door, stepped into the marble hall. She shrugged, started to return to her apartment when the sound of footsteps on the stairs halted her. She waited.

He came into view. Harry Horn. There was no mistaking his face. It had flashed on and off the telecaster throughout the day.

"Brickel?" he said, coming up to her.

His white coveralls were spotted with grime. There was a dark bruise on his right cheek.

"Yes," she said.

"I'm Harry Horn."

"I know."

"You've got to help me." His voice was urgent, pleading. He brushed past her, into her room. She walked in after him, shut and locked the door, leaned her back against it.

"You can't stay here," she said.

"Are you alone?"

"Yes," she said. "I'm alone."

He went through the apartment, returned to the front room. "I had to make sure." He sank into the low divan, covered his face with his hands.

She walked toward him. "You can't stay here," she repeated.

He looked up at her, his eyes frightened. "Do you have any idea of what Lazar will do to me once he gets his fat hands around my throat? He won't kill me right away."

"Why come to me?"

"You can help me."

"What can I do?"

"You can help me get away. A turbo-engine space ship. That's all I need. It's small and fast."

"But why come to me? You haven't explained."

"You helped McLean and Sanderson."

"How do you know this?"

"We're both in the same organization but not in the same unit. The leader of my unit instructed me to go to you."

"I see. Who is your leader?"

"I can't tell you. You know that. I wouldn't ask you your leader's name."

* * * * *

Lynn shrugged slim shoulders. "It wouldn't make any difference. He is not stationed on Mars."

Horn jumped to his feet. "You will help me?"

"If I can."

"Can you get me the ship?"

"I suppose. But we'll have to wait for night. It is dangerous to do anything now. Ten thousand credits. Lazar wants you awful bad. He offered five for both McLean and Sanderson."

"I was very close to Lazar in the Security Police. I know too much."

"We all make mistakes."

"I envy your logic. But I can't see it that way. I was considered too good an agent to make a mistake."

"It's too late to cry over it now. When it is dark I'll contact--a friend--and have the space ship ready."

Horn grinned. "You're still not sure of me?"

"It isn't that. But you don't belong to my unit. We can't name names to outsiders."

"You're right, of course. You've been well trained."

"Are you hungry?"

"Yes."

She set food in front of him and watched him eat.

"What is Lazar like?" she asked. "I have heard of him."

"Cruel," he said. "A sadist. Death is the easy way out when you're in Lazar's hands."

"It will soon be dark," she said.

He stood up, his hunger satisfied. "Tell me," he said, "was it difficult getting Sanderson and McLean out of Mars?"

"No," she said. "Not difficult at all."

"Good." He went to the interphone. He dialed, spoke, "You may come up now."

"What are you doing?" her face paled.

He turned to her, smiling. "Lazar was wondering how Sanderson and McLean escaped. You were on the master list of suspects. I was waiting for you to confess."

Lynn stiffened. "It--it was a trick."

"That's right, Brickel. Too bad. You're too pretty to die."

"That--that was a message to Lazar."

"Yes. He'll be here shortly."

Lynn slipped her hand in the pocket of her tunic, brought out a small blaster.

"Don't be a fool," Horn said. "Maybe you'll be spared. Why take your life? Just tell all you know?"

Lynn smiled. "I wasn't thinking of taking my life. But yours."

Horn frowned. "Don't be an idiot." He advanced toward her.

Lynn shook her head slowly. "Now it's my turn to be clever."

Horn's face went wild. "You can't escape Lazar! Listen to me--"

She blasted him.

* * * * *

Lynn opened the door.

Lazar stood there, fat and ugly. There were two men of the Security Police with him.

"Come in," she invited.

They came in. She shut the door. Lazar looked down at the dead Harry Horn.

"You said dead or alive," Lynn reminded Lazar. "You owe me ten thousand credits."

"What happened?" Lazar snapped at her. His flesh-bedded eyes studied her.

"He came to me for help. I had to bide my time. I told him I'd help him. I was waiting for the chance to get to you. He was by the interphone a few minutes ago. It was the chance I needed. I pulled my blaster, covered him. He made a dash for freedom so I had to kill him."

"This is crazy," one of the men said. "Horn must have had her confession. But now what do we do for evidence?"

"Shut up!" Lazar snapped.

"Your word is good, isn't it, Lazar?" Lynn said.

"What do you mean?"

"The ten thousand credits. As a loyal citizen I've earned them."

"You'll get your credits," Lazar snarled, frustration in his eyes.

"I know I will," Lynn said, smiling.

Contents

GIANTS ON THE EARTH

By Capt. S. P. Meek

The yoke of Jovian oppression rests heavily on the dwellers of Earth--until Damis, the Nepthalim, comes forward to lead them in spirited revolt.

CHAPTER I

The Jovian Tyrant

Glavour, Jovian Viceroy of the Earth, looked arrogantly about as he lay at ease on the cushions of the ornate chariot which bore him through the streets of his capital city. Like all the Jovians, he was cast in a heroic mold compared to his Earth-born subjects. Even for a Jovian, Glavour was large. He measured a good eight feet from the soles of his huge splayed feet to the crown of his enormous head, crested with stiff black hair which even the best efforts of Tonsome, the court barber, failed to make lie in order. His keen black eyes glittered as they swept over the scene before him. Where only a few years before had been only tangled tropical jungle on the narrow neck of land separating the two great oceans, now rose row after row of stately buildings. Suddenly Glavour's attention was attracted by a girlish form in a passing chariot.

"Stop!" he cried.

Obedient to the driver's touch on a lever, the tiny radium motor of the chariot ceased to revolve and the equipage stopped its forward motion. Glavour turned to an equerry at his side.

"Havenner," he exclaimed, "did you note that maiden who passed us?"

"I did, Your Excellency."

"Bring her before me."

The equerry sprang lightly to the ground and called out in a stentorian voice. At the sound every vehicle on the street ceased its movement until the will of the Viceroy, the ruler of the Sons of God, should be made known. In a few steps, his powerful Jovian muscles carrying his huge body forward at a rate impossible to persons born of Earthly parentage who had not inherited the power needed to overcome the enormous gravity of Jupiter, Havenner reached the equipage containing the girl. He gave a curt order and the girl's driver turned his vehicle and brought it alongside the Viceroy's.

* * * * *

Glavour's eyes rested on the slim lithesome figure of the Earth-girl. She was just emerging from the grace of girlhood into the full dignity of young womanhood and the soft clinging garb she wore accentuated rather than concealed the curves of her body. As Glavour's gaze fell on her, she cast down her eyes and a flush crept slowly over her pretty face to the mass of coppery gold hair which crowned her head. An expression of brutal lust came into the Viceroy's eyes.

"Daughter of Man," he said slowly, "how are you named and what is your family?"

"My name is Lura, Your Excellency," she faltered, "and I am the daughter of Turgan, the Kildare of this province."

"You please me, girl," said the Viceroy. "Dismiss your chariot and join me in mine. There is room in my seraglio for you."

Lura stared with horror at the huge Jovian and shrank back from his sensual gaze. Glavour gazed at her in astonishment and a deep scowl spread over his face.

"The prospect does not seem to please you, Daughter of Man," he said slowly. "Perhaps the company of the Viceroy of Tubain, Ruler of the Universe, is too lowly to please you and you desire more exalted company. Be careful that I do not have you stripped and given to the palace guards for their sport. Join me in my chariot."

He half rose and leaned forward to clasp her. Lura gave a cry of horror and sprang from her chariot to the ground on the side farthest from the vehicle of the Viceroy. Glavour leaped to his feet with a roar of rage and lunged after her. Before he had left his chariot, the hand of his equerry fell restrainingly on his shoulder. The Viceroy turned a rage-maddened face toward his minion.

"Seize that maiden, Havenner!" he cried. "As I live, she shall be sacrificed at the next games."

* * * * *

The equerry made no move to obey his superior's orders and Glavour's face grew purple with rage.

"Obey my orders or you shall join her as a sacrifice!" he roared.

The equerry's face paled slightly and grew grim at the Viceroy's words but no trace of fear appeared on his heavy countenance.

"Save your breath, Glavour," he said shortly, but in so quiet a voice that no one but the Viceroy heard him. "You may be head of the Sons of God on this planet but your power does not extend to life and death over me, who am of the same blood that you are. I have the right to appeal to Tubain from such a sentence. Before you strive to haul that girl away to your already crowded seraglio against her will, listen to me. Do you realize who she is?"

The Viceroy's face was a study. For a moment rage predominated and he raised a mighty fist to strike Havenner down, but the equerry looked him fearlessly in the eye. Slowly the hot rage faded and a deadly ferocity took its place.

"You try me far, Havenner," he said in a quiet voice, yet with a hint of steel in his tones, "yet your loyalty is above suspicion. Heard you not the girl say she was the daughter of the Kildare of this province?"

"I heard, Your Excellency," replied the equerry, "but beyond that, she is someone else. She is the affianced bride of Damis, the son of Hortan, who was Viceroy before you."

"A Nepthalim!" exclaimed the Viceroy scornfully. "What matters that? Are the desires of a half-breed bastard to stand above the wishes of the ruler of the planet?"

"It is true that the mother of Damis was a Daughter of Man," said the equerry quietly, "yet Hortan married her in honor. Damis is a man of great influence and it would be well to reflect before you rob him of his chosen bride. There is wide discontent with our rule which needs only a leader to flare up. Remember that we are few and Jupiter is far away."

"Havenner, you talk like a frightened woman," sneered the Viceroy. "Let him join the ranks of the malcontents. For my part, I hope they revolt. They need to be taught a lesson. Stand aside while I seize the maiden."

* * * * *

The equerry stood aside with a shrug of his shoulders and the Viceroy sprang to the ground. The girl had run as rapidly as her clinging robes would allow toward one of the beautiful buildings which lined the thoroughfare. She had almost reached the doorway before Glavour reached the ground and raced after her. His Jovian muscles carried his body forward at a pace which no Terrestrial could equal. It was evident to the watchers that he would seize Lura before she could reach the sanctuary she sought.

A mingled chorus of cries of rage and hisses came from the Earthmen who witnessed the scene. The Jovian guards strove to suppress the outcries until a word from Havenner made them cease their efforts and close in around the Viceregal chariot. The cries rose to a tumult but as yet none of the Earthmen dared to raise a hand against the person of the representative of Tubain, the far-off Jovian whom they had been forced to acknowledge as God, and whom many of the ignorant believed was God.

The Viceroy rapidly overtook his victim and his hand was outstretched to grasp her when there came an interruption. From the doorway which the girl had been striving to reach, a man burst forth and leaped between her and her pursuer. Glavour stopped and glowered at the new obstacle in the path of his sensuality.

The newcomer stood five inches over six feet in his flat sandals but it was only in his unusual height and his enormous strength that he showed the blood of his Jovian father. His feet were small and shapely with a high-arched instep and his whole form was graceful and symmetrical. Crisply curling yellow hair surmounted a head which Praxiteles would have reveled in as a model for his youthful Hermes. As he faced the Viceroy, his usual pleasant smile was gone and his face was set in grim lines, his clear blue eyes as cold as the ice brought from the polar regions to cool the Viceroy's drink.

* * * * *

The two stood and stared at one another, the black eyes of the Jovian burning like fire in strange contrast to the cold glare of the blue ones. Then tension in the street grew taut. The Earthmen gradually closed in about them. At a word from Havenner, the Jovian guards closed up and drew from their garments long black tubes. Presently Glavour broke the silence.

"Make way, son of Hortan, for the Viceroy of God," he rumbled in his deep-toned voice.

Damis made no reply, nor did he move a muscle. The rage deepened on the Viceroy's face and he strode forward, his hand raised to strike down this puny assailant who had interposed his slight form between the massive limbs of the Jovian and the object of his desires. With a cry of rage he brought down his huge hand and then Damis moved. So swiftly that the eye could hardly follow his movements, he leaped to one side and his own hand shot up. Fingers of steel circled the hairy wrist of the Viceroy and stopped his hand in mid-air. For a moment Glavour was too astonished at the idea of physical resistance to move. Damis, with an almost contemptuous air, tossed aside the hand he held and made as if to turn his back. With an inarticulate roar of rage, the Jovian charged.

Again Damis sprang to one side and his hand moved. In a long arc his clenched fist shot up and caught Glavour on the chin and rocked the four hundred pounds of bone and muscle that made up the Viceroy. For a moment Glavour staggered and then his hand fell on Damis' shoulder. Exerting all of his huge strength, he pulled his opponent toward him and threw his massive arms about him. Damis made no attempt to wriggle out of the bone-crushing grip, but, instead, threw his arms about the Jovian and matched muscle against muscle. The Jovian guards, who had witnessed the feats of strength which were the Viceroy's boast, expected only one outcome, but to Havenner, who recalled that Hortan, the father of Damis, had been one of the mightiest men of Jupiter, the issue was not a foregone conclusion. Stealthily as a cat he crept forward, a long black tube clenched in his hand.

* * * * *

Mightily the two strove. The face of the Jovian grew dark red and then almost purple as he put forth his last ounce of strength to crush the opponent whom he topped a good eighteen inches. For all of his effort, not an inch did Damis yield. His face grew as pale as the Jovian's grew red and his breath came whistling through his lips, but the strength he had inherited from his mighty sire stood him in good stead. Inch by inch he bent the huge form of his opponent backward. With a sudden effort, the Jovian raised one of his huge misshapen feet and strove to bring his mighty thighs to aid him in thrusting away his enemy. Damis' knee came up and the Jovian dropped his foot with a howl of pain. His breath came in gasps and he stared into the implacable blue eyes before him with a sudden spasm of fear. At last Glavour had met his match.

He opened his lips to call to his guards for help but shame held back the cry. Once he admitted defeat, the fear in which the Earthmen held him would be shaken. With an effort he bent forward his head and buried his huge fangs in Damis' shoulder. There was a cry from the watching Earthmen as they surged forward. The Jovian guards ran to their ruler's assistance but they were too far away. Havenner was close and he sprang forward, thrusting the black tube which he carried, toward Damis.

A cry advised Damis of his danger. With a herculean effort he lifted the huge Jovian from his feet and swung him around until the massive body was between him and the threatening weapon of the equerry. As swiftly as striking snakes his arms uncoiled from around Glavour's body and grasped him by the shoulders. With one mighty heave he tore the Jovian's mouth from his shoulder although the flesh was torn and lacerated by the action. One arm went under Glavour's arm and back around until the hand rested on the back of his neck. The other arm caught the Viceroy's arm and twisted it behind his back. Glavour gave a cry of pain as the punishing hold was applied. Holding his captive before him, Damis turned to the equerry.

"Put up your tube," he said. "One hostile move and your ruler dies."

"Disintegrate him, Havenner!" gasped the Viceroy.

* * * * *

The equerry hesitated a moment but aid was at hand. The Jovian guards had come up to the scene of the struggle and surrounded the pair, black tubes in their hands. The sight of reinforcements roused the Viceroy's lagging courage.

"Capture him alive!" he gasped. "He will be sacrificed at the next games!"

With a roar the guards closed in on the struggling pair. As hairy hands grasped his shoulders, Damis lunged back with all his strength. There was the crack of a breaking bone and the Viceroy's arm hung dangling and useless. Damis whirled on the guards, shaking himself loose for a moment from their grasp, and his fists flew out. Two of the giants went down before well-aimed blows but no one man, no matter what his might, could fight against a score of the huge Jovians and Damis was borne to the ground. Even as he fell, a roar went up from the watching Terrestrials and with one accord they closed in to attack.

The Jovian guards who were nearest whirled about and raised the black tubes threateningly. For a moment the Earthmen hesitated and then came on with a rush. From the tubes came rays of intensely violet light. As they fell on the front ranks of the charging Terrestrials, the form, on which the rays impinged grew suddenly tenuous. The sunlight penetrated through the bodies for a moment and then there was nothing but a group of dancing motes of light to mark where they had stood.

* * * * *

Undaunted by the fate of their leaders, the balance of the mob surged forward uttering cries of hate and rage. From all the doorways, fresh hordes of Earthmen came rushing to join the fray. Again and again the terrible rays of the Jovian guards blasted scores of their assailants into nothingness but more came. Presently the tubes of the Jovians began to lose their power and the violet light became lighter in shade. With a roar the Earthmen swept forward and the huge guards went down under the onrushing waves of humanity. Half a dozen of them were dragged down and hurled back into the milling crowd where they were torn limb from limb. The balance of the guards, guided by Havenner's stentorian shouts, closed in around Glavour and the prisoner and battered their way by sheer brute force toward the Viceregal chariot. They had reached in and climbed in when a feminine shout pierced the din of conflict.

"Damis! They have Damis prisoner! Rescue him!"

With a roar, the mob charged again. Mightily the Jovians strove but they were outnumbered by hundreds to one. One after another was torn from the chariot until Damis freed himself by a mighty effort and leaped to the ground. As he did so, the driver's hand found the controlling lever and the chariot shot forward, crushing under its wheels several luckless Earthmen who stood in its path. A roar of triumph rose from the crowd and Damis was hastily lifted to their shoulders. He looked down on his rescuers with an anguished face.

"Lura!" he gasped. "Is she safe?"

One of the Terrestrials shouted something unintelligible and pointed up. Damis' gaze followed the direction in which he pointed. From an upper window of the building into which she had fled, Lura's face, wreathed with smiles, looked down on him. He smiled and waved in triumph to her. There was a stir on the outskirts of the crowd and an elderly man, tall for an Earthman and with dignity and authority written large on his countenance, made his way through the crowd. At a word from him, Damis was lowered to his feet to face the newcomer.

"Damis," said the elderly man, "I never thought to grasp the hand of a Nepthalim or of anyone with Jovian blood in his veins in friendship, yet I can do no less than offer my hand. It is the thanks of a father to the saviour of his daughter."

* * * * *

Damis met the outstretched hand with a grip that made the elderly man wince.

"It is an honor and a pleasure to grasp in friendship the hand of Turgan, the Kildare of this province," he said, "the hand of one who was born to be ruler in fact, instead of an underling under a Jovian master."

"It is true that my father was king of this country before the Jovians came, forty years ago," said Turgan gravely, "yet now there is no honor or merit in it. Even the rank of Kildare, which is but that of a slave ruling other more unfortunate slaves, could not have prevented my only daughter from being dragged away to the seraglio of that monster. To such a pass has one been brought whose birth made him the peer of any. But now we must plan and plan swiftly, else are we undone. Glavour will return with his minions. Safety will be found only in flight, for mere numbers cannot oppose the weapons they will turn against us. Damis, so far you have been one with our Jovian masters, as have all of the Nepthalim. Now it is war to the death between them and us. On which side do you stand?"

Damis hesitated as the Kildare's keen gray eyes bored into his own.

"My father was Viceroy of the Earth in the days gone by," he said slowly, "and he planned that I should take his place. His dream was a peaceful union of the strength and science of Jupiter with the beauty and humanity of the Earth. True to his dream, I have cleaved to his people and striven to bring it about, but I can see now the folly of his ambition. In stature and mental power he was a Jovian, in all else he was a Terrestrial. Since his death I have seen you stripped bit by bit of what he left you until now you are lower than the slaves on Jupiter, who can appeal to Tubain against a cruel master. Even I, a Nepthalim, the son of a Viceroy, am forced to revolt to save the maiden I love. Henceforth, I give up my father's dream of peace and do what my heart tells me is right. It is war to the death between the Sons of God and the Sons of Man, and I, who am descended from a Son of God and a Daughter of Man, cleave to my mother's people."

* * * * *

A shout of joy came from all who heard his ringing voice announce his new allegiance. Damis had ever a reputation as a humane man and he was guilty of none of the brutalities which made the Jovians so detested and which were bettered by those of the Nepthalim who had the power. It was only the influence which Damis had wielded with the Earthmen which had prevented many an outbreak which would have been ruthlessly crushed by the Jovian overlords. To know that the son of a Viceroy, reputed one of the most brilliant as well as one of the strongest of Jovian blood, was one with them, made them hope that they might make some headway against their oppressors and wring from them some small measure of liberty. Turgan's face was wreathed with smiles.

"Again I offer you my hand, Damis," he said. "Before it was as a father thanking you for the rescue of his daughter. Now it is a father welcoming the son he has always longed for and whom he feared he would never have. My consent to your union with Lura which was grudgingly given only to save her from the dishonor of being dragged a slave to Glavour's seraglio, is withdrawn, and in its place I give you a happy father's joyous consent to the marriage."

There were tears in the old Kildare's eyes as he grasped the hand of the young blond giant. For a moment they stood with clasped hands, two strong men taking the measure of one another and each found the other good. The Kildare dropped Damis' hand and turned to the crowd.

"To your homes!" he cried sharply. "The Sons of God will return with new weapons and it is my wish that none be found to oppose them. All within sound of my voice who are members of the inner council will join me in the palace. Damis, come with me."

Followed by Damis and a score of Earthmen, the Kildare led the way into a building. As they entered, Damis cast a swift glance around and looked questioningly at Turgan.

"Lura--?" he asked hesitantly.

"Will join us in the council room," said Turgan with a smile.

CHAPTER II

Turgan's Plan

Content with the Kildare's answer, Damis followed him down a corridor and into a large room set around with benches. The Kildare did not pause but moved to the far end of the room and manipulated a hidden switch. A portion of the paneled wall swung inward and through the doorway thus opened, Turgan led the way. The corridor in which they found themselves was dimly lighted by radium bulbs which Damis shrewdly suspected had been stolen from the palace of the Viceroy by Earthmen employed there. It sloped steeply downward and Damis estimated that they were fifty feet below the level of the ground before another door opened to Turgan's manipulation of hidden catches and admitted them to a large room equipped with tables and chairs and well lighted by other radium bulbs. Damis turned to the Kildare.

"For years there have been rumors among the Sons of God of the existence of this place," he exclaimed, "yet every effort to find it has been futile. Glavour and his council have at last decided that it is merely a myth and that the underground council chamber does not exist. You have kept your secret well, for never has a breath of suspicion reached him that Turgan was one of the conspirators who plotted to overthrow the reign of the Sons of God."

"Let that, Damis, be a sample of the earnestness and loyalty of your new brethren," said the Kildare. "There are hundreds of Earthmen who know where this place is and what secrets it holds, yet none has ever betrayed it. Scores have gone to torture and to the sacrifice of the games without unsealing their lips. Would a Jovian have done likewise?"

"To give them due credit, I think they would have," replied Damis thoughtfully, "yet their motive would not have been loyalty, but stubbornness and a refusal to subordinate their will to another's. I thought you said that Lura would join us here?"

* * * * *

As Damis spoke a door on the far side of the chamber opened and a half dozen women entered. Lura was among them and with a cry of joy, she ran lightly forward and threw herself into Damis' outstretched arms. Turgan smiled paternally at them for a moment and then touched his daughter lightly on the shoulder.

"I have freely and gladly given my blessing to your union with Damis," he said. "He is now one with us. His presence makes victory possible and enables us to act at once instead of planning for years. Damis, you can operate a space flyer, can you not?"

"Certainly. That is knowledge which all Nepthalim possess."

A suppressed cheer greeted his words and the Earthmen crowded around him, vibrant with excitement.

"The time is at hand!" cried a stern-faced man in the crimson robe which marked him an Akildare, an under-officer of the Earthmen.

"Before I can operate a space flyer, I will have to have one to operate," objected Damis.

"That will be supplied," cried a dozen voices. Turgan's voice rose above the hubbub of sound.

"Let us proceed in orderly fashion," he cried.

* * * * *

The noise died down to silence and at a gesture from their ruler, the Earthmen took seats. Turgan stood beside Damis.

"For the enlightenment of our new-found brother, I will recite what has happened and what we have done, although most of you know it and many of you have done your part in bringing it about.

"Forty years ago, the Earth was prosperous, peopled with free men, and happy. While we knew little of science and lived in mere huts, yet we worshipped beauty and Him who ruled all and loved his children. It was to such a world that the Jovians came.

"When the first space flyer with a load of these inhuman monsters arrived on the earth, we foolishly took them for the angels whom we had been taught to believe spent eternity in glorifying Him. We welcomed them with our best and humbly obeyed when they spoke. This illusion was fostered by the name the Jovians gave themselves, the 'Sons of God.' Hortan, their leader and the father of our new brother, was a just and kindly man and he ruled the earth wisely and well. We learned from them and they learned from us. That was the golden age. And the Sons of God saw that the Daughters of Man were fair, and they took of them wives, such as they chose. And sons were born to them, the Nepthalim, the mighty men of the Earth.

"In time other flyers came from the heavens above and brought more of the Sons of God to rule over us. Then Hortan, the Viceroy, died, and Damis, know you how he died? You were a babe at the time and you know nothing. Your father and your mother, who was my distant kinswoman, died under the knives of assassins. It was given out that they had gone to Jupiter, yet there were some who knew the truth. You, the killers sought, but one of the Earthmen whose heart bled for your dead mother, spirited you away. When you had grown to boyhood, he announced your name and lineage, although his life paid for his indiscretion. The same hand which struck down your father and your mother struck at him and struck not unavailingly. You, since all knew your name and lineage, he dared not strike, lest those who love him not, would appeal to Tubain. Know you the name of the monster, the traitor to his ruler and the murderer of your parents?"

* * * * *

Damis' face had paled during the recital and when the old Kildare turned to him, he silently shook his head.

"It was the monster who now rules over us as Viceroy and who profanes the name of God by conferring it on his master and who would, if he dared, assume the name for himself. It was Glavour, Viceroy of the Earth."

The blood surged back into Damis' face and he raised a hand in a dramatic gesture.

"Now I vow that I will never rest until he lies low in death and this be the hand that brings him there!"

A murmur of applause greeted Damis' announcement and Turgan went on with his tale.

"With the kind and just Hortan dead, Glavour assumed the throne of power, for none dared oppose him. Once secure, he gave way to every brutal lust and vice. Your mother was Hortan's only wife and he honored her as such, and meant that the Nepthalim should in time rule the Earth, but Glavour had no such ideas. To him, the Daughters of Man were playthings to satisfy his brutal lusts. By dozens and by scores he swept the fairest of them into his seraglio, heeding not the bonds of matrimony nor the wishes of his victims. Only the fact that my daughter has been kept from his sight until to-day has spared her.

"The Earthmen who had been content to live under Hortan's rule, rebelled against Glavour but the rebellion was crushed in blood. Time and again they rose, but each time the mighty weapons of the Jovians stamped out resistance. At last we realized that craft and not force must win the battle. This chamber had been built when Hortan erected his new capital and none of the Jovians knew of its location, so it was chosen as our meeting place. To-day, Damis, I have twenty thousand men sworn to do my bidding and to rise when I give the word. Many thousands more will rise when they see others in arms and know that again the Sons of Man stand in arms against the Sons of God."

* * * * *

"There are less than a thousand Jovians and perhaps twice that number of Nepthalim on the Earth, yet that handful would stand victorious against all the Earthmen living," said Damis thoughtfully. "Even I, and I am a Nepthalim, do not know the secret weapons in the arsenal of Glavour, but I know that they are more powerful than anything we have ever seen. Forget not, too, that a radio message to Jupiter will bring down ships with hundreds, nay, thousands, of her fighting men with weapons to overwhelm all opposition."

"Such was the case but it is so no longer since we number you among us," replied the Kildare. "Earthmen are employed in the communications net which the Jovians have thrown around the Earth and it is but a step from those machines to the huge one with which they talk to their mother planet. My spies have been busy for years and our plans are all laid. There is one planet which all the forces of Jupiter have never been able to conquer; from which their ships have ever retreated in defeat."

"Mars!" exclaimed Damis.

"Exactly," replied Turgan. "The Martians are a peaceful and justice-loving people, yet they know that peace is given only to those who are ready and able to fight for it. Ages ago they perfected weapons before which the Jovians fly, if they are not destroyed. I have communicated with the Grand Mognac of Mars and laid our plight before him. He has pledged his aid and has promised us enough of his weapons to not only destroy the Jovians and the Nepthalim on the Earth, but also to prevent other Jovian ships from ever landing. The only problem has been how to get them here. The Martians, not desiring conquest and content with their own planet, have never perfected space flyers. They have promised us the weapons, but we must go to Mars and bring them here. Enough can be transported on one of the Jovian ships."

"How will we get a ship?" asked Damis.

"That also has been solved. There are two Jovian ships kept on the Earth, ready for instant flight to Jupiter. They are loosely guarded for the Sons of God believe that we have no idea of how to operate them. We can capture one of them whenever we desire, but so far such action would have been useless. Little by little we have gathered bits of information about the flyers, but we had expected to wait for years before our venture would have a chance of success. We dared not try prematurely, for one attempt will be all that we will ever get. Now we are ready to strike. You can fly the ship to Mars and back and with the Martian weapons, we can sweep the Jovians from the Earth."

* * * * *

Damis' eyes lighted as Turgan spoke.

"Your plans are good," he cried, "and I will fly the ship for you. In return I ask but one thing: let mine be the hand which strikes Glavour down."

"If it can be so done, yours shall be the hand, oh Nepthalim!" cried the Akildare who had first spoken of the ship. Turgan bowed his head and a murmur of assent came from the assembled council.

"And now for action!" cried Turgan. "There is no need to talk longer. Years ago our plans were perfected for the capture of the space ship and each knows the part assigned to him. Toness, the Akildare, will rule during my absence, for I will command the ship, under Damis. Twelve of our men who know all that we have been able to learn will make up the crew. None of them will take any part in the capture of the ship for many lives may be lost in that venture and we will need the instructed men to operate the ship after we capture it. Damis, have you any addition to make to our plans?"

"Only one, Turgan. Glavour will ransack the Earth rather than be cheated of one he has marked for his prey. Lura will be safe nowhere on Earth. Her capture by the Sons of God will discourage the timid who will say that if Turgan cannot protect his own daughter, how can he free the Earth? She must go with us."

"Your point is well taken, Damis," replied the Kildare. "She shall go. Now to action! Monaill, are your men ready?"

"They will assemble at my signal, oh, Kildare."

"Give the signal, for nothing will be gained by delay. We will follow behind while you capture the ship."

* * * * *

Monaill bowed before the Kildare and hastened from the council room. In a few words Turgan gave to Toness the final orders for the conduct of the conspiracy during his absence. Followed by Lura, Damis and three of the council, he made his way to a hidden doorway. Along an underground passage they made their way for a quarter of a mile. A group of figures was seen dimly ahead of them and nine men joined the party. Turgan identified them to Damis as the balance of the crew.

"Has Monaill passed this way?" he asked.

"He passed with his band a few moments ago, oh, Kildare," replied one of the men. "See, there is the light which summons us to follow."

He pointed to a tiny light which had suddenly flashed into brilliance. Turgan nodded and led the way forward. At another doorway which opened to Turgan's touch on a hidden lever, the party paused. An instant later there came from a few hundred yards ahead of them a hoarse cry of alarm followed by the roar of a huge whistle.

"The battle has joined!" cried Turgan. The others crouched, tense and motionless. From ahead came the sound of battle. Violet light showed in short intense flashes. It was evident that the Jovian guard of the space ship was fighting valiantly to protect it. Shaking aside Turgan's restraining hand, Damis crept slowly forward.

Two hundred yards from the spot where he left Turgan he came to a bend in the passage. The sound of battle came from just ahead. He crept forward and peered around the corner. The passage emerged from the ground and gave way to a huge open space which he recognized as part of the grounds of the Viceregal palace. Standing on a launching platform was a Jovian space ship around which a battle raged.

* * * * *

Five of the huge Jovians were battling furiously with a score of Earthmen. Three dead Jovians and a dozen crushed forms of Terrestrials testified to the bitterness of the fight. The terrible black tubes of the Jovians were exhausted and the battle was now being waged hand to hand, Jovian ax against Earthly sword. The Terrestrials were being gradually pressed back.

A shout came from the distance and Damis could see a dozen Jovian guards hastening toward the scene of the fight, brandishing in their hands the terrible black tubes. He turned back and shouted to Turgan.

"Hasten!" he cried. "In a moment, Monaill and his men will be overthrown!"

With a shout the crouching group of Terrestrials rushed toward him, but Damis did not wait. The oncoming Jovians were several hundred yards away when he threw himself into the fray. At his appearance, a cry of dismay went up from the Earthmen which was changed to one of mingled wonder and triumph as Damis seized the nearest Jovian and bore the fellow down despite his struggles. It was a matter of seconds for him to break the bull neck of the huge guard and he turned to grasp another. The four remaining Jovians backed away but Damis was not to be denied. He rushed in and grasped another about the waist, avoiding the swing of the forty-pound ax, and dragged him back. The swords of the Terrestrials pierced the struggling guard from the rear and Damis rushed toward the three survivors.

Heartened by his aid, the remnants of Monaill's band charged with him. Two of the Jovians fell before the swords of the Earthmen and the third went down before a blow of Damis' fist. As he turned back to the ship, Turgan, followed by the crew of the ship, dashed up.

"Into the ship!" cried Damis. A glance showed that the Jovian guards were less than two hundred yards away and were coming on in huge leaps. The door of the space ship was open and the band of Terrestrials clambered in.

"Quick, Damis!" came Lura's voice.

The Nepthalim turned to enter but his gaze fell on the six survivors of Monaill's band.

"In with you!" he cried sharply.

* * * * *

The Terrestrials hesitated but Damis grasped the nearest of them by the belt and threw him bodily into the ship. The others hesitated no longer but clambered in. The Jovians were less than fifty yards away and already deep violet flashes began to come from the tubes they carried. Damis stooped and grasped one of the dead Jovians. With an effort possible to only two men on Earth, himself and Glavour, he raised the body above his head and hurled it straight at the oncoming Jovians. His aim was true and three of them were swept from their feet. With a mighty bound, Damis sprang through the door of the space ship and the airlock clanged shut behind him.

The crew of the ship were already in place, awaiting orders. There was no time for instruction and Damis leaped to the control board. He pulled a lever far down and in an instant the entire crew was flat on the floor as though an enormous weight had pressed them down. With a superhuman effort, Damis raised himself enough to cut off the power. The ship shot on through the rapidly thinning air, its sides glowing a dull red. The heat inside the ship was almost intolerable.

As the pressure of the enormous acceleration ceased, the bruised Terrestrials struggled to their feet. Damis turned to another lever and a breath of icy air swept through the ship.

"This will help for an instant," he gasped, "and the cold of space will soon cool us down. I had to give the ship a tremendous start or the tubes of the Sons of God would have reduced us to elemental atoms. Keep away from the walls and don't exert yourselves. I can handle the ship alone for the present."

* * * * *

For half an hour the ship charged on through space. Damis presently pulled the control lever down and placed the ship under power. The walls changed from dull red to black and the temperature in the ship grew noticeably lower. Damis made his way to one of the walls and tested it with a moistened finger.

"It's cool enough to touch," he announced. "Fortunately the insulating vacuum between the inner and the outer skins was at its maximum, otherwise we would have been roasted alive. The external wall was almost at the fusing point. We can move around now."

He posted lookouts at the observing instruments with which the ship was equipped and instructed them in their duties and the manipulation of the instruments. He placed one man at the control lever of the stern rocket-motors. As he turned away from the control board he saw Lura standing quietly in a corner. He opened his arms and she ran to them with a cry of joy.

"Oh, Damis, I was so afraid for you," she gasped, "and I wanted to hug you when you jumped in and Father closed the lock behind you but I knew that you had to take care of the ship. Were you hurt at all?"

"Not a bit, darling," he assured her, "but it was touch and go for a moment. I didn't know whether the guards would dare to disintegrate the ship without orders from Glavour. In any event, the blasts of the stern motors must have hurled them half a mile. No strength could stand the blast of gas to which they were subjected. Are you all right?"

"Perfectly," she replied; "I never was in any danger. I was the first one in the ship and the only chance I had to be hurt was to have you overcome and the ship recaptured. In that case, I had this."

She displayed a small dagger which she drew from the bosom of her robe. Damis shuddered and took the weapon from her.

"Poisoned," he exclaimed as he glanced at its tip. "You had better let me take care of it. You might fall and prick yourself with it."

She surrendered the weapon to him with a smile and Damis placed it in a cabinet built against the wall of the flyer.

"Now go in and lie down," he told her. "I've got to start plotting a course to Mars and teaching my crew how to operate the ship."

"Can't I learn, too?" she objected. "If anything should happen, it might be quite a useful bit of knowledge. Besides, I already understand celestial geography quite well and I may be able to help in the navigation."

Damis looked at her in surprise.

"You a celestial geographer?" he asked in astonishment. "Where did you learn it?"

"From my father. He was a famous heaven-master before the Jovians came and he taught me."

"That's excellent!" cried Damis. "I didn't realize we had so much knowledge at our command. Turgan, will you take charge of the navigating after I plot a course? Lura can assist you. Now, the rest of you attend to my words and I'll teach you how to operate the rocket motors."

* * * * *

The Jovian ship was built along very simple lines. Batteries of rocket motors at the bow and stern and on each of the sides furnished both motive and steering power. The Terrestrials were all chosen men and in three hours Damis announced himself as satisfied with their ability to operate the ship under any normal conditions. With Turgan and Lura watching and checking his calculations, he plotted a course which would intercept Mars on its orbit.

"Luckily, Mars is approaching us now," he said, "and we won't have a stern chase, which is always a long one. We will be able to reach Mars, spend several days on it and return to Earth before ships can reach the Earth from Jupiter, even if they are already on the way, which is highly probable. I'll turn the ship a little."

Under his direction, the crew turned the ship in its course until it was headed for the point in space where Damis planned to intercept the red planet. With the course set to his satisfaction, he gave orders for the stern motors to be operated at such a power as to give the highest acceleration consistent with comfort for the crew. There were no windows in the ship but two observers seated at instruments kept the entire heavens under constant observation. Damis motioned one of them to stand aside and told Lura to take his place. She sat down before a box in which were set two lenses, eye-distance apart. She looked through the lenses and gave a cry of astonishment. Before her appeared the heavens in miniature with the entire galaxy of stars displayed to her gaze. In the center of the screen was a large disk thickly marked with pocks.

"The moon," explained Damis. "We are headed directly toward it now but we'll shift and go around it. We'll pass only a few hundred miles from its surface, but unfortunately it will be between us and the sun and you'll be able to see nothing. Look in the other observer."

* * * * *

Lura turned to the second instrument. A large part of the hemisphere was blotted out by the Earth which was still only a few thousand miles away. The sun showed to one side of the Earth, but a movable disk was arranged in the instrument by means of which it could be shut off from the gaze of the observer. Despite the presence of the sun, the stars shone brilliantly in the intense black of space.

"How fast are we traveling?" asked Lura.

"It is impossible to tell exactly," he replied. "I can approximate our speed by a study of the power consumed in our stern motors and again I can approximate it by a series of celestial observations, provided we do not have to change our course while I am doing so."

"Isn't there some sort of an instrument which will tell you how fast we are going?" she asked in astonishment.

"Unfortunately not. We are traveling through no medium which is dense enough to register on an instrument. Our course is not straight, but is necessarily an erratic one as we are subject to the gravimetric pull of all of the celestial bodies. Just now the Earth supplies most of the pull on us but as soon as we approach the moon, we will tend to fall on it and frequent sideblasts will be needed to keep us away from it. Once we get up some speed that is comparable with light, we can measure by direct comparison, but our speed is too low for that now."

"I saw you lay out your course, but how are we steering?"

"The observer who works on the front instrument keeps a cross hair on a fixed star. When the curving of the ship deviates us more than five degrees from our course, a side motor is turned on until we straighten out again. It is quite a simple matter and I'll take the ship myself when we near Mars. There is no need to be frightened."

"I'm not frightened," said Lura quickly; "I was just curious. Is there any danger of hitting a wandering body?"

* * * * *

"Not much in this zone and at this speed. When our speed picks up there will be a slight danger because the higher our rate of speed, the more crowded space becomes. If we were going to Jupiter we would have to use much more caution. The asteroid belt lying between Mars and Jupiter is really crowded with small bodies but comparatively few are in the zone between Earth and Mars. That is one thing I figured on when I said that we would have plenty of time to go to Mars and back before ships could come from Jupiter. Ships from Jupiter would be able to develop a much higher speed than we will attain were it not for the asteroid belt. They will have to travel quite slowly through it, in portions, not over a few thousand miles per minute, while we are not held down that way. Now that we are really started, it will be best to set regular watches. I will assign you as navigator for one watch if you wish."

"I certainly do want to do my share."

"All right, we'll let it go that way. Turgan and I will take the other two watches until we get there."

"How soon will that be?"

"About seventeen days. Mars happens to be only about forty million miles away just now. Now I'll set the watches and divide the crew."

A short examination showed Damis that his crew were intelligent and that his instruction had been good. Every member knew his duties. Instead of the two twelve-hour watches which were usual on space flyers, the additional members of the crew who had been part of Monaill's band enabled Damis to set only eight-hour shifts. Each member of the crew was taught to operate the offensive ray projectors with which the flyer was equipped.

* * * * *

Things soon settled down to routine. No wandering celestial bodies came close enough to cause them any real alarm. Once the novelty of hurtling through space had passed away, the trip became monotonous. The Earth, which had at first filled the field of one of the observers, dwindled until it became merely a brilliant green star. The red speck which was Mars grew constantly more prominent as the hours went by and Damis gave the word to turn on the bow motors and retard the speed of the flyer. Several of the crew had worked in the communications net which Glavour had thrown around the Earth and under orders from Turgan, they began to call the red planet on the ship's communicator.

"It is well to let them know who we are," he said to Damis when he gave the order. "We are flying a Jovian ship and since we have come so far successfully, I have no desire to be blasted out of space by their powerful weapons of defense."

Damis agreed heartily, and for twelve hours continual attempts were made to communicate with their destination. At last their signals were answered. Despite the differences in language, they had no trouble in understanding the messages. A system of communication based not on words or sound forms, but on thought forms, had been introduced to the Earth by the Jovians and both Damis and Turgan were quite familiar with it. The Martians informed them that the approaching ship had been sighted and carefully watched for several days. As soon as he learned who the occupants were, the Grand Mognac of Mars sent a message of welcome and instructed them on what part of the planet to land. He promised that a deputation would meet them with transportation to his capital city where he would welcome them in person and supply them with the weapons they sought.

CHAPTER III

The Doom on Mars

Two days later Damis dropped the ship gently to the ground in a wide and deep depression which had been designated as their landing place. The Grand Mognac had assured them that the depression held enough atmosphere to enable them to breathe with comfort. There was no one in sight when they landed and after a short consultation, Damis and Turgan entered the airlock. In a few moments they stood on the surface of Mars.

They had landed in a desert without even a trace of the most rudimentary vegetation. Barren slate-colored mountains shut off their view at a distance of a few miles. When they strove to move they found that the conditions which had confronted the Jovians in their first landing on the Earth were duplicated. The lesser gravity of the smaller planet made their strength too great for easy control and the slightest effort sent them yards into the air. This condition had been anticipated and at a word from Damis, lead weights, made to clamp on the soles of their sandals were passed out from the space ship. Although this enabled them to keep their footing when moving over the dry surface of Mars, the slightest exertion in the thin air caused them acute distress.

"We had better save our strength until the messengers of the Grand Mognac arrive," said Damis at length. "We may have quite a trip before us."

Turgan agreed and they sat down by the side of the ship where its shadow would shield them from the fierce solar rays which beat down on them. The sun looked curiously small, yet its rays penetrated the thin air with a heat and fierceness strange to them. Lura and a half dozen of the crew were passed through the airlock and joined them.

"I am surprised that the Martians have not arrived," said Damis presently. "I am interested to see what their appearance is."

* * * * *

Hardly had he spoken than the air before them seemed to thicken in a curious fashion. Lura gave a cry of alarm and pressed close to Damis. The sun's rays penetrated with difficulty through a patch of air directly before them. Gradually the mistiness began to assume a nebulous uncertain outline and separated itself into four distinct patches. The thickening air took on a silvery metallic gleam and four metallic cylinders made their appearance. Two of them were about eight feet in height and three feet in diameter. The other two were fully thirty feet in length and about the same diameter. On the top of each one was a projecting cap shaped like a mushroom and from it long tenuous streamers of metal ran the full length of each cylinder. From the ether came a thought wave which registered on the brains of all the Terrestrials.

"The Grand Mognac of Mars sends his greeting and a welcome to the visitors from Earth," the message ran. "Before his envoys make their appearance before you, we wish to warn you to be prepared for a severe shock for their physical appearance is not that of the life with which you are familiar. I would suggest that you turn your heads while we emerge from our transporters."

Obediently the Earthmen turned their gaze toward their ship until another thought wave ordered them to turn. Lura gave a cry of horror and Damis instinctively raised one of the Jovian ray tubes. Before them were huge figures which seemed to have stepped out of a nightmare, so grotesque were their forms.

* * * * *

The Martians had long slug-like bodies, twenty-five feet in length, from which projected a multiplicity of short legs. The legs on the rear portions of the bodies terminated in sucker-like disks on which they stood on the surface of the planet. The upper part of the body was raised from the ground and the legs terminated in forked appendages like hands. Stiff, coarse hair, brown in color, protruded from between brilliant green scales, edged with crimson. The heads were huge and misshapen and consisted mostly of eyes with a multitude of facets and huge jaws which worked incessantly as though the slugs were continually chewing on something. Nothing that the Earth could show resembled those monstrosities, although it flashed across Damis' mind that a hugely enlarged caricature of an intelligent caterpillar would bear some resemblance to the Martians. Another thought wave impinged on the consciousness of the Terrestrials.

"Mars is much older than your planet and evolution has gone much farther here than it has on the Earth. At one time there were forms of life similar to yours which ruled this planet, but as air and water became scarce, these forms gave way to others which were better suited to conditions as they existed. I would be pleased to explain further, but the Grand Mognac anxiously awaits his guests. His orders are that two of you shall visit him in his city. The two whom he desires to come are Turgan, the leader of the expedition and Damis, the Nepthalim. Fear nothing, you are among friends."

Damis hesitated and cast a glance at Lura.

"By all means, Damis, do as the Grand Mognac bids you," she exclaimed. "I will stay here with the ship until you return. I am not at all frightened, for the whole crew will be here with me."

* * * * *

Damis kissed her and after a word with Turgan, he announced their readiness to proceed. He inquired the direction in which they should travel, but another thought wave interrupted him.

"We have brought transportation for you," it said. "Each of you will enter one of the smaller transporters which were especially prepared for your use. When you enter them, seal them tightly and place your feet in the stirrups you will find in them. Grasp the handles which will be before you firmly in your hands. In an instant you will be dissolved into elemental atoms and carried on a beam of force to the receiving focus where you will again be materialized. There is no danger and no pain. It is our usual means of transportation."

With a final word of farewell to Lura and the crew, Turgan and Damis unfastened and entered the two smaller cylinders. Before the astonished eyes of the Terrestrials the cylinders grew thin and vanished like a puff of smoke dissipating in a wind. Lura turned to Kastner whom Turgan had left in command.

"What were my father's orders?" she asked.

"Merely that we wait here until his return," he replied. "Since we are among friends, there is no need to keep the ray projectors manned and I am anxious to let all of the crew have the experience of setting foot on a new planet."

"I am a little tired," said Lura. "I will return to the ship and rest while you let the crew try their footing on Mars."

She entered the airlock and in a few moments was again inside the ship. At a word from Kastner the balance of the crew passed through the lock and began to amuse themselves by trying to keep their footing on the surface of Mars.

* * * * *

Damis and Turgan, having entered the transporters, slipped their feet in place as the Martians had directed. They grasped firmly the handles which projected from the inside of the cylinders. There was a momentary sensation of slight nausea and then a thought wave reached them.

"You have arrived. Unfasten your cylinders and emerge."

They stepped out of the transporters and rubbed their eyes in astonishment. Two of the huge slugs had been amazing, but the effect of half a hundred grouped about them was more than the mind could, for a moment, grasp. They were in a huge room composed apparently of the same silvery material of which the transporters were made. It rose above them in a huge dome with no signs of windows or openings. It was lighted by a soft glow which seemed to emanate from the material of the dome itself, for it cast no shadows. On a raised platform before them rested one of the huge slugs, a broad band of silvery metal set with flashing coruscating jewels clasped about its body. From the ornament and the exalted position, they judged that they were before the Grand Mognac of Mars. With a muttered word to Turgan to follow him, Damis advanced to the foot of the platform and bowed deeply.

"I thank you for that mark of respect, Nepthalim," came a thought wave from the Grand Mognac, "but such forms are obsolete on Mars. Here all living intelligences are equal. Only the accident of superior mental power is allowed to differentiate between us and this added power brings only added and more arduous duties. You came here to get weapons which will free you from the dominance of the Jovians who rule you, did you not?"

"We did, oh Grand Mognac," replied Damis.

"Your prayers shall be answered if you are found worthy. Relate to me now all that has passed since the Jovians first landed on your planet. If you can form thoughts without speaking, you may save the effort of speech. The air has become so thin on Mars that sound will not carry over large portions of it. As a result, we have no organs of hearing, for they have been atrophied from ages of disuse. We use thought as our only means of communication."

* * * * *

Rapidly, Damis marshaled his thoughts in order. Slowly and carefully he pictured in his mind the landing of the Jovians as he had heard it described and then the event leading up to their trip. The Grand Mognac frequently interrupted him and caused him to amplify in detail some of the mental pictures and at times turned to Turgan and requested him to picture the same events. When Damis had finished the Grand Mognac was motionless for ten minutes.

"Pardon me for sealing my thoughts from you," he said at length, "but my consultation with my councillors was not a matter for those from another planet to know, no matter how friendly they may be. My council have agreed with me that your tale is a true one and has been fairly pictured. We have no interest in the fate of your planet except that we desire to help the form best adapted to bring about the day we all await with anxiety when all of the planets will be united in bonds of love and justice. We believe that the form which developed on the Earth is better adapted to this than the form which developed on Jupiter and we will give you weapons which will enable you to free yourselves and to protect your planet against future invasions. My scientists are now busy preparing for you weapons which we will deliver to your ship. Meanwhile, you are our honored guests. You will be interested in seeing life as it exists here and Attomanis, one of my council, will be your guide and will answer your questions."

The Grand Mognac dropped the upper portion of his body to the dais as a sign that the interview was ended. Damis and Turgan hurriedly tried to form appropriate expressions of gratitude in their minds but a powerful thought wave took possession of their minds.

"Follow me," it said.

* * * * *

One of the caterpillars crawled forward and beckoned to them. With a backward glance at the Grand Mognac who seemed unaware of their existence, Damis and Turgan followed their guide. He led the way to a platform upon which he slowly crawled. In answer to a thought command, Turgan and Damis climbed upon it and in an instant they were skimming at high speed over the ground. The platform came to a stop near the outer edge of the huge dome. They followed their guide from the platform to a box-like contrivance built against the dome. It had lenses similar in appearance to the observers on the Jovian space ship but built on a larger scale. Attomanis removed the lenses from the instrument and substituted two smaller pairs through which he motioned Turgan and Damis to look.

Before them lay a huge plain across which ran a belt of green foliage. The vegetation forms were like nothing the earth could show. There were no true leaves but huge pulpy branches ran up into the air a hundred feet and divided and subdivided until they became no larger around than hairs. At places on the plants were huge crimson, mauve and blue flowers, ten feet across. As they watched a monstrous form flitted into view. It was that of a butterfly, but such a butterfly as they had never imagined.

The spread of the huge wings was fully a hundred feet across and its swollen body was larger by far than the huge slug which stood beside them. The butterfly waved its thirty-foot tentacles and approached one of the blue flowers. A long curled sucker, fifty feet in length, unrolled and was plunged down into the heart of the trumpet-shaped flower. Gradually the blue color faded to mauve and then to a brilliant crimson. The butterfly abandoned it when the change of color was completed and flitted away to another of the blue blooms.

* * * * *

"What manner of thing is that?" demanded Damis.

"That was a member of the council," replied Attomanis. "She was chosen to be one of those to perpetuate our race. Evolution has gone further with us than on your planet but it will show you what in time you may expect.

"Life started with an amoeba on Mars as it did on Earth and the slow process of evolution followed similar lines. At one time forms like yours were the ruling and guiding intelligences of Mars. They were, however, a highly specialized form. As conditions changed, the form changed. The head and chest grew larger as the air grew thinner until the enfeebled trunk and limbs could no longer support their weight. Gradually the form died out and was replaced by others.

"The forms which you call insects on your Earth were more primitive and hardier forms and more readily adaptable. They increased in size and in intelligence until they were ready to supplant all other forms. The last vestiges of the bipeds were carefully nurtured and guarded by our forefathers until the vanishing atmosphere made their survival impossible. The insect form became supreme.

"We multiplied with extreme rapidity and would have overcrowded the planet had we not learned several things. Our present form of life is immature in many ways. For example, we are totally unable to reproduce our kind. That is the function of the next phase. In this form, however, the intelligence reaches its maximum. As a result, all living creatures, except selected ones, have their growth arrested at the larval stage and pass their entire life in this form. Certain ones at long intervals of time as the population diminishes, are allowed to spin cocoons and hatch out in the form you have witnessed. This form is almost brainless, the securing of nourishment from flowers and reproducing their kind being the limits of their intelligence. The eggs are maturing in the body of the one you saw. Soon she will lay many thousands of them and then, her life mission accomplished, she will die. We will gather these eggs and tend them until they hatch. All defective ones will be destroyed and the balance will be instructed until they are ready to take their place in the community and carry on the work of the planet."

* * * * *

"That is extremely interesting," exclaimed Damis. "Will our Earth in time support the same forms of life as does Mars now?"

"I can see no reason why evolution should follow a different path there than it has here," replied Attomanis, "but millions of years will pass before you lose your atmosphere to such an extent as we have. All of our water is gathered at the polar icecaps, from whence we lead it as it melts through underground pipes hundreds of miles to the spot where we desire vegetation to grow. There we deliver it directly to the roots of the plants so there is no waste. Great bands of cultivated areas crisscross the planet where the soil is of unusual fertility. A certain number of plants are allowed to flower and to bear fruit for the sustenance of the reproductive form of life and to replace themselves. The others we devour while they are young and tender."

"Do you always live in these sealed cities?"

"Always. There are hundreds of them scattered over the planet. As you have noticed, they are composed of damazonium, the same substance as is used in making the transporters. The whole city is but a large transporter. When we desire to feed, the city is disintegrated and materialized over a patch of vegetation which we eat. When the supply is for a time exhausted, the city is moved. This is one way in which we conserve the small supply of atmosphere which is left."

Attomanis suddenly paused and held up one hand for silence. In a moment the thought waves again beat in on the consciousness of Damis and Turgan.

"The weapons which were promised you are ready," he said. "We will return to the throne of the Grand Mognac and you will receive instructions in their use."

* * * * *

He again mounted the platform and Damis and Turgan took their places beside him. Rapidly they were borne over the ground until they came to a stop before the dais on which the Grand Mognac rested. Beside the four cylinders in which they and the Grand Mognac's messengers had traveled from the space ship to the city, another of huge proportions stood before the platform. Beside it were two instruments. From a mass of coils and tubes a long rod projected up. It was pivoted so that it could be directed toward any point. The rod on one of the instruments was blue while the other was a fiery scarlet.

"These are the weapons which will enable you to destroy your oppressors and prevent more from ever landing," said the Grand Mognac. "I must caution you, however, regarding their use. They generate a ray of almost infinite frequency, much higher than the disintegrating ray the Jovians use. Instead of resolving materials into light and energy, these devices will absolutely destroy the ether, that imponderable substance which permeates and fills all space.

"Heat and light travel in waves through the ether. When it is destroyed, only blackness and entire absence of heat remain. Nothing can bear the cold of interstellar space and yet it is warm compared to the absolute cold which the absence of ether produces. When you direct one of these rays toward a Jovian ship, the ether in the ship is destroyed. No insulation against the cold of space will interfere for the ether penetrates and permeates all substance. The cold of absolute nothingness will destroy all life in the twinkling of an eye and the ship will be reduced to a puff of powder. At such a temperature, even stellanium has less strength than the most brittle substance.

* * * * *

"There are two of these devices, set to different powers. The one with the blue rod is for use against space ships either before or after they enter the atmosphere envelope. Beware of using it except when it points in a direction almost normal to the surface of your planet. These devices tap and use the enormous force of gravity itself and when they are locked to your planet, they are anchored to the center of gravity of the planet. Unless it were normal to the planet's surface, its reactive force is so great that it would disrupt the balance which holds the planet in place were the beam sent off on a tangential line.

"The other, whose projecting rod is painted red, can be used at any angle as its force is only a minute fraction of that of the other. It also must be locked to the center of gravity of the earth before it is used by means of the switch on the front. This instrument will give you power to annihilate your oppressors on earth, for while it has not the terrible force of the other, it will penetrate any protective screen which the science of Jupiter can erect. Use it only against the Jovians and when you have finished with it, destroy it that it may not fall into the hands of those who would misuse it. The other may be left intact to repel other Jovian attacks but I think you need fear none. Once they learn you have it, they will be content with their conquests of Venus and Mercury and give you a wide berth. The Jovians have had a taste of it already and they leave Mars alone. Each instrument is set in action by closing the switch on top, after closing the gravity anchor switch. To stop them, open the top switch."

Under the direction of the Grand Mognac, the Martians placed the terrible weapons in the transporter prepared for them. Turgan and Damis strove to thank the Grand Mognac for his gift but he interrupted them promptly.

"No thanks are due us," he said. "We have done that which we believe is the best for the orderly development of this galaxy of planets and there is no reason why we should be thanked. Now enter the transporters and you will be returned to your space ship. Destroy your oppressors and work for the day when Mars and Earth will march in peace toward the final goal of all life."

* * * * *

Accompanied by two Martian envoys, Damis and Turgan entered the cylinders and fastened them closely. They set their feet in place and grasped the handles before them. Again came the feeling of nausea and then a thought ordered them to emerge from the transporters. They emerged almost at the same instant. Before them lay the space ship with its airlock wide open. Not a living soul was in sight. Damis leaped toward the ship, but his foot struck an obstruction which sent him sprawling. He glanced down and a hoarse cry of alarm broke from his lips. He had stumbled over the body of Kastner. The body had been horribly mutilated by some heavy instrument, one arm hanging to the torso by a mere shred of flesh. Scattered around on the ground lay other mutilated bodies.

With a shout of anguish, Turgan sped toward the open space ship. Damis, with a pale face, hastily examined the dead bodies. Eighteen of the Terrestrials lay stiff in death while the bodies of two huge Jovians in the uniform of Glavour's personal guard told the cause of their death. Damis struck by a sudden apprehension, ran from one body to the next, and in a little while he straightened up with a momentary breath of relief. Lura's body was not among them. He turned to the space ship in time to see Turgan appear in the door of the airlock, his face distorted by grief and his tall body swaying. Damis hurriedly ran to him.

"Is Lura--dead?"

He brought out the last word with an effort. Turgan's face worked for a moment before he could reply. Through the thin air of Mars came his choking voice.

"Worse," he muttered: "she is gone!"

CHAPTER IV

Damis' Decision

Damis stared at Turgan for a moment as though unable to comprehend the old man's words.

"Gone?" he repeated stupidly. "She has slain herself?"

"No," replied the Kildare, his face still working in grief; "she is gone from us. She has been captured by Glavour's minions."

"Her dagger--?" asked Damis hesitatingly.

"Is gone with her," replied Turgan.

The Nepthalim started toward the space ship but a thought wave from one of the Martian envoys stopped him in mid-stride.

"Wait, Man of Earth," came the message. "The heavens are eternally watched by our people and none can enter or leave the vicinity of Mars unknown to us. My comrade is now inquiring of each of the observers whence came the Jovians and where they have gone."

Turgan and Damis waited impatiently. Presently the second Martian sent a thought wave to their minds.

"The Jovian ship approached Mars using Phobus, one of our moons, as a screen to its movements. It was close to the planet before it was seen. When challenged, the ship sent a message saying that it was captained by Toness, an Akildare of Earth and an enemy of the Jovians. The Grand Mognac was engaged and the matter was referred to the Mozar of Chinamonot, the nearest city. Thinking they were your followers, he directed them to land here. The Grand Mognac is enraged beyond measure that, after so many ages of failure, the Jovians have made a successful raid on our planet. The Mozar will pay for his indiscretion with his life."

A groan burst from Turgan's lips. Damis stood for a moment stricken with grief, and then sprang in giant leaps toward the space flyer.

"Come, Turgan!" he cried. "We may overtake them yet. At least we can avenge if we cannot save."

The Kildare followed him more slowly.

"Where, oh, Nepthalim," he asked, "will we find them in the trackless wastes of space?"

Damis paused at the words.

"Why, between here and Earth," he replied. As he did so a thought crossed his mind which was revealed by the sudden expression of dismay which clouded his features. "Earth, Venus, Mercury, Moon, Jupiter--all are under the rule of the Sons of God," he cried.

"And to any of them, Glavour's ship may have fled," replied the Kildare. "Before we start in pursuit, it is best to find, if we can, in what direction the ship went."

* * * * *

Frantically, Damis strove to muster his thoughts and hurl a question at the two Martians who stood beside the transporter cylinders. Before the thought had been fully formed, an answer reached him.

"I have been inquiring, Nepthalim, why, when our observers saw that the ship contained Jovians, they were not destroyed. One of the observers who watched them tells me that their ship landed between your ship and the only instruments of destruction which could be brought to bear on them. The Jovians poured out and attacked your crew who were all out of the ship. They were so mingled that it would have been impossible to destroy them without encompassing the destruction of your men as well and we could not blast their ship into nothingness without also destroying yours. When they rose again they carried one of your crew a prisoner and so they were not blasted out of the heavens. They took a course which carried them behind Phobus where they were shielded. When next seen, they were headed away from your planet."

"If Glavour came to Mars, Lura is dead by now," said Turgan sorrowfully, tears coursing down his cheeks. "Glavour is not one to await the fulfillment of his desires and Lura had her dagger. Her soul is now with Him whom we are taught to glorify. His will be done!"

"If it be His will," replied Damis. "Don't give up, Turgan, we may save her yet." He turned to the Martians and formed a thought message in his mind.

"Has your science any way of telling us who was in command of the Jovian ship?" he asked.

"Were your men who lie dead familiar with the features of the Jovian Viceroy?"

"Yes, all of them."

"Then we will search the brains of the dead. The pictures that are in the living brain fade rapidly when death comes, but the last impression of these men was a powerful one of fighting and hatred and some traces may remain. I will search."

* * * * *

The huge slug crawled over the ground to the body of the nearest dead Terrestrial. In one of his many hands he carried a shiny metal tube from which crimson rays flickered and played over the head of the dead man. The skull disintegrated under the influence of the strange instrument until the brain lay naked and exposed to the fierce glare of the Martian sun. The Martian delicately connected two wires terminating in metal plates to the tissue of the brain and attached the other ends of the wires to a metal circlet which he clamped about his middle. For some moments he remained motionless and then crawled to the body of the second dead Earthman. One after another he examined each of the eighteen dead bodies. When he had completed he crawled over to Damis and Turgan.

"Put these bands about your brows," he commanded in thought language as he handed to each of them a metallic band similar to the one clasped about him. The two Earthmen quickly adjusted the bands. "Let your minds remain a blank and in them will be reproduced the impressions I have gathered from the brains of your dead followers."

Damis sprang suddenly upward and smote with all of his force at the air. Out of nothingness had materialized the form of a huge Jovian clad in the uniform of Glavour's guards. His blow went harmless through the thin air and the Jovian swung a massive ax. Just before the blow landed the Jovian disappeared and a thought wave from the Martian impinged on Damis' brain.

"Spare your energies, Nepthalim," the message said. "What you saw was not a Jovian but was the last impression stored in the brain of the man who met his death under a blow of the ax which seemed to be striking at you. I am merely reproducing in you the emotions and experiences that man felt. Had I allowed the phantom blow to land, you would now be cold in death, so great was the strength of the impression. Now make your mind again a blank and I will reveal to you what was in the mind of another at the instant that his death came upon him."

* * * * *

Before the Nepthalim's startled gaze, another Jovian appeared.

"Havenner!" he cried as he recognized the principal officer of Glavour. The equerry came forward slowly, blood dripping from a wound in his leg. He swung his ax but it went wide of the mark. Again he struck, but two Terrestrials attacked him from the rear and he whirled. For a moment, Damis had a chance to watch the conflict which was raging about him. Nine of the huge Jovians were engaged in deadly combat with a dozen of the Terrestrials who still remained on their feet. In the door of the space ship stood Lura, watching the conflict with frightened eyes. One after another of the Earthmen were stricken down. Suddenly a Jovian rushed at Damis but the scene went blank before the raised ax could strike him down.

"Have you seen enough or shall I show you the scenes in the brains of the others?" asked the Martian.

"I have seen and recognized nine of the Jovians," replied Damis, "yet among them was not the one I feared. Let me see into the brains of the others that I may be sure that Glavour was not among them."

Another scene materialized before him. It was merely a variation of those he had already seen. In the brain of one of the Terrestrials he saw the landing of the Jovian ship and the sudden outrush of the Sons of God, armed only with the forty-pound axes they used at close quarters. In none of the scenes did he see the huge form of Glavour. He removed the band with a sigh of relief.

"I broke Glavour's arms a few days back," he said to Turgan, "and it is probable that that prevented him from following us, even if he felt that he could leave the Earth in the turmoil which Toness had undoubtedly raised. It means that Lura is safe for the present, for Havenner would not dare to do other than to bring her to the Viceroy. We must follow them and endeavor to rescue her. I will ask our friends if they can plot her course for us."

* * * * *

"I have inquired as to that," replied the Martian to Damis' unspoken question, "and find we cannot. Soon after the ship left the surface of Mars, our observers sighted a Jovian fleet of a hundred flyers in the asteroid belt between here and Jupiter. They are nearly through the belt now and are headed toward your planet. Their path will bring them within a few thousand miles of Mars and every instrument on the planet is trained on them. While the Grand Mognac believes that Earth is their destination, never before have the Jovians approached us in such force and it may be that Tubain will try to avenge his former defeats by an attack in force. We have no instruments to spare to keep track of a lone flyer unless it changes its course and approaches us. There is one more source of information. I will examine the brains of the dead Jovians. Perhaps they know their leader's plans."

From the first Jovian the Martian turned away with an expression of disappointment.

"There is nothing in his brain but a scene of the fight with your followers, yet it may cheer you to know that at the last he felt fear, the emotion the Jovians boast is foreign to them," said the Martian. "I will examine the other."

With his crimson ray he removed the covering from the brain of the second Jovian and connected his wires. For a few moments he was motionless and then he removed the wires and crawled rapidly toward Damis.

"Nepthalim, here is what you wish," came his thoughts, jumbled in a chaotic state of excitement. "This man had a wonderful brain and the impressions of the last month are clear and distinct. Attend carefully and leave your mind a blank."

* * * * *

On the Martian plain buildings suddenly materialized before the Nepthalim's gaze. With a cry of astonishment he saw himself facing Glavour in defiance. Lura, who had been crouching behind him, ran into one of the buildings. Act by act, Damis saw the fight between himself and the Jovian Viceroy repeated. The Viceroy, one arm dangling uselessly, was whisked away in his chariot. The scene faded and another took its place. The Viceregal palace was beleaguered by thousands and scores of thousands of shouting Terrestrials. The Jovians sought with rays and with atomic bombs to disperse them, but where a score were blasted into nothingness or torn into fragments, a hundred fresh men took their place. Suddenly the Jovian rays began to fail. The Earthmen had found the secret source of power which supplied the palace and had cut it.

Again the scene faded and he was on a space ship with Havenner talking to him. The words he could not hear for the Martian could not comprehend a record of a sound. The pictures conjured up by the words were easy of comprehension and in picture forms the Martian conveyed to him the sense of the conversation. Havenner was telling him of their destination. First came a scene which he recognized as a Martian landscape. The Jovians swarmed from their space ship and struck down the Earthmen without exertion. Three were made captives: himself, Turgan, and Lura. The Jovians reentered the ship and sped away into space. Damis wondered what this last picture signified.

* * * * *

Another scene materialized and they were on another planet. It was not Mars and it was not Earth. For a moment he was puzzled. The sun, when it shone, was larger and fiercer than he had ever seen it, but it shone only for an instant. Blankets of cloud and fog hid it from view. Rain fell incessantly. Lush, rank vegetation covered the ground and rose in a tangle far overhead. The Jovians emerged from the space ship, the prisoners in their midst. A huge lizard, a hundred feet long, rushed at them but a flash of the disintegrating tubes dissolved it into dancing motes of light. The Jovians made their way through the steaming jungle until a huge city, roofed with a crystal dome which covered it and arched high into the air, appeared before them. Toward this city the Jovians marched.

"The crystal cities of Venus!" cried Turgan. Damis nodded in assent.

Again the scene changed and the Martian plain was before them. From the space ship the Jovians emerged, but instead of the easy victory they had had in the earlier scene, they found the task a difficult one. From all sides the Terrestrials charged at them and Damis found himself fighting against his compatriots. A sword flashed before his eyes and the scene was gone.

"Have you learned that which you sought?" came a Martian thought inquiry.

Damis hastily formed his thoughts into an affirmative message of thanks and turned to Turgan.

"We know now where to go," he cried exultingly. "Lura is safe until they land on Venus and enter the crystal cities, for Havenner would not dare to do otherwise than carry out the orders of Glavour. The Martian weapons which we have will insure us an easy victory. Come, let us hasten."

A thought message from the Martians stopped him.

* * * * *

"Those weapons on which you are planning, Nepthalim, were given to you by our Grand Mognac for the purpose of ridding your planet of your oppressors and of defending your planet against further Jovian attacks, not for the purpose of invading another planet with which we have no quarrel. If you will use them for the purpose for which they were given you, you may depart with them in peace. If you plan to go to Venus, the weapons will remain on Mars."

"We will go to the Earth and rid her of her oppressors," replied Damis, "but first we must go to Venus and rescue Lura."

"Venus lies beyond the sun," was the Martian answer, "while your planet and Mars are on the same side. It will take you five times as long to go to Venus as to go to the Earth. Meanwhile the Jovian fleet will have landed and your efforts will be in vain to dislodge them. Even now you must fly at your best speed to reach your planet before them."

"But we cannot abandon Lura. She is the only daughter of my comrade and she is my affianced bride. She means more to us than does the fate of our planet."

"Then go to Venus after her, Nepthalim, but go without Martian aid. Only to save you from your oppressors will we help you. Never has Mars attempted conquest of another celestial body, although not even Jupiter could stand against our might if we chose to attack it."

"You cannot understand her relationship to us, Martian."

"No, I cannot. We are sexless and sex exists on Mars only for the purpose for which it was intended, the perpetuation of our species. It may be that we have been mistaken. If the fate of one member of your species means more to you than the rescue of your whole race, it is perhaps well that you be eliminated by the Jovians. In any event, our decision is final. Make your choice of whether you depart with the weapons or as you came."

"Then I will go to Venus," cried Damis. "If necessary, I will fight the Jovians with bare hands, but I will rescue Lura or die in the attempt."

* * * * *

"And what of the Earthmen who trusted you, Nepthalim?" asked Turgan. "Dozens gave their lives gladly to capture the space ship in which we came here and thousands have gone cheerfully to annihilation to keep the Sons of God beleaguered in the Viceregal palace until we return with the weapons which will bring them victory. Think you that they would choose the destruction of enslavement of the whole race to the possible chance of rescuing one person from the grasp of Glavour's minions?"

"Turgan, you are mad!" cried Damis. "Have you forgotten that Lura is your only child?"

"Since the days of Hortan, Glavour has sought information as to the secret assembly room. Hundreds of men have gone to torture and death with their lips sealed when they could have bought life and freedom by speaking."

"Were it my own life, Turgan, I would not hesitate."

"Think you that never before has an Earthman been faced with the choice of betraying his countrymen or seeing his wife or daughter violated and sacrificed in the games? All have been true to the last and yet they could have done little harm had they spoken. You have the fate of the Earth in your hand, yet you hesitate. I am Lura's father and I know her better, it seems, than do you. If you abandon her countrymen, she will despise you for a coward. It is better that one or that many be lost than that all be lost."

Damis bowed his head in silence. Raised by the Jovians whose only ideal of life was their own selfish pleasure, the thought that the fate of thousands whom he did not know and in whom he felt little interest could be of more importance than the fate of the one whose safety meant more than life to him was a novel one. The lifelong training he had received from the Sons of God struggled, and struggled in vain, against the ideals he had inherited from his Earthly mother and his loved sire. With a face drawn with anguish, he raised his head.

* * * * *

"We will take your weapons, Martian, and with them go to Earth. If it be His will that Lura be safe, safe shall she be although the whole force of Jupiter threaten her. If not, His will be done. One promise I exact of you, Turgan. When we have reached Earth and I have taught your followers to use the Martian weapons, you will give me a crew and let me depart to Venus to find her."

"Gladly will I promise, and if I be spared, I will go with you, Damis," said Turgan. "Do not think that Lura is not dear to me; she is dearer than all else in the Universe save only the keeping bright the ideal of loyalty that has been the guiding light of the Terrestrials for untold ages."

"Your decision is well made, Nepthalim," said the Martian, "and word of it shall be given to the Grand Mognac that he may know that he made no mistake when he entrusted you with the weapons of Mars. Now for your course. When you rise, direct your ship toward Deiphos. The Jovian fleet is now at an ascension of forty-two degrees and at an angle of one hundred and sixty degrees from the sun. Deiphos will hide you from their instruments. Once you reach it, our observers will plot your course and send you a bearing which will take you as far from the Jovian fleet as possible. They are now passing Ceres and will soon be out of the asteroid belt. They are larger and more powerful than the ship you are flying and they will make better speed. However, if you use your maximum power, you will easily arrive on your planet before them. Have you fuel enough for your trip at full speed?"

Damis hastily inspected the fuel supply of the ship and made some rapid calculations.

"We have enough to carry us at maximum speed to Earth and to retard us to a safe landing, but very little to spare. Can you give us some?"

"There is no tantalum on Mars except a little scattered through tons of rock. It would take us days to extract enough to do you any good. It is well that you did not plan to fly to Venus for you could have made little speed and the Jovian flyer would have reached there long before you did. Now go, and may our best wishes aid you in your flight."

* * * * *

Damis turned and instinctively held out his hand. A trace of expression flickered over the face of the nearest Martian slug and he bent forward and clasped the proffered hand in one of the many hands with which he was provided. No further message came to Damis from the Martians and he entered the airlock with Turgan following him. As the lock clanged shut, he turned to his companion.

"Open the reserve air tanks and restore the atmosphere gradually to the pressure of Earth," he directed. "Unless you do that, we will be unable to function efficiently."

While Turgan opened the valve which allowed the reserve supply of compressed air to gradually enter the ship, Damis pulled down the starting lever of the ship. With a terrific lurch the flyer left the surface of Mars and shot up into the trackless realms of space. Abandoning his controls for an instant, Damis looked into one of the observers. The plain below them was empty of Martians, but in the distance he could dimly see two of the silvery domes which marked their cities. He made some short calculations and turned on a side motor for a moment. The ship swerved and headed for the Martian satellite to which he had been directed.

In an hour he was holding the ship less than a thousand miles from Deiphos while he received a message from the Grand Mognac as to the location of the Jovian fleet, their speed and course, and the course which he should fly to reach the Earth ahead of them. He noted down the directions and set the cross hairs of his forward observer on Alpha Centauri. His hand sought the controlling lever and the ship rapidly gathered momentum for the trip to Earth.

CHAPTER V

A Desperate Plan

Flying the space ship with a crew of two men instead of the normal nine threw a heavy strain on Damis. Turgan proved to be almost tireless, but while he could act as an observer, Damis devoutly hoped that no wandering celestial body would approach within the danger zone while he was alone on duty. Nothing of the sort happened. The days passed with monotonous slowness, yet daily and, indeed, hourly, the planet Mars faded to a red star and the green point of light which marked their destination grew larger. Damis cast many a longing glance at Venus, but he remained steadfast to the faith which Turgan had engendered in him. During the long hours Turgan had opportunity to tell the Nepthalim of some of the sacrifices made by Terrestrials for the cause of liberty. They filled Damis with amazement and moved him to awe to think of the loyalty and bravery displayed by those whom he had been taught from childhood to regard as a race of slaves, created solely to minister to their overlords.

Damis pushed the ship to the greatest acceleration which he dared to use, and, as they approached the Earth, he cast many an anxious glance at the diminishing fuel supply. For thirteen days he drove at high speed until the Earth seemed almost at hand. Using almost the full power of his bow motors, he checked its speed. For a time he thought he had overestimated the power of his motors and that it would be necessary to avoid the atmosphere belt, run past the Earth and return. At the middle of the fifteenth day, with the Earth less than a thousand miles away, he threw in his last notch of power.

The deceleration pressed them so tightly to the nose of the ship that they could hardly breathe. Damis lay with his hand on a side motor to throw them out of danger. Gradually the forward motion of the ship ceased and at last Damis rose with an effort and shut off the bow motors.

"We are falling under the influence of terrestrial gravity," he announced. "In another three hours, we will land."

* * * * *

He was as good as his word. Three hours later he dropped the space ship to a landing at a spot half a dozen miles distant from the beleaguered capital of the Sons of God. As he landed, the sun was just peeping over the eastern horizon.

Their approach had been seen and the ship was surrounded by hundreds of Terrestrial swordsmen. As the airlock opened and Damis and Turgan appeared there was silence for a moment and then a thunderous shout of joy rose to the heavens. From the forefront of the crowd, a crimson-robed man ran toward the ship.

"Turgan, my lord," he cried as fell on his knees and strove to kiss the Kildare's hand. "You are spared to us who had given you up for lost. Our spies reported that the Sons of God had followed you to Mars and had slain you all. Havenner reported to Glavour that you had made such a resistance that it was impossible to follow his orders and bring you back alive."

"Havenner!" cried Damis. "Havenner is on Venus with Lura."

"The ship of the Sons of God returned last night," replied the Akildare, "with a loss of two men of its crew and with the Princess Lura a prisoner."

Tears of joy sprang into Damis' eyes and ran unrestrained down his face.

"And she is safe?" he cried.

"One of our spies saw her and reports that she is well although in poor spirits. She is confined in the palace and will not be harmed. A Jovian fleet of a hundred ships is expected hourly with Tubain himself in command. A message to Glavour has ordered that Lura be held for Tubain's arrival, when he will dispose of her."

"What is the situation here, Toness?" interrupted Turgan. "I rejoice with Damis that my daughter is safe, yet, unless we are victorious, her present safety will avail her little."

* * * * *

"Things have gone neither well nor ill since your departure, Kildare," replied Toness. "I have followed out the great conspiracy as it was planned many years ago. Although we have lost thousands of our bravest men, we have the Sons of God besieged in the Viceregal palace and we have tapped and cut the secret source of power which Timour, the Akildare, found years ago. They have no weapons save some hand tubes that are not yet exhausted and their axes. Their most powerful weapons of offense are crippled, yet we cannot storm the palace in the face of the defenses they have left. Have you brought us any hope from Mars?"

"We have brought weapons against which all the power and science of the Sons of God are as helpless as is our feeble strength against their might," replied Turgan. "Send me men to transport these weapons, and in two hours not a Jovian will remain on the planet."

A wild cheer of joy from the assembled Terrestrials answered the words of the Kildare. A score of men ran forward and entered the space ship on the heels of Turgan. They reappeared in a few minutes carrying with the greatest of care the two terrible weapons which were the gift of the Grand Mognac. Damis suddenly looked up from a reverie in which he had been plunged.

"I have just figured it out," he exclaimed. "Despite his report to Glavour, Havenner knew that Turgan and I lived. He started away from Mars toward Venus, a destination which he had already informed his crew that they would make for. He feared the Martian weapons and he strove to draw us away toward Venus so that he would be safe. Once the Martian instruments had ceased to watch him, he altered his course and made for Earth. With his greater supply of fuel and more powerful ship, he was able to make a higher speed and, despite the additional million or two of miles, he was able to land before us. The thing that puzzles me is why we were not seen by the Jovians as we approached."

"You came from a different direction than Havenner, oh Nepthalim," replied Toness. "All of their instruments were either watching Havenner or the Jovian fleet. But for an accident, your approach would not have been noted by us. I am confident that the Sons of God have no idea that you have returned, especially since Havenner reported that he had slain you. We will take them by surprise. Where shall we take the weapons?"

"Take the one with the blue rod to the top of the mountain which overlooks the palace and set it so that the rod points in the direction from which Tubain's fleet is approaching. That hill is less than two miles from the palace, so you had better take them both there. Point the red rod toward the palace."

* * * * *

At a word from Toness, the Terrestrials started off with the weapons for the point indicated by Damis. The Nepthalim and Turgan followed them, relating their adventure on the red planet as they walked along. The shutting off of the Jovian source of power had effectually crippled all of the power-driven chariots which certain of the higher officials among the Earthmen had been allowed to maintain.

On the top of the hill overlooking the palace grounds the two Martian weapons were placed on the ground, side by side. Damis carefully aligned the red rod on the Viceregal palace. When he had it set, with a word of warning, he closed the gravity anchor switch. The instrument settled a trifle on the solid rock on which it was bedded and then was motionless. At a word from Damis, as many of the Terrestrials as could find a hand-rest pushed against it. It was as though they were pressing against the mountain itself. Damis sighted along the rod and adjusted it until it pointed at the center of the building.

"So much for that one," he said. "It is the less powerful of the two, but it will be enough to destroy the Sons of God and the Nepthalim who are in the palace. The few who are scattered over the Earth, we can dispose of at our leisure. If the Jovian fleet approaches the Earth from directly above us, we will be able to destroy it easily. In any event, this weapon is to be used only when it is approximately normal to the surface of the Earth. We must have it almost under the point from which the Jovians are approaching. That may be on the opposite side of the Earth."

"I think not, Nepthalim," said Toness. "We know that Glavour and Tubain have been in constant communication since the Jovian fleet passed Mars and he expects them to land here. There would be no object in their taking a circuitous route, so they will probably drop directly down in the palace grounds."

"Let us hope so, Toness. In any event, we might as well anchor the weapon here as elsewhere."

* * * * *

He set the weapon with the blue rod on another patch of bare rock and tested the rod to make sure that it revolved freely and could be made to cover the entire heavens from horizon to horizon. He closed the gravity anchor switch and again the efforts of a dozen Terrestrials were futile to move it.

"Now we are ready for their attack," he said to Turgan. "You are as familiar with these weapons as I am, but I will instruct a dozen of your followers in using them. It is possible that we may not be able to operate the weapons ourselves."

"I can operate one weapon while you manipulate the other, Damis," replied the Kildare. "However, no harm will be done in instructing others."

"I may not be here," said Damis briefly.

Without replying to the questions of Turgan and Toness, he proceeded to instruct a dozen of the Earthmen in the use of the terrible Martian weapons. When he was certain that he had a half dozen men capable of attending to each of the weapons, he turned to Turgan.

"I may not be here when the weapons are used," he said. "When I thought that Lura had gone to Venus, I gave her up and sacrificed both her and my heart on the altar of our cause, for it is what she would have chosen. Now I have accomplished the sacrifice and returned with the Martian weapons to find that she is a captive in the Viceroy's palace. We can turn on the rays and reduce the building and all in it to a pinch of dust in a few seconds, but Lura would be immolated with the Sons of God. The weapons are here; our men know how to use them, and my usefulness is at an end. Now I stand here with no more responsibility for our success than the humblest swordsman. Since I am no longer needed, I will leave the fate of the Earth to you and follow out my private designs."

"Where are you going, Nepthalim?" cried Toness. The question was echoed by all within the sound of his voice. Only Turgan smiled as though he knew Damis' answer.

* * * * *

"Where could I go, Akildare, but to one place?" replied the Nepthalim. "I go to Glavour's palace. I have two errands there. One is to rescue Lura and the other is to mete out to Glavour the death which I swore that I would accomplish. The rays can be turned on and the palace demolished at any time, but I ask that you wait until I return with Lura or until you know that we are dead."

"But if the Jovian fleet arrives before that time, Nepthalim?" demanded Toness.

"Then give the word for the use of the weapons, Akildare, and Lura's soul and mine will join the thousands of others whose lives are but a part of the price the race of Earthmen have had to pay to rid their planet of the Sons of God."

"It grieves me, Damis, to see you go to certain death," said Turgan sadly to the blond giant, "yet I will say nothing to stop you. Were it not that my presence would hinder you in your attempt, I would accompany you."

"Your place, Kildare, is at the head of your men, whom you were born to rule. I can hope to succeed only by stealth, else a thousand men would come with me. Now call from the ranks one who is a barber that he may change the color of my hair and alter my face that I shall not be known."

At the Kildare's word, three men stepped forward from the ranks of swordsmen and announced themselves adepts in the art of disguise. Swift runners were sent to bring supplies and the three labored over Damis. When they had finished their ministrations, only a close observer would have known him under the bushy black beard which covered his face.

CHAPTER VI

In the Seraglio

With a parting word to Turgan and his followers, Damis made his way alone down the hill and into the thick tropical jungle which grew up almost to the gates of the Viceregal palace. He was well acquainted with a secret entrance into the building. It was a matter of minutes for him to locate the outer end and open it.

For half a mile he made his way underground until a huge stone door barred his way. He felt for the hidden catches and the slab of rock rose before him. As he turned toward the doorway he found himself looking into the muzzle of a black ray tube in the hands of a gigantic Jovian in the uniform of the Viceroy's guards.

"Whence came you, Nepthalim?" demanded the guard, a cold note of suspicion in his voice.

"From far Torna," replied Damis readily. "I am Durmino, Komar of the province of Capries. The slaves rose on us and all were slain except me. I have had to travel by night and hide by day to reach here. I knew not whether the slaves had conquered or not, but when I found them lying by thousands about Glavour's palace, I knew that the reign of the Sons of God was safe. What news from Tubain?"

The face of the Jovian guard cleared as Damis spoke. Durmino, a son of Glavour by one of his Terrestrial concubines, was Komar of Capries, a fact well known to Damis. There was nothing in the newcomer's story to excite suspicion.

"The fleet of the Ruler of the Universe is approaching," the guard replied. "In two hours it will be hovering above us. We would have needed no aid had not the dogs of Earthmen found our source of power and managed to destroy it with stolen ray tubes. We have been cooped up here like rats waiting for Tubain to arrive. When he comes our vengeance will be heavy."

"The heavier the better," growled Damis with an oath. "The dogs have been getting surly for a generation. I hope that Tubain will teach them a lesson that will not be forgotten for ages to come."

"He will, never fear," laughed the guard. "Already Glavour has made his plans. I am not a member of the council, yet I have heard enough to realize why Glavour is our ruler. My brain could not conceive of such a stupendous plan."

"I will go to my father now," said Damis. "What is the word for passing the inner gate? I wish to surprise my sire for he doubtless mourns me as dead."

"He thinks you are dead," replied the guard, "yet I never heard of Glavour mourning for any loss which did not affect his pleasures. He has plenty of bastards to take your place. The word is 'Tubain.'"

"I thank you, Son of God," said Damis, "and I will inform my sire of the great respect and high regard which you have for him. Fear not, your words shall be truthfully reported to him."

* * * * *

Leaving the Jovian guard hastily reviewing the conversation with the supposed Durmino, Damis made his way toward the palace. Since he knew that he would not reach another door until after several of the underground passages with which the foundations of the palace were honeycombed had joined, he had little doubt of his ability to make his way unsuspected into the citadel. He debated for a moment on the advisability of killing the Jovian guard and taking his weapons, but caution prevailed, and empty-handed, save for a dagger concealed under his robes, he strode forward.

His knowledge of the password enabled him to pass the various guards he met without difficulty. There were many of the Nepthalim who held subordinate positions in the outlying provinces and who were seldom at court, and the Jovian guards, who in their hearts regarded the Nepthalim as little better than the Terrestrials, paid small attention to him. He passed several guarded points before the path rose steeply and he passed through the final gate into the palace itself. A Nepthalim passed him hurriedly and Damis plucked at his robe.

"I am just from outpost," he said. "What news of Tubain?"

"The fleet has entered the atmosphere belt a thousand miles east of here," replied the Nepthalim. "They are dropping to an altitude of five miles and will then approach. They should arrive in an hour. It is well that they hurry."

"What rush is there?" asked Damis in surprise. "We may not be able to leave here, but, at the same time, all the forces the slaves can muster would never force an entrance."

* * * * *

"You have not heard then?" exclaimed the other in surprise. "No--certainly not, if you have been on outpost--for I just learned it myself. There is a rumor that Havenner lied when he said that he killed Turgan, the Kildare and Damis, the renegade--the curse of Tubain rest on him--on Mars. It is said that they not only escaped death but have returned to Earth armed with the weapons of the red planet. Havenner is with Glavour now and no one knows what the outcome will be. Since Tubain is at hand, doubtless nothing will be done until he arrives. That is the reason why Tubain altered his course and came down so far away instead of directly overhead. He hopes thus to elude the Martian weapons if the Earthmen really have them."

"Surely that is a lie!" cried Damis.

"We hope that it is, yet Havenner would have been slain without mercy had he admitted that he left Mars without slaying or capturing Turgan and Damis. Many believe that it is true."

"Is Glavour in the council room?" asked Damis. "I have a message."

"It would be better for you to defer the message if it be ill news until Tubain arrives, brother, for Glavour is enraged beyond measure at all of us. He threatens to sacrifice us at the next games and he may do so unless Tubain alters the decree. He has not loved us since Damis broke his arm a month ago."

"Nevertheless, I will deliver my message," replied Damis. "While it may not please him, it is essential that he get it before Tubain arrives."

"Good luck go with you, brother," replied the Nepthalim with a shrug of his shoulders. "The temper of the Viceroy of God is an uncertain quality at best. He is in his seraglio."

* * * * *

Damis saluted the messenger and made his way toward the inner portion of the palace where the women whom the lustful Viceroy had dragged into his harem were kept. He had no plausible excuse for passing the guards into this forbidden portion of the palace, but that was a matter which caused him small worry. There were few of the secrets of the palace which were not well known to Damis, who had at one time been major domo of the building. There were some well known to him, the existence of which was not even suspected by the majority of the Sons of God.

As he neared the seraglio, he turned off to his right and passed through a maze of little-used passages until he halted before what was apparently a blank wall. Casting a rapid glance around to ensure himself that there was no one in sight, he touched a hidden catch and a portion of the wall swung inward, opening a way before him. He entered a passage built in the thickness of the wall and lighted with radium bulbs. The door closed softly behind him. He removed his sandals lest even their quiet tread should betray him and on bare feet crept forward.

The passage bent and twisted as it followed the walls until Damis knew that he was in one of the walls of the seraglio. Praying that it would work noiselessly, he slid open a panel of stone and found himself looking through a semi-transparent hanging into the sacred precincts of the seraglio itself. Glavour stood facing him, his heavy face drawn up in a scowl of rage. Damis noted with satisfaction that one of the Viceroy's arms was supported by a silk scarf and that he made no attempt to use it. With a pale face, Havenner stood before his ruler.

* * * * *

"The word has been brought to me from a source which I trust as much as I do your own word, Havenner," Glavour was saying. "I tell you, I do not believe your story. If Damis and Turgan were dead, the Terrestrials would not see them alive again on Earth. Neither would they have weapons of which we know nothing. One of our observers admits that he saw a space ship land a few hours ago, coming from the direction of Mars. You failed in your mission, Havenner, and on you I pronounce the doom. I sentence you to the twilight of the gods."

"I appeal to Tubain from that sentence!" cried the equerry with dry lips.

"Your appeal shall be noted and laid before him at the proper time," replied the Viceroy savagely; "yet, by the time he arrives, it will be too late. Ho, Guards! Take him away."

Havenner turned as though to resist, but six of the huge Jovians answered the Viceroy's call. Two of them grasped him by the arms and started to lead him from the room.

"I appeal!" cried Havenner again. "I brought back the maiden whom I was sent to fetch, and for that reason I made no failure. To bring her was the principal item of my orders."

Glavour's face grew purple with rage.

"And who sent the message to Tubain which resulted in the orders which he sent me?" he demanded savagely. "It was sent by one of your henchmen and by your orders. You slew the sender before I could question him, but I know whose orders he obeyed. Take him away!"

The guards started to drag the luckless equerry from the presence of the Viceroy, but Havenner made a final appeal for his life.

"I will confess, Viceroy of God," he cried. "No message was sent to Tubain. I dared not send such a message lest such orders would be returned as I caused to be given to you. I coveted the maiden for myself and I took this means of getting her. I had a false message delivered to you which would prevent you from taking her before Tubain arrived. In reward for my services as spy on you, I planned to ask that she be given to me. I surrender all claims to her, Glavour. Spare my life and you may have her."

* * * * *

For a moment Glavour could not speak for rage.

"So you have been the spy who has reported my every doing and my every secret council to Tubain!" he gasped. "But for you, I would long ago have conquered Venus and Mercury and declared myself independent of the Jovian overlord. In time I might have even overthrown him, but every move was known to him before I made it. Not once, but a dozen times, would you go through the twilight were Tubain not at hand. Niton, it is my order that the twilight be as slow as our instruments will allow. Give him time to learn to suffer and to pray for the blessing of death at my hand. Take him away!"

The struggling Havenner was removed by the guards despite his efforts at resistance and his cries for mercy. Glavour stared after him for a moment and an evil gleam came into his eyes.

"Sonom!" he called sharply.

A guard entered the room and saluted.

"Sonom, bring me the Daughter of Man, Lura!" cried the Viceroy. "When you have brought her here, post guards at all doors and see that no one is admitted under any circumstances until Tubain himself arrives and demands admittance."

The guard hesitated.

"Your Excellency," he faltered, "the orders from Tubain were--"

"False rumors given out by the traitor, Havenner, who has now gone to the twilight of the gods," interrupted the Viceroy. "By the crown of Tubain, do I need to repeat my orders? I am Viceroy of the Earth and am supreme until Tubain revokes my rank. Obey my orders!"

* * * * *

The guard saluted and withdrew. Glavour licked his thick lips in anticipation and strode restlessly back and forth across the room. Inside the hangings, Damis' face hardened and he drew his dagger from under his robe. The door opened and Sonom returned, dragging Lura after him. The face of the Earth-girl was pale and drawn, yet, when she saw Glavour, her head rose in an expression of defiance. Sonom saluted the Viceroy and left the room, the massive door clanging shut behind him. Glavour stared at the girl with an evil leer on his heavy countenance.

"I have learned, Daughter of Man," he said slowly, "of how you seduced one of my servants from his duty to me and caused him to forge an order from the great Tubain in order that he might keep you for his own pleasure. For a time the stratagem succeeded, but now my eyes are open. When I first looked upon your face and form I swore to myself that you should be the solace of my leisure hours. Now the time is come. I was minded once to honor you as Hortan once honored a Terrestrial and let you amuse yourself by sitting on a throne, but your treachery has changed my intention. Not even as an accepted concubine shall you rank, but only as a slave to be used as a toy and tossed to one of my guards when I am tired of you. Come hither!"

Lura made no move to obey the order, and Glavour with an oath stepped toward her, his one good arm outstretched in a grasping gesture. Lura did not move until his hand almost closed on her arm and then she sprang back. Her hand sought the bosom of her robe and the Viceroy recoiled as a glittering dagger flashed in the air.

"Back, Jovian!" cried Lura in ringing tones. "Think you that the daughter of a king of men is to be a toy for your base Jovian passions? The point of this dagger is poisoned so that one touch through your skin will mean death. One step nearer and I will strike!"

* * * * *

The Viceroy hesitated for a moment and then drew from his robe a short thick tube. Lura correctly interpreted the gesture.

"Raise that tube and I will bury the blade in my own body!" she cried. "I know that you have the power to clasp me in your arms, but it will be a corpse which you clasp."

She lowered the knife until the point rested against the skin of her throat. The slightest pressure would cause it to penetrate her skin and bring about her almost instant death. Glavour watched her like a cat, the tube ready in his hand. With a grim laugh he threw the tube from him and walked a few steps away. Lura lowered the knife. As she did so, Glavour turned with a movement so swift that the eye could hardly follow it. His eyes caught Lura's and she straightened back her head, powerless against his will, caught as she was, momentarily off her guard.

"Throw down your knife," said Glavour's voice slowly. Lura struggled to raise the weapon against herself, but she could not. Slowly her fingers relaxed and the weapon clattered on the floor. Still holding her eyes with his own, Glavour stepped forward until his huge splayed foot rested on the weapon. He averted his gaze and swiftly picked it up. Lura gave a scream of horror and strove to fly, but the heavy door was barred against her. Glavour placed the weapon in a cabinet on the wall which he locked and then turned to her, an expression of triumph on his face.

"It is useless, Daughter of Man, to struggle against the will of the Sons of God," he said mockingly. "What we desire is ours. Come to me."

Lura's face showed an expression of loathing as she looked at the huge misshapen monstrosity before her. The Viceroy forgot the momentary satisfaction of his triumph in his rage at her attitude. With a growl of anger he grasped at her. Lura avoided his rush and ran along the side of the room, Glavour in pursuit. He cornered her at last and she stopped with her back to the tapestry with which the room was hung. Glowering in his triumph, Glavour approached and reached out his hand to seize her. His huge paw descended, but before it touched her shoulder a hand with fingers of steel reached through the hangings and grasped his wrist.

* * * * *

When Sonom had dragged Lura into the room, Damis inserted the point of his dagger into the tapestry and started to cut a slit through which he could enter the room. The keen-edged knife cut for a few inches readily enough and then stopped. Damis withdrew the blade and examined the stuff before him. An expression of dismay crossed his face, for the material was crisscrossed with stellanium wires, set six inches apart. Each juncture was braised together and the whole made a web through which he could not force his way. Cautiously he exerted his strength. The keen blade hewed through the first of the stellanium strands, but Damis held his breath as the wire parted. It seemed impossible that the ting of parting metal which sounded like a thunderclap in his ears would not be heard by the Viceroy. He knew that there must be an entrance into the room through the hangings and he made his way cautiously forward, testing the draperies from time to time with his knife.

When Lura laid her dagger against her breast and threatened to end her life, it took all of Damis' self-control to keep from crying out and striving to force his way into the room by sheer strength. He knew the toughness of stellanium well enough to realize the impossibility of even his enormous strength tearing apart a webbing of it. The certainty that Glavour would not push matters far enough to rob himself of his prey aided him to restrain his ardor and to pursue his systematic search.

He came at last to a corner where his knife met with no resistance as it made its way through the silken stuff on the walls. Swiftly he cut a slit through which he could rush. As he parted the material, Lura rushed past him and stood with her back to the wall to await the oncoming Viceroy. Damis raised his hand and stood ready. As Glavour's huge paw descended on Lura's shoulder Damis' hand shot out. Still holding the wrist of the Viceroy in a grip of steel, he emerged from his hiding place, tearing off the black wig and beard which disguised him.

"Damis!" cried Lura in wonder and delight as she saw him.

* * * * *

Glavour stared with unbelieving eyes for a moment and then a hoarse cry of alarm burst from his lips. Desperately he strove to release his wrist from the Nepthalim's grip, but to no avail. He disengaged his crippled arm from the scarf which supported it and groped under his robe for a weapon. Lura cried out in warning, but Damis had anticipated such a move. With a quick effort he whirled about and drew the Viceroy's arm over his shoulder. He bent forward and exerted his full strength. The huge bulk of Glavour rose in the air and pitched forward over Damis' shoulder. There was a crash as he landed on the marble floor. Quick as a cat, Damis sprang on him and pinioned down his arms.

"Take his weapons, Lura!" he cried.

Lura bent over the prostrate form of the Jovian to take from his belt the tubes which he habitually carried there. As she stooped, Glavour raised one of his huge feet and struck her with all the force of his mighty thighs behind the blow. With a cry of pain, Lura flew halfway across the room. Damis leaped to her assistance, forgetting for a moment the potentialities for destruction which the Viceroy bore on his person. A sudden sound made him whirl about. He bent over Lura and picked her from the floor. With her in his arms he leaped to one side just as a flash of violet light stabbed through the air. It missed them by inches. He dropped Lura on a rug and turned to face Glavour.

On the Jovian's face was an expression of fiendish triumph. In his hand was a short black tube which he aimed with deliberate slowness at the crouching Nepthalim. Damis shifted his gaze from the Viceroy's eyes and concentrated it on the muscles of his wrist. Glavour's grip tightened and Damis leaped to one side as the violet light again stabbed the air. With an oath, Glavour swung the deadly ray in an arc trying to reach the Nepthalim, but Damis moved like a cat. Once, as the ray almost touched him, he sprang high in the air and let it sweep by under him. With each movement he came nearer to the Viceroy. Slowly the violet began to lose its intensity of color. Glavour dropped it and reached for a second tube. Before he could draw one, Damis was on him.

CHAPTER VII

The Deluge

Few of the Sons of God and none of the Nepthalim, save Damis, could match the brute strength of the Viceroy. As Damis rushed, Glavour sidestepped and caught the Nepthalim's arm in a bone-crushing grasp. Damis made no effort to break the grip, but with his free hand he gripped the wrist of Glavour's crippled arm. With a quick effort he twisted it and the Viceroy gave a shriek of pain as the newly knit bone gave way and his arm fell, dangling and useless. Damis caught his sound arm in a powerful grip and twisted slowly on his wrist. Gradually Glavour's fingers relaxed and Damis' arm was free. His hands shot up and gripped Glavour about the throat just in time to shut off the cry for help which was forming on his thick lips. The two giants strove silently for mastery in the struggle which meant life for the victor and death for the vanquished. The expression in Damis' eyes was one of confident mastery, but the face of the Jovian showed something that was strangely akin to fear. Even when he was whole, Glavour had found that his strength was no match for the power that lay in Damis' graceful limbs. With one of the Viceroy's arms useless, the issue was a foregone conclusion.

Glavour's face gradually grew purple and his eyes started out of their sockets. His tongue protruded horribly from his opened jaws. He grew weaker until it was only Damis' grip which kept him from falling to the ground. Then Damis broke his silence and spoke slowly and distinctly into the dying Viceroy's ears.

* * * * *

"I was loyal to you, Glavour," he said, "despite your brutality and sensuality which sickened me, until you strove to add to your already crowded seraglio the maiden whom I had chosen. As a Nepthalim, you thought I had no right which you need respect and I would tamely submit to whatever you chose to do. You forgot that in my veins run the best blood of Earth and the proudest blood of Jupiter. Hortan was a Mildash of Jupiter, a rank to which you could never aspire. I restricted your efforts and proved to you a thing which I long have known, that, man to man, I am your superior.

"Even then you might have won back my loyalty had I not learned how my father and my mother came to their death. It has always been given out that they went to Jupiter on a summons from Tubain, but I know the truth. They died under the knife of a cowardly assassin, under your knife, Glavour. Then it was that I swore that it would be my hand that would strike you down. When you raised your hand against me, you were Viceroy of the Earth and your power was secure, for the conspiracy against you had no hope of success. What is the situation now? You are beleaguered in your palace, holding only the ground your few feeble weapons cover. Even this ground you hold only on the sufferance of the Earthmen. Listen to what I say, for I wish your last moments to be bitter ones. On the hill east of the city sit two weapons of a type and a power unknown to both Earth and Jupiter. They are the deadly black ray weapons of Mars. Ah, you tremble! You have good cause. One of them is trained on this palace while the other searches the heavens, ready to blast into powder the fleet of Tubain when it appears. And who, think you, brought this about, Glavour? It was I, Damis, the Nepthalim, the 'half-breed bastard' whom you despised. My only regret is that I cannot send you to the twilight of the gods as you sent that other arch-traitor, Havenner. Are your last moments pleasant, Glavour? I am increasing the pressure slowly so that you will have time to think, to think of the Earthmen you have given to sacrifice and torture, to think of your ruler, Hortan, dying under your knife, to think of the doom which is about to overcome your race. Think, Glavour, for your time for thought is short."

* * * * *

As he finished, Damis thrust back on the Viceroy's chin with a sudden effort. There was a dull crack as Glavour's neck broke and Damis gently lowered the inert bulk to the floor. He felt a touch on his arm as he straightened up. He whirled like a cat and Lura shrank back with a frightened gesture. Damis opened his arms and in an instant the Earth-girl was folded in them.

"Is my father safe?" was her first question.

"Safer by far than we are," exclaimed Damis with a sudden pang of anxiety. He glanced at the time-recording device on the wall. Three-quarters of an hour had passed since he had first entered the Viceregal palace. If the estimates of Tubain's arrival which he had heard were correct, the Jovian fleet should be almost most overhead. "Come," he cried to Lura, "we have no time to lose if we escape before the palace and all in it are destroyed. Where did Havenner land his ship?"

"In the yard west of the palace," she replied.

"Pray that it is still there," said Damis. "We can reach it through the path by which I entered this room. Come quickly."

With Lura at his heels, he passed through the rent in the tapestry and entered the secret passage through the walls. The way twisted and turned interminably, but finally he paused before a door. Before opening it he slid back a panel which opened a peep-hole and looked out.

"The ship is there," he whispered in a voice of relief. "There is only one guard over it that I can see. Why didn't I think to bring Glavour's weapons? I'll have to try to catch him by surprise. When I open the door, run straight for the space ship as though you were trying to escape from me. Don't try to dodge the guard, keep right on for the ship. As soon as I overpower the guard, get in the ship and hold your hand on the starting lever. When I get on board, throw in the power at a low rate. We don't want to rise rapidly enough to get out of easy control. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Damis," she whispered.

* * * * *

He watched until a sudden shout drew the attention of the sentry momentarily away from the ship he was guarding. A confused sound of cheering came from the palace and the sentry looked toward the western heavens. A moment of gazing and he raised his voice in a raucous shout of joy. Instantly Damis swung open the door.

Lura sped out like a frightened deer with Damis in close pursuit. The attention of the sentry was fixed on some distant object in the sky and he did not see the oncoming pair until Lura was only a few yards from him. The sound of her footsteps attracted his attention and he glanced down at her. An expression of surprise came over his heavy features and he reached for a weapon. His gesture was never finished, for Damis' fist caught him under the ear and he dropped in his tracks. Damis looked in the direction in which the sentry had been staring and a cry broke from his lips.

"The fleet of Tubain!" he cried.

A thousand yards in the air and a scant five miles to the west was a clump of half a dozen Jovian space flyers. Massed behind them were a hundred more. They were approaching with tremendous velocity.

Damis gave a mighty bound and leaped through the airlock of the ship. Hardly had he cleared the door than Lura pulled down the starting lever. The ship flew up from the ground. Hardly had it left its ways than a momentary flash came from the hill east of the palace. The air grew black around them and a cold as of interstellar space penetrated their very bones. In an instant the ship had flashed up into the sun above the zone of influence of the Martian weapon. The shouting from the palace was suddenly stilled. Damis looked down, but nothing could be seen save a pall of intense blackness over the ground where the building stood.

"The port motor, Lura!" cried Damis. The Jovian fleet was approaching so rapidly that a collision with the nearest flyer seemed inevitable. There was a roar from the air as Lura threw in the port blast with its maximum power. Damis was hurled against the side of the ship.

* * * * *

From the hill where the Martian weapons had been placed came a second flash of light and a beam of jetty blackness shot through the air. An edge of it brushed the ship for an instant and Lura stiffened. A terrible cold bit through the flyer and the side where the Martian ray had touched crumpled into powder. The ship sped on, and the friction of the air and the bright rays of the sun dissipated the extreme cold. Through the terrific storm which was raging, the black ray stabbed again and again. Back and forth it played and ship after ship of the Jovians was momentarily caught in the beam. When the beam passed on there was nothing left of the ship save a cloud of dust which the terrific wind dissipated in all directions.

Damis glanced at the Earth below him. It seemed to be flying past the ship at a velocity which he could hardly comprehend. He made his way against the pressure of the movement to the control levers and strove to check the speed. As the Earth ceased to revolve beneath them, the wind rose to a terrible force.

"What has happened, Damis?" shrieked Lura in his ear.

"I don't know," he shouted in reply. "I am trying to keep away from the neighborhood of the palace for a while until the Jovian fleet is destroyed. Toness and your father might not be able to tell us from one of Tubain's ships and they might turn the ray on us."

* * * * *

He bent over the control levers of the ship, but they refused to obey his touch. The stern motor still roared with enough force to keep them three thousand feet above the ground, but none of the side motors responded to the controls. The ship was helpless and was tossed about, a plaything of the terrific wind which howled through the heavens. Damis watched the ground below them.

"Look, Lura!" he cried.

They swept over the site of the palace. The black ray was no longer playing on it, but the whole palace glistened like crystal.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Frost!" he shouted. "The Martian weapon did its work well. Everything in that palace is frozen. In the name of Tubain!"

The Jovian ejaculation had burst from his lips, unbidden, at the sight which met his gaze. Racing over the land was a solid wall of water, hundreds of feet high and moving with enormous speed. On toward the palace it swept. Below they could see the Earthmen on the hill striving to fly, but there was no place of safety. The oncoming wall of water was higher by a hundred feet than the top of the hill and it was the highest bit of land for many miles.

Nearer and nearer came the water until with a roar and a crash which they could plainly hear in the crippled space ship, it swept over the hill and the palace, burying them under a hundred feet of brine.

"Father!" cried Lura in anguish.

Damis made his way across the ship and folded her in his arms.

"He was chosen as one of the lives needed to buy the freedom of the Earth," he murmured to her. "It is hard, for I loved him as a father; but it was the end which he would have chosen. He died at the head of his followers battling for freedom."

* * * * *

"What happened, Damis?" asked Lura an hour later as she looked down on the seething tumult of water under them.

"As nearly as I can figure out, the Jovian fleet approached the palace from the west at a low elevation. In order to destroy them, we could not use the Martian weapon normal to the Earth's surface as they commanded us, but were forced to use it tangentially. The enormous counter reaction to the stream of force of almost incredible intensity which was shot at Tubain's flyers, had to be absorbed in some way. The weapon could not take it up as it was anchored to the center of gravity of the earth. As a result, the force was translated into one of increased rotation. The Earth must be spinning on its axis at fully twice its former rate. Both the air and the water had too much inertia to follow the accelerated motion of the land, so the wind blew a gale and the oceans left their beds and swept over the land. Everything must have been swept to destruction before this flood."

"And all our labor and sacrifice has been useless," cried Lura. "We have freed a world at the cost of the lives of its inhabitants."

"The world is not lost, sweetheart," he cried as he clasped her to him. "The floods will not have overwhelmed the mountains and some men and animals will have escaped. The waters will subside in a few weeks as they take up the new rotation of the Earth. By His will, we are spared for the labor of building a new world. As soon as the land again appears above the waters, we will land and assemble those who have been spared. The fleet of Jupiter has been destroyed and we need fear no fresh attack for ages, perhaps never. Unhampered, we will build a new world and try to avoid the mistakes of the old one.

"Look, Damis!" exclaimed Lura in a hushed tone.

From the spray and mist below them leaped a living bridge of colored light. Above the sun it arced its way into the heavens in the direction in which they knew Mars lay.

"It is His promise," whispered Damis reverently, "that henceforth the planets will live in peace and amity and that nevermore will the Jovians be allowed to invade us."

Contents

THE STUTTERER

BY R. R. MERLISS

A man can be killed by a toy gun--he can die of fright, for heart attacks can kill. What, then, is the deadly thing that must be sealed away, forever locked in buried concrete--a thing or an idea?

Out of the twenty only one managed to escape the planet. And he did it very simply, merely by walking up to the crowded ticket window at one of the rocket ports and buying passage to Earth. His Army identification papers passed the harassed inspection of the agent, and he gratefully and silently pocketed the small plastic stub that was handed him in exchange for his money.

He picked his way with infinite care through the hordes of ex-soldiers clamoring for passage back to the multitudinous planets from which they had come. Then he slowly climbed the heavy ramp into the waiting rocket.

He saw with relief that the seats were strongly constructed, built to survive the pressure of many gravities and he chose one as far removed as possible from the other passengers.

He was still very apprehensive, and, as he waited for the rocket to take off, he tried hard to remember the principles of the pulse drive that powered the ship, and whether his additional weight would upset its efficiency enough to awaken suspicion.

The seats filled quickly with excited hurrying passengers. Soon he heard the great door clang shut, and saw the red light flicker on, warning of the take-off. He felt a slow surge of pressure as the ship arose from the ground, and his chair creaked ominously with the extra weight. He became fearful that it might collapse, and he strained forward trying to shift some of the pressure through his feet to the floor. He sat that way, tense and immobile, for what seemed a long time until abruptly the strain was relieved and he heard the rising and falling whine of the rockets that told him the ship was in pulse drive, flickering back and forth across the speed of light.

He realized that the pilots had not discovered his extra weight, and that the initial hazards were over. The important thing was to look like a passenger, a returning soldier like the others, so that no one would notice him and remember his presence.

His fellow travelers were by this time chatting with one another, some playing cards, and others watching the teledepth screens. These were the adventurers who had flocked from all corners of the galaxy to fight in the first national war in centuries. They were the uncivilized few who had read about battle and armed struggle in their history books and found the old stories exciting.

They paid no attention to their silent companion who sat quietly looking through the quartz windows at the diamond-bright stars, tacked against the blackness of infinity.

The fugitive scarcely moved the entire time of the passage. Finally when Earth hung out in the sky like a blue balloon, the ship cut its pulsations and swung around for a tail landing.

The atmosphere screamed through the fins of the rocket, and the continents and the countries, and then the rivers and the mountains took shape. The big ship settled down as gently as a snowflake, shuddered a few times and was quiet.

* * * * *

The passengers hurriedly gathered up their scattered belongings and pushed toward the exit in a great rush to be out and back on Earth.

The fugitive was the last to leave. He stayed well away from the others, being fearful that, if he should touch or brush up against someone, his identity might be recognized.

When he saw the ramp running from the ship to the ground, he was dismayed. It seemed a flimsy structure, supported only by tubular steel. Five people were walking down it, and he made a mental calculation of their weight--about eight hundred pounds he thought. He weighed five times that. The ramp was obviously never built to support such a load.

He hesitated, and then he realized that he had caught the eye of the stewardess waiting on the ground. A little panicky, he stepped out with one foot and he was horrified to feel the steel buckle. He drew back hastily and threw a quick glance at the stewardess. Fortunately at the moment she was looking down one field and waving at someone.

The ramp floor was supported by steel tubes at its edges and in its exact center. He tentatively put one foot in the middle over the support and gradually shifted his weight to it. The metal complained creakily, but held, and he slowly trod the exact center line to Earth. The stewardess' back was turned toward him as he walked off across the field toward the customhouse.

He found it comforting to have under his feet what felt like at least one yard of cement. He could step briskly and not be fearful of betraying himself.

There was one further danger: the customs inspector.

He took his place at the end of the line and waited patiently until it led him up to a desk at which a uniformed man sat, busily checking and stamping declarations and traveling papers. The official, however, did not even look up when he handed him his passport and identification.

"Human. You don't have to go through immigration," the agent said. "Do you have anything to declare?"

"N-no," the traveler said. "I d-didn't bring anything in."

"Sign the affidavit," the agent said and pushed a sheet of paper toward him.

The traveler picked up a pen from the desk and signed "Jon Hall" in a clear, perfect script.

The agent gave it a passing glance and tossed it into a wire basket.

Then he pushed his uniform cap back exposing a bald head. "You're my last customer for a while, until the rocket from Sirius comes in. Guess I might as well relax for a minute." He reached into a drawer of the desk and pulled out a package of cigarettes, of which he lit one.

"You been in the war, too?" he asked.

Hall nodded. He did not want to talk any more than he had to.

The agent studied his face.

"That's funny," he said after a minute. "I never would have picked you for one of these so-called adventurers. You're too quiet and peaceful looking. I would have put you down as a doctor or maybe a writer."

"N-no," Hall said. "I w-was in the war."

"Well, that shows you can't tell by looking at a fellow," the agent said philosophically. He handed Hall his papers. "There you are. The left door leads out to the copter field. Good luck on Earth!"

Hall pocketed the stamped documents. "Thanks," he said. "I'm glad to be here."

He walked down the wide station room to a far exit and pushed the door open. A few steps farther and he was standing on a cement path dug into a hillside.

* * * * *

Across the valley, bright in the noon sun lay the pine covered slopes of the Argus mountains, and at his feet the green Mojave flowering with orchards stretched far to the north and south. Between the trees, in the center of the valley, the Sacramento River rolled southward in a man-made bed of concrete and steel giving water and life to what had a century before been dry dead earth.

There was a small outcropping of limestone near the cement walk, and he stepped over to it and sat down. He would have been happy to rest and enjoy for a few moments his escape and his triumph, but he had to let the others know so that they might have hope.

He closed his eyes and groped across the stars toward Grismet. Almost immediately he felt an impatient tug at his mind, strong because there were many clamoring at once to be heard. He counted them. There were seventeen. So one more had been captured since he had left Grismet.

"Be quiet," the told them. "I'll let you see, after a while. First I have to reach the two of us that are still free."

Obediently, the seventeen were still, and he groped some more and found another of his kind deep in an ice cave in the polar regions of Grismet.

"How goes it?" he asked.

The figure on Grismet lay stretched out at full length on the blue ice, his eyes closed. He answered without moving: "They discovered my radiation about an hour ago. Pretty soon, they'll start blasting through the ice."

The one on Earth felt the chill despair of his comrade and let go. He groped about again until he found the last one, the only other one left. He was squatting in the cellar of a warehouse in the main city of Grismet.

"Have they picked up your trail yet?" he asked.

"No," answered the one in the cellar. "They won't for a while. I've scattered depots of radiation all through the town. They'll be some time tracking them all down, before they can get to me."

In a flash of his mind, Hall revealed his escape and the one on Grismet nodded and said: "Be careful. Be very careful. You are our only hope."

Hall returned then to the seventeen, and he said with his thoughts: "All right, now you can look." Immobile in their darkness, they snatched at his mind, and as he opened his eyes, they, too, saw the splendors of the mountains and the valley, the blue sky, and the gold sun high overhead.

* * * * *

The new man was young, only twenty-six. He was lean and dark and very enthusiastic about his work. He sat straight in his chair waiting attentively while his superior across the desk leafed through a folder.

"Jordan. Tom Jordan," the older man finally said. "A nice old Earth name. I suppose your folks came from there."

"Yes, sir," the new man said briskly.

The chief closed the folder.

"Well," he said, "your first job is a pretty important one."

"I realize that, sir," Jordan said. "I know it's a great responsibility for a man just starting with the Commission, but I'll give it every thing I have."

The chief leaned back in his seat and scratched his chin thoughtfully.

"Normally we start a beginner like you working in a pair with an older man. But we just haven't got enough men to go around. There are eight thousand planets there"--he pointed with his thumb over his shoulder to a wall-sized map of the galaxy--"and we've got to cover every one. It seems reasonable that if he escaped this planet, he'll go to another that will by its atmosphere or its temperature give him some natural advantage over us--some place that is either burning hot or at absolute zero, or perhaps with a chlorine or sulfur dioxide atmosphere. That's why"--he hesitated a minute, but continued because he was a truthful man--"I picked you for Earth. It's the most populated of all the planets and it seems the least likely one that he would choose."

Jordan's face dropped a little bit when he heard the last piece of information, but he said: "I understand, sir, and if he's there, I'll bring him back."

The chief slouched farther back in his seat. He picked up a shard of rubidium that served as a paper weight and toyed with it.

"I guess you know most of the facts. They are made out of permallium. Have you ever seen any of the stuff?"

The new man shook his head. "I read about it though--some new alloy, isn't it?"

"Plenty new. It's the hardest stuff anybody has ever made. If you set off one hundred successive atom blasts over a lump of permallium, you might crystallize and scale maybe a micron off the surface. It will stand any temperature or pressure we can produce. That just means there's no way to destroy it."

Jordan nodded. He felt a little honored that the chief was giving him this explanation in person rather than just turning him over to one of the scientific personnel for a briefing. He did not understand that the old man was troubled and was talking the situation through as much for his own sake as for anyone else's.

* * * * *

"That's the problem," the chief continued. "Essentially an indestructible machine with a built-in source of power that one can't reach. It had to be built that way--a war instrument, you know."

He stopped and looked squarely at the bright young man sitting across the desk. "This lousy war. You'd think the human race would grow up some time, wouldn't you?" He filled a pipe with imported Earth tobacco and lit it, and took a few deep puffs. "There's something else. I don't know how they do it, but they can communicate with one another over long distances. That made them very useful for military purposes.

"They are loyal to one another, too. They try to protect each other and keep one another from being captured. Do you find that surprising?"

The question caught Jordan unprepared. "Well, yes. It is, kind of--" he said. "They are only machines."

The chief closed his eyes for a moment. He seemed tired.

"Yes," he repeated, "they are only machines. Anyway, we don't know everything about them, even yet. There are still a few secret angles, I think. The men who could tell us are either dead or in hiding.

"There's one fact though that gives us a great advantage. Their brain"--he stopped on the word and considered it--"I mean their thinking apparatus gives off a very penetrating short-wave length radiation which you can pick up on your meters anywhere in a radius of two thousand miles, and you can locate the source accurately if you get within fifty miles.

"The only real problem you'll have in finding them is the confusion created by illegal atomic piles. You'd be surprised how many of them we have turned up recently. They are owned by private parties and are run illegally to keep from paying the tax on sources of power. You have to track those down, but once you get them labeled it will be clear sailing."

He stopped to take a few puffs on his pipe.

"Don't try to be a hero," he said after a few moments. "Don't get close to the thing you are hunting. None of them yet has injured any of us, but if one should want to, he could crush you to death with two fingers. Use the permallium nets and net bombs if you locate him."

He tamped his pipe out. "Well, that's it," he said.

The new man arose. "I want you to know that I appreciate the trust you have put in me."

"Sure, sure," the chief said, but it was not unfriendly. "Do you like the job?"

"It is a great opportunity," Jordan said, and he meant it.

"What do you think about what we do to them after we capture them?"

The new man shrugged. "I suppose it's the only thing to do. It's not as though they were human."

"Yeah," the chief said. "I guess so. Anyway, good luck."

Jordan arose and shook the chief's hand. However, just as he was stepping through the door, his superior asked him another question. "Did you know that one of them stutters?"

He turned back, puzzled. "Stutters? Why should he stutter? How could that be?"

The chief shook his head and started cleaning out his pipe.

"I don't know for sure. You'd better get started." He sat back in his seat and watched the back of the new man as he disappeared through the doorway.

That young fellow has a lot to learn, he thought to himself. But even so, maybe he's better off than I am. Maybe I've had too much experience. Maybe too much experience puts you back where you started from. You've done the wrong thing so many times and profited so many times from your mistakes that you see errors and tragedies in everything.

He was depressed, and he did something that usually made him feel better again. He reached under the edge of his desk and pulled a little switch that made the galactic map on the wall light up in three-dimensional depth, then he swung around in his chair so he could see it. Eight thousand planets that his race had conquered, eight thousand planets hundreds of light-years apart. Looking at the map gave him a sense of accomplishment and pride in humanity which even a stupid war and its aftermath could not completely destroy.

* * * * *

Jon Hall, the fugitive, walked along the highway leading south from the rocket port. There was very little traffic, only an occasional delivery truck carrying meat or groceries. The real highway was half a mile overhead where the copters shuttled back and forth up and down the state in neat orderly layers.

The seventeen were inside his head, looking through his eyes, and feasting on the blueness of the sky, and the rich green vegetation that covered the fertile fields. From time to time they talked to him, giving advice, asking questions, or making comments, but mostly they looked, each knowing that the hours of their sight might be very few.

After walking a while, Hall became aware of someone's footsteps behind him. He stopped suddenly in apprehension and swung around. A dozen or so paces away was a red-headed boy of about ten or eleven, dressed in plastic overalls, and carrying a basket of ripe raspberries. The stains about his mouth showed that not all the raspberries were carried in the basket.

Hall's anxiety faded, and he was glad to see the child. He had hoped to meet someone who was not so old that they would become suspicious, but old enough that they might give him directions.

He waited for the lad to catch up.

"Hello," the boy said. "I've been walking behind you most of a mile, but I guess you didn't hear me."

"It looks as though you've been p-p-picking raspberries," Hall said.

"Yup. My dad owns a patch by the river. Want some?" He proffered the basket.

"No, thank you," Hall answered. He resumed his walk up the highway with the boy at his side.

"D-do you live around here," he asked.

"Just up the road a ways." The lad studied his companion for a minute. "You stutter, don't you?"

"A little."

"There was a boy in my class who used to stutter. The teacher said it was because he thought so far ahead of what he said he got all tangled up." The boy reached in his basket for a handful of berries and chewed them thoughtfully. "She was always after him to talk slower, but I guess it didn't do any good. He still stutters."

"Is there a p-power plant around here?" Hall asked. "You know, where the electricity comes from."

"You mean the place where they have the nu-nuclear fission"--the boy stumbled on the unfamiliar word, but got it out--"and they don't let you in because you get poisoned or something?"

"Yes, I think that's it."

"There are two places. There's one over at Red Mountain and another over at Ballarat."

"Where are they?"

"Well--" The boy stopped to think. "Red Mountain's straight ahead, maybe ten miles, and Ballarat's over there"--he pointed west across the orange groves--"maybe fifteen miles."

"Good," Hall said. "Good." And he felt glad inside of himself. Maybe it could be done, he thought.

* * * * *

They walked along together. Hall sometimes listening to the chattering of the boy beside him, sometimes listening to and answering the distant voices of the seventeen. Abruptly, a few hundred yards before the house that the boy had pointed out as his father's, a small sports car whipped down the highway, coming on them almost without warning. The lad jumped sideways, and Hall, to avoid touching him, stepped off the concrete road. His leg sank into the earth up to the mid-calf. He pulled it out as quickly as he could.

The boy was looking at the fast retreating rear of the sports car.

"Gee," he said. "I sure didn't see them coming." Then he caught sight of the deep hole alongside the road, and he stared at it. "Gosh, you sure made a footprint there," he said wonderingly.

"The ground was soft," Hall said. "C-come along."

But instead of following, the boy walked over to the edge of the road and stared into the hole. He tentatively stamped on the earth around it. "This ground isn't soft," he said. "It's hard as a rock." He turned and looked at Hall with big eyes.

Hall came close to the boy and took hold of his jacket. "D-don't pay any attention to it, son. I just stepped into a soft spot."

The boy tried to pull away. "I know who you are," he said. "I heard about you on the teledepth."

Suddenly, in the way of children, panic engulfed him and he flung his basket away and threw himself back and forth, trying to tear free. "Let me go," he screamed. "Let me go. Let me go."

"Just l-listen to me, son," Hall pleaded. "Just listen to me. I won't hurt you."

But the boy was beyond reasoning. Terror stricken, he screamed at the top of his voice, using all his little strength to escape.

"If you p-promise to l-listen to me, I'll let you go," Hall said.

"I promise," the boy sobbed, still struggling.

But the moment Hall let go of his coat, he tore away and ran as fast as he could over the adjacent field.

"W-wait--don't run away," Hall shouted. "I won't hurt you. Stay where you are. I couldn't follow you anyway. I'd sink to my hips."

The logic of the last sentence appealed to the frightened lad. He hesitated and then stopped and turned around, a hundred feet or so from the highway.

"L-listen," said Hall earnestly. "The teledepths are wr-wrong. They d-didn't tell you the t-truth about us. I d-don't want to hurt anyone. All I n-need is a few hours. D-don't tell anyone for j-just a few hours and it'll be all right." He paused because he didn't know what to say next.

The boy, now that he seemed secure from danger had recovered his wits. He plucked a blade of grass from the ground and chewed on an end of it, looking for all the world like a grownup farmer thoughtfully considering his fields. "Well, I guess you could have hurt me plenty, but you didn't," he said. "That's something."

"Just a few hours," Hall said. "It won't take long. Y-you can tell your father tonight."

The boy suddenly remembered his raspberries when he saw his basket and its spilled contents on the highway.

"Why don't you go along a bit," he said. "I would like to pick up those berries I dropped."

"Remember," Hall said, "just a few hours." He turned and started walking again toward Red Mountain. Inside his mind, the seventeen asked anxiously, "Do you think he'll give the alarm? Will he report your presence?"

Back on the highway, the boy was gathering the berries back into his basket while he tried to make his mind up.

* * * * *

Jordan reached Earth atmosphere about two o'clock in the afternoon. He immediately reported in to the Terrestrial police force, and via the teledepth screen spoke with a bored lieutenant. The lieutenant, after listening to Jordan's account of his mission, assured him without any particular enthusiasm of the willingness of the Terrestrial forces to coöperate, and of more value, gave him the location of all licensed sources of radiation in the western hemisphere.

The galactic agent set eagerly to work, and in the next several hours uncovered two unlisted radiation sources, both of which he promptly investigated. In one case, north of Eugene, he found in the backyard of a metal die company a small atomic pile. The owner was using it as an illegal generator of electricity, and when he saw Jordan snooping about with his detection instruments, he immediately offered the agent a sizable bribe. It was a grave mistake since Jordan filed charges against him, via teledepth, not only for evading taxes, but also for attempted bribery.

The second strike seemed more hopeful. He picked up strong radiation in a rather barren area of Montana; however when he landed, he found that it was arising from the earth itself. From a short conversation with the local authorities, he learned that the phenomenon was well known: an atomic fission plant had been destroyed at that site during the Third World War.

He was flying over the lovely blue water of Lake Bonneville, when his teledepth screen flickered. He flipped the switch on and the lieutenant's picture flooded in.

"I have a call I think you ought to take," the Earth official said. "It seems as though it might be in your line. It's from a sheriff in a small town in California. I'll have the operator plug him in."

* * * * *

Abruptly the picture switched to that of a stout red-faced man wearing the brown uniform of a county peace officer.

"You're the galactic man?" the sheriff asked.

"Yes. My name is Tom Jordan," Jordan said.

"Mine's Berkhammer." It must have been warm in California because the sheriff pulled out a large handkerchief and mopped his brow. When he was done with that he blew his nose loudly. "Hay fever," he announced.

"Want to see my credentials?"

"Oh sure, sure," the sheriff hastily replied. He scrutinized the card and badge that Jordan displayed. After a moment, he said, "I don't know why I'm looking at those. They might be fakes for all I know. Never saw them before and I'll probably never see them again."

"They're genuine."

"The deuce with formality," the sheriff said heavily. "There's some kid around here who thinks he saw that ... that machine you're supposed to be looking for."

"When was that?" Jordan asked.

"About four hours ago. Here, I'll let you talk to him yourself." He pulled his big bulk to one side, and a boy and his father walked into the picture. The boy was red-eyed, as though he had been crying. The father was a tall, stoop-shouldered farmer, dressed like his son in plastic overalls.

* * * * *

The sheriff patted the boy on the back. "Come on, Jimmy. Tell the man what you saw."

"I saw him," the boy said sullenly. "I walked up the highway with him."

Jordan leaned forward toward the screen.

"How did you know who he was?"

"I knew because when he stepped on the ground, he sank into it up to his knee. He tried to say the ground was soft, but it was hard. I know it was hard."

"Why did you wait so long to tell anybody?" Jordan asked softly.

The boy looked at him with defiance and dislike in his eyes and kept his small mouth clamped shut.

His father nudged him roughly in the ribs.

"Answer the man," he commanded.

Jimmy looked down at his shoes.

"Because he asked me not to tell for a while," he said curtly.

"Stubborn as nails," the father said not without pride in his voice. "Got more loyalty to a lousy machine than to the whole human race."

"Which way did he go, Jimmy?"

"Toward Red Mountain. I think maybe to the power house. He asked me where it was."

"What do you think he wants with that?" the sheriff asked of Jordan.

Jordan shrugged and shook his head.

"Maybe it's all in the kid's head," the sheriff suggested. "These wild teledepth programs they look at give them all kinds of ideas."

"It isn't in my head," Jimmy said violently. "I saw him. He stepped on the ground and stuck his foot into it. I talked to him. And I know something else. He stutters."

"What?" said the sheriff. "Now I know you're lying."

The father started dragging the boy by the arm. "Come on home, Jimmy. You got one more licking coming."

Jordan, however, was sure the boy was not lying. "Leave him alone," he said. "He's right. He did see him." He took a fast look at the timepiece on his panel board. "I'll be down in an hour and a half. Wait for me."

He flicked the switch off, and kicked up the motors. The ship shot southward almost as rapidly as a projectile.

He had topped the Sierras and had just turned into the great central valley of California when, with the impact of a blow, a frightening thought occurred to him.

He flicked the screen on again, and he caught the sheriff sitting behind his desk industriously scratching himself in one armpit.

"Listen," Jordan said, speaking very fast. "You've got to send out a national alarm. You must get every man you can down to the power plant. You've got to stop him from getting in."

The sheriff stopped scratching himself and stared at Jordan.

"What are you so het up about, young man?"

"Do it, and do it now," Jordan almost shouted. "He'll tear the pile apart and let the hafnium go off. It'll blow half the state off the planet."

The sheriff was unperturbed. "Mr. Star boy," he said sarcastically, "any grammar school kid knows that if someone came within a hundred yards of one of those power-house piles, he'd burn like a match stick. And besides why would he want to blow himself to pieces?"

"He's made out of permallium." Jordan was shouting now.

The sheriff suddenly grew pale. "Get off my screen. I'm calling Sacramento."

* * * * *

Jordan set the ship for maximum speed, well beyond the safety limit. He kept peering ahead into the dusk, momentarily fearful that the whole countryside would light up in one brilliant flash. In a few minutes he was sweating and trembling with the tension.

Over Walnut Grove, he recognized the series of dams, reservoirs and water-lifts where the Sacramento was raised up out of its bed and turned south. For greater speed, he came close to Earth, flying at emergency height, reserved ordinarily for police, firemen, doctors and ambulances. He set his course by sight following the silver road of the river, losing it for ten or fifteen miles at a time where it passed through subterranean tunnels, picking it up again at the surface, always shooting south as fast as the atmosphere permitted.

At seven thirty, when the sun had finally set, he sighted the lights of Red Mountain, and he cut his speed and swung in to land. There was no trouble picking out the power plant; it was a big dome-shaped building surrounded by a high wall. It was so brilliantly lit up, that it stood out like a beacon, and there were several hundred men milling about before it.

He settled down on the lawn inside the walls, and the sheriff came bustling up, a little more red in the face than usual.

"I've been trying to figure for the last hour what the devil I would do to stop him if he decided to come here," Berkhammer said.

"He's not here then?"

The sheriff shook his head. "Not a sign of him. We've gone over the place three times."

Jordan settled back in relief, sitting down in the open doorway of his ship. "Good," he said wearily.

"Good!" the sheriff exploded. "I don't know whether I'd rather have him show up or not. If this whole business is nothing more than the crazy imagination of some kid who ought to get tanned and a star-cop with milk behind his ears, I'm really in the soup. I've sent out an alarm and I've got the whole state jumping. There's a full mechanized battalion of state troops waiting in there." He pointed toward the power plant. "They've got artillery and tanks all around the place."

Jordan jumped down out of the ship. "Let's see what you've got set up here. In the meantime, stop fretting. I'd rather see you fired than vaporized along with fifty million other people."

"I guess you're right there," Berkhammer conceded, "but I don't like to have anyone make a fool out of me."

* * * * *

At Ballarat, an old man, Eddie Yudovich, was the watchman and general caretaker of the electrical generation plant. Actually, his job was a completely unnecessary one, since the plant ran itself. In its very center, buried in a mine of graphite were the tubes of hafnium, from whose nuclear explosions flowed a river of electricity without the need of human thought or direction.

He had worked for the company for a long time and when he became crippled with arthritis, the directors gave him the job so that he might have security in his latter years.

Yudovich, however, was a proud old man, and he never once acknowledged to himself or to anyone else that his work was useless. He guarded and checked the plant as though it were the storehouse of the Terrestrial Treasury. Every hour punctually, he made his rounds through the building.

At approximately seven thirty he was making his usual circuit when he came to the second level. What he discovered justified all the years of punctilious discharge of his duties. He was startled to see a man kneeling on the floor, just above where the main power lines ran. He had torn a hole in the composition floor, and as Yudovich watched, he reached in and pulled out the great cable. Immediately the intruder glowed in the semidarkness with an unearthly blue shine and sparkles crackled off of his face, hands and feet.

Yudovich stood rooted to the floor. He knew very well that no man could touch that cable and live. But as he watched, the intruder handled it with impunity, pulling a length of wire out of his pocket and making some sort of a connection.

It was too much for the old man. Electricity was obviously being stolen. He roared out at the top of his voice, and stumped over to the wall where he threw the alarm switch. Immediately, a hundred arc lights flashed on, lighting the level brighter than the noon sun, and a tremendously loud siren started wailing its warning to the whole countryside.

The intruder jumped up as though he had been stabbed. He dropped the wires, and after a wild look around him, he ran at full speed toward the far exit.

"Hold on there," Yudovich shouted and tried to give chase, but his swollen, crooked knees almost collapsed with the effort.

His eyes fell on a large wrench lying on a worktable, and he snatched it up and threw it with all his strength. In his youth he had been a ball player with some local fame as a pitcher, and in his later life, he was addicted to playing horseshoes. His aim was, therefore, good, and the wrench sailed through the air striking the runner on the back of the head. Sparks flew and there was a loud metallic clang, the wrench rebounding high in the air. The man who was struck did not even turn his head, but continued his panicky flight and was gone in a second.

When he realized there was no hope of effecting a capture, Yudovich stumped over to see the amount of the damage. A hole had been torn in the floor, but the cable itself was intact.

Something strange caught his attention. Wherever the intruder had put his foot down, there were many radiating cracks in the composition floor, just as though someone had struck a sheet of ice with a sledge hammer.

"I'll be danged," he said to himself. "I'll be danged and double danged."

He turned off the alarm and then went downstairs to the teledepth screen to notify the sheriff's office.

A few hundred yards from the powerhouse, Jon Hall stood in the darkness, listening to the voices of his fellows. There were eighteen of them, not seventeen, for a short while before the one in the ice cave had been captured, and they railed at him with a bitter hopeless anger.

He looked toward the bright lights of the powerhouse, considering whether he should return. "It's too late," said one of them. "The alarm is already out." "Go into the town and mix with the people," another suggested. "If you stay within a half mile of the hafnium pile, the detection man will not be able to pick up your radiation and maybe you will have a second chance."

They all assented in that, and Hall, weary of making his own decisions turned toward the town. He walked through a tree-lined residential street, the houses with neatly trimmed lawns, and each with a copter parked on the roof. In almost every house the teledepths were turned on and he caught snatches of bulletins about himself: "... Is known to be in the Mojave area." "... About six feet in height and very similar to a human being. When last seen, he was dressed in--" "Governor Leibowitz has promised speedy action and attorney general Markle has stated--"

The main street of Ballarat was brilliantly lighted. Many of the residents, aroused by the alarm from the powerhouse, were out, standing in small groups in front of the stores and talking excitedly to one another.

He hesitated, unwilling to walk through the bright street, but uncertain where to turn. Two men talking loudly came around the corner suddenly and he stepped back into a store entrance to avoid them. They stopped directly in front of him. One of them, an overalled farm hand from his looks, said, "He killed a kid just a little while ago. My brother-in-law heard it."

"Murderer," the other said viciously.

The farmer turned his head and his glance fell on Hall. "Well, a new face in town," he said after a moment's inspection. "Say I bet you're a reporter from one of the papers, aren't you?"

Hall came out of the entrance and tried to walk around the two men, but the farmer caught him by the sleeve.

"A reporter, huh? Well, I got some news for you. That thing from Grismet just killed a kid."

Hall could restrain himself no longer.

"That's a lie," he said coldly.

The farmer looked him up and down.

"What do you know about it," he demanded. "My brother-in-law got it from somebody in the state guard."

"It's still a lie."

"Just because it's not on the teledepth, you say it's a lie," the farmer said belligerently. "Not everything is told on the teledepth, Mr. Wiseheimer. They're keeping it a secret. They don't want to scare the people."

Hall started to walk away, but the farmer blocked his path.

"Who are you anyway? Where do you live? I never saw you before," he said suspiciously.

"Aw, Randy," his companion said, "don't go suspecting everybody."

"I don't like anyone to call me a liar."

Hall stepped around the man in his path, and turned down the street. He was boiling inside with an almost uncontrollable fury.

* * * * *

A few feet away, catastrophe suddenly broke loose. A faulty section of the sidewalk split without warning under his feet and he went pitching forward into the street. He clutched desperately at the trunk of a tall palm tree, but with a loud snap, it broke, throwing him head on into a parked road car. The entire front end of the car collapsed like an egg shell under his weight.

For a long moment, the entire street was dead quiet. With difficulty, Hall pulled himself to his feet. Pale, astonished faces were staring at him from all sides.

Suddenly the farmer started screaming. "That's him. I knew it. That's him." He was jumping up and down with excitement.

Hall turned his back and walked in the other direction. The people in front of him faded away, leaving a clear path.

He had gone a dozen steps when a man with a huge double-barreled shotgun popped out from a store front just ahead. He aimed for the middle of Hall's chest and fired both barrels.

The blast and the shot struck Hall squarely, burning a large hole in his shirt front. He did not change his pace, but continued step by step.

The man with the gun snatched two shells out of his pocket and frantically tried to reload. Hall reached out and closed his hand over the barrel of the gun and the blue steel crumpled like wet paper.

From across the street, someone was shooting at him with a rifle. Several times a bullet smacked warmly against his head or his back.

He continued walking slowly up the street. At its far end several men appeared dragging a small howitzer--probably the only piece in the local armory. They scurried around it, trying to get it aimed and loaded.

"Fools. Stupid fools," Hall shouted at them.

The men could not seem to get the muzzle of the gun down, and when he was a dozen paces from it they took to their heels. He tore the heavy cannon off of its carriage and with one blow of his fist caved it in. He left it lying in the street broken and useless.

Almost as suddenly as it came, his anger left him. He stopped and looked back at the people cringing in the doorways.

"You poor, cruel fools," Hall said again.

He sat down in the middle of the street on the twisted howitzer barrel and buried his head in his hands. There was nothing else for him to do. He knew that in just a matter of seconds, the ships with their permallium nets and snares would be on him.

* * * * *

Since Jordan's ship was not large enough to transport Jon Hall's great weight back to Grismet, the terrestrial government put at the agent's disposal a much heavier vessel, one room of which had been hastily lined with permallium and outfitted as a prison cell. A pilot by the name of Wilkins went with the ship. He was a battered old veteran, given to cigar smoking, clandestine drinking and card playing.

The vessel took off, rose straight through the atmosphere for about forty miles, and then hung, idly circling Earth, awaiting clearance before launching into the pulse drive. A full course between Earth and Grismet had to be plotted and cleared by the technicians at the dispatch center because the mass of the vessel increased so greatly with its pulsating speed that if any two ships passed within a hundred thousand miles of each other, they would at least be torn from their course, and might even be totally destroyed.

Wilkins had proposed a pinochle game, and he and Jordan sat playing in the control room.

The pilot had been winning and he was elated. "Seventy-six dollars so far," he announced after some arithmetic. "The easiest day's pay I made this month."

Jordan shuffled the cards and dealt them out, three at a time. He was troubled by his own thoughts, and so preoccupied that he scarcely followed the game.

"Spades, again," the pilot commented gleefully. "Well, ain't that too bad for you." He gave his cigar a few chomps and played a card.

Jordan had been looking out of the window. The ship had tilted and he could see without rising the rim of Earth forming a beautiful geometric arc, hazy and blue in its shimmering atmosphere.

"Come on, play," the pilot said, impatiently. "I just led an ace."

Jordan put down his cards. "I guess I better quit," he said.

"What the devil!" the pilot said angrily. "You can't quit like that in the middle of a deal. I got a flush and aces."

"I'm sorry," Jordan said, "but I'm going to lie down in my cabin until we are given clearance."

He opened the door of the little room and went into the hall. He walked down past his own cabin and stopped in front of another door, a new one that was sheathed in permallium. He hesitated a few moments; then he snapped open the outside latch and walked in, letting the door swing closed behind him.

* * * * *

Hall lay unmoving in the middle of the floor, his legs and arms fastened in greaves of permallium.

Jordan was embarrassed. He did not look directly at the robot.

"I don't know whether you want to talk to me or not," he started. "If you don't want to, that's all right. But, I've followed you since you landed on Earth, and I don't understand why you did what you did. You don't have to tell me, but I wish you would. It would make me feel better."

The robot shrugged--a very human gesture, Jordan noted.

"G-go ahead and ask me," he said. "It d-doesn't make any difference now."

Jordan sat down on the floor. "The boy was the one who gave you away. If not for him, no one would have ever known what planet you were on. Why did you let the kid get away?"

The robot looked straight at the agent. "Would you kill a child?" he asked.

"No, of course not," Jordan said a little bit annoyed, "but I'm not a robot either." He waited for a further explanation, but when he saw none was coming, he said: "I don't know what you were trying to do in that powerhouse at Ballarat, but, whatever it was, that old man couldn't have stopped you. What happened?"

"I l-lost my head," the robot said quietly. "The alarm and the lights rattled me, and I got into a p-panic."

"I see," said Jordan, frustrated, not really seeing at all. He sat back and thought for a moment. "Let me put it this way. Why do you stutter?"

Hall smiled a wry smile. "Th-that used to be a m-military secret," he said. "It's our one weakness--the one Achilles heel in a m-machine that was meant to be invulnerable."

He struggled to a sitting position. "You see, we were m-made as s-soldiers and had to have a certain loyalty to the country that m-made us. Only living things are loyal--machines are not. We had to think like human beings."

Jordan's brows contracted as he tried to understand the robot.

"You mean you have a transplanted human brain?" he asked incredulously.

"In a way," Hall said. "Our b-brains are permallium strips on which the mind of some human donor was m-magnetically imprinted. My mind was copied f-from a man who stuttered and who got panicky when the going got rough, and who couldn't kill a child no matter what was at s-stake."

Jordan felt physically ill. Hall was human and he was immortal. And according to galactic decree, he, like his fellows, was to be manacled in permallium and fixed in a great block of cement, and that block was to be dropped into the deep silent depths of the Grismet ocean, to be slowly covered by the blue sediment that gradually filters down through the miles of ocean water to stay immobile and blind for countless millions of years.

Jordan arose to his feet. He could think of nothing further to say.

He stopped, however, with the door half open, and asked: "One more question--what did you want with the electrical generator plants on Earth?"

Slowly and without emotion Hall told him, and when he understood, he became even sicker.

* * * * *

He went across to his cabin and stood for a while looking out the window. Then he lit a cigarette and lay down on his bunk thinking. After a time, he put out the cigarette and walked into the hall where he paced up and down.

As he passed the cell door for about the tenth time, he suddenly swung around and lifted the latch and entered. He went over to the robot, and with a key that he took from his pocket, he unlocked the greaves and chains.

"There's no point in keeping you bound up like this," he said. "I don't think you're very dangerous." He put the key back in his pocket.

"I suppose you know that this ship runs on an atomic pile," he said in a conversational tone of voice. "The cables are just under the floor in the control room and they can be reached through a little trap door."

Jordan looked directly into Hall's face. The robot was listening with great intentness.

"Well," the agent said, "we'll probably be leaving Earth's atmosphere in about fifteen minutes. I think I'll go play pinochle with the pilot."

He carefully left the door of the cell unlatched as he left. He walked to the control room and found Wilkins, a dry cigar butt clenched between his teeth, absorbed in a magazine.

"Let's have another game," Jordan said. "I want some of that seventy-six dollars back."

Wilkins shook his head. "I'm in the middle of a good story here. Real sexy. I'll play you after we take off."

"Nothing doing," Jordan said sharply. "Let's play right now."

Wilkins kept reading. "We got an eighteen-hour flight in front of us. You have lots of time."

The agent snatched the magazine out of his hands. "We're going to play right now in my cabin," he said.

"You quit when I have aces and a flush, and now you come back and want to play again. That's not sportsmanlike," Wilkins complained, but he allowed himself to be led back to Jordan's cabin. "I never saw anybody so upset about losing a miserable seventy-six bucks," was his final comment.

* * * * *

The robot lay perfectly still until he heard the door to Jordan's cabin slam shut, and then he arose as quietly as he could and stole out into the hall. The steel of the hall floor groaned, but bore his weight, and carefully, trembling with excitement inside of his ponderous metallic body, he made his way to the control room. He knelt and lifted the little trap door and found the naked power cable, pulsating with electrical current.

In a locker under the panel board he found a length of copper wire. It was all he needed for the necessary connection.

Since his capture, his fellows on Grismet had been silent with despair, but as he knelt to close the circuit, their minds flooded in on him and he realized with a tremendous horror that there were now nineteen, that all except he had been bound and fixed in their eternal cement prisons.

"We are going to have our chance," he told them. "We won't have much time, but we will have our chance."

He closed the circuit and a tremendous tide of electric power flowed into his head. Inside that two-inch shell of permallium was a small strip of metal tape on whose electrons and atoms were written the borrowed mind of a man. Connected to the tape was a minute instrument for receiving and sending electromagnetic impulses--the chain by which the mind of one robot was tied to that of another.

The current surged in and the tiny impulses swelled in strength and poured out through the hull of the ship in a great cone that penetrated Earth's atmosphere in a quadrant that extended from Baffin land to Omaha, and from Hawaii to Labrador. The waves swept through skin and bone and entered the sluggish gelatinous brain of sentient beings, setting up in those organs the same thoughts and pictures that played among the electrons of the permallium strip that constituted Jon Hall's mind.

All nineteen clamored to be heard, for Hall to relay their voices to Earth, but he held them off and first he told his story.

* * * * *

The Casseiopeian delegate to the Galactic Senate was at the moment finishing his breakfast. He was small and furry, not unlike a very large squirrel, and he sat perched on a high chair eating salted roast almonds of which he was very fond.

Suddenly a voice started talking inside of his head, just as it did at that very second inside the heads of thirteen billion other inhabitants of the northwest corner of Earth. The Casseiopeian delegate was so startled that he dropped the dish of almonds, his mouth popping open, his tiny red tongue inside flickering nervously. He listened spellbound.

The voice told him of the war on Grismet and of the permallium constructed robots, and of the cement blocks. This, however, he already knew, because he had been one of the delegates to the Peace Conference who had decided to dispose of the robots. The voice, however, also told him things he did not know, such as the inability of the robots to commit any crime that any other sane human being would not commit, of their very simple desire to be allowed to live in peace, and most of all of their utter horror for the fate a civilized galaxy had decreed for them.

When the voice stopped, the Casseiopeian delegate was a greatly shaken little being.

* * * * *

Back on the ship, Hall opened the circuit to the nineteen, and they spoke in words, in memory pictures and in sensations.

* * * * *

A copter cab driver was hurrying with his fare from Manhattan to Oyster Bay. Suddenly, in his mind, he became a permallium robot. He was bound with cables of the heavy metal, and was suspended upside down in a huge cement block. The stone pressed firmly on his eyes, his ears, and his chest. He was completely immobile, and worst of all, he knew that above his head for six miles lay the great Grismet Ocean, with the blue mud slowly settling down encasing the cement in a stony stratum that would last till the planet broke apart.

The cab driver gasped: "What the hell." His throat was so dry he could scarcely talk. He turned around to his fare, and the passenger, a young man, was pale and trembling.

"You seeing things, too?" the driver asked.

"I sure am," the fare said unsteadily. "What a thing to do."

* * * * *

For fifteen minutes, over the northwest quadrant of Earth, the words and the pictures went out, and thirteen billion people knew suddenly what lay in the hearts and minds of nineteen robots.

* * * * *

A housewife in San Rafael was at the moment in a butcher shop buying meat for her family. As the thoughts and images started pouring into her mind, she remained stock-still, her package of meat forgotten on the counter. The butcher, wiping his bloodied hands on his apron froze in that position, an expression of horror and incredulity on his face.

When the thoughts stopped coming in, the butcher was the first to come out of the trancelike state.

"Boy," he said, "that's sure some way of sending messages. Sure beats the teledepths."

The housewife snatched her meat off the counter. "Is that all you think of," she demanded angrily.

"That's a terrible thing that those barbarians on Grismet are doing to those ... those people. Why didn't they tell us that they were human." She stalked out of the shop, not certain what she would do, but determined to do something.

* * * * *

In the ship Hall reluctantly broke off the connection and replaced the trap door. Then he went back to his cell and locked himself in. He had accomplished his mission; its results now lay in the opinions of men.

* * * * *

Jordan left the ship immediately on landing, and took a copter over to the agency building. His conversation with his superior was something he wanted to get over with as soon as possible.

The young woman at the secretary's desk looked at him coldly and led him directly into the inner office. The chief was standing up in front of the map of the galaxy, his hands in his pockets, his eyes an icy blue.

"I've been hearing about you," he said without a greeting.

Jordan sat down. He was tense and jumpy but tried not to show it. "I suppose you have," he said, adding, after a moment, "Sir."

"How did that robot manage to break out of his cell and get to the power source on the ship in the first place?"

"He didn't break out," Jordan said slowly. "I let him out."

"I see," the chief said, nodding. "You let him out. I see. No doubt you had your reasons."

"Yes, I did. Look--" Jordan wanted to explain, but he could not find the words. It would have been different if the robots' messages had reached Grismet; he would not have had to justify himself then. But they had not, and he could not find a way to tell this cold old man of what he had learned about the robots and their unity with men. "I did it because it was the only decent thing to do."

"I see," the chief said. "You did it because you have a heart." He leaned suddenly forward, both hands on his desk. "It's good for a man to have a heart and be compassionate. He's not worth anything if he isn't. But"--and he shook his finger at Jordan as he spoke--"that man is going to be compassionate at his own expense, not at the expense of the agency. Do you understand that?"

"I certainly do," Jordan answered, "but you have me wrong if you think I'm here to make excuses or to apologize. Now, if you will get on with my firing, sir, I'll go home and have my supper."

The chief looked at him for a long minute. "Don't you care about your position in the agency?" he asked quietly.

"Sure I do," Jordan said almost roughly. "It's the work I wanted to do all my life. But, as you said, what I did, I did at my own expense. Look, sir, I don't like this any better than you do. Why don't you fire me and let me go home? Your prisoner's safely locked up in the ship."

For answer the chief tossed him a stellogram. Jordan glanced at the first few words and saw that it was from Galactic Headquarters on Earth. He put it back on the desk without reading it through.

"I know that I must have kicked up a fuss. You don't have to spell it out for me."

"Read it," the chief said impatiently.

Jordan took back the stellogram and examined it. It read.

To: Captain Lawrence Macrae Detection Agency, Grismet.

From: Prantal Aminopterin Delegate from Casseiopeia Chairman, Grismet Peace Committee of the Galactic Senate.

Message: You are hereby notified that the committee by a vote of 17-0 has decided to rescind its order of January 18, 2214, directing the disposal of the permallium robots of Grismet. Instead, the committee directs that you remove from their confinement all the robots and put them in some safe place where they will be afforded reasonable and humane treatment.

The committee will arrive in Grismet some time during the next month to decide on permanent disposition.

Jordan's heart swelled as he read the gram. "It worked," he said. "They have changed their minds. It won't be so bad being discharged now." He put the paper back on the desk and arose to go.

The chief smiled and it was like sunlight suddenly flooding over an arctic glacier. "Discharged? Now who's discharging you? I'd sooner do without my right arm."

He reached in a desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of old Earth bourbon and two glasses. He carefully poured out a shot into each glass, and handed one to Jordan.

"I like a man with a heart, and if you get away with it, why then you get away with it. And that's just what you've done."

He sat down and started sipping his whisky. Jordan stood uncertainly above him, his glass in his hand.

"Sit down, son," the old man said. "Sit down and tell me about your adventures on Earth."

Jordan sat down, put his feet on the desk and took a sizable swallow of his whisky.

"Well, Larry," he started, "I got into Earth atmosphere about 2:40 o'clock--"

THE END

Contents

GENERAL MAX SHORTER

By KRIS NEVILLE

To spread Mankind to the stars carries a high cost in lives--and not all of them are human!

Miracastle: The initial landing had been made on a flat plateau among steep, foreboding mountains which seemed to float through briefly cleared air. In the distance a sharp rock formation stood revealed like an etching: a castle of iron-gray stone whose form had been carved by alien winds and eroded by acid tears from acid clouds.

Far above was a halo where the sun should be. The sun was an orange star only slightly larger than Sol and as near to Miracastle as Sol to Earth. The orange rays splintered against the fog and gloom was perpetually upon the dark face of existence.

This was the first two-stage planet man had ever attempted to colonize. Miracastle was so far from Earth that the long ships were destroyed twice to reach it.

* * * * *

The technicians came, commanded by General Max Shorter, sixty-three years old. Men wearing the circle whose diameter was etched in ruby steel enclosing a background of gleaming ebon--the emblem was a silver D over a sunburst of hammered gold.

The surface of Miracastle roiled with unfamiliar storms and tornados and hurricanes. Before these, the films of lichen evaporated into dust, and the sparse and stunted vegetation with ochre foliage turned sear and was powdered by the fury in the air.

Earth equipment, alien to the orange sun, hammered into the heart of Miracastle. Night and day it converted the pulverized substance of the planet in the white-hot core of its atomic furnaces.

Acid rivers snapped at the wind and changed to salt deposits and super-heated steam. In the gaseous atmosphere, neutral crystals formed and fell like powdered rain. Miracastle heated and cooled and shivered with the virus of man-made chemical reactions, and the storms screamed and tore at the age-old mountains.

Inside the eternal, self-renewing Richardson domes, the technicians worked and waited and superintended the computers which controlled the processes raging beyond them.

The long ship lifted steadily and majestically through the battering storm and the driving rain of dust and crystals. Out beyond the dense space that surrounds all stars, the long ship probed the ever-shifting currents in the four-dimensional universe. The long ship found a low-density flaw, where space could hardly be said to exist at all. The long ship, described mathematically, was half as long as the continuum--the length being inversely proportional and related only to mass. Time was but a moth's wing between twin cliffs of eternity.

Inside Miracastle's orange sun, at its very core, an atom of hydrogen was destroyed completely; and in the inconceivable distance, an atom of hydrogen appeared. The pulsing, steady-state equation of the universe maintained its knife-edge and inevitable thermo-dynamic balance.

Inside the long ship, a pilot-machine ordered the destruction of a vastly greater collection of matter. The atoms of the ship and the sailors--fixed in relationship, each to each--imploded into nothingness.

And the long ship and the men aboard it were born again at a low-density area a million light years away--halfway to Earth. Born and were destroyed again, in the blink of an eye.

Beyond the ship now lay Sol, pulsing in its own warmth and warming its children embedded in the cold and distant texture of the universe. The sailors were ghosts come home.

Miracastle was alone with her conquerors.

* * * * *

General Max Shorter, a few weeks later, began writing a diary.

"I have been Destroyed thirty-seven times during forty years' service with the long ships," he wrote. He wrote with a pen, using a metal straight edge as a line rule.

"I have served faithfully and I believe as well as any man the Corps, the planet and mankind. It is perhaps appropriate at this time, as I approach the end of my long service, to record a few observations which have occurred to me during the course of it as well as to record the day-to-day details of my present command."

The general wrote: "A man is given a job to do. And when all is said and done, that is the most important thing in his life: to do his job."

It took perhaps ten seconds for the soft knock to penetrate his concentration. He adjusted himself to the moment and closed the diary softly. He deposited it in the upper right-hand drawer of the writing desk and locked the drawer.

The knock came again.

He arranged his tie.

"Come in," General Shorter said.

The agitation of the man in the doorway was announced by the paleness of his face.

"Come in, David," General Shorter said, rising politely from the writing desk. "Be seated, please."

"General, we've had a ... a very unfortunate thing happen on the shift."

The general sank back into his chair. Light from the desk lamp framed his expressionless and immobile face, half in light, half in shadow. He fingered the straight-edge on the desk top.

"Sit down, David, and then tell me about it."

Shift-Captain Arnold moved uncertainly.

"Sit down, sit down," General Shorter repeated impatiently.

Captain Arnold seated himself on the edge of the chair.

"One of the men," he said, "just committed suicide. He was in charge of the air changing monitor this shift. He went outside without a suit."

The general blinked as though to remove an irritation from his eye. His hand lay still and hard upon the straight-edge. "What was his name?" he asked in a voice that was vaguely puzzled.

"Schuster. Sergeant Schuster, sir."

"Yes, I remember him," the general said. "He came to us about a week before the lift. I think he was from Colorado. He had very broad shoulders. Short and broad. Neat appearing. Uniform always in good order."

General Shorter ran his thumb and forefinger up the bridge of his nose and then, with a very small sigh, placed his palm over his eyes.

"Draw up the report," he said. "Was there a final message?" The question was uttered without hesitation and was followed by a moment of silence.

"No, sir."

General Shorter's breath was audible.

"Please feel free to smoke, David."

"Thank you, sir, I don't smoke."

"No, of course not. I'd forgotten." General Shorter half turned and placed his hands on the desk. He stood under their pressure. "What would you say to a brandy?"

"I should return to duty, sir."

"A few minutes more," the general said. "The brandy is good." He moved into the shadow and sorted bottles at his tiny cupboard. "Here." He held the glass to the light. Amber liquid flowed softly and the general handed across the half-filled glass. "Sit back," he said. "I'll join you."

Glass in hand, the general stood with his back to the light. He seemed surrounded by cold fire, and the glass sparkled as he lifted it. He sipped. "Try it, it's good."

"It's very good, sir."

* * * * *

For a moment neither spoke. Then the general said, "This isn't my first command, you know. I've seen men die. I've had to take chances with them occasionally. You could say, I suppose, that I ordered some men to their deaths. But still, the men came aboard knowing the risks. In the final sense, they, not I, made the decision. I never sent a--"

The sentence ended as the glass slipped and fell. "I'm sorry," he said, looking down at the sparkling fragments at his feet. The dark liquid--the light gave it a reddish cast--puddled and flowed and its aroma filled the room. "No, no. Let it be, David. I'll get it later."

The general went to the cupboard and poured into a new glass. Again he was light and shadow. The spilled liquid approached the shadow and was devoured in it as though it had never been, but still the aroma stood on the air.

The general said: "Imagine, if you can, David, that Earth were attacked, and the attack destroyed many of the military installations. After you struck back, David, what would you do next?"

"I don't know, sir. I'm not a strategist, I'm afraid."

"What about your cities? The millions of people trapped without supplies--over-running the countryside, looting, plundering in search of food. Carrying pestilence and disease and terror. What would you do, David?"

"Well, I guess I'd try to organize some relief organization or something."

"But David. Anything you diverted to care for these people would limit your ability to fight back, wouldn't it? They would be cluttering up all your transportation, frustrating effective retaliation. Your second move would be to take the bombs which destroy people and not property and ... use them on your own cities."

Captain Arnold drained his glass. "That would be...." He did not finish.

"Insane, David? No. Rational. Field Commanders must be realists. The job comes first. In this case, the job of defeating the enemy.... But what does that have to do with us? Nothing, eh? You're right. Sometimes I like to talk, and I suppose that's one of my privileges. I'm not the idealist I used to be, I guess. I remember when I was your age. I saw things differently than I do now. What used to seem important no longer does. Each stage of development has its unique biological imperatives: a child, a youth, a mature man, look out on the world from a body held in focus to different chemistries. But the job remains." General Shorter held up his glass. "Cheers." He drained it.

Again there was silence.

"David, do you think I'm in much trouble?"

"I'm afraid so, General. The Committee is due to arrive tomorrow."

"I know," the general said. "This suicide isn't going to help us. Tomorrow. Is it that soon? I thought ... yes, I guess it is tomorrow.... Well, we've been here long enough to lose our immunity, so we'll all catch colds."

Captain Arnold stood. "I better get started on my report."

"Poor Sergeant Schuster," General Shorter said. "If anyone's to blame, it must be me."

"He obeyed the orders."

"What did you say?"

"I said he obeyed the orders, sir."

"Of course he obeyed the orders," the general said. "What else could he have done?"

The long ship hung in orbit above Miracastle and discharged its passengers. The Scout Ball could handle them: saving energy, which along with time itself, is the ultimate precious commodity of the universe governed by the laws of entropy.

The Scout Ball settled through the dark turbulence undisturbed by the hissing winds. It hovered momentarily in the invisible beacon above the Richardson dome as if both attracted and repelled. It moved horizontally and settled. Suited figures on the surface wrestled with its flexible exit-tube against the storm, fighting to couple it to the lock of the Richardson dome. The exit-tube moved rhythmically until the Scout Ball inched away, drawing it taut. Pumps whirred. The suited figures entered the forward lock of the Scout Ball.

Inside, General Shorter divested himself of the helmet. The suit hung upon him like ancient, wrinkled skin.

He asked, "What time is it?"

Upon being told, he nodded with satisfaction. "Seventeen minutes, total. Good job. Who's in charge?"

"A Mr. Tucker, sir."

"Tucker? Jim Tucker, by any chance?"

"Yes, sir."

General Shorter grunted. "Served with him once. He's probably forgotten.... That's all right. I'll keep the suit on."

"I don't think they're expecting you with the surface party, General."

"Probably not or they'd be here. Earth crew?"

"They've been out ten months or so, sir."

"We will have colds, then. Would you take me to Mr. Tucker, please?" To the other suited men he said, "Good, fast job."

General Shorter followed the crewman up the spiral staircase and along the corridor. His hand touched a frictionless wall. "New plastic?"

"This is one of the most recent balls, sir."

"How does it handle?"

"Quite well, sir."

"I miss the Model Ten," he said.

"There's only a few left now, I guess."

"I haven't seen one in years."

The crewman stopped before a numberless panel. He knocked politely. "Mr. Tucker? I have General Shorter here. He came out with the surface party."

Mr. Tucker's voice, the edge of surprise partly lost through the partition, came: "Just a moment."

In silence they waited. General Shorter moved restlessly. Several minutes passed.

The panel opened.

* * * * *

Mr. Tucker was a short, rotund man. His close-cropped hair was graying, although his face was unlined, with the smooth complexion of a child. His irises were gray and gold.

General Shorter stepped forward and introduced himself.

"Come in."

The panel closed.

The two men stood. General Shorter glanced around for a chair.

"Small quarters," Mr. Tucker said. "If you like, sit there. I'll sit on the bed."

They arranged themselves.

"Perhaps you don't remember me?" the general said. "We served together--what, ten years ago?--for about two weeks on Avalon, I believe it was."

"Yes, I thought that was the case. You have a good memory, General."

"Please," the general said, "just call me Max."

Mr. Tucker considered, without committing himself. He proffered a cigar. The general declined.

Mr. Tucker lighted the cigar carefully, moving the flame several times across the blunt end. He regarded the results without expression. "A cigar should be properly lit, General," he said.

"Yes, yes, I suppose so," the general said. He paused to worry at a wrinkle on his suit. "Good trip out?"

"Routine."

"New ship? I notice this is one of the new Balls."

"Mark Six."

"Ah, those. I've always liked the Mark Six. Solid construction. I've been Destroyed maybe half the time in the Mark Sixes. Each one of the Marks has its own personality--I've always thought so. I don't suppose you remember the old Mark Two? That was a long time ago. I've been around. We got lost in one once. It picked a pseudo-fault line and ... well, never mind. Earth the same, I guess?"

"Hasn't changed."

"I don't know when I'll get back," the general said. The statement seemed to dangle as though it were an unfinished question.

"The new detectors have put Miracastle on the fringe of things."

"I've followed the work," the general said. "I try to keep up. It involves a new concept of mass variation, doesn't it?"

"It just about makes it uneconomical to colonize a two-stage planet any more. Or to keep one going."

The general's eyelids flickered. His body moved beneath the wrinkled folds of the surface suit. Cigar smoke curled in the still air.

Mr. Tucker said, "You must have been aware that it would not have been a great loss to have evacuated Miracastle."

The general shuffled in silence. "Yes, sir, I knew the background. It's part of my job to know things like that. You'll find, sir, that I have a strong sense of responsibility. If it's part of my job, I'll know about it."

General Max Shorter abruptly stood and for a moment was motionless, a man deformed and diminished in stature by the ill-fitting surface suit. Expressionless, he looked down, without psychological advantage, at the seated civilian holding the partially smoked cigar.

Later the same day, Mr. Tucker and two of the three other members of the Committee donned surface suits and, together with Captain Meford, the cartographer assigned to Miracastle, they boarded the surface scout.

They arranged themselves in the uncomfortable bucket seats and strapped in.

"Little early for an easy ride," Mr. Tucker commented.

"I've been out before," Captain Meford said laconically. It was his usual manner.

"How long do you think it will take us to get there?"

"Between fifteen and twenty minutes, if I don't hit too much cross wind."

Mr. Ryan, one of the other two civilians, commented, "A long time between cigars, eh, Jim?"

The question was out of place and was ignored without hostility.

Mr. Ryan twisted uncomfortably. At length he said, apologetically, "Dirty, filthy business. I wish it were over with."

"So do I," Mr. Tucker said.

Captain Meford activated the ramp and eased the scout out. It was immediately buffeted by the winds.

"Sorry," he said. "It'll take a minute. Hold tight." The scout moved in three dimensions, erratically. "Wow! Let's set it at about twenty-six inches. Sorry. This will slow us down, but it will ease the bumps on down draft. There. That's better. We're okay now, I think. I guess we can settle back."

Thirty-five minutes later, they came to what was left of the alien city.

* * * * *

Back in the Richardson dome, General Shorter had coffee, in his quarters, with the remaining man on the Committee, a Mr. Flison. They were going through the ritual of conversation.

"This is the first time you've been Destroyed then, sir," the general said. "My first time was so long ago I've forgotten what it feels like."

"I was uneasy in advance," Mr. Flison said. "You read various descriptions about the physical sensations. Intellectually, of course, you draw a distinction, but emotionally you know that the only word which applies is death--pure and simple. But there's no sensation. It happens too fast. You don't even notice it."

Politely attentive, the general had leaned forward. "I don't think it could be put better," he contributed. "That's very apt. You don't even notice it."

Mr. Flison's eyes narrowed in speculation. They maintained the general's own in unwavering focus. He did not acknowledge the compliment.

The general's eyes broke to one side. He moved nervously as though physically to dismiss the tactical error of underestimating his opponent.

"Since this is your first planet," the general said, "perhaps you'd like to see something of the operation? Basically, we have nine Richardson Domes here on Miracastle. Two are the living quarters--the other similar to this. Right now domes Seven and Nine are the more important. They contain the air-changing equipment. We are holding tightly to our completion date, and these two--Seven and Nine--will be pulled out in fifteen days. That is to say, they will, barring any serious interruptions in our work. On schedule, I should point out."

The general poured coffee for himself. Mr. Flison politely declined.

"When you've been in the Corps as long as I have," the general resumed, "the schedule becomes a part of you. Everything--" he held his hands before him, fingers spread, palms facing, and drew them together--"converges on that. It's that simple. Other planets are waiting. In a society as complex as ours, a million--and I mean this literally, sir--a million decisions must be reviewed if the schedule falls behind. Delay of a critical item of equipment can necessitate an unbelievably vast reassignment of personnel and supply patterns. A small cause reverberates throughout the whole fabric of the space technology."

"General Shorter, I think perhaps you're being carried away a little. I'm sure we have adequate procedures to accommodate minor variations in equipment delivery dates. If we don't, the Lord help us: we'd have been dead long ago."

The general was in the process of forming an immediate reply, but he reconsidered. When he reached for the coffee, which by now was cool and bitter, his hand was trembling.

The general licked his lips. "More coffee? No? Well, I didn't intend to get off on this. I really wanted to ask if you'd like to inspect our operations." He glanced at his time piece. "I could show you the present shift operation in Dome Nine."

Mr. Flison rose. "No, General, I don't want to be of any bother. I wouldn't want to interfere with your--work."

III

"City" is not necessarily descriptive: perhaps less so than the application of Euclidean axioms to advanced geometry. Physically, it was this:

1. Three dozen stone arches whose keystones were inverted bowls.

2. A smooth-walled recess in the sheer face of a cliff.

3. A level lip of rock, as precisely flat as though honed, from which the arches seemed to grow.

"Is this all?" Mr. Tucker asked.

"Yes, sir," Captain Meford said.

Mr. Ryan came to the viewing section. "It looks," he said, "as though the cliff were split down to here and then hewn away to leave the structures there and the apron."

"We found no tools, sir. There were no tools here, nor with them."

"Nothing else at all?"

"They left behind some four hundred chips of stone, apparently numbered. We have them in the dome. And there's a two-line inscription on one of the arches. There's nothing else."

High above the men and the ship, the new wind sang in one of the inverted bowls and fluttered lightly over the inscription. It, like the face of the cliff, was oxidizing. Dust filtered down before the recess, alien symbols falling. Life is the recording angel of time. Without life, all ceases.

"Dust," Mr. Tucker said. "Dust ... dust ... more dust. Soon the dust will be over everything. When the wind is gone, it will be there to hold our footprints."

Inside the air-conditioned scout, the men shivered.

"How did you come to find them?" Mr. Ryan asked.

"I saw the constructions from the photos, sir. This had been missed by the mapping party. It's easy enough to see why when you see the pictures."

"This the only one?"

"Yes, sir."

"How can you be sure of that, Captain Meford? It's a large planet."

"I had one of the machines scan the remaining maps for geometrical patterns, sir."

"Isn't that done routinely?" Mr. Tucker asked rather sharply.

"Yes, sir. But you see, we've always expected that if we were ever going to encounter intelligent life on a planet, it would be rather widespread. Accordingly--and this is the routine procedure, sir, used, as far as I know, by all contact parties--we ran through a statistically significant sample of the terrain. There was nothing on Miracastle out of the ordinary. There was the typical, low-order vegetable matter, about what we always find. It was a very typical planet, sir."

The third man from the Earth Committee, Mr. Wallace, seldom spoke. When he did, his voice was mild, and there was a sense of child-like wonder in his tone. "The natives?" he asked.

"They ... had fled when we discovered the city."

"Where did they flee to?" Mr. Wallace asked.

* * * * *

Captain Meford glanced upward. Other eyes followed to end just below the edge of the view screen. Above stood the sheer face of the cliff. Clouds roiled below the summit, obscuring it from view.

"There is a long sloping plateau up there, and a series of natural caves back in the next cliff face," Captain Meford said. This did not seem adequate. He continued: "Most of the air-changing activity starts in the low-lying areas, at first around the dome positions. It advances along an elevation front, gradually drifting up. Little tongues are carried up in advance by the heated currents. The aliens retreated before it. On the plateau you can see the sentries. I guess they posted themselves there, at intervals, between the edge and the new caves, to define the limits of safety. They died there. Six of them. The rest, several hundred, reached the caves. They are dead, too."

"I see," Mr. Wallace said.

"When you first discovered them--?" Mr. Ryan asked after a moment.

Captain Meford hesitated.

Mr. Tucker said: "I believe one of your men killed himself last night--wasn't it? A technician? I was told he felt you could reverse the air-changing equipment in time to save the aliens. I understand that was very much on his mind for the last week or so."

"I'm not too familiar with the man, sir. He was on Captain Arnold's shift, I believe."

"Captain Meford," Mr. Ryan insisted, "when did you say you first discovered the aliens?"

Captain Meford hesitated. The others waited.

"They were then scaling the cliff, sir."

"And General Shorter, was he told of this immediately?" Mr. Ryan asked.

"I don't know when the general was told."

"You discovered them?"

"Yes, sir. I ... you see, at the time the winds completely prohibited air traffic. As you know, the air scouts are not stable enough until ... later. Later, I ... Yes, sir. I discovered them."

"Did you then inform the general?"

"No, sir. I informed the duty officer."

"Did he inform the general?"

"I don't know."

"Why didn't you tell the general?" Mr. Tucker asked.

"I was then in communication with Captain Geiger, and I felt he...." The sentence trailed away.

"Would tell the general?" Mr. Tucker prompted. "Well, did he?"

"I believe he did, sir," Captain Meford said. He let out a long breath.

"May we see the aliens?" Mr. Ryan asked.

"I wouldn't advise it, sir," Captain Meford said. "High flights are still very risky because of the wind velocities."

* * * * *

After the evening meal, General Shorter called Captain Arnold aside. "Mind if I go over to Nine with you?" he asked. "The air around here is--well, the fact of the matter is, I'd like to get away from them for awhile."

"Of course not, sir," Captain Arnold said.

"We'll call it an inspection. Which might be a good idea at that. With these people running around trying to interfere with my schedule. Poking around. Asking questions. Taking men away from their work, basically." He tapped his teeth with his right thumb in reflection. "I'd better check up on all the domes tonight, just to be sure."

"Yes, sir."

"I wouldn't want anything to go wrong because they're here."

In the dressing quarters, they donned surface suits and exited through the locks to Miracastle. In the area immediately beyond the Dome, the solidly positioned connection rails radiated away. The general gestured for the captain to lead.

The wind buffeted them. Inside the surface suits it was quiet.

"David?" the general asked.

"Yes, sir?" Captain Arnold said. He was fastening his safety line in the keyed slot. He fumbled with it for a moment before the wind.

"You on suit communications?"

"Yes, sir." Captain Arnold straightened and moved forward. The general replaced him and dropped his safety line in place with practiced efficiency.

Captain Arnold, surrounded by dust devils, became a distant, indistinct bulk. His motions were ponderous. The general could no longer see his face or his expression.

"I do not entirely understand this, David," the general said conversationally. "The investigation. I thought I had powerful friends in the Corps. Though a man makes enemies." The general lurched awkwardly over the broken surface of Miracastle, drawing the safety line taut. He moved toward the connection rail again. "A general is separated from much of his command. Some of the technical refinements are too involved--and, of course, men hide their feelings." Once again he struggled with the wind, turning slowly at the end of the safety line: held from the devouring anger of the planet only by the slender umbilical cord from the stars. "General Grisley, now. I think he's sixteen star, in headquarters. He was a politician. He came up fast. In fact, he was my adjutant a few years ago. He was always a man to hold a grudge."

Captain Arnold made no reply.

"You know how politics is in the Corps."

Dome Nine rose from the swirling mist before them. The wind seemed to increase in fury. And still, inside the suits, there was the sound only of labored breathing and the general's voice.

"These natives," the general said. "They were very primitive, David." Neither could see the other's face. "I can't think of them as intelligent at all. I feel they were very low on the evolutionary ladder. I wouldn't call it a city, as I've heard it called. Natural formation, more likely. Nature plays strange tricks."

* * * * *

They were at the lock of Dome Nine.

Inside, the general removed his helmet. "David," he said, "I've been meaning to talk to you for some time now. You've got a good career in front of you in the Corps. You're going to move up. With a few breaks, right to the top. I'm just now writing up my evaluation for your files. I plan to give you a very fine recommendation, Captain. Normally, I don't talk about this sort of thing, but I thought you might like to know."

"Thank you, sir," Captain Arnold said uneasily, opening his surface suit.

"Well, let's inspect the area, Captain."

The inspection was perfunctory. As he always did, the general paused at the pile monitor and watched, in the Dante screen, the virtually indescribable reactions being sustained far beneath the surface: molten rock flowing and smoking. Orange, blue and white flames danced as though in agony in the great, expanding cavern, danced and merged and vanished and reappeared in an ever-changing pattern.

Back at the locks, the general bid Captain Arnold good-by and turned to leave. Then, as if an afterthought came forward, he turned back.

"David, oh, David!"

"Yes, sir."

"Perhaps you remember a conversation we had a few weeks ago? I called on you for some technical advice." He held his helmet in his hands.

"When was that, sir?"

"Oh, it was about the technical feasibility of reversing the air-changing equipment, I believe. As you know, I can't be up on all the technical, purely detailed procedure, for all phases of the operation. That's what we have experts for." The last statement was unusually jovial. "I believe you told me, David, that the process was too far along at that time. Perhaps you remember?"

"General Shorter, when was that?"

"I thought you would remember, David. I'm sure it was you. Yes, I'm almost positive it was. But if you say.... Well, David, it wasn't quite so much as exactly a statement like that. But that was the general meaning of it, you know, stripped of all the technical language. You have to take it in the over-all context. That was the meaning I got." He laughed tactfully. "You're like lawyers, all you technicians. You answer everything yes and no at the same time. I hoped you'd remember the conversation. I got that idea from it." The general waited. "Well, David--don't look like that--it's not at all important. Just trying to refresh my own memory. It's not important, really.... Good night, David." He placed the helmet over his head.

"Good night, General."

Methodically the general completed his rounds. He laughed often and joked with the men and seemed in exceptionally good spirits.

Back in his own quarters, he brought out his diary. With a weary sigh, he sat down to it. He glanced at his timepiece. The day extended backward almost beyond memory but it was not yet late.

After thumbing the diary listlessly for several minutes--pausing now and then at a paragraph--he began to write. He put the events of the day down precisely in their logical sequence.

The Committee took over the dining area when the general left for his tour of inspection. While the steward's department was preparing coffee for the interviewees, now assembling in the corridor, the four members of the Committee arranged themselves at the larger of the tables. Notepaper lay before them.

Mr. Tucker lighted a cigar and fingered it. "A rather good meal," he said.

The others nodded.

"I may as well start off, while we're waiting," Mr. Wallace said. "I'll summarize my somewhat contradictory observations.

"Superficially, the cultural level of the natives appeared quite primitive. The absence of tools would normally be indicative. On the other hand, the city was carved from rock in a way so as to suggest a very sophisticated technology. And writing, while apparently not practiced to any considerable extent, was known--or, if not writing as we understand it, some advanced decorative technique. We've found two lines of it, at least.

"Again superficially, the city would suggest a nomadic tradition, but for its craftsmanship. It seems independent of any obvious supply of food and their equivalent of water, if any. Nor were any provisions in evidence for the disposal of waste products. Yet the city had the appearance of age and continual usage. If you notice, the floor of the recess was worn unevenly toward the center by what I should guess to be the traffic of several centuries.

"The thought naturally occurs that the aliens were the rather decadent relics of a highly developed technological civilization existing on the planet in the not too distant past. Yet Miracastle offers no evidence for the existence of a prior technology--no ruins, no residual radioactivity from atomic operations. In short, the city has no apparent genesis in the past.

"The alternative arises: perhaps the natives were not natives at all, but immigrants or colonists like ourselves. Yet the age of the city contradicts this.

"Perhaps there is a simple explanation, although it does not occur to me. But I do have this feeling. The city was utilitarian. To me, it calls to mind one of those exquisite etchings of Picasso. The severe economy of line suggests simplicity. Yet, on further inspection, you see that each line contributes to a rather bewildering variety of perspectives. I strongly suspect that the city and the people of Miracastle will remain one of the great, unsolved mysteries of the universe."

Mr. Wallace was finished with his remarks.

Mr. Ryan nodded. "Perhaps I'm deficient in sensibilities, but I find that the most ... agonizing ... thing of all is not ever to be able to know what these people were like. It's almost as if some part of us had been lopped off, isn't it? What did the people of Miracastle think about? What was their philosophy of life? What was their social organization? What was their ultimate goals? When you realize how much we learned of ourselves from an examination of our own primitive cultures, the sense of loss really comes home. Think how much more we could have learned of ourselves by acquiring the perspective of a truly alien culture. It's almost as if we could really understand ourselves at last if we could only understand a totally alien culture ..."

"Well, that's gone," Mr. Tucker said. The words were brittle and discrete. They hung in memory and the listeners waited as though for an echo of something shouted into a canyon. The echo did not come.

They were silent. Grief is the final knowledge of time. When one first learns that it can never be turned backward upon itself to permit the correction of past sins and the rightings of wrongs transfixed and forever unalterable. Grief is the frantic, futile beating of hands against a barrier without substance, both obscenely unreal and yet the only reality. Grief is the knowledge that we cannot step backwards before the death of loved ones and see those precious half-forgotten dream faces once again. Grief is the knowledge that time is immutable.

Outside the Richardson Dome, the wind was changing. It could now neither support the life that was nor the life that would be, and it howled in melancholy and insensate anguish its loneliness and longing to the eternal and ever-changing pattern of the stars.

* * * * *

The Committee concluded their interviews with an old-line corporal. He had just short of thirty years service and had several times traveled the two-way escalator of non-commissioned rank from master sergeant to private. He was perhaps typical of many of the older soldiers. His love of the Corps was expressed by his loyalty to it; his hatred of the Corps was expressed by his inability to abide by its regulations.

"You knew Sergeant Schuster very well?" Mr. Tucker asked.

"He was a new man," the corporal said. "He got on just before lift-off. A week, two weeks, something like that. I knew him, I guess. He was one of them kind that was always thinking. And like you know, sir, thinking ain't too good for a soldier. I've known a lot of guys like that in my time. You know what I mean? They're not cut out for the Corps."

"He talked to you quite a bit?"

The corporal turned to face Mr. Ryan. "He was always talking, sir. He was a regular nut. I thought for a while he was queer. He had all those crazy ideas."

"Like what, Corporal?"

"Oh, like--well, you know." The corporal hesitated and rummaged his memory without conspicuous success. "Sunsets," he said rather emphatically. "Talked about sunsets. Talked about just anything. Called me out back on Earth to look at a sunset once, I remember."

"What did he think about killing the natives?" Mr. Wallace asked.

The question alerted the mechanism which produced the almost-Pavlovian loyalty response.

"We didn't kill no natives," the corporal said. "They just died when we changed the air. Tough."

He looked at Mr. Wallace and then into the silence around him.

"Well ... well, let's see. I guess you'd say that sort of got to him. I mean, you know, he thought it was--" the voice became distant, as though describing a fantastic event which he could not relate to anything in a rational environment--"he thought it was his fault. You know how some of these guys are. I used to have a platoon once, you know. And they say--" He twisted his mouth and changed his voice to a childish whine. "What for?" The voice reverted to normal. "They don't ask for any reason. They just ask. I say to them, I say, 'God damn it'--excuse me, sir--'I told you to do it, ain't that enough?' Well, this Schuster, sir, he worried all the time. He got so he cut himself shaving. Damnedest thing. Oh, hell, maybe for the last week, every morning, he came out a bloody mess. Patches of toilet paper all over his face. 'I can't shave,' he'd say. 'My God, I can't shave.' He wasn't nervous, either. His hands were okay. They didn't shake. It's just that he couldn't shave. Like I say, he was a nut."

No one spoke for a moment, and the corporal twisted uncomfortably.

Then Mr. Tucker said, "Well, Corporal, tell me this, please."

"Yes, sir."

"What's your own personal impression of General Shorter?"

"The old man?" the corporal asked in surprise. "He's okay."

"Feel free to discuss this," Mr. Flison said. "We'd like to know, really, what your opinion is."

"Like I say, he's okay. He's got a job to do. You know, he busted me once. General Shorter personally, I mean. Hell, I don't hold it against him, though. He's got his job to do, I got mine. I wouldn't say anything against General Shorter, no, sir. He's a soldier. I mean, you know ... he's a soldier."

After the corporal was dismissed, Mr. Tucker said, "Well, gentlemen, I guess we've about wrapped it up here. I think this is enough. Anybody's mind changed? I don't think we need any more, do you?"

Mr. Wallace sighed heavily. He looked down at his hands.

* * * * *

General Shorter was still at his writing desk when he was notified that Mr. Tucker would like to see him first thing in the morning.

"Another day of it, eh?" the general asked the sergeant who brought the message.

"No, sir. From the other crew, I hear they're planning to leave tomorrow."

The general's face relaxed. His smile reflected weary tolerance. "Had enough in one day, have they? It's about time they let us get back to work."

After the sergeant left, the general wrote a final paragraph:

"I've just been informed the 'investigation' is completed. In record time, it seems. They finished up in the mess tonight, talking to some of the men. So what did it all really accomplish? They took a long ship that could better have been used somewhere else. Half my men are down with the virus. They almost cost me my schedule. And to what end? Just another piece of paper somewhere. Put Miracastle on the scale against some nice, heavy report and see which way the scale tips."

The general closed the diary. It was late now. He was very tired.

* * * * *

Mr. Tucker, after breakfast, knocked on the general's door.

"Come in," General Shorter called.

The civilian entered. The general dismissed the orderly with a nod. "And I'll need some clean towels for tonight," he called. His voice was hoarse.

"Yes, sir."

The door closed. The two of them were alone.

"Sit down. Excuse the cold. Got it last night. What do you say to a brandy?"

"Don't let me stop you."

"I never drink alone."

"Perhaps you'd better," Mr. Tucker said.

The general had paused just short of the cupboard. He turned slowly. "In that case, I'll make an exception, this once." He poured. "Just what did you mean by that, sir? Let's get to the point."

"General Shorter, we're going to have to ask you to come back with us."

The general bent slightly forward. His lips were partly open, as though he were listening to hear a second time.

"Why," he said, "I've too much work to do, sir. I'm afraid that's out of the question. It's just not possible at all."

Mr. Tucker waited.

General Shorter poured himself another brandy. His back was to the civilian.

"There's nothing more important, right now, than my job here," he said. He drank the brandy in a single gulp.

"I don't see how it can wait, General," Mr. Tucker said.

The general's lips were dry. He closed his eyes tightly for a moment against the alcohol and the cold. He licked his lips. "What's the formal charge?"

Mr. Tucker bent forward. His voice was soft and curious, as though the question were his final effort to understand something that puzzled him for a long time. "What do you think it is, General?"

"What could it be?" the general said sharply. "I follow orders, sir. I was sent out here to make this planet suitable for human habitation. This is exactly what I have been doing." His voice was growing progressively more angry and with an effort he curbed himself. "Put yourself in my position. I did what any field commander would have done. It was too late to stop it. I've got--It's a question of the limits of normal prudence. A matter of interpretation, sir."

The general was in the process of pouring still another drink. The slender brandy glass broke under the force of his anger. He opened his palm. Blood trickled from between his fingers.

The general looked up from the hand and fleeting annoyance came and went before he was recalled to present reality. His eyes met Mr. Tucker's.

Mr. Tucker suddenly shivered as if touched by a wind from beyond the most distant stars, a wind which whispered: The aliens are among us.

"General," Mr. Tucker said, "the formal charge is murder."

Contents

MARTYR

By ALAN E. NOURSE

Rejuvenation for the millions--or rejuvenation for the five hundred lucky ones, the select ones, that can be treated each year? Tough, independent Senator Dan Fowler fights a one-man battle against the clique that seeks perpetual power and perpetual youth, in this hard-hitting novel by Alan E. Nourse. Why did it have to be his personal fight? The others fumble it--they'd foul it up, Fowler protested? But why was he in the fight and what was to happen to Senator Fowler's fight against this fantastic conspiracy? Who would win?

"I can break him, split his Criterion Committee wide open now while there's still a chance, and open rejuvenation up to everybody...."

Four and one half hours after Martian sunset, the last light in the Headquarters Building finally blinked out.

Carl Golden stamped his feet nervously against the cold, cupping his cigarette in his hand to suck up the tiny spark of warmth. The night air bit his nostrils and made the smoke tasteless in the darkness. Atmosphere screens kept the oxygen in, all right--but they never kept the biting cold out. As the light disappeared he dropped the cigarette, stamping it sharply into darkness. Boredom vanished, and warm blood prickled through his shivering legs.

He slid back tight against the coarse black building front, peering across the road in the gloom.

It was the girl. He had thought so, but hadn't been sure. She swung the heavy stone door shut after her, glanced both left and right, and started down the frosty road toward the lights of the colony.

Carl Golden waited until she was gone. He glanced at his wrist-chrono, and waited ten minutes more. He didn't realize that he was trembling until he ducked swiftly across the road. Through the window of the low, one-story building he could see the lobby call-board, with the little colored studs all dark. He smiled in unpleasant satisfaction--no one was left in the building. It was routine, just like everything else in this god-forsaken hole. Utter, abysmal, trancelike routine. The girl was a little later than usual, probably because of the ship coming in tomorrow. Reports to get ready, supply requisitions, personnel recommendations--

--and the final reports on Armstrong's death. Mustn't forget that. The real story, the absolute, factual truth, without any nonsense. The reports that would go, ultimately, to Rinehart and only Rinehart, as all other important reports from the Mars Colony had been doing for so many years.

Carl skirted the long, low building, falling into the black shadows of the side wall. Halfway around he came to the supply chute, covered with a heavy moulded-stone cover.

Now?

It had taken four months here to know that he would have to do it this way. Four months of ridiculous masquerade--made idiotic by the incredible fact that everyone took him for exactly what he pretended to be, and never challenged him--not even Terry Fisher, who drunk or sober always challenged everything and everybody! But the four months had told on his nerves, in his reactions, in the hollows under his quick brown eyes. There was always the spectre of a slip-up, an aroused suspicion. And until he had the reports before his eyes, he couldn't fall back on Dan Fowler's name to save him. He had shook Dan's hand the night he had left, and Dan had said, "Remember, son--I don't know you. Hate to do it this way, but we can't risk it now--" And they couldn't, of course. Not until they knew, for certain, who had murdered Kenneth Armstrong.

They already knew why.

* * * * *

The utter stillness of the place reassured him; he hoisted up the chute cover, threw it high, and shinned his long body into the chute. It was a steep slide; he held on for an instant, then let go. Blackness gulped him down as the cover snapped closed behind him.

He struck hard and rolled. The chute opened into the commissary in the third deep-level of the building, and the place was black as the inside of a pocket. He tested unbroken legs with a sigh of relief, and limped across to where the door should be.

In the corridor there was some light--dim phosphorescence from the Martian night-rock lining the walls and tiling the floor. He walked swiftly, cursing the clack-clack his heels made on the ringing stone. When he reached the end of the corridor he tried the heavy door.

It gave, complaining. Good, good! It had been a quick, imperfect job of jimmying the lock, so obviously poor that it had worried him a lot--but why should they test it? There was still another door.

He stepped into the blackness again, started across the room as the door swung shut behind him.

A shoe scraped, the faintest rustle of sound. Carl froze. His own trouser leg? A trick of acoustics? He didn't move a muscle.

Then: "Carl?"

His pocket light flickered around the room, a small secretary's ante-room. It stopped on a pair of legs, a body, slouched down in the soft plastifoam chair--a face, ruddy and bland, with a shock of sandy hair, with quixotic eyebrows. "Terry! For Christ sake, what--"

The man leaned forward, grinning up at him. "You're late, Carl." His voice was a muddy drawl. "Should have made it sooner than this, sheems--seems to me."

Carl's light moved past the man in the chair to the floor. The bottle was standing there, still half full. "My god, you're drunk!"

"Course I'm drunk. Whadj-ya think, I'd sober up after you left me tonight? No thanks, I'd rather be drunk." Terry Fisher hiccupped loudly. "I'd always rather be drunk, around this place."

"All right, you've got to get out of here--" Carl's voice rose with bitter anger. Of all times, of all times--he wanted to scream. "How did you get in here? You've got to get out--"

"So do you. They're on to you, Carl. I don't think you know that, but they are." He leaned forward precariously. "I had a talk with Barness this morning, one of his nice 'spontaneous' chats, and he pumped the hell out of me and thought I was too drunk to know it. They're expecting you to come here tonight--"

Carl heaved at the drunken man's arm, frantically in the darkness. "Get out of here, Terry, or so help me--"

Terry clutched at him. "Didn't you hear me? They know about you. Personell supervisor! They think you're spying for the Eastern boys--they're starting a Mars colony too, you know. Barness is sure you're selling them info--" The man hiccupped again. "Barness is an ass, just like all the other Retreads running this place, but I'm not an ass, and you didn't fool me for two days--"

Carl gritted his teeth. How could Terry Fisher know? "For the last time--"

Fisher lurched to his feet. "They'll get you, Carl. They can try you and shoot you right on the spot, and Barness will do it. I had to tell you, you've walked right into it, but you might still get away if--"

It was cruel. The drunken man's head jerked up at the blow, and he gave a little grunt, then slid back down on the chair. Carl stepped over his legs, worked swiftly at the door beyond. If they caught him now, Terry Fisher was right. But in five more minutes--

The lock squeaked, and the door fell open. Inside he tore through the file cases, wrenched at the locked drawers in frantic haste, ripping the weak aluminum sheeting like thick tinfoil. Then he found the folder marked KENNETH ARMSTRONG on the tab.

Somewhere above him an alarm went off, screaming a mournful note through the building. He threw on the light switch, flooding the room with whiteness, and started through the papers, one by one, in the folder. No time to read. Flash retinal photos were hard to superimpose and keep straight, but that was one reason why Carl Golden was on Mars instead of sitting in an office back on Earth--

He flipped the last page, and threw the folder onto the floor. As he went through the door, he flipped out the light, raced with clattering footsteps down the corridor.

Lights caught him from both sides, slicing the blackness like hot knives. "All right, Golden. Stop right there."

Dark figures came out of the lights, ripped his clothing off without a word. Somebody wrenched open his mouth, shined a light in, rammed coarse cold fingers down into his throat. Then: "All right, you bastard, up stairs. Barness wants to see you."

They packed him naked into the street, hurried him into a three-wheeled ground car. Five minutes later he was wading through frosty dust into another building, and Barness was glaring at him across the room.

* * * * *

Odd things flashed through Carl's mind. You seldom saw a Repeater get really angry--but Barness was angry. The man's young-old face (the strange, utterly ageless amalgamation of sixty years of wisdom, superimposed by the youth of a twenty-year-old) had unaccustomed lines of wrath about the eyes and mouth. Barness didn't waste words. "What did you want down there?"

"Armstrong." Carl cut the word out almost gleefully. "And I got it, and there's nothing you or Rinehart or anybody else in between can do about it. I don't know what I saw yet, but I've got it in my eyes and in my cortex, and you can't touch it."

"You stupid fool, we can peel your cortex," Barness snarled.

"Well, you won't. You won't dare."

Barness glanced across at the officer who had brought him in. "Tommy--"

"Dan Fowler won't like it," said Carl.

Barness stopped short, blinking. He took a slow breath. Then he sank down into his chair. "Fowler" he said, as though dawn were just breaking.

"That's right. He sent me up here. I've found what he wants. Shoot me now, and when they probe you Dan will know I found it, and you won't be around for another rejuvenation."

Barness looked suddenly old. "What did he want?"

"The truth about Armstrong. Not the 'accident' story you fed to the teevies.... "Tragic End for World Hero, Died With His Boots On". Dan wanted the truth. Who killed him. Why this colony is grinding down from compound low to stop, and turning men like Terry Fisher into alcoholic bums. Why this colony is turning into a glorified, super-refined Birdie's Rest for old men. But mostly who killed Armstrong, how he was murdered, who gave the orders. And if you don't mind, I'm beginning to get cold."

"And you got all that," said Barness.

"That's right."

"You haven't read it, though."

"Not yet. Plenty of time for that on the way back."

Barness nodded wearily, and motioned the guard to give Carl his clothes. "I think you'd better read it tonight. Maybe it'll surprise you."

Golden's eyes widened. Something in the man's voice, some curious note of defeat and hopelessness, told him that Barness was not lying. "Oh?"

"Armstrong didn't have an accident, that's true. But nobody murdered him, either. Nobody gave any orders, to anybody, from anybody. Armstrong put a bullet through his head--quite of his own volition."

"All right, Senator," the young red-headed doctor said. "You say you want it straight--that's how you're going to get it." Moments before, Dr. Moss had been laughing. Now he wasn't laughing. "Six months, at the outside. Nine, if you went to bed tomorrow, retired from the Senate, and lived on tea and crackers. But where I'm sitting I wouldn't bet a plugged nickel that you'll be alive a month from now. If you think I'm joking, you just try to squeeze a bet out of me."

Senator Dan Fowler took the black cigar from his mouth, stared at the chewed-up end for a moment, and put it back in again. He had had something exceedingly witty all ready to say at this point in the examination; now it didn't seem to be too funny. If Moss had been a mealy-mouthed quack like the last Doc he had seen, okay. But Moss wasn't. Moss was obviously not impressed by the old man sitting across the desk from him, a fact which made Dan Fowler just a trifle uneasy. And Moss knew his turnips.

Dan Fowler looked at the doctor and said, "Garbage."

The red-headed doctor shrugged. "Look, Senator--sometimes a banana is a banana. I know heart disease, and I know how it acts. I know that it kills people if they wait too long. And when you're dead, no rejuvenation lab is going to bring you back to life again."

"Oh, hell! Who's dying?" Fowler's grey eyebrows knit in the old familiar scowl, and he bit down hard on the cigar. "Heart disease! So I get a little pain now and then--sure it won't last forever, and when it gets bad I'll come in and take the full treatment. But I can't do it now!" He spread his hands in a violent gesture. "I only came in here because my daughter dragged me. My heart's doing fine--I've been working an eighteen hour day for forty years now, and I can do it for another year or two--"

"But you have pain," said Dr. Moss.

"So? A little twinge, now and then."

"Whenever you lose your temper. Whenever anything upsets you."

"All right--a twinge."

"Which makes you sit down for ten or fifteen minutes. Which doesn't go away with one nitro-tablet any more, so you have to take two, and sometimes three--right?"

* * * * *

Dan Fowler blinked. "All right, sometimes it gets a little bad--"

"And it used to be only once or twice a month, but now it's almost every day. And once or twice you've blacked clean out for a while, and made your staff work like demons to cover for you and keep it off the teevies, right?"

"Say, who's been talking to you?"

"Jean has been talking to me."

"Can't even trust your own daughter to keep her trap shut." The Senator tossed the cigar butt down in disgust. "It happened once, yes. That god damned Rinehart is enough to make anybody black out." He thrust out his jaw and glowered at Dr. Moss as though it were all his fault. Then he grinned. "Oh, I know you're right, Doc. It's just that this is the wrong time. I can't take two months out now--there's too much to be done between now and the middle of next month."

"Oh, yes. The Hearings. Why not turn it over to your staff? They know what's going on."

"Nonsense. They know, but not like I know. After the Hearings, fine--I'll come along like a lamb. But now--"

Dr. Moss reddened, slammed his fist down on the desk. "Dammit, man, are you blind and deaf? Or just plain stupid? Didn't you hear me a moment ago? You may not live through the Hearings. You could go, just like that, any minute. But this is 2134 A.D., not the middle ages. It would be so utterly, hopelessly pointless to let that happen--"

Fowler champed his cigar and scowled. "After it was done I'd have to Free-Agent for a year, wouldn't I?" It was an accusation.

"You should. But that's a formality. If you want to go back to what you were doing the day you came from the Center--"

"Yes, if! But supposing I didn't? Supposing I was all changed?"

The young doctor looked at the old man shrewdly. Dan Fowler was 56 years old--and he looked forty. It seemed incredible even to Moss that the man could have done what he had done, and look almost as young and fighting-mad now as he had when he started. Clever old goat, too--but Dan Fowler's last remark opened the hidden door wide. Moss smiled to himself. "You're afraid of it, aren't you, Senator?"

"Of rejuvenation? Nonsense."

"But you are. You aren't the only one--it's a pretty frightening thing. Cash in the old model, take out a new one, just like a jet racer or a worn out talk-writer. Only it isn't machinery, it's your body, and your life." Dr. Moss grinned. "It scares a man. Rejuvenation isn't the right word, of course. Aside from the neurones, they take away every cell in your body, one way or another, and give you new ones. A hundred and fifty years ago Cancelmo and Klein did it on a dog, and called it sub-total prosthesis. A crude job--I've seen their papers and films. Vat-grown hearts and kidneys, revitalized vascular material, building up new organ systems like a patchwork quilt, coaxing new tissues to grow to replace old ones--but they got a living dog out of it, and that dog lived to the ripe old age of 37 years before he died."

* * * * *

Moss pushed back from his desk, watching Dan Fowler's face. "Then in 1992 Nimrock tried it on a man, and almost got himself hanged because the man died. That was a hundred and forty-two years ago. And then while he was still on trial, his workers completed the second job, and the man lived, and oh, how the jig changed for Nimrock!"

The doctor shrugged. As he talked, Dan Fowler sat silent, chewing his cigar furiously. But listening--he was listening, all right. "Well, it was crude, then," Moss said. "It's not so crude any more." He pointed to a large bronze plaque hanging on the office wall. "You've seen that before. Read it."

Dan Fowler's eyes went up to the plaque. A list of names. At the top words said, "These ten gave life to Mankind."

Below it were the names:

Martin Aronson, Ph. D. Education

Thomas Bevalaqua Literature and Art

Chauncy Devlin Music

Frederick A. Kehler, M. S. Engineering

William B. Morse, L. L. D. Law

Rev. Hugh H. F. Norton Philosophy and Theology

Jacob Prowsnitz, Ph. D. History

Arthur L. Rodgers, M. D. Medicine

Carlotta Sokol, Ph. D. Sociopsychology

Harvey Tatum Business

"I know," said Dan Fowler. "June 1st, 2005. They were volunteers."

"Ten out of several dozen volunteers," Moss amended. "Those ten were chosen by lot. Already people were dreaming of what sub-total prosthesis could do. It could preserve the great minds, it could compound the accumulated wisdom of one lifetime with another lifetime--and maybe more. Those ten people--representing ten great fields of study--risked their lives. Not to live forever--just to see if rejuvenation could really preserve their minds in newly built bodies. All of them were old, older than you are, Senator, some were sicker than you, and all of them were afraid. But seven of the ten are still alive today, a hundred and thirty years later. Rodgers died in a jet crash. Tatum died of neuro-toxic virus, because we couldn't do anything to rebuild neurones in those days. Bevalaqua suicided. The rest are still alive, after two more rejuvenations."

"Fine," said Dan Fowler. "I still can't do it now."

"That was just ten people," Moss cut in. "It took five years to get ready for them. But now we can do five hundred a year--only five hundred select individuals, to live on instead of dying. And you've got the gall to sit there and tell me you don't have the time for it!"

* * * * *

The old man rose slowly, lighting another cigar. "It could be five thousand a year. That's why I don't have the time. Fifteen thousand, fifty thousand. We could do it--but we're not doing it. Walter Rinehart's been rejuvenated--twice already! I'm on the list because I shouted so loud they didn't dare leave me off. But you're not on it. Why not? You could be. Everybody could be."

Dr. Moss spread his hands. "The Criterion Committee does the choosing."

"Rinehart's criteria! Only five hundred a year. Use it for a weapon. Build power with it. Get a strangle-hold on it, and never, never let it go." The Senator leaned across the desk, his eyes bright with anger. "I haven't got time to stop what I'm doing now--because I can stop Rinehart, if I only live that long, I can break him, split his Criterion Committee wide open now while there's still a chance, and open rejuvenation up to everybody instead of five hundred lucky ones a year. I can stop him because I've dug at him and dug at him for twenty-nine years, and shouted and screamed and fought and made people listen. And if I fumble now, it'll all be down the drain, finished, washed up.

"If that happens, nobody will ever stop him."

There was silence in the room for a moment. Then Moss spread his hands. "The hearings are that critical, eh?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Why has it got to be your personal fight? Other people could do it."

"They'd fumble it. They'd foul it up. Senator Libby fouled it up once already, a long time ago. Rinehart's lived for a hundred and nineteen years, and he's learning new tricks every year. I've only lived fifty-six of them, but I know his tricks. I can beat him."

"But why you?"

"Somebody's got to do it. My card is on top."

A 'phone buzzer chirped. "Yes, he's here." Dr. Moss handed Dan the receiver. A moment later the Senator was grinning like a cat struggling into his overcoat and scarf. "Sorry, Doc--I know what you tell me is true, and I'm no fool. If I have to stop, I'll stop."

"Tomorrow, then."

"Not tomorrow. One of my lads is back from the Mars Colony. Tomorrow we pow-wow--but hard. After the hearings, Doc. And meanwhile, keep your eye on the teevies. I'll be seeing you."

The door clicked shut with a note of finality, and Dr. David Moss stared at it gloomily. "I hope so," he said. But nobody in particular heard him.

III

A Volta two-wheeler was waiting for him outside. Jean drove off down the drive with characteristic contempt for the laws of gravity when Dan had piled in, and Carl Golden was there, looking thinner, more gaunt and hawk-like than ever before, his brown eyes sharp under his shock of black hair, his long, thin aquiline nose ("If you weren't a Jew you'd be a discredit to the Gentiles," Dan Fowler had twitted him once, years before, and Carl had looked down his long, thin, aquiline nose, and sniffed, and let the matter drop, because until then he had never been sure whether his being a Jew had mattered to Dan Fowler or not, and now he knew, and was quite satisfied with the knowledge) and the ever-present cigarette between thin, sensitive fingers. Dan clapped him on the shoulder, and shot a black look at his daughter, relegating her to an indescribable Fowler limbo, which was where she belonged, and would reside until Dan got excited and forgot how she'd betrayed him to Dr. Moss, which would take about ten or fifteen minutes all told. Jean Fowler knew her father far too well to worry about it, and squinted out the window at the afternoon traffic as the car skidded the corner into the Boulevard Throughway, across the river toward home. "God damn it, boy, you could have wired me at least. One of Jean's crew spotted the passage list, so I knew you'd left, and got the hearing moved up to next month--"

Carl scowled. "I thought it was all set for February 15th."

Dan chuckled. "It was. But I was only waiting for you, and got the ball rolling as soon as I knew you were on your way. Dwight McKenzie is still writing the Committee's business calendar, of course, and he didn't like it a bit, but he couldn't find any solid reason why it shouldn't be set ahead. And I think our good friend Senator Rinehart is probably wriggling on the stick about now, just on the shock value of the switch. Always figure in the shock value of everything you do, my boy--it pays off more than you'd ever dream--"

Carl Golden shook his head. "I don't like it, Dan."

"What, the switch in dates?"

"The switch. I wish you hadn't done that."

"But why? Look, son, I know that with Ken Armstrong dead our whole approach has to be changed--it's going to be trickier, but it might even work out better. The Senate knows what's been going on between Rinehart and me, and so does the President. They know elections are due next June. They know I want a seat on his Criterion Committee before elections, and they know that to get on it I'll do my damnedest to unseat him. They know I've shaken him up, that he's scared of me. Okay, fine. With Armstrong there to tell how he was chosen for Retread back in '87, we'd have had Rinehart running for his life...."

"But you don't," Carl cut in flatly, "and that's that."

"What, are you crazy, son? I needed Armstrong, bad. Rinehart knew it, and had him taken care of. It was fishy--it stunk from here to Mars, but Rinehart covered it up fast and clean. But with the stuff you got up in the Colony, we can charge Rinehart with murder, and the whole Senate knows his motive already. He didn't dare to let Armstrong testify."

* * * * *

Carl was shaking his head sadly.

"Well, what's wrong?"

"You aren't going to like this, Dan. Rinehart's clean. Armstrong comitted suicide."

Fowler's mouth fell open, and he sat back hard. "Oh, no."

"Sorry."

"Ken Armstrong? Suicided?" He shook his head helplessly, groping for words. "I--I--oh, Jesus. I don't believe it. If Ken Armstrong suicided, I'm the Scarlet Whore of Babylon."

"Well, we'll try to keep that off the teevies."

"There's no chance that you're wrong," said the old man.

Carl shook his head. "There's plenty that's funny about that Mars Colony, but Armstrong's death was suicide. Period. Even Barness didn't understand it."

Sharp eyes went to Carl's face. "What's funny about the Colony?"

Carl shrugged, and lit a cigarette. "Hard to say. This was my first look, I had nothing to compare it with. But there's something wrong. I always thought the Mars Colony was a frontier, a real challenge--you know, Man against the Wilderness, and all that. Saloons jammed on Saturday nights with rough boys out to get some and babes that had it to give. A place that could take Earthbound softies and toughen them up in a week, working to tame down the desert--"

His voice trailed off. "They've got a saloon, all right--but everybody just comes in quietly and gets slobbery drunk. Met a guy named Fisher, thought the same thing I did when he came up five years ago. A real go-getter, leader type, lots of ideas and the guts to put them across. Now he's got a hob-nail liver and he came back here on the ship with me, hating Mars and everything up there, most of all himself. Something's wrong up there, Dan. Maybe that's why Armstrong bowed out."

The Senator took a deep breath. "Not a man like Ken Armstrong. Why, I used to worship him when I was a kid. I was ten when he came back to Earth for his second Retread." The old man shook his head. "I wanted to go back to Mars with him--I actually packed up to run away, until dear brother Paul caught me and squealed to Dad. Imagine."

"I'm sorry, Dan."

The car whizzed off the Throughway, and began weaving through the residential areas of Arlington. Jean swung under an arched gate, stopped in front of a large greystone house of the sort they hadn't built for a hundred years. Dan Fowler stared out at the grey November afternoon. "Well, then we're really on thin ice at the Hearings. We can still do it. It'll take some steam-rollering, but we can manage it." He turned to the girl. "Get Schirmer on the wire as soon as we get inside. I'll go over Carl's report for whatever I can find. Tell Schirmer if he wants to keep his job as Coordinator of the Medical Center next year, he'd better have all the statistics available on all rejuvenated persons past and present, in my office tomorrow morning."

Jean gave her father a queer look. "Schirmer's waiting for you inside right now."

"Oh? Why?"

"He wouldn't say. Nothing to do with politics, he said. Something about Paul."

* * * * *

Nathan Shirmer was waiting in the library, sipping a brandy and pretending to scan a Congressional Record in the viewer-box. He looked up, bird-like, as Dan Fowler strode in. "Well, Nate. Sit down, sit down. I see you're into my private stock already, so I won't offer you any. What's this about my brother?"

Schirmer coughed into his hand. "Why--Dan, I don't quite know how to tell you this. He was in Washington this afternoon--"

"Of course he was. He was supposed to go to the Center--" Dan broke off short, whirling on Schirmer. "Wait a minute! There wasn't a slip-up on this permit?"

"Permit?"

"For rejuvention, you ass! He's on the Starship Project, coordinating engineer of the whole works out there. He's got a fair place on the list coming to him three ways from Sunday. Follmer put the permit through months ago, and Paul has just been diddling around getting himself clear so he could come in--"

The little Coordinator's eyes widened. "Oh, there wasn't anything wrong on our side, if that's what you mean. The permit was perfectly clear, the doctors were waiting for him. It was nothing like that."

"Then what was it like?"

Nathan Schirmer wriggled, and tried to avoid Dan's eyes. "Your brother refused it. He laughed in our faces, and told us to go to hell, and took the next jet back to Nevada. All in one afternoon."

The vibration of the jet engines hung just at perception level, nagging and nagging at Dan Fowler, until he threw his papers aside with a snarl of disgust, and peered angrily out the window.

They were high, and moving fast. Far below was a tiny spot of light in the blackness. Pittsburgh. Maybe Cleveland. It didn't matter which. Jets traveled at such-and-such a rate of speed; they left at such-and-such a time and arrived elsewhere at such-and-such a time later. He could worry, or he could not-worry. The jet would bring him down in Las Vegas in exactly the same time, to the second, either way. Another half-hour taxi ride over dusty desert roads would bring him to the glorified quonset hut his brother called home. Nothing Dan Fowler could do would hurry the process of getting there.

Dan had called, and received no answer.

He had talked to the Las Vegas authorities, and even gotten Lijinsky at the Starship, and neither of them knew anything. The police said yes, they would check at Dr. Fowler's residence, if he wasn't out at the Ship, and check back. But they hadn't checked back, and that was two hours ago. Meanwhile, Carl had chartered him a plane.

God damn Paul to three kinds of hell. Of all miserable times to start playing games, acting like an imbecile child! And the work and sweat Dan had gone through to get that permit, to buy it beg it, steal it, gold-plate it. Of course the odds were good that Paul would have gotten it without a whisper from Dan--he was high on the list, he was critical to Starship, and certainly Starship was critical enough to rate. But Dan had gone out on a limb, way out--The Senator's fist clenched, and he drummed it helplessly on the empty seat, and felt a twinge of pain spread up his chest, down his arm. He cursed, fumbled for the bottle in his vest pocket. God damned heart and god damned brother and god damned Rinehart--did everything have to split the wrong way? Now? Of all times of all days of all his fifty-six years of life, now?

All right, Dan. Cool, boy. Relax. Shame on you. Can't you quit being selfish just for a little while? Dan didn't like the idea as it flickered through his mind, but then he didn't like anything too much right then, so he forced the thought back for a rerun.

Big Dan Fowler, Senator Dan Fowler, Selfish Dan Fowler loves Dan Fowler mostly.

Poor Paul.

* * * * *

The words had been going through his mind like a silly chant since the first moment he had seen Nate Schirmer in the library. Poor Paul. Dan did all right for himself, he did--made quite a name down in Washington, you know, a fighter, a real fighter. The Boy with the Golden Touch (joke, son, laugh now). Everything he ever did worked out with him on top, somehow. Paul was different. Smart enough, plenty of the old gazoo, but he never had Dan's drive. Bad breaks, right down the line. Kinda tough on a guy, with a comet like Dan in the family. Poor Paul.

He let his mind drift back slowly, remembering little things, trying to spot the time, the single instant in time, when he stopped fighting Paul and started feeling sorry for him. It had been different, years ago. Paul was the smart one, all right. Never had Dan's build but he could think rings around him. Dan was always a little slow--never forgot anything he learned, but he learned slow. Still, there were ways to get around that--

Dad and Mom always liked Paul the best (their first boy, you know) and babied him more, and that was decidedly tougher to get around--Still there were ways.

Like the night the prize money came from the lottery, when he and Paul had split a ticket down the middle. How old was he then--ten? Eleven? And Paul was fifteen. He'd grubbed up the dollar polishing cars, and met Paul's dollar halfway, never dreaming the thing would pay off. And when it did! Oh, he'd never forget that night. He wanted the jet-racer. The ticket paid two thousand, a hell of a lot of cash for a pair of boys--and the two thousand would buy the racer. He'd been so excited tears had poured down his face.... But Paul had said no. Split it even, just like the ticket, Paul had said. There were hot words, and pleading, and threats, and Paul had just laughed at him until he got so mad he wanted to kill him with only his fists. Bad mistake, that. Paul was skinny, not much muscle, read books all the time it looked like a cinch. But Paul had five years on him that he hadn't counted on. Important five years. Paul connected with just one--enough to lay Dan flat on his back with a concussion and a broken jaw, and that, my boy, was that.

Almost.

Dan had won the fight, of course. It was the broken jaw that did it, that night, later the fight Mom and Dad had, worse than usual, a cruel one, low blows, mean--But Dan got his racer, on the strength of the broken jaw. That jaw had done him a lot of good. Never grew quite right after that, got one of the centers of ossification, the doc had said, and Dan had been god's gift to the pen-and-brush men with that heavy, angular jaw--a fighter's jaw, they called it.

* * * * *

That started it, of course. He knew then that he could beat Paul. Good to know. But never sure of it, always having to prove it. The successes came, and always he let Paul know about them, watched Paul's face like a cat. And Paul would squirm, and sneer, and tell Dan that in the end it was brains that would pay off. Sour grapes, of course. If Paul had ever squared off to him again, man to man, they might have had it over with. But Paul just seemed content to sit and quietly hate him.

Like the night he broke the Universalists in New Chicago, at the hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner. He'd told them, that night. That was the night they'd cold-shouldered him, and put Libby up to run for Mayor. Oh, he'd raised a glorious stink that night--he'd never enjoyed himself so much in his life, turning their whole twisted machine right over to the public on a silver platter. Cutting loose from the old crowd, appointing himself a committee of one to nominate himself on an Independent Reform ticket, campaign himself, and elect himself. A whippersnapper of thirty-two. Paul had been amused by it all, almost indulgent. "You do get melodramatic, don't you, Dan? Well, if you want to cut your own throat, that's your affair." And Dan had burned, and told Paul to watch the teevies, he'd see a thing or two, and he did, all right. He remembered Paul's face a few months later, when Libby conceded at 11:45 PM on election night, and Dan rode into office with a new crowd of livewires who were ready to help him plow into New Chicago and clean up that burg like it'd never been cleaned up. And the sweetest part of the victory pie had been the look on Paul's face that night--

So they'd fought, and he'd won and rubbed it in, and Paul had lost, and hated him for it, until that mysterious day--when had it really happened?--when "that big-brained brother of mine" changed subtly into "Christ, man, quit floundering! Who wants engineers? They're all over the place, you'll starve to death" and then finally, to "poor Paul."

When had it happened? Why?

Dan wondered, suddenly, if he had ever really forgiven Paul that blow to the jaw--

Perhaps.

He shook himself, scowling into the plastiglass window blackness. Okay, they'd fought it out. Always jolly, always making it out to be a big friendly game, only it never was a game. He knew how much he owed to Paul. He'd known it with growing concern for a lot of years. And now if he had to drag him back to Washington by the hair, he'd drag the silly fool--

They didn't look very much alike. There was a spareness about Paul--a tall, lean, hungry-looking man, with large soft eyes that hid their anger and a face that was lined with tiredness and resignation. A year ago, when Dan had seen him last, he had looked a young 60, closer to 45; now he looked an old, old 61. How much of this was the cancer Dan didn't know. The pathologist had said: "Not a very malignant tumor right now, but you can never tell when it'll blow up. He'd better be scheduled at the Center, if he's got a permit--"

But some of it was Paul, just Paul. The house was exactly as Dan had expected it would be (though he had never been inside this house since Paul had come to Starship Project fifteen years ago)--stuffy, severe, rather gloomy, rooms packed with bookshelves, drawing boards, odds and ends of papers and blueprints and inks, thick, ugly furniture from the early 2000's, a cluttered, improvised, helter-skelter barn of a testing-lab, with modern equipment that looked lost and alien scattered among the mouldering junk of two centuries.

"Get your coat," said Dan. "It's cold outside. We're going back to Washington."

"Have a drink." Paul waved him toward the sideboard. "Relax. Your pilot needs a rest."

"Paul, I didn't come here to play games. The games are over now."

Paul poured a brandy with deliberation. Handed Dan one, sipped his own. "Good brandy," he murmured. "Wish I could afford more of it."

"Paul. You're going with me."

The old man shrugged with a little tired smile. "I'll go with you if you insist, of course. But I'm not going."

"Do you know what you're saying?"

"Perfectly."

"Paul, you don't just say 'Thanks, but I don't believe I'll have any' when they give you a rejuvenation permit. Nobody refuses rejuvenation. Why, there are a million people out there begging for a place on the list. It's life, Paul. You can't just turn it down--"

"This is good brandy," said Paul. "Would you care to take a look at my lab, by the way? Not too well equipped, but sometimes I can work here better than--"

Dan swung on his brother viciously. "I will tell you what I'm going to do," he grated, hitting each word hard, like knuckles rapping the table. "I'm going to take you to the plane. If you won't come, my pilot and I will drag you. When we get to Washington, we'll take you to the Center. If you won't sign the necessary releases, I'll forge them. I'll bribe two witnesses who will swear in the face of death by torture that they saw you signing. I'll buy out the doctors that can do the job, and if they won't do it, I'll sweat them down until they will."

* * * * *

He slammed the glass down on the table, feeling his heart pounding in his throat, feeling the pain creep up. "I've got lots of things on lots of people, and I can get things done when I want them done. People don't fool with me in Washington any more, because when they do they get their fingers burned off at the knuckles. For Christ sake, Paul, I knew you were stubborn but I didn't think you were block-headed stupid!"

Paul shrugged, apologetically. "I'm impressed, Dan. Really."

"You don't think I can do it?" Dan roared.

"Oh, no doubt you could. But such a lot of trouble for an unwilling victim. And I'm your brother, Dan. Remember?"

Dan Fowler spread his hands in defeat, then sank down in the chair. "Paul, tell me why."

"I don't want to be rejuvenated." As though he were saying, "I don't want any sugar in my coffee."

"Why not? If I could only see why, if I knew what was going through your mind, maybe I could understand. But I can't."

Dan looked up at Paul, practically pleading. "You're needed. I had a tape from Lijinsky last month--do you know what he said? He said why couldn't you have come to Starship ten years earlier? Nobody knows that ship like you do, you're making it go. That ship can take men to the stars, now, with rejuvenation, and the same men can come back again to find the same people waiting for them when they get here. They can live that long, now. We've been tied down to seventy years of life, to a tight little universe of one sun and nine planets for thousands of years. Well, we can change that now. We can go out. That's what your work can do for us." He stared helplessly at his brother. "You could go out on that ship you're building, Paul. You've always wanted to. Why not?"

Paul looked across at him for a long moment. There was pity in his eyes. There was also hatred there, and victory, long awaited, bitterly won. "Do you really want me to tell you?"

"I want you to tell me."

Then Paul told him. It took about ten minutes. It was not tempered with mercy.

It split Dan Fowler's world wide open at the seams.

* * * * *

"You've been talking about the Starship," said Paul Fowler. "All right, that's as good a starting place as any. I came to Starship Project--what was it, fifteen years ago? Almost sixteen, I guess. This was my meat. I couldn't work well with people, I worked with things, processes, ideas. I dug in hard on Starship. I loved it, dreamed it, lived with it. I had dreams in those days. Work hard, make myself valuable here, maybe I'd get rejuvenation, so I could work more on Starship. I believed everything you just said. Alpha Centauri, Arcturus, Vega, anywhere we wanted to go--and I could go along! It wouldn't be long, either. We had Lijinsky back with us after his rejuvenation, directing the Project, we had Keller and Stark and Eddie Cochran--great men, the men who had pounded Starship Project into reality, took it out of the story books and made the people of this country want it bad enough to pay for it. Those men were back now--new men, rebuilt bodies, with all their knowledge and experience preserved. Only now they had something even more precious than life: time. And I was part of it, and I too could have time."

Paul shook his head, slowly, and sank back into the chair. His eyes were very tired. "A dream, nothing more. A fantasy. It took me fifteen years to learn what a dream it was. Not even a suspicion at first--only a vague puzzlement, things happening that I couldn't quite grasp. Easy to shrug off, until it got too obvious. Not a matter of wrong decisions, really. The decisions were right, but they were in the wrong places. Something about Starship Project shifting, changing somehow. Something being lost. Slowly. Nothing you could nail down, at first, but growing month by month.

"Then one night I saw what it was. That was when I equipped the lab here, and proved to myself that Starship Project was a dream."

* * * * *

He spread his hands and smiled at Dan like a benign old Chips to a third-form schoolboy. "The Starship isn't going to Alpha Centauri or anywhere else. It's not going to leave the ground. I thought I'd live long enough to launch that ship and be one of its crew. Well, I won't. That ship wouldn't leave the ground if I lived a million years."

"Garbage," said Dan Fowler succinctly.

"No, Dan. Not garbage. Unfortunately, we sometimes have to recognize our dreams as dreams, and look reality right square in the face. Starship Project is dying. Our whole civilization is dying. Nimrock drove the first nail into the coffin a hundred and thirty years ago--lord, if they'd only hanged him when his first rejuvenation failed! But that would only have delayed it. Now we're dying, slowly right now, but soon it will be fast, very fast. And do you know who's getting set to land the death-blow?" He smiled sadly across at his brother. "You are, Dan."

Dan Fowler sprang from his chair with a roar. "My god, Paul, you're sick! Of all the idiot's delights I ever heard, I--I--oh, Jesus." He stood shaking, groping for words, staring at his brother.

"You said you wanted me to tell you."

"Tell me! Tell me what?" Dan took a trembling breath, and sat down, visibly, gripping himself. "All right, all right, I heard what you said--you must mean something, but I don't know what. Let's be reasonable. Let's forget philosophy and semantics and concepts and all the frills for just a minute and talk about facts, huh? Just facts."

"All right, facts," said Paul. "Kenneth Armstrong wrote MAN ON MARS in 2028--he was fifty-seven years old then, and he hadn't been rejuvenated yet. Fundamentally a good book, analyzing his first Mars Colony, taking it apart right down to the silk undies, to show why it had failed so miserably, and why the next one could succeed if he could ever get up there again. He had foresight; with rejuvenation just getting started, he had a whole flock of ideas about overpopulation and the need for a Mars Colony--he was all wet on the population angle, of course, but nobody knew that then. He kicked Keller and Lijinsky off on the Starship idea. They admit it--it was MAN ON MARS that first started them thinking. They were both young, with lots of fight in them. Okay?"

"Just stick to facts," said Dan coldly.

* * * * *

"Okay. Starship Project got started, and blossomed into the people's Baby. They started work on the basic blueprints about 60 years ago. Everybody knew it would be a long job--cost money, plenty of it, and there was so much to do before the building ever began. That was where I came in, fifteen years ago. Building. They were looking for engineers who weren't eager to get rich. It went fine. We started to build. Then Keller and Stark came back from rejuvenation. Lijinsky had been rejuvenated five years before."

"Look, I don't need a course in history," Dan exploded.

"Yes, you do," Paul snapped. "You need to sit down and listen for once, instead of shooting your big mouth off all the time. That's what you need real bad, Dan." Paul Fowler rubbed his chin. There were red spots in his cheeks. "Okay, there were some changes made. I didn't like the engine housing--I never had, so I went along with them a hundred percent on that. Even though I designed it--I'd learned a few things since. And there were bugs. It made perfectly good sense, talking to Lijinsky. Starship Project was pretty important to all of us. Dangerous to risk a fumble on the first play, even a tiny risk. We might never get another chance. Lijinsky knew we youngsters were driving along on adrenalin and nerves, and couldn't wait to get out there, but when you thought about it, what was the rush? Was it worth a chance of a fumble to get out there this year instead of next? Couldn't we take time to find a valid test for that engine at ultra-high acceleration before we put it back in? After all, we had time now--Keller and Stark just back with sixty more years to live--why the rush?

"Okay. I bought it. We worked out a valid test on paper. Took us four years of work on it to find out you couldn't build such a device on Earth, but never mind that. Other things were stalling all the while. The colony-plan for the ship. Choosing the crew--what criteria, what qualifications? There was plenty of time--why not make sure it's right? Don't leave anything crude, if we can refine it a little first--"

Paul sighed wearily. "It snowballed. Keller and Stark backed Lijinsky to the hilt. There was some trouble about money--I think you had your thumb in the pie there, getting it fixed for us, didn't you? More refining. Work it out. Detail. Get sidetracked on some aspect for a few years--so what? Lots of time. Rejuvenation, and all that, talk about the Universalists beating Rinehart out and throwing the Center open to everybody. Et cetera, et cetera. But somewhere along the line I began to see that it just wasn't true. The holdups, the changes, the digressions and snags and refinements were all excuses, all part of a big, beautiful, exquisitely reasonable facade built up to obscure the real truth. Lijinsky and Keller and Stark had changed."

Dan Fowler snorted. "I know a very smart young doctor who told me that there weren't any changes."

"I don't mean anything physical--their bodies were fine. Nothing mental, either--they had the same sharp minds they always had. It was a change in values. They'd lost something that they'd had before. The drive that made them start Starship Project, the urgency, the vital importance of the thing--it was all gone. They just didn't have the push any more. They began to look for the easy way, and it was far easier to build and rebuild, and refine, and improve the Starship here on the ground than to throw that Starship out into space--"

* * * * *

There was a long, long silence. Dan Fowler sat grey-faced, staring at Paul, just shaking his head and staring. "I don't believe it," he said finally. "You do maybe, because you want to, but you're mixed up, Paul. I've seen Lijinsky's reports. There's been progress, regular progress, month by month. You've been too close to it, maybe. Of course there have been delays, but only when they were necessary. The progress has gone on--"

Paul stood up suddenly. "Come in here, Dan. Look." He threw open a door, strode rapidly down a corridor and a flight of stairs into the long, low barn of a laboratory. "Here, here, let me show you something." He pulled out drawers, dragged out rolls of blueprints. "These are my own. They're based on the working prints from Starship that we drew up ten years ago, scaled down to model size. I've tested them, I've run tolerances, I've checked the math five ways and back again. I've tested the parts, the engine--model size. The blueprints haven't got a flaw in them. They're perfect as they'll ever get. No, wait a minute, look--"

He strode fiercely across to slide back a floor panel, drew up the long, glittering thing from a well in the floor--sleek, beautiful, three feet long. Paul maneuvered a midget loading crane, guided the thing into launching position on the floor, then turned back to Dan. "There it is. Just a model, but it's perfect. Every detail is perfect. There's even fuel in it. No men, but there could be if there were any men small enough."

Anger was blazing in Paul's voice now, bitterness and frustration. "I built it, because I had to be sure. I've tested its thrust. I could launch this model for Alpha Centauri tonight--and it would get there. If there were little men who could get into it, they'd get there, too--alive. Starship Project is completed, it's been completed for ten years now, but do you know what happened to these blueprints, the originals? They were studied. They were improvements. They almost had the ship built, and then they took it apart again."

"But I've read the reports," Dan cried.

"Have you seen the Starship? Have you talked to them over there? It isn't just there, it's everywhere, Dan. There are only about 70,000 rejuvenated men alive in this hemisphere so far, but already the change is beginning to show. Go talk to the Advertising people--there's a delicate indicator of social change if there ever was one. See what they say. Who are they backing in the Government? You? Like hell. Rinehart? No, they're backing up 'Moses' Tyndall and his Abolitionist goon-squad who preach that rejuvenation is the work of Satan, and they're giving him enough strength that he's even getting you worried. How about Roderigo Aviado and his Solar Energy Project down in Antarctica? Do you know what he's been doing down there lately? You'd better find out, Dan. What's happening to the Mars Colony? Do you have any idea? You'd better find out. Have you gone to see any of the Noble Ten that are still rattling around? Oh, you ought to. How about all the suicides we've been having in the last ten years? What do the insurance people say about that?"

* * * * *

He stopped, from lack of breath. Dan just stared at him, shaking his head like Silly Willy on the teevies. "Find out what you're doing, Dan--before you push this universal rejuvenation idea of yours through. Find out--if you've got the guts to find out, that is. We've got a monster on our hands, and now you've got to be Big Dan Fowler playing God and turning him loose on the world. Well, be careful. Find out first, while you can. It's all here to see, if you'll open your eyes, but you're all so dead sure that you want life everlasting that nobody's even bothered to look. And now it's become such a political bludgeon that nobody dares to look."

The model ship seemed to gleam in the dim laboratory light. Dan Fowler walked over to it, ran a finger up the shiny side to the pinpoint tip. His face was old, and something was gone from his eyes when he turned back to Paul. "You've known this for so long, and you never told me. You never said a word." He shook his head slowly. "I didn't know you hated me so much. But I'm not going to let you win this one, either, Paul. You're wrong. I'm going to prove it if it kills me."

"Well, try his home number, then," Dan Fowler snarled into the speaker. He gnawed his cigar and fumed as long minutes spun off the wall clock. His fingers drummed the wall. "How's that? Dammit, I want to speak to Dwight McKenzie, his aide will not do--well, of course he's in town. I just saw him yesterday--"

He waited another five minutes, and then his half dollar clanked back in the return, with apologies. "All right, get his office when it opens, and call me back." He reeled off the number of the private booth.

Carl Golden looked up as he came back to the table and stirred sugar-cream into half-cold coffee. "No luck?"

"Son of a bitch has vanished." Dan leaned back against the wall, glowering at Carl and Jean. Through the transparent walls of the glassed-in booth, they could see the morning breakfast-seekers drifting into the place. "We should have him pretty soon." He bit off the end of a fresh cigar, and assaulted it with a match.

"Dad, you know what Dr. Moss said--"

"Look, little girl--if I'm going to die in ten minutes, I'm going to smoke for those ten minutes and enjoy them," Dan snapped. The coffee was like lukewarm dishwater. Both the young people sipped theirs with bleary early-morning resignation. Carl Golden needed a shave badly. He opened his second pack of cigarettes. "Did you sleep on the way back?"

Dan snorted. "What do you think?"

"I think Paul might be lying to you."

Dan shot him a sharp glance. "Maybe--but I don't think so. Paul has always been fussy about telling the truth. He's all wrong, of course--" (fresh coffee, sugar-cream)--"but I think he believes his tale. Does it sound like he's lying to you?"

Carl sighed and shook his head. "No. I don't like it. It sounds to me as though he's pretty sure he's right."

Dan clanked the cup down and swore. "He's demented, that's what he is! He's waited too long, his brain's starting to go. If that story of his were true, why has he waited so long to tell somebody about it?"

"Maybe he wanted to see you hang yourself."

"But I can only hang myself on facts, not on the paranoid ramblings of a sick old man. The horrible thing is that he probably believes it--he almost had me believing it, for a while. But it isn't true. He's wrong--good lord, he's got to be wrong." Dan broke off, staring across at Carl. He gulped the last of the coffee. "If he isn't wrong, then that's all, kiddies. The mountain sinks into the sea, with us just ten feet from the top of it."

"Well, would you walk into the Center for a Retread now without being sure he's wrong?"

"Of course I wouldn't," said Dan peevishly. "Paul has taken the game right out from under our noses. We've got to stop everything and find out now, before we do another damned thing." The Senator dragged a sheaf of yellow paper out of his breast pocket and spread it out on the table. "I worked it out on the way back. We've got a nasty job on our hands. More than we can possibly squeeze in before the Hearing come up on December 15th. So number one job is to shift the Hearings back again. I'll take care of that as soon as I can get McKenzie on the wire."

"What's your excuse going to be?" Jean wanted to know.

"Anything but the truth. McKenzie thinks I'm going to win the fight at the Hearings, and he wants to be on the right side of the toast when it's buttered. He'll shift the date back to February 15th. Okay, next step: we need a crew. A crowd that can do fast, accurate, hard work and not squeal if they don't sleep for a month or so. Tommy Sandborn should be in Washington--he can handle statistics for us. In addition, we need a couple of good sharp detectives. Jean?"

* * * * *

The girl nodded. "I can handle that end. It'll take some time getting them together, though."

"How much time?"

"Couple of days."

"Fine, we can have lots of work for them in a couple of days." The Senator turned back to Carl. "I want you to hit Starship Project first thing."

Carl shook his head. "I've got a better man for that job. Saw him last night, and he's dying for something to do. You don't know him--Terry Fisher. He'll know how to dig out what we want. He was doing it for five years on Mars."

"The alky?" Dan didn't like it. "We can't risk a slip to the teevies. We just don't dare."

"There won't be any slip. Terry jumped in the bottle to get away from Mars, that's all. He'll stay cold when it counts."

"Okay, if you say so. I want to see the setup there, too, but I want it ready for a quick scan. Get him down there this morning to soften things up and get it all out on the table for me. You'd better tackle the ad-men, then. Let's see--Tenner's Agency in Philly is a good place to start. Then hit Metro Insurance. Don't waste time with underlings, go to the top and wave my name around like an orange flag. They won't like it a damned bit, but they know I have the finger on Kornwall in Communications. We'll take his scalp if they don't play ball. All you'll have to do is convince them of that."

"What's on Kornwall?"

"Kornwall has been fronting for 'Moses' Tyndall for years. That's why Tyndall never bothered me too much, because we could get him through Kornwall any time we wanted to. And the ad-men and Metro have everything they own sunk into Tyndall's plans." Carl's frown still lingered. "Don't worry about it, son. It's okay."

"I think maybe you're underestimating John Tyndall."

"Why?"

"I worked for him once, remember? He doesn't like you. He knows it's going to be you or him, in the long haul, with nobody else involved. And you realize what happens if 'Moses' gets wind of this mess? Finds out what your brother told you, or even finds out that you're worried about something?"

Dan chewed his lip. "He could be a pain, couldn't he?"

"He sure could. More than a pain, and Kornwall wouldn't be much help after the news got out."

"Well, we'll have to take the risk, that's all. We'll have to be fast and quiet." He pushed aside his coffee cup as the phone blinker started in. "I think that gets us started. Jean, you'll keep somebody on the switchboard, and keep track of us all. When I get through with McKenzie, I may be leaving the country for a while. You'll have to be my ears, and cover for me. Yes, yes. I was calling Dwight McKenzie--"

The phonebox squawked for a moment or two.

"Hello, Dwight?--What? Oh, thunder! Well, where is he? Timagami--Ontario? An island!" He covered the speaker and growled, "He's gone moose-hunting." Then: "Okay, get me Eastern Sea-Jet Charter Service."

Five minutes later they walked out onto the street and split up in three different directions.

* * * * *

A long series of grey, flickering pictures, then, for Dan Fowler. A fast meal in the car to the Charter Service landing field. Morning sun swallowed up, sky gray, then almost black, temperature dropping, a grey drizzling rain. Cold. Wind carrying it across the open field in waves, slashing his cheeks with icy blades of water. Grey shape of the ski-plane ("Eight feet of snow up there, according to the IWB reports. Lake's frozen three feet thick. Going to be a rough ride, Senator"). Jean's quick kiss before he climbed up, the sharp worry in her eyes ("Got your pills, Dad? Try to sleep. Take it easy. Give me a call about anything--") (But there aren't any phones, the operator said. Better not tell her that. Why scare her any more? Damned heart, anyway). A wobbly takeoff that almost dumped his stomach in his lap, sent the briefcase flying across the cabin. Then rain, and grey-black nothing out through the mid-day view ports, heading north. Faster, faster, why can't you get this crate to move? Sorry, Senator. Nasty currents up here. Maybe we can try going higher--

Time! Paul had called it more precious than life, and now time flew screaming by in great deadly sweeps, like a black-winged buzzard. And through it all, weariness, tiredness that he had never felt before. Not years, not work. Weary body, yes--and time was running out, he should have rejuvenated years ago. But now--what if Paul were right?

Can't do it now. Not until Paul is wrong, a thousand times wrong. That was it, of course, that was the weariness that wasn't time-weariness or body-weariness. Just mind-weariness. Weariness at the thought of wasted work, the wasted years--a wasted life. Unless Paul is very wrong.

A snarl of disgust, a toggle switch snapped, a flickering teevie screen. Wonderful pickup these days. News of the World brought to you by Atomics International, the fuel to power the Starship--the President returned to Washington today after three-week vacation conference in Calcutta with Chinese and Indian dignitaries--full accord and a cordial ending to the meeting--American medical supplies to be made available--and on the home front, appropriations renewed for Antarctica Project, to bring solar energy into every home, Aviado was quoted as saying--huge Abolitionist rally last night in New Chicago as John 'Moses' Tyndall returned to that city to celebrate the fifteenth birthday of the movement that started there back in 2119--no violence reported as Tyndall lashed out at Senator Daniel Fowler's universal rejuvenation program--twenty-five hour work week hailed by Senator Rinehart of Alaska as a great progressive step for the American people--Senator Rinehart, chairman of the policy-making Criterion Committee held forth hope last night that rejuvenation techniques may increase the number of candidates to six hundred a year within five years--and now, news from the entertainment world--

Going down, then, into flurries of Northern snow, peering out at the whiter gloom below, a long stretch of white with blobs of black on either side, resolving into snow-laden black pines, a long flat lake-top of ice and snow. Taxi-ing down, engines roaring, sucking up snow into steam in the orange afterblast. And ahead, up from the lake, a black blot of a house, with orange window lights reflecting warmth and cheer against the wilderness outside--

Then Dwight McKenzie, peering out into the gloom, eyes widening in recognition, little mean eyes with streaks of fear through them, widening and then smiling, pumping his hand. "Dan! My god, I couldn't imagine--hardly ever see anybody up here, you know. Come in, come in, you must be half frozen. What's happened? Something torn loose down in Washington?" And more questions, fast, tumbling over each other, no answers wanted, talky-talk questions to cover surprise and fear and the one large question of why Dan Fowler should be dropping down out of the sky on him, which question he didn't think he wanted answered just yet--

* * * * *

A huge, rugged room, blazing fire in a mammoth fireplace at the end, moose heads, a rug of thick black bear hide. "Like to come up here a day or two ahead of the party, you know," McKenzie was saying. "Does a man good to commune with his soul once in a while. Do you like to hunt? You should join us, Dan. Libby and Donaldson will be up tomorrow with a couple of guides. We could find you an extra gun. They say hunting should be good this year--"

One chair against the fireplace, a book hastily thrown down beside it, SEXTRA SPECIAL, Cartoons by Kulp. Great book for soul-searching Senators. Things were all out of focus after the sudden change from the cold, but now Dan was beginning to see. One book, one chair, but two half-filled sherry glasses at the sideboard--

"Can't wait, Dwight, I have to get back to the city, but I couldn't find you down there, and they didn't know when you were coming back. I just wanted to let you know that I put you to all that trouble for nothing--we don't need the Hearing date in December, after all."

Wariness suddenly in McKenzie's eyes. "Well! Nice of you to think of it, Dan--but it wasn't really any trouble. No trouble at all. December 15th is fine, as a matter of fact, better than the February date would have been. Give the Committee a chance to collect itself during the Holidays, ha, ha."

"Well, it now seems that it wouldn't be so good for me, Dwight. I'd much prefer it to be changed back to the February date."

"Well, now." Pause. "Dan, we have to settle these things sooner or later, you know. I don't know whether we can do that now--"

"Don't know! Why not?"

The moose-hunter licked both lips, couldn't keep his eyes on Dan's eyes, focused on his nose instead,--as if the nose were really the important part of the conversation. "It isn't just me that makes these decisions, Dan. Other people have to be consulted. It's pretty late to catch them now, you know. It might be pretty hard to do that--"

No more smiles from Dan. "Now look--you make the calendar, and you can change it." Face getting red, getting angry--careful, Dan, those two sherry glasses, watch what you say--"I want it changed back. And I've got to know right now."

"But you told me you'd be all ready to roll by December 15th--"

To hell with caution--he had to have time. "Look, there's no reason you can't do it if you want to, Dwight. I'd consider it a personal favor--I repeat, a very large personal favor--if you'd make the arrangements. I won't forget it--" What did the swine want, an arm off at the roots?

"Sorry," said a voice from the rear door of the room. Walter Rinehart walked across to the sideboard. "You don't mind if I finish this, Dwight?"

A deep breath from McKenzie, like a sigh of relief. "Go right ahead, Walt. Sherry, Dan?"

"No, I don't think so." It was Walter, all right. Tall, upright, dignified Walter, fine shock of wavy hair that was white as the snow outside. Young-old lines on his face. Some men looked finer after rejuvenation, much finer than before. There had been a chilly look about Walter Rinehart's eyes before his first Retread. Not now. A fine man, like somebody's dear old grandfather. Just give him a chunk of wood to whittle and a jack-blade to whittle it with--

But inside, the mind was the same. Inside, no changes. Author of the Rinehart Criteria, the royal road to a self-perpetuating "immortal elite."

* * * * *

Dan turned his back on Rinehart and said to McKenzie: "I want the date changed."

"I--I can't do it, Dan." An inquiring glance at Rinehart, a faint smiling nod in return.

He knew he'd blundered then, blundered badly. McKenzie was afraid. McKenzie wanted another lifetime, one of these days. He'd decided that Rinehart would be the one who could give it to him. But worse, far worse: Rinehart knew now that something had happened, something was wrong. "What's the matter, Dan?" he said smoothly. "You need more time? Why? You had it before, and you were pretty eager to toss it up. Well, what's happened, Dan?"

That was all. Back against the wall. The thought of bluffing it through, swallowing the December 15th date and telling them to shove it flashed through his mind. He threw it out violently, his heart sinking. That was only a few more days. They had weeks of work ahead of them. They needed more time, they had to have it--

Rinehart was grinning confidently. "Of course I'd like to cooperate, Dan. Only I have some plans for the Hearings, too. You've been getting on people's nerves, down in the city. There's even been talk of reconsidering your rejuvenation permit--"

Your move, Dan. God, what a blunder! Why did you ever come up here? And every minute you stand there with your jaw sagging just tells Rinehart how tight he's got you--do something, anything--

There was a way. Would Carl understand it? Carl had begged him never to use it, ever, under any circumstances. And Carl had trusted him when he had said he wouldn't--but if Carl were standing here now, he'd say yes, go ahead, use it, wouldn't he? He'd have to--

"I want the Hearings on February 15th," Dan said to Rinehart.

"Sorry, Dan. We can't be tossing dates around like that. Unless you'd care to tell me why."

"Okay." Dan grabbed his hat angrily. "I'll make a formal request for the change tomorrow morning, and read it on the teevies. Then I'll also announce a feature attraction that the people can look forward to when the Hearing date comes. We weren't planning to use it, but I guess you'd like to have both barrels right in the face, so that's what we'll give you."

Walter Rinehart roared with laughter. "Another feature attraction? You do dig them up, don't you? Ken Armstrong's dead, you know."

"Peter Golden's widow isn't."

* * * * *

The smile faded on Rinehart's face. He looked suddenly like a man carved out of grey stone. Dan trembled, let the words sink in. "You didn't think anybody knew about that, did you, Walt? Sorry. We've got the story on Peter Golden. Took us quite a while to piece it together, but we did with the help of his son. Carl remembers his father before the accident, you see, quite well. His widow remembers him even before that. And we have some fascinating recordings that Peter Golden made when he applied for rejuvenation, and when he appealed the Committee's decisions. Some of the private interviews, too, Walter."

"I gave Peter Golden forty more years of life," Rinehart said.

"You crucified him," said Dan, bluntly.

There was silence, long silence. Then: "Are you selling?"

"I'm selling." Cut out my tongue, Carl, but I'm selling.

"How do I know you won't break it anyway?"

"You don't know. Except that I'm telling you I won't."

Rinehart soaked that in with the last gulp of sherry. Then he smashed the glass on the stone floor. "Change the date," he said to McKenzie. "Then throw this vermin out of here."

Back in the snow and darkness Dan tried to breathe again, and couldn't quite make it. He had to stop and rest twice going down to the plane. Then he was sick all the way back.

Early evening, as the plane dropped him off in New York Crater, and picked up another charter. Two cold eggs and some scalding coffee, eaten standing up at the airport counter. Great for the stomach, but there wasn't time to stop. Anyway, Dan's stomach wasn't in the mood for dim lights and pale wine, not just this minute. Questions howling through his mind. The knowledge that he had made the one Class A colossal blunder of his thirty years in politics, this last half-day. A miscalculation of a man! He should have known about McKenzie--at least suspected. McKenzie was getting old, he wanted a Retread, and wanted it badly. Before, he had planned to get it through Dan. Then something changed his mind, and he decided Rinehart would end up on top.

Why?

Armstrong's suicide, of course. Pretty good proof that even Rinehart hadn't known it was a suicide. If Carl had brought back evidence of murder, Dan would win, McKenzie thought. But evidence of suicide--it was shaky. Walt Rinehart has his hooks in too deep.

They piped down the fifteen minute warning for the Washington Jet. Dan gulped the last of his coffee, and found a visi-phone booth with a scrambler in working order. Two calls. The first one to Jean, to line up round-the-clock guards for Peter Golden's widow on Long Island. Jean couldn't keep surprise out of her voice. Dan grunted and didn't elaborate--just get them out there.

Then a call to locate Carl. He chewed his cigar nervously.

Two minutes of waiting while they called Carl from wherever he was. Then: "I just saw McKenzie. I found him hiding in Rhinehart's hip pocket."

"Jesus, Dan. We've got to have time."

"We've got it--but the price was very steep, son."

Silence then as Carl peered at him. Finally: "I see."

"If I hadn't been in such a hurry, if I'd only thought it out," Dan said miserably. "It was an awful error--and all mine, too."

"Well, don't go out and shoot yourself. I suppose it had to happen sooner or later. What about Mother?"

"She'll be perfectly safe. They won't get within a mile of her. Look, son--is Fisher doing all right?"

Carl nodded. "I talked to him an hour ago. He'll be ready for you by tomorrow night, he thinks."

"Sober?"

"Sober. And mad. He's the right guy for the job." Worried lines deepened on Golden's forehead. "Everything's O.K.? Rinehart won't dare--"

"I scared him. He'd almost forgotten. Everything's fine." Dan rang off, scowling. He wished he was as sure as he sounded. Rinehart's back was to the wall, now. Dan wasn't too sure he liked it that way.

An hour later he was in Washington, and Jean was dragging him into the Volta. "If you don't sleep now, I'll have you put to sleep. Now shut up while I drive you home."

A soft bed, darkness, escape. When had he slept last? It was heaven.

* * * * *

He slept the clock around, which he had not intended, and caught the next night-jet to Las Vegas, which he had intended. There was some delay with the passenger list after he had gone aboard, a fight of some sort, and the jet took off four minutes late. Dan slept again, fitfully.

Somebody slid into the adjoining seat. "Well! Good old Dan Fowler!"

A gaunt, frantic-looking man, with skin like cracked parchment across his high cheekbones, and a pair of Carradine eyes looking down at Dan. If Death should walk in human flesh, Dan thought, it would look like John Tyndall.

"What do you want, 'Moses'?"

"Just dropped by to chat," said Tyndall. "You're heading for Las Vegas, eh? Why?"

Dan jerked, fumbled for the upright-button. "I like the climate out there. If you want to talk, talk and get it over with."

Tyndall lifted a narrow foot and gave the recline-button a sharp jab, dumping the Senator back against the seat. "You're onto something. I can smell it cooking, and I want my share, right now."

Dan stared into the gaunt face, and burst out laughing. He had never actually been so close to John Tyndall before, and he did not like the smell, which had brought on the laugh, but he knew all about Tyndall. More than Tyndall himself knew, probably. He could even remember the early rallies Tyndall had led, feeding on the fears and suspicions and nasty rumors grown up in the early days. It was evil, they had said. This was not God's way, this was Man's way, as evil as Man was evil. If God had wanted Man to live a thousand years, he would have given him such a body--

Or:

They'll use it for a tool! Political football. They'll buy and sell with it. They'll make a cult of it, they're doing it right now! Look at Walter Rinehart. Did you hear about his scheme? To keep it down to five hundred a year? They'll make themselves a ruling class, an immortal elite, with Rinehart for their Black Pope. Better that nobody should have it--

Or:

Immortality, huh? But what kind? You hear what happened to Harvey Tatum? That's right, the jet-car man, big business. He was one of their 'Noble Ten' they're always bragging about. But they say he had to have special drugs every night, that he had changed. That's right, if he didn't get these drugs, see, he'd go mad and try to suck blood and butcher up children--oh, they didn't dare publish it, had to put him out of the way quietly, but my brother-in-law was down in Lancaster one night when--

* * * * *

All it really needed was the man, and one day there was 'Moses' Tyndall. Leader of the New Crusade for God. Small, at first. But the ad-men began supporting him, broadcasting his rallies, playing him up big. Abolish rejuvenation, it's a blot against Man's immortal soul. Amen. Then the insurance people came along, with money. (The ad-men and the insurance people weren't too concerned about Man's immortal soul--they'd take their share now, thanks--but this didn't bother Tyndall too much. Misguided, but they were on God's side. He prayed for them.) So they gave Tyndall the first Abolitionist seat in the Senate, in 2124, just nine years ago, and the fight between Rinehart and Dan Fowler that was brewing even then had turned into a three-cornered fight--

* * * * *

Dan grinned up at Tyndall and said, "Go away, John. Don't bother me."

"You've got something," Tyndall snarled. "What is that damn shadow of yours nosing around Tenner's for? Why the sudden leaping interest in Nevada? Two trips in three days--what are you trying to track down?"

"Why on Earth should I tell you anything, Holy Man?"

The parchment face wrinkled unpleasantly. "Because it would be very smart, that's why. Rinehart's out of it, now. Washed up, finished, thanks to you. Now it's just you or me, one or the other. You're in the way, and you're going to be gotten out of the way when you've finished up Rinehart, because I'm going to start rolling them. Go along with me now and you won't get smashed, Dan."

"Get out of here," Dan snarled, sitting bolt upright. "You gave it to Carl Golden, a long time ago when he was with you, remember? Carl's my boy now--do you think I'll swallow the same bait?"

"You'd be smart if you did." The man leaned forward. "I'll let you in on a secret. I've just recently had a--vision, you might say. There are going to be riots and fires and shouting, around the time of the Hearings. People will be killed. Lots of people--spontaneous outbursts of passion, of course, the great voice of the people rising against the Abomination. And against you, Dan. A few Repeaters may be taken out and hanged, and then when you have won against Rinehart, you'll find people thinking that you're really a traitor--"

"Nobody will swallow that," Dan snapped.

"Just watch and see. I can still call it off, if you say so." He stood up quickly as Dan's face went purple. "New Chicago," he said smoothly. "Have to see a man here, and then get back to the Capitol. Happy hunting, Dan. You know where to reach me."

He strode down the aisle of the ship, leaving Dan staring bleakly at an empty seat.

Paul, Paul--

* * * * *

He met Terry Fisher at the landing field in Las Vegas. A firm handshake, clear brown eyes looking at him the way a four-year-old looks at Santa Claus. "Glad you could come tonight, Senator. I've had a busy couple of days. I think you'll be interested." Remarkable restraint in the man's voice. His face was full of things unsaid. Dan caught it; he knew faces, read them like typescript. "What is it, son?"

"Wait until you see." Fisher laughed nervously. "I thought for a while that I was back on Mars."

"Cigar?"

"No thanks. I never use them."

The car broke through darkness across bumpy pavement. The men sat silently. Then a barbed-wire enclosure loomed up, and a guard walked over, peered at their credentials, and waved them through. Ahead lay a long, low row of buildings, and a tall something spearing up into the clear desert night. They stopped at the first building, and hurried up the steps.

Small, red-faced Lijinsky greeted them, all warm handshake and enthusiasm and unmistakable happiness and surprise. "A real pleasure, Senator! We haven't had a direct governmental look-see in quite a while. I'm glad I'm here to show you around."

"Everything is going right along, eh?"

"Oh, yes! She'll be a ship to be proud of. Now, I think we can arrange some quarters for you for the night, and in the morning we can sit down and have a nice, long talk."

Terry Fisher was shaking his head. "I think the Senator would like to see the ship now--isn't that right, Senator?"

Lijinsky's eyes opened wide, his head bobbed in surprise. Young-old creases on his face flickered. "Tonight? Oh, you can't really be serious. Why, it's almost two in the morning! We only have a skeleton crew working at night. Tomorrow you can see--"

"Tonight, if you don't mind." Dan tried to keep the sharp edge out of his voice. "Unless you have some specific objection, of course."

"Objection? None whatsoever." Lijinsky seemed puzzled, and a little hurt. But he bounced back: "Tonight it is, then. Let's go." There was no doubting the little man's honesty. He wasn't hiding anything, just surprised. But a moment later there was concern on his face as he led them out toward the factory compounds. "There's no question of appropriations, I hope, Senator?"

"No, no. Nothing of the sort."

"Well, I'm certainly glad to hear that. Sometimes our contacts from Washington are a little disappointed in the Ship, of course."

Dan's throat tightened. "Why?"

"No reason, really. We're making fine progress, it isn't that. Yes, things really buzz around here; just ask Mr. Fisher about that--he was here all day watching the workers. But there are always minor changes in plans, of course, as we recognize more of the problems."

Terry Fisher grimaced silently, and followed them into a small Whirlwind groundcar. The little gyro-car bumped down the road on its single wheel, down into a gorge, then out onto the flats. Dan strained his eyes, peering ahead at the spear of Starship gleaming in the distant night-lights. Pictures from the last Starship Progress Report flickered through his mind, and a frown gathered as they came closer to the ship. Then the car halted on the edge of the building-pit and they blinked down and up at the scaffolded monster.

Dan didn't even move from the car. He just stared. The report had featured photos, projected testing dates--even ventured a possible date for launching, with the building of the Starship so near to completion. That had been a month ago. Now Dan stared at the ship and shook his head, uncomprehending.

The hull-plates were off again, lying in heaps on the ground in a mammoth circle. The ship was a skeleton, a long, gawky structure of naked metal beams. Even now a dozen men were scampering around the scaffolding, before Dan's incredulous eyes, and he saw some of the beaming coming off the body of the ship, being dropped onto the crane, moving slowly to the ground.

Ten years ago the ship had looked the same. As he watched, he felt a wave of hopelessness sweep through him, a sense of desolate, empty bitterness. Ten years--

His eyes met Terry Fisher's in the gloom of the car, begging to be told it wasn't so. Fisher shook his head.

Then Dan said: "I think I've seen enough. Take me back to the air field."

* * * * *

"It was the same thing on Mars," Fisher was telling him as the return jet speared East into the dawn. "The refining and super-refining, the slowing down, the changes in viewpoint and planning. I went up there ready to beat the world barehanded, to work on the frontier, to build that colony, and maybe lead another one. I even worked out the plans for a break-away colony--we would need colony-builders when we went to the stars, I thought." He shrugged sadly. "Carl told you, I guess. They considered the break-away colony, carefully, and then Barness decided it was really too early. Too much work already, with just one colony. And there was, in a sense: frantic activity, noise, hubbub, hard work, fancy plans--all going nowhere. No drive, no real direction." He shrugged again. "I did a lot of drinking before they threw me off Mars."

"Nobody saw it happening?"

"It wasn't the sort of thing you see. You could only feel it. It started when Armstrong came to the colony, rejuvenated, to take over its development. And eventually, I think Armstrong did see it. That's why he suicided."

"But the Starship," Dan cried. "It was almost built, and they were tearing it down. I saw it with my own eyes."

"Ah, yes. For the twenty-seventh time, I think. A change in the engineering thinking, that's all. Keller and Lijinsky suddenly came to the conclusion that the whole thing might fall apart in midair at the launching. Can you imagine it? When rockets have been built for years, running to Mars every two months? But they could prove it on paper, and by the time they got through explaining it every damned soul on the project was saying yes, it might fall apart at the launching. Why, it's a standing joke with the workers. They call Keller "Old Jet Propulsion" and always have a good laugh. But then, Keller and Stark and Lijinsky should know what's what. They've all been rejuvenated, and working on the ship for years." Fisher's voice was heavy with anger.

Dan didn't answer. There didn't seem to be much to answer, and he just couldn't tell Fisher how it felt to have a cold blanket of fear wrapping around his heart, so dreadful and cold that he hardly dared look five minutes ahead right now. We have a Monster on our hands--

VII

He was sick when they reached Washington. The pain in his chest became acute as he walked down the gangway, and by the time he found a seat in the terminal and popped a nitro-tablet under his tongue he was breathing in deep, ragged gasps. He sat very still, trying to lean back against the seat, and quite suddenly he realized that he was very, very ill. The good red-headed Dr. Moss would smile in satisfaction, he thought bitterly. There was sweat on his forehead; it had never seemed very probable to him that he might one day die--he didn't have to die in this great, wonderful world of new bodies for old, he could live on, and on, and on. He could live to see the Golden Centuries of Man. A solar system teeming with life. Ships to challenge the stars, the barriers breaking, crumbling before their very eyes. Other changes, as short-lived Man became long-lived Man. Changes in teaching, in thinking, in feeling. Disease, the Enemy, was crushed. Famine, the Enemy, slinking back into the dim memory of history. War, the Enemy, pointless to extinction.

All based on one principle: Man must live. He need not die. If a man could live forty years instead of twenty, had it been wrong to fight the plagues that struck him down in his youth? If he could live sixty years instead of forty, had the great researchers of the 1940's and '50's and '60's been wrong? Was it any more wrong to want to live a thousand years? Who could say that it was?

He took a shuddering breath, and then nodded to Terry Fisher, and walked unsteadily to the cab stand. He would not believe what he had seen at Starship Project. It was not enough. Collect the evidence, then conclude. He gave Fisher an ashen smile. "It's nothing. The ticker kicks up once in a while, that's all. Let's go see what Carl and Jean and the boys have dug up." Fisher smiled grimly, an eager gleam in his eye.

Carl and Jean and the boys had dug up plenty. The floor of offices Dan rented for the work of his organization was going like Washington Terminal at rush hour. A dozen people were here and there, working with tapes, papers, program cards. Jean met them at the door, hustled them into the private offices in the back. "Carl just got here, too. He's down eating. The boys outside are trying to make sense out of his insurance and advertising figures."

"He got next to them okay?"

"Sure--but you were right, they didn't like it."

"What sort of reports?"

* * * * *

The girl sighed. "Only prelims. Almost all of the stuff is up in the air, which makes it hard to evaluate. The ad-men have to be figuring what they're going to do next half-century, so that they'll be there with the right thing when the time comes. But it seems they don't like what they see. People have to buy what the ad-men are selling, or the ad-men shrivel up, and already the trend seems to be showing up. People aren't in such a rush to buy. Don't have the same sense of urgency that they used to--" Her hands fluttered. "Well, as I say, it's all up in the air. Let the boys analyze for a while. The suicide business is a little more tangible. The rates are up, all over. But break it into first-generation and Repeaters, and it's pretty clear who's pushing it up."

"Like Armstrong," said Dan slowly.

Jean nodded. "Oh, here's Carl now."

He came in, rubbing his hands, and gave Dan a queer look. "Everything under control, Dan?"

Dan nodded. He told Carl about Tyndall's proposition. Carl gave a wry grin. "He hasn't changed a bit, has he?"

"Yes, he has. He's gotten lots stronger."

Carl scowled, and slapped the desk with his palm. "You should have stopped him, Dan. I told you that a long time ago--back when I first came in with you. He was aiming for your throat even then, trying to use me and what I knew about Dad to sell the country a pack of lies about you. He almost did, too. I hated your guts back then. I thought you were the rottenest man that ever came up in politics, until you got hold of me and pounded sense into my head. And Tyndall's never forgiven you that, either."

"All right--we're still ahead of him. Have you just finished with the ad-men?"

"Oh, no. I just got back from a trip south. My nose is still cold."

Dan's eyebrows went up. "And how was Dr. Aviado? I haven't seen a report from Antarctica Project for five years."

"Yes you have. You just couldn't read them. Aviado is quite a theoretician. That's how he got his money and his Project, down there, with plenty of room to build his reflectors and nobody around to get hurt if something goes wrong. Except a few penguins. And he's done a real job of development down there since his rejuvenation."

"Ah." Dan glanced up hopefully.

"Now there," said Carl, "is a real lively project. Solar energy into power on a utilitarian level. The man is fanatic, of course, but with his plans he could actually be producing in another five years." He lit a cigarette, drew on it as though it were bitter.

"Could?"

"Seems he's gotten sidetracked a bit," said Carl.

Dan glanced at Terry Fisher. "How?"

"Well, his equipment is working fine, and he can concentrate solar heat from ten square miles onto a spot the size of a manhole cover. But he hasn't gone too far converting it to useful power yet." Carl suddenly burst out laughing. "Dan, this'll kill you. Billions and billions of calories of solar heat concentrated down there, and what do you think he's doing with it? He's digging a hole in the ice two thousand feet deep and a mile wide. That's what."

"A hole in the ice!"

"Exactly. Conversion? Certainly--but first we want to be sure we're right. So right now his whole crew is very busy trying to melt down Antarctica. And if you give him another ten years, he'll have it done, by god."

* * * * *

This was the last, most painful trip of all.

Dan didn't even know why he was going, except that Paul had told him he should go, and no stone could be left unturned.

The landing in New York Crater had been rough, and Dan had cracked his elbow on the bulkhead; he nursed it now as he left the Volta on the deserted street of the crater city, and entered the low one-story lobby of the groundscraper. The clerk took his name impassively, and he sat down to wait.

An hour passed, then another.

Then: "Mr. Devlin will see you now, Senator."

Down in the elevator, four--five--six stories. Above him was the world; here, deep below, with subtly efficient ventilators and shafts and exotic cubby-holes for retreat, a man could forget that a world above existed.

Soft lighting in the corridor, a golden plastic door. The door swung open, and a tiny old man blinked out.

"Mr. Chauncey Devlin?"

"Senator Fowler!" The little old man beamed. "Come in, come in--my dear fellow, if I'd realized it was you, I'd never have dreamed of keeping you so long--" He smiled, obviously distressed. "Retreat has its disadvantages, too, you see. Nothing is perfect but life, as they say. When you've lived for a hundred and ninety years, you'll be glad to get away from people, and to be able to keep them out, from time to time."

In better light Dan stared openly at the man. A hundred and ninety years. It was incredible. He told the man so.

"Isn't it, though?" Chauncey Devlin chirped. "Well, I was a was-baby! Can you imagine? Born in London in 1945. But I don't even think about those horrid years any more. Imagine--people dropping bombs on each other!"

A tiny bird of a man--three times rejuvenated, and still the mind was sharp, the eyes were sharp. The face was a strange mixture of recent youth and very great age. It stirred something deep inside Dan--almost a feeling of loathing. An uncanny feeling.

"We've always known your music," he said. "We've always loved it. Just a week ago we heard the Washington Philharmonic doing--"

"The eighth." Chauncey Devlin cut him off disdainfully. "They always do the eighth."

"It's a great symphony," Dan protested.

Devlin chuckled, and bounced about the room like a little boy. "It was only half finished when they chose me for the big plunge," he said. "Of course I was doing a lot of conducting then, too. Now I'd much rather just write." He hurried across the long, softly-lit room to the piano, came back with a sheaf of papers. "Do you read music? This is just what I've been doing recently. Can't get it quite right, but it'll come, it'll come."

"Which will this be?" asked Dan.

"The tenth. The ninth was under contract, of course--strictly a pot-boiler, I'm afraid. Thought it was pretty good at the time, but this one--ah!" He fondled the smooth sheets of paper. "In this one I could say something. Always before it was hit and run, make a stab at it, then rush on to stab at something else. Not this one." He patted the manuscript happily. "With this one there will be nothing wrong."

"It's almost finished?"

"Oh, no. Oh, my goodness no! A fairly acceptable first movement, but not what I will do on it--as I go along."

"I see. I--understand. How long have you worked on it now?"

"Oh, I don't know--I must have it down here somewhere. Oh, yes. Started it in April of 2057. Seventy-seven years."

They talked on, until it became too painful. Then Dan rose, and thanked his host, and started back for the corridor and life again. He had never even mentioned his excuse for coming, and nobody had missed it.

Chauncey Devlin, a tiny, perfect wax-image of a man, so old, so wise, so excited and full of enthusiasm and energy and carefulness, working eagerly, happily--

Accomplishing nothing. Seventy-seven years. The picture of a man who had been great, and who had slowly ground to a standstill.

And now Dan knew that he hadn't really been looking at Chauncey Devlin at all. He had been looking at the whole human race.

VIII

February 15th, 2135.

The day of the Hearings, to consider the charges and petition formally placed by The Honorable Daniel Fowler, Independent Senator from the Great State of Illinois. The long oval hearing-room was filling early; the gallery above was packed by 9:05 in the morning. Teevie-boys all over the place. The Criterion Committee members, taking their places in twos and threes--some old, some young, some rejuvenated, some not, taking their places in the oval. Then the other Senators--not the President, of course, but he'll be well represented by Senator Rinehart himself, ah yes. Don't worry about the President.

* * * * *

Bad news in the papers. Trouble in New Chicago, where so much trouble seems to start these days. Bomb thrown in the Medical Center out there, a bomb of all things! Shades of Lenin. Couple of people killed, and one of the doctors nearly beaten to death on the street before the police arrived to clear the mob away. Dan Fowler's name popping up here and there, not pleasantly. Whispers and accusations, sotto voce. And 'Moses' Tyndall's network hookup last night--of course nobody with any sense listens to him, but did you hear that hall go wild?

Rinehart--yes, that's him. Well, he's got a right to look worried. If Dan can unseat him here and now, he's washed up. According to the rules of the Government, you know, Fowler can legally petition for Rinehart's chairmanship without risking it as a platform plank in the next election, and get a hearing here, and then if the Senate votes him in, he's got the election made. Dan's smart. They're scared to throw old Rinehart out, of course--after all, he's let them keep their thumbs on rejuvination all these years with his Criteria, and if they supported him they got named, and if they didn't, they didn't get named. Not quite as crude as that, of course, but that's what it boiled down to, let me tell you! But now, if they reject Dan's petition and the people give him the election over their heads, they're really in a spot. Out on the ice on their rosy red--

How's that? Can't be too long now. I see Tyndall has just come in, Bible and all. See if he's got any tomatoes in his pockets. Ol' Moses really gets you going--ever listen to him talk? Well, it's just as well. Damn, but it's hot in here--

In the rear chamber, Dan mopped his brow, popped a pill under his tongue, dragged savagely on the long black cigar. "You with me, son?"

Carl nodded.

"You know what it means."

"Of course. There's your buzzer. Better get in there." Carl went back to Jean and the others around the 80-inch screen, set deep in the wall. Dan put his cigar down, gently, as though he planned to be back to smoke it again before it went out, and walked through the tall oak doors.

* * * * *

The hubbub caught, rose up for a few moments, then dropped away. Dan took his seat, grinned across at Libby, leaned his head over to drop an aside into Parker's ear. Rinehart staring at the ceiling as the charges are read off in a droning voice--

--Whereas the criteria for selection of candidates for sub-total prosthesis, first written by the Honorable Walter Rinehart of the Great State of Alaska, have been found to be inadequate, outdated, and utterly inappropriate to the use of sub-total prosthesis that is now possible--

--And whereas that same Honorable Walter Rinehart has repeatedly used the criteria, not in the just, honorable, and humble way in which such criteria must be regarded, but rather as a tool and weapon for his own furtherance and for that of his friends and associates--

Dan waited, patiently. Was Rinehart's face whiter than it had been? Was the Hall quieter now? Maybe not--but wait for the petition--

--The Senate of the United States of North America is formally petitioned that the Honorable Walter Rinehart should be displaced from his seat as Chairman in the Criterion Committee, and that his seat as Chairman of that committee should be resumed by the Honorable Daniel Fowler, author of this petition, who has hereby pledged himself before God to seek through this Committee in any and every way possible, the extention of the benefits of sub-total prosthesis techniques to all the people of this land and not to a chosen few--

Screams, hoots, cat-calls, applause, all from the gallery. None below--Senatorial dignity forbade, and the anti-sound glass kept the noise out of the chamber below. Then Dan Fowler stood up, an older Dan Fowler than most of them seemed to remember. "You have heard the charges which have been read. I stand before you now, formally, to withdraw them--"

What, what? Jaws sagging, eyes wide; teevie camera frozen on the Senator's face, then jerking wildly around the room to catch the reaction--

"You have also heard the petition which has been read. I stand before you now, formally, to withdraw it--"

Slowly, measuring each word, he told them. He knew that words were not enough, but he told them. "Only 75,000 men and women have undergone the process, at this date, out of almost two hundred million people on this continent, yet it has already begun to sap our strength. We were told that no change was involved, and indeed we saw no change, but it was there, my friends. The suicides of men like Kenneth Armstrong did not just occur. There are many reasons that might lead a man to take his life in this world of ours--selfishness, self-pity, hatred of the world or of himself, bitterness, resentment--but it was none of these that motivated Kenneth Armstrong. His death was the act of a bewildered, defeated mind--for he saw what I am telling you now and knew that it was true. He saw Starships built and rebuilt, and never launched--colonies dying of lethargy, because there was no longer any drive behind them--brilliant minds losing sight of goals, and drifting into endless inconsequential digressions--lifetimes wasted in repetition, in re-doing and re-writing and re-living. He saw it: the downward spiral which could only lead to death for all of us in the last days.

"This is why I withdraw the charges and petition of this Hearing. This is why I reject rejuvenation, and declare that it is a monstrous thing which we must not allow to continue. This is why I now announce that I personally will nominate the Honorable John Tyndall for President in the elections next spring, and will promise him my pledged support, my political organization and experience, and my every personal effort to see that he is elected."

* * * * *

It seemed that there would be no end to it, when Dan Fowler had finished. 'Moses' Tyndall had sat staring as the blood drained out of his sallow face; his jaw gaped, and he half-rose from his chair, then sank back with a ragged cough, staring at the Senator as if he had been transformed into a snake. Carl and Terry were beside Dan in a moment, clearing a way back to the rear chambers, then down the steps of the building to a cab. Senator Libby intercepted them there, his face purple with rage, and McKenzie, bristling and indignant. "You've lost your mind, Dan."

"I have not. I am perfectly sane."

"But Tyndall! He'll turn Washington into a grand revival meeting, he'll--"

"Then we'll cut him down to size. He's my candidate, remember, not his own. He'll play my game if it pays him well enough. But I want an Abolitionist administration, and I'm going to get one."

In the cab he stared glumly out the window, his heart racing, his whole body shaking in reaction now. "You know what it means," he said to Carl for the tenth time.

"Yes, Dan, I know."

"It means no rejuvenation, for you or for any of us. It means proving something; to people that they just don't want to believe, and cramming it down their throats if we have to. It means taking away their right to keep on living."

"I know all that."

"Carl, if you want out--"

"Yesterday was the time."

"Okay then. We've got work to do."

Up in the offices again, Dan was on the phone immediately. He knew politics, and people--like the jungle cat knows the whimpering creatures he stalks. He knew that it was the first impact, the first jolting blow that would win for them, or lose for them. Everything had to hit right. He had spent his life working with people, building friends, building power, banking his resources, investing himself. Now the time had come to cash in.

Carl and Jean and the others worked with him--a dreadful afternoon and evening, fighting off newsmen, blocking phone calls, trying to concentrate in the midst of bedlam. The campaign to elect Tyndall had to start now. They labored to record a work-schedule, listing names, outlining telegrams, drinking coffee, as Dan swore at his dead cigar like old times once again, and grinned like a madman as the plans slowly developed and blossomed out.

Then the phone jangled, and Dan reached out for it. It was that last small effort that did it. A sledge-hammer blow, from deep within him, sharp agonizing pain, a driving hunger for the air that he just couldn't drag into his lungs. He let out a small, sharp cry, and doubled over with pain. They found him seconds later, still clinging to the phone, his breath so faint as to be no breath at all.

* * * * *

He regained consciousness hours later. He stared about him at the straight lines of the ceiling, at the hospital bed and the hospital window. Dimly he saw Carl Golden, head dropping on his chest, dozing at the side of the bed.

There was a hissing sound, and he raised a hand, felt the tiny oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. But even with that help, every breath was an agony of pain and weariness.

He was so very tired. But slowly, through the fog, he remembered. Cold sweat broke out on his forehead, drenched his body. He was alive. Yet he remembered crystal clear the thought that had exploded in his mind in the instant the blow had come. I'm dying. This is the end--it's too late now. And then, cruelly, why did I wait so long?

He struggled against the mask, sat bolt upright in bed. "I'm going to die," he whispered, then caught his breath. Carl sat up, smiled at him.

"Lie back, Dan. Get some rest."

Had he heard? Had Carl heard the fear he had whispered? Perhaps not. He lay back, panting, as Carl watched. Do you know what I'm thinking, Carl? I'm thinking how much I want to live. People don't need to die--wasn't that what Dr. Moss had said? It's such a terrible waste, he had said.

Too late, now. Dan's hands trembled. He remembered the Senators in the oval hall, hearing him speak his brave words; he remembered Rinehart's face, and Tyndall's, and Libby's. He was committed now. Yesterday, no. Now, yes.

Paul had been right, and Dan had proved it.

His eyes moved across to the bedside table. A telephone. He was still alive, Moss had said that sometimes it was possible even when you were dying. That was what they did with your father, wasn't it, Carl? Brave Peter Golden, who had fought Rinehart so hard, who had begged and pleaded for universal rejuvenation, waited and watched and finally caught Rinehart red-handed, to prove that he was corrupting the law and expose him. Simple, honest Peter Golden, applying so naively for his rightful place on the list, when his cancer was diagnosed. Peter Golden had been all but dead when he had finally whispered defeat, and given Rinehart his perpetual silence in return for life. They had snatched him from death, indeed. But he had been crucified all the same. They had torn away everything, and found a coward underneath.

Coward? Why? Was it wrong to want to live? Dan Fowler was dying. Why must it be him? He had committed himself to a fight, yes, but there were others, young men, who could fight. Men like Peter Golden's son.

But you are their leader, Dan. If you fail them, they will never win.

Carl was watching him silently, his lean dark face expressionless. Could the boy read his mind? Was it possible that he knew what Dan Fowler was thinking? Carl had always understood before. It had seemed that sometimes Carl had understood Dan far better than Dan did. He wanted to cry out to Carl now, spill over his dreadful thoughts.

There was no one to run to. He was facing himself now. No more cover-up, no deceit. Life or death, that was the choice. No compromise. Life or death, but decide now. Not tomorrow, not next week, not in five minutes--

He knew the answer then, the flaw, the one thing that even Paul hadn't known. That life is too dear, that a man loves life--not what he can do with life, but very life itself for its own sake--too much to die. It was no choice, not really. A man will always choose life, as long as the choice is really his. Dan Fowler knew that now.

It would be selling himself--like Peter Golden did. It would betray Carl, and Jean, and all the rest. It would mean derision, and scorn, and oblivion for Dan Fowler.

Carl Golden was standing by the bed when he reached out his arm for the telephone. The squeaking of a valve--what? Carl's hand, infinitely gentle, on his chest, bringing up the soft blankets, and his good clean oxygen dwindling, dwindling--

Carl!

How did you know?

* * * * *

She came in the room as he was reopening the valve on the oxygen tank. She stared at Dan, grey on the bed, and then at Carl. One look at Carl's face and she knew too.

Carl nodded, slowly. "I'm sorry, Jean."

She shook her head, tears welling up. "But you loved him so."

"More than my own father."

"Then why?"

"He wanted to be immortal. Always, that drove him. Greatness, power--all the same. Now he will be immortal, because we needed a martyr in order to win. Now we will win. The other way we would surely lose, and he would live on and on, and die every day." He turned slowly to the bed and brought the sheet up gently. "This is better. This way he will never die."

They left the quiet room.

Contents

MEETING OF THE BOARD

By Alan E. Nourse

It was going to be a bad day. As he pushed his way nervously through the crowds toward the Exit Strip, Walter Towne turned the dismal prospect over and over in his mind. The potential gloominess of this particular day had descended upon him the instant the morning buzzer had gone off, making it even more tempting than usual just to roll over and forget about it all. Twenty minutes later, the water-douse came to drag him, drenched and gurgling, back to the cruel cold world. He had wolfed down his morning Koffee-Kup with one eye on the clock and one eye on his growing sense of impending crisis. And now, to make things just a trifle worse, he was going to be late again.

He struggled doggedly across the rumbling Exit strip toward the plant entrance. After all, he told himself, why should he be so upset? He was Vice President-in-Charge-of-Production of the Robling Titanium Corporation. What could they do to him, really? He had rehearsed his part many times, squaring his thin shoulders, looking the union boss straight in the eye and saying, "Now, see here, Torkleson--" But he knew, when the showdown came, that he wouldn't say any such thing. And this was the morning that the showdown would come.

Oh, not because of the lateness. Of course Bailey, the shop steward, would take his usual delight in bringing that up. But this seemed hardly worthy of concern this morning. The reports waiting on his desk were what worried him. The sales reports. The promotion-draw reports. The royalty reports. The anticipated dividend reports. Walter shook his head wearily. The shop steward was a goad, annoying, perhaps even infuriating, but tolerable. Torkleson was a different matter.

He pulled his worn overcoat down over frayed shirt sleeves, and tried vainly to straighten the celluloid collar that kept scooting his tie up under his ear. Once off the moving strip, he started up the Robling corridor toward the plant gate. Perhaps he would be fortunate. Maybe the reports would be late. Maybe his secretary's two neurones would fail to synapse this morning, and she'd lose them altogether. And, as long as he was dreaming, maybe Bailey would break his neck on the way to work. He walked quickly past the workers' lounge, glancing in at the groups of men, arguing politics and checking the stock market reports before they changed from their neat gray business suits to their welding dungarees. Running up the stairs to the administrative wing, he paused outside the door to punch the time clock. 8:04. Damn. If only Bailey could be sick--

Bailey was not sick. The administrative offices were humming with frantic activity as Walter glanced down the rows of cubbyholes. In the middle of it all sat Bailey, in his black-and-yellow checkered tattersall, smoking a large cigar. His feet were planted on his desk top, but he hadn't started on his morning Western yet. He was busy glaring, first at the clock, then at Walter.

"Late again, I see," the shop steward growled.

Walter gulped. "Yes, sir. Just four minutes, this time, sir. You know those crowded strips--"

"So it's just four minutes now, eh?" Bailey's feet came down with a crash. "After last month's fine production record, you think four minutes doesn't matter, eh? Think just because you're a vice president it's all right to mosey in here whenever you feel like it." He glowered. "Well, this is three times this month you've been late, Towne. That's a demerit for each time, and you know what that means."

"You wouldn't count four minutes as a whole demerit!"

Bailey grinned. "Wouldn't I, now! You just add up your pay envelope on Friday. Ten cents an hour off for each demerit."

Walter sighed and shuffled back to his desk. Oh, well. It could have been worse. They might have fired him like poor Cartwright last month. He'd just have to listen to that morning buzzer.

The reports were on his desk. He picked them up warily. Maybe they wouldn't be so bad. He'd had more freedom this last month than before, maybe there'd been a policy change. Maybe Torkleson was gaining confidence in him. Maybe--

The reports were worse than he had ever dreamed.

"Towne!"

Walter jumped a foot. Bailey was putting down the visiphone receiver. His grin spread unpleasantly from ear to ear. "What have you been doing lately? Sabotaging the production line?"

"What's the trouble now?"

Bailey jerked a thumb significantly at the ceiling. "The boss wants to see you. And you'd better have the right answers, too. The boss seems to have a lot of questions."

Walter rose slowly from his seat. This was it, then. Torkleson had already seen the reports. He started for the door, his knees shaking.

It hadn't always been like this, he reflected miserably. Time was when things had been very different. It had meant something to be vice president of a huge industrial firm like Robling Titanium. A man could have had a fine house of his own, and a 'copter-car, and belong to the Country Club; maybe even have a cottage on a lake somewhere.

Walter could almost remember those days with Robling, before the switchover, before that black day when the exchange of ten little shares of stock had thrown the Robling Titanium Corporation into the hands of strange and unnatural owners.

* * * * *

The door was of heavy stained oak, with bold letters edged in gold:

TITANIUM WORKERS OF AMERICA Amalgamated Locals Daniel P. Torkleson, Secretary

The secretary flipped down the desk switch and eyed Walter with pity. "Mr. Torkleson will see you."

Walter pushed through the door into the long, handsome office. For an instant he felt a pang of nostalgia--the floor-to-ceiling windows looking out across the long buildings of the Robling plant, the pine paneling, the broad expanse of desk--

"Well? Don't just stand there. Shut the door and come over here." The man behind the desk hoisted his three hundred well-dressed pounds and glared at Walter from under flagrant eyebrows. Torkleson's whole body quivered as he slammed a sheaf of papers down on the desk. "Just what do you think you're doing with this company, Towne?"

Walter swallowed. "I'm production manager of the corporation."

"And just what does the production manager do all day?"

Walter reddened. "He organizes the work of the plant, establishes production lines, works with Promotion and Sales, integrates Research and Development, operates the planning machines."

"And you think you do a pretty good job of it, eh? Even asked for a raise last year!" Torkleson's voice was dangerous.

Walter spread his hands. "I do my best. I've been doing it for thirty years. I should know what I'm doing."

"Then how do you explain these reports?" Torkleson threw the heap of papers into Walter's arms, and paced up and down behind the desk. "Look at them! Sales at rock bottom. Receipts impossible. Big orders canceled. The worst reports in seven years, and you say you know your job!"

"I've been doing everything I could," Walter snapped. "Of course the reports are bad, they couldn't help but be. We haven't met a production schedule in over two years. No plant can keep up production the way the men are working."

Torkleson's face darkened. He leaned forward slowly. "So it's the men now, is it? Go ahead. Tell me what's wrong with the men."

"Nothing's wrong with the men--if they'd only work. But they come in when they please, and leave when they please, and spend half their time changing and the other half on Koffee-Kup. No company could survive this. But that's only half of it--" Walter searched through the reports frantically. "This International Jet Transport account--they dropped us because we haven't had a new engine in six years. Why? Because Research and Development hasn't had any money for six years. What can two starved engineers and a second rate chemist drag out of an attic laboratory for competition in the titanium market?" Walter took a deep breath. "I've warned you time and again. Robling had built up accounts over the years with fine products and new models. But since the switchover seven years ago, you and your board have forced me to play the cheap products for the quick profit in order to give your men their dividends. Now the bottom's dropped out. We couldn't turn a quick profit on the big, important accounts, so we had to cancel them. If you had let me manage the company the way it should have been run--"

Torkleson had been slowly turning purple. Now he slammed his fist down on the desk. "We should just turn the company back to Management again, eh? Just let you have a free hand to rob us blind again. Well, it won't work, Towne. Not while I'm secretary of this union. We fought long and hard for control of this corporation, just the way all the other unions did. I know. I was through it all." He sat back smugly, his cheeks quivering with emotion. "You might say that I was a national leader in the movement. But I did it only for the men. The men want their dividends. They own the stock, stock is supposed to pay dividends."

"But they're cutting their own throats," Walter wailed. "You can't build a company and make it grow the way I've been forced to run it."

"Details!" Torkleson snorted. "I don't care how the dividends come in. That's your job. My job is to report a dividend every six months to the men who own the stock, the men working on the production lines."

Walter nodded bitterly. "And every year the dividend has to be higher than the last, or you and your fat friends are likely to be thrown out of your jobs--right? No more steaks every night. No more private gold-plated Buicks for you boys. No more twenty-room mansions in Westchester. No more big game hunting in the Rockies. No, you don't have to know anything but how to whip a board meeting into a frenzy so they'll vote you into office again each year."

Torkleson's eyes glittered. His voice was very soft. "I've always liked you, Walter. So I'm going to pretend I didn't hear you." He paused, then continued. "But here on my desk is a small bit of white paper. Unless you have my signature on that paper on the first of next month, you are out of a job, on grounds of incompetence. And I will personally see that you go on every White list in the country."

Walter felt the fight go out of him like a dying wind. He knew what the White list meant. No job, anywhere, ever, in management. No chance, ever, to join a union. No more house, no more weekly pay envelope. He spread his hands weakly. "What do you want?" he asked.

"I want a production plan on my desk within twenty-four hours. A plan that will guarantee me a five per cent increase in dividends in the next six months. And you'd better move fast, because I'm not fooling."

* * * * *

Back in his cubbyhole downstairs, Walter stared hopelessly at the reports. He had known it would come to this sooner or later. They all knew it--Hendricks of Promotion, Pendleton of Sales, the whole managerial staff.

It was wrong, all the way down the line. Walter had fought it tooth and nail since the day Torkleson had installed the moose heads in Walter's old office, and moved him down to the cubbyhole, under Bailey's watchful eye. He had argued, and battled, and pleaded, and lost. He had watched the company deteriorate day by day. Now they blamed him, and threatened his job, and he was helpless to do anything about it.

He stared at the machines, clicking busily against the wall. An idea began to form in his head. Helpless?

Not quite. Not if the others could see it, go along with it. It was a repugnant idea. But there was one thing they could do that even Torkleson and his fat-jowled crew would understand.

They could go on strike.

* * * * *

"It's ridiculous," the lawyer spluttered, staring at the circle of men in the room. "How can I give you an opinion on the legality of the thing? There isn't any legal precedent that I know of." He mopped his bald head with a large white handkerchief. "There just hasn't been a case of a company's management striking against its own labor. It--it isn't done. Oh, there have been lockouts, but this isn't the same thing at all."

Walter nodded. "Well, we couldn't very well lock the men out, they own the plant. We were thinking more of a lock-in sort of thing." He turned to Paul Hendricks and the others. "We know how the machines operate. They don't. We also know that the data we keep in the machines is essential to running the business; the machines figure production quotas, organize blueprints, prepare distribution lists, test promotion schemes. It would take an office full of managerial experts to handle even a single phase of the work without the machines."

The man at the window hissed, and Pendleton quickly snapped out the lights. They sat in darkness, hardly daring to breathe. Then: "Okay. Just the man next door coming home."

Pendleton sighed. "You're sure you didn't let them suspect anything, Walter? They wouldn't be watching the house?"

"I don't think so. And you all came alone, at different times." He nodded to the window guard, and turned back to the lawyer. "So we can't be sure of the legal end. You'd have to be on your toes."

"I still don't see how we could work it," Hendricks objected. His heavy face was wrinkled with worry. "Torkleson is no fool, and he has a lot of power in the National Association of Union Stockholders. All he'd need to do is ask for managers, and a dozen companies would throw them to him on loan. They'd be able to figure out the machine system and take over without losing a day."

"Not quite." Walter was grinning. "That's why I spoke of a lock-in. Before we leave, we throw the machines into feedback, every one of them. Lock them into reverberating circuits with a code sequence key. Then all they'll do is buzz and sputter until the feedback is broken with the key. And the key is our secret. It'll tie the Robling office into granny knots, and scabs won't be able to get any more data out of the machines than Torkleson could. With a lawyer to handle injunctions, we've got them strapped."

"For what?" asked the lawyer.

Walter turned on him sharply. "For new contracts. Contracts to let us manage the company the way it should be managed. If they won't do it, they won't get another Titanium product off their production lines for the rest of the year, and their dividends will really take a nosedive."

"That means you'll have to beat Torkleson," said Bates. "He'll never go along."

"Then he'll be left behind."

Hendricks stood up, brushing off his dungarees. "I'm with you, Walter. I've taken all of Torkleson that I want to. And I'm sick of the junk we've been trying to sell people."

The others nodded. Walter rubbed his hands together. "All right. Tomorrow we work as usual, until the noon whistle. When we go off for lunch, we throw the machines into lock-step. Then we just don't come back. But the big thing is to keep it quiet until the noon whistle." He turned to the lawyer. "Are you with us, Jeff?"

Jeff Bates shook his head sadly. "I'm with you. I don't know why, you haven't got a leg to stand on. But if you want to commit suicide, that's all right with me." He picked up his briefcase, and started for the door. "I'll have your contract demands by tomorrow," he grinned. "See you at the lynching."

They got down to the details of planning.

* * * * *

The news hit the afternoon telecasts the following day. Headlines screamed:

MANAGEMENT SABOTAGES ROBLING MACHINES OFFICE STRIKERS THREATEN LABOR ECONOMY ROBLING LOCK-IN CREATES PANDEMONIUM

There was a long, indignant statement from Daniel P. Torkleson, condemning Towne and his followers for "flagrant violation of management contracts and illegal fouling of managerial processes." Ben Starkey, President of the Board of American Steel, expressed "shock and regret"; the Amalgamated Buttonhole Makers held a mass meeting in protest, demanding that "the instigators of this unprecedented crime be permanently barred from positions in American Industry."

In Washington, the nation's economists were more cautious in their views. Yes, it was an unprecedented action. Yes, there would undoubtedly be repercussions--many industries were having managerial troubles; but as for long term effects, it was difficult to say just at present.

On the Robling production lines the workmen blinked at each other, and at their machines, and wondered vaguely what it was all about.

Yet in all the upheaval, there was very little expression of surprise. Step by step, through the years, economists had been watching with wary eyes the growing movement toward union, control of industry. Even as far back as the '40's and '50's unions, finding themselves oppressed with the administration of growing sums of money--pension funds, welfare funds, medical insurance funds, accruing union dues--had begun investing in corporate stock. It was no news to them that money could make money. And what stock more logical to buy than stock in their own companies?

At first it had been a quiet movement. One by one the smaller firms had tottered, bled drier and drier by increasing production costs, increasing labor demands, and an ever-dwindling margin of profit. One by one they had seen their stocks tottering as they faced bankruptcy, only to be gobbled up by the one ready buyer with plenty of funds to buy with. At first, changes had been small and insignificant: boards of directors shifted; the men were paid higher wages and worked shorter hours; there were tighter management policies; and a little less money was spent on extras like Research and Development.

At first--until that fateful night when Daniel P. Torkleson of TWA and Jake Squill of Amalgamated Buttonhole Makers spent a long evening with beer and cigars in a hotel room, and floated the loan that threw steel to the unions. Oil had followed with hardly a fight, and as the unions began to feel their oats, the changes grew more radical.

Walter Towne remembered those stormy days well. The gradual undercutting of the managerial salaries, the tightening up of inter-union collusion to establish the infamous White list of Recalcitrant Managers. The shift from hourly wage to annual salary for the factory workers, and the change to the other pole for the managerial staff. And then, with creeping malignancy, the hungry howling of the union bosses for more and higher dividends, year after year, moving steadily toward the inevitable crisis.

Until Shop Steward Bailey suddenly found himself in charge of a dozen sputtering machines and an empty office.

* * * * *

Torkleson was waiting to see the shop steward when he came in next morning. The union boss's office was crowded with TV cameras, newsmen, and puzzled workmen. The floor was littered with piles of ominous-looking paper. Torkleson was shouting into a telephone, and three lawyers were shouting into Torkleson's ear. He spotted Bailey and waved him through the crowd into an inner office room. "Well? Did they get them fixed?"

Bailey spread his hands nervously. "The electronics boys have been at it since yesterday afternoon. Practically had the machines apart on the floor."

"I know that, stupid," Torkleson roared. "I ordered them there. Did they get the machines fixed?"

"Uh--well, no, as a matter of fact--"

"Well, what's holding them up?"

Bailey's face was a study in misery. "The machines just go in circles. The circuits are locked. They just reverberate."

"Then call American Electronics. Have them send down an expert crew."

Bailey shook his head. "They won't come."

"They what?"

"They said thanks, but no thanks. They don't want their fingers in this pie at all."

"Wait until I get O'Gilvy on the phone."

"It won't do any good, sir. They've got their own management troubles. They're scared silly of a sympathy strike."

The door burst open, and a lawyer stuck his head in. "What about those injunctions, Dan?"

"Get them moving," Torkleson howled. "They'll start those machines again, or I'll have them in jail so fast--" He turned back to Bailey. "What about the production lines?"

The shop steward's face lighted. "They slipped up, there. There was one program that hadn't been coded into the machines yet. Just a minor item, but it's a starter. We found it in Towne's desk, blueprints all ready, promotion all planned."

"Good, good," Torkleson breathed. "I have a directors' meeting right now, have to get the workers quieted down a bit. You put the program through, and give those electronics men three more hours to unsnarl this knot, or we throw them out of the union." He started for the door. "What were the blueprints for?"

"Trash cans," said Bailey. "Pure titanium-steel trash cans."

It took Robling Titanium approximately two days to convert its entire production line to titanium-steel trash cans. With the total resources of the giant plant behind the effort, production was phenomenal. In two more days the available markets were glutted. Within two weeks, at a conservative estimate, there would be a titanium-steel trash can for every man, woman, child, and hound dog on the North American continent. The jet engines, structural steels, tubing, and other pre-strike products piled up in the freight yards, their routing slips and order requisitions tied up in the reverberating machines.

But the machines continued to buzz and sputter.

The workers grew restive. From the first day, Towne and Hendricks and all the others had been picketing the plant, until angry crowds of workers had driven them off with shotguns. Then they came back in an old, weatherbeaten 'copter which hovered over the plant entrance carrying a banner with a plaintive message: ROBLING TITANIUM UNFAIR TO MANAGEMENT. Tomatoes were hurled, fists were shaken, but the 'copter remained.

The third day, Jeff Bates was served with an injunction ordering Towne to return to work. It was duly appealed, legal machinery began tying itself in knots, and the strikers still struck. By the fifth day there was a more serious note.

"You're going to have to appear, Walter. We can't dodge this one."

"When?"

"Tomorrow morning. And before a labor-rigged judge, too." The little lawyer paced his office nervously. "I don't like it. Torkleson's getting desperate. The workers are putting pressure on him."

Walter grinned. "Then Pendleton is doing a good job of selling."

"But you haven't got time," the lawyer wailed. "They'll have you in jail if you don't start the machines again. They may have you in jail if you do start them, too, but that's another bridge. Right now they want those machines going again."

"We'll see," said Walter. "What time tomorrow?"

"Ten o'clock." Bates looked up. "And don't try to skip. You be there, because I don't know what to tell them."

Walter was there a half hour early. Torkleson's legal staff glowered from across the room. The judge glowered from the bench. Walter closed his eyes with a little smile as the charges were read: "--breach of contract, malicious mischief, sabotage of the company's machines, conspiring to destroy the livelihood of ten thousand workers. Your Honor, we are preparing briefs to prove further that these men have formed a conspiracy to undermine the economy of the entire nation. We appeal to the spirit of orderly justice--"

Walter yawned as the words went on.

"Of course, if the defendant will waive his appeals against the previous injunctions, and will release the machines that were sabotaged, we will be happy to formally withdraw these charges."

There was a rustle of sound through the courtroom. His Honor turned to Jeff Bates. "Are you counsel for the defendant?"

"Yes, sir." Bates mopped his bald scalp. "The defendant pleads guilty to all counts."

The union lawyer dropped his glasses on the table with a crash. The judge stared. "Mr. Bates, if you plead guilty, you leave me no alternative--"

"--but to send me to jail," said Walter Towne. "Go ahead. Send me to jail. In fact, I insist upon going to jail."

The union lawyer's jaw sagged. There was a hurried conference. A recess was pleaded. Telephones buzzed. Then: "Your Honor, the plaintiff desires to withdraw all charges at this time."

"Objection," Bates exclaimed. "We've already pleaded."

"--feel sure that a settlement can be effected out of court--"

The case was thrown out on its ear.

And still the machines sputtered.

* * * * *

Back at the plant rumor had it that the machines were permanently gutted, and that the plant could never go back into production. Conflicting scuttlebutt suggested that persons high in uniondom had perpetrated the crisis deliberately, bullying Management into the strike for the sole purpose of cutting current dividends and selling stock to themselves cheaply. The rumors grew easier and easier to believe. The workers came to the plants in business suits, it was true, and lounged in the finest of lounges, and read the Wall Street Journal, and felt like stockholders. But to face facts, their salaries were not the highest. Deduct union dues, pension fees, medical insurance fees, and sundry other little items which had formerly been paid by well-to-do managements, and very little was left but the semi-annual dividend checks. And now the dividends were tottering.

Production lines slowed. There were daily brawls on the plant floor, in the lounge and locker rooms. Workers began joking about the trash cans; then the humor grew more and more remote. Finally, late in the afternoon of the eighth day, Bailey was once again in Torkleson's office.

"Well? Speak up! What's the beef this time?"

"Sir--the men--I mean, there's been some nasty talk. They're tired of making trash cans. No challenge in it. Anyway, the stock room is full, and the freight yard is full, and the last run of orders we sent out came back because nobody wants any more trash cans." Bailey shook his head. "The men won't swallow it any more. There's--well, there's been talk about having a board meeting."

Torkleson's ruddy cheeks paled. "Board meeting, huh?" He licked his heavy lips. "Now look, Bailey, we've always worked well together. I consider you a good friend of mine. You've got to get things under control. Tell the men we're making progress. Tell them Management is beginning to weaken from its original stand. Tell them we expect to have the strike broken in another few hours. Tell them anything."

He waited until Bailey was gone. Then, with a trembling hand he lifted the visiphone receiver. "Get me Walter Towne," he said.

* * * * *

"I'm not an unreasonable man," Torkleson was saying miserably, waving his fat paws in the air as he paced back and forth in front of the spokesmen for the striking managers. "Perhaps we were a little demanding, I concede it! Overenthusiastic with our ownership, and all that. But I'm sure we can come to some agreement. A hike in wage scale is certainly within reason. Perhaps we can even arrange for better company houses."

Walter Towne stifled a yawn. "Perhaps you didn't understand us. The men are agitating for a meeting of the board of directors. We want to be at that meeting. That's the only thing we're interested in right now."

"But there wasn't anything about a board meeting in the contract your lawyer presented."

"I know, but you rejected that contract. So we tore it up. Anyway, we've changed our minds."

Torkleson sat down, his heavy cheeks quivering. "Gentlemen, be reasonable! I can guarantee you your jobs, even give you a free hand with the management. So the dividends won't be so large--the men will have to get used to that. That's it, we'll put it through at the next executive conference, give you--"

"The board meeting," Walter said gently. "That'll be enough for us."

The union boss swore and slammed his fist on the desk. "Walk out in front of those men after what you've done? You're fools! Well, I've given you your chance. You'll get your board meeting. But you'd better come armed. Because I know how to handle this kind of board meeting, and if I have anything to say about it, this one will end with a massacre."

* * * * *

The meeting was held in a huge auditorium in the Robling administration building. Since every member of the union owned stock in the company, every member had the right to vote for members of the board of directors. But in the early days of the switchover, the idea of a board of directors smacked too strongly of the old system of corporate organization to suit the men. The solution had been simple, if a trifle ungainly. Everyone who owned stock in Robling Titanium was automatically a member of the board of directors, with Torkleson as chairman of the board. The stockholders numbered over ten thousand.

They were all present. They were packed in from the wall to the stage, and hanging from the rafters. They overflowed into the corridors. They jammed the lobby. Ten thousand men rose with a howl of anger when Walter Towne walked out on the stage. But they quieted down again as Dan Torkleson started to speak.

It was a masterful display of rabble-rousing. Torkleson paced the stage, his fat body shaking with agitation, pointing a chubby finger again and again at Walter Towne. He pranced and he ranted. He paused at just the right times for thunderous peals of applause.

"This morning in my office we offered to compromise with these jackals," he cried, "and they rejected compromise. Even at the cost of lowering dividends, of taking food from the mouths of your wives and children, we made our generous offers. They were rejected with scorn. These thieves have one desire in mind, my friends, to starve you all, and to destroy your company and your jobs. To every appeal they heartlessly refused to divulge the key to the lock-in. And now this man--the ringleader who keeps the key word buried in secrecy--has the temerity to ask an audience with you. You're angry men; you want to know the man to blame for our hardship."

He pointed to Towne with a flourish. "I give you your man. Do what you want with him."

The hall exploded in angry thunder. The first wave of men rushed onto the stage as Walter stood up. A tomato whizzed past his ear and splattered against the wall. More men clambered up on the stage, shouting and shaking their fists.

Then somebody appeared with a rope.

Walter gave a sharp nod to the side of the stage. Abruptly the roar of the men was drowned in another sound--a soul-rending, teeth-grating, bone-rattling screech. The men froze, jaws sagging, eyes wide, hardly believing their ears. In the instant of silence as the factory whistle died away, Walter grabbed the microphone. "You want the code word to start the machines again? I'll give it to you before I sit down!"

The men stared at him, shuffling, a murmur rising. Torkleson burst to his feet. "It's a trick!" he howled. "Wait 'til you hear their price."

"We have no price, and no demands," said Walter Towne. "We will give you the code word, and we ask nothing in return but that you listen for sixty seconds." He glanced back at Torkleson, and then out to the crowd. "You men here are an electing body--right? You own this great plant and company, top to bottom--right? You should all be rich, because Robling could make you rich. But not one of you out there is rich. Only the fat ones on this stage are. But I'll tell you how you can be rich."

They listened. Not a peep came from the huge hall. Suddenly, Walter Towne was talking their language.

"You think that since you own the company, times have changed. Well, have they? Are you any better off than you were? Of course not. Because you haven't learned yet that oppression by either side leads to misery for both. You haven't learned moderation. And you never will, until you throw out the ones who have fought moderation right down to the last ditch. You know whom I mean. You know who's grown richer and richer since the switchover. Throw him out, and you too can be rich." He paused for a deep breath. "You want the code word to unlock the machines? All right, I'll give it to you."

He swung around to point a long finger at the fat man sitting there. "The code word is TORKLESON!"

* * * * *

Much later, Walter Towne and Jeff Bates pried the trophies off the wall of the big office. The lawyer shook his head sadly. "Pity about Dan Torkleson. Gruesome affair."

Walter nodded as he struggled down with a moose head. "Yes, a pity, but you know the boys when they get upset."

"I suppose so." The lawyer stopped to rest, panting. "Anyway, with the newly elected board of directors, things will be different for everybody. You took a long gamble."

"Not so long. Not when you knew what they wanted to hear. It just took a little timing."

"Still, I didn't think they'd elect you secretary of the union. It just doesn't figure."

Walter Towne chuckled. "Doesn't it? I don't know. Everything's been a little screwy since the switchover. And in a screwy world like this--" He shrugged, and tossed down the moose head. "Anything figures."

Contents

HE WALKED AROUND THE HORSES

BY H. BEAM PIPER

This tale is based on an authenticated, documented fact. A man vanished--right out of this world. And where he went--

In November 1809, an Englishman named Benjamin Bathurst vanished, inexplicably and utterly.

He was en route to Hamburg from Vienna, where he had been serving as his government's envoy to the court of what Napoleon had left of the Austrian Empire. At an inn in Perleburg, in Prussia, while examining a change of horses for his coach, he casually stepped out of sight of his secretary and his valet. He was not seen to leave the inn yard. He was not seen again, ever.

At least, not in this continuum....

(From Baron Eugen von Krutz, Minister of Police, to His Excellency the Count von Berchtenwald, Chancellor to His Majesty Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia.)

25 November, 1809

Your Excellency:

A circumstance has come to the notice of this Ministry, the significance of which I am at a loss to define, but, since it appears to involve matters of State, both here and abroad, I am convinced that it is of sufficient importance to be brought to your personal attention. Frankly, I am unwilling to take any further action in the matter without your advice.

Briefly, the situation is this: We are holding, here at the Ministry of Police, a person giving his name as Benjamin Bathurst, who claims to be a British diplomat. This person was taken into custody by the police at Perleburg yesterday, as a result of a disturbance at an inn there; he is being detained on technical charges of causing disorder in a public place, and of being a suspicious person. When arrested, he had in his possession a dispatch case, containing a number of papers; these are of such an extraordinary nature that the local authorities declined to assume any responsibility beyond having the man sent here to Berlin.

After interviewing this person and examining his papers, I am, I must confess, in much the same position. This is not, I am convinced, any ordinary police matter; there is something very strange and disturbing here. The man's statements, taken alone, are so incredible as to justify the assumption that he is mad. I cannot, however, adopt this theory, in view of his demeanor, which is that of a man of perfect rationality, and because of the existence of these papers. The whole thing is mad; incomprehensible!

The papers in question accompany, along with copies of the various statements taken at Perleburg, a personal letter to me from my nephew, Lieutenant Rudolf von Tarlburg. This last is deserving of your particular attention; Lieutenant von Tarlburg is a very level-headed young officer, not at all inclined to be fanciful or imaginative. It would take a good deal to affect him as he describes.

The man calling himself Benjamin Bathurst is now lodged in an apartment here at the Ministry; he is being treated with every consideration, and, except for freedom of movement, accorded every privilege.

I am, most anxiously awaiting your advice, et cetera, et cetera,

Krutz

(Report of Traugott Zeller, Oberwachtmeister, Staatspolizei, made at Perleburg, 25 November, 1809.)

At about ten minutes past two of the afternoon of Saturday, 25 November, while I was at the police station, there entered a man known to me as Franz Bauer, an inn servant employed by Christian Hauck, at the sign of the Sword & Scepter, here in Perleburg. This man Franz Bauer made complaint to Staatspolizeikapitan Ernst Hartenstein, saying that there was a madman making trouble at the inn where he, Franz Bauer, worked. I was, therefore, directed, by Staatspolizeikapitan Hartenstein, to go to the Sword & Scepter Inn, there to act at discretion to maintain the peace.

Arriving at the inn in company with the said Franz Bauer, I found a considerable crowd of people in the common room, and, in the midst of them, the innkeeper, Christian Hauck, in altercation with a stranger. This stranger was a gentlemanly-appearing person, dressed in traveling clothes, who had under his arm a small leather dispatch case. As I entered, I could hear him, speaking in German with a strong English accent, abusing the innkeeper, the said Christian Hauck, and accusing him of having drugged his, the stranger's, wine, and of having stolen his, the stranger's, coach-and-four, and of having abducted his, the stranger's, secretary and servants. This the said Christian Hauck was loudly denying, and the other people in the inn were taking the innkeeper's part, and mocking the stranger for a madman.

On entering, I commanded everyone to be silent, in the king's name, and then, as he appeared to be the complaining party of the dispute, I required the foreign gentleman to state to me what was the trouble. He then repeated his accusations against the innkeeper, Hauck, saying that Hauck, or, rather, another man who resembled Hauck and who had claimed to be the innkeeper, had drugged his wine and stolen his coach and made off with his secretary and his servants. At this point, the innkeeper and the bystanders all began shouting denials and contradictions, so that I had to pound on a table with my truncheon to command silence.

I then required the innkeeper, Christian Hauck, to answer the charges which the stranger had made; this he did with a complete denial of all of them, saying that the stranger had had no wine in his inn, and that he had not been inside the inn until a few minutes before, when he had burst in shouting accusations, and that there had been no secretary, and no valet, and no coachman, and no coach-and-four, at the inn, and that the gentleman was raving mad. To all this, he called the people who were in the common room to witness.

I then required the stranger to account for himself. He said that his name was Benjamin Bathurst, and that he was a British diplomat, returning to England from Vienna. To prove this, he produced from his dispatch case sundry papers. One of these was a letter of safe-conduct, issued by the Prussian Chancellery, in which he was named and described as Benjamin Bathurst. The other papers were English, all bearing seals, and appearing to be official documents.

Accordingly, I requested him to accompany me to the police station, and also the innkeeper, and three men whom the innkeeper wanted to bring as witnesses.

Traugott Zeller Oberwachtmeister

Report approved,

Ernst Hartenstein Staatspolizeikapitan

(Statement of the self-so-called Benjamin Bathurst, taken at the police station at Perleburg, 25 November, 1809.)

My name is Benjamin Bathurst, and I am Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of the government of His Britannic Majesty to the court of His Majesty Franz I, Emperor of Austria, or, at least, I was until the events following the Austrian surrender made necessary my return to London. I left Vienna on the morning of Monday, the 20th, to go to Hamburg to take ship home; I was traveling in my own coach-and-four, with my secretary, Mr. Bertram Jardine, and my valet, William Small, both British subjects, and a coachman, Josef Bidek, an Austrian subject, whom I had hired for the trip. Because of the presence of French troops, whom I was anxious to avoid, I was forced to make a detour west as far as Salzburg before turning north toward Magdeburg, where I crossed the Elbe. I was unable to get a change of horses for my coach after leaving Gera, until I reached Perleburg, where I stopped at the Sword & Scepter Inn.

Arriving there, I left my coach in the inn yard, and I and my secretary, Mr. Jardine, went into the inn. A man, not this fellow here, but another rogue, with more beard and less paunch, and more shabbily dressed, but as like him as though he were his brother, represented himself as the innkeeper, and I dealt with him for a change of horses, and ordered a bottle of wine for myself and my secretary, and also a pot of beer apiece for my valet and the coachman, to be taken outside to them. Then Jardine and I sat down to our wine, at a table in the common room, until the man who claimed to be the innkeeper came back and told us that the fresh horses were harnessed to the coach and ready to go. Then we went outside again.

I looked at the two horses on the off side, and then walked around in front of the team to look at the two nigh-side horses, and as I did I felt giddy, as though I were about to fall, and everything went black before my eyes. I thought I was having a fainting spell, something I am not at all subject to, and I put out my hand to grasp the hitching bar, but could not find it. I am sure, now, that I was unconscious for some time, because when my head cleared, the coach and horses were gone, and in their place was a big farm wagon, jacked up in front, with the right front wheel off, and two peasants were greasing the detached wheel.

I looked at them for a moment, unable to credit my eyes, and then I spoke to them in German, saying, "Where the devil's my coach-and-four?"

They both straightened, startled: the one who was holding the wheel almost dropped it.

"Pardon, excellency," he said, "there's been no coach-and-four here, all the time we've been here."

"Yes," said his mate, "and we've been here since just after noon."

I did not attempt to argue with them. It occurred to me--and it is still my opinion--that I was the victim of some plot; that my wine had been drugged, that I had been unconscious for some time, during which my coach had been removed and this wagon substituted for it, and that these peasants had been put to work on it and instructed what to say if questioned. If my arrival at the inn had been anticipated, and everything put in readiness, the whole business would not have taken ten minutes.

I therefore entered the inn, determined to have it out with this rascally innkeeper, but when I returned to the common room, he was nowhere to be seen, and this other fellow, who has given his name as Christian Hauck, claimed to be the innkeeper and denied knowledge of any of the things I have just stated. Furthermore, there were four cavalrymen, Uhlans, drinking beer and playing cards at the table where Jardine and I had had our wine, and they claimed to have been there for several hours.

I have no idea why such an elaborate prank, involving the participation of many people, should be played on me, except at the instigation of the French. In that case, I cannot understand why Prussian soldiers should lend themselves to it.

Benjamin Bathurst

(Statement of Christian Hauck, innkeeper, taken at the police station at Perleburg, 25 November, 1809.)

May it please your honor, my name is Christian Hauck, and I keep an inn at the sign of the Sword & Scepter, and have these past fifteen years, and my father, and his father, before me, for the past fifty years, and never has there been a complaint like this against my inn. Your honor, it is a hard thing for a man who keeps a decent house, and pays his taxes, and obeys the laws, to be accused of crimes of this sort.

I know nothing of this gentleman, nor of his coach, nor his secretary, nor his servants; I never set eyes on him before he came bursting into the inn from the yard, shouting and raving like a madman, and crying out, "Where the devil's that rogue of an innkeeper?"

I said to him, "I am the innkeeper; what cause have you to call me a rogue, sir?"

The stranger replied:

"You're not the innkeeper I did business with a few minutes ago, and he's the rascal I want to see. I want to know what the devil's been done with my coach, and what's happened to my secretary and my servants."

I tried to tell him that I knew nothing of what he was talking about, but he would not listen, and gave me the lie, saying that he had been drugged and robbed, and his people kidnaped. He even had the impudence to claim that he and his secretary had been sitting at a table in that room, drinking wine, not fifteen minutes before, when there had been four noncommissioned officers of the Third Uhlans at that table since noon. Everybody in the room spoke up for me, but he would not listen, and was shouting that we were all robbers, and kidnapers, and French spies, and I don't know what all, when the police came.

Your honor, the man is mad. What I have told you about this is the truth, and all that I know about this business, so help me God.

Christian Hauck

(Statement of Franz Bauer, inn servant, taken at the police station at Perleburg, 25 November, 1809.)

May it please your honor, my name is Franz Bauer, and I am a servant at the Sword & Scepter Inn, kept by Christian Hauck.

This afternoon, when I went into the inn yard to empty a bucket of slops on the dung heap by the stables, I heard voices and turned around, to see this gentleman speaking to Wilhelm Beick and Fritz Herzer, who were greasing their wagon in the yard. He had not been in the yard when I had turned away to empty the bucket, and I thought that he must have come in from the street. This gentleman was asking Beick and Herzer where was his coach, and when they told him they didn't know, he turned and ran into the inn.

Of my own knowledge, the man had not been inside the inn before then, nor had there been any coach, or any of the people he spoke of, at the inn, and none of the things he spoke of happened there, for otherwise I would know, since I was at the inn all day.

When I went back inside, I found him in the common room shouting at my master, and claiming that he had been drugged and robbed. I saw that he was mad and was afraid that he would do some mischief, so I went for the police.

Franz Bauer his (x) mark

(Statements of Wilhelm Beick and Fritz Herzer, peasants, taken at the police station at Perleburg, 25 November, 1809.)

May it please your honor, my name is Wilhelm Beick, and I am a tenant on the estate of the Baron von Hentig. On this day, I and Fritz Herzer were sent into Perleburg with a load of potatoes and cabbages which the innkeeper at the Sword & Scepter had bought from the estate superintendent. After we had unloaded them, we decided to grease our wagon, which was very dry, before going back, so we unhitched and began working on it. We took about two hours, starting just after we had eaten lunch, and in all that time, there was no coach-and-four in the inn yard. We were just finishing when this gentleman spoke to us, demanding to know where his coach was. We told him that there had been no coach in the yard all the time we had been there, so he turned around and ran into the inn. At the time, I thought that he had come out of the inn before speaking to us, for I know that he could not have come in from the street. Now I do not know where he came from, but I know that I never saw him before that moment.

Wilhelm Beick his (x) mark

I have heard the above testimony, and it is true to my own knowledge, and I have nothing to add to it.

Fritz Herzer his (x) mark

(From Staatspolizeikapitan Ernst Hartenstein, to His Excellency, the Baron von Krutz, Minister of Police.)

25 November, 1809

Your Excellency:

The accompanying copies of statements taken this day will explain how the prisoner, the self-so-called Benjamin Bathurst, came into my custody. I have charged him with causing disorder and being a suspicious person, to hold him until more can be learned about him. However, as he represents himself to be a British diplomat, I am unwilling to assume any further responsibility, and am having him sent to your excellency, in Berlin.

In the first place, your excellency, I have the strongest doubts of the man's story. The statement which he made before me, and signed, is bad enough, with a coach-and-four turning into a farm wagon, like Cinderella's coach into a pumpkin, and three people vanishing as though swallowed by the earth. But all this is perfectly reasonable and credible, beside the things he said to me, of which no record was made.

Your excellency will have noticed, in his statement, certain allusions to the Austrian surrender, and to French troops in Austria. After his statement had been taken down, I noticed these allusions, and I inquired, what surrender, and what were French troops doing in Austria. The man looked at me in a pitying manner, and said:

"News seems to travel slowly, hereabouts; peace was concluded at Vienna on the 14th of last month. And as for what French troops are doing in Austria, they're doing the same things Bonaparte's brigands are doing everywhere in Europe."

"And who is Bonaparte?" I asked.

He stared at me as though I had asked him, "Who is the Lord Jehovah?" Then, after a moment, a look of comprehension came into his face.

"So, you Prussians concede him the title of Emperor, and refer to him as Napoleon," he said. "Well, I can assure you that His Britannic Majesty's government haven't done so, and never will; not so long as one Englishman has a finger left to pull a trigger. General Bonaparte is a usurper; His Britannic Majesty's government do not recognize any sovereignty in France except the House of Bourbon." This he said very sternly, as though rebuking me.

[Illustration]

It took me a moment or so to digest that, and to appreciate all its implications. Why, this fellow evidently believed, as a matter of fact, that the French Monarchy had been overthrown by some military adventurer named Bonaparte, who was calling himself the Emperor Napoleon, and who had made war on Austria and forced a surrender. I made no attempt to argue with him--one wastes time arguing with madmen--but if this man could believe that, the transformation of a coach-and-four into a cabbage wagon was a small matter indeed. So, to humor him, I asked him if he thought General Bonaparte's agents were responsible for his trouble at the inn.

"Certainly," he replied. "The chances are they didn't know me to see me, and took Jardine for the minister, and me for the secretary, so they made off with poor Jardine. I wonder, though, that they left me my dispatch case. And that reminds me; I'll want that back. Diplomatic papers, you know."

I told him, very seriously, that we would have to check his credentials. I promised him I would make every effort to locate his secretary and his servants and his coach, took a complete description of all of them, and persuaded him to go into an upstairs room, where I kept him under guard. I did start inquiries, calling in all my informers and spies, but, as I expected, I could learn nothing. I could not find anybody, even, who had seen him anywhere in Perleburg before he appeared at the Sword & Scepter, and that rather surprised me, as somebody should have seen him enter the town, or walk along the street.

In this connection, let me remind your excellency of the discrepancy in the statements of the servant, Franz Bauer, and of the two peasants. The former is certain the man entered the inn yard from the street; the latter are just as positive that he did not. Your excellency, I do not like such puzzles, for I am sure that all three were telling the truth to the best of their knowledge. They are ignorant common folk, I admit, but they should know what they did or did not see.

After I got the prisoner into safekeeping, I fell to examining his papers, and I can assure your excellency that they gave me a shock. I had paid little heed to his ravings about the King of France being dethroned, or about this General Bonaparte who called himself the Emperor Napoleon, but I found all these things mentioned in his papers and dispatches, which had every appearance of being official documents. There was repeated mention of the taking, by the French, of Vienna, last May, and of the capitulation of the Austrian Emperor to this General Bonaparte, and of battles being fought all over Europe, and I don't know what other fantastic things. Your excellency, I have heard of all sorts of madmen--one believing himself to be the Archangel Gabriel, or Mohammed, or a werewolf, and another convinced that his bones are made of glass, or that he is pursued and tormented by devils--but so help me God, this is the first time I have heard of a madman who had documentary proof for his delusions! Does your excellency wonder, then, that I want no part of this business?

But the matter of his credentials was even worse. He had papers, sealed with the seal of the British Foreign Office, and to every appearance genuine--but they were signed, as Foreign Minister, by one George Canning, and all the world knows that Lord Castlereagh has been Foreign Minister these last five years. And to cap it all, he had a safe-conduct, sealed with the seal of the Prussian Chancellery--the very seal, for I compared it, under a strong magnifying glass, with one that I knew to be genuine, and they were identical!--and yet, this letter was signed, as Chancellor, not by Count von Berchtenwald, but by Baron Stein, the Minister of Agriculture, and the signature, as far as I could see, appeared to be genuine! This is too much for me, your excellency; I must ask to be excused from dealing with this matter, before I become as mad as my prisoner!

I made arrangements, accordingly, with Colonel Keitel, of the Third Uhlans, to furnish an officer to escort this man into Berlin. The coach in which they come belongs to this police station, and the driver is one of my men. He should be furnished expense money to get back to Perleburg. The guard is a corporal of Uhlans, the orderly of the officer. He will stay with the Herr Oberleutnant, and both of them will return here at their own convenience and expense.

I have the honor, your excellency, to be, et cetera, et cetera.

Ernst Hartenstein Staatspolizeikapitan

(From Oberleutnant Rudolf von Tarlburg, to Baron Eugen von Krutz.)

26 November, 1809

Dear Uncle Eugen;

This is in no sense a formal report; I made that at the Ministry, when I turned the Englishman and his papers over to one of your officers--a fellow with red hair and a face like a bulldog. But there are a few things which you should be told, which wouldn't look well in an official report, to let you know just what sort of a rare fish has got into your net.

I had just come in from drilling my platoon, yesterday, when Colonel Keitel's orderly told me that the colonel wanted to see me in his quarters. I found the old fellow in undress in his sitting room, smoking his big pipe.

"Come in, lieutenant; come in and sit down, my boy!" he greeted me, in that bluff, hearty manner which he always adopts with his junior officers when he has some particularly nasty job to be done. "How would you like to take a little trip in to Berlin? I have an errand, which won't take half an hour, and you can stay as long as you like, just so you're back by Thursday, when your turn comes up for road patrol."

Well, I thought, this is the bait. I waited to see what the hook would look like, saying that it was entirely agreeable with me, and asking what his errand was.

"Well, it isn't for myself, Tarlburg," he said. "It's for this fellow Hartenstein, the Staatspolizeikapitan here. He has something he wants done at the Ministry of Police, and I thought of you because I've heard you're related to the Baron von Krutz. You are, aren't you?" he asked, just as though he didn't know all about who all his officers are related to.

"That's right, colonel; the baron is my uncle," I said. "What does Hartenstein want done?"

"Why, he has a prisoner whom he wants taken to Berlin and turned over at the Ministry. All you have to do is to take him in, in a coach, and see he doesn't escape on the way, and get a receipt for him, and for some papers. This is a very important prisoner; I don't think Hartenstein has anybody he can trust to handle him. The prisoner claims to be some sort of a British diplomat, and for all Hartenstein knows, maybe he is. Also, he is a madman."

"A madman?" I echoed.

"Yes, just so. At least, that's what Hartenstein told me. I wanted to know what sort of a madman--there are various kinds of madmen, all of whom must be handled differently--but all Hartenstein would tell me was that he had unrealistic beliefs about the state of affairs in Europe."

"Ha! What diplomat hasn't?" I asked.

Old Keitel gave a laugh, somewhere between the bark of a dog and the croaking of a raven.

"Yes, exactly! The unrealistic beliefs of diplomats are what soldiers die of," he said. "I said as much to Hartenstein, but he wouldn't tell me anything more. He seemed to regret having said even that much. He looked like a man who's seen a particularly terrifying ghost." The old man puffed hard at his famous pipe for a while, blowing smoke through his mustache. "Rudi, Hartenstein has pulled a hot potato out of the ashes, this time, and he wants to toss it to your uncle, before he burns his fingers. I think that's one reason why he got me to furnish an escort for his Englishman. Now, look; you must take this unrealistic diplomat, or this undiplomatic madman, or whatever in blazes he is, in to Berlin. And understand this." He pointed his pipe at me as though it were a pistol. "Your orders are to take him there and turn him over at the Ministry of Police. Nothing has been said about whether you turn him over alive, or dead, or half one and half the other. I know nothing about this business, and want to know nothing; if Hartenstein wants us to play goal warders for him, then he must be satisfied with our way of doing it!"

Well, to cut short the story, I looked at the coach Hartenstein had placed at my disposal, and I decided to chain the left door shut on the outside, so that it couldn't be opened from within. Then, I would put my prisoner on my left, so that the only way out would be past me. I decided not to carry any weapons which he might be able to snatch from me, so I took off my saber and locked it in the seat box, along with the dispatch case containing the Englishman's papers. It was cold enough to wear a greatcoat in comfort, so I wore mine, and in the right side pocket, where my prisoner couldn't reach, I put a little leaded bludgeon, and also a brace of pocket pistols. Hartenstein was going to furnish me a guard as well as a driver, but I said that I would take a servant, who could act as guard. The servant, of course, was my orderly, old Johann; I gave him my double hunting gun to carry, with a big charge of boar shot in one barrel and an ounce ball in the other.

In addition, I armed myself with a big bottle of cognac. I thought that if I could shoot my prisoner often enough with that, he would give me no trouble.

As it happened, he didn't, and none of my precautions--except the cognac--were needed. The man didn't look like a lunatic to me. He was a rather stout gentleman, of past middle age, with a ruddy complexion and an intelligent face. The only unusual thing about him was his hat, which was a peculiar contraption, looking like a pot. I put him in the carriage, and then offered him a drink out of my bottle, taking one about half as big myself. He smacked his lips over it and said, "Well, that's real brandy; whatever we think of their detestable politics, we can't criticize the French for their liquor." Then, he said, "I'm glad they're sending me in the custody of a military gentleman, instead of a confounded gendarme. Tell me the truth, lieutenant; am I under arrest for anything?"

"Why," I said, "Captain Hartenstein should have told you about that. All I know is that I have orders to take you to the Ministry of Police, in Berlin, and not to let you escape on the way. These orders I will carry out; I hope you don't hold that against me."

He assured me that he did not, and we had another drink on it--I made sure, again, that he got twice as much as I did--and then the coachman cracked his whip and we were off for Berlin.

Now, I thought, I am going to see just what sort of a madman this is, and why Hartenstein is making a State affair out of a squabble at an inn. So I decided to explore his unrealistic beliefs about the state of affairs in Europe.

After guiding the conversation to where I wanted it, I asked him:

"What, Herr Bathurst, in your belief, is the real, underlying cause of the present tragic situation in Europe?"

That, I thought, was safe enough. Name me one year, since the days of Julius Caesar, when the situation in Europe hasn't been tragic! And it worked, to perfection.

"In my belief," says this Englishman, "the whole mess is the result of the victory of the rebellious colonists in North America, and their blasted republic."

Well, you can imagine, that gave me a start. All the world knows that the American Patriots lost their war for independence from England; that their army was shattered, that their leaders were either killed or driven into exile. How many times, when I was a little boy, did I not sit up long past my bedtime, when old Baron von Steuben was a guest at Tarlburg-Schloss, listening open-mouthed and wide-eyed to his stories of that gallant lost struggle! How I used to shiver at his tales of the terrible winter camp, or thrill at the battles, or weep as he told how he held the dying Washington in his arms, and listened to his noble last words, at the Battle of Doylestown! And here, this man was telling me that the Patriots had really won, and set up the republic for which they had fought! I had been prepared for some of what Hartenstein had called unrealistic beliefs, but nothing as fantastic as this.

"I can cut it even finer than that," Bathurst continued. "It was the defeat of Burgoyne at Saratoga. We made a good bargain when we got Benedict Arnold to turn his coat, but we didn't do it soon enough. If he hadn't been on the field that day, Burgoyne would have gone through Gates' army like a hot knife through butter."

But Arnold hadn't been at Saratoga. I know; I have read much of the American War. Arnold was shot dead on New Year's Day of 1776, during the storming of Quebec. And Burgoyne had done just as Bathurst had said; he had gone through Gates like a knife, and down the Hudson to join Howe.

"But, Herr Bathurst," I asked, "how could that affect the situation in Europe? America is thousands of miles away, across the ocean."

"Ideas can cross oceans quicker than armies. When Louis XVI decided to come to the aid of the Americans, he doomed himself and his regime. A successful resistance to royal authority in America was all the French Republicans needed to inspire them. Of course, we have Louis's own weakness to blame, too. If he'd given those rascals a whiff of grapeshot, when the mob tried to storm Versailles in 1790, there'd have been no French Revolution."

But he had. When Louis XVI ordered the howitzers turned on the mob at Versailles, and then sent the dragoons to ride down the survivors, the Republican movement had been broken. That had been when Cardinal Talleyrand, who was then merely Bishop of Autun, had came to the fore and become the power that he is today in France; the greatest King's Minister since Richelieu.

"And, after that, Louis's death followed as surely as night after day," Bathurst was saying. "And because the French had no experience in self-government, their republic was foredoomed. If Bonaparte hadn't seized power, somebody else would have; when the French murdered their king, they delivered themselves to dictatorship. And a dictator, unsupported by the prestige of royalty, has no choice but to lead his people into foreign war, to keep them from turning upon him."

It was like that all the way to Berlin. All these things seem foolish, by daylight, but as I sat in the darkness of that swaying coach, I was almost convinced of the reality of what he told me. I tell you, Uncle Eugen, it was frightening, as though he were giving me a view of Hell. Gott im Himmel, the things that man talked of! Armies swarming over Europe; sack and massacre, and cities burning; blockades, and starvation; kings deposed, and thrones tumbling like tenpins; battles in which the soldiers of every nation fought, and in which tens of thousands were mowed down like ripe grain; and, over all, the Satanic figure of a little man in a gray coat, who dictated peace to the Austrian Emperor in Schoenbrunn, and carried the Pope away a prisoner to Savona.

Madman, eh? Unrealistic beliefs, says Hartenstein? Well, give me madmen who drool spittle, and foam at the mouth, and shriek obscene blasphemies. But not this pleasant-seeming gentleman who sat beside me and talked of horrors in a quiet, cultured voice, while he drank my cognac.

But not all my cognac! If your man at the Ministry--the one with red hair and the bulldog face--tells you that I was drunk when I brought in that Englishman, you had better believe him!

Rudi.

(From Count von Berchtenwald, to the British Minister.)

28 November, 1809

Honored Sir:

The accompanying dossier will acquaint you with the problem confronting this Chancellery, without needless repetition on my part. Please to understand that it is not, and never was, any part of the intentions of the government of His Majesty Friedrich Wilhelm III to offer any injury or indignity to the government of His Britannic Majesty George III. We would never contemplate holding in arrest the person, or tampering with the papers, of an accredited envoy of your government. However, we have the gravest doubt, to make a considerable understatement, that this person who calls himself Benjamin Bathurst is any such envoy, and we do not think that it would be any service to the government of His Britannic Majesty to allow an impostor to travel about Europe in the guise of a British diplomatic representative. We certainly should not thank the government of His Britannic Majesty for failing to take steps to deal with some person who, in England, might falsely represent himself to be a Prussian diplomat.

This affair touches us as closely as it does your own government; this man had in his possession a letter of safe-conduct, which you will find in the accompanying dispatch case. It is of the regular form, as issued by this Chancellery, and is sealed with the Chancellery seal, or with a very exact counterfeit of it. However, it has been signed, as Chancellor of Prussia, with a signature indistinguishable from that of the Baron Stein, who is the present Prussian Minister of Agriculture. Baron Stein was shown the signature, with the rest of the letter covered, and without hesitation acknowledged it for his own writing. However, when the letter was uncovered and shown to him, his surprise and horror were such as would require the pen of a Goethe or a Schiller to describe, and he denied categorically ever having seen the document before.

I have no choice but to believe him. It is impossible to think that a man of Baron Stein's honorable and serious character would be party to the fabrication of a paper of this sort. Even aside from this, I am in the thing as deeply as he; if it is signed with his signature, it is also sealed with my seal, which has not been out of my personal keeping in the ten years that I have been Chancellor here. In fact, the word "impossible" can be used to describe the entire business. It was impossible for the man Benjamin Bathurst to have entered the inn yard--yet he did. It was impossible that he should carry papers of the sort found in his dispatch case, or that such papers should exist--yet I am sending them to you with this letter. It is impossible that Baron von Stein should sign a paper of the sort he did, or that it should be sealed by the Chancellery--yet it bears both Stein's signature and my seal.

You will also find in the dispatch case other credentials, ostensibly originating with the British Foreign Office, of the same character, being signed by persons having no connection with the Foreign Office, or even with the government, but being sealed with apparently authentic seals. If you send these papers to London, I fancy you will find that they will there create the same situation as that caused here by this letter of safe-conduct.

I am also sending you a charcoal sketch of the person who calls himself Benjamin Bathurst. This portrait was taken without its subject's knowledge. Baron von Krutz's nephew, Lieutenant von Tarlburg, who is the son of our mutual friend Count von Tarlburg, has a little friend, a very clever young lady who is, as you will see, an expert at this sort of work: she was introduced into a room at the Ministry of Police and placed behind a screen, where she could sketch our prisoner's face. If you should send this picture to London, I think that there is a good chance that it might be recognized. I can vouch that it is an excellent likeness.

To tell the truth, we are at our wits' end about this affair. I cannot understand how such excellent imitations of these various seals could be made, and the signature of the Baron von Stein is the most expert forgery that I have ever seen, in thirty years' experience as a statesman. This would indicate careful and painstaking work on the part of somebody; how, then, do we reconcile this with such clumsy mistakes, recognizable as such by any schoolboy, as signing the name of Baron Stein as Prussian Chancellor, or Mr. George Canning, who is a member of the opposition party and not connected with your government, as British Foreign secretary.

[Illustration: 25 NOVEMBER 1808]

These are mistakes which only a madman would make. There are those who think our prisoner is mad, because of his apparent delusions about the great conqueror, General Bonaparte, alias the Emperor Napoleon. Madmen have been known to fabricate evidence to support their delusions, it is true, but I shudder to think of a madman having at his disposal the resources to manufacture the papers you will find in this dispatch case. Moreover, some of our foremost medical men, who have specialized in the disorders of the mind, have interviewed this man Bathurst and say that, save for his fixed belief in a nonexistent situation, he is perfectly sane.

Personally, I believe that the whole thing is a gigantic hoax, perpetrated for some hidden and sinister purpose, possibly to create confusion, and to undermine the confidence existing between your government and mine, and to set against one another various persons connected with both governments, or else as a mask for some other conspiratorial activity. Only a few months ago, you will recall, there was a Jacobin plot unmasked at Köln.

But, whatever this business may portend, I do not like it. I want to get to the bottom of it as soon as possible, and I will thank you, my dear sir, and your government, for any assistance you may find possible.

I have the honor, sir, to be, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,

Berchtenwald

FROM BARON VON KRUTZ, TO THE COUNT VON BERCHTENWALD. MOST URGENT; MOST IMPORTANT. TO BE DELIVERED IMMEDIATELY AND IN PERSON REGARDLESS OF CIRCUMSTANCES.

28 November, 1809

Count von Berchtenwald:

Within the past half hour, that is, at about eleven o'clock tonight, the man calling himself Benjamin Bathurst was shot and killed by a sentry at the Ministry of Police, while attempting to escape from custody.

A sentry on duty in the rear courtyard of the Ministry observed a man attempting to leave the building in a suspicious and furtive manner. This sentry, who was under the strictest orders to allow no one to enter or leave without written authorization, challenged him; when he attempted to run, the sentry fired his musket at him, bringing him down. At the shot, the Sergeant of the Guard rushed into the courtyard with his detail, and the man whom the sentry had shot was found to be the Englishman, Benjamin Bathurst. He had been hit in the chest with an ounce ball, and died before the doctor could arrive, and without recovering consciousness.

An investigation revealed that the prisoner, who was confined on the third floor of the building, had fashioned a rope from his bedding, his bed cord, and the leather strap of his bell pull. This rope was only long enough to reach to the window of the office on the second floor, directly below, but he managed to enter this by kicking the glass out of the window. I am trying to find out how he could do this without being heard. I can assure you that somebody is going to smart for this night's work. As for the sentry, he acted within his orders; I have commended him for doing his duty, and for good shooting, and I assume full responsibility for the death of the prisoner at his hands.

I have no idea why the self-so-called Benjamin Bathurst, who, until now, was well-behaved and seemed to take his confinement philosophically, should suddenly make this rash and fatal attempt, unless it was because of those infernal dunderheads of madhouse doctors who have been bothering him. Only this afternoon they deliberately handed him a bundle of newspapers--Prussian, Austrian, French, and English--all dated within the last month. They wanted they said, to see how he would react. Well, God pardon them, they've found out!

What do you think should be done about giving the body burial?

Krutz

(From the British Minister, to the Count von Berchtenwald.)

December 20th, 1809

My dear Count von Berchtenwald:

Reply from London to my letter of the 28th, which accompanied the dispatch case and the other papers, has finally come to hand. The papers which you wanted returned--the copies of the statements taken at Perleburg, the letter to the Baron von Krutz from the police captain, Hartenstein, and the personal letter of Krutz's nephew, Lieutenant von Tarlburg, and the letter of safe-conduct found in the dispatch case--accompany herewith. I don't know what the people at Whitehall did with the other papers; tossed them into the nearest fire, for my guess. Were I in your place, that's where the papers I am returning would go.

I have heard nothing, yet, from my dispatch of the 29th concerning the death of the man who called himself Benjamin Bathurst, but I doubt very much if any official notice will ever be taken of it. Your government had a perfect right to detain the fellow, and, that being the case, he attempted to escape at his own risk. After all, sentries are not required to carry loaded muskets in order to discourage them from putting their hands in their pockets.

To hazard a purely unofficial opinion, I should not imagine that London is very much dissatisfied with this dénouement. His Majesty's government are a hard-headed and matter-of-fact set of gentry who do not relish mysteries, least of all mysteries whose solution may be more disturbing than the original problem.

This is entirely confidential, but those papers which were in that dispatch case kicked up the devil's own row in London, with half the government bigwigs protesting their innocence to high Heaven, and the rest accusing one another of complicity in the hoax. If that was somebody's intention, it was literally a howling success. For a while, it was even feared that there would be questions in Parliament, but eventually, the whole vexatious business was hushed.

You may tell Count Tarlburg's son that his little friend is a most talented young lady; her sketch was highly commended by no less an authority than Sir Thomas Lawrence, and here comes the most bedeviling part of a thoroughly bedeviled business. The picture was instantly recognized. It is a very fair likeness of Benjamin Bathurst, or, I should say, Sir Benjamin Bathurst, who is King's lieutenant governor for the Crown Colony of Georgia. As Sir Thomas Lawrence did his portrait a few years back, he is in an excellent position to criticize the work of Lieutenant von Tarlburg's young lady. However, Sir Benjamin Bathurst was known to have been in Savannah, attending to the duties of his office, and in the public eye, all the while that his double was in Prussia. Sir Benjamin does not have a twin brother. It has been suggested that this fellow might be a half-brother, but, as far as I know, there is no justification for this theory.

The General Bonaparte, alias the Emperor Napoleon, who is given so much mention in the dispatches, seems also to have a counterpart in actual life; there is, in the French army, a Colonel of Artillery by that name, a Corsican who Gallicized his original name of Napolione Buonaparte. He is a most brilliant military theoretician; I am sure some of your own officers, like General Scharnhorst, could tell you about him. His loyalty to the French monarchy has never been questioned.

This same correspondence to fact seems to crop up everywhere in that amazing collection of pseudo-dispatches and pseudo-State papers. The United States of America, you will recall, was the style by which the rebellious colonies referred to themselves, in the Declaration of Philadelphia. The James Madison who is mentioned as the current President of the United States is now living, in exile, in Switzerland. His alleged predecessor in office, Thomas Jefferson, was the author of the rebel Declaration; after the defeat of the rebels, he escaped to Havana, and died, several years ago, in the Principality of Lichtenstein.

I was quite amused to find our old friend Cardinal Talleyrand--without the ecclesiastical title--cast in the role of chief adviser to the usurper, Bonaparte. His Eminence, I have always thought, is the sort of fellow who would land on his feet on top of any heap, and who would as little scruple to be Prime Minister to His Satanic Majesty as to His Most Christian Majesty.

I was baffled, however, by one name, frequently mentioned in those fantastic papers. This was the English general, Wellington. I haven't the least idea who this person might be.

I have the honor, your excellency, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,

Sir Arthur Wellesley

THE END.

Contents

HUNTER PATROL

By H. BEAM PIPER and JOHN J. McGUIRE

Many men have dreamed of world peace, but none have been able to achieve it. If one man did have that power, could mankind afford to pay the price?

At the crest of the ridge, Benson stopped for an instant, glancing first at his wrist-watch and then back over his shoulder. It was 0539; the barrage was due in eleven minutes, at the spot where he was now standing. Behind, on the long northeast slope, he could see the columns of black oil smoke rising from what had been the Pan-Soviet advance supply dump. There was a great deal of firing going on, back there; he wondered if the Commies had managed to corner a few of his men, after the patrol had accomplished its mission and scattered, or if a couple of Communist units were shooting each other up in mutual mistaken identity. The result would be about the same in either case--reserve units would be disorganized, and some men would have been pulled back from the front line. His dozen-odd UN regulars and Turkish partisans had done their best to simulate a paratroop attack in force. At least, his job was done; now to execute that classic infantry maneuver described as, "Let's get the hell outa here." This was his last patrol before rotation home. He didn't want anything unfortunate to happen.

There was a little ravine to the left; the stream which had cut it in the steep southern slope of the ridge would be dry at this time of year, and he could make better time, and find protection in it from any chance shots when the interdictory barrage started. He hurried toward it and followed it down to the valley that would lead toward the front--the thinly-held section of the Communist lines, and the UN lines beyond, where fresh troops were waiting to jump from their holes and begin the attack.

There was something wrong about this ravine, though. At first, it was only a vague presentiment, growing stronger as he followed the dry gully down to the valley below. Something he had smelled, or heard, or seen, without conscious recognition. Then, in the dry sand where the ravine debouched into the valley, he saw faint tank-tracks--only one pair. There was something wrong about the vines that mantled one side of the ravine, too....

An instant later, he was diving to the right, breaking his fall with the butt of his auto-carbine, rolling rapidly toward the cover of a rock, and as he did so, the thinking part of his mind recognized what was wrong. The tank-tracks had ended against the vine-grown side of the ravine, what he had smelled had been lubricating oil and petrol, and the leaves on some of the vines hung upside down.

Almost at once, from behind the vines, a tank's machine guns snarled at him, clipping the place where he had been standing, then shifting to rage against the sheltering rock. With a sudden motor-roar, the muzzle of a long tank-gun pushed out through the vines, and then the low body of a tank with a red star on the turret came rumbling out of the camouflaged bay. The machine guns kept him pinned behind the rock; the tank swerved ever so slightly so that its wide left tread was aimed directly at him, then picked up speed. Aren't even going to waste a shell on me, he thought.

Futilely, he let go a clip from his carbine, trying to hit one of the vision-slits; then rolled to one side, dropped out the clip, slapped in another. There was a shimmering blue mist around him. If he only hadn't used his last grenade, back there at the supply-dump....

The strange blue mist became a flickering radiance that ran through all the colors of the spectrum and became an utter, impenetrable blackness....

* * * * *

There were voices in the blackness, and a softness under him, but under his back, when he had been lying on his stomach, as though he were now on a comfortable bed. They got me alive, he thought; now comes the brainwashing!

He cracked one eye open imperceptibly. Lights, white and glaring, from a ceiling far above; walls as white as the lights. Without moving his head, he opened both eyes and shifted them from right to left. Vaguely, he could see people and, behind them, machines so simply designed that their functions were unguessable. He sat up and looked around groggily. The people, their costumes--definitely not Pan-Soviet uniforms--and the room and its machines, told him nothing. The hardness under his right hip was a welcome surprise; they hadn't taken his pistol from him! Feigning even more puzzlement and weakness, he clutched his knees with his elbows and leaned his head forward on them, trying to collect his thoughts.

"We shall have to give up, Gregory," a voice trembled with disappointment.

"Why, Anthony?" The new voice was deeper, more aggressive.

"Look. Another typical reaction; retreat to the foetus."

Footsteps approached. Another voice, discouragement heavily weighting each syllable: "You're right. He's like all the others. We'll have to send him back."

"And look for no more?" The voice he recognized as Anthony faltered between question and statement.

A babel of voices, in dispute; then, clearly, the voice Benson had come to label as Gregory, cut in:

"I will never give up!"

He raised his head; there was something in the timbre of that voice reminding him of his own feelings in the dark days when the UN had everywhere been reeling back under the Pan-Soviet hammer-blows.

"Anthony!" Gregory's voice again; Benson saw the speaker; short, stocky, gray-haired, stubborn lines about the mouth. The face of a man chasing an illusive but not uncapturable dream.

"That means nothing." A tall thin man, too lean for the tunic-like garment he wore, was shaking his head.

Deliberately, trying to remember his college courses in psychology, he forced himself to accept, and to assess, what he saw as reality. He was on a small table, like an operating table; the whole place looked like a medical lab or a clinic. He was still in uniform; his boots had soiled the white sheets with the dust of Armenia. He had all his equipment, including his pistol and combat-knife; his carbine was gone, however. He could feel the weight of his helmet on his head. The room still rocked and swayed a little, but the faces of the people were coming into focus.

* * * * *

He counted them, saying each number to himself: one, two, three, four, five men; one woman. He swung his feet over the edge of the table, being careful that it would be between him and the others when he rose, and began inching his right hand toward his right hip, using his left hand, on his brow, to misdirect attention.

"I would classify his actions as arising from conscious effort at cortico-thalamic integration," the woman said, like an archaeologist who has just found a K-ration tin at the bottom of a neolithic kitchen-midden. She had the peculiarly young-old look of the spinster teachers with whom Benson had worked before going to the war.

"I want to believe it, but I'm afraid to," another man for whom Benson had no name-association said. He was portly, gray-haired, arrogant-faced; he wore a short black jacket with a jewelled zipper-pull, and striped trousers.

Benson cleared his throat. "Just who are you people?" he inquired. "And just where am I?"

Anthony grabbed Gregory's hand and pumped it frantically.

"I've dreamed of the day when I could say this!" he cried. "Congratulations, Gregory!"

* * * * *

That touched off another bedlam, of joy, this time, instead of despair. Benson hid his amusement at the facility with which all of them were discovering in one another the courage, vision and stamina of true patriots and pioneers. He let it go on for a few moments, hoping to glean some clue. Finally, he interrupted.

"I believe I asked a couple of questions," he said, using the voice he reserved for sergeants and second lieutenants. "I hate to break up this mutual admiration session, but I would appreciate some answers. This isn't anything like the situation I last remember...."

"He remembers!" Gregory exclaimed. "That confirms your first derivation by symbolic logic, and it strengthens the validity of the second...."

The schoolteacherish woman began jabbering excitedly; she ran through about a paragraph of what was pure gobbledegook to Benson, before the man with the arrogant face and the jewelled zipper-pull broke in on her.

"Save that for later, Paula," he barked. "I'd be very much interested in your theories about why memories are unimpaired when you time-jump forward and lost when you reverse the process, but let's stick to business. We have what we wanted; now let's use what we have."

"I never liked the way you made your money," a dark-faced, cadaverous man said, "but when you talk, it makes sense. Let's get on with it."

Benson used the brief silence which followed to study the six. With the exception of the two who had just spoken, there was the indefinable mark of the fanatic upon all of them--people fanatical about different things, united for different reasons in a single purpose. It reminded him sharply of some teachers' committee about to beard a school-board with an unpopular and expensive recommendation.

Anthony--the oldest of the lot, in a knee-length tunic--turned to Gregory.

"I believe you had better...." he began.

"As to who we are, we'll explain that, partially, later. As for your question, 'Where am I?' that will have to be rephrased. If you ask, 'When and where am I?' I can furnish a rational answer. In the temporal dimension, you are fifty years futureward of the day of your death; spatially, you are about eight thousand miles from the place of your death, in what is now the World Capitol, St. Louis."

Nothing in the answer made sense but the name of the city. Benson chuckled.

"What happened; the Cardinals conquer the world? I knew they had a good team, but I didn't think it was that good."

"No, no," Gregory told him earnestly. "The government isn't a theocracy. At least not yet. But if The Guide keeps on insisting that only beautiful things are good and that he is uniquely qualified to define beauty, watch his rule change into just that."

"I've been detecting symptoms of religious paranoia, messianic delusions, about his public statements...." the woman began.

"Idolatry!" another member of the group, who wore a black coat fastened to the neck, and white neck-bands, rasped. "Idolatry in deed, as well as in spirit!"

* * * * *

The sense of unreality, partially dispelled, began to return. Benson dropped to the floor and stood beside the table, getting a cigarette out of his pocket and lighting it.

"I made a joke," he said, putting his lighter away. "The fact that none of you got it has done more to prove that I am fifty years in the future than anything any of you could say." He went on to explain who the St. Louis Cardinals were.

"Yes; I remember! Baseball!" Anthony exclaimed. "There is no baseball, now. The Guide will not allow competitive sports; he says that they foster the spirit of violence...."

The cadaverous man in the blue jacket turned to the man in the black garment of similar cut.

"You probably know more history than any of us," he said, getting a cigar out of his pocket and lighting it. He lighted it by rubbing the end on the sole of his shoe. "Suppose you tell him what the score is." He turned to Benson. "You can rely on his dates and happenings; his interpretation's strictly capitalist, of course," he said.

Black-jacket shook his head. "You first, Gregory," he said. "Tell him how he got here, and then I'll tell him why."

"I believe," Gregory began, "that in your period, fiction writers made some use of the subject of time-travel. It was not, however, given serious consideration, largely because of certain alleged paradoxes involved, and because of an elementalistic and objectifying attitude toward the whole subject of time. I won't go into the mathematics and symbolic logic involved, but we have disposed of the objections; more, we have succeeded in constructing a time-machine, if you want to call it that. We prefer to call it a temporal-spatial displacement field generator."

"It's really very simple," the woman called Paula interrupted. "If the universe is expanding, time is a widening spiral; if contracting, a diminishing spiral; if static, a uniform spiral. The possibility of pulsation was our only worry...."

"That's no worry," Gregory reproved her. "I showed you that the rate was too slow to have an effect on...."

"Oh, nonsense; you can measure something which exists within a microsecond, but where is the instrument to measure a temporal pulsation that may require years...? You haven't come to that yet."

"Be quiet, both of you!" the man with the black coat and the white bands commanded. "While you argue about vanities, thousands are being converted to the godlessness of The Guide, and other thousands of his dupes are dying, unprepared to face their Maker!"

"All right, you invented a time-machine," Benson said. "In civvies, I was only a high school chemistry teacher. I can tell a class of juniors the difference between H^{2}O and H^{2}SO^{4}, but the theory of time-travel is wasted on me.... Suppose you just let me ask the questions; then I'll be sure of finding out what I don't know. For instance, who won the war I was fighting in, before you grabbed me and brought me here? The Commies?"

"No, the United Nations," Anthony told him. "At least, they were the least exhausted when both sides decided to quit."

"Then what's this dictatorship.... The Guide? Extreme Rightist?"

"Walter, you'd better tell him," Gregory said.

* * * * *

"We damn near lost the war," the man in the black jacket and striped trousers said, "but for once, we won the peace. The Soviet Bloc was broken up--India, China, Indonesia, Mongolia, Russia, the Ukraine, all the Satellite States. Most of them turned into little dictatorships, like the Latin American countries after the liberation from Spain, but they were personal, non-ideological, generally benevolent, dictatorships, the kind that can grow into democracies, if they're given time."

"Capitalistic dictatorships, he means," the cadaverous man in the blue jacket explained.

"Be quiet, Carl," Anthony told him. "Let's not confuse this with any class-struggle stuff."

"Actually, the United Nations rules the world," Walter continued. "What goes on in the Ukraine or Latvia or Manchuria is about analogous to what went on under the old United States government in, let's say, Tammany-ruled New York. But here's the catch. The UN is ruled absolutely by one man."

"How could that happen? In my time, the UN had its functions so subdivided and compartmented that it couldn't even run a war properly. Our army commanders were making war by systematic disobedience."

"The charter was changed shortly after ... er, that is, after...." Walter was fumbling for words.

"After my death." Benson finished politely. "Go on. Even with a changed charter, how did one man get all the powers into his hands?"

"By sorcery!" black-coat-and-white-bands fairly shouted. "By the help of his master, Satan!"

"You know, there are times when some such theory tempts me," Paula said.

"He was a big moneybags," Carl said. "He bribed his way in. See, New York was bombed flat. Where the old UN buildings were, it's still hot. So The Guide donated a big tract of land outside St. Louis, built these buildings--we're in the basement of one of them, right now, if you want a good laugh--and before long, he had the whole organization eating out of his hand. They just voted him into power, and the world into slavery."

Benson looked around at the others, who were nodding in varying degrees of agreement.

"Substantially, that's it. He managed to convince everybody of his altruism, integrity and wisdom," Walter said. "It was almost blasphemous to say anything against him. I really don't understand how it happened...."

"Well, what's he been doing with his power?" Benson asked. "Wise things, or stupid ones?"

"I could be general, and say that he has deprived all of us of our political and other liberties. It is best to be specific," Anthony said. "Gregory?"

"My own field--dimensional physics--hasn't been interfered with much, yet. It's different in other fields. For instance, all research in sonics has been arbitrarily stopped. So has a great deal of work in organic and synthetic chemistry. Psychology is a madhouse of ... what was the old word, licentiousness? No, lysenkoism. Medicine and surgery--well, there's a huge program of compulsory sterilization, and another one of eugenic marriage-control. And infants who don't conform to certain physical standards don't survive. Neither do people who have disfiguring accidents beyond the power of plastic surgery."

* * * * *

Paula spoke next. "My field is child welfare. Well, I'm going to show you an audio-visual of an interesting ceremony in a Hindu village, derived from the ancient custom of the suttee. It is the Hindu method of conforming to The Guide's demand that only beautiful children be allowed to grow to maturity."

The film was mercifully brief. Even in spite of the drums and gongs, and the chanting of the crowd, Benson found out how loudly a newborn infant can scream in a fire. The others looked as though they were going to be sick; he doubted if he looked much better.

"Of course, we are a more practical and mechanical-minded people, here and in Europe," Paula added, holding down her gorge by main strength. "We have lethal-gas chambers that even Hitler would have envied."

"I am a musician," Anthony said. "A composer. If Gregory thinks that the sciences are controlled, he should try to write even the simplest piece of music. The extent of censorship and control over all the arts, and especially music, is incredible." He coughed slightly. "And I have another motive, a more selfish one. I am approaching the compulsory retirement age; I will soon be invited to go to one of the Havens. Even though these Havens are located in the most barren places, they are beauty-spots, verdant beyond belief. It is of only passing interest that, while large numbers of the aged go there yearly, their populations remain constant, and, to judge from the quantities of supplies shipped to them, extremely small."

* * * * *

"They call me Samuel, in this organization," the man in the long black coat said. "Whoever gave me that alias must have chosen it because I am here in an effort to live up to it. Although I am ordained by no church, I fight for all of them. The plain fact is that this man we call The Guide is really the Antichrist!"

"Well, I haven't quite so lofty a motive, but it's good enough to make me willing to finance this project," Walter said. "It's very simple. The Guide won't let people make money, and if they do, he taxes it away from them. And he has laws to prohibit inheritance; what little you can accumulate, you can't pass on to your children."

"I put up a lot of the money, too, don't forget," Carl told him. "Or the Union did; I'm a poor man, myself." He was smoking an excellent cigar, for a poor man, and his clothes could have come from the same tailor as Walter's. "Look, we got a real Union--the Union of all unions. Every working man in North America, Europe, Australia and South Africa belongs to it. And The Guide has us all hog-tied."

"He won't let you strike," Benson chuckled.

"That's right. And what can we do? Why, we can't even make our closed-shop contracts stick. And as far as getting anything like a pay-raise...."

"Good thing. Another pay-raise in some of my companies would bankrupt them, the way The Guide has us under his thumb...." Walter began, but he was cut off.

"Well! It seems as though this Guide has done some good, if he's made you two realize that you're both on the same side, and that what hurts one hurts both," Benson said. "When I shipped out for Turkey in '77, neither Labor nor Management had learned that." He looked from one to another of them. "The Guide must have a really good bodyguard, with all the enemies he's made."

Gregory shook his head. "He lives virtually alone, in a very small house on the UN Capitol grounds. In fact, except for a small police-force, armed only with non-lethal stun-guns, your profession of arms is non-existent."

* * * * *

"I've been guessing what you want me to do," Benson said. "You want this Guide bumped off. But why can't any of you do it? Or, if it's too risky, at least somebody from your own time? Why me?"

"We can't. Everybody in the world today is conditioned against violence, especially the taking of human life," Anthony told him.

"Now, wait a moment!" This time, he was using the voice he would have employed in chiding a couple of Anatolian peasant partisans who were field-stripping a machine gun the wrong way. "Those babies in that film you showed me weren't dying of old age...."

"That is not violence," Paula said bitterly. "That is humane beneficence. Ugly people would be unhappy, and would make others unhappy, in a world where everybody else is beautiful."

"And all these oppressive and tyrannical laws," Benson continued. "How does he enforce them, without violence, actual or threatened?"

Samuel started to say something about the Power of the Evil One; Paula, ignoring him, said:

"I really don't know; he just does it. Mass hypnotism of some sort. I know music has something to do with it, because there is always music, everywhere. This laboratory, for instance, was secretly soundproofed; we couldn't have worked here, otherwise."

"All right. I can see that you'd need somebody from the past, preferably a soldier, whose conditioning has been in favor rather than against violence. I'm not the only one you snatched, I take it?"

"No. We've been using that machine to pick up men from battlefields all over the world and all over history," Gregory said. "Until now, none of them could adjust.... Uggh!" He shuddered, looking even sicker than when the film was being shown.

"He's thinking," Walter said, "about a French officer from Waterloo who blew out his brains with a pocket-pistol on that table, and an English archer from Agincourt who ran amok with a dagger in here, and a trooper of the Seventh Cavalry from the Custer Massacre."

Gregory managed to overcome his revulsion. "You see, we were forced to take our subjects largely at random with regard to individual characteristics, mental attitudes, adaptability, et cetera." As long as he stuck to high order abstractions, he could control himself. "Aside from their professional lack of repugnance for violence, we took soldiers from battlefields because we could select men facing immediate death, whose removal from the past would not have any effect upon the casual chain of events affecting the present."

A warning buzzer rasped in Benson's brain. He nodded, poker-faced.

"I can see that," he agreed. "You wouldn't dare do anything to change the past. That was always one of the favorite paradoxes in time-travel fiction.... Well, I think I have the general picture. You have a dictator who is tyrannizing you; you want to get rid of him; you can't kill him yourselves. I'm opposed to dictators, myself; that--and the Selective Service law, of course--was why I was a soldier. I have no moral or psychological taboos against killing dictators, or anybody else. Suppose I cooperate with you; what's in it for me?"

There was a long silence. Walter and Carl looked at one another inquiringly; the others dithered helplessly. It was Carl who answered.

"Your return to your own time and place."

"And if I don't cooperate with you?"

"Guess when and where else we could send you," Walter said.

Benson dropped his cigarette and tramped it.

"Exactly the same time and place?" he asked.

"Well, the structure of space-time demands...." Paula began.

"The spatio-temporal displacement field is capable of identifying that spot--" Gregory pointed to a ten-foot circle in front of a bank of sleek-cabineted, dial-studded machines "--with any set of space-time coordinates in the universe. However, to avoid disruption of the structure of space-time, we must return you to approximately the same point in space-time."

Benson nodded again, this time at the confirmation of his earlier suspicion. Well, while he was alive, he still had a chance.

"All right; tell me exactly what you want me to do."

* * * * *

A third outbreak of bedlam, this time of relief and frantic explanation.

"Shut up, all of you!" For so thin a man, Carl had an astonishing voice. "I worked this out, so let me tell it." He turned to Benson. "Maybe I'm tougher than the rest of them, or maybe I'm not as deeply conditioned. For one thing, I'm tone-deaf. Well, here's the way it is. Gregory can set the machine to function automatically. You stand where he shows you, press the button he shows you, and fifteen seconds later it'll take you forward in time five seconds and about a kilometer in space, to The Guide's office. He'll be at his desk now. You'll have forty-five seconds to do the job, from the time the field collapses around you till it rebuilds. Then you'll be taken back to your own time again. The whole thing's automatic."

"Can do," Benson agreed. "How do I kill him?"

"I'm getting sick!" Paula murmured weakly. Her face was whiter than her gown.

"Take care of her, Samuel. Both of you'd better get out of here," Gregory said.

"The Lord of Hosts is my strength, He will.... Uggggh!" Samuel gasped.

"Conditioning's getting him, too; we gotta be quick," Carl said. "Here. This is what you'll use." He handed Benson a two-inch globe of black plastic. "Take the damn thing, quick! Little button on the side; press it, and get it out of your hand fast...." He retched. "Limited-effect bomb; everything within two-meter circle burned to nothing; outside that, great but not unendurable heat. Shut your eyes when you throw it. Flash almost blinding." He dropped his cigar and turned almost green in the face. Walter had a drink poured and handed it to him. "Uggh! Thanks, Walter." He downed it.

"Peculiar sort of thing for a non-violent people to manufacture," Benson said, looking at the bomb and then putting it in his jacket pocket.

"It isn't a weapon. Industrial; we use it in mining. I used plenty of them, in Walter's iron mines."

He nodded again. "Where do I stand, now?" he asked.

"Right over here." Gregory placed him in front of a small panel with three buttons. "Press the middle one, and step back into the small red circle and stand perfectly still while the field builds up and collapses. Face that way."

* * * * *

Benson drew his pistol and checked it; magazine full, a round in the chamber, safety on.

"Put that horrid thing out of sight!" Anthony gasped. "The ... the other thing ... is what you want to use."

"The bomb won't be any good if some of his guards come in before the field re-builds," Benson said.

"He has no guards. He lives absolutely alone. We told you...."

"I know you did. You probably believed it, too. I don't. And by the way, you're sending me forward. What do you do about the fact that a time-jump seems to make me pass out?"

"Here. Before you press the button, swallow it." Gregory gave him a small blue pill.

"Well, I guess that's all there is," Gregory continued. "I hope...." His face twitched, and he dropped to the floor with a thud. Carl and Walter came forward, dragged him away from the machine.

"Conditioning got him. Getting me, too," Walter said. "Hurry up, man!"

Benson swallowed the pill, pressed the button and stepped back into the red circle, drawing his pistol and snapping off the safety. The blue mist closed in on him.

* * * * *

This time, however, it did not thicken into blackness. It became luminous, brightening to a dazzle and dimming again to a colored mist, and then it cleared, while Benson stood at raise pistol, as though on a target range. He was facing a big desk at twenty feet, across a thick-piled blue rug. There was a man seated at the desk, a white-haired man with a mustache and a small beard, who wore a loose coat of some glossy plum-brown fabric, and a vividly blue neck-scarf.

The pistol centered on the v-shaped blue under his chin. Deliberately, Benson squeezed, recovered from the recoil, aimed, fired, recovered, aimed, fired. Five seconds gone. The old man slumped across the desk, his arms extended. Better make a good job of it, six, seven, eight seconds; he stepped forward to the edge of the desk, call that fifteen seconds, and put the muzzle to the top of the man's head, firing again and snapping on the safety. There had been something familiar about The Guide's face, but it was too late to check on that, now. There wasn't any face left; not even much head.

A box, on the desk, caught Benson's eye, a cardboard box with an envelope, stamped Top Secret! For the Guide Only! taped to it. He holstered his pistol and caught that up, stuffing it into his pocket, in obedience to an instinct to grab anything that looked like intelligence matter while in the enemy's country. Then he stepped back to the spot where the field had deposited him. He had ten seconds to spare; somebody was banging on a door when the blue mist began to gather around him.

* * * * *

He was crouching, the spherical plastic object in his right hand, his thumb over the button, when the field collapsed. Sure enough, right in front of him, so close that he could smell the very heat of it, was the big tank with the red star on its turret. He cursed the sextet of sanctimonious double-crossers eight thousand miles and fifty years away in space-time. The machine guns had stopped--probably because they couldn't be depressed far enough to aim at him, now; that was a notorious fault of some of the newer Pan-Soviet tanks--and he rocked back on his heels, pressed the button, and heaved, closing his eyes. As the thing left his fingers, he knew that he had thrown too hard. His muscles, accustomed to the heavier cast-iron grenades of his experience, had betrayed him. For a moment, he was closer to despair than at any other time in the whole phantasmagoric adventure. Then he was hit, with physical violence, by a wave of almost solid heat. It didn't smell like the heat of the tank's engines; it smelled like molten metal, with undertones of burned flesh. Immediately, there was a multiple explosion that threw him flat, as the tank's ammunition went up. There were no screams. It was too fast for that. He opened his eyes.

The turret and top armor of the tank had vanished. The two massive treads had been toppled over, one to either side. The body had collapsed between them, and it was running sticky trickles of molten metal. He blinked, rubbed his eyes on the back of his hand, and looked again. Of all the many blasted and burned-out tanks, Soviet and UN, that he had seen, this was the most completely wrecked thing in his experience. And he'd done that with one grenade....

* * * * *

At that moment, there was a sudden rushing overhead, and an instant later the barrage began falling beyond the crest of the ridge. He looked at his watch, blinked, and looked again. That barrage was due at 0550; according to the watch, it was 0726. He was sure that, ten minutes ago, when he had looked at it, up there at the head of the ravine, it had been twenty minutes to six. He puzzled about that for a moment, and decided that he must have caught the stem on something and pulled it out, and then twisted it a little, setting the watch ahead. Then, somehow, the stem had gotten pushed back in, starting it at the new setting. That was a pretty far-fetched explanation, but it was the only one he could think of.

But about this tank, now. He was positive that he could remember throwing a grenade.... Yet he'd used his last grenade back there at the supply dump. He saw his carbine, and picked it up. That silly blackout he'd had, for a second, there; he must have dropped it. Action was open, empty magazine on the ground where he'd dropped it. He wondered, stupidly, if one of his bullets couldn't have gone down the muzzle of the tank's gun and exploded the shell in the chamber.... Oh, the hell with it! The tank might have been hit by a premature shot from the barrage which was raging against the far slope of the ridge. He reset his watch by guess and looked down the valley. The big attack would be starting any minute, now, and there would be fleeing Commies coming up the valley ahead of the UN advance. He'd better get himself placed before they started coming in on him.

He stopped thinking about the mystery of the blown-up tank, a solution to which seemed to dance maddeningly just out of his mental reach, and found himself a place among the rocks to wait. Down the valley he could hear everything from pistols to mortars going off, and shouting in three or four racial intonations. After a while, fugitive Communists began coming, many of them without their equipment, stumbling in their haste and looking back over their shoulders. Most of them avoided the mouth of the ravine and hurried by to the left or right, but one little clump, eight or ten, came up the dry stream-bed, and stopped a hundred and fifty yards from his hiding-place to make a stand. They were Hindus, with outsize helmets over their turbans. Two of them came ahead, carrying a machine gun, followed by a third with a flame-thrower; the others retreated more slowly, firing their rifles to delay pursuit.

* * * * *

Cuddling the stock of his carbine to his cheek, he divided a ten-shot burst between the two machine-gunners, then, as a matter of principle, he shot the man with the flame-thrower. He had a dislike for flame-throwers; he killed every enemy he found with one. The others dropped their rifles and raised their hands, screaming: "Hey, Joe! Hey, Joe! You no shoot, me no shoot!"

A dozen men in UN battledress came up and took them prisoner. Benson shouted to them, and then rose and came down to join them. They were British--Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders, advertising the fact by inconspicuous bits of tartan on their uniforms. The subaltern in command looked at him and nodded.

"Captain Benson? We were warned to be on watch for your patrol," he said. "Any of the rest of you lads get out?"

Benson shrugged. "We split up after the attack. You may run into a couple of them. Some are locals and don't speak very good English. I've got to get back to Division, myself; what's the best way?"

"Down that way. You'll overtake a couple of our walking wounded. If you don't mind going slowly, they'll show you the way to advance dressing station, and you can hitch a ride on an ambulance from there."

Benson nodded. Off on the left, there was a flurry of small-arms fire, ending in yells of "Hey, Joe! Hey, Joe!"--the World War IV version of "Kamarad"!

* * * * *

His company was a non-T/O outfit; he came directly under Division command and didn't have to bother reporting to any regimental or brigade commanders. He walked for an hour with half a dozen lightly wounded Scots, rode for another hour on a big cat-truck loaded with casualties of six regiments and four races, and finally reached Division Rear, where both the Division and Corps commanders took time to compliment him on the part his last hunter patrol had played in the now complete breakthrough. His replacement, an equine-faced Spaniard with an imposing display of fruit-salad, was there, too; he solemnly took off the bracelet a refugee Caucasian goldsmith had made for his predecessor's predecessor and gave it to the new commander of what had formerly been Benson's Butchers. As he had expected, there was also another medal waiting for him.

A medical check at Task Force Center got him a warning; his last patrol had brought him dangerously close to the edge of combat fatigue. Remembering the incidents of the tank and the unaccountably fast watch, and the mysterious box and envelope which he had found in his coat pocket, he agreed, saying nothing about the questions that were puzzling him. The Psychological Department was never too busy to refuse another case; they hunted patients gleefully, each psych-shark seeking in every one proof of his own particular theories. It was with relief that he watched them fill out the red tag which gave him a priority on jet transports for home.

Ankara to Alexandria, Alexandria to Dakar, Dakar to Belm, Belm to the shattered skyline of New York, the "hurry-and-wait" procedures at Fort Carlisle, and, after the usual separation promotion, Major Fred Benson, late of Benson's Butchers, was back at teaching high school juniors the difference between H^{2}O and H^{2}SO^{4}.

* * * * *

There were two high schools in the city: McKinley High, on the east side, and Dwight Eisenhower High, on the west. A few blocks from McKinley was the Tulip Tavern, where the Eisenhower teachers came in the late afternoons; the McKinley faculty crossed town to do their after-school drinking on the west side. When Benson entered the Tulip Tavern, on a warm September afternoon, he found Bill Myers, the school psychologist, at one of the tables, smoking his pipe, checking over a stack of aptitude test forms, and drinking beer. He got a highball at the bar and carried it over to Bill's table.

"Oh, hi, Fred." The psychologist separated the finished from the unfinished work with a sheet of yellow paper and crammed the whole business into his brief case. "I was hoping somebody'd show up...."

Benson lit a cigarette, sipped his highball. They talked at random--school-talk; the progress of the war, now in its twelfth year; personal reminiscences, of the Turkish Theater where Benson had served, and the Madras Beachhead, where Myers had been.

"Bring home any souvenirs?" Myers asked.

"Not much. Couple of pistols, couple of knives, some pictures. I don't remember what all; haven't gotten around to unpacking them, yet.... I have a sixth of rye and some beer, at my rooms. Let's go around and see what I did bring home."

They finished their drinks and went out.

"What the devil's that?" Myers said, pointing to the cardboard box with the envelope taped to it, when Benson lifted it out of the gray-green locker.

"Bill, I don't know," Benson said. "I found it in the pocket of my coat, on my way back from my last hunter patrol.... I've never told anybody about this, before."

"That's the damnedest story I've ever heard, and in my racket you hear some honeys," Myers said, when he had finished. "You couldn't have picked that thing up in some other way, deliberately forgotten the circumstances, and fabricated this story about the tank and the grenade and the discrepancy in your watch subconsciously as an explanation?"

"My subconscious is a better liar than that," Benson replied. "It would have cobbled up some kind of a story that would stand up. This business...."

"Top Secret! For the Guide Only!" Myers frowned. "That isn't one of our marks, and if it were Soviet, it'd be tri-lingual, Russian, Hindi and Chinese."

"Well, let's see what's in it. I want this thing cleared up. I've been having some of the nastiest dreams, lately...."

"Well, be careful; it may be booby-trapped," Myers said urgently.

"Don't worry; I will."

He used a knife to slice the envelope open without untaping it from the box, and exposed five sheets of typewritten onion-skin paper. There was no letterhead, no salutation or address-line. Just a mass of chemical formulae, and a concise report on tests. It seemed to be a report on an improved syrup for a carbonated soft-drink. There were a few cryptic cautionary references to heightened physico-psychological effects.

The box was opened with the same caution, but it proved as innocent of dangers as the envelope. It contained only a half-liter bottle, wax-sealed, containing a dark reddish-brown syrup.

"There's a lot of this stuff I don't dig," Benson said, tapping the sheets of onion-skin. "I don't even scratch the surface of this rigamarole about The Guide. I'm going to get to work on this sample in the lab, at school, though. Maybe we have something, here."

* * * * *

At eight-thirty the next evening, after four and a half hours work, he stopped to check what he had found out.

The school's X-ray, an excellent one, had given him a complete picture of the molecular structure of the syrup. There were a couple of long-chain molecules that he could only believe after two re-examinations and a careful check of the machine, but with the help of the notes he could deduce how they had been put together. They would be the Ingredient Alpha and Ingredient Beta referred to in the notes.

The components of the syrup were all simple and easily procurable with these two exceptions, as were the basic components from which these were made.

The mechanical guinea-pig demonstrated that the syrup contained nothing harmful to human tissue.

Of course, there were the warnings about heightened psycho-physiological effects....

He stuck a poison-label on the bottle, locked it up, and went home. The next day, he and Bill Myers got a bottle of carbonated water and mixed themselves a couple of drinks of it. It was delicious--sweet, dry, tart, sour, all of these in alternating waves of pleasure.

"We do have something, Bill," he said. "We have something that's going to give our income-tax experts headaches."

"You have," Myers corrected. "Where do you start fitting me into it?"

"We're a good team, Bill. I'm a chemist, but I don't know a thing about people. You're a psychologist. A real one; not one of these night-school boys. A juvenile psychologist, too. And what age-group spends the most money in this country for soft-drinks?"

Knowing the names of the syrup's ingredients, and what their molecular structure was like, was only the beginning. Gallon after gallon of the School Board's chemicals went down the laboratory sink; Fred Benson and Bill Myers almost lived in the fourth floor lab. Once or twice there were head-shaking warnings from the principal about the dangers of over-work. The watchmen, at all hours, would hear the occasional twanging of Benson's guitar in the laboratory, and know that he had come to a dead end on something and was trying to think. Football season came and went; basketball season; the inevitable riot between McKinley and Eisenhower rooters; the Spring concerts. The term-end exams were only a month away when Benson and Myers finally did it, and stood solemnly, each with a beaker in either hand and took alternate sips of the original and the drink mixed from the syrup they had made.

"Not a bit of difference, Fred," Myers said. "We have it!"

Benson picked up the guitar and began plunking on it.

"Hey!" Myers exclaimed. "Have you been finding time to take lessons on that thing? I never heard you play as well as that!"

* * * * *

They decided to go into business in St. Louis. It was centrally located, and, being behind more concentric circles of radar and counter-rocket defenses, it was in better shape than any other city in the country and most likely to stay that way. Getting started wasn't hard; the first banker who tasted the new drink-named Evri-Flave, at Myers' suggestion--couldn't dig up the necessary money fast enough. Evri-Flave hit the market with a bang and became an instant success; soon the rainbow-tinted vending machines were everywhere, dispensing the slender, slightly flattened bottles and devouring quarters voraciously. In spite of high taxes and the difficulties of doing business in a consumers' economy upon which a war-time economy had been superimposed, both Myers and Benson were rapidly becoming wealthy. The gregarious Myers installed himself in a luxurious apartment in the city; Benson bought a large tract of land down the river toward Carondelet and started building a home and landscaping the grounds.

The dreams began bothering him again, now that the urgency of getting Evri-Flave, Inc., started had eased. They were not dreams of the men he had killed in battle, or, except for one about a huge, hot-smelling tank with a red star on the turret, about the war. Generally, they were about a strange, beautiful, office-room, in which a young man in uniform killed an older man in a plum-brown coat and a vivid blue neck-scarf. Sometimes Benson identified himself with the killer; sometimes with the old man who was killed.

He talked to Myers about these dreams, but beyond generalities about delayed effects of combat fatigue and vague advice to relax, the psychologist, now head of Sales & Promotion of Evri-Flave, Inc., could give him no help.

The war ended three years after the new company was launched. There was a momentary faltering of the economy, and then the work of reconstruction was crying hungrily for all the labor and capital that had been idled by the end of destruction, and more. There was a new flood-tide of prosperity, and Evri-Flave rode the crest. The estate at Carondelet was finished--a beautiful place, surrounded with gardens, fragrant with flowers, full of the songs of birds and soft music from concealed record-players. It made him forget the ugliness of the war, and kept the dreams from returning so frequently. All the world ought to be like that, he thought; beautiful and quiet and peaceful. People surrounded with such beauty couldn't think about war.

All the world could be like that, if only....

* * * * *

The UN chose St. Louis for its new headquarters--many of its offices had been moved there after the second and most destructive bombing of New York--and when the city by the Mississippi began growing into a real World Capital, the flow of money into it almost squared overnight. Benson began to take an active part in politics in the new World Sovereignty party. He did not, however, allow his political activities to distract him from the work of expanding the company to which he owed his wealth and position. There were always things to worry about.

"I don't know," Myers said to him, one evening, as they sat over a bottle of rye in the psychologist's apartment. "I could make almost as much money practicing as a psychiatrist, these days. The whole world seems to be going pure, unadulterated nuts! That affair in Munich, for instance."

"Yes." Benson grimaced as he thought of the affair in Munich--a Wagnerian concert which had terminated in an insane orgy of mass suicide. "Just a week after we started our free-sample campaign in South Germany, too...."

He stopped short, downing his drink and coughing over it.

"Bill! You remember those sheets of onion-skin in that envelope?"

"The foundation of our fortunes; I wonder where you really did get that.... Fred!" His eyes widened in horror. "That caution about 'heightened psycho-physiological effects,' that we were never able to understand!"

Benson nodded grimly. "And think of all the crazy cases of mass-hysteria--that baseball-game riot in Baltimore; the time everybody started tearing off each others' clothes in Milwaukee; the sex-orgy in New Orleans. And the sharp uptrend in individual psycho-neurotic and psychotic behavior. All in connection with music, too, and all after Evri-Flave got on the market."

"We'll have to stop it; pull Evri-Flave off the market," Myers said. "We can't be responsible for letting this go on."

"We can't stop, either. There's at least a two months' supply out in the hands of jobbers and distributors over whom we have no control. And we have all these contractual obligations, to buy the entire output of the companies that make the syrup for us; if we stop buying, they can sell it in competition with us, as long as they don't infringe our trade-name. And we can't prevent pirating. You know how easily we were able to duplicate that sample I brought back from Turkey. Why, our legal department's kept busy all the time prosecuting unlicensed manufacturers as it is."

"We've got to do something, Fred!" There was almost a whiff of hysteria in Myers' voice.

"We will. We'll start, first thing tomorrow, on a series of tests--just you and I, like the old times at Eisenhower High. First, we want to be sure that Evri-Flave really is responsible. It'd be a hell of a thing if we started a public panic against our own product for nothing. And then...."

* * * * *

It took just two weeks, in a soundproofed and guarded laboratory on Benson's Carondelet estate, to convict their delicious drink of responsibility for that Munich State Opera House Horror and everything else. Reports from confidential investigators in Munich confirmed this. It had, of course, been impossible to interview the two thousand men and women who had turned the Opera House into a pyre for their own immolation, but none of the tiny minority who had kept their sanity and saved their lives had tasted Evri-Flave.

* * * * *

It took another month to find out exactly how the stuff affected the human nervous system, and they almost wrecked their own nervous systems in the process. The real villain, they discovered, was the incredible-looking long-chain compound alluded to in the original notes as Ingredient Beta; its principal physiological effect was to greatly increase the sensitivity of the aural nerves. Not only was the hearing range widened--after consuming thirty CC of Beta, they could hear the sound of an ultrasonic dog-whistle quite plainly--but the very quality of all audible sounds was curiously enhanced and altered. Myers, the psychologist, who was also well grounded in neurology, explained how the chemical produced this effect; it meant about as much to Benson as some of his chemistry did to Bill Myers. There was also a secondary, purely psychological, effect. Certain musical chords had definite effects on the emotions of the hearer, and the subject, beside being directly influenced by the music, was rendered extremely open to verbal suggestions accompanied by a suitable musical background.

Benson transferred the final results of this stage of the research to the black notebook and burned the scratch-sheets.

"That's how it happened, then," he said. "The Munich thing was the result of all that Götterdämmerung music. There was a band at the baseball park in Baltimore. The New Orleans Orgy started while a local radio station was broadcasting some of this new dance-music. Look, these tone-clusters, here, have a definite sex-excitation effect. This series of six chords, which occur in some of the Wagnerian stuff; effect, a combined feeling of godlike isolation and despair. And these consecutive fifths--a sense of danger, anger, combativeness. You know, we could work out a whole range of emotional stimuli to fit the effects of Ingredient Beta...."

"We don't want to," Myers said. "We want to work out a substitute for Beta that will keep the flavor of the drink without the psycho-physiological effects."

"Yes, sure. I have some of the boys at the plant lab working on that. Gave them a lot of syrup without Beta, and told them to work out cheap additives to restore the regular Evri-Flave taste; told them it was an effort to find a cheap substitute for an expensive ingredient. But look, Bill. You and I both see, for instance, that a powerful world-wide supra-national sovereignty is the only guarantee of world peace. If we could use something like this to help overcome antiquated verbal prejudices and nationalistic emotional attachments...."

"No!" Myers said. "I won't ever consent to anything like that, Fred! Not even in a cause like world peace; use a thing like this for a good, almost holy, cause now, and tomorrow we, or those who would come after us, would be using it to create a tyranny. You know what year this is, Bill?"

"Why, 1984," Benson said.

"Yes. You remember that old political novel of Orwell's, written about forty years ago? Well, that's a picture of the kind of world you'd have, eventually, no matter what kind of a world you started out to make. Fred, don't ever think of using this stuff for a purpose like that. If you try it, I'll fight you with every resource I have."

There was a fanatical, almost murderous, look in Bill Myers' eyes. Benson put the notebook in his pocket, then laughed and threw up his hands.

"Hey, Joe! Hey, Joe!" he cried. "You're right, of course, Bill. We can't even trust the UN with a thing like this. It makes the H-bomb look like a stone hatchet.... Well, I'll call Grant, at the plant lab, and see how his boys are coming along with the substitute; as soon as we get it, we can put out a confidential letter to all our distributors and syrup-manufacturers...."

* * * * *

He walked alone in the garden at Carondelet, watching the color fade out of the sky and the twilight seep in among the clipped yews. All the world could be like this garden, a place of peace and beauty and quiet, if only.... All the world would be a beautiful and peaceful garden, in his own lifetime! He had the means of making it so!

Three weeks later, he murdered his friend and partner, Bill Myers. It was a suicide; nobody but Fred Benson knew that he had taken fifty CC of pure Ingredient Beta in a couple of cocktails while listening to the queer phonograph record that he had played half an hour before blowing his brains out.

The decision had cost Benson a battle with his conscience from which he had emerged the sole survivor. The conscience was buried along with Bill Myers, and all that remained was a purpose.

Evri-Flave stayed on the market unaltered. The night before the national election, the World Sovereignty party distributed thousands of gallons of Evri-Flave; their speakers, on every radio and television network, were backgrounded by soft music. The next day, when the vote was counted, it was found that the American Nationalists had carried a few backwoods precincts in the Rockies and the Southern Appalachians and one county in Alaska, where there had been no distribution of Evri-Flave.

The dreams came back more often, now that Bill Myers was gone. Benson was only beginning to realize what a large fact in his life the companionship of the young psychologist had been. Well, a world of peace and beauty was an omelet worth the breaking of many eggs....

He purchased another great tract of land near the city, and donated it to the UN for their new headquarters buildings; the same architects and landscapists who had created the estate at Carondelet were put to work on it. In the middle of what was to become World City, they erected a small home for Fred Benson. Benson was often invited to address the delegates to the UN; always, there was soft piped-in music behind his words. He saw to it that Evri-Flave was available free to all UN personnel. The Senate of the United States elected him as perpetual U. S. delegate-in-chief to the UN; not long after, the Security Council elected him their perpetual chairman.

In keeping with his new dignities, and to ameliorate his youthful appearance, he grew a mustache and, eventually, a small beard. The black notebook in which he kept the records of his experiments was always with him; page after page was filled with notes. Experiments in sonics, like the one which had produced the ultrasonic stun-gun which rendered lethal weapons unnecessary for police and defense purposes, or the new musical combinations with which he was able to play upon every emotion and instinct.

But he still dreamed, the same recurring dream of the young soldier and the old man in the office. By now, he was consistently identifying himself with the latter. He took to carrying one of the thick-barrelled stun-pistols always, now. Alone, he practiced constantly with it, drawing, breaking soap-bubbles with the concentrated sound-waves it projected. It was silly, perhaps, but it helped him in his dreams. Now, the old man with whom he identified himself would draw a stun-pistol, occasionally, to defend himself.

The years drained one by one through the hour-glass of Time. Year after year, the world grew more peaceful, more beautiful. There were no more incidents like the mass-suicide of Munich or the mass-perversions of New Orleans; the playing and even the composing of music was strictly controlled--no dangerous notes or chords could be played in a world drenched with Ingredient Beta. Steadily the idea grew that peace and beauty were supremely good, that violence and ugliness were supremely evil. Even competitive sports which simulated violence; even children born ugly and misshapen....

* * * * *

He finished the breakfast which he had prepared for himself--he trusted no food that another had touched--and knotted the vivid blue scarf about his neck before slipping into the loose coat of glossy plum-brown, then checked the stun-pistol and pocketed the black notebook, its plastileather cover glossy from long use. He stood in front of the mirror, brushing his beard, now snow-white. Two years, now, and he would be eighty--had he been anyone but The Guide, he would have long ago retired to the absolute peace and repose of one of the Elders' Havens. Peace and repose, however, were not for The Guide; it would take another twenty years to finish his task of remaking the world, and he would need every day of it that his medical staff could borrow or steal for him. He made an eye-baffling practice draw with the stun-pistol, then holstered it and started down the spiral stairway to the office below.

There was the usual mass of papers on his desk. A corps of secretaries had screened out everything but what required his own personal and immediate attention, but the business of guiding a world could only be reduced to a certain point. On top was the digest of the world's news for the past twenty-four hours, and below that was the agenda for the afternoon's meeting of the Council. He laid both in front of him, reading over the former and occasionally making a note on the latter. Once his glance strayed to the cardboard box in front of him, with the envelope taped to it--the latest improvement on the Evri-Flave syrup, with the report from his own chemists, all conditioned to obedience, loyalty and secrecy. If they thought he was going to try that damned stuff on himself....

There was a sudden gleam of light in the middle of the room, in front of his desk. No, a mist, through which a blue light seemed to shine. The stun-pistol was in his hand--his instinctive reaction to anything unusual--and pointed into the shining mist when it vanished and a man appeared in front of him; a man in the baggy green combat-uniform that he himself had worn fifty years before; a man with a heavy automatic pistol in his hand. The gun was pointed directly at him.

* * * * *

The Guide aimed quickly and pressed the trigger of the ultrasonic stunner. The pistol dropped soundlessly on the thick-piled rug; the man in uniform slumped in an inert heap. The Guide sprang to his feet and rounded the desk, crossing to and bending over the intruder. Why, this was the dream that had plagued him through the years. But it was ending differently. The young man--his face was startlingly familiar, somehow--was not killing the old man. Those years of practice with the stun-pistol....

He stooped and picked the automatic up. The young man was unconscious, and The Guide had his pistol, now. He slipped the automatic into his pocket and straightened beside his inert would-be slayer.

A shimmering globe of blue mist appeared around them, brightened to a dazzle, and dimmed again to a colored mist before it vanished, and when it cleared away, he was standing beside the man in uniform, in the sandy bed of a dry stream at the mouth of a little ravine, and directly in front of him, looming above him, was a thing that had not been seen in the world for close to half a century--a big, hot-smelling tank with a red star on its turret.

He might have screamed--the din of its treads and engines deafened him--and, in panic, he turned and ran, his old legs racing, his old heart pumping madly. The noise of the tank increased as machine guns joined the uproar. He felt the first bullet strike him, just above the hips--no pain; just a tremendous impact. He might have felt the second bullet, too, as the ground tilted and rushed up at his face. Then he was diving into a tunnel of blackness that had no end....

* * * * *

Captain Fred Benson, of Benson's Butchers, had been jerked back into consciousness when the field began to build around him. He was struggling to rise, fumbling the grenade out of his pocket, when it collapsed. Sure enough, right in front of him, so close that he could smell the very heat of it, was the big tank with the red star on its turret. He cursed the sextet of sanctimonious double-crossers eight thousand miles and fifty years away in space-time. The machine guns had stopped--probably because they couldn't be depressed far enough to aim at him, now; that was a notorious fault of some of the newer Pan-Soviet tanks. He had the bomb out of his pocket, when the machine guns began firing again, this time at something on his left. Wondering what had created the diversion, he rocked back on his heels, pressed the button, and heaved, closing his eyes. As the thing left his fingers, he knew that he had thrown too hard. His muscles, accustomed to the heavier cast-iron grenades, had betrayed him. For a moment, he was closer to despair than at any other time in the whole phantasmagoric adventure. Then he was hit, with physical force, by a wave of almost solid heat. It didn't smell like the heat of the tank's engines; it smelled like molten metal, with undertones of burned flesh. Immediately, there was a multiple explosion that threw him flat, as the tank's ammunition went up. There were no screams. It was too fast for that. He opened his eyes.

Remembering the curious manner in which, at the last, the tank had begun firing at something to the side, he looked around, to see the crumpled body in the pale violet-gray trousers and the plum-brown coat. Finding his carbine and reloading it, he went over to the dead man, turning the body over. He was an old man, with a white mustache and a small white beard--why, if the mustache were smaller and there were no beard, he would pass for Benson's own father, who had died in 1962. The clothes weren't Turkish or Armenian or Persian, or anything one would expect in this country.

The old man had a pistol in his coat pocket, and Benson pulled it out and looked at it, then did a double-take and grabbed for his own holster, to find it empty. The pistol was his own 9.5 Colt automatic. He looked at the dead man, with the white beard and the vivid blue neck-scarf, and he was sure that he had never seen him before. He'd had that pistol when he'd come down the ravine....

There was another pistol under the dead man's coat, in a shoulder-holster; a queer thing with a thick round barrel, like an old percussion pepper-box, and a diaphragm instead of a muzzle. Probably projected ultrasonic waves. He holstered his own Colt and pocketed the unknown weapon. There was a black plastileather-bound notebook. It was full of notes. Chemical formulae, yes, and some stuff on sonics; that tied in with the queer pistol. He pocketed that. He'd look both over, when he had time and privacy, two scarce commodities in the Army....

* * * * *

At that moment, there was a sudden rushing overhead, and an instant later, the barrage began falling beyond the crest of the ridge. He looked at his watch, blinked, and looked again. That barrage was due at 0550; according to his watch, it was 0726. That was another mystery, to go with the question of who the dead man was, where he had come from, and how he'd gotten hold of Benson's pistol. Yes, and how that tank had gotten blown up. Benson was sure he had used his last grenade back at the supply-dump.

The hell with it; he'd worry about all that later. The attack was due any minute, now, and there would be fleeing Commies coming up the valley ahead, of the UN advance. He'd better get himself placed before they started coming in on him.

He stopped thinking about the multiple mystery, a solution to which seemed to dance maddeningly just out of his mental reach, and found himself a place among the rocks to wait, and while he waited, he looked over the plastileather-bound notebook. In civil life, he had been a high school chemistry teacher, but the stuff in this book was utterly new to him. Some of it he could understand readily enough; the rest of it he could dig out for himself. Stuff about some kind of a carbonated soft-drink, and about a couple of unbelievable-looking long-chain molecules....

After a while, fugitive Communists began coming up the valley to make their stand.

Benson put away the notebook, picked up his carbine, and cuddled the stock to his cheek....

THE END

Contents

GUN FOR HIRE

By MACK REYNOLDS

A gun is an interesting weapon; it can be hired, of course, and naturally doesn't care who hires it. Something much the same can be said of the gunman, too....

Joe Prantera called softly, "Al." The pleasurable, comfortable, warm feeling began spreading over him, the way it always did.

The older man stopped and squinted, but not suspiciously, even now.

The evening was dark, it was unlikely that the other even saw the circle of steel that was the mouth of the shotgun barrel, now resting on the car's window ledge.

"Who's it?" he growled.

Joe Prantera said softly, "Big Louis sent me, Al."

And he pressed the trigger.

And at that moment, the universe caved inward upon Joseph Marie Prantera.

There was nausea and nausea upon nausea.

There was a falling through all space and through all time. There was doubling and twisting and twitching of every muscle and nerve.

There was pain, horror and tumultuous fear.

And he came out of it as quickly and completely as he'd gone in.

He was in, he thought, a hospital and his first reaction was to think, This here California. Everything different. Then his second thought was Something went wrong. Big Louis, he ain't going to like this.

[Illustration]

He brought his thinking to the present. So far as he could remember, he hadn't completely pulled the trigger. That at least meant that whatever the rap was it wouldn't be too tough. With luck, the syndicate would get him off with a couple of years at Quentin.

A door slid open in the wall in a way that Joe had never seen a door operate before. This here California.

The clothes on the newcomer were wrong, too. For the first time, Joe Prantera began to sense an alienness--a something that was awfully wrong.

The other spoke precisely and slowly, the way a highly educated man speaks a language which he reads and writes fluently but has little occasion to practice vocally. "You have recovered?"

Joe Prantera looked at the other expressionlessly. Maybe the old duck was one of these foreign doctors, like.

The newcomer said, "You have undoubtedly been through a most harrowing experience. If you have any untoward symptoms, possibly I could be of assistance."

Joe couldn't figure out how he stood. For one thing, there should have been some kind of police guard.

The other said, "Perhaps a bit of stimulant?"

Joe said flatly, "I wanta lawyer."

The newcomer frowned at him. "A lawyer?"

"I'm not sayin' nothin'. Not until I get a mouthpiece."

The newcomer started off on another tack. "My name is Lawrence Reston-Farrell. If I am not mistaken, you are Joseph Salviati-Prantera."

Salviati happened to be Joe's mother's maiden name. But it was unlikely this character could have known that. Joe had been born in Naples and his mother had died in childbirth. His father hadn't brought him to the States until the age of five and by that time he had a stepmother.

"I wanta mouthpiece," Joe said flatly, "or let me outta here."

Lawrence Reston-Farrell said, "You are not being constrained. There are clothes for you in the closet there."

Joe gingerly tried swinging his feet to the floor and sitting up, while the other stood watching him, strangely. He came to his feet. With the exception of a faint nausea, which brought back memories of that extreme condition he'd suffered during ... during what? He hadn't the vaguest idea of what had happened.

He was dressed in a hospital-type nightgown. He looked down at it and snorted and made his way over to the closet. It opened on his approach, the door sliding back into the wall in much the same manner as the room's door had opened for Reston-Farrell.

Joe Prantera scowled and said, "These ain't my clothes."

"No, I am afraid not."

"You think I'd be seen dead wearing this stuff? What is this, some religious crackpot hospital?"

Reston-Farrell said, "I am afraid, Mr. Salviati-Prantera, that these are the only garments available. I suggest you look out the window there."

Joe gave him a long, chill look and then stepped to the window. He couldn't figure the other. Unless he was a fruitcake. Maybe he was in some kind of pressure cooker and this was one of the fruitcakes.

He looked out, however, not on the lawns and walks of a sanitarium but upon a wide boulevard of what was obviously a populous city.

And for a moment again, Joe Prantera felt the depths of nausea.

This was not his world.

He stared for a long, long moment. The cars didn't even have wheels, he noted dully. He turned slowly and faced the older man.

Reston-Farrell said compassionately, "Try this, it's excellent cognac."

Joe Prantera stared at him, said finally, flatly, "What's it all about?"

The other put down the unaccepted glass. "We were afraid first realization would be a shock to you," he said. "My colleague is in the adjoining room. We will be glad to explain to you if you will join us there."

"I wanta get out of here," Joe said.

"Where would you go?"

The fear of police, of Al Rossi's vengeance, of the measures that might be taken by Big Louis on his failure, were now far away.

Reston-Farrell had approached the door by which he had entered and it reopened for him. He went through it without looking back.

There was nothing else to do. Joe dressed, then followed him.

* * * * *

In the adjoining room was a circular table that would have accommodated a dozen persons. Two were seated there now, papers, books and soiled coffee cups before them. There had evidently been a long wait.

Reston-Farrell, the one Joe had already met, was tall and drawn of face and with a chainsmoker's nervousness. The other was heavier and more at ease. They were both, Joe estimated, somewhere in their middle fifties. They both looked like docs. He wondered, all over again, if this was some kind of pressure cooker.

But that didn't explain the view from the window.

Reston-Farrell said, "May I present my colleague, Citizen Warren Brett-James? Warren, this is our guest from ... from yesteryear, Mr. Joseph Salviati-Prantera."

Brett-James nodded to him, friendly, so far as Joe could see. He said gently, "I think it would be Mr. Joseph Prantera, wouldn't it? The maternal linage was almost universally ignored." His voice too gave the impression he was speaking a language not usually on his tongue.

Joe took an empty chair, hardly bothering to note its alien qualities. His body seemed to fit into the piece of furniture, as though it had been molded to his order.

Joe said, "I think maybe I'll take that there drink, Doc."

Reston-Farrell said, "Of course," and then something else Joe didn't get. Whatever the something else was, a slot opened in the middle of the table and a glass, so clear of texture as to be all but invisible, was elevated. It contained possibly three ounces of golden fluid.

Joe didn't allow himself to think of its means of delivery. He took up the drink and bolted it. He put the glass down and said carefully, "What's it all about, huh?"

Warren Brett-James said soothingly, "Prepare yourself for somewhat of a shock, Mr. Prantera. You are no longer in Los Angeles--"

"Ya think I'm stupid? I can see that."

"I was about to say, Los Angeles of 1960. Mr. Prantera, we welcome you to Nuevo Los Angeles."

"Ta where?"

"To Nuevo Los Angeles and to the year--" Brett-James looked at his companion. "What is the date, Old Calendar?"

"2133," Reston-Farrell said. "2133 A.D. they would say."

Joe Prantera looked from one of them to the other, scowling. "What are you guys talking about?"

Warren Brett-James said softly, "Mr. Prantera, you are no longer in the year 1960, you are now in the year 2133."

He said, uncomprehendingly, "You mean I been, like, unconscious for--" He let the sentence fall away as he realized the impossibility.

Brett-James said gently, "Hardly for one hundred and seventy years, Mr. Prantera."

Reston-Farrell said, "I am afraid we are confusing you. Briefly, we have transported you, I suppose one might say, from your own era to ours."

Joe Prantera had never been exposed to the concept of time travel. He had simply never associated with anyone who had ever even remotely considered such an idea. Now he said, "You mean, like, I been asleep all that time?"

"Not exactly," Brett-James said, frowning.

Reston-Farrell said, "Suffice to say, you are now one hundred and seventy-three years after the last memory you have."

Joe Prantera's mind suddenly reverted to those last memories and his eyes narrowed dangerously. He felt suddenly at bay. He said, "Maybe you guys better let me in on what's this all about."

Reston-Farrell said, "Mr. Prantera, we have brought you from your era to perform a task for us."

Joe stared at him, and then at the other. He couldn't believe he was getting through to them. Or, at least, that they were to him.

Finally he said, "If I get this, you want me to do a job for you."

"That is correct."

Joe said, "You guys know the kind of jobs I do?"

"That is correct."

"Like hell you do. You think I'm stupid? I never even seen you before." Joe Prantera came abruptly to his feet. "I'm gettin' outta here."

For the second time, Reston-Farrell said, "Where would you go, Mr. Prantera?"

Joe glared at him. Then sat down again, as abruptly as he'd arisen.

* * * * *

"Let's start all over again. I got this straight, you brought me, some screwy way, all the way ... here. O.K., I'll buy that. I seen what it looks like out that window--" The real comprehension was seeping through to him even as he talked. "Everybody I know, Jessie, Tony, the Kid, Big Louis, everybody, they're dead. Even Big Louis."

"Yes," Brett-James said, his voice soft. "They are all dead, Mr. Prantera. Their children are all dead, and their grandchildren."

The two men of the future said nothing more for long minutes while Joe Prantera's mind whirled its confusion.

Finally he said, "What's this bit about you wanting me to give it to some guy."

"That is why we brought you here, Mr. Prantera. You were ... you are, a professional assassin."

"Hey, wait a minute, now."

Reston-Farrell went on, ignoring the interruption. "There is small point in denying your calling. Pray remember that at the point when we ... transported you, you were about to dispose of a contemporary named Alphonso Annunziata-Rossi. A citizen, I might say, whose demise would probably have caused small dismay to society."

They had him pegged all right. Joe said, "But why me? Why don't you get some heavy from now? Somebody knows the ropes these days."

Brett-James said, "Mr. Prantera, there are no professional assassins in this age, nor have there been for over a century and a half."

"Well, then do it yourself." Joe Prantera's irritation over this whole complicated mess was growing. And already he was beginning to long for the things he knew--for Jessie and Tony and the others, for his favorite bar, for the lasagne down at Papa Giovanni's. Right now he could have welcomed a calling down at the hands of Big Louis.

Reston-Farrell had come to his feet and walked to one of the large room's windows. He looked out, as though unseeing. Then, his back turned, he said, "We have tried, but it is simply not in us, Mr. Prantera."

"You mean you're yella?"

"No, if by that you mean afraid. It is simply not within us to take the life of a fellow creature--not to speak of a fellow man."

Joe snapped: "Everything you guys say sounds crazy. Let's start all over again."

Brett-James said, "Let me do it, Lawrence." He turned his eyes to Joe. "Mr. Prantera, in your own era, did you ever consider the future?"

Joe looked at him blankly.

"In your day you were confronted with national and international, problems. Just as we are today and just as nations were a century or a millennium ago."

"Sure, O.K., so we had problems. I know whatcha mean--like wars, and depressions and dictators and like that."

"Yes, like that," Brett-James nodded.

The heavy-set man paused a moment. "Yes, like that," he repeated. "That we confront you now indicates that the problems of your day were solved. Hadn't they been, the world most surely would have destroyed itself. Wars? Our pedagogues are hard put to convince their students that such ever existed. More than a century and a half ago our society eliminated the reasons for international conflict. For that matter," he added musingly, "we eliminated most international boundaries. Depressions? Shortly after your own period, man awoke to the fact that he had achieved to the point where it was possible to produce an abundance for all with a minimum of toil. Overnight, for all practical purposes, the whole world was industrialized, automated. The second industrial revolution was accompanied by revolutionary changes in almost every field, certainly in every science. Dictators? Your ancestors found, Mr. Prantera, that it is difficult for a man to be free so long as others are still enslaved. Today the democratic ethic has reached a pinnacle never dreamed of in your own era."

"O.K., O.K.," Joe Prantera growled. "So everybody's got it made. What I wanta know is what's all this about me giving it ta somebody? If everything's so great, how come you want me to knock this guy off?"

Reston-Farrell bent forward and thumped his right index finger twice on the table. "The bacterium of hate--a new strain--has found the human race unprotected from its disease. We had thought our vaccines immunized us."

"What's that suppose to mean?"

Brett-James took up the ball again. "Mr. Prantera, have you ever heard of Ghengis Khan, of Tamerlane, Alexander, Caesar?"

Joe Prantera scowled at him emptily.

"Or, more likely, of Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin?"

"Sure I heard of Hitler and Stalin," Joe growled. "I ain't stupid."

The other nodded. "Such men are unique. They have a drive ... a drive to power which exceeds by far the ambitions of the average man. They are genii in their way, Mr. Prantera, genii of evil. Such a genius of evil has appeared on the current scene."

"Now we're getting somewheres," Joe snorted. "So you got a guy what's a little ambitious, like, eh? And you guys ain't got the guts to give it to him. O.K. What's in it for me?"

The two of them frowned, exchanged glances. Reston-Farrell said, "You know, that is one aspect we had not considered."

Brett-James said to Joe Prantera, "Had we not, ah, taken you at the time we did, do you realize what would have happened?"

"Sure," Joe grunted. "I woulda let old Al Rossi have it right in the guts, five times. Then I woulda took the plane back to Chi."

Brett-James was shaking his head. "No. You see, by coincidence, a police squad car was coming down the street just at that moment to arrest Mr. Rossi. You would have been apprehended. As I understand Californian law of the period, your life would have been forfeit, Mr. Prantera."

Joe winced. It didn't occur to him to doubt their word.

Reston-Farrell said, "As to reward, Mr. Prantera, we have already told you there is ultra-abundance in this age. Once this task has been performed, we will sponsor your entry into present day society. Competent psychiatric therapy will soon remove your present--"

"Waita minute, now. You figure on gettin' me candled by some head shrinker, eh? No thanks, Buster. I'm going back to my own--"

Brett-James was shaking his head again. "I am afraid there is no return, Mr. Prantera. Time travel works but in one direction, with the flow of the time stream. There can be no return to your own era."

Joe Prantera had been rocking with the mental blows he had been assimilating, but this was the final haymaker. He was stuck in this squaresville of a world.

* * * * *

Joe Prantera on a job was thorough.

Careful, painstaking, competent.

He spent the first three days of his life in the year 2133 getting the feel of things. Brett-James and Reston-Farrell had been appointed to work with him. Joe didn't meet any of the others who belonged to the group which had taken the measures to bring him from the past. He didn't want to meet them. The fewer persons involved, the better.

He stayed in the apartment of Reston-Farrell. Joe had been right, Reston-Farrell was a medical doctor. Brett-James evidently had something to do with the process that had enabled them to bring Joe from the past. Joe didn't know how they'd done it, and he didn't care. Joe was a realist. He was here. The thing was to adapt.

There didn't seem to be any hurry. Once the deal was made, they left it up to him to make the decisions.

They drove him around the town, when he wished to check the traffic arteries. They flew him about the whole vicinity. From the air, Southern California looked much the same as it had in his own time. Oceans, mountains, and to a lesser extent, deserts, are fairly permanent even against man's corroding efforts.

It was while he was flying with Brett-James on the second day that Joe said, "How about Mexico? Could I make the get to Mexico?"

The physicist looked at him questioningly. "Get?" he said.

Joe Prantera said impatiently, "The getaway. After I give it to this Howard Temple-Tracy guy, I gotta go on the run, don't I?"

"I see." Brett-James cleared his throat. "Mexico is no longer a separate nation, Mr. Prantera. All North America has been united into one unit. Today, there are only eight nations in the world."

"Where's the nearest?"

"South America."

"That's a helluva long way to go on a get."

"We hadn't thought of the matter being handled in that manner."

Joe eyed him in scorn. "Oh, you didn't, huh? What happens after I give it to this guy? I just sit around and wait for the cops to put the arm on me?"

Brett-James grimaced in amusement. "Mr. Prantera, this will probably be difficult for you to comprehend, but there are no police in this era."

Joe gaped at him. "No police! What happens if you gotta throw some guy in stir?"

"If I understand your idiom correctly, you mean prison. There are no prisons in this era, Mr. Prantera."

Joe stared. "No cops, no jails. What stops anybody? What stops anybody from just going into some bank, like, and collecting up all the bread?"

Brett-James cleared his throat. "Mr. Prantera, there are no banks."

"No banks! You gotta have banks!"

"And no money to put in them. We found it a rather antiquated method of distribution well over a century ago."

Joe had given up. Now he merely stared.

Brett-James said reasonably, "We found we were devoting as much time to financial matters in all their endless ramifications--including bank robberies--as we were to productive efforts. So we turned to more efficient methods of distribution."

* * * * *

On the fourth day, Joe said, "O.K., let's get down to facts. Summa the things you guys say don't stick together so good. Now, first place, where's this guy Temple-Tracy you want knocked off?"

Reston-Farrell and Brett-James were both present. The three of them sat in the living room of the latter's apartment, sipping a sparkling wine which seemed to be the prevailing beverage of the day. For Joe's taste it was insipid stuff. Happily, rye was available to those who wanted it.

Reston-Farrell said, "You mean, where does he reside? Why, here in this city."

"Well, that's handy, eh?" Joe scratched himself thoughtfully. "You got somebody can finger him for me?"

"Finger him?"

"Look, before I can give it to this guy I gotta know some place where he'll be at some time. Get it? Like Al Rossi. My finger, he works in Rossi's house, see? He lets me know every Wednesday night, eight o'clock, Al leaves the house all by hisself. O.K., so I can make plans, like, to give it to him." Joe Prantera wound it up reasonably. "You gotta have a finger."

Brett-James said, "Why not just go to Temple-Tracy's apartment and, ah, dispose of him?"

"Jest walk in, eh? You think I'm stupid? How do I know how many witnesses hangin' around? How do I know if the guy's carryin' heat?"

"Heat?"

"A gun, a gun. Ya think I'm stupid? I come to give it to him and he gives it to me instead."

Dr. Reston-Farrell said, "Howard Temple-Tracy lives alone. He customarily receives visitors every afternoon, largely potential followers. He is attempting to recruit members to an organization he is forming. It would be quite simple for you to enter his establishment and dispose of him. I assure you, he does not possess weapons."

Joe was indignant. "Just like that, eh?" he said sarcastically. "Then what happens? How do I get out of the building? Where's my get car parked? Where do I hide out? Where do I dump the heat?"

"Dump the heat?"

"Get rid of the gun. You want I should get caught with the gun on me? I'd wind up in the gas chamber so quick--"

"See here, Mr. Prantera," Brett-James said softly. "We no longer have capital punishment, you must realize."

"O.K. I still don't wanta get caught. What is the rap these days, huh?" Joe scowled. "You said they didn't have no jails any more."

"This is difficult for you to understand, I imagine," Reston-Farrell told him, "but, you see, we no longer punish people in this era."

That took a long, unbelieving moment to sink in. "You mean, like, no matter what they do? That's crazy. Everybody'd be running around giving it to everybody else."

"The motivation for crime has been removed, Mr. Prantera," Reston-Farrell attempted to explain. "A person who commits a violence against another is obviously in need of medical care. And, consequently, receives it."

"You mean, like, if I steal a car or something, they just take me to a doctor?" Joe Prantera was unbelieving.

"Why would anybody wish to steal a car?" Reston-Farrell said easily.

"But if I give it to somebody?"

"You will be turned over to a medical institution. Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy is the last man you will ever kill, Mr. Prantera."

A chillness was in the belly of Joe Prantera. He said very slowly, very dangerously, "You guys figure on me getting caught, don't you?"

"Yes," Brett-James said evenly.

"Well then, figure something else. You think I'm stupid?"

"Mr. Prantera," Dr. Reston-Farrell said, "there has been as much progress in the field of psychiatry in the past two centuries as there has in any other. Your treatment would be brief and painless, believe me."

Joe said coldly, "And what happens to you guys? How do you know I won't rat on you?"

Brett-James said gently, "The moment after you have accomplished your mission, we plan to turn ourselves over to the nearest institution to have determined whether or not we also need therapy."

"Now I'm beginning to wonder about you guys," Joe said. "Look, all over again, what'd'ya wanta give it to this guy for?"

The doctor said, "We explained the other day, Mr. Prantera. Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy is a dangerous, atavistic, evil genius. We are afraid for our institutions if his plans are allowed to mature."

"Well if you got things so good, everybody's got it made, like, who'd listen to him?"

The doctor nodded at the validity of the question. "Mr. Prantera, Homo sapiens is a unique animal. Physically he matures at approximately the age of thirteen. However, mental maturity and adjustment is often not fully realized until thirty or even more. Indeed, it is sometimes never achieved. Before such maturity is reached, our youth are susceptible to romantic appeal. Nationalism, chauvinism, racism, the supposed glory of the military, all seem romantic to the immature. They rebel at the orderliness of present society. They seek entertainment in excitement. Citizen Temple-Tracy is aware of this and finds his recruits among the young."

"O.K., so this guy is dangerous. You want him knocked off before he screws everything up. But the way things are, there's no way of making a get. So you'll have to get some other patsy. Not me."

"I am afraid you have no alternative," Brett-James said gently. "Without us, what will you do? Mr. Prantera, you do not even speak the language."

"What'd'ya mean? I don't understand summa the big words you eggheads use, but I get by O.K."

Brett-James said, "Amer-English is no longer the language spoken by the man in the street, Mr. Prantera. Only students of such subjects any longer speak such tongues as Amer-English, French, Russian or the many others that once confused the race with their limitations as a means of communication."

"You mean there's no place in the whole world where they talk American?" Joe demanded, aghast.

* * * * *

Dr. Reston-Farrell controlled the car. Joe Prantera sat in the seat next to him and Warren Brett-James sat in the back. Joe had, tucked in his belt, a .45 caliber automatic, once displayed in a museum. It had been more easily procured than the ammunition to fit it, but that problem too had been solved.

The others were nervous, obviously repelled by the very conception of what they had planned.

Inwardly, Joe was amused. Now that they had got in the clutch, the others were on the verge of chickening out. He knew it wouldn't have taken much for them to cancel the project. It wasn't any answer though. If they allowed him to call it off today, they'd talk themselves into it again before the week was through.

Besides, already Joe was beginning to feel the comfortable, pleasurable, warm feeling that came to him on occasions like this.

He said, "You're sure this guy talks American, eh?"

Warren Brett-James said, "Quite sure. He is a student of history."

"And he won't think it's funny I talk American to him, eh?"

"He'll undoubtedly be intrigued."

They pulled up before a large apartment building that overlooked the area once known as Wilmington.

Joe was coolly efficient now. He pulled out the automatic, held it down below his knees and threw a shell into the barrel. He eased the hammer down, thumbed on the safety, stuck the weapon back in his belt and beneath the jacketlike garment he wore.

He said, "O.K. See you guys later." He left them and entered the building.

An elevator--he still wasn't used to their speed in this era--whooshed him to the penthouse duplex occupied by Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy.

There were two persons in the reception room but they left on Joe's arrival, without bothering to look at him more than glancingly.

He spotted the screen immediately and went over and stood before it.

The screen lit and revealed a heavy-set, dour of countenance man seated at a desk. He looked into Joe Prantera's face, scowled and said something.

Joe said, "Joseph Salviati-Prantera to interview Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy."

The other's shaggy eyebrows rose. "Indeed," he said. "In Amer-English?"

Joe nodded.

"Enter," the other said.

A door had slid open on the other side of the room. Joe walked through it and into what was obviously an office. Citizen Temple-Tracy sat at a desk. There was only one other chair in the room. Joe Prantera ignored it and remained standing.

Citizen Temple-Tracy said, "What can I do for you?"

Joe looked at him for a long, long moment. Then he reached down to his belt and brought forth the .45 automatic. He moistened his lips.

Joe said softly, "You know what this here is?"

Temple-Tracy stared at the weapon. "It's a handgun, circa, I would say, about 1925 Old Calendar. What in the world are you doing with it?"

Joe said, very slowly, "Chief, in the line you're in these days you needa heavy around with wunna these. Otherwise, Chief, you're gunna wind up in some gutter with a lotta holes in you. What I'm doin', I'm askin' for a job. You need a good man knows how to handle wunna these, Chief."

Citizen Howard Temple-Tracy eyed him appraisingly. "Perhaps," he said, "you are right at that. In the near future, I may well need an assistant knowledgeable in the field of violence. Tell me more about yourself. You surprise me considerably."

"Sure, Chief. It's kinda a long story, though. First off, I better tell you you got some bad enemies, Chief. Two guys special, named Brett-James and Doc Reston-Farrell. I think one of the first jobs I'm gunna hafta do for you, Chief, is to give it to those two."

THE END

Contents

I'M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF

By MACK REYNOLDS

The Place de France is the town's hub. It marks the end of Boulevard Pasteur, the main drag of the westernized part of the city, and the beginning of Rue de la Liberté, which leads down to the Grand Socco and the medina. In a three-minute walk from the Place de France you can go from an ultra-modern, California-like resort to the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid.

It's quite a town, Tangier.

King-size sidewalk cafes occupy three of the strategic corners on the Place de France. The Cafe de Paris serves the best draft beer in town, gets all the better custom, and has three shoeshine boys attached to the establishment. You can sit of a sunny morning and read the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune while getting your shoes done up like mirrors for thirty Moroccan francs which comes to about five cents at current exchange.

You can sit there, after the paper's read, sip your expresso and watch the people go by.

Tangier is possibly the most cosmopolitan city in the world. In native costume you'll see Berber and Rif, Arab and Blue Man, and occasionally a Senegalese from further south. In European dress you'll see Japs and Chinese, Hindus and Turks, Levantines and Filipinos, North Americans and South Americans, and, of course, even Europeans--from both sides of the Curtain.

In Tangier you'll find some of the world's poorest and some of the richest. The poorest will try to sell you anything from a shoeshine to their not very lily-white bodies, and the richest will avoid your eyes, afraid you might try to sell them something.

In spite of recent changes, the town still has its unique qualities. As a result of them the permanent population includes smugglers and black-marketeers, fugitives from justice and international con men, espionage and counter-espionage agents, homosexuals, nymphomaniacs, alcoholics, drug addicts, displaced persons, ex-royalty, and subversives of every flavor. Local law limits the activities of few of these.

Like I said, it's quite a town.

* * * * *

I looked up from my Herald Tribune and said, "Hello, Paul. Anything new cooking?"

He sank into the chair opposite me and looked around for the waiter. The tables were all crowded and since mine was a face he recognized, he assumed he was welcome to intrude. It was more or less standard procedure at the Cafe de Paris. It wasn't a place to go if you wanted to be alone.

Paul said, "How are you, Rupert? Haven't seen you for donkey's years."

The waiter came along and Paul ordered a glass of beer. Paul was an easy-going, sallow-faced little man. I vaguely remembered somebody saying he was from Liverpool and in exports.

"What's in the newspaper?" he said, disinterestedly.

"Pogo and Albert are going to fight a duel," I told him, "and Lil Abner is becoming a rock'n'roll singer."

He grunted.

"Oh," I said, "the intellectual type." I scanned the front page. "The Russkies have put up another manned satellite."

"They have, eh? How big?"

"Several times bigger than anything we Americans have."

The beer came and looked good, so I ordered a glass too.

Paul said, "What ever happened to those poxy flying saucers?"

"What flying saucers?"

A French girl went by with a poodle so finely clipped as to look as though it'd been shaven. The girl was in the latest from Paris. Every pore in place. We both looked after her.

"You know, what everybody was seeing a few years ago. It's too bad one of these bloody manned satellites wasn't up then. Maybe they would've seen one."

"That's an idea," I said.

We didn't say anything else for a while and I began to wonder if I could go back to my paper without rubbing him the wrong way. I didn't know Paul very well, but, for that matter, it's comparatively seldom you ever get to know anybody very well in Tangier. Largely, cards are played close to the chest.

* * * * *

My beer came and a plate of tapas for us both. Tapas at the Cafe de Paris are apt to be potato salad, a few anchovies, olives, and possibly some cheese. Free lunch, they used to call it in the States.

Just to say something, I said, "Where do you think they came from?" And when he looked blank, I added, "The Flying Saucers."

He grinned. "From Mars or Venus, or someplace."

"Ummmm," I said. "Too bad none of them ever crashed, or landed on the Yale football field and said Take me to your cheerleader, or something."

Paul yawned and said, "That was always the trouble with those crackpot blokes' explanations of them. If they were aliens from space, then why not show themselves?"

I ate one of the potato chips. It'd been cooked in rancid olive oil.

I said, "Oh, there are various answers to that one. We could probably sit around here and think of two or three that made sense."

Paul was mildly interested. "Like what?"

"Well, hell, suppose for instance there's this big Galactic League of civilized planets. But it's restricted, see. You're not eligible for membership until you, well, say until you've developed space flight. Then you're invited into the club. Meanwhile, they send secret missions down from time to time to keep an eye on your progress."

Paul grinned at me. "I see you read the same poxy stuff I do."

A Moorish girl went by dressed in a neatly tailored gray jellaba, European style high-heeled shoes, and a pinkish silk veil so transparent that you could see she wore lipstick. Very provocative, dark eyes can be over a veil. We both looked after her.

I said, "Or, here's another one. Suppose you have a very advanced civilization on, say, Mars."

"Not Mars. No air, and too bloody dry to support life."

"Don't interrupt, please," I said with mock severity. "This is a very old civilization and as the planet began to lose its water and air, it withdrew underground. Uses hydroponics and so forth, husbands its water and air. Isn't that what we'd do, in a few million years, if Earth lost its water and air?"

"I suppose so," he said. "Anyway, what about them?"

"Well, they observe how man is going through a scientific boom, an industrial boom, a population boom. A boom, period. Any day now he's going to have practical space ships. Meanwhile, he's also got the H-Bomb and the way he beats the drums on both sides of the Curtain, he's not against using it, if he could get away with it."

Paul said, "I got it. So they're scared and are keeping an eye on us. That's an old one. I've read that a dozen times, dished up different."

I shifted my shoulders. "Well, it's one possibility."

"I got a better one. How's this. There's this alien life form that's way ahead of us. Their civilization is so old that they don't have any records of when it began and how it was in the early days. They've gone beyond things like wars and depressions and revolutions, and greed for power or any of these things giving us a bad time here on Earth. They're all like scholars, get it? And some of them are pretty jolly well taken by Earth, especially the way we are right now, with all the problems, get it? Things developing so fast we don't know where we're going or how we're going to get there."

* * * * *

I finished my beer and clapped my hands for Mouley. "How do you mean, where we're going?"

"Well, take half the countries in the world today. They're trying to industrialize, modernize, catch up with the advanced countries. Look at Egypt, and Israel, and India and China, and Yugoslavia and Brazil, and all the rest. Trying to drag themselves up to the level of the advanced countries, and all using different methods of doing it. But look at the so-called advanced countries. Up to their bottoms in problems. Juvenile delinquents, climbing crime and suicide rates, the loony-bins full of the balmy, unemployed, threat of war, spending all their money on armaments instead of things like schools. All the bloody mess of it. Why, a man from Mars would be fascinated, like."

Mouley came shuffling up in his babouche slippers and we both ordered another schooner of beer.

Paul said seriously, "You know, there's only one big snag in this sort of talk. I've sorted the whole thing out before, and you always come up against this brick wall. Where are they, these observers, or scholars, or spies or whatever they are? Sooner or later we'd nab one of them. You know, Scotland Yard, or the F.B.I., or Russia's secret police, or the French Sûreté, or Interpol. This world is so deep in police, counter-espionage outfits and security agents that an alien would slip up in time, no matter how much he'd been trained. Sooner or later, he'd slip up, and they'd nab him."

I shook my head. "Not necessarily. The first time I ever considered this possibility, it seemed to me that such an alien would base himself in London or New York. Somewhere where he could use the libraries for research, get the daily newspapers and the magazines. Be right in the center of things. But now I don't think so. I think he'd be right here in Tangier."

"Why Tangier?"

"It's the one town in the world where anything goes. Nobody gives a damn about you or your affairs. For instance, I've known you a year or more now, and I haven't the slightest idea of how you make your living."

"That's right," Paul admitted. "In this town you seldom even ask a man where's he's from. He can be British, a White Russian, a Basque or a Sikh and nobody could care less. Where are you from, Rupert?"

"California," I told him.

"No, you're not," he grinned.

I was taken aback. "What do you mean?"

"I felt your mind probe back a few minutes ago when I was talking about Scotland Yard or the F.B.I. possibly flushing an alien. Telepathy is a sense not trained by the humanoids. If they had it, your job--and mine--would be considerably more difficult. Let's face it, in spite of these human bodies we're disguised in, neither of us is humanoid. Where are you really from, Rupert?"

"Aldebaran," I said. "How about you?"

"Deneb," he told me, shaking.

We had a laugh and ordered another beer.

"What're you doing here on Earth?" I asked him.

"Researching for one of our meat trusts. We're protein eaters. Humanoid flesh is considered quite a delicacy. How about you?"

"Scouting the place for thrill tourists. My job is to go around to these backward cultures and help stir up inter-tribal, or international, conflicts--all according to how advanced they are. Then our tourists come in--well shielded, of course--and get their kicks watching it."

Paul frowned. "That sort of practice could spoil an awful lot of good meat."

THE END

Contents

SEE?

By EDWARD G. ROBLES, JR.

Seeing things? Don't go to an analyst--see the Commission--if it doesn't find you first!

Well, there was this song a few years back. You know the one. Phil Harris singing about a thing that you couldn't get rid of, no matter what you did, a thing so repulsive it made you a social outcast. Never thought I'd see one, though. Dirty Pete found it.

Don't rush me. I'll tell you about it.

We're hobos, understand? Now a hobo is a different breed of cat than you think. Oh, people are getting educated to the idea that a hobo will work and move on, whereas a tramp will mooch and move on, and a bum will mooch and hang around, but you still find folks who are ignorant enough to call us bums.

We're aristocrats, yes sir. If it wasn't for us, you wouldn't enjoy half the little luxuries you do. Oh, don't believe me--talk to your experts. They know that, without the migratory worker, most of the crops wouldn't get harvested. And, if I talk highfalutin' once in a while, don't blame me. Associating with the Professor improves any man's vocabulary, in spite of themselves.

* * * * *

There was the four of us, see? We'd been kicking around together for longer than I care to think about. There was the Professor and Dirty Pete and Sacks and Eddie. I'm Eddie. Nicknames are funny things. Take the Professor--he was a real professor once, until he began hitting the bottle. Well, he lost his job, his home, his family, and his rep.

One morning, he wakes up on Skid Row without a nickel in his jeans and the great-granddaddy of all hangovers. He comes to a decision. Either he could make a man out of hisself, or he could die. Right then, dying looked like the easiest thing to do, but it took more guts that he had to jump off a bridge, so he went on the Road instead.

After he got over his shakes--and he sure had 'em bad--he decided that, if he never took another drink, it'd be the best thing for him. So he didn't. He had a kind of dignity, though, and he could really talk, so he and I teamed up during the wheat harvest in South Dakota. We made all the stops and, when we hit the peaches in California we picked up Sacks and Dirty Pete.

Sacks got his monicker because he never wore shoes. He claimed that gunny-sacks, wrapped around his feet and shins, gave as much protection and more freedom, and they were more comfortable, besides costing nix. Since we mostly bought our shoes at the dumps, at four bits a pair, you might say he was stretching a point, but that's one of the laws of the Road. You don't step on the other guy's corns, and he don't step on yours.

So guess why Dirty Pete was called that. Yeah. He hadn't taken a bath since 'forty-six, when he got out of the army, and he didn't figure on ever takin' another. He was a damn' good worker, though, and nobody'd ever try anything with him around. He wasn't any bigger than a Mack truck. Besides, he was quiet.

Oh, sure. You wanna know why I'm on the Road. Well, it happens I like whiskers. Trouble is, they're not fashionable, unless you're some kind of an artist, which I'm not. You know, social disapproval. I didn't have the guts to face it, so I lit out. Nobody cares on the Road what you do, so I was okay with my belt-length beard.

A beard's an enjoyable thing, too. There's a certain kind of thrill you get from stroking it, and feeling its silkiness run through your fingers. And besides, combing it, and keeping it free of burrs, snarls and tangles, sort of keeps your spare moments so full that the devil don't find any idle time to put your hands to work in. If you ask me, I think that the razor has been the downfall of society. And I'm willing to bet I have plenty of company with the same opinion.

Show me a man who doesn't let his beard grow once in a while, even if it's only for a day or so, and you've shown me a man who thinks more of social pressure than he does of his own comfort. And show me a man who says he likes to shave, and you've shown me a man who is either a liar or is asking for punishment.

* * * * *

That's enough about us. Now to get on with the story. You know, if the Professor hadn't been around, there would probably have been murder done over the Thing, or at least our little group would've split up, 'cause none of us had the brains to figure it out.

Pete's an expert scrounger. His eyes are sharp, and he's always on the lookout for a salable piece of goods, even if he can only get a nickel for it. One night, we're sitting in a jungle near Sacramento, trying to figure out whether to go north for the grapes, or south for the grapes. They're all over California, you know, and they pay pretty well.

Pete, as usual, is out looking, and pretty soon he comes back into camp with this thing in his hand. He handles it like it was hot, but he's pleased he's found it, because he hopes to merchandise it. So he walks up to me, and says, "Hey, Eddie. What'll you gimme for this, huh?"

I say, "Get that to hell away from me! I'll give you a swift kick in the pants if you don't."

He looks real surprised. He says, "Huh, I thought maybe you could use it."

I get up on my feet. I say, real low and careful, because maybe he's joking, "Look, Pete--you oughtta know by this time, I like my beard. Now will you go away?"

He mooches off, looking like I'd kicked him, and goes over to the Professor. I figure maybe the Professor could use it, so I listen. The Prof looks like he was being offered a live rattlesnake.

"No, thanks, really, Pete. I have resolved never to touch it again. I hope you don't mind."

Well, for some reason Pete don't look pleased, and he's real unhappy by this time, but he tries again.

"Hey, Sacks, what'll you gimme for--"

He don't get a chance to finish. I'm only listening with half an ear, but I'm so surprised I stand up like I been stuck with a pin. Sacks says, "Whatinell would I do with a left shoe? You know I don't use 'em."

Pete looks at the thing in his hand, and the Prof and I go over there.

The Professor looks at the thing real carefully and speaks up. "Say, Pete, look at that thing and tell me what it is."

"Why, it's a brand new bar of soap, of course. I don't use it, but one of you might want to. What's all the beef about?"

"Soap?" I say. "Why, you poor fish, something must have happened to your eyes. When you offered me that straight razor, I thought you'd gone off your nut. Now I know it."

The Professor interrupts. He looks excited. "Wait a minute, Eddie. To me that item looks exactly like a full fifth of Old Harvester, 100 proof. Used to be my favorite, before I became an abstainer. To Pete, it looks like soap. To you, it looks like a straight razor while, to Sacks, it resembles a shoe. Does that give you any ideas?"

"Means we're all having hallucinations," I grunts.

"Exactly. Pete, was there anything else in the location where you found this thing?"

"Nothing but some scrap tin."

"Show us."

* * * * *

So, the four of us wanders across the field and, sure enough, there was this silly-looking object lying there. It was about eighteen or twenty feet across, and two feet thick, and I nearly made a fool of myself. I almost screamed when I saw six straight razors crawling out of a hole in its side.

The Professor whistled. "Grab them, boys. We want them."

Well, Sacks sacrifices one of his sacks, and we rounded up fifteen of the useless things. We went back to the jungle, where the Prof explained it.

"Look, fellows, suppose you were a being from another planet that wanted to take over here. Suppose, further, that you were rather small and relatively defenseless. To finish the suppositions, suppose you were a positive telepath, with not only the ability to read minds, but also the ability to create visual and tactile hallucinations. How would you protect yourself?"

A light began to dawn, but I didn't say a word about it.

The Professor continued. "If you could do all this, you'd make yourself look just as useless as possible. To Pete, you'd look like a bar of soap, because he never uses the stuff. To Sacks, you'd look like a shoe, because his dislike for shoes is evident in his mind. To Eddie, who is proud of his beard, you'd look like a razor, while to me, you'd look like a bottle of booze, because I dislike its effects intensely. In other words, you would assume an imposture that would assure you'd never be picked up, except by someone like Pete, who would see in you a salable item, even though not a usable one. It may be, Pete, that you have saved the world."

So, that's the story. We're all still on the Road, of course, but now we are the "Commission for the Investigation of Extraterrestrial Invasion." Congress named us as that, when we got the data to them.

Now, Mr. Mayor, you see our problem. Have your citizens seen anything around that they don't want? If they have, we want to look at it.

Contents

I WAS A TEEN-AGE SECRET WEAPON

BY RICHARD SABIA

He could truthfully say that he never hurt anybody. You know--like the eye of a hurricane? It never hurts anybody....

"Get away from me!" screamed Dr. Berry at the approaching figure.

"But Ah got to feed an' water the animals an' clean out the cages," drawled the lanky, eighteen-year-old boy amiably.

"Get out of this laboratory, you hoodoo," shrilled Berry, "or I swear I'll kill you! I'll not give you the chance to do me in!"

Tow-headed Dolliver Wims regarded chubby Dr. Berry with his innocent green eyes. "Ah don't know why y'all fuss at me like you do," he complained in aggrieved tones.

"YOU DON'T KNOW WHY!" shrieked two hundred and eighteen pounds of outraged Dr. Berry. "How dare you stand there and say you don't know why?" Berry flung a pudgy hand within an inch of Wims' nose. Slashed across the back of it, like frozen lightning, was a new, jagged scar. "That's why!" he shouted. Berry twisted his head into profile, thrust it at Wims and pointed to a slightly truncated ear lobe. "And that's why!" he roared. He yanked up a trouser leg, revealing a finely pitted patch of skin. "And also why!" he yelled. He paused to snatch a breath and glared at the boy. "And if I weren't so modest I'd show you another why!"

"Kin Ah help it if you're always havin' accidents?" Wims replied with a shrug.

Berry turned a deeper red and a dangerous rumble issued from his throat, as if he were a volcano threatening to erupt. Then quite suddenly, with an obvious effort, he capped his seething anger and subsided somewhat. Through taut lips he said, "I'm not going to stand here and argue with you, Wims; just get out."

"But the animals--"

"You can come back in an hour when I've finished running these rats through the maze."

"But--"

"I SAID OUT!" Berry leaped at Wims with arms outthrust, intending to push him toward the door, but Wims had stepped aside in slight alarm and the avalanche of meat plunged past and into a bench on which rested a huge, multilevel glass maze which was a shopping-center model being tested to determine a design that would subliminally compel shoppers into bankruptcy. There was a sustained and magnificent tinkling crash as if a Chinese wind-chime factory was entertaining a typhoon. Berry skidded on the shards into a bank of wooden cages and went down in a splintering welter of escaping chimpanzees, Wistar albino rats, ocelots and other assorted fauna.

Wims moved forward to help extricate the stunned Dr. Berry from the Everest of debris in which he sat immersed.

"DON'T TOUCH ME!" Berry screeched.

"O.K.," Wims said, retreating, "but Ah guess y'all gonna blame me fer this, too."

Berry's mouth worked convulsively in sheer rage but he had no words left to contain it. He put his head on his knees and sobbed.

The other psychologists of the research division came crowding into the laboratory to seek the cause of all the tumult.

"What happened?" Dr. Wilholm inquired.

"Well, Doc Berry has gone an' riled hisself into 'nuther accident," Wims informed him.

"I suppose you had nothing to do with it," Wilholm snapped.

"Cain't rightly say Ah had. He worked it out all by hisself."

"Just like the rest of us, I suppose," Wilholm said with unconcealed hostility.

"Well now y'all mention it, Doc, Ah ain't nevah seen sich a collection o' slip-fingered folk. Always bustin' either their gear or theirselves."

"Listen, you--"

"Now lookit Doc Castle up on top o' that lockah. He's gonna bust a leg if he don't quit foolin' with that critter."

Wilholm turned to see Dr. Castle up near the ceiling trying to get at a chimpanzee perched just out of reach on a steam pipe. "Castle, are you crazy?" he cried. "Get down from there before you hurt yourself."

"But I've got to get Zsa Zsa into a cage before one of the cats gets her," Castle protested. Just then an ocelot leaped for Zsa Zsa and she leaped for Dr. Castle who promptly lost his balance and plummeted toward Dr. Wilholm who foolishly tried to catch him. They all crashed to the floor and lay stunned for some moments. Castle attempted to rise but he sank back almost immediately with a grimace of pain. "I think my leg is broken," he announced.

"Well Ah tole you," Wims said. "Ain't that so, Dr. Wilholm?"

Wilholm attempted to hurl Zsa Zsa at Wims but found to his surprise he could only wriggle his fingers. The effort sent little slivers of pain slicing through his back.

By this time the laboratory was resounding with the fury of a riot sale in a bargain basement. Sounds of destruction, counterpointed with cries of pain and imprecations increased as the staff pursued maddeningly elusive animals through a growing jungle of toppled and overturning equipment. At the far end there was a shower of sparks and a flash of flame as something furry plunged into a network of wires and vacuum tubes.

* * * * *

Two hours later, Dr. Titus, the division chief, strolled in just as the firemen quenched the last stubborn flames. He surveyed the nearly total ruin of the laboratory. "Really!" he said to a thickly bandaged Dr. Berry who was attempting to rescue an undamaged electroencephalograph from a gleeful fireman's ax, "can't you test your hypothesis without being so untidy?"

Dr. Berry whirled and struck Dr. Titus.

"Of course you know what this means," Titus said calmly, rubbing his jaw. "I'll just have to have a closer look at your Rorschach."

"You can just go take a closer look," Berry snarled.

"Now, now," Titus said soothingly, "why don't we just go to my office and find out what is disturbing us? Hm-m-m?"

The ax came down on the encephalograph and Berry burst into tears and allowed Titus to lead him away.

Titus seated himself at his desk and waited for the sobbing Berry to subside. "That's it," he said unctuously, "let's just get it right out of our systems, shall we? Hm-m-m?"

Berry stopped in mid-sob and became all tiger again. "Stop talking to me as if I were a schizo!" he roared.

"Now, now, we are not going to become hostile all over again are we? Hm-m-m?"

"Hm-m-m all you want to, Titus, but you'll change your tune soon enough when you hear what happened. It was no band-aid brouhaha this time. I've warned you time and again about Wims and you've chosen to treat the matter as airily as possible--almost to the point of being elfin. However, the casualty list ought to bring you back down to earth." Berry ticked off the names on his fingers: "Dr. Wilholm hospitalized with a broken back; Dr. Castle, a broken leg; Dr. Angelillo, Dr. Bernstein, Dr. Maranos and four lab technicians severely burned; Dr. Grossblatt and two assistants, badly clawed; Dr. Cahill, clawed and burned; and no one knows what's wrong with Dr. Zimmerman. He's locked himself in the broom closet and refuses to come out. Twelve other people will be out a day or two with minor injuries, including your secretary who was pursued by Elvira, the orangutan, and is now being treated for shock."

Titus protested, "Why Elvira wouldn't harm--"

"Elvira has been misnamed. Elvis might be more appropriate."

"Why I had no idea," Titus mused. "Now I'll have to rerun those tests with the new bias."

Berry flared up again. "You don't even have a lab left to run a test in. You can't keep Wims after this!"

"Are you blaming poor Wims for what happened?"

"How can you sit there and ask that question without choking? Ever since that two-legged disaster was hired to sweep up, everybody in the psycho-research division has suffered from one accident after another; even you haven't remained unscathed. Why within the month he arrived we lost the plaque we had won two years running for our unmarred safety record. In fact, the poor fellow who came to remove it from its place of honor in the staff dining room fell from the ladder and broke his neck. Guess who was holding the ladder?"

"I was there at the time," Titus said, "and I saw the entire performance. Wims did nothing but hold the ladder as he had been instructed to do. Old John, instead of confining his attention to what he was doing, kept worrying about whether or not the ladder was being held firmly enough and, as could be expected, he dropped the plaque, made a grab for it and down he went."

"Don't you think it significant, Titus, that Old John had been the university handyman for eighteen years, had climbed up and down ladders, over roofs, and had never fallen or had a serious accident until Wims came upon the scene? And this is just about the case with everyone here?"

"Yes, I think it is very significant."

"Then how can anyone but Wims be blamed?"

"But Wims never has the accidents. He never gets hurt; not so much as a scratch!"

"The devil never gets burned."

"My dear Berry, let the scientist in you consider the fact that never yet has Wims so much as laid a finger on any of our people. And Wims never knocks over equipment, or lets things explode, or sets fire to anything. I find it very odd that it is only my staff that does these things and yet to a man they invariably fix the blame on an eighteen-year-old lad who seems to want nothing more out of life than to be liked. Don't you find it odd?"

"The only thing I find odd is your keeping him in the face of the unanimous staff request to get rid of him."

"And have you ever thought of what my reason might be?"

Dr. Berry looked hard at Dr. Titus and said with unmistakable emphasis, "Some of your people think they know."

It took Titus a moment to fully understand, then he said severely: "Let's discuss this sensibly."

"There's no point in further discussion. There's only one thing more I have to say. I'm not going to endanger my life any longer. Either Wims goes or you can have my resignation."

"Are you serious?"

"Certainly."

"Well then, it was pleasant having a good friend as an associate. I'm certain you will easily find something more satisfactory. Of course you can depend on me for a glowing letter of reference."

Berry sat openmouthed. "You mean to say you'd keep a mere porter in preference to me?"

Titus regarded his steepled fingers. "In this case I'm afraid so."

* * * * *

The telephone in the outer office rang several times before Titus remembered he was without his secretary. He pressed a stud and took the call on his line. He identified himself and after listening a long while without comment, he spoke. "That's very good, general, two weeks will be fine. You understand he must be commissioned as soon as possible, perhaps at the end of basic training.... Of course I know it's unheard of but it's got to be done. I realize you are not too happy about being brought into this but someone on the General Staff is needed to pull the necessary strings and the President assured me that we could depend on your complete co-operation." Titus listened and when he spoke again a trace of anger edged his voice. "I don't know why you are so hostile to this project, general. If it succeeds, the benefit to the free world will be immense. If not, all we stand to lose is one man, no equipment to speak of; not even 'face' since it need not ever be made known. A far cry, I must say, from the military, whose expensive Roman candles, when they do manage to get off the ground, keep falling out of the sky and denting Florida and New Mexico with depressing regularity. Good-by!"

Titus hung up and turned to Berry. "Now, my dear Berry, if you'll withdraw your resignation we can go and have dinner and plot how we can milk more funds from the university to refurbish the lab and keep ourselves from getting fired in the process."

"My mind is made up, Titus, and all your cajoling will not get me to change it."

"But Wims is going," Titus said, nodding toward the phone. "In two weeks he will be in the Army."

Berry's face went white. "Heaven preserve us," he gasped.

"Really, my dear Berry, for a jolly, fat man you can be positively bleak at times."

"Let's get the finest dinner we can buy," Berry said. "It may be one of our last."

* * * * *

Private Dolliver Wims liked the Army but was unhappy because the Army did not like him. After only two weeks of basic training his company shunned him, his noncoms hated him and his officers, in order to reduce the wear and tear on their sanity often pretended he did not exist. From time to time they faced reality long enough to attempt to have him transferred but regimental headquarters, suspicious of anything that emanated from the "Jonah" company, ignored their pleas. Now in his third week of basic, Wims sat on the front bench in the barrack classroom, an island unto himself. His company, now twenty-two per cent below strength, and the survivors of his platoon, some newly returned from the hospital, were seating themselves so distant from him that the sergeants were threatening to report the company AWOL if they didn't move closer to the lieutenant-instructor.

The lieutenant watched the sullen company reluctantly coagulating before him and inquired facetiously of the platoon sergeant, "Prisoners of war?"

"No such luck," the sergeant replied grimly.

"Be seated, men," the lieutenant addressed the company. Misinterpreting the resentment of the recruits, he decided a bit of a pep talk was in order. "I know a lot of you are wondering why you're in the Army in the first place, and secondly, why you should be afflicted with the infantry. As civilians you've probably heard so much about the modern pentomic army with its electronic and atomic weapons and all the yak about pushbutton warfare, you figure the infantry is something that should be in the history books with the cavalry. O.K., so let's look at the facts. In the forty-five years since World War II, there've been almost as many localized, 'brush fire' wars as the one now going on in Burma. Sure, there's still a limited use of tactical atomic weapons, but it's still the infantry that has to go in and do the winning. So far nobody wants to try for a knockout and go whoosh with the ICBM. So no matter how many wheels or rotors they hang on it, it is still the infantry, still the Queen of Battles and you should be proud to be a part of it."

With the exception of one recruit sitting alone on the front bench and leaning forward with eager interest, the lieutenant observed that his captive audience was utterly unimpressed with his stirring little "thought for today." He knew he could find more esprit de corps in a chain gang. He shrugged and launched his scheduled lecture.

"Because of the pentomic army's small, mobile and self-sufficient battle groups and the very fluid nature of modern warfare the frequency of units being surrounded, cut off and subsequently captured is very high. As early as thirty years ago, in the Laotian War, the number of prisoners taken by all sides was becoming increasingly unmanageable and so the present system of prisoner exchange was evolved. At the end of every month an exchange is made; enlisted men, man for man; officers, rank for rank. This is an advantage for our side since, generally, except for the topmost ranks, no man is in enemy hands over thirty days. This makes any attempts to brainwash the enlisted men impracticable and a great deal of pressure is thereby removed.

"So, if you're taken prisoner, you have really nothing to worry about. Just keep your mouth shut and sit it out till the end of the month. The only information you're required to give is your name, rank and serial number. There are no exceptions. Don't try to outsmart your interrogator by giving false information. They'll peg you right away and easily trick you into saying more than you intend. Now you'll see a film which will show you the right and wrong way to handle yourself during an interrogation and a lot of the gimmicks they're liable to throw at you in order to trick you into shooting off your mouth." The isolated and unnaturally attentive Wims again caught the lieutenant's eye. "You there!" he said, pointing to Wims, "come help me set up this screen."

Wims rose to his feet and one of the platoon sergeants leaped forward. "I'll help you, sir. Wims, sit down."

"I asked this man to help me, sergeant."

"But sir--"

Another platoon sergeant and a corporal were already on the platform. They had seized the stand and were unfolding it. The lieutenant spun around. "What are you doing?"

"We're helping, sir," the sergeant said.

"Well, cut it out. You noncoms are too officious and it's unnatural. It makes me nervous."

Wims was now on the platform and had taken hold of the screen cylinder. One of the corporals was tugging at the other end, trying to get it away from him.

"Let go of that screen," the lieutenant roared at the corporal. Wims, misunderstanding, released the cylinder a fraction of a second before the corporal did and the corporal went tumbling backwards, knocking the lieutenant off the platform and demolishing the loud-speaker.

The top sergeant raced outside and found one of the company lieutenants. "Sir, you'd better move the company out of the building right away!"

"Why?"

"It's Wims. He's being helpful again."

The lieutenant paled and dashed inside. He took no time to determine the specific nature of the commotion which was shaking the building. He managed to evacuate the company in time to prevent serious casualties when the structure collapsed.

[Illustration]

* * * * *

Captain Aronsen, the company commander, faced two of his lieutenants. "You're not telling me anything new," he said wearily. "I know all about Wims. I've tried everything to get him discharged, honorably and otherwise. I've spent a lot of time setting things up so he could hardly help but foul up and we could bounce him, but what happens? Everybody else fouls up and he stays clean. And as if that isn't enough to worry about, headquarters has notified me that General Harmon B. Fyfe of the General Staff will come down from Washington tomorrow for a tour of this post. He'll visit the bivouac area and observe the tactical exercises. As you know, gentlemen, tomorrow is the final day of the two-week bivouac for this company which completes their sixteen-week basic training program. We'll have the usual company combat exercise which will involve the attack, capture and defense against counterattack of Hill Ninety-three."

"The same as always," said one of the lieutenants.

"It won't be the same as always!" the captain said, banging his fist on his desk. "The area of action, the battle plan may be the same but this time we've got General Fyfe as an observer and Dolliver Wims as a participant and, if I can manage to squeeze the day successfully past that Scylla and Charybdis, I'll promise not to devour any more second lieutenants between meals."

"Sir," offered one of the lieutenants, "why don't we put Wims in the hospital just for tomorrow. It would be simple to arrange--say, an upset stomach."

The captain looked sadly at his junior officer. "It's the only hospital we have," he said. "Besides, I have a better idea. I'm detaching Wims from his platoon and will keep him with me at the company command post as a messenger and I'll shoot the first man who attempts to use him as a messenger or anything else."

"Hah! No need to worry about that, sir. Wims may have us a little shook up but he hasn't flipped us yet."

"I hope we can all say that when tomorrow ends," the captain said fervently.

* * * * *

The company command post had been set up under a cluster of dispirited pines obviously suffering from tired sap but in spite of the ragged shade they provided against the mild, mid-morning sun, Captain Aronsen was perspiring excessively and becoming increasingly unsettled. He glanced uneasily over at the somewhat planetary bulk of General Fyfe surrounded by his satellite colonels and other aides, and muttered to his lieutenant, "If Old Brassbottom came down here to observe the exercise, then why the devil doesn't he go over to the hill and observe instead of hanging around here like a sword of Demosthenes?"

"I think you mean Damocles, captain," the lieutenant corrected. "Demosthenes was the orator."

Aronsen looked sourly at the lieutenant. "I know what I'm talking about. Fyfe has only to say the word and off come our heads."

The lieutenant lowered his voice. "I don't like the way he keeps looking at Wims. Do you think he's heard about him?"

"In Washington?"

"You know how rumors travel in the Army."

"Rumors, yes," the captain said, "but the truth can't even limp out of the orderly room." He wiped his brow and shot a venomous glance at Wims. He said to the lieutenant, "I don't like Wims sitting there in full view of the general. Go tell him to take his comic book and sit on the other side of the tree."

At that moment one of the young trainees stumbled into the headquarters area bleeding profusely from a deep gash on his cheek. Between lung-tearing gasps he told how the machine gun, intended to serve as the base of fire for the attacking platoons, had been captured by a Red patrol before it could be set up. They were being led off under the supervision of a referee when he tumbled into a ravine and in the confusion made good his escape.

"Get the jeep and rush this man to the hospital," the captain instructed the lieutenant.

"What about the attack?" the lieutenant inquired. "Someone will have to get word to the forward platoons to hold up until we can move up a new gun."

"I'll send a messenger."

"But they're all out."

"One of them is bound to return soon. If not, I'll--"

"What is the matter with that man sulking behind that tree?" boomed General Fyfe who had been listening since the trainee had blurted his story.

The lieutenant snatched the bleeding recruit's arm and bolted for the jeep.

"Hey, lieutenant, take it easy," the trainee complained, "you're pulling my arm off!"

Ignoring him, the lieutenant was absorbed in desperate calculation. "The base hospital is about twelve miles from here," he muttered as they ran. "We should be safe enough there."

"But, general," the captain was protesting, "that man is the company snafu. He means well but he was designed by nature to foul things up."

"I won't buy that, captain," the general said forcefully. "If a man has the right attitude and still doesn't measure up then it's the fault of the people who are training him." There was a mark of menace in the general's voice as he said, "Do you read me?"

"Like the handwriting on the wall," the captain said resignedly. He glanced at the tree behind which, he knew, doom sat reading a comic book.

"Give the man a chance to redeem himself and I'm certain he'll come through with flying colors. I'll give you the opportunity to prove it to yourself." The general turned and bellowed at the tree, "Soldier! You! Private Wims! Come over here!"

* * * * *

Wims scurried over to the general and snapped a salute. The general flicked his hand in return. "Wims, your commanding officer has an important mission for you."

Wims turned to his captain, his face alight. He braced and saluted smartly.

"Wims," the captain said, "I want you to take a message to the lieutenant in command of the first, third and fourth platoons now in the jump-off area. Do you understand so far?" Wims nodded. "Tell the lieutenant there's been a delay in the attack plan. He's not to move out until he sees a white signal flare fired from the spur of woods on his left. Have you got that?"

Wims nodded emphatically, "Yes, suh!"

"Repeat the message."

"Ah'm to tell the lieutenant there's been a change in plans an' he's not supposed to move until a white flare is shot outta the woods on his left flank."

The captain exploded. "Delay, not change! And I didn't say anything about a left flank! The woods on his left flank and the spur of woods on his left that stick out a hundred yards beyond his present position are two different things! So help me, Wims, if you get this message fouled up, I'll use you as a dummy for bayonet practice."

Wims squirmed unhappily. "Couldn't you write it down, suh?"

"Why? So you can get captured and--"

The general interposed. "Even if the message is a bit garbled the intent should be obvious to the lieutenant if he has any intelligence."

The captain regarded the general balefully and then snapped at Wims, "What are you waiting for? Move out! ON THE DOUBLE!"

Wims trotted away and as soon as he was out of sight the general said abruptly to Aronsen, "I'm going over to the Red lines and watch your Blue attack from there."

Sure, the captain snarled inwardly, now that he's set the fuse he's running for the hills.

The general climbed into his command car and waited while one of his majors dashed into the woods along the path that led to the attack group's staging area. Less than a minute later he returned, followed by a colonel. They jumped into the command car which roared off immediately. As the captain was trying to puzzle out the incident's meaning, three of his runners came out of the woods along the same path.

"Where have you goldbricks been? You should've been back long ago!"

"Sir," one of them spoke up, "there was a colonel a little way back there wouldn't let us pass. Said the gen'ral was havin' a secret conf'rence and for us to wait."

The captain tucked away the strange information for later consideration. Right now there was no time to be lost. "You! Get over to the attack group and tell the lieutenant in command to hold up until a white flare is fired from the spur of woods on his left. All other orders remain the same. If Wims has already been there, the lieutenant is to disregard any message Wims might have given him. If you see Wims, tell him to get back here. All right, move out!

"You! Get over to the second platoon in the reserve area and tell them to rush a replacement machine gun with support riflemen to the tip of the spur; base of fire to be maintained twenty minutes. Signal end of firing with white flare."

The captain dispatched his last runner with additional tactical revisions and then took time to consider the odd fact that the general had one of his colonels delay his messengers. Was he only testing his ability to improvise? Yet he seemed unduly anxious to have him use Wims. Why? Suddenly, into his mind flashed the scene of the general calling Wims from behind the tree and he knew what it was that had been screaming for attention at the back of his mind these last hectic minutes. No one had mentioned Wims' name within earshot of the general and yet Fyfe had called Wims by name!

* * * * *

Wims had not been included in the company briefing and he wished he had had the courage to ask the captain where the jump-off area was, but the captain had been so angry with him he had not wanted to provoke him further. After a while of wandering he came upon two of his own company's flank pickets nested in a deadfall a short distance beyond the edge of the woods. They greeted him with hearty hostility. "Git outta here, Wims. You ain't got no business here."

"But Ah'm lookin' fer the lieutenant. Ah got a message fer 'im from the captain."

"He's over there on that hill," one of them replied, spitefully indicating the hill occupied by the Red force.

"Thanks," Wims said gratefully and in all innocence headed for the enemy hill. He lost his bearings in the woods and when he finally came upon the hill he had made a wide swing around the left flank and was approaching its rear slope. Immediately he was spotted by several trainees of the defending force foxholed on the lower slope. Since he came so openly from their rear area and alone, they assumed he was one of their own men.

As they let him come within challenging distance, they saw, pinned to his tunic, the green cardboard bar that identified him as a messenger. The bars were worn so that noncoms wouldn't be snatching for other duties, messengers idling between missions. As had always been done, both sides in this exercise were using the same device to identify their messengers, never expecting them to be delivering messages behind enemy lines.

The challenged Wims explained his mission and he was passed through with the information that most of the junior officers were on the forward slope. Wims climbed up the hill, inconspicuous among others scurrying about on various missions, many of whom did not wear the identifying red armband of the defenders.

He reached the crown of the wooded hill without finding a second lieutenant who was not a referee. He had almost reached the bottom of the forward slope when a small bush jumped up and yelled, "Hey, jerk! Why'n't ya watch where ya goin'?"

Wims pulled back just in time to avoid falling into a well camouflaged machine-gun nest. One of the foliage-covered gunners, thinking Wims was about to topple on him, jumped aside. His ankle twisted under him and he fell, catching the barrel of the machine gun just under the edge of his helmet and sagging into unconsciousness.

A platoon sergeant heard the steely clatter and rushed over. "That's funny," he growled ominously, "I coulda sworn I set up a machine-gun emplacement here but it's makin' noises like a boiler factory."

The assistant gunner pointed to the unconscious gunner. "He fell an' hit his head. He's breathin' but he ain't movin'."

The chattering of a machine gun from the woods opposite the hill was noted by the sergeant and he knew the Blues would be coming soon. He turned to the gunner. "Get up the hill an' snag one of our looeys or a referee. Tell 'im we got a man hurt here, needs lookin' at."

The gunner dashed off and the sergeant jerked his thumb at Wims. "You! Get on that gun!"

"But Ah got an important message fer the lieutenant," Wims protested.

The sergeant, annoyed, glanced at the green bar. "What lieutenant?"

"The captain said the lieutenant in charge."

"Gimmee the message. I'll tell 'im."

Wims started to protest but the sergeant's eyes crackled. "Well, the captain said fer the lieutenant not to move out 'til he saw the white flare fired outta the woods on his left."

"Not to move out?" the sergeant echoed doubtfully. "That don't sound right. Are ya sure he didn't say not ta fire until we saw the white flare?"

"Maybe that's it," Wims said agreeably.

"Maybe!" the sergeant roared, "whaddaya mean, maybe?" He grabbed Wims by the collar and pushed his face against the boy's as if he were about to devour him. "Is it YES or NO?"

"Y-yes," Wims agreed nervously.

"What's your name, soldier?" the sergeant asked.

"Dolliver Wims."

"You don't happen to be a gen'ral do ya?"

Wims looked confused. "No," he ventured.

"Well then say so!" the sergeant screamed.

"Ah'm not a gen'ral," Wims said, desperately trying to please.

"Are ya tryin' ta get wise with me? WHAT IS YOUR RANK?"

"Private."

"Now, what's your name, soldier."

Wims finally understood. "Private Wims, Dolliver."

"That's better." The sergeant's eyes narrowed as he searched his memory. "I don't r'member seein' ya 'round this company before."

"Ah don't recall seein' you 'roun' here either," Wims said in suicidal innocence.

"Y'ARE GETTIN' WISE WITH ME!" the sergeant roared. "I'll take care of ya later." He thrust Wims into the pit with the machine gun. "Now stay there on that gun 'til I get back. I'm goin' ta find the lieutenant."

Wims squatted behind the gun, squinting experimentally through the sights and swinging the barrel to and fro.

The sergeant returned shortly with the lieutenant. "That's him," he said, pointing to Wims.

The lieutenant glanced at the green bar. "Are you sure you got that message straight?"

Wims looked at the menacing sergeant. "Yes, suh," he said, swallowing.

"Somebody is crazy," the lieutenant muttered. "Sergeant, tell Lieutenant Haas to cover my platoon. I'm going back to the CP to see Captain Blair about this message. I'll try to be back before the attack starts to either confirm or cancel the order, but, if not, Haas is to hold his fire until he spots the white flare, or the Blues are right on top of us; whichever happens first."

* * * * *

The lieutenant hustled up the hill and the sergeant went off to find Lieutenant Haas, leaving Wims alone with the machine gun and the still unconscious gunner. The distant machine-gun firing had stopped and the white smoke of a screen laid down by the Blue attackers started scudding thickly across the face of the hill, hiding them as they charged.

"Pickets are back," the sergeant yelled at Lieutenant Haas. "The Blues've crossed the road an' are in the gully at the bottom of the hill."

"How the devil can I possibly see a signal flare through these trees and all this smoke?" Haas muttered to the sergeant. "I think we've got a first-class snafu. Let's go check the machine-gun position; if it's still there."

A whistle sounded and the Blue company surged up out of the ditch and swarmed up the hill. As had been ordered, not a defending shot had yet been fired. Wims opened the breech of the machine gun to see if the ammunition belt was properly engaged. He had a difficult time forcing it open and when he succeeded he found the webbing twisted and a couple of cartridges jammed in at impossible angles. As he was trying to clear it, the unconscious gunner revived, glanced at the advancing Blues and made for the gun which Wims had already commenced to take apart.

"Whaddaya doin'?" the gunner yelled. He pushed Wims aside, causing him to release his hold on the powerful spring. The bolt shot out of the back of the gun and struck the approaching Lieutenant Haas above the left ear just as he was opening his mouth to give the order to return fire. He fell to the ground with the command unspoken and the sergeant knelt to his aid. At the same moment Wims recognized some members of his platoon charging up the hill and realized for the first time he was behind enemy lines. In sheer embarrassment he slunk away, hoping none of his comrades would notice.

* * * * *

The lieutenant who had gone to confirm Wims' message now came running down the hill shouting at his men to return fire. He had his captain with a lieutenant aide in tow and when they reached the machine-gun nest and the fallen Haas the lieutenant looked for Wims.

"I tell you he was here," the lieutenant said. "The gunner and the sergeant can bear me out."

"And I tell you," the captain said excitedly, "I did not issue any such bird-brained order."

[Illustration]

A lieutenant referee tapped the captain on the shoulder. "Sir, would you gentlemen please leave the field," he said, indicating the lieutenant, the captain and his aide, the sergeant, the gunner and the unconscious Haas. "You are all dead."

The captain looked around to discover that their little group was the target of the blank fire of several advancing Blue infantrymen. "But we're trying to straighten out a mix-up here," the captain protested.

"I'm sorry, sir, but you're all standing here gossiping in the middle of a battle. Theoretically you are all Swiss cheese. Please leave the area."

"We WON'T leave the area!" the captain shouted. "I'm trying to tell you we wouldn't be dead if some idiot hadn't gotten in here and bollixed up this training exercise and--"

"... It was a brilliant demonstration of infiltration and diversionary tactics by Dolliver Wims," said General Fyfe, striding forward.

The captain rolled his eyes heavenward in supplication before turning to face the general. "Sir," he inquired acidly, "What are dolliver wims?"

"Private Wims is the embodiment of the initiative and resourcefulness we are trying to inculcate in all our soldiers. I observed the entire operation and he has demonstrated a great potential for leadership." Fyfe hesitated and for a moment a shadow of repugnance darkened his features as if, for purposes of camouflage, he were about to perform the necessary but distasteful task of smearing mud over his crisp, shining uniform. "I am recommending Private Wims for a battlefield commission."

"A battlefield commission during a training exercise?" the captain screeched incredulously.

Fyfe looked at him severely. "Captain, if you are unable to communicate except in those high tones, I would suggest a visit to the base hospital for some hormones." The general paused and looked around. "It seems, captain, you've lost the hill." He glanced at his watch. "And in record time, too."

"Sir," the captain said, "I won't accept that. This is a limited training exercise conducted without benefit of full communications, weapons or elaborate tactics. Blue company had no right to send a man behind our lines to--"

"Captain," Fyfe said with annoyance, "you are the most argumentative corpse I have ever encountered. I'm leaving now to get that recommendation off to Washington. In the meantime, have someone tell Captain Aronsen to see that Wims is not assassinated before we get him his lieutenancy."

* * * * *

Lieutenant Wims unfolded out of the jeep into the jungle mud. The driver pointed to a cluster of tents sagging under the weight of the streaming rain. "You'll find Major Hecker in there."

"Thanks fer the ride," Wims said as he wrestled his gear out of the jeep. He located the headquarters tent and an orderly brought him in to the major. "Lieutenant Dolliver Wims reportin' fer dooty, suh," the saluting Wims said crisply.

Major Hecker's hand slid wearily to the vicinity of his fatigued and unshaven face in return salute. "Welcome, lieutenant, to Hlangtan, Burma's foremost nothing." Wims handed his orders to the major who said as he accepted them, "You'll be taking the third platoon of A company. They lost their lieutenant two days ago." The major glanced at the orders and exploded. "What do they mean, 'attached to your command as an observer'? I need a platoon leader! What are you supposed to observe?"

Wims shifted uneasily. "Ah cain't rightly say, suh." The truth of the matter was that Wims didn't really know. His commission had been virtually thrown at him. In Washington he had been vaguely briefed that he was to be sent to the front in Burma on a mission of the utmost importance and not to breathe a word to anyone. It was only when he alighted from the plane in Rangoon that he fully realized that actually no one had breathed a word to him about what exactly he was to do. His orders merely stated that he was to get as close to the enemy as possible and observe.

The major regarded him nastily. "What's that insignia you're wearing? They look like question marks."

"Ah guess they do," Wims replied unhappily.

"Well are they?" the major inquired with a soft shout.

"Ah guess they are, suh."

"You guess!" The major now regarded him with open animosity. "And I suppose you don't know what they stand for."

"Well, suh, Ah tried to find out but somehow Ah couldn't get a straight ansuh."

"O.K., O.K., Lieutenant Cloak and Dagger, but if you don't want questions why wear the things? If the Commies know you're a special and catch you--"

"But Ah'm not no special nuthin'. Ah'm jus'--"

"Yeah, sure." The major poked a grimy finger at the paper before him and grinned almost savagely. "It says here you're to operate with our most forward units. That's just fine. I've got a patrol going out tonight. They will take you close enough to sit in their ever-lovin' yellow laps."

As Wims was leaving the major suddenly called after him. "Say, lieutenant, since you're some kind of special agent you probably have an 'in' at the Pentagon. Will you pass the word that I need a looey replacement? One that doesn't wear punctuation marks."

* * * * *

The patrol had not been out twenty minutes before it fearfully decided it had better ditch this boy lieutenant who, with each step, sounded as if he were setting off a room full of mousetraps. At a whispered signal from the sergeant in command, the patrol slid noiselessly off the trail and dropped to the ground as the groping Wims went clattering by in the darkness. Within the hour Wims tripped over a Chinese patrol that lay cowering in the ferns as it listened apprehensively to what it thought was an approaching enemy battalion.

The next several days were confusing ones for Wims. With little food or sleep he was hustled from place to place and endlessly questioned by officers of increasing rank. He was passed up to the divisional level where he was briefly interrogated by a Russian officer-advisor to the Chinese headquarters. There seemed to be some disagreement between the Russian and Chinese officers concerning Wims and they were almost shouting when he was pulled from the room and thrown back into his cell.

In the chill, early hours of the following morning he was yanked out of an embarrassing nightmare where he dreamed he went to a hoedown in his briefs. He was squeezed between two furtive men into a shade-drawn limousine with unillumined headlamps and after a frenzied ride the vehicle screeched to a halt. He heard a roaring and in the darkness he was dimly aware that he was being shoved into an airplane. After that he was certain of nothing as he plunged gratefully back into sleep.

Wims was back at the hoedown only this time without even his briefs. And all the interrogators had stopped dancing and were circled around him, glaring and demanding to know what he was hiding. As they closed in upon him he was snatched from the dream by two guards who prodded him out of his cell, down a bleak corridor and into a large room. The windows were hidden by drawn, dark-green shades and two low-hanging, unshaded electric-light bulbs provided a harsh illumination. The chamber was sparsely furnished with a splintered desk, several battered chairs and half a dozen Russian MVD officers.

A man, so thick and heavy in appearance and movement that he was obviously a concrete abutment come to life, stepped up to Wims. The man's stony visage cracked in a slow, cold smile as he rumbled in English, "Welcome to Moscow, Lieutenant Dolliver Wims. I am Colonel Sergei Bushmilov. I am your friend." The word "friend" sounded rather squeaky as if it had not been used in years and needed oiling.

Wims glanced around the room. These people were like unshielded reactors throwing off hard radiations of hostility. "Ah sure could use a friend," he said with utmost fervency.

"Good!" said Bushmilov. "There are some things I wish to know and you are going to tell to me because we are friends."

"Ah kin only give you mah name, rank an' serial number, suh." Wims saw the colonel's face harden and his fist clench. Just then a burst of angry shouting and scuffling erupted in the corridor. Suddenly the door was flung open and half a dozen Chinese stormed into the room trailing a couple of protesting Russian guards. Two of the Chinese were civilian attachés from the embassy and the remainder were uniformed, military intelligence officers.

* * * * *

Bushmilov whirled and immediately recognized the foremost man. "Colonel Peng! What are you doing here?" he exclaimed in startled surprise.

Colonel Peng replied in an askew English, the only language he had in common with Bushmilov. "Our American lieutenant, you kid-stolen." He pointed at Wims.

Bushmilov unconsciously shifted his bulk to blot Wims from Peng's view. "You are wrong Colonel Peng. Your intelligence was not getting nowhere with him and we are having more experience in these matters. We think you approve to take him to Moscow."

"Ah. Yes? Then why you sneak away like folding Arabian tent? Ah!"

Although Bushmilov did not comprehend what Arabian tents had to do with this business he did understand the accusation. Before he could reply, Peng continued. "Us Chinese not fool, Comrade Colonel. You Russian think us not good like you, like smart. O.K. Us not b'long Russia like sat'lite. Us b'long us. Us not let you take what you want and no asking. You will give it back, the American officer. Us can make him say secret."

Bushmilov stiffened and dropped all pretense at cordiality. "Us will--" He shook his head in annoyance. "I will not do that without order from my superior, Minister Modrilensky. Now you will be kind to leave. There is business to finish."

"No go unless us take officer."

An angry Bushmilov strode to the door and snarled at the two guards in Russian. One of them dashed away down the corridor. "We shall see," Bushmilov sneered at Peng.

"Yes us shall, ah!" said Peng, withdrawing his automatic pistol from its holster. The other Chinese did the same and their movement was duplicated immediately by the Russians.

No one moved or spoke further until five Russian security guards burst into the room with submachine guns at the ready. The corporal in charge looked to Bushmilov for instructions. The Russian colonel looked long and thoughtfully at the primed Chinese. He had not expected them to go to this extreme. Perhaps they were only bluffing but one sudden misinterpreted movement or the wrong word and another ugly incident in an already dangerously long chain might be created to accelerate the deteriorating Sino-Soviet relations. Without specific instructions he dared not take the responsibility for any untoward action. Bushmilov ordered the guards to stand at ease and dispatched one of his henchmen to notify his superior of the crisis.

"You being very wise, Comrade Colonel," Peng said.

"You are being very annoying," Bushmilov snapped.

"O.K., yes," Peng replied. "Chinese People's Republic ambassador now at Kremlin demand give back American officer. Come soon now, us go. Take lieutenant. You annoying finish. Ah!"

Bushmilov spoke sharply to his junior officers who still stood with drawn pistols. One of them came over and stationed himself alongside Bushmilov. He explained to Peng, "I go on with questioning. My men will shoot anyone who interfere."

Colonel Peng knew his bounds. "O.K., yes. Us wait when order come you give us lieutenant. Us stay. Listen."

Bushmilov turned to Wims. "You are captured six days before. Two weeks from now at this month end you suppose to be exchange by Geneva Concordat number seventeen. Now you tell to me why your government in such a hurry they can not wait and why they make special request to government of Chinese People's Republic for immediate return of you. And why is it offered, twelve Chinese officers, all ranks, to get back only you?"

"Ah don't know, suh," Wims said in honest surprise.

"I warn you. If you not co-operating, you not go home at month end. You cannot pretend with us. We check and know much about you. You go in army three month before now. No university education, no military experience and now you are second lieutenant so quick. How so?"

"Oh, Ah kin tell y'all that," Wims said with relief. "That ain't no mil't'ry secret. When we was havin' basic trainin' this here gen'ral allowed as to how Ah did some right smart soldierin' durin' maneuvers an' he up an' give me a battlefield commission."

Bushmilov's eyes were slits. "Ha. Ha. Ha," Bushmilov said without a smile. "You Americans, always making joke. I enjoy that good laugh. Now we are serious. It is true, yes, that you are intelligence officer sent to Burma with special mission? We know everything," Bushmilov lied, "but we want you say it with your words the few details."

"Cain't tell you nuthin' cause they ain't nuthin' to tell, Ah mean!"

* * * * *

Bushmilov swung up his arm to strike Wims across the face. His hand smacked against the pistol held by the Russian officer standing next to him. The gun went off. The bullet zipped through the window, across the courtyard, into another office and past the nose of Minister of Internal Security, Modrilensky.

Modrilensky shouted for his guards while his aide pointed out the window and yelled, "The shot came from Bushmilov's office. See! The glass is broken in his window!"

Modrilensky paled. "Bushmilov? My truest comrade? Who is there to trust? This I expect from that filthy plotter, Berjanian! Or that sneak, Lemchovsky, or Kamashev. And Gorshkinets and that babyface, Konevets; they do not fool me, I assure you! They would all like to denounce me and steal my job! And the others! I know them all, every last one of them and I'll deal with them, they'll see! But Bushmilov!"

Several guards with submachine guns burst into the room. "Those windows!" Modrilensky screamed. "Shoot them! Kill the deviationist plotters!"

The guards were uncertain which windows Modrilensky was indicating with his wildly waving arms but they had no intention of risking the displeasure of the top man of the MVD. They tentatively sprayed all the windows around the courtyard with bullets and when they received no censure from their chief they went at it with gusto. Modrilensky was too busy shouting orders to other guards to give them any further attention. The sound of the firing was assurance enough that his orders were being obeyed. By the time he had dispatched men to get Bushmilov and neutralize other potential plotters the occupants of most of the offices overlooking the courtyard were crouched at the windows, shooting indiscriminately at each other.

"I can't believe it about Bushmilov," Modrilensky shouted to his aide over the din.

"You know he was at the Kremlin yesterday with Shaposnik," the aide shouted back. "And you know how close Shaposnik is to the Premier. Maybe they have discovered our plan and Bushmilov, as your successor, was ordered to liquidate you!"

Modrilensky slapped his forehead. "Of course! We must act at once! Send our man to Marshal Mazianko and tell him it is time. He must get his trusted troops into the city before the others suspect what is happening, especially that Kamashev."

Major Kamashev of the MVD put in a hasty call to the Minister of Transport. "I am forced to phone because of a sudden emergency. Modrilensky must have gotten wind of our plans. His men are besieging my office. You must get General Kodorovich to move his men into the city at once! And watch out for the Foreign Minister. I think he and Lemachovsky are up to something."

Major Lemachovsky of the MVD was listening to the Foreign Minister. "The Premier has ordered the arrest of the Minister of Heavy Industry for plotting with General Plekoskaya to bring in troops to seize the government. As soon as General Zenovlov arrives with his troops and we are in control, I will teach these vile counterrevolutionaries that they cannot plot against the party and the people with impunity! And be careful! I think the Minister of Hydroelectric Power is involved with your Colonel Berjanian."

Colonel Berjanian of the MVD was shouting into the phone. "Why can't I get the Minister of Hydroelectric Power? If you don't want a vacation in Siberia, you had better get my call through!"

"I'm sorry, Comrade Colonel," the harried operator whined, "but it isn't my fault. Can I help it if all of Moscow decides to use the telephones all at once? The lines are still tied up. I will keep trying, Com--"

Berjanian slammed down the phone just as an aide rushed in. "Colonel, I have good news! Our men have gained control of most of the immediate hallway and we have captured the lavatory from Captain Konevets!"

"Wonderful!" Berjanian beamed as he hastily left the room.

* * * * *

General Kodorovich's command car rattled and bounced along the rough shoulder of the highway past his stalled 71st Motorized Infantry Division. He found the van of his column tangled with the rear of the 124th Armored Division under General Plekoskaya. Kodorovich sought out Plekoskaya and found him at table under some trees having a fine lunch.

"Would you mind getting your army out of the way," General Kodorovich said to General Plekoskaya. "I have emergency orders to proceed immediately to Moscow."

"So have I," Plekoskaya replied, wiping his lips. "Won't you join me for lunch?"

"I haven't time!" Kodorovich snapped, glaring accusingly at the roast fowl and wine on the white linen.

"Oh but you have, my dear Kodorovich," Plekoskaya said pleasantly. "You see, neither of us is going anywhere for the moment. There's a brigade of the 48th blocking the road ahead."

"The 48th from Kiev?" Kodorovich exclaimed. "What is a brigade of the 48th doing up here?"

"Looking for its sister brigades from which it was separated when the 116th Mechanized, in its hurry to reach Moscow, cut through their column."

"The 116th Mechanized?" Kodorovich exclaimed again. He wanted to stop talking in questions but all this was coming so fast and unexpectedly.

"Don't even inquire of me about them," Plekoskaya said, shuddering. "They are so disorganized and tangled with two other armored divisions whose designations I don't even know. It all happened because they were trying to outrace each other to the trunk highway and they arrived at the intersection almost simultaneously. You can't possibly imagine the hideous clatter when you have two stubborn armored divisions and an obstinate mechanized one all trying to occupy the same road at once. I could hear it all the way back here." Plekoskaya belched delicately. "General, do wash off the dust of the road and join me at table."

[Illustration]

"No thank you. If that's all the delay is, it should be cleared soon and we'll be moving again. I'll want to be with my division."

"General Kodorovich, you evidently don't understand what has happened. The word that has been passed from the most forward units, which are in the city itself, to the rear ones, indicates that Moscow is the hub of one vast military traffic jam thirty to perhaps fifty miles deep and growing worse all the time as new groups are moving in."

"But I must get to the city," Kodorovich insisted. "I have orders to surround the Kremlin, seal off MVD headquarters and--"

"Ease your mind," Plekoskaya interrupted. "The Kremlin is well surrounded. General Smolledin is deployed around the walls; General Alexeiev is deployed around General Smolledin; General Paretsev is deployed around Alexeiev and so on to the outskirts of the city. Those of us out here, of course, cannot deploy off the roads, for, who knows, tomorrow the Minister of Agriculture may be Premier and he may not take it kindly if we trample the collectives."

"How can you just sit there and do nothing when the people's government is in some kind of danger?" Kodorovich said with some heat.

"It is very simple," Plekoskaya said with mild irritation and sarcasm. "I merely bend at the knees and hips and have a lunch of a weight adequate enough to keep me from floating off my chair and rushing about seeking trouble. Of course it takes years of experience to learn how to do this and most important, when." In kindlier tones Plekoskaya continued. "Whatever it is that is happening in the Kremlin and the other hotbeds of intrigue will have to happen without us. There is no telling who, if anyone, is in control. Conflicting orders have been coming over the military radio depending upon which clique controls which headquarters. Why do you know, my dear Kodorovich, already this morning the 124th has alternately been ordered to march to Moscow and a dozen other places including downtown Siberia."

Kodorovich did not smile at Plekoskaya's slight humor. He was squinting anxiously through the bright sunlight at the immobile column of men and vehicles jammed along the road into the far, blue distance.

* * * * *

Plekoskaya took a sip of wine. "There is obviously some kind of political readjustment going on within the government and the unpleasant thing about these little disturbances is that one can never be certain who will emerge to inform the people that he is their unanimous choice for leader. So don't be in so much of a hurry to rush off to Moscow to commit yourself. You might pick the wrong one."

Kodorovich shrugged and sat down at the table. "Perhaps you are right. Do you have any idea who is involved this time?"

"Who isn't involved?" Plekoskaya snorted. "You and I know, as sensible men must, that in our milieu there are at any given moment thousands of intrigues and plots and counterplots simmering away in the Party halls, the ministries, the barracks and anywhere else you care to look. Of course it is treason, don't misunderstand, general, but most of it is really quite harmless. It is the national pastime of the power elite; a sort of political mah-jongg and most of these little bubbling kettles cool and sour from inaction. However, this time, it is evident that some drastic catalyst has caused a most violent reaction of these subversive ingredients and the incredible, one in a million possibility has occurred. All the pots are suddenly, all at once, boiling over ... erupting into action!

"By the way," Plekoskaya continued with a smile, "you might be interested to know that when I reach Moscow I am supposed to relieve you of command of the 71st and place you under arrest for unsocialistic activities."

Kodorovich, looking dazed, took a glass of wine. "Who signed your orders?"

"Major Lemchovsky of the MVD."

Kodorovich smiled for the first time since they had met under the trees. "I have orders for your arrest also, to take effect when we reach Moscow; signed by Major Kamashev, MVD."

"I'm sorry," Plekoskaya said, "but you will have to wait your turn. The commanders of the 116th and the 48th are both ahead of you."

Kodorovich suddenly stood up frowning and stared around at the fields where the peasants were working. "I don't like the way those people keep glancing at the troops and snickering. I can hear some of their remarks."

"Don't trouble yourself about it. They've been doing it all morning. It's only good-natured jesting."

"It breeds disrespect of the Army. And disrespect of authority is the first step on the road to anarchy," Kodorovich said severely.

"Well at least that's a movement to somewhere," Plekoskaya said. "Can you blame them for smiling? That's the 124th, the famous 'lightning' division, that's been glued to the road in front of them for the past six hours. In that time it has moved perhaps a hundred or so feet and I suspect it is only because your 71st is very ill-manneredly pushing from behind."

"I still don't like their smirking."

Plekoskaya became suddenly solemn. "It is when they begin to laugh openly that we should become concerned."

* * * * *

"How did you get the American lieutenant out of Moscow?" Colonel Peng's superior was asking him.

"Bushmilov was conducting the interrogation," Colonel Peng replied, "when suddenly somebody started shooting through the window from another office across the way. I heard Bushmilov yell something about plotters and counterrevolutionaries and he and his men started shooting back. Within minutes the entire building was like a battlefield. In the confusion we snatched the American and hustled him away. The corridors were full of groups of MVD men running and shooting and I have no idea what it was all about but whatever it was it didn't affect us for we were allowed to pass unmolested. We managed to escape stray bullets and get out of the building with whole skins to our embassy.

"Getting out of Moscow was the real problem. Within hours the city was clogged with troops. Slowly, as supplies were choked off by the congestion, offices and factories and shops closed down and the people were on the streets strolling about as if on holiday, laughing and joking about the tangle of tanks and vehicles and military equipment that was effectively strangling the city.

"It appears that not even the highest officers and officials were making any effort to clear up the mess. Each one seemed to be afraid to take any responsibility beyond the last coherent orders that had brought practically the entire army converging on Moscow.

"We tried to get out by air but that proved impossible. All civil flights were canceled so that the fields could accommodate the armadas of military aircraft that swarmed into the area. We couldn't even get a wireless message out because of the spreading chaos. We had to proceed out of the city on foot and by then affairs were beginning to take an ugly turn. Food supplies were becoming exhausted and as long as the military refused to budge nothing could be brought in, even their own supplies. Once out of the city we took to the river. No one attempted to stop us but neither did any official attempt to help their Chinese comrades. The curious paralysis had spread. It was as if the entire countryside was holding its breath, waiting for some positive sign of authority. In Gorki, where there was less air-congestion, we managed to steal a plane and flew it to Finland. The rest you know."

Peng's superior nodded. "Our Russian friends are losing their grip. That is because they do not practice pure Communism. Upon China now falls the mantle of leadership of the people's republics as we knew, long before, it was destined to be." He rose from behind his desk. "Come, let us now turn our attention to this strange American lieutenant and see how the interrogation is proceeding."

As Peng and his chief stepped into the hallway, they heard a shattering of glass and a cry of pain from a room at the far end of the hallway.

"It sounds like someone falling through a window!" Peng exclaimed.

His chief's face was shadowed with a momentary irritation. "If that is another one of my men having a foolish accident--"

"What do you mean?" Peng inquired.

"Mean?" his chief repeated in exasperation. "I'll tell you what I mean. Since this interrogation started four of my men have injured themselves in silly, stupid accidents; like the captain who fell off his chair and broke his leg. If I didn't know my men, I would swear that they had all been drinking!"

There was a sudden, single shot. They hurried along the hall but before they could reach the room at the end they had to drop to the floor to escape the fusillade of bullets that whined down the corridor.

* * * * *

In the great Operations Room of the Pentagon, the uppermost echelons of the American General Staff glared at Dr. Titus whose civilian presence was defiling this military "holy of holies."

An admiral, sitting next to General Fyfe, banged his fist on the table and almost shouted at Titus. "So you're one of the idiots who's been advising the President not to let us commit our forces in Afghanistan. Do you realize the Russians will--"

Titus appealed to the Chairman of the General Staff. "Do I or do I not have the floor? Hm-m-m?" Reluctantly, the chairman restored order and motioned Titus to continue. "It is true that the President has been persuaded to not commit the United States to any further military adventures until we have given a plan of mine some little time to take effect. Gentlemen, we have in operation a secret weapon that, if all goes well, will make any future military undertakings unnecessary and bring about the destruction of our enemies." At the mention of "secret weapon," the entire General Staff, excepting Fyfe, creaked forward in their seats with eager interest. "The secret weapon is an eighteen-year-old boy named Dolliver Wims, recently commissioned a lieutenant in the Army and now in Russian hands."

An avalanche of derisive remarks concerning his sanity roared down on Titus but he ignored them and continued. "Wims came to work for us last spring and nothing in his manner or appearance indicated that he was in any way unusual. However, he had hardly been with us a month before complaints from my staff started flooding my office. Our accident rate soared skyward and all staff fingers pointed at Wims. I investigated and discovered that in spite of the accusations Wims was never directly involved in these mishaps. He was present when they occurred, yes, but he never pushed or bumped anyone or dropped anything or even fingered anything he wasn't supposed to and yet in the face of this fact, almost everyone, including my most dispassionate researchers, invariably blamed Wims. Finding this extremely odd, I kept the boy on and under various subterfuges I probed, tested and observed him without his knowledge.

"Then one day I became annoyed with him; without just cause I must admit, merely because I was not getting any positive results; and I handled him rather roughly. Within seconds I sliced open a finger. My irritation mounted and later I went to shove him rudely aside and down I went, giving my head a nasty crack on the edge of a lab bench. I felt wonderful as I sat in pain on the floor, sopping the blood out of my eyes. With the blow an idea had come to me and I felt I at last knew what Wims was and the factor that triggered his dangerous potential. For weeks afterward, under carefully controlled conditions, I was as nasty to him as I dared be. It took my most delicate judgment to avoid fatal injury but I managed to document the world's first known accident prone inducer. I call him Homo Causacadere, the fall causer, whose activator is hostility.

"We have always had the accident prone, the person who has a psychological proclivity for having more than his share of mishaps. Wims is an individual who can make an accident prone of anyone who threatens his well being and survival. This boy, who, as indicated by the tests, hasn't an unkind thought for any creature on this planet, has an unconscious, reactive, invulnerable defense against persons who exhibit even the slightest hostility toward him. The energies of their own hostility are turned against them. The greater the hostility, the more accidents they have and the more serious they become. And the increase in accidents gives rise to an increase in hostility and so it goes in an ever widening circle of dislocation and destruction.

"As a scientist I would have preferred to take the many months, perhaps years, necessary to investigate this phenomenon thoroughly, however these are critical times and I was possessed with an inspired idea on how we might utilize this phenomenon against the enemies of the free world. Through a colleague on the Scientific Advisory Council I got the President's ear and he decided to let us try, on the basis, I'm certain, that the best way to handle screwball scientists is to allow them one or two harmless, inexpensive insanities in the hope that they will make an error and discover something useful.

"Through the good offices of General Fyfe, who was apprised of our plan, Wims was snatched into the Army, commissioned and sent to Burma to be captured. Intelligence advises that he has been taken to Moscow which is for him, an American officer ostensibly on a secret mission, the most hostile environment extant." Titus shook his head. "I suppose I should feel sorry for those poor Russians. They don't have a chance."

"Sorry for them!" Fyfe blustered. "Think what I've had to go through. Those ridiculous orders; couldn't explain to anyone. All my people think that I've lost my mind. Felt like a fool giving that idiot a battlefield commission during a training exercise."

"It was necessary to give him some rank," Titus explained. "The Communists wouldn't expect a private to be sent on a secret mission; they just wouldn't bother to interrogate him. Now an officer, whose return was specially requested the day following his capture would seize their attention and surely they would apply their nasty pressures to find out why. He hasn't been returned through the regular monthly exchange and they even deny having captured him which seems to indicate that the plan is working."

An admiral stirred and shifted under his crust of gold. "How long have they had him?"

"Six weeks."

"And nothing's happened yet," the admiral commented. "My guess is that we could sit here for six years and nothing would come of such a barnacle-brained scheme."

An Air Force general spoke up in the breezy jargon of the youngest service. "I'm with the old man from the sea on this one," he said as the admiral winced. "I just don't see spending billions for alphabet bombs and then warming our tails on them while these psycho-noseys move in and try to fight these sand-lot wars with voodoo and all that jazz."

* * * * *

An aide hurried in from the adjoining message center and handed the chairman a paper. Everybody waited in silence while the chairman seemed to take an unusually long time to read it. Finally he looked up and said. "This is a special relay from the President's office and since it concerns us all I'll read it aloud." He held the paper up and read, "Apropos of your present conference with Dr. Titus, it may please the General Staff to learn that the Russian Communist Party newspaper, Pravda, has just denounced the newspaper of the Red Army, Izvestia, as a tool of the decadent, warmongering, capitalist ruling circles of the imperialist Western bloc. Other evidence of severe internal upheaval of a nature favorable to the West is pouring in through news channels and being confirmed by State and CIA sources. Congratulations, Dr. Titus."

Dr. Titus arose with unconcealed triumph. "Gentlemen, apparently my hypothesis is correct. The disintegration that will crumble our enemies has already begun. Our secret weapon is a stunning success!"

The crusted admiral looked sourly at Titus. "Of course you're only assuming that this Wims person is responsible. We'll never really know."

"Why won't we?" Titus demanded. "You speak of him as if he were dead or doomed and I tell you he is no such thing. Don't you understand? He cannot be harmed! And when he gets back here, as he will, he'll tell us himself exactly what and how it happened."

The aide rushed in with another message. "Again from the President," he announced. "It has been confirmed by CIA," he began reading aloud, "that two weeks ago a group of Chinese officials in a Russian aircraft landed at a Finnish airfield. It is now known definitely that an ostensibly ill member of their group who was put aboard their plane in a stretcher was in reality a young American officer. Among other things, this explains the eighteen contradictory Five Year Plans announced by Peiping this week. CIA says they are going the way of the Russians. Again congratulations, Dr. Titus."

"Well, General Fyfe," Titus said, smiling at him, "perhaps you now feel somewhat differently about this Wims business, hm-m-m?"

Fyfe roared, unable to contain himself any longer: "Do you really believe that rot you've been feeding us? You have the audacity to credit yourself with the downfall of two powerful nations, even if it does happen? You think your insane ditherings about an incompetent halfwit has anything to do with anything? You may have bamboozled the President, after all he's only a civilian, but you're not about to fool me! These are perilous times and I have no use for you professors and your crazy, useless theories. Now why don't you get out of here and let us do our job, trying to keep this planet from blowing up in our faces!"

For the first time in his life Dr. Titus flew into an unreasoning fury. How could this fat, uniformed mountain of stupidity still contrive to deny the facts and dare speak to him the way he did? And after what he had just accomplished! His rage boiled over and Titus rushed at Fyfe, his fist already striking ahead. He never touched the general. Unaccountably he got tangled in his own legs and fell heavily to the floor. When he tried to rise hot pain burned in his ankle. He sat there staring up in astonishment at Fyfe, hulking over him.

It had happened so swiftly no one had yet spoken or moved.

"YOU!" Titus screeched incredulously, pointing directly at Fyfe. "You of all people!" And Titus sat there on the floor rubbing his injured ankle and he laughed and laughed till the tears came.

THE END

Contents

THE STAR HYACINTHS

By JAMES H. SCHMITZ

On a bleak, distant unchartered world two ships lay wrecked and a lone man stared at a star hyacinth. Its brilliance burned into his retina ... and he knew that men could easily kill and kill for that one beauty alone.

The robbery of the Dosey Asteroids Shipping Station in a remote and spottily explored section of space provided the newscasting systems of the Federation of the Hub with one of the juiciest crime stories of the season. In a manner not clearly explained, the Dosey Asteroids Company had lost six months' production of gem-quality cut star hyacinths valued at nearly a hundred million credits. It lost also its Chief Lapidary and seventy-eight other company employees who had been in the station dome at the time.

All these people appeared at first to have been killed by gunfire, but a study of their bodies revealed that only in a few instances had gun wounds been the actual cause of death. For the most part the wounds had been inflicted on corpses, presumably in an attempt to conceal the fact that disaster in another and unknown form had befallen the station.

The raiders left very few clues. It appeared that the attack on the station had been carried out by a single ship, and that the locks to the dome had been opened from within. The latter fact, of course, aroused speculation, but led the investigators nowhere.

Six years later the great Dosey Asteroids robbery remained an unsolved mystery.

* * * * *

The two wrecked spaceships rested almost side by side near the tip of a narrow, deep arm of a great lake.

The only man on the planet sat on a rocky ledge three miles uphill from the two ships, gazing broodingly down at them. He was a big fellow in neatly patched shipboard clothing. His hands were clean, his face carefully shaved. He had two of the castaway's traditional possessions with him; a massive hunting bow rested against the rocks, and a minor representative of the class of life which was this world's equivalent of birds was hopping about near his feet. This was a thrush-sized creature with a jaunty bearing and bright yellow eyes. From the front of its round face protruded a short, narrow tube tipped with small, sharp teeth. Round, horny knobs at the ends of its long toes protected retractile claws as it bounded back and forth between the bow and the man, giving a quick flutter of its wings on each bound. Finally it stopped before the man, stretching its neck to stare up at him, trying to catch his attention.

He roused from his musing, glanced irritably down at it.

"Not now, Birdie," he said. "Keep quiet!"

The man's gaze returned to the two ships, then passed briefly along a towering range of volcanos on the other side of the lake, and lifted to the cloudless blue sky. His eyes probed on, searching the sunlit, empty vault above him. If a ship ever came again, it would come from there, the two wrecks by the lake arm already fixed in its detectors; it would not come gliding along the surface of the planet....

Birdie produced a sharp, plaintive whistle. The man looked at it.

"Shut up, stupid!" he told it.

He reached into the inner pocket of his coat, took out a small object wrapped in a piece of leather, and unfolded the leather.

Then it lay in his cupped palm, and blazed with the brilliance of twenty diamonds, seeming to flash the fires of the spectrum furiously from every faceted surface, without ever quite subduing the pure violet luminance which made a star hyacinth impossible to imitate or, once seen, to forget. The most beautiful of gems, the rarest, the most valuable. The man who was a castaway stared at it for long seconds, his breath quickening and his hand beginning to tremble. Finally he folded the chip of incredible mineral back into the leather, replaced it carefully in his pocket.

When he looked about again, the sunlit air seemed brighter, the coloring of lake and land more vivid and alive. Once during each of this world's short days, but no oftener, he permitted himself to look at the star hyacinth. It was a ritual adhered to with almost religious strictness, and it had kept him as sane as he was ever likely to be again, for over six years.

It might, he sometimes thought, keep him sane until a third ship presently came along to this place. And then ...

The third ship was coming along at the moment, still some five hours' flight out from the system. She was a small ship with lean, rakish lines, a hot little speedster, gliding placidly through subspace just now, her engines throttled down.

Aboard her, things were less peaceful.

* * * * *

The girl was putting up a pretty good fight but getting nowhere with it against the bull-necked Fleetman who had her pinned back against the wall.

Wellan Dasinger paused in momentary indecision at the entrance to the half-darkened control section of the speedboat. The scuffle in there very probably was none of his business. The people of the roving Independent Fleets had their own practices and mores and resented interference from uninformed planet dwellers. For all Dasinger knew, their blue-eyed lady pilot enjoyed roughhousing with the burly members of her crew. If the thing wasn't serious....

He heard the man rap out something in the Willata Fleet tongue, following the words up with a solid thump of his fist into the girl's side. The thump hadn't been playful, and her sharp gasp of pain indicated no enjoyment whatever. Dasinger stepped quickly into the room.

He saw the girl turn startled eyes toward him as he came up behind the man. The man was Liu Taunus, the bigger of the two crew members ... too big and too well muscled by a good deal, in fact, to make a sportsmanlike suggestion to divert his thumpings to Dasinger look like a sensible approach. Besides Dasinger didn't know the Willata Fleet's language. The edge of his hand slashed twice from behind along the thick neck; then his fist brought the breath whistling from Taunus's lungs before the Fleetman had time to turn fully towards him.

It gave Dasinger a considerable starting advantage. During the next twenty seconds or so the advantage seemed to diminish rapidly. Taunus's fists and boots had scored only near misses so far, but he began to look like the hardest big man to chop down Dasinger had yet run into. And then the Fleetman was suddenly sprawling on the floor, face down, arms flung out limply, a tough boy with a thoroughly bludgeoned nervous system.

Dasinger was straightening up when he heard the thunk of the wrench. He turned sharply, discovered first the girl standing ten feet away with the wrench in her raised hand, next their second crew member lying on the carpet between them, finally the long, thin knife lying near the man's hand.

"Thanks, Miss Mines!" he said, somewhat out of breath. "I really should have remembered Calat might be somewhere around."

Duomart Mines gestured with her head at the adjoining control cabin. "He was in there," she said, also breathlessly. She was a long-legged blonde with a limber way of moving, pleasing to look at in her shaped Fleet uniform, though with somewhat aloof and calculating eyes. In the dim light of the room she seemed to be studying Dasinger now with an expression somewhere between wariness and surprised speculation. Then, as he took a step forward to check on Calat's condition, she backed off slightly, half lifting the wrench again.

Dasinger stopped and looked at her. "Well," he said, "make up your mind! Whose side are you on here?"

Miss Mines hesitated, let the wrench down. "Yours, I guess," she acknowledged. "I'd better be, now! They'd murder me for helping a planeteer."

* * * * *

Dasinger went down on one knee beside Calat, rather cautiously though the Fleetman wasn't stirring, and picked up the knife. Miss Mines turned up the room's lights. Dasinger asked, "What was this ... a mutiny? You're technically in charge of the ship, aren't you?"

"Technically," she agreed, added, "We were arguing about a Fleet matter."

"I see. We'll call it mutiny." Dasinger checked to be sure Calat wasn't faking unconsciousness. He inquired, "Do you really need these boys to help you?"

Duomart Mines shook her blond head. "Not at all. Flying the Mooncat is a one-man job."

"I did have a feeling," Dasinger admitted, "that Willata's Fleet was doing a little featherbedding when they said I'd have to hire a crew of three to go along with their speedboat."

"Uh-huh." Her tone was non-committal. "They were. What are you going to do with them?"

"Anywhere they can be locked up safely?"

"Not safely. Their own cabin's as good as anything. They can batter their way out of here if they try hard enough. Of course we'd hear them doing it."

"Well, we can fix that." Dasinger stood up, fished his cabin key out of a pocket and gave it to her. "Tan suitcase standing at the head of my bunk," he said. "Mind bringing that and the little crane from the storeroom up here?"

Neither of the Fleetmen had begun to stir when Duomart Mines came riding a gravity crane back in through the door a couple of minutes later, the suitcase dangling in front of her. She halted the crane in the center of the room, slid out of its saddle with a supple twist of her body, and handed Dasinger his cabin key.

"Thanks." Dasinger took the suitcase from the crane, unlocked and opened it. He brought out a pair of plastic handcuffs, aware that Miss Mines stood behind him making an intent scrutiny of what could be seen of the suitcase's contents. He didn't blame her for feeling curious; she was looking at a variety of devices which might have delighted the eyes of both a professional burglar and military spy. She offered no comment.

Neither did Dasinger. He hauled Liu Taunus over on his back, fastened handcuffs about the Fleetman's wrists, then rolled him over on his face again. He did the same for Calat, hung the suitcase back in the crane, slung a leg across the crane's saddle and settled into it.

Miss Mines remarked, "I'd look their cabin over pretty closely for guns and so on before leaving them there."

"I intend to. By the way, has Dr. Egavine mentioned how close we are to our destination?" Dasinger maneuvered the crane over to Taunus, lowered a beam to the small of the Fleetman's back and hoisted him up carefully, arms, head and legs dangling.

The blond girl checked her watch. "He didn't tell me exactly," she said, "but there's what seems to be a terraprox in the G2 system ahead. If that's it, we'll get there in around five hours depending on what subspace conditions in the system are. Dr. Egavine's due up here in thirty minutes to give me the final figures." She paused, added curiously, "Don't you know yourself just where we're going?"

"No," Dasinger said. "I'm financing the trip. The doctor is the man with the maps and other pertinent information."

"I thought you were partners."

"We are. Dr. Egavine is taciturn about some things. I'll bring him back here with me as soon as I have these two locked away." Dasinger finished picking up Calat, swung the crane slowly towards the door, the unconscious Fleetmen suspended ahead of him.

* * * * *

Dr. Egavine stood at the open door to his stateroom as Dasinger came walking back up the passage from the crew quarters and the storage. Quist, the doctor's manservant, peered out of the stateroom behind him.

"What in heaven's name were you doing with those two men?" Egavine inquired, twitching his eyebrows disapprovingly up and down. The doctor was a tall, thin man in his forties, dressed habitually in undertaker black, with bony features and intense dark eyes. He added, "They appeared to be unconscious ... and fettered!"

"They were both," Dasinger admitted. "I've confined them to their cabin."

"Why?"

"We had a little slugfest in the control section a few minutes ago. One of the boys was beating around on our pilot, so I laid him out, and she laid out the other one when he tried to get into the act with a knife. She says the original dispute was a Fleet matter ... in other words, none of our business. However, I don't know. There's something decidedly fishy about the situation."

"In what way?" Egavine asked.

Dasinger said, "I checked over the crew quarters for weapons just now and found something which suggests that Willata's Fleet is much more interested in what we're doing out here than we thought."

Egavine looked startled, peered quickly along the passage to the control section. "I feel," he said, lowering his voice, "that we should continue this discussion behind closed doors...."

"All right." Quist, a bandy-legged, wiry little man with a large bulb of a nose and close-set, small eyes, moved back from the door. Dasinger went inside. Egavine pulled the door shut behind them and drew a chair out from the cabin table. Dasinger sat down opposite him.

"What did you find?" Dr. Egavine asked.

Dasinger said, "You know Miss Mines is supposed to be the only Fleet member on board who speaks the Federation's translingue. However, there was a listening device attached to the inside of the cabin communicator in the crew quarters. Its settings show that the Willata Fleet people have bugged each of the Mooncat's other cabins, and also--which I think is an interesting point--the control section. Have you and Quist discussed our project in any detail since coming aboard?"

"I believe we did, on several occasions," Egavine said hesitantly.

"Then we'd better assume Taunus and Calat knew that we're looking for the wreck of the Dosey Asteroids raider, and ..."

Egavine put a cautioning finger to his lips. "Should we...?"

"Oh, no harm in talking now," Dasinger assured him. "I pulled the instrument out and dropped it in my cabin. Actually, the thing needn't be too serious if we stay on guard. But of course we shouldn't go back to the Fleet station after we have the stuff. Gadgetry of that kind suggests bad intentions ... also a rather sophisticated level of criminality for an I-Fleet. We'll return directly to the Hub. We might have to go on short rations for a few weeks, but we'll make it. And we'll keep those two so-called crew members locked up."

The doctor cleared his throat. "Miss Mines ..."

"She doesn't appear to be personally involved in any piratical schemes," Dasinger said. "Otherwise they wouldn't have bugged her cabin and the control rooms. If we dangle a few star hyacinths before her eyes, she should be willing to fly us back. If she balks, I think I can handle the Mooncat well enough to get us there."

Dr. Egavine tugged pensively at his ear lobe. "I see." His hand moved on toward his right coat lapel. "What do you think of ..."

"Mind watching this for a moment, doctor?" Dasinger interrupted. He nodded at his own hand lying on the table before him.

"Watch...?" Egavine began questioningly. Then his eyes went wide with alarm.

Dasinger's hand had turned suddenly sideways from the wrist, turned up again. There was a small gun in the hand now, its stubby muzzle pointing up steadily at Egavine's chest.

"Dasinger! What does ..."

"Neat trick, eh?" Dasinger commented. "Sleeve gun. Now keep quiet and hold everything just as it is. If you move or Quist over there moves before I tell you to, you've had it, doctor!"

* * * * *

He reached across the table with his left hand, slipped it beneath Egavine's right coat lapel, tugged sharply at something in there, and brought out a flat black pouch with a tiny spray needle projecting from it. He dropped the pouch in his pocket, said, "Keep your seat, doctor," stood up and went over to Quist. Quist darted an anxious glance at his employer, and made a whimpering sound in his throat.

"You're not getting hurt," Dasinger told him. "Just put your hands on top of your head and stand still. Now let's take a look at the thing you started to pull from your pocket a moment ago ... Electric stunsap, eh? That wasn't very nice of you, Quist! Let's see what else--

"Good Lord, Egavine," he announced presently, "your boy's a regular armory! Two blasters, a pencil-beam, a knife, and the sap ... All right, Quist. Go over and sit down with the doctor." He watched the little man move dejectedly to the table, then fitted the assorted lethal devices carefully into one of his coat pockets, brought the pouch he had taken from Egavine out of the other pocket.

"Now, doctor," he said, "let's talk. I'm unhappy about this. I discovered you were carrying this thing around before we left Mezmiali, and I had a sample of its contents analyzed. I was told it's a hypnotic with an almost instantaneous effect both at skin contact and when inhaled. Care to comment?"

"I do indeed!" Egavine said frigidly. "I have no intention of denying that the instrument is a hypnotic spray. As you know, I dislike guns and similar weapons, and we are engaged in a matter in which the need to defend myself against a personal attack might arise. Your assumption, however, that I intended to employ the spray on you just now is simply ridiculous!"

"I might be chuckling myself," Dasinger said, "if Quist hadn't had the sap halfway out of his pocket as soon as you reached for your lapel. If I'd ducked from the spray, I'd have backed into the sap, right? There's a little too much at stake here, doctor. You may be telling the truth, but just in case you're nourishing unfriendly ideas--and that's what it looks like to me--I'm taking a few precautions."

Dr. Egavine stared at him, his mouth set in a thin, bitter line. Then he asked, "What kind of precautions?"

Dasinger said, "I'll keep the hypnotic and Quist's bag of dirty tricks until we land. You might need those things on the planet but you don't need them on shipboard. You and I'll go up to the control section now to give Miss Mines her final flight directions. After that, you and Quist stay in this cabin with the door locked until the ship has set down. I don't want to have anything else to worry about while we're making the approach. If my suspicions turn out to be unjustified, I'll apologize ... after we're all safely back in the Hub."

* * * * *

"What was your partner looking so sour about?" Duomart Mines inquired a little later, her eyes on the flight screens. "Have a quarrel with him?"

Dasinger, standing in the entry to the little control cabin across from her, shrugged his shoulders.

"Not exactly," he said. "Egavine tried to use a hypno spray on me."

"Hypno spray?" the young woman asked.

"A chemical which induces an instantaneous hypnotic trance in people. Leaves them wide open to suggestion. Medical hypnotists make a lot of use of it. So do criminals."

She turned away from the control console to look at him. "Why would your partner want to hypnotize you?"

"I don't know," Dasinger said. "He hasn't admitted that he intended to do it."

"Is he a criminal?"

"I wouldn't say he isn't," Dasinger observed judiciously, "but I couldn't prove it."

Duomart puckered her lips, staring at him thoughtfully. "What about yourself?" she asked.

"No, Miss Mines, I have a very high regard for the law. I'm a simple businessman."

"A simple businessman who flies his own cruiser four weeks out from the Hub into I-Fleet territory?"

"That's the kind of business I'm in," Dasinger explained. "I own a charter ship company."

"I see," she said. "Well, you two make an odd pair of partners...."

"I suppose we do. Incidentally, has there been any occasion when you and Dr. Egavine--or you and Dr. Egavine and his servant--were alone somewhere in the ship together? For example, except when we came up here to give you further flight instructions, did he ever enter the control room?"

She shook her blond head. "No. Those are the only times I've seen him."

"Certain of that?" he asked.

Duomart nodded without hesitation. "Quite certain!"

Dasinger took an ointment tube from his pocket, removed its cap, squeezed a drop of black, oily substance out on a fingertip. "Mind rolling up your sleeve a moment?" he asked. "Just above the elbow...."

"What for?"

"It's because of the way those hypno sprays work," Dasinger said. "Give your victim a dose of the stuff, tell him what to do, and it usually gets done. And if you're being illegal about it, one of the first things you tell him to do is to forget he's ever been sprayed. This goop is designed for the specific purpose of knocking out hypnotic commands. Just roll up your sleeve like a good girl now, and I'll rub a little of it on your arm."

"You're not rubbing anything on my arm, mister!" Duomart told him coldly.

Dasinger shrugged resignedly, recapped the tube, and dropped it in his pocket. "Have it your way then," he remarked. "I was only ..."

He lunged suddenly towards her.

Duomart gave him quite a struggle. A minute or two later, he had her down on the floor, her body and one arm clamped between his knees, while he unzipped the cuff on the sleeve of the other arm and pulled the sleeve up. He brought out the tube of antihypno ointment and rubbed a few drops of the ointment into the hollow of Duomart's elbow, put the tube back in his pocket, then went on holding her down for nearly another minute. She was gasping for breath, blue eyes furious, muscles tensed.

* * * * *

Suddenly he felt her relax. An expression of stunned surprise appeared on her face. "Why," she began incredulously, "he did ..."

"Gave you the spray treatment, eh?" Dasinger said, satisfied. "I was pretty sure he had."

"Why, that-- At his beck and call, he says! Well, we'll just see about ... let me up, Dasinger! Just wait till I get my hands on that bony partner of yours!"

"Now take it easy."

"Take it easy! Why should I? I ..."

"It would be better," Dasinger explained, "if Egavine believes you're still under the influence."

She scowled up at him; then her face turned thoughtful. "Ho! You feel it isn't that he's a depraved old goat, that he's got something more sinister in mind?"

"It's a definite possibility. Why not wait and find out? The ointment will immunize you against further tricks."

Miss Mines regarded him consideringly for a few seconds, then nodded. "All right! You can let me up now. What do you think he's planning?"

"Not easy to say with Dr. Egavine. He's a devious man." Dasinger got himself disentangled, came to his feet, and reached down to help her scramble up.

"They certainly wrap you up with that hypno stuff, don't they!" she observed wonderingly.

Dasinger nodded. "They certainly do!" Then he added, "I'm keeping the doctor and his little sidekick locked up, too, until we get to the planet. That leaves you and me with the run of the ship."

Duomart looked at him. "So it does," she agreed.

"Know how to use a gun?"

"Of course. But I'm not allow-- I don't have one with me on this trip."

* * * * *

He reached into his coat, took out a small gun in a fabric holster. Duomart glanced at it, then her eyes went back to his face.

"Might clip it to your belt," Dasinger said. "It's a good little shocker, fifty-foot range, safe for shipboard use. It's got a full load, eighty shots. We may or may not run into emergencies. If we don't, you'll still be more comfortable carrying it."

Duomart holstered the gun and attached the holster to her belt. She slid the tip of her tongue reflectively out between her lips, drew it back, blinked at the flight screens for a few seconds, then looked across at Dasinger and tapped the holster at her side.

"That sort of changes things, too!" she said.

"Changes what?"

"Tell you in a minute. Sit down, Dasinger. Manual course corrections coming up...." She slid into the pilot seat, moved her hands out over the controls, and appeared to forget about him.

Dasinger settled into a chair to her left, lit a cigarette, smoked and watched her, glancing occasionally at the screens. She was jockeying the Mooncat deftly in and out of the fringes of a gravitic stress knot, presently brought it into the clear, slapped over a direction lever and slid the palm of her right hand along a row of speed control buttons depressing them in turn.

* * * * *

"Nice piece of piloting," Dasinger observed.

Duomart lifted one shoulder in a slight shrug. "That's my job." Her face remained serious. "Are you wondering why I edged us through that thing instead of going around it?"

"Uh-huh, a little," Dasinger admitted.

"It knocked half an hour off the time it should take us to get to your planet," she said. "That is, if you'll still want to go there. We're being followed, you see."

"By whom?"

"They call her the Spy. After the Mooncat she's the fastest job in the Fleet. She's got guns, and her normal complement is twenty armed men."

"The idea being to have us lead them to what we're after, and then take it away from us?" Dasinger asked.

"That's right. I'm not supposed to know about it. You know what a Gray Fleet is?"

Dasinger nodded. "An Independent that's turned criminal."

"Yes. Willata's Fleet was a legitimate outfit up to four years ago. Then Liu Taunus and Calat and their gang took over. That happened to be the two Fleet bosses you slapped handcuffs on, Dasinger. We're a Gray Fleet now. So I had some plans of my own for this trip. If I can get to some other I-Fleet or to the Hub, I might be able to do something about Taunus. After we were down on the planet, I was going to steal the Mooncat and take off by myself."

"Why are you telling me?"

Miss Mines colored a little. "Well, you gave me the gun," she said. "And you clobbered Taunus, and got me out of that hypno thing ... I mean, I'd have to be pretty much of a jerk to ditch you now, wouldn't I? Anyway, now that I've told you, you won't be going back to Willata's Fleet, whatever you do. I'll still get to the Hub." She paused. "So what do you want to do now? Beat it until the coast's clear, or make a quick try for your loot before the Spy gets there?"

"How far is she behind us?" Dasinger asked.

Duomart said, "I don't know exactly. Here's what happened. When we started out, Taunus told me not to let the Mooncat travel at more than three-quarters speed for any reason. I figured then the Spy was involved in whatever he was planning; she can keep up with us at that rate, and she has considerably better detector reach than the Cat. She's stayed far enough back not to register on our plates throughout the trip.

"Late yesterday we hit some extensive turbulence areas, and I started playing games. There was this little cluster of three sun systems ahead. One of them was our target, though Dr. Egavine hadn't yet said which. I ducked around a few twisters, doubled back, and there was the Spy coming the other way. I beat it then--top velocity. The Spy dropped off our detectors two hours later, and she can't have kept us on for more than another hour herself.

"So they'll assume we're headed for one of those three systems, but they don't know which one. They'll have to look for us. There's only one terraprox in the system we're going to. There may be none in the others, or maybe four or five. But the terraprox worlds is where they'll look because the salvage suits you're carrying are designed for ordinary underwater work. After the way I ran from them, they'll figure something's gone wrong with Taunus's plans, of course."

* * * * *

Dasinger rubbed his chin. "And if they're lucky and follow us straight in to the planet?"

"Then," Miss Mines said, "you might still have up to six or seven hours to locate the stuff you want, load it aboard and be gone again."

"Might have?"

She shrugged. "We've got a lead on them, but just how big a lead we finally wind up with depends to a considerable extent on the flight conditions they run into behind us. They might get a break there, too. Then there's another very unfortunate thing. The system Dr. Egavine's directed us to now is the one we were closest to when I broke out of detection range. They'll probably decide to look there first. You see?"

"Yes," Dasinger said. "Not so good, is it?" He knuckled his jaw again reflectively. "Why was Taunus pounding around on you when I came forward?"

"Oh, those two runches caught me flying the ship at top speed. Taunus was furious. He couldn't know whether the Spy still had a fix on us or not. Of course he didn't tell me that. The lumps he was preparing to hand out were to be for disregarding his instructions. He does things like that." She paused. "Well, are you going to make a try for the planet?"

"Yes," Dasinger said. "If we wait, there's entirely too good a chance the Spy will run across what we're after while she's snooping around for us there. We'll try to arrange things for a quick getaway in case our luck doesn't hold up."

Duomart nodded. "Mind telling me what you're after?"

"Not at all. Under the circumstances you should be told....

* * * * *

"Of course," Dasinger concluded a minute or two later, "all we'll have a legal claim to is the salvage fee."

Miss Mines glanced over at him, looking somewhat shaken. "You are playing this legally?"

"Definitely."

"Even so," she said, "if that really is the wreck of the Dosey Asteroids raider, and the stones are still on board ... you two will collect something like ten million credits between you!"

"Roughly that," Dasinger agreed. "Dr. Egavine learned about the matter from one of your Willata Fleetmen."

Her eyes widened. "He what!"

"The Fleet lost a unit called Handing's Scout about four years ago, didn't it?"

"Three and a half," she said. She paused. "Handing's Scout is the other wreck down there?"

"Yes. There was one survivor ... as far as we know. You may recall his name. Leed Farous."

Duomart nodded. "The little kwil hound. He was assistant navigator. How did Dr. Egavine...?"

Dasinger said, "Farous died in a Federation hospital on Mezmiali two years ago, apparently of the accumulative effects of kwil addiction. He'd been picked up in Hub space in a lifeboat which we now know was one of the two on Handing's Scout."

"In Hub space? Why, it must have taken him almost a year to get that far in one of those tubs!"

"From what Dr. Egavine learned," Dasinger said, "it did take that long. The lifeboat couldn't be identified at the time. Neither could Farous. He was completely addled with kwil ... quite incoherent, in fact already apparently in the terminal stages of the addiction. Strenuous efforts were made to identify him because a single large star hyacinth had been found in the lifeboat ... there was the possibility it was one of the stones the Dosey Asteroids Company had lost. But Farous died some months later without regaining his senses sufficiently to offer any information.

"Dr. Egavine was the physician in charge of the case, and eventually also the man who signed the death certificate. The doctor stayed on at the hospital for another year, then resigned, announcing that he intended to go into private research. Before Farous died, Egavine had of course obtained his story from him."

Miss Mines looked puzzled. "If Farous never regained his senses ..."

"Dr. Egavine is a hypnotherapist of exceptional ability," Dasinger said. "Leed Farous wasn't so far gone that the information couldn't be pried out of him with an understanding use of drug hypnosis."

"Then why didn't others ..."

"Oh, it was attempted. But you'll remember," Dasinger said, "that I had a little trouble getting close to you with an antihypnotic. The good doctor got to Farous first, that's all. Instead of the few minutes he spent on you, he could put in hour after hour conditioning Farous. Later comers simply didn't stand a chance of getting through to him."

* * * * *

Duomart Mines was silent a moment, then asked, "Why did you two come out to the Willata Fleet station and hire one of our ships? Your cruiser's a lot slower than the Mooncat but it would have got you here."

Dasinger said, "Dr. Egavine slipped up on one point. One can hardly blame him for it since interstellar navigation isn't in his line. The reference points on the maps he had Farous make up for him turned out to be meaningless when compared with Federation star charts. We needed the opportunity to check them against your Fleet maps. They make sense then."

"I see." Duomart gave him a sideways glance, remarked, "You know, the way you've put it, the thing's still pretty fishy."

"In what manner?"

"Dr. Egavine finished off old Farous, didn't he?"

"He may have," Dasinger conceded. "It would be impossible to prove it now. You can't force a man to testify against himself. It's true, of course, that Farous died at a very convenient moment, from Dr. Egavine's point of view."

"Well," she said, "a man like that wouldn't be satisfied with half a salvage fee when he saw the chance to quietly make away with the entire Dosey Asteroids haul."

"That could be," Dasinger said thoughtfully. "On the other hand, a man who had committed an unprovable murder to obtain a legal claim to six million credits might very well decide not to push his luck any farther. You know the space salvage ruling that when a criminal act or criminal intent can be shown in connection with an operation like this, the guilty person automatically forfeits any claim he has to the fee."

"Yes, I know ... and of course," Miss Mines said, "you aren't necessarily so lily white either. That's another possibility. And there's still another one. You don't happen to be a Federation detective, do you?"

Dasinger blinked. After a moment he said, "Not a bad guess. However, I don't work for the Federation."

"Oh? For whom do you work?"

"At the moment, and indirectly, for the Dosey Asteroids Company."

"Insurance?"

"No. After Farous died, Dosey Asteroids employed a detective agency to investigate the matter. I represent the agency."

"The agency collects on the salvage?"

"That's the agreement. We deliver the goods or get nothing."

"And Dr. Egavine?"

Dasinger shrugged. "If the doctor keeps his nose clean, he stays entitled to half the salvage fee."

"What about the way he got the information from Farous?" she asked.

"From any professional viewpoint, that was highly unethical procedure. But there's no evidence Egavine broke any laws."

Miss Mines studied him, her eyes bright and quizzical. "I had a feeling about you," she said. "I ..."

A warning burr came from the tolerance indicator; the girl turned her head quickly, said, "Cat's complaining ... looks like we're hitting the first system stresses!" She slid back into the pilot seat. "Be with you again in a while...."

* * * * *

When Dasinger returned presently to the control section Duomart sat at ease in the pilot seat with coffee and a sandwich before her.

"How are the mutineers doing?" she asked.

"They ate with a good appetite, said nothing, and gave me no trouble," Dasinger said. "They still pretend they don't understand Federation translingue. Dr. Egavine's a bit sulky. He wanted to be up front during the prelanding period. I told him he could watch things through his cabin communicator screen."

Miss Mines finished her sandwich, her eyes thoughtful. "I've been wondering, you know ... how can you be sure Dr. Egavine told you the truth about what he got from Leed Farous?"

Dasinger said, "I studied the recordings Dr. Egavine made of his sessions with Farous in the hospital. He may have held back on a few details, but the recordings were genuine enough."

"So Farous passes out on a kwil jag," she said, "and he doesn't even know they're making a landing. When he comes to, the scout's parked, the Number Three drive is smashed, the lock is open, and not another soul is aboard or in sight.

"Then he notices another wreck with its lock open, wanders over, sees a few bones and stuff lying around inside, picks up a star hyacinth, and learns from the ship's records that down in the hold under sixty feet of water is a sealed compartment with a whole little crateful of the stones...."

"That's the story," Dasinger agreed.

"In the Fleets," she remarked, "if we heard of a place where a couple of ship's crews seemed to have vanished into thin air, we'd call it a spooked world. And usually we'd keep away from it." She clamped her lower lip lightly between her teeth for a moment. "Do you think Dr. Egavine has considered the kwil angle?"

[Illustration]

Dasinger nodded. "I'm sure of it. Of course it's only a guess that the kwil made a difference for Farous. The stuff has no known medical value of any kind. But when the only known survivor of two crews happens to be a kwil-eater, the point has to be considered."

"Nobody else on Handing's Scout took kwil," Duomart said. "I know that. There aren't many in the Fleet who do." She hesitated. "You know, Dasinger, perhaps I should try it again! Maybe if I took it straight from the needle this time ..."

Dasinger shook his head. "If the little flake you nibbled made you feel drowsy, even a quarter of a standard shot would put you out cold for an hour or two. Kwil has that effect on a lot of people. Which is one reason it isn't a very popular drug."

"What effect does it have on you?" she asked.

"Depends to some extent on the size of the dose. Sometimes it slows me down physically and mentally. At other times there were no effects that I could tell until the kwil wore off. Then I'd have hallucinations for a while--that can be very distracting, of course, when there's something you have to do. Those hangover hallucinations seem to be another fairly common reaction."

He concluded, "Since you can't take the drug and stay awake, you'll simply remain inside the locked ship. It will be better anyway to keep the Mooncat well up in the air and ready to move most of the time we're on the planet."

"What about Taunus and Calat?" she asked.

"They come out with us, of course. If kwil is what it takes to stay healthy down there, I've enough to go around. And if it knocks them out, it will keep them out of trouble."

* * * * *

"Looks like there's a firemaker down there!" Duomart's slim forefinger indicated a point on the ground-view plate. "Column of smoke starting to come up next to that big patch of trees!... Two point nine miles due north and uphill of the wrecks."

From a wall screen Dr. Egavine's voice repeated sharply, "Smoke? Then Leed Farous was not the only survivor!"

Duomart gave him a cool glance. "Might be a native animal that knows how to make fire. They're not so unusual." She went on to Dasinger. "It would take a hand detector to spot us where we are, but it does look like a distress signal. If it's men from one of the wrecks, why haven't they used the scout's other lifeboat?"

"Would the lifeboat still be intact?" Dasinger asked.

Duomart spun the ground-view plate back to the scout. "Look for yourself," she said. "It couldn't have been damaged in as light a crash as that one was. Those tubs are built to stand a really solid shaking up! And what else could have harmed it?"

"Farous may have put it out of commission before he left," Dasinger said. "He wanted to come back from the Hub with an expedition to get the hyacinths, so he wouldn't have cared for the idea of anyone else getting away from the planet meanwhile." He looked over at the screen. "How about it, doctor? Did Farous make any mention of that?"

Dr. Egavine seemed to hesitate an instant. "As a matter of fact, he did. Farous was approximately a third of the way to the Hub when he realized he might have made a mistake in not rendering the second lifeboat unusable. But by then it was too late to turn back, and of course he was almost certain there were no other survivors."

"So that lifeboat should still be in good condition?"

"It was in good condition when Farous left here."

"Well, whoever's down there simply may not know how to handle it."

Duomart shook her blond head decidedly. "That's out, too!" she said. "Our Fleet lifeboats all came off an old Grand Commerce liner which was up for scrap eighty, ninety years ago. They're designed so any fool can tell what to do, and the navigational settings are completely automatic. Of course if it is a native firemaker--with mighty keen eyesight--down there, that could be different! A creature like that mightn't think of going near the scout. Should I start easing the Cat in towards the smoke, Dasinger?"

"Yes. We'll have to find out what the signal means before we try to approach the wrecks. Doctor, are you satisfied now that Miss Mines's outworld biotic check was correct?"

"The analysis appears to be fairly accurate," Dr. Egavine acknowledged, "and all detectable trouble sources are covered by the selected Fleet serum."

* * * * *

Dasinger said, "We'll prepare for an immediate landing then. There'll be less than an hour of daylight left on the ground, but the night's so short we'll disregard that factor." He switched off the connection to Egavine's cabin, turned to Duomart. "Now our wrist communicators, you say, have a five-mile range?"

"A little over five."

"Then," Dasinger said, "we'll keep you and the Cat stationed at an exact five-mile altitude ninety-five per cent of the time we spend on the planet. If the Spy arrives while you're up there, how much time will we have to clear out?"

She shrugged. "That depends of course on how they arrive. My detectors can pick the Spy up in space before their detectors can make out the Cat against the planet. If we spot them as they're heading in, we'll have around fifteen minutes.

"But if they show up on the horizon in atmosphere, or surface her out of subspace, that's something else. If I don't move instantly then, they'll have me bracketed ... and BLOOIE!"

Dasinger said, "Then those are the possibilities you'll have to watch for. Think you could draw the Spy far enough away in a chase to be able to come back for us?"

"They wouldn't follow me that far," Duomart said. "They know the Cat can outrun them easily once she's really stretched out, so if they can't nail her in the first few minutes they'll come back to look around for what we were interested in here." She added, "And if I don't let the Cat go all out but just keep a little ahead of them, they'll know that I'm trying to draw them away from something."

Dasinger nodded. "In that case we'll each be on our own, and your job will be to keep right on going and get the information as quickly as possible to the Kyth detective agency in Orado. The agency will take the matter from there."

* * * * *

Miss Mines looked at him. "Aren't you sort of likely to be dead before the agency can do anything about the situation?"

"I'll try to avoid it," Dasinger said. "Now, we've assumed the worst as far as the Spy is concerned. But things might also go wrong downstairs. Say I lose control of the group, or we all get hit down there by whatever hit the previous landing parties and it turns out that kwil's no good for it. It's understood that in any such event you again head the Cat immediately for the Hub and get the word to the agency. Right?"

Duomart nodded.

He brought a flat case of medical hypodermics out of his pocket, and opened it.

"Going to take your shot of kwil before we land?" Miss Mines asked.

"No. I want you to keep one of these needles on hand, at least until we find out what the problem is. It'll knock you out if you have to take it, but it might also keep you alive. I'm waiting myself to see if it's necessary to go on kwil. The hallucinations I get from the stuff afterwards could hit me while we're in the middle of some critical activity or other, and that mightn't be so good." He closed the case again, put it away. "I think we've covered everything. If you'll check the view plate, something--or somebody--has come out from under the trees near the column of smoke. And unless I'm mistaken it's a human being."

Duomart slipped the kwil needle he'd given her into a drawer of the instrument console. "I don't think you're mistaken," she said. "I've been watching him for the last thirty seconds."

"It is a man?"

"Pretty sure of it. He moves like one."

Dasinger stood up. "I'll go talk with Egavine then. I had a job in mind for him and his hypno sprays if we happened to run into human survivors."

"Shall I put the ship down next to this one?"

"No. Land around five hundred yards to the north, in the middle of that big stretch of open ground. That should keep us out of ambushes. Better keep clear of the airspace immediately around the wrecks as you go down."

Duomart looked at him. "Darn right I'll keep clear of that area!"

Dasinger grinned. "Something about the scout?"

"Sure. No visible reason at all why the scout should have settled hard enough to buckle a drive. Handing was a good pilot."

"Hm-m-m." Dasinger rubbed his chin. "Well, I've been wondering. The Dosey Asteroids raiders are supposed to have used an unknown type of antipersonnel weapon in their attack on the station, you know. Nothing in sight on their wreck that might be, say, an automatic gun but ... well, just move in carefully and stay ready to haul away very fast at the first hint of trouble!"

* * * * *

The Mooncat slid slowly down through the air near the point where the man stood in open ground, a hundred yards from the clump of trees out of which smoke still billowed thickly upwards. The man watched the speedboat's descent quietly, making no further attempt to attract the attention of those on board to himself.

Duomart had said that the man was not a member of Handing's lost crew but a stranger. He was therefore one of the Dosey Asteroids raiders.

Putting down her two land legs, the Mooncat touched the open hillside a little over a quarter of a mile from the woods, stood straddled and rakish, nose high. The storeroom lock opened, and a slender ramp slid out. Quist showed in the lock, dumped two portable shelters to the ground, came scrambling nimbly down the ramp. Dr. Egavine followed, more cautiously, the two handcuffed Fleetmen behind him. Dasinger came out last, glancing over at the castaway who had started across the slope towards the ship.

"Everyone's out," he told his wrist communicator. "Take her up."

The ramp snaked soundlessly back into the lock, the lock snapped shut and the Mooncat lifted smoothly and quickly from the ground. Liu Taunus glanced after the rising speedboat, looked at Calat, and spoke loudly and emphatically in Fleetlingue for a few seconds, his broad face without expression. Dasinger said, "All right, Quist, break out the shelter."

When the shelter was assembled, Dasinger motioned the Fleetmen towards the door with his thumb. "Inside, boys!" he said. "Quist, lock the shelter behind them and stay on guard here. Come on, doctor. We'll meet our friend halfway...."

* * * * *

The castaway approached unhurriedly, walking with a long, easy stride, the bird thing on his shoulder craning its neck to peer at the strangers with round yellow eyes. The man was big and rangy, probably less heavy by thirty pounds than Liu Taunus, but in perfect physical condition. The face was strong and intelligent, smiling elatedly now.

"I'd nearly stopped hoping this day would arrive!" he said in translingue. "May I ask who you are?"

"An exploration group." Dasinger gripped the extended hand, shook it, as Dr. Egavine's right hand went casually to his coat lapel. "We noticed the two wrecked ships down by the lake," Dasinger explained, "then saw your smoke signal. Your name?"

"Graylock. Once chief engineer of the Antares, out of Vanadia on Aruaque." Graylock turned, still smiling, towards Egavine.

Egavine smiled as pleasantly.

"Graylock," he observed, "you feel, and will continue to feel, that this is the conversation you planned to conduct with us, that everything is going exactly in accordance with your wishes." He turned his head to Dasinger, inquired, "Would you prefer to question him yourself, Dasinger?"

Dasinger hesitated, startled; but Graylock's expression did not change. Dasinger shook his head. "Very smooth, doctor!" he commented. "No, go ahead. You're obviously the expert here."

"Very well ... Graylock," Dr. Egavine resumed, "you will cooperate with me fully and to the best of your ability now, knowing that I am both your master and friend. Are any of the other men who came here on those two ships down by the water still alive?"

There was complete stillness for a second or two. Then Graylock's face began to work unpleasantly, all color draining from it. He said harshly, "No. But I ... I don't ..." He stammered incomprehensibly, went silent again, his expression wooden and set.

"Graylock," Egavine continued to probe, "you can remember everything now, and you are not afraid. Tell me what happened to the other men."

Sweat covered the castaway's ashen face. His mouth twisted in agonized, silent grimaces again. The bird thing leaped from his shoulder with a small purring sound, fluttered softly away.

Dr. Egavine repeated, "You are not afraid. You can remember. What happened to them? How did they die?"

And abruptly the big man's face smoothed out. He looked from Egavine to Dasinger and back with an air of brief puzzlement, then explained conversationally, "Why, Hovig's generator killed many of us as we ran away from the Antares. Some reached the edges of the circle with me, and I killed them later."

Dr. Egavine flicked another glance towards Dasinger but did not pause.

"And the crew of the second ship?" he asked.

"Those two. They had things I needed, and naturally I didn't want them alive here."

"Is Hovig's generator still on the Antares?"

"Yes."

"How does the generator kill?"

Sweat suddenly started out on Graylock's face again, but now he seemed unaware of any accompanying emotions. He said, "It kills by fear, of course...."

* * * * *

The story of the Dosey Asteroids raider and of Hovig's fear generators unfolded quickly from there. Hovig had developed his machines for the single purpose of robbing the Dosey Asteroids Shipping Station. The plan then had been to have the Antares cruise in uncharted space with the looted star hyacinths for at least two years, finally to approach the area of the Federation from a sector far removed from the Dosey system. That precaution resulted in disaster for Hovig. Chief Engineer Graylock had time to consider that his share in the profits of the raid would be relatively insignificant, and that there was a possibility of increasing it.

Graylock and his friends attacked their shipmates as the raider was touching down to the surface of an uncharted world to replenish its water supply. The attack succeeded but Hovig, fatally wounded, took a terrible revenge on the mutineers. He contrived to set off one of his grisly devices, and to all intents and purposes everyone still alive on board the Antares immediately went insane with fear. The ship crashed out of control at the edge of a lake. Somebody had opened a lock and a number of the frantic crew plunged from the ramp and fell to their death on the rocks below. Those who reached the foot of the ramp fled frenziedly from the wreck, the effects of Hovig's machine pursuing them but weakening gradually as they widened the distance between themselves and the Antares. Finally, almost three miles away, the fear impulses faded out completely....

But thereafter the wreck was unapproachable. The fear generator did not run out of power, might not run out of power for years.

Dasinger said, "Doctor, let's hurry this up! Ask him why they weren't affected by their murder machines when they robbed Dosey Asteroids. Do the generators have a beam-operated shut-off, or what?"

Graylock listened to the question, said, "We had taken kwil. The effects were still very unpleasant, but they could be tolerated."

There was a pause of a few seconds. Dr. Egavine cleared his throat. "It appears, Dasinger," he remarked, "that we have failed to consider a very important clue!"

Dasinger nodded. "And an obvious one," he said drily. "Keep it moving along, doctor. How much kwil did they take? How long had they been taking it before the raid?"

Dr. Egavine glanced over at him, repeated the questions.

Graylock said Hovig had begun conditioning the crew to kwil a week or two before the Antares slipped out of Aruaque for the strike on the station. In each case the dosage had been built up gradually to the quantity the man in question required to remain immune to the generators. Individual variations had been wide and unpredictable.

Dasinger passed his tongue over his lips, nodded. "Ask him ..."

* * * * *

He checked himself at a soft, purring noise, a shadowy fluttering in the air. Graylock's animal flew past him, settled on its master's shoulder, turned to stare at Dasinger and Egavine. Dasinger looked at the yellow owl-eyes, the odd little tube of a mouth, continued to Egavine, "Ask him where the haul was stored in the ship."

Graylock confirmed Leed Farous's statement of what he had seen in the Antares's records. All but a few of the star hyacinths had been placed in a vault-like compartment in the storage, and the compartment was sealed. Explosives would be required to open it. Hovig kept out half a dozen of the larger stones, perhaps as an antidote to boredom during the long voyage ahead. Graylock had found one of them just before Hovig's infernal instrument went into action.

"And where is that one now?" Dr. Egavine asked.

"I still have it."

"On your person?"

"Yes."

Dr. Egavine held out his hand, palm upward. "You no longer want it, Graylock. Give it to me."

Graylock looked bewildered; for a moment he appeared about to weep. Then he brought a knotted piece of leather from his pocket, unwrapped it, took out the gem and placed it in Egavine's hand. Egavine picked it up between thumb and forefinger of his other hand, held it out before him.

There was silence for some seconds while the star hyacinth burned in the evening air and the three men and the small winged animal stared at it. Then Dr. Egavine exhaled slowly.

"Ah, now!" he said, his voice a trifle unsteady. "Men might kill and kill for that one beauty alone, that is true!... Will you keep it for now, Dasinger? Or shall I?"

Dasinger looked at him thoughtfully.

"You keep it, doctor," he said.

* * * * *

"Dasinger," Dr. Egavine observed a few minutes later, "I have been thinking...."

"Yes?"

"Graylock's attempted description of his experience indicates that the machine on the Antares does not actually broadcast the emotion of terror, as he believes. The picture presented is that of a mind in which both the natural and the acquired barriers of compartmentalization are temporarily nullified, resulting in an explosion of compounded insanity to an extent which would be inconceivable without such an outside agent. As we saw in Graylock, the condition is in fact impossible to describe or imagine! A diabolical device...."

He frowned. "Why the drug kwil counteracts such an effect remains unclear. But since we now know that it does, I may have a solution to the problem confronting us."

Dasinger nodded. "Let's hear it."

"Have Miss Mines bring the ship down immediately," Egavine instructed him. "There is a definite probability that among my medical supplies will be an effective substitute for kwil, for this particular purpose. A few hours of experimentation, and ..."

"Doctor," Dasinger interrupted, "hold it right there! So far there's been no real harm in sparring around. But we're in a different situation now ... we may be running out of time very quickly. Let's quit playing games."

Dr. Egavine glanced sharply across at him. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that we both have kwil, of course. There's no reason to experiment. But the fact that we have it is no guarantee that we'll be able to get near that generator. Leed Farous's tissues were soaked with the drug. Graylock's outfit had weeks to determine how much each of them needed to be able to operate within range of the machines and stay sane. We're likely to have trouble enough without trying to jockey each other."

Dr. Egavine cleared his throat. "But I ..."

Dasinger interrupted again. "Your reluctance to tell me everything you knew or had guessed is understandable. You had no more reason to trust me completely than I had to trust you. So before you say anything else I'd like you to look at these credentials. You're familiar with the Federation seal, I think."

Dr. Egavine took the proffered identification case, glanced at Dasinger again, then opened the case.

"So," he said presently. "You're a detective working for the Dosey Asteroids Company...." His voice was even. "That alters the situation, of course. Why didn't you tell me this?"

"That should be obvious," Dasinger said. "If you're an honest man, the fact can make no difference. The company remains legally bound to pay out the salvage fee for the star hyacinths. They have no objection to that. What they didn't like was the possibility of having the gems stolen for the second time. If that's what you had in mind, you wouldn't, of course, have led an agent of the company here. In other words, doctor, in cooperating with me you're running no risk of being cheated out of your half of the salvage rights."

Dasinger patted the gun in his coat pocket. "And of course," he added, "if I happened to be a bandit in spite of the credentials, I'd be eliminating you from the partnership right now instead of talking to you! The fact that I'm not doing it should be a sufficient guarantee that I don't intend to do it."

Dr. Egavine nodded. "I'm aware of the point."

"Then let's get on with the salvage," Dasinger said. "For your further information, there's an armed Fleet ship hunting for us with piratical intentions, and the probability is that it will find us in a matter of hours...."

* * * * *

He described the situation briefly, concluded, "You've carried out your part of the contract by directing us here. You can, if you wish, minimize further personal risks by using the Fleet scout's lifeboat to get yourself and Quist off the planet, providing kwil will get you to the scout. Set a normspace course for Orado then, and we'll pick you up after we've finished the job."

Dr. Egavine shook his head. "Thank you, but I'm staying. It's in my interest to give you what assistance I can ... and, as you've surmised, I do have a supply of kwil. What is your plan?"

"Getting Hovig's generator shut off is the first step," Dasinger said. "And since we don't know what dosage of the drug is required for each of us, we'd be asking for trouble by approaching the Antares in the ship. Miss Mines happens to be a kwil-sensitive, in any case. So it's going to take hiking, and I'll start down immediately now. Would Graylock and the Fleetmen obey hypnotic orders to the extent of helping out dependably in the salvage work?"

Egavine nodded. "There is no question of that."

"Then you might start conditioning them to the idea now. From the outer appearance of the Antares, it may be a real job to cut through inside her to get to the star hyacinths. We have the three salvage suits. If I can make it to the generator, shut it off, and it turns out then that I need some hypnotized brawn down there, Miss Mines will fly over the shelter as a signal to start marching the men down."

"Why march? At that point, Miss Mines could take us to the wreck within seconds."

Dasinger shook his head. "Sorry, doctor. Nobody but Miss Mines or myself goes aboard the Mooncat until we either wind up the job or are forced to clear out and run. I'm afraid that's one precaution I'll have to take. When you get to the Antares we'll give each of the boys a full shot of kwil. The ones that don't go limp on it can start helping."

Dr. Egavine said reflectively, "You feel the drug would still be a requirement?"

"Well," Dasinger said, "Hovig appears to have been a man who took precautions, too. We know he had three generators and that he set off one of them. The question is where the other two are. It wouldn't be so very surprising, would it, if one or both of them turned out to be waiting for intruders in the vault where he sealed away the loot?"

* * * * *

The night was cool. Wind rustled in the ground vegetation and the occasional patches of trees. Otherwise the slopes were quiet. The sky was covered with cloud layers through which the Mooncat drifted invisibly. In the infrared glasses Dasinger had slipped on when he started, the rocky hillside showed clear for two hundred yards, tinted green as though bathed by a strange moonlight; beyond was murky darkness.

"Still all right?" Duomart's voice inquired from the wrist communicator.

"Uh-huh!" Dasinger said. "A little nervous, but I'd be feeling that way in any case, under the circumstances."

"I'm not so sure," she said. "You've gone past the two and a half mile line from the generator. From what that Graylock monster said, you should have started to pick up its effects. Why not take your shot, and play safe?"

"No," Dasinger said. "If I wait until I feel something that can be definitely attributed to the machine, I can keep the kwil dose down to what I need. I don't want to load myself up with the drug any more than I have to."

A stand of tall trees with furry trunks moved presently into range of the glasses, thick undergrowth beneath. Dasinger picked his way through the thickets with some caution. The indications so far had been that local animals had as much good reason to avoid the vicinity of Hovig's machine as human beings, but if there was any poisonous vermin in the area this would be a good place for it to be lurking. Which seemed a fairly reasonable apprehension. Other, equally definite, apprehensions looked less reasonable when considered objectively. If he stumbled on a stone, it produced a surge of sharp alarm which lingered for seconds; and his breathing had quickened much more than could be accounted for by the exertions of the downhill climb.

* * * * *

Five minutes beyond the wood Dasinger emerged from the mouth of a narrow gorge, and stopped short with a startled exclamation. His hand dug hurriedly into his pocket for the case of kwil needles.

"What's the matter?" Duomart inquired sharply.

Dasinger produced a somewhat breathless laugh. "I've decided to take the kwil. At once!"

"You're feeling ... things?" Her voice was also shaky.

"I'll say! Not just a matter of feeling it, either. For example, a couple of old friends are walking towards me at the moment. Dead ones, as it happens."

"Ugh!" she said faintly. "Hurry up!"

Dasinger shoved the needle's plunger a quarter of the way down on the kwil solution, pulled the needle out of his arm. He stood still for some seconds, filled his lungs with the cool night air, let it out in a long sigh.

"That did it!" he announced, his voice steadying again. "The stuff works fast. A quarter shot...."

"Why did you wait so long?"

"It wasn't too bad till just now. Then suddenly ... that generator can't be putting out evenly! Anyway, it hit me like a rock. I doubt you'd be interested in details."

"I wouldn't," Duomart agreed. "I'm crawly enough as it is up here. I wish we were through with this!"

"With just a little luck we should be off the planet in an hour."

By the time he could hear the lapping of the lake water on the wind, he was aware of the growing pulse of Hovig's generator ahead of him, alive and malignant in the night. Then the Fleet scout came into the glasses, a squat, dark ship, its base concealed in the growth that had sprung up around it after it piled up on the slope. Dasinger moved past the scout, pushing through bushy aromatic shrubbery which thickened as he neared the water. He felt physically sick and sluggish now, was aware, too, of an increasing reluctance to go on. He would need more of the drug before attempting to enter the Antares.

To the west, the sky was partly clear, and presently he saw the wreck of the Dosey Asteroids raider loom up over the edge of the lake arm, blotting out a section of stars. Still beyond the field of the glasses, it looked like an armored water animal about to crawl up on the slopes. Dasinger approached slowly, in foggy unwillingness, emerged from the bushes into open ground, and saw a broad ramp furred with a thick coat of moldlike growth rise steeply towards an open lock in the upper part of the Antares. The pulse of the generator might have been the beating of the maimed ship's heart, angry and threatening. It seemed to be growing stronger. And had something moved in the lock? Dasinger stood, senses swimming sickly, dreaming that something huge rose slowly, towered over him like a giant wave, leaned forwards....

* * * * *

"Still all right?" Duomart inquired.

The wave broke.

"Dasinger! What's happened?"

"Nothing," Dasinger said, his voice raw. He pulled the empty needle out of his arm, dropped it. "But something nearly did! The kwil I took wasn't enough. I was standing here waiting to let that damned machine swamp me when you spoke."

"You should have heard what you sounded like over the communicator! I thought you were ..." her voice stopped for an instant, began again. "Anyway," she said briskly, "you're loaded with kwil now, I hope?"

"More than I should be, probably." Dasinger rubbed both hands slowly down along his face. "Well, it couldn't be helped. That was pretty close, I guess! I don't even remember getting the hypo out of the case."

He looked back up at the looming bow of the Antares, unbeautiful enough but prosaically devoid of menace and mystery now, though the pulsing beat still came from there. A mechanical obstacle and nothing else. "I'm going on in now."

From the darkness within the lock came the smell of stagnant water, of old decay. The mold that proliferated over the ramp did not extend into the wreck. But other things grew inside, pale and oily tendrils festooning the walls. Dasinger removed his night glasses, brought out a pencil light, let the beam fan out, and moved through the lock.

The crash which had crumpled the ship's lower shell had thrust up the flooring of the lock compartment, turned it into what was nearly level footing now. On the right, a twenty-foot black gap showed between the ragged edge of the deck and the far bulkhead from which it had been torn. The oily plant life spread over the edges of the flooring and on down into the flooded lower sections of the Antares. The pulse of Hovig's generator came from above and the left where a passage slanted steeply up into the ship's nose. Dasinger turned towards the passage, began clambering up.

* * * * *

There was no guesswork involved in determining which of the doors along the passage hid the machine in what, if Graylock's story was correct, had been Hovig's personal stateroom. As Dasinger approached that point, it was like climbing into silent thunder. The door was locked, and though the walls beside it were warped and cracked, the cracks were too narrow to permit entry. Dasinger dug out a tool which had once been the prized property of one of Orado's more eminent safecrackers, and went to work on the lock. A minute or two later he forced the door partly back in its tilted frame, scrambled through into the cabin.

Not enough was left of Hovig after this span of time to be particularly offensive. The generator lay in a lower corner, half buried under other molded and unrecognizable debris. Dasinger uncovered it, feeling as if he were drowning in the invisible torrent pouring out from it, knelt down and placed the light against the wall beside him.

The machine matched Graylock's description. A pancake-shaped heavy plastic casing eighteen inches across, two thick studs set into its edge, one stud depressed and flush with the surface, the other extended. Dasinger thumbed experimentally at the extended stud, found it apparently immovable, took out his gun.

"How is it going, Dasinger?" Miss Mines asked.

"All right," Dasinger said. He realized he was speaking with difficulty. "I've found the thing! Trying to get it shut off now. Tell you in a minute...."

He tapped the extended stud twice with the butt of the gun, then slashed heavily down. The stud flattened back into the machine. Its counterpart didn't move. The drowning sensations continued.

Dasinger licked his lips, dropped the gun into his pocket, brought out the lock opener. He had the generator's cover plate pried partway back when it shattered. With that, the thunder that wasn't sound ebbed swiftly from the cabin. Dasinger reached into the generator, wrenched out a power battery, snapping half a dozen leads.

He sat back on his heels, momentarily dizzy with relief, then climbed to his feet with the smashed components of Hovig's machine, and turned to the door. Something in the debris along the wall flashed dazzlingly in the beam of his light.

Dasinger stared at the star hyacinth for an instant, then picked it up. It was slightly larger than the one Graylock had carried out of the Antares with him, perfectly cut. He found four others of similar quality within the next minute, started back down to the lock compartment with what might amount to two million credits in honest money, around half that in the Hub's underworld gem trade, in one of his pockets.

"Yes?"

"Got the thing's teeth pulled now."

"Thank God! Coming right down...."

The Mooncat was sliding in from the south as Dasinger stepped out on the head of the ramp. "Lock's open," Duomart's voice informed him. "I'll come aft and help."

* * * * *

It took four trips with the gravity crane to transfer the salvage equipment into the Antares's lock compartment. Then Miss Mines sealed the Mooncat and went back upstairs. Dasinger climbed into one of the three salvage suits, hung the wrist communicator inside the helmet, snapped on the suit's lights and went over to the edge of the compartment deck. Black water reflected the lights thirty feet below. He checked the assortment of tools attached to his belt, nudged the suit's gravity cutoff to the right, energized magnetic pads on knees, boot tips and wrists, then fly-walked rapidly down a bulkhead and dropped into the water.

"No go, Duomart!" he informed the girl ten minutes later, his voice heavy with disappointment. "It's an ungodly twisted mess down here ... worse than I thought it might be! Looks as if we'll have to cut all the way through to that vault. Give Egavine the signal to start herding the boys down."

Approximately an hour afterwards, Miss Mines reported urgently through the communicator, "They'll reach the lock in less than four minutes now, Dasinger! Better drop it and come up!"

"I'm on my way." Dasinger reluctantly switched off the beam-saw he was working with, fastened it to the belt of the salvage suit, turned in the murky water and started back towards the upper sections of the wreck. The job of getting through the tangled jungle of metal and plastic to the gem vault appeared no more than half completed, and the prospect of being delayed over it until the Spy discovered them here began to look like a disagreeably definite possibility. He clambered and floated hurriedly up through the almost vertical passage he'd cleared, found daylight flooding the lock compartment, the system's yellow sun well above the horizon. Peeling off the salvage suit, he restored the communicator to his wrist and went over to the head of the ramp.

* * * * *

The five men came filing down the last slopes in the morning light, Taunus and Calat in the lead, Graylock behind them, the winged animal riding his shoulder and lifting occasionally into the air to flutter about the group. Quist and Egavine brought up the rear. Dasinger took the gun from his pocket.

"I'll clip my gun to the suit belt when I go back down in the water with the boys," he told the communicator. "If the doctor's turning any tricks over in his mind, that should give him food for thought. I'll relieve Quist of his weapon as he comes in."

"What about the guns in Graylock's hut?" Duomart asked.

"No charge left in them. If I'm reasonably careful, I really don't see what Dr. Egavine can do. He knows he loses his half-interest in the salvage the moment he pulls any illegal stunts."

A minute or two later, he called out, "Hold it there, doctor?"

The group shuffled to a stop near the foot of the ramp, staring up at him.

"Yes, Dasinger?" Dr. Egavine called back, sounding a trifle winded.

"Have Quist come up first and alone, please." Dasinger disarmed the little man at the entrance to the lock, motioned him on to the center of the compartment. The others arrived then in a line, filed past Dasinger and joined Quist.

"You've explained the situation to everybody?" Dasinger asked Egavine. There was an air of tenseness about the little group he didn't like, though tension might be understandable enough under the circumstances.

"Yes," Dr. Egavine said. "They feel entirely willing to assist us, of course." He smiled significantly.

"Fine." Dasinger nodded. "Line them up and let's get going! Taunus first. Get ..."

There was a momentary stirring of the air back of his head. He turned sharply, jerking up the gun, felt twin needles drive into either side of his neck.

His body instantly went insensate. The lock appeared to circle about him, then he was on his back and Graylock's pet was alighting with a flutter of wings on his chest. It craned its head forward to peer into his face, the tip of its mouth tube open, showing a ring of tiny teeth. Vision and awareness left Dasinger together.

The other men hadn't moved. Now Dr. Egavine, his face a little pale, came over to Dasinger, the birdlike creature bounding back to the edge of the lock as he approached. Egavine knelt down, said quietly, his mouth near the wrist communicator, "Duomart Mines, you will obey me."

There was silence for a second or two. Then the communicator whispered, "Yes."

Dr. Egavine drew in a long, slow breath.

"You feel no question, no concern, no doubt about this situation," he went on. "You will bring the ship down now and land it safely beside the Antares. Then come up into the lock of the Antares for further instructions." Egavine stood up, his eyes bright with triumph.

* * * * *

In the Mooncat three miles overhead, Duomart switched off her wrist communicator, sat white-faced, staring at the image of the Antares in the ground-view plate.

"Sweet Jana!" she whispered. "How did he ... now what do I ..."

She hesitated an instant, then opened a console drawer, took out the kwil needle Dasinger had left with her and slipped it into a pocket, clipped the holstered shocker back to her belt, and reached for the controls. A vast whistling shriek smote the Antares and the ears of those within as the Mooncat ripped down through atmosphere at an unatmospheric speed, leveled out smoothly and floated to the ground beside the wreck.

There was no one in sight in the lock of the Antares as Duomart came out and sealed the Mooncat's entry behind her. She went quickly up the broad, mold-covered ramp. The lock remained empty. From beyond it came the sound of some metallic object being pulled about, a murmur of voices. Twelve steps from the top, she took out the little gun, ran up to the lock and into it, bringing the gun up. She had a glimpse of Dr. Egavine and Quist standing near a rusty bench in the compartment, of Graylock half into a salvage suit, Dasinger on the floor ... then a flick of motion to right and left.

The tips of two space lines lashed about her simultaneously, one pinning her arms to her sides, the other clamping about her ankles and twitching her legs out from beneath her. She fired twice blindly to the left as the lines snapped her face down to the floor of the compartment. The gun was clamped beneath her stretched-out body and useless.

* * * * *

"What made that animal attack me anyway?" Dasinger asked wearily. He had just regained consciousness and been ordered by Calat to join the others on a rusted metal bench in the center of the lock compartment; Duomart to his left, Egavine on his right, Quist on the other side of Egavine. Calat stood watching them fifteen feet away, holding Dasinger's gun in one hand while he jiggled a few of Hovig's star hyacinths gently about in the other.

Calat's expression was cheerful, which made him the exception here. Liu Taunus and Graylock were down in the hold of the ship, working sturdily with cutter beams and power hoists to get to the sealed vault and blow it open. How long they'd been at it, Dasinger didn't know.

"You can thank your double-crossing partner for what happened!" Duomart informed him. She looked pretty thoroughly mussed up though still unsubdued. "Graylock's been using the bird-thing to hunt with," she said. "It's a bloodsucker ... nicks some animal with its claws and the animal stays knocked out while the little beast fills its tummy. So the intellectual over there had Graylock point you out to his pet, and it waited until your back was turned...." She hesitated, went on less vehemently, "Sorry about not carrying out orders, Dasinger. I assumed Egavine really was in control here, and I could have handled him. I walked into a trap." She fished the shards of a smashed kwil needle out of her pocket, looked at them, and dropped them on the floor before her. "I got slammed around a little," she explained.

Calat laughed, said something in the Fleet tongue, grinning at her. She ignored him.

Egavine said, "My effects were secretly inspected while we were at the Fleet station, Dasinger, and the Fleetmen have been taking drugs to immunize themselves against my hypnotic agents. They disclosed this when Miss Mines brought the speedboat down. There was nothing I could do. I regret to say that they intend to murder us. They are waiting only to assure themselves that the star hyacinths actually are in the indicated compartment."

"Great!" Dasinger groaned. He put his hands back in a groping gesture to support himself on the bench.

"Still pretty feeble, I suppose?" Miss Mines inquired, gentle sympathy in her voice.

"I'm poisoned," he muttered brokenly. "The thing's left me paralyzed...." He sagged sideways a little, his hand moving behind Duomart. He pinched her then in a markedly unparalyzed and vigorous manner.

Duomart's right eyelid flickered for an instant.

* * * * *

"Somebody wrung the little monster's neck before I got here," she remarked. "But there're other necks I'd sooner wring! Your partner's, for instance. Not that he's necessarily the biggest louse around at the moment." She nodded at Calat. "The two runches who call themselves Fleetmen don't intend to share the star hyacinths even with their own gang! They're rushing the job through so they can be on their way to the Hub before the Spy arrives. And don't think Liu Taunus trusts that muscle-bound foogal standing there, either! He's hanging on to the key of the Mooncat's console until he comes back up."

Calat smiled with a suggestion of strain, then said something in a flat, expressionless voice, staring at her.

"Oh, sure," she returned. "With Taunus holding me, I suppose?" She looked at Dasinger. "They're not shooting me right off, you know," she told him. "They're annoyed with me, so they're taking me along for something a little more special. But they'll have to skip the fun if the Spy shows up, or I'll be telling twenty armed Fleetmen exactly what kind of thieving cheats they have leading them!" She looked back at Calat, smiled, placed the tip of her tongue lightly between her lips for an instant, then pronounced a few dozen Fleet words in a clear, precise voice.

It must have been an extraordinarily unflattering comment. Calat went white, then red. Half-smart tough had been Duomart's earlier description of him. It began to look like an accurate one ... Dasinger felt a surge of pleased anticipation. His legs already were drawn well back beneath the bench; he shifted his weight slowly forwards now, keeping an expression of anxious concern on his face. Calat spoke in Fleetlingue again, voice thickening with rage.

Miss Mines replied sweetly, stood up. The challenge direct.

The Fleetman's face worked in incredulous fury. He shifted the gun to his left hand and came striding purposefully towards Miss Mines, right fist cocked. Then, as Dasinger tensed his legs happily, a muffled thump from deep within the wreck announced the opening of the star hyacinth vault.

The sound was followed by instant proof that Hovig had trapped the vault.

Duomart and Calat screamed together. Dasinger drove himself forward off the bench, aiming for the Fleetman's legs, checked and turned for the gun which Calat, staggering and shrieking, his face distorted with lunatic terror, had flung aside. Dr. Egavine, alert for this contingency, already was stooping for the gun, hand outstretched, when Dasinger lunged against him, bowling him over.

* * * * *

Dasinger came up with the gun, Quist pounding at his shoulders, flung the little man aside, turned back in a frenzy of urgency. Duomart twisted about on the floor near the far end of the compartment, arms covering her face. The noises that bubbled out from behind her arms set Dasinger's teeth on edge. She rolled over convulsively twice, stopped dangerously close to the edge of the jagged break in the deck, was turning again as Dasinger dropped beside her and caught her.

Immediately there was a heavy, painful blow on his shoulder. He glanced up, saw Quist running toward him, a rusted chunk of metal like the one he had thrown in his raised hand, and Egavine peering at both of them from the other side of the compartment. Dasinger flung a leg across Duomart, pinning her down, pulled out the gun, fired without aiming. Quist reversed his direction almost in mid-stride. Dasinger fired again, saw Egavine dart towards the lock, hesitate there an instant, then disappear down the ramp, Quist sprinting out frantically after him.

A moment later he drove one of the remaining kwil needles through the cloth of Duomart's uniform, and rammed the plunger down.

The drug hit hard and promptly. Between one instant and the next, the plunging and screaming ended; she drew in a long, shuddering breath, went limp, her eyes closing slowly. Dasinger was lifting her from the floor when the complete silence in the compartment caught his attention. He looked around. Calat was not in sight. And only then did he become aware of a familiar sensation ... a Hovig generator's pulsing, savage storm of seeming nothingness, nullified by the drug in his blood.

He laid the unconscious girl on the bench, went on to the lock.

Dr. Egavine and Quist had vanished; the thick shrubbery along the lake bank stirred uneasily at twenty different points but he wasn't looking for the pair. With the Mooncat inaccessible to them, there was only one place they could go. Calat's body lay doubled up in the rocks below the ramp, almost sixty feet down, where other human bodies had lain six years earlier. Dasinger glanced over at the Fleet scout, went back into the compartment.

He was buckling himself into the third salvage suit when he heard the scout's lifeboat take off. At a guess Hovig's little private collection of star hyacinths was taking off with it. Dasinger decided he couldn't care less.

He snapped on the headpiece, then hesitated at the edge of the deck, looking down. A bubble of foggy white light was rising slowly through the water of the hold, and in a moment the headpiece of one of the other suits broke the oily surface, stayed there, bobbing gently about. Dasinger climbed down, brought Liu Taunus's body back up to the lock compartment, and recovered the Mooncat's master key.

He found Graylock floating in his suit against a bulkhead not far from the shattered vault where Hovig's two remaining generators thundered. Dasinger silenced the machines, fastened them and a small steel case containing nearly a hundred million credits' worth of star hyacinths to the salvage carrier, and towed it all up to the lock compartment.

A very few minutes later, the Mooncat lifted in somewhat jerky, erratic fashion from the planet's surface. As Dasinger had suspected, he lacked, and by a good deal, Miss Mines's trained sensitivity with the speedboat's controls; but he succeeded in wrestling the little ship up to a five-mile altitude where a subspace dive might be carried out in relative safety.

He was attempting then to get the Mooncat's nose turned away from the distant volcano ranges towards which she seemed determined to point when the detector needles slapped flat against their pins and the alarm bell sounded. A strange ship stood outlined in the Mooncat's stern screen.

* * * * *

The image vanished as Dasinger hit the dive button, simultaneously flattening the speed controls with a slam of his hand. The semisolid subspace turbulence representing the mountain ranges beyond the lake flashed instantly past below him ... within yards, it seemed. Another second put them beyond the planet's atmosphere. Then the Spy reappeared in subspace, following hard. A hammering series of explosions showed suddenly in the screens, kept up for a few hair-raising moments, began to drop back. Five minutes later, with the distance between them widening rapidly, the Spy gave up the chase, swung around and headed back towards the planet.

Dasinger shakily reduced his ship's speed to relatively sane level, kept her moving along another twenty minutes, then surfaced into normspace and set a general course for the Hub. He was a very fair yachtsman for a planeteer. But after riding the Mooncat for the short time he'd turned her loose to keep ahead of the Spy through the G2's stress zone, he didn't have to be told that in Fleet territory he was outclassed. He mopped his forehead, climbed gratefully out of the pilot seat and went to the cot he had hauled into the control room, to check on Duomart Mines.

She was still unconscious, of course; the dose he'd given her was enough to knock a kwil-sensitive out for at least a dozen hours. Dasinger looked down at the filth-smudged, pale face, the bruised cheeks and blackened left eye for a few seconds, then opened Dr. Egavine's medical kit to do what he could about getting Miss Mines patched up again.

Fifteen hours later she was still asleep, though to all outer appearances back in good repair. Dasinger happened to be bemusedly studying her face once more when she opened her eyes and gazed up at him.

"We made it! You ..." She smiled, tried to sit up, looked startled, then indignant. "What's the idea of tying me down to this thing?"

Dasinger nodded. "I guess you're all there!" He reached down to unfasten her from the cot. "After what happened, I wasn't so sure you'd be entirely rational when the kwil wore off and you woke up."

Duomart paled a little. "I hadn't imagined ..." She shook her blond head. "Well, let's skip that! I'll have nightmares for years.... What happened to the others?"

* * * * *

Dasinger told her, concluded, "Egavine may have run into the Spy, but I doubt it. He'll probably show up in the Hub eventually with the gems he took from Calat, and if he doesn't get caught peddling them he may wind up with around a million credits ... about the sixth part of what he would have collected if he'd stopped playing crooked and trying to get everything. I doubt the doctor will ever quit kicking himself for that!"

"Your agency gets the whole salvage fee now, eh?"

"Not exactly," Dasinger said. "Considering everything that's happened, the Kyth Interstellar Detective Agency would have to be extremely ungrateful if it didn't feel you'd earned the same split we were going to give Dr. Egavine."

Miss Mines gazed at him in startled silence, flushed excitedly. "Think you can talk the Kyth people into that, Dasinger?"

"I imagine so," Dasinger said, "since I own the agency. That should finance your Willata Fleet operation very comfortably and still leave a couple of million credits over for your old age. I doubt we'll clear anything on Hovig's generators...."

Miss Mines looked uncomfortable. "Do you have those things aboard?"

"At the moment. Disassembled of course. Primarily I didn't want the Fleet gang to get their hands on them. We might lose them in space somewhere or take them back to the Federation for the scientists to poke over. We'll discuss that on the way. Now, do you feel perky enough to want a look at the stuff that's cost around a hundred and fifty lives before it ever hit the Hub's markets?"

"Couldn't feel perkier!" She straightened up expectantly. "Let's see them...."

Dasinger turned away towards the wall where he had put down the little steel case with the loot of the Dosey Asteroids robbery.

Behind him, Duomart screamed.

He spun back to her, his face white. "What's the matter?"

Duomart was staring wide-eyed past him towards the instrument console, the back of one hand to her mouth. "That ... the thing!"

"Thing?"

"Big ... yellow ... wet ... ugh! It's ducked behind the console, Dasinger! It's lurking there!"

"Oh!" Dasinger said, relaxing. He smiled. "That's all right. Don't worry about it."

"Don't worry about ... are you crazy?"

"Not in the least. I thought you were for a second, but it's very simple. You've worked off the kwil and now you're in the hangover period. You get hallucinations then, just as I usually do. For the next eight or nine hours, you'll be seeing odd things around from time to time. So what? They're not real."

* * * * *

"All right, they're not real, but they seem real enough while they're around," Duomart said. "I don't want to see them." She caught her breath and her hand flew up to her mouth again. "Dasinger, please, don't you have something that will put me back to sleep till I'm past the hangover too?"

Dasinger reflected. "One of Doc Egavine's hypno sprays will do it. I know enough of the mumbo jumbo to send you to dreamland for another ten hours." He smiled evilly. "Of course, you realize that means you're putting yourself completely in my power."

Duomart's eyes narrowed for an instant. She considered him, grinned. "I'll risk it," she said.

THE END

Contents

THE WINDS OF TIME

by James H. Schmitz

He contracted for a charter trip--but the man who hired his spacer wasn't quite a man, it turned out--and he wanted more than service!

Gefty Rammer came along the narrow passages between the Silver Queen's control compartment and the staterooms, trying to exchange the haggard look on his face for one of competent self-assurance. There was nothing to gain by letting his two passengers suspect that during the past few minutes their pilot, the owner of Rammer Spacelines, had been a bare step away from plain and fancy gibbering.

He opened the door to Mr. Maulbow's stateroom and went inside. Mr. Maulbow, face very pale, eyes closed, lay on his back on the couch, still unconscious. He'd been knocked out when some unknown forces suddenly started batting the Silver Queen's turnip-shape around as the Queen had never been batted before in her eighteen years of spacefaring. Kerim Ruse, Maulbow's secretary, knelt beside her employer, checking his pulse. She looked anxiously up at Gefty.

"What did you find out?" she asked in a voice that was not very steady.

Gefty shrugged. "Nothing definite as yet. The ship hasn't been damaged--she's a tough tub. That's one good point. Otherwise ... well, I climbed into a suit and took a look out the escape hatch. And I saw the same thing there that the screens show. Whatever that is."

"You've no idea then of what's happened to us, or where we are?" Miss Ruse persisted. She was a rather small girl with large, beautiful gray eyes and thick blue-black hair. At the moment, she was barefoot and in a sleeping outfit which consisted of something soft wrapped around her top, soft and floppy trousers below. The black hair was tousled and she looked around fifteen. She'd been asleep in her stateroom when something smacked the Queen, and she was sensible enough then not to climb out of the bunk's safety field until the ship finally stopped shuddering and bucking about. That made her the only one of the three persons aboard who had collected no bruises. She was scared, of course, but taking the situation very well.

Gefty said carefully, "There're a number of possibilities. It's obvious that the Queen has been knocked out of normspace, and it may take some time to find out how to get her back there. But the main thing is that the ship's intact. So far, it doesn't look too bad."

Miss Ruse seemed somewhat reassured. Gefty could hardly have said the same for himself. He was a qualified normspace and subspace pilot. He had put in a hitch with the Federation Navy, and for the past eight years he'd been ferrying his own two ships about the Hub and not infrequently beyond the Federation's space territories, but he had never heard of a situation like this. What he saw in the viewscreens when the ship steadied enough to let him pick himself off the instrument room floor, and again, a few minutes later and with much more immediacy, from the escape hatch, made no sense--seemed simply to have no meaning. The pressure meters said there was a vacuum outside the Queen's skin. That vacuum was dark, even pitch-black but here and there came momentary suggestions of vague light and color. Occasional pinpricks of brightness showed and were gone. And there had been one startling phenomenon like a distant, giant explosion, a sudden pallid glare in the dark, which appeared far ahead of the Queen and, for the instant it remained in sight, seemed to be rushing directly towards them. It had given Gefty the feeling that the ship itself was plowing at high speed through this eerie medium. But he had cut the Queen's drives to the merest idling pulse as soon as he staggered back to the control console and got his first look at the screens, so it must have been the light that had moved.

But such details were best not discussed with a passenger. Kerim Ruse would be arriving at enough disquieting speculations on her own; the less he told her, the better. There was the matter of the ship's location instruments. The only set Gefty had been able to obtain any reading on were the direction indicators. And what they appeared to indicate was that the Silver Queen was turning on a new heading something like twenty times a second.

Gefty asked, "Has Mr. Maulbow shown any signs of waking up?"

Kerim shook her head. "His breathing and pulse seem all right, and that bump on his head doesn't look really bad, but he hasn't moved at all. Can you think of anything else we might do for him, Gefty?"

"Not at the moment," Gefty said. "He hasn't broken any bones. We'll see how he feels when he comes out of it." He was wondering about Mr. Maulbow and the fact that this charter had showed some unusual features from the beginning.

Kerim was a friendly sort of girl; they'd got to calling each other by their first names within a day or two after the trip started. But after that, she seemed to be avoiding him; and Gefty guessed that Maulbow had spoken to her, probably to make sure that Kerim didn't let any of her employer's secrets slip out.

Maulbow himself was as aloof and taciturn a client as Rammer Spacelines ever had picked up. A lean, blond character of indeterminate age, with pale eyes, hard mouth. Why he had selected a bulky semifreighter like the Queen for a mineralogical survey jaunt to a lifeless little sun system far beyond the outposts of civilization was a point he didn't discuss. Gefty, needing the charter money, had restrained his curiosity. If Maulbow wanted only a pilot and preferred to do all the rest of the work himself, that was certainly Maulbow's affair. And if he happened to be up to something illegal--though it was difficult to imagine what--Customs would nail him when they got back to the Hub.

But those facts looked a little different now.

* * *

Gefty scratched his chin, inquired, "Do you happen to know where Mr. Maulbow keeps the keys to the storage vault?"

Kerim looked startled. "Why, no! I couldn't permit you to take the keys anyway while he ... while he's unconscious! You know that."

Gefty grunted. "Any idea of what he has locked up in the vault?"

"You shouldn't ask me--" Her eyes widened. "Why, that couldn't possibly have anything to do with what's happened!"

He might, Gefty thought, have reassured her a little too much. He said, "I wouldn't know. But I don't want to just sit here and wonder about it until Maulbow wakes up. Until we're back in normspace, we'd better not miss any bets. Because one thing's sure--if this has happened to anybody else, they didn't turn up again to report it. You see?"

Kerim apparently did. She went pale, then said hesitantly, "Well ... the sealed cases Mr. Maulbow brought out from the Hub with him had some very expensive instruments in them. That's all I know. He's always trusted me not to pry into his business any more than my secretarial duties required, and of course I haven't."

"You don't know then what it was he brought up from that moon a few hours ago--those two big cases he stowed away in the vault?"

"No, I don't, Gefty. You see, he hasn't told me what the purpose of this trip is. I only know that it's a matter of great importance to him." Kerim paused, added, "From the careful manner Mr. Maulbow handled the cases with the cranes, I had the impression that whatever was inside them must be quite heavy."

"I noticed that," Gefty said. It wasn't much help. "Well, I'll tell you something now," he went on. "I let your boss keep both sets of keys to the storage vault because he insisted on it when he signed the charter. What I didn't tell him was that I could make up a duplicate set any time in around half an hour."

"Oh! Have you--?"

"Not yet. But I intend to take a look at what Mr. Maulbow's got in that vault now, with or without his consent. You'd better run along and get dressed while I take him up to the instrument room."

"Why move him?" Kerim asked.

"The instrument room's got an overall safety field. I've turned it on now, and if something starts banging us around again, the room will be the safest place on the ship. I'll bring his personal luggage up too, and you can start looking through it for the keys. You may find them before I get a new set made. Or he may wake up and tell us where they are."

Kerim Ruse gave her employer a dubious glance, then nodded, said, "I imagine you're right, Gefty," and pattered hurriedly out of the stateroom. A few minutes later, she arrived, fully dressed, in the instrument room. Gefty looked around from the table-shelf where he had laid out his tools, and said, "He hasn't stirred. His suitcases are over there. I've unlocked them."

Kerim gazed at what showed in the screens about the control console and shivered slightly. She said, "I was thinking, Gefty ... isn't there something they call Space Three?"

[Illustration]

"Sure. Pseudospace. But that isn't where we are. There're some special-built Navy tubs that can operate in that stuff if they don't stay too long. A ship like the Queen ... well, you and I and everything else in here would be frozen solid by now if we'd got sucked somehow into Space Three."

"I see," Kerim said uncomfortably. Gefty heard her move over to the suitcases. After a moment, she asked, "What do the vault keys look like?"

"You can't miss them if he's just thrown them in there. They're over six inches long. What kind of a guy is this Maulbow? A scientist?"

"I couldn't say, Gefty. He's never referred to himself as a scientist. I've had this job a year and a half. Mr. Maulbow is a very considerate employer ... one of the nicest men I've known, really. But it was simply understood that I should ask no questions about the business beyond what I actually needed to know for my work."

"What's the business called?"

"Maulbow Engineering."

"Big help," Gefty observed, somewhat sourly. "Those instruments he brought along ... he build those himself?"

"No, but I think he designed some of them--probably most of them. The companies he had doing the actual work appeared to have a terrible time getting everything exactly the way Mr. Maulbow wanted it--There's nothing that looks like a set of keys in those first two suitcases, Gefty."

"Well," Gefty said, "if you don't find them in the others, you might start thumping around to see if he's got secret compartments in his luggage somewhere."

"I do wish," Kerim Ruse said uneasily, "that Mr. Maulbow would regain consciousness. It seems so ... so underhanded to be doing these things behind his back!"

Gefty grunted noncommittally. He wasn't at all certain by now that he wanted his secretive client to wake up before he'd checked on the contents of the Queen's storage vault.

* * * * *

Fifteen minutes later, Gefty Rammer was climbing down to the storage deck in the Queen's broad stern, the newly fashioned set of vault keys clanking heavily in his coat pocket. Kerim had remained with her employer who was getting back his color but still hadn't opened his eyes. She hadn't found the original keys. Gefty wasn't sure she'd tried too hard, though she seemed to realize the seriousness of the situation now. But her loyalty to Mr. Maulbow could make no further difference, and she probably felt more comfortable for it.

Lights went on automatically in the wide passage leading from the cargo lock to the vault as Gefty turned into it. His steps echoed between the steel bulkheads on either side. He paused a moment before the big circular vault doors, listening to the purr of the Queen's idling engines in the next compartment. The familiar sound was somehow reassuring. He inserted the first key, turned it over twice, drew it out again and pressed one of the buttons in the control panel beside the door. The heavy slab of steel moved sideways with a soft, hissing sound, vanished into the wall. Gefty slid the other key into the lock of the inner door. A few seconds later, the vault entrance lay open before him.

He stood still again, wrinkling his nose. The area ahead was only dimly illuminated--the shaking-up the Queen had undergone had disturbed the lighting system here. And what was that odor? Rather sharp, unpleasant; it might have been spilled ammonia. Gefty stepped through the door into the wide, short entrance passage beyond it, turned to the right and peered about in the semidarkness of the vault.

Two great steel cases--the ones Maulbow had taken down to an airless moon surface, loaded up with something and brought back to the Queen--were jammed awkwardly into a corner, in a manner which suggested they'd slid into it when the ship was being knocked around. One of them was open and appeared to be empty. Gefty wasn't sure of the other. In the dimness beside them lay the loose coils of some very thick, dark cable--And standing near the center of the floor was a thing that at once riveted his attention on it completely. He sucked his breath in softly, feeling chilled.

He realized he hadn't really believed his own hunch. But, of course, if it hadn't been an unheard-of outside force that plucked the Queen out of normspace and threw her into this elsewhere, then it must be something Maulbow had put on board. And that something had to be a machine of some kind--

It was.

About it he could make out a thin gleaming of wires--a jury-rigged safety field. Within the flimsy-looking protective cage was a double bank of instruments, some of them alive with the flicker and glow of lights. Those must be the very expensive and difficult-to-build items Maulbow had brought out from the Hub. Beside them stood the machine, squat and ponderous. In the vague light, it looked misshaped and discolored. A piece of equipment that had taken a bad beating of some kind. But it was functioning. As he stared, intermittent bursts of clicking noises rose from it, like the staccato of irregular gunfire.

For a moment, questions raced in disorder through his mind. What was it? Why had it been on that moon? Part of another ship, wrecked now ... a ship that had been at home here? Was it some sort of drive?

Maulbow must know. He'd known enough to design the instruments required to bring the battered monster back to life. On the other hand, he had not foreseen in all detail what could happen once the thing was in operation, because the Queen's sudden buck-jumping act had surprised him and knocked him out.

The first step, in any event, was to get Maulbow awake now. To tamper with a device like this, before learning as much as one could about it, would be lunatic foolhardiness. It looked like too good a bet that the next serious mistake made by anybody would finish them all--

Perhaps it was only because Gefty's nerves were on edge that he grew aware at that point in his reflections of two minor signals from his senses. One was that the smell of ammonia, which he had almost stopped noticing, was becoming appreciably stronger. The other was the faintest of sounds--a whispering suggestion of motion somewhere behind him. But here in the storage vault nothing should have moved, and Gefty's muscles were tensing as his head came around. Almost in the same instant, he flung himself wildly to one side, stumbling and regaining his balance as something big and dark slapped heavily down on the floor at the point where he had stood. Then he was darting up through the entrance passage, turning, and knocking down the lock switches on the outside door panel.

It came flowing around the corner of the passage behind him as the vault doors began to slide together. He was aware mainly of swift, smooth, oiling motion like that of a big snake; then, for a fraction of a second, a strip of brighter light from the outside passage showed a long, heavy wedge of a head, a green metal-glint of staring eyes.

The doors closed silently into their frames and locked. The thing was inside. But it was almost a minute then before Gefty could control his shaking legs enough to start moving back towards the main deck. In the half-dark of the vault, it had looked like a big coiled cable lying next to the packing cases. Like Maulbow, it might have been battered around and knocked out during the recent disturbance; and when it recovered, it had found Gefty in the vault with it. But it might also have been awake all the while, waiting cunningly until Gefty's attention seemed fixed elsewhere before launching its attack. It was big enough to have flattened him and smashed every bone in his body if the stroke had landed.

Some kind of guard animal--a snakelike watchdog? What other connection could it have with the mystery machine? Perhaps Maulbow had intended to leave it confined in one of the cases, and it had broken loose--

Too many questions by now, Gefty thought. But Maulbow had the answers.

* * * * *

He was hurrying up the main deck's central passage when Maulbow's voice addressed him sharply from a door he'd just passed.

"Stop right there, Rammer! Don't dare to move! I--"

The voice ended on a note of surprise. Gefty's reaction had not been too rational, but it was prompt. Maulbow's tone and phrasing implied he was armed. Gefty wasn't, but he kept a gun in the instrument room for emergencies. He'd been through a whole series of unnerving experiences, winding up with being shagged out of his storage vault by something that stank of ammonia and looked like a giant snake. To have one of the Queen's passengers order him to stand where he was topped it off. Every other consideration was swept aside by a great urge to get his hands on his gun.

He glanced back, saw Maulbow coming out of the half-opened door, something like a twenty-inch, thin, white rod in one hand. Then Gefty went bounding on along the passage, hunched forward and zigzagging from wall to wall to give Maulbow--if the thing he held was a weapon and he actually intended to use it--as small and erratic a target as possible. Maulbow shouted angrily behind him. Then, as Gefty came up to the next cross-passage, a line of white fire seared through the air across his shoulders and smashed off the passage wall.

With that, he was around the corner, and boiling mad. He had no great liking for gunfire, but it didn't shake him like the silently attacking beast in the dark storage had done. He reached the deserted instrument room not many seconds later, had his gun out and cocked, and was faced back towards the passage by which he had entered. Maulbow, if he had pursued without hesitation, should be arriving by now. But the passage stayed quiet. Gefty couldn't see into it from where he stood. He waited, trying to steady his breathing, wondering where Kerim Ruse was and what had got into Maulbow. After a moment, without taking his eyes from the passage entrance, he reached into the wall closet from which he had taken the gun and fished out another souvenir of his active service days, a thin-bladed knife in a slip-sheath. Gefty worked the fastenings of the sheath over his left wrist and up his forearm under his coat, tested the release to make sure it was functioning, and shook his coat sleeve back into place.

The passage was still quiet. Gefty moved softly over to one of the chairs, took a small cushion from it and pitched it out in front of the entrance.

There was a hiss. The cushion turned in midair into a puff of bright white fire. Gefty aimed his gun high at the far passage wall just beyond the entrance and pulled the trigger. It was a projectile gun. He heard the slug screech off the slick plastic bulkhead and go slamming down the passage. Somebody out there made a startled, incoherent noise. But not the kind of a noise a man makes when he's just been hit.

"If you come in here armed," Gefty called, "I'll blow your head off. Want to stop this nonsense now?"

There was a moment's silence. Then Maulbow's voice replied shakily from the passage. He seemed to be standing about twenty feet back from the room.

"If you'll end your thoughtless attempts at interference, Rammer," he said, "there will be no trouble." He was speaking with the restraint of a man who is in a state of cold fury. "You're endangering us all. You must realize that you have no understanding of what you are doing."

Well, the last could be true enough. "We'll talk about it," Gefty said without friendliness. "I haven't done anything yet, but I'm not just handing the ship over to you. And what have you done with Miss Ruse?"

Maulbow hesitated again. "She's in the map room," he said then. "I ... it was necessary to restrict her movements for a while. But you might as well let her out now. We must reach an agreement without loss of time."

Gefty glanced over his shoulder at the small closed door of the map room. There was no lock on the door, and he had heard no sound from inside; this might be some trick. But it wouldn't take long to find out. He backed up to the wall, pushed the door open and looked inside.

Kerim was there, sitting on a chair in one corner of the tiny room. The reason she hadn't made any noise became clear. She and the chair were covered by a rather closely fitting sack of transparent, glistening fabric. She stared out through it despairingly at Gefty, her lips moving urgently. But no sound came from the sack.

Gefty called angrily, "Maulbow--"

"Don't excite yourself, Rammer." There was a suggestion of what might be contempt in Maulbow's tone now. "The girl hasn't been harmed. She can breathe easily through the restrainer. And you can remove it by pulling at the material from outside."

Gefty's mouth tightened. "I'll keep my gun on the passage while I do it--"

Maulbow didn't answer. Gefty edged back into the map room, tentatively grasped the transparent stuff above Kerim's shoulder. To his surprise, it parted like wet tissue. He pulled sharply, and in a moment Kerim came peeling herself out of it, her face tear-stained, working desperately with hands, elbows and shoulders.

"Gefty," she gasped, "he ... Mr. Maulbow--"

"He's out in the passage there," Gefty said. "He can hear you." His glance shifted for an instant to the wall where a second of the shroudlike transparencies was hanging. And who could that have been intended for, he thought, but Gefty Rammer? He added, "We've had a little trouble."

"Oh!" She looked out of the room towards the passage, then at the gun in Gefty's hand, then up at his face.

"Maulbow," Gefty went on, speaking distinctly enough to make sure Maulbow heard, "has a gun, too. He'll stay there in the passage and we'll stay in the instrument room until we agree on what should be done. He's responsible for what's happened and seems to know where we are."

He looked at Kerim's frightened eyes, dropped his voice to a whisper. "Don't let this worry you too much. I haven't found out just what he's up to, but so far his tricks have pretty much backfired. He was counting on taking us both by surprise, for one thing. That didn't work, so now he'd like us to co-operate."

"Are you going to?"

Gefty shrugged. "Depends on what he has in mind. I'm just interested in getting us out of this alive. Let's hear what Maulbow has to say--"

* * * * *

Some minutes later Gefty was trying to decide whether it was taking a worse risk to believe what Maulbow said than to keep things stalled on the chance that he was lying.

Kerim Ruse, perched stiffly erect on the edge of a chair, eyes big and round, face almost colorless, apparently believed Maulbow and was wishing she didn't. There was, of course, some supporting evidence ... primarily the improbable appearance of their surroundings. The pencil-thin fire-spouter and the sleazy-looking "restrainer" had a sufficiently unfamiliar air to go with Maulbow's story; but as far as Gefty knew, either of them could have been manufactured in the Hub.

Then there was the janandra--the big, snakish thing in the storage which Maulbow had brought back up from the moon along with the battered machine. It had been, he said, his shipboard companion on another voyage. It wasn't ordinarily aggressive--Gefty's sudden appearance in the vault must have startled it into making an attack. It was not exactly a pet. There was a psychological relationship between it and Maulbow which Maulbow would not attempt to explain because Gefty and Kerim would be unable to grasp its significance. The janandra was essential, in this unexplained manner, to his well-being.

That item was almost curious enough to seem to substantiate his other statements; but it didn't really prove anything. The only point Gefty didn't question in the least was that they were in a bad spot which might be getting worse rapidly. His gaze shifted back to the screens. What he saw out there, surrounding the ship, was, according to Maulbow, an illusion of space created by the time flow in which they were moving.

Also according to Maulbow, there was a race of the future, human in appearance, with machines to sail the current of time through the universe--to run and tack with the winds of time, dipping in and out of the normspace of distant periods and galaxies as they chose. Maulbow, one of the explorers, had met disaster a million light-years from the home of his kind, centuries behind them, his vehicle wrecked on an airless moon with damaged control unit and shattered instruments. He had made his way to a human civilization to obtain the equipment he needed, and returned at last with the Silver Queen to where the time-sailer lay buried.

Gefty's lip curled. No, he wasn't buying all that just yet--but if Maulbow was not lying, then the unseen stars were racing past, the mass of the galaxy beginning to slide by, eventually to be lost forever beyond a black distance no space drive could span. The matter simply had to be settled quickly. But Maulbow was also strained and impatient, and if his impatience could be increased a little more, he might start telling the things that really mattered, the things Gefty had to know. Gefty asked slowly, as if hesitant to commit himself, "Why did you bring us along?"

The voice from the passage snapped, "Because my resources were nearly exhausted, Rammer! I couldn't obtain a new ship. Therefore I chartered yours; and you came with it. As for Miss Ruse--in spite of every precaution, my activities may have aroused suspicion and curiosity among your people. When I disappeared, Miss Ruse might have been questioned. I couldn't risk being followed to the wreck of the sailer, so I took her with me. And what does that mean against what I have offered you? The greatest adventure--followed, I give you my solemn word, by a safe return to your own place and time, and the most generous compensations for any inconvenience you may have suffered!"

Kerim, looking up at Gefty, shook her head violently. Gefty said, "We find it difficult to take you on trust now, Maulbow. Why do you want to get into the instrument room?"

Maulbow was silent for some seconds. Then he said, "As I told you, this ship would not have been buffeted about during the moments of transfer if the control unit were operating with complete efficiency. Certain adjustments will have to be made in the unit, and this should be done promptly."

* * *

"Where do the ship instruments come in?" Gefty asked.

"I can determine the nature of the problem from them. When I was ... stranded ... the unit was seriously damaged. My recent repairs were necessarily hasty. I--"

[Illustration]

"What caused the crack-up?"

Maulbow said, tone taut with impatience, "Certain sections of the Great Current are infested with dangerous forces. I shall not attempt to describe them ..."

"I wouldn't get it?"

"I don't pretend to understand them very well myself, Rammer. They are not life but show characteristics of life--even of intelligent life. If you can imagine radiant energy being capable of conscious hostility...."

There was a chill at the back of Gefty's neck. "A big, fast-moving light?"

"Yes!" Sharp concern showed suddenly in the voice from the passage. "You ... when did you see that?"

Gefty glanced at the screens. "Twice since you've been talking. And once before--immediately after we got tumbled around."

"Then we can waste no more time, Rammer. Those forces are sensitive to the fluctuations of the control unit. If they were close enough to be seen, they're aware the ship is here. They were attempting to locate it."

"What could they do?"

Maulbow said, "A single attack was enough to put the control unit out of operation in my sailer. The Great Current then rejected us instantly. A ship of this size might afford more protection, which is the reason I chose it. But if the control unit is not adjusted immediately to enable it to take us out of this section, the attacks will continue until the ship--and we--have been destroyed."

Gefty drew a deep breath. "There's another solution to that problem, Maulbow. Miss Ruse and I prefer it. And if you meant what you said--that you'd see to it we got back eventually--you shouldn't object either."

The voice asked sharply, "What do you mean?"

Gefty said, "Shut the control unit off. From what you were saying, that throws us automatically back into normspace, while we're still close enough to the Hub. You'll find plenty of people there who'll stake you to a trip to the future if they can go along and are convinced they'll return. Miss Ruse and I don't happen to be that adventurous."

There was silence from the passage. Gefty added, "Take your time to make up your mind about it, if you want to. I don't like the idea of those lights hitting us, but neither do you. And I think I can wait this out as well as you can...."

The silence stretched out. Presently Gefty said, "If you do accept, slide that fire-shooting device of yours into the room before you show up. We don't want accidents."

He paused again. Kerim was chewing her lips, hands clenched into small fists in her lap. Then Maulbow answered, voice flat and expressionless now.

"The worst thing we can do at present," he said, "is to prolong a dispute about possible courses of action. If I disarm, will you lay aside your gun?"

"Yes."

"Then I accept your conditions, disappointing as they are."

He was silent. After a moment, Gefty heard the white rod clatter lightly along the floor of the passage. It struck the passage wall, spun off it, and rolled into the instrument room, coming to rest a few feet away from him. Gefty hesitated, picked it up and laid it on the wall table. He placed his own gun beside it, moved a dozen steps away. Kerim's eyes followed him anxiously.

"Gefty," she whispered, "he might ..."

Gefty looked at her, formed the words "It's all right" with his mouth and called, "Guns have been put aside, Maulbow. Come on in, and let's keep it peaceable."

He waited, arms hanging loosely at his side, heart beating heavily, as quick footsteps came up the passage. Maulbow appeared in the entrance, glanced at Gefty and Kerim, then about the room. His gaze rested for a moment on the wall table, shifted back to Gefty. Maulbow came on into the room, turning towards Gefty, mouth twisting.

He said softly, "It is not our practice, Rammer, to share the secrets of the Great Current with other races. I hadn't foreseen that you might become a dangerous nuisance. But now--"

His right hand began to lift, half closed about some small golden instrument. Gefty's left arm moved back and quickly forwards.

The service knife slid out of its sheath and up from his palm as an arrow of smoky blackness burst from the thing in Maulbow's hand. The blackness came racing with a thin, snarling noise across the floor towards Gefty's feet. The knife flashed above it, turning, and stood hilt-deep in Maulbow's chest.

* * * * *

Gefty returned a few minutes later from the forward cabin which served as the Queen's sick bay, and said to Kerim, "He's still alive, though I don't know why. He may even recover. He's full of anesthetic, and that should keep him quiet till we're back in normspace. Then I'll see what we can do for him."

Kerim had lost some of her white, shocked look while he was gone. "You knew he would try to kill you?" she asked shakily.

"Suspected he had it in mind--he gave in too quick. But I thought I'd have a chance to take any gadget he was hiding away from him first. I was wrong about that. Now we'd better move fast ..."

He switched the emergency check panel back on, glanced over the familiar patterns of lights and numbers. A few minor damage spots were indicated, but the ship was still fully operational. One minor damage spot which did not appear on the panel was now to be found in the instrument room itself, in the corner on which the door of the map room opened. The door, the adjoining bulkheads and section of flooring were scarred, blackened, and as assortedly malodorous as burned things tend to become. That was where Gefty had stood when Maulbow entered the room, and if he had remained there an instant after letting go of the knife, he would have been in very much worse condition than the essentially fireproof furnishings.

Both Maulbow's weapons--the white rod lying innocently on the wall table and the round, golden device which had dropped from his hand spitting darts of smoking blackness--had blasted unnervingly away into that area for almost thirty seconds after Maulbow was down and twisting about on the floor. Then he went limp and the firing instantly stopped. Apparently, Maulbow's control of them had ended as he lost consciousness.

It seemed fortunate that the sick bay cabin's emergency treatment accessories, gentle as their action was, might have been designed for the specific purpose of keeping the most violent of prisoners immobilized--let alone one with a terrible knife wound in him. At the angle along which the knife had driven in and up below the ribs, an ordinary man would have been dead in seconds. But it was very evident now that Maulbow was no ordinary man, and even after the eerie weapons had been pitched out of the ship through the instrument room's disposal tube, Gefty couldn't rid himself of an uncomfortable suspicion that he wasn't done with Maulbow yet--wouldn't be done with him, in fact, until one or the other of them was dead.

He said to Kerim, "I thought the machine Maulbow set up in the storage vault would turn out to be some drive engine, but apparently it has an entirely different function. He connected it with the instruments he had made in the Hub, and together they form what he calls a control unit. The emergency panel would show if the unit were drawing juice from the ship. It isn't, and I don't know what powers it. But we do know now that the control unit is holding us in the time current, and it will go on holding us there as long as it's in operation.

"If we could shut it off, the Queen would be 'rejected' by the current, like Maulbow's sailer was. In other words, we'd get knocked back into normspace--which is what we want. And we want it to happen as soon as possible because, if Maulbow was telling the truth on that point, every minute that passes here is taking us farther away from the Hub, and farther from our own time towards his."

Kerim nodded, eyes intent on his face.

"Now I can't just go down there and start slapping switches around on the thing," Gefty went on. "He said it wasn't working right, and even if it were, I couldn't tell what would happen. But it doesn't seem to connect up with any ship systems--it just seems to be holding us in a field of its own. So I should be able to move the whole unit into the cargo lock and eject it from there. If we shift the Queen outside its field, that should have the same effect as shutting the control unit off. It should throw us back into normspace."

Kerim nodded again. "What about Mr. Maulbow's janandra animal?"

Gefty shrugged. "Depends on the mood I find it in. He said it wasn't usually aggressive. Maybe it isn't. I'll get into a spacesuit for protection and break out some of the mining equipment to move it along with. If I can maneuver it into an empty compartment where it will be out of the ..."

* * *

He broke off, expression changing, eyes fastened on the emergency panel. Then he turned hurriedly, reached across the side of the console for the intership airseal controls. Kerim asked apprehensively, "What's the matter, Gefty?"

"Wish I knew ... exactly." Gefty indicated the emergency panel. "Little red light there, on the storage deck section--it wasn't showing a minute ago. It means that the vault doors have been opened since then."

He saw the same half-superstitious fear appear in her face that had touched him. "You think he did it?"

"I don't know." Maulbow's control of the guns had seemed uncanny enough. But that was a different matter. The guns were a product of his own time and science. But the vault door mechanisms? There might have been sufficient opportunity for Maulbow to study them and alter them, for some purpose of his own, since he'd come aboard....

"I've got the ship compartments and decks sealed off from each other now," Gefty said slowly. "The only connecting points from one to the other are personnel hatches--they're small air locks. So the janandra's confined to the storage deck. If it's come out of the vault, it might be a nuisance until I can get equipment to handle it. But that isn't too serious. The spacesuits are on the second deck, and I'll get into one before I go on to the storage. You wait here a moment, I'll look in on Maulbow again before I start."

If Maulbow wasn't still unconscious, he was doing a good job of feigning it. Gefty looked at the pale, lax face, the half-shut eyes, shook his head and left the cabin, locking it behind him. It mightn't be Maulbow's doing, but having the big snake loose in the storage could, in fact, make things extremely awkward now. He didn't think his gun would make much impression on anything of that size, and while several of the ship's mining tools could be employed as very effective close-range weapons, they happened, unfortunately, to be stored away on the same deck.

He found Kerim standing in the center of the instrument room, waiting for him.

"Gefty," she said, "do you notice anything? An odd sort of smell...."

Then the odor was in Gefty's nostrils, too, and the back of his neck turned to ice as he recognized it. He glanced up at the ventilation outlet, looked back at Kerim.

He took her arm, said softly, "Come this way. Keep very quiet! I don't know how it happened, but the janandra's on the main deck now. That's what it smells like. The smell's coming through the ventilation system, so the thing's moving around in the port section. We'll go the other way."

Kerim whispered, "What will we do?"

"Get ourselves into spacesuits first, and then get Maulbow's control unit out of the ship. The janandra may be looking around for him. If it is, it won't bother us."

* * * * *

He hadn't wanted to remind Kerim that, from what Maulbow said, there might be more than one reason for getting rid of the control unit as quickly as possible. But it had been constantly in the back of his mind; and twice, in the few minutes that passed after Maulbow's strange weapons were silenced, he had seen a momentary pale glare appear in the unquiet flow of darkness reflecting in the viewscreens. Gefty had said nothing, because if it was true that hostile forces were alert and searching for them here, it added to their immediate danger but not at all to the absolute need to free themselves from the inexorable rush of the Great Current before they were carried beyond hope of return to their civilization.

But those brief glimpses did add to the sense of urgency throbbing in Gefty's nerves, while events, and the equally hard necessity to avoid a fatally mistaken move in this welter of unknown factors, kept blocking him. Now the mysterious manner in which Maulbow's unpleasant traveling companion had appeared on the main deck made it impossible to do anything but keep Kerim at his side. If Maulbow was still capable of taking a hand in matters, there was no reasonably safe place to leave her aboard the Queen.

And Maulbow might be capable of it. Twice as they hurried up the narrow, angled passages along the Queen's curving hull towards an airseal leading to the next compartment, Gefty caught a trace of the ammonia-like animal odor coming over the ventilating system. They reached the lock without incident; but then, as they came along the second deck hall to the ship's magazine, there was a sharp click in the stillness behind them. Its meaning was disconcertingly apparent. Gefty hesitated, turned Kerim into a side passage, guided her along it.

She looked up at his face. "It's following us?"

"Seems to be." No time for the spacesuits in the magazine now--something had just emerged from the air lock through which they had entered the second deck not many moments before. He helped the girl quickly down a section of ladderlike stairs to the airseal connecting the second deck with the storage, punched a wall button there. As the lock door opened, there was another noise from the passage they had just left, as if something had thudded briefly and heavily against one of the bulkheads. Kerim uttered a little gasp. Then they were in the lock, and Gefty slapped down two other buttons, stood watching the door behind them snap shut and, a few seconds later, the one on the far side open on the dark storage deck.

They scrambled down another twelve feet of ladder to the floor of a side passage, hearing the lock snap shut behind them. As it closed, they were in complete darkness. Gefty seized Kerim's arm, ran with her up the passage to the left, guiding himself with his fingertips on the left bulkhead. When they came to a corner, he turned her to the left again. A few seconds later, he pulled open a small door, bundled the girl through, came in himself, and shut the door to a narrow slit behind them.

Kerim whispered shakily, "What will we do now, Gefty?"

"Stay here for the moment. It'll look for us in the vault first."

And it should go to the storage vault first where it had been guarding Maulbow's machine, to hunt for them there. But it might not. Gefty eased the gun from his pocket on the far side of Kerim. Across the dark compartment was another door. They could retreat a little farther here if it became necessary--but not very much farther.

They waited in a silence that was complete except for their unsteady breathing and the distant, deep pulse of the Queen's throttled-down drives. He felt Kerim trembling against him. How did Maulbow's creature move through the airseal locks? The operating mechanisms were simple--a dog might have been taught to use them. But a dog had paws....

There came the soft hiss of the opening lock, the faintest shimmer of light to the right of the passage mouth he was watching through the door. A heavy thump on the floor below the locks followed, then a hard click as the lock closed and complete darkness returned.

The silence resumed. Seconds dragged on. Gefty's imagination pictured the thing waiting, its great, wedge-shaped head raised as its senses probed the dark about it for a sign of the two human beings. Then a vague rushing noise began, growing louder as it approached the passage mouth, crossing it, receding rapidly again to the left.

Gefty let his breath out slowly, eased the door open and stood listening again. Abruptly, there was reflected light in the lock passage, coming now from the left. He said in a whisper, "It's moving around in the main hall, Kerim. We can go on the other way now, but we'll have to be fast and keep quiet. I've thought of how we can get rid of that thing."

* * *

The cargo lock on the storage deck had two inner doors. The one which opened into the side of the vault hall was built to allow passage of the largest chunks of freight the Queen was likely to be burdened with; it was almost thirty feet wide and twenty high. The second door was just large enough to let a man in a spacesuit climb in and out of the side of the lock without using the freight door. It opened on a tiny control cubicle from which the lock's mechanisms were operated during loading processes.

[Illustration]

Gefty let Kerim and himself into the cubicle from one of the passages, steered the girl through the pitch blackness of the little room to the chair before the control panel and told her to sit down. He groped for a moment at the side of the panel, found a knob and twisted it. There was a faint click. A scattering of pale lights appeared suddenly on the panel, a dark viewscreen, set at a tilt above them, reflecting their gleam.

Gefty explained in a low voice, "Left side of that screen covers the lock. Right one covers the big hall outside. No lights in either at the moment, so you don't see anything. Only way the cargo door to the hall can be opened or closed is with these switches right here. What I want to do is get the janandra into the lock, slam the door on it and lock down the control switches. Then we've got it trapped."

"But how are you going to get it to go in there?"

"No real problem--I'll be three jumps ahead of it. Then I duck back up into this cubicle, and lock both doors. And it'll be inside the lock. You have the picture now?"

Kerim said unsteadily, "I do. But it sounds awfully risky, Gefty."

"Well, I don't like it either," Gefty admitted. "So I'll start right now before I lose my nerve. As soon as I move out into the vault hall, the lighting will go on. That's automatic. You watch the right side of the screen. If you see the janandra coming before I do, yell as loud as you can."

He shifted the two inner door switches to the right. A red spark appeared in the dark viewscreen, high up near the center. A second red light showed on the cubicle bulkhead beside Gefty. Beneath it an oblong section of the bulkhead turned silently away on heavy hinges, became a door two feet in thickness, which stood jutting out at a right angle into the darkness of the cargo lock. A wave of cold air moved through it into the control cubicle.

On the screen, another red spark appeared beside the first one.

"Both doors are open now," Gefty murmured to the girl. "The janandra isn't in the vault hall or the lighting would have turned on, but it may have heard the door open and be on its way. So keep watching the screen."

"I certainly will!" she whispered shakily.

Gefty took an oversized wrench from the wall, climbed quickly and quietly down the three ladder steps to the floor of the lock, and walked across it to the sill of the giant freight door, which now had swung out and down into the vault hall, fitting itself into a depression of the flooring. He hesitated an instant on the sill, then stepped out into the big dark hall. Light filled it immediately in both directions.

He stood quiet, intent on the storage vault entrance far up the hall to his left. He could see the vault was open. The janandra might still be inside it. But the seconds passed, and the dark entrance remained silent and there was no suggestion of motion beyond it. Gefty glanced to the right, moved a dozen steps farther out into the hall, hefted the wrench and spun it through the air towards the ventilator frame on the opposite bulkhead.

The heavy tool clanged loudly against the frame, bounced off and thudded to the floor. Gefty started slowly over to it, heart pounding, with the vault entrance still at the edge of his vision.

Kerim's voice screamed, "Gefty, it's--"

He spun around, sprinted back to the cargo lock. The janandra had come silently out of the nearest side passage behind him, was approaching with the remembered oiling swiftness of motion, its great head lifted a yard from the floor. Gefty plunged through the lock, jumped for the top of the cubicle door steps, came stumbling into the cubicle. Kerim was on her feet, staring. He swung the cubicle door switch to the left, slapping it flat to the panel. The door snapped back into the wall behind him with a force that shook the floor.

On the screen, the janandra's thick, dark worm-shape was swinging around in the dim lock to regain the open hall. It had seen the trap. But the freight door switch went flat beside the other, and the freight door rose with massive swiftness. The heavy body smashed against it, went sliding back to the floor as the door slammed shut and the screen section showing the cargo lock turned dark.

"Got it--got it--got it!" Gefty heard himself whispering exultantly. He switched on the lock's interior lights.

Then he swore softly, and, beside him, Kerim sucked in her breath.

* * * * *

The screen showed the janandra in violent but apparently purposeful motion inside the lock ... and it was also apparent now that it was a more complexly constructed creature than the long worm-body and heavy head had indicated. The skin, to a distance of some eight feet back of the head, had spread out into a wide, flexible frill. From beneath the frill extended half a dozen jointed, bone-white arms, along with waving, ribbonlike appendages less easy to define. The thing was reared half up along the hall door, inspecting its surface with these members; then suddenly it flung itself around and flashed over to the outer lock door. Three arms shot out; wiry fingers caught the three spin-locks simultaneously, began to whirl them.

Gefty said, staring, "Kerim, it's going to ..."

The janandra didn't. The motion checked suddenly, was reversed. The locks drew tight again. The janandra swung back from the door, lifting half its length upwards, big head weaving about as it inspected the tool racks overhead. An arm reached suddenly, snatched something from one of the racks. Then the thing turned again; and in the next instant its head filled the viewscreen. Kerim made a choked sound of fright, jerking back against Gefty. The bulging, metal-green eyes seemed to stare directly at him. And the screen went black.

Kerim whispered, "Wha ... what happened, Gefty?"

Gefty swallowed, said, "It smashed the view pickup. Must have guessed we were watching and didn't like it...." He added, "I was beginning to think Maulbow must be some kind of superman. But it wasn't any remote-control magic of his that let the janandra out of the vault, and opened the intership locks when it came up to the main deck and followed us down again. It was doing all that for itself. It's Maulbow's partner, not his pet. And it's probably got at least as good a brain as anyone else on board behind that ugly face."

Kerim moistened her lips. "Can it ... could it get out again?"

"Into the ship?" Gefty shook his head decidedly. "Uh-uh. It could dump itself out on the other side--and it almost did before it realized where it was and what it was about to do. But the inner lock doors won't open until someone opens them right on this panel. No, the thing's safely trapped. On the other hand ..."

On the other hand, Gefty realized that he wouldn't now be able to bring himself to eject the janandra out of the cargo lock and into the Great Current. Its intentions obviously hadn't been friendly, but its level of intelligence was as good as his own, and perhaps somewhat better; and at present it was helpless. To dispose of it as he'd had in mind would therefore be the cold-blooded murder of an equal. But so long as that ugly and formidable shipmate of Maulbow's stayed in the cargo lock, the lock couldn't be used to get rid of the control unit in the vault.

A new solution presented itself while Gefty was making a rapid and rather desperate mental review of various heavy-duty tools which might be employed as weapons to force the janandra into submission and haul it off for confinement elsewhere in the ship. Not impossible, but a highly precarious and time-consuming operation at best. Then another thought occurred: the storage vault lay directly against the hull of the Queen--

How long to cut through the hull? The ship's mining equipment was on board, and the tools were self-powered. Climb into a spacesuit, empty the air from the entire storage deck, leaving the janandra imprisoned in the cargo lock ... with Maulbow incapacitated in sick bay, and Kerim back in the control compartment and also in a suit, for additional protection. Then cut ship's power to this deck to avoid complications with the Queen's involved circuitry and work under space conditions--half an hour if he hurried.

* * *

"Shouldn't take more than another ten minutes," he informed Kerim presently over the suit's intercom.

"I'm very glad to hear it, Gefty." She sounded shaky.

"Anything going on in the screens?" he asked.

She hesitated a little, said, "No. Not at the moment."

Gefty grunted, blinked sweat from his eyes, and took hold of the handgrips of the heavy mining cutter again, turning it nose down towards the vault floor. The guide light found the point he was working on, and the slice beam stabbed out, began nibbling delicately away to extend the curving line it had eaten through the Queen's thick skin. He had drawn a twenty-five foot circle around Maulbow's battered control unit and the instruments attached to it, well outside the fragile-looking safety field. The circle was broken at four points where he would plant explosives. The explosives, going off together, should shatter the connecting links with the hull and throw the machine clear. If that didn't release them immediately from its influence, he would see what putting the Queen's drives into action would do.

"Gefty?" Kerim's voice asked.

"Uh-huh?"

He could hear her swallow over the intercom. "Those lights are back now."

"How many?"

"Two," Kerim said. "I think they're only two. They keep crossing back and forth in front of us." She laughed nervously. "It's idiotic, of course, but I do get the feeling they're looking at us."

Gefty said hesitantly, "Everything's set but I need another minute or two to get this last connection whittled down a little more. If I blow the charge too soon, it mightn't take the gadget clean out of the ship."

Kerim said, "I know. I'll just watch ... they just disappeared again." Her voice changed. "Now there's something else."

"What's that?"

"You know you said to watch the cargo lock lights on the emergency panel."

"Yes."

"The outer lock door has just been opened."

"What!"

"It must have been. The light started blinking red just now as I was looking at it."

Gefty was silent a moment, his mind racing. Why would the janandra open the lock? From what Maulbow had said, it could live for a while without air, but it still could gain nothing but eventual death from leaving the ship--

Unless, Gefty thought, the janandra had become aware in some way that he was about to blow their machine out of the Queen. There were grappling lines in the cargo lock, and if four or five of those lines were slapped to the circular section of the hull he'd loosened ...

"Kerim," he said.

"Yes?"

"I'm going to blow the deal right now. Got your suit snapped to the wall braces like I showed you?"

"Yes, Gefty." Her voice was faint but clear.

He turned the cutter away from the line it had dug, sent it rolling off towards the far wall. He hurried around the circle, checking the four charges, lumbered over to the vault passage, stopped just around the corner. He took the firing box from his suit.

"Ready, Kerim?" He opened the box.

"Ready...."

"Here goes!" Gefty reached into the box, twisted the firing handle. Light flared in the vault. The deck shook below him. He came stumbling out from behind the wall.

Maulbow's machine and its stand of instruments had vanished. Where it had stood was a dark circular hole. Nothing else seemed to have happened. Gefty clumped hurriedly over to the mining cutter, swung it around, started more cautiously back towards the hole. He didn't have the faintest idea what would come next, but a definite possibility was that he would see the janandra's dark form flowing up over the rim of the hole. Letting it run into the cutter beam might be the best way to discourage it from re-entering the Queen.

[Illustration]

Instead, a dazzling brilliance suddenly blotted out everything. The cutter was plucked from Gefty's grasp; then he was picked up, suit and all, and slammed up towards the vault ceiling. He had a feeling that inaudible thunders were shaking the ship. He seemed to be rolling over and over along the ceiling. At last, the suit crashed into something which showed a total disinclination to yield, and Gefty blacked out.

* * * * *

The left side of his face felt pushed out of shape; his left eye wasn't functioning too well, and there was a severe pulsing ache throughout the top of his head. But Gefty felt happy.

There were a few qualifying considerations.

"Of course," he pointed out to Kerim, "all we can really say immediately is that we're back in normspace and somewhere in the galaxy."

She smiled shakily. "Isn't that saying quite a lot, Gefty?"

"It's something." Gefty glanced around the instrument room. He had placed an emergency light on the console, but except for that, the control compartment was in darkness. The renewed battering the Queen had absorbed had knocked out the power in the forward section. The viewscreens were black, every instrument dead. But he'd seen the stars of normspace through the torn vault floor. It was something....

"We might have the light that slugged us to thank for that," he said. "I'm not sure just what did happen there, but it could have been Maulbow's control unit it was attacking rather than the ship. Maulbow said the lights were sensitive to the unit. At any rate, we're here, and we're rid of the gadget--and of the janandra." He hesitated. "I just don't feel you should get your hopes too high. We may find out we're a very long way from the Hub."

Kerim's large eyes showed a degree of confidence which made him almost uncomfortable. "If we are," she said serenely, "you'll get us back somehow."

Gefty cleared his throat. "Well, we'll see. If the power shutoff is something the Queen's repair scanners can handle, the instruments will come back on any minute. Give the scanners ten minutes. If they haven't done it by that time, they can't do it and I'll have to play repairman. Then, with the instruments working, we can determine exactly where we are."

Unless, he told himself silently, they'd wound up in a distant cluster never penetrated by the Federation's mapping teams. And there was the other little question of where they now were in time. But Kerim looked rosy with relief, and those details could wait.

He took up another emergency light, switched it on and said, "I'll see how Maulbow is doing while we're waiting for power. If the first aid treatment has pulled him through so far, the autosurgeon probably can fix him up."

Kerim's face suddenly took on a guilty expression. "I forgot all about Mr. Maulbow!" She hesitated. "Should I come along?"

Gefty shook his head. "I won't need help. And if it's a case for the surgeon, you wouldn't like it. Those things work painlessly, but it gets to be a mess for a while."

He shut off the light again when he reached the sick bay which was running on its independent power system. As he opened the cabin door from the dispensary, carrying the autosurgeon, it became evident that Maulbow was still alive but that he might be in delirium. Gefty placed the surgeon on the table, went over to the bed and looked at Maulbow.

To the extent that the emergency treatment instruments' cautious restraints permitted, Maulbow was twisting slowly about on the bed. He was speaking in a low, rapid voice, his face distorted by emotion. The words were not slurred, but they were in a language Gefty didn't know. It seemed clear that Maulbow had reverted mentally to his own time, and for some seconds he remained unaware that Gefty had entered the room. Then, surprisingly, the slitted blue eyes opened wider and focused on Gefty's face. And Maulbow screamed with rage.

Gefty felt somewhat disconcerted. For the reason alone that he was under anesthetic, Maulbow should not have been conscious. But he was. The words were now ones Gefty could understand, and Maulbow was telling him things which would have been interesting enough under different circumstances. Gefty broke in as soon as he could.

"Look," he said quietly, "I'm trying to help you. I ..."

Maulbow interrupted him in turn, not at all quietly. Gefty listened a moment longer, then shrugged. So Maulbow didn't like him. He couldn't say honestly that he'd ever liked Maulbow much, and what he was hearing made him like Maulbow considerably less. But he would keep the man from the future alive if he could.

He positioned the autosurgeon behind the head of the bed to allow the device to begin its analysis, stood back at its controls where he could both follow the progress it made and watch Maulbow without exciting him further by remaining within his range of vision. After a moment, the surgeon shut off the first-aid instruments and made unobtrusive use of a heavy tranquilizing drug. Then it waited.

Maulbow should have lapsed into passive somnolence thirty seconds afterwards. But the drug seemed to produce no more effect on him mentally than the preceding anesthetic. He raged and screeched on. Gefty watched him uneasily, knowing now that he was looking at insanity. There was nothing more he could do at the moment--the autosurgeon's decisions were safer than any nonprofessional's guesswork. And the surgeon continued to wait.

Then, abruptly, Maulbow died. The taut body slumped against the bed and the contorted features relaxed. The eyes remained half open; and when Gefty came around to the side of the bed, they still seemed to be looking up at him, but they no longer moved. A thin trickle of blood started from the side of the slack mouth and stopped again.

* * *

The control compartment was still darkened and without power when Gefty returned to it. He told Kerim briefly what had happened, added, "I'm not at all sure now he was even human. I'd rather believe he wasn't."

"Why that, Gefty?" She was studying his expression soberly.

Gefty hesitated, said, "I thought at first he was furious because we'd upset his plans. But they weren't his plans ... they were the janandra's. He wasn't exactly its servant. I suppose you'd have to say he was something like a pet animal."

Kerim said incredulously, "But that isn't possible! Think of how intelligently Mr. Maulbow ..."

"He was following instructions," Gefty said. "The janandra let him know whatever it wanted done. He was following instructions again when he tried to kill me after I'd got away from the thing in the vault. The real brain around here was the janandra ... and it was a real brain. With a little luck it would have had the ship."

Kerim smiled briefly. "You handled that big brain rather well, I think."

"I was the one who got lucky," Gefty said. "Anyway, where Maulbow came from, it's the janandra's kind that gives the orders. And the thing is, Maulbow liked it that way. He didn't want it to be different. When the light hit us, it killed the janandra on the outside of the ship. Maulbow felt it happen and it cracked him up. He wanted to kill us for it. But since he was helpless, he killed himself. He didn't want to be healed--not by us. At least, that's what it looks like."

He shrugged, checked his watch, climbed out of the chair. "Well," he said, "the ten minutes I gave the Queen to turn the power back on are up. Looks like the old girl couldn't do it. So I'll--"

The indirect lighting system in the instrument room went on silently. The emergency light flickered and went out. Gefty's head came around.

Kerim was staring past him at the screens, her face radiant.

"Oh, Gefty!" she cried softly. "Oh, Gefty! Our stars!"

* * * * *

"Green dot here is us," Gefty explained, somewhat hoarsely. He cleared his throat, went on, "Our true ship position, that is--" He stopped, realizing he was talking too much, almost babbling, in an attempt to take some of the tension out of the moment. The next few seconds might not tell them where they were, but it would show whether they had been carried beyond the regions of space charted by Federation instruments. Which would mean the difference between having a chance--whether a good chance or a bad one--of getting home eventually, and the alternative of being hopelessly lost.

There had been nothing recognizably familiar about the brilliantly dense star patterns in the viewscreens, but he gave no further thought to that. Unless the ship's exact position was known or one was on an established route, it was a waste of time looking for landmarks in a sizable cluster.

He turned on the basic star chart. Within the locator plate the green pinpoint of light reappeared, red-ringed and suspended now against the three-dimensional immensities of the Milky Way. It stayed still a moment, began a smooth drift towards Galactic East. Gefty let his breath out carefully. He sensed Kerim's eyes on him but kept his gaze fixed on the locator plate.

The green dot slowed, came to a stop. Gefty's finger tapped the same button four times. The big chart flicked out of existence, and in the plate three regional star maps appeared and vanished in quick succession behind it. The fourth map stayed. For a few seconds, the red-circled green spark was not visible here. Then it showed at the eastern margin of the map, came gliding forwards and to the left, slowed again and held steady. Now the star map began to glide through the locator plate, carrying the fixed green dot with it. It brought the dot up to dead center point in the locator plate and stopped.

Gefty slumped a little. He rubbed his hands slowly down his face and muttered a few words. Then he shook his head.

"Gefty," Kerim whispered, "what is it? Where are we?"

Gefty looked at her.

"After we got hauled into that time current," he said hoarsely, "I tried to find out which way in space we were headed. The direction indicators over there seemed to show we were trying to go everywhere at once. You remember Maulbow's control unit wasn't working right, needed adjustments. Well, all those little impulses must have pretty well canceled out because we weren't taken really far. In the last hour and a half we've covered roughly the distance the Queen could have gone on her own in, say, thirty days."

"Then where ..."

"Home," Gefty said simply. "It's ridiculous! Other side of the Hub from where we started." He nodded at the plate. "Eastern Hub Quadrant. Section Six Eight. The G2 behind the green dot--that's the Evalee system. We could be putting down at Evalee Interstellar three hours from now if we wanted to."

Kerim was laughing and crying together. "Oh, Gefty! I knew you would ..."

"A fat lot I had to do with it!" Gefty leaned forward suddenly, switched on the transmitter. "And now let's pick up a live newscast. There's something else I ..."

His voice trailed off. The transmitter screen lit up with a blurred jumble of print, colors, a muttering of voices, music and noises. Gefty twisted a dial. The screen cleared, showed a newscast headline sheet. Gefty blinked at it, glanced sideways at Kerim, grimaced.

"The something else," he said, his voice a little strained, "was something I was also worried about. Looks like I was more or less right."

"Why, what's wrong?"

"Nothing really bad," Gefty assured her. He added, "I think. But take a look at the Federation dateline."

Kerim peered at the screen, frowned. "But ..."

"Uh-huh."

"Why, that ... that's almost ..."

"That," Gefty said, "or rather this is the day after we started out from the Hub, headed roughly Galactic west. Three weeks ago. We'd be just past Miam." He knuckled his chin. "Interesting thought, isn't it?"

Kerim was silent for long seconds. "Then they ... or we ..."

"Oh, they're us, all right," Gefty said. "They'd have to be, wouldn't they?"

"I suppose so. It seems a little confusing. But I was thinking. If you send them a transmitter call ..."

Gefty shook his head. "The Queen's transmitter isn't too hot, but it might push a call as far as Evalee. Then we could arrange for a Com-Web link-up there, and in another ten minutes or so ... but I don't think we'd better."

"Why not?" Kerim demanded.

"Because we got through it all safely, so we're going to get through it safely. But if we receive that message now and never go on to Maulbow's moon ... you see? There's no way of knowing just what would happen."

Kerim looked hesitant, frowned. "I suppose you're right," she agreed reluctantly at last. "So Mr. Maulbow will have to stay dead now. And that janandra." After a moment she added pensively, "Of course, they weren't really very nice--"

Gefty shivered. One of the things he'd learned from Maulbow's ravings was the real reason he and Kerim had been taken along on the trip. He didn't feel like telling Kerim about it just yet, but it had been solely because of Maulbow's concern for his master's creature comforts. The janandra could go for a long time without food, but after fasting for several years on the moon, a couple of snacks on the homeward run would have been highly welcome.

And the janandra was a gourmet. It much preferred, as Maulbow well knew, to have its snacks still wriggling-fresh as it started them down its gullet.

"No," Gefty said, "I couldn't call either of them really nice."

Contents

A MATTER OF MAGNITUDE

By AL SEVCIK

When you're commanding a spaceship over a mile long, and armed to the teeth, you don't exactly expect to be told to get the hell out ...

The ship, for reasons that had to do with the politics of appropriations, was named Senator Joseph L. Holloway, but the press and the public called her Big Joe. Her captain, six-star Admiral Heselton, thought of her as Great Big Joe, and never fully got over being awestruck at the size of his command.

"She's a mighty big ship, Rogers," he said proudly to the navigator, ignoring the latter's rather vacant stare and fixed smile. "More than a mile long, and wider than hell." He waved his hands expansively. "She's never touched down on Earth, you know. Never will. Too big for that. They built her on the moon. The cost? Well ..."

Swiveling his chair around, Heselton slowly surveyed the ship's control room with a small, satisfied smile. The two pilots sitting far forward, almost hidden by their banks of instruments, the radar operators idly watching their scopes, the three flight engineers sitting intently at their enormous control consoles, and, just behind, the radio shack--its closed door undoubtedly hiding a game of cards. For weeks now, as Big Joe moved across the galaxy's uncharted fringe, the radio bands had been completely dead, except, of course, for the usual star static hissing and burbling in the background.

Turning back again to his navigator, Heselton smiled modestly and noted that Big Joe was undisputedly the largest, most powerful, most feared, and most effective spaceship in the known universe.

As always, Rogers nodded agreement. The fact that he'd heard it a hundred times didn't make it any less true. Big Joe, armed with every weapon known to Terran technology, was literally the battleship to end all battleships. Ending battleships--and battles--was, in fact, her job. And she did it well. For the first time, the galaxy was at peace.

* * * * *

With a relaxed sigh, Heselton leaned back to gaze at the stars and contemplate the vastness of the universe, compared to which even Big Joe was an insignificant dot.

"Well," said Rogers, "time for another course check. I'll ..." He jumped back, barely avoiding the worried lieutenant who exploded upon them from the radio shack.

"A signal, sir! Damn close, on the VHF band, their transmission is completely overriding the background noise." He waved excitedly to someone in the radio shack and an overhead speaker came to life emitting a distinct clacking-grunting sound. "It's audio of some sort, sir, but there's lots more to the signal than that."

In one motion Heselton's chair snapped forward, his right fist hit the red emergency alert button on his desk, and his left snapped on the ship's intercom. Lights dimmed momentarily as powerful emergency drive units snapped into action, and the ship echoed with the sound of two thousand men running to battle stations.

"Bridge to radar! Report."

"Radar to bridge. All clear."

Heselton stared incredulously at the intercom. "What?"

"Radar to bridge, repeating. All clear. Admiral, we've got two men on every scope, there's nothing anywhere."

A new voice cut in on the speaker. "Radio track to bridge."

Frowning, Heselton answered. "Bridge. Come in radio track. We're listening."

"Sir," the crisp voice of the radio track section's commander had an excited tinge. "Sir, Doppler calculations show that the source of those signals is slowing down somewhere to our right. It's acting like a spaceship, sir, that's coming to a halt."

The admiral locked eyes with Rogers for a second, then shrugged. "Slow the ship, and circle right. Radio track, can you keep me posted on the object's position?"

"No can do, sir. Doppler effect can't be used on a slow moving source. It's still off to our right, but that's the best I can say."

"Sir," another voice chimed in, "this is fire control. We've got our directional antennas on the thing. It's either directly right or directly left of the ship, matching speed with us exactly."

"Either to our right or left?"

"That's the best we can do, sir, without radar help."

"Admiral, sir," the lieutenant who had first reported the signal came running back. "Judging from the frequency and strength, we think it's probably less than a hundred miles away."

"Less than a hundr ..."

"Of course, we can't be positive, sir."

Heselton whirled back to the intercom. "Radar! That thing is practically on our necks. What the hell's the matter with that equipment...?"

The radar commander's voice showed distinct signs of strain. "Can't help it, Admiral. The equipment is working perfectly. We've tried the complete range of frequencies, twenty-five different sets are in operation, we're going blind looking. There is absolutely nothing, nothing at all."

For a moment the bridge was silent, except for the clacking-grunting from the overhead speaker which, if anything, sounded louder than before.

"It's tv, sir!" The radio lieutenant came running in again. "We've unscrambled the image. Here!" The communications screen on Heselton's desk glowed for a moment, then flashed into life.

* * * * *

The figure was clearly alien, though startlingly humanoid--at least from the waist up, which was all that showed in the screen. A large mouth and slightly bulging eyes gave it a somewhat jovial, frog-like demeanor. Seated at a desk similar to Heselton's, wearing a gaudy uniform profusely strewn with a variety of insignia, it was obviously Heselton's counterpart, the commander of an alien vessel.

"Hmmm, looks like we've contacted a new race. Let's return the call, Lieutenant." A tiny red light glowed beneath a miniature camera on Heselton's desk and almost at once the alien's face registered obvious satisfaction. It waved a six-fingered hand in an unorthodox, but friendly, greeting.

Heselton waved back.

The alien then pointed to his mouth, made several clacking-grunting sounds, and moved a hand on his desk. The scene switched to another alien standing in front of what looked like a blackboard, with a piece of chalk in his hand. The meaning was clear.

"Lieutenant, have this transmission switched to the linguistics section. Maybe those guys can work some sort of language." The screen blanked out. Heselton leaned back, tense, obviously worried. Hesitantly, he reached out and touched a button on the intercom.

"Astronomy."

"Professor, there's a ship right next door somewhere that should stand out like King Kong in a kindergarten."

"I know, Admiral. I've been listening to the intercom. Our optical equipment isn't designed for close range work, but we've been doing the best we can, tried everything from infra-red through ultra-violet. If there is a ship out there I'm afraid it's invisible."

Beads of sweat sprinkled Heselton's forehead. "This is bad, Rogers. Mighty bad." Nervously, he walked across to the right of the bridge and stood, hands clasped behind his back, staring blankly out at blackness and the scattered stars. "I know there is a ship out there, and I know that a ship simply can't be invisible, not to radar and optics."

"What makes you sure there is only one, sir?"

Heselton cracked his fists together. "My God, Rogers, you're right! There might be ..."

The intercom clacked. "This is fire control again, sir. I think we've got something on the radiation detectors."

"Good work, what did you find?"

"Slight radioactivity, typical of interstellar drive mechanisms, somewhere off to our right. Can't tell exactly where, though."

"How far away is it?"

"I don't know, sir."

Heselton's hands dropped to his sides. "Thanks," he said, "for the help."

His desk tv flashed into life with a picture of the smiling alien commander. "This is the linguistics section, Admiral. The aliens understand a fairly common galactic symbology, I believe we can translate simple messages for you now."

"Ask him where the hell he is," Heselton snapped without thinking, then instantly regretted it as the alien's face showed unmistakable surprise.

The alien's smile grew into an almost unbelievable grin. He turned sideways to speak to someone out of sight of the camera and suddenly burst into a series of roaring cackles. "He's laughing, sir." The translator commented unnecessarily.

The joke was strictly with the aliens. Heselton's face whitened in quick realization. "Rogers! They didn't know that we can't see them!"

"Look, sir." The navigator pointed to the tv screen and a brilliantly clear image of Big Joe shimmering against the galaxy, lit by millions of stars. Every missile port, even the military numerals along her nose were clearly visible.

"They're rubbing it in, Rogers. Showing us what we look like to them." Heselton's face was chalk. "They could blast Big Joe apart, piece by piece--the most powerful ship in the galaxy."

"Maybe," said Rogers, "the second most powerful."

Without answering, Heselton turned and looked out again at empty space and millions of steady, unwinking stars. His mind formed an image of a huge, ethereal spaceship, missile ports open, weapons aimed directly at Big Joe.

The speaker interrupted his nightmare. "This is fire control, Admiral. With your permission I'll scatter a few C-bombs ..."

Heselton leaped for the microphone. "Are you out of your mind? We haven't the slightest idea of the forces that guy has. We might be in the center of a whole blooming fleet. Ever think of that?"

The alien's face, still smirking, appeared again on the screen. "He says," said the interpreter, "that he finds the presence of our armed ship very annoying."

Heselton knew what he had to do. "Tell him," he said, swallowing hard, "that we apologize. This part of the galaxy is strange to us."

"He says he is contemplating blasting us out of the sky."

Heselton said nothing, but he longed to reach out and throttle the grinning, alien face.

"However," the interpreter continued, "he will let us go safely if we leave immediately. He says to send an unarmed, diplomatic vessel next time and maybe his people will talk to us."

"Thank him for his kindness." Heselton's jaws clenched so tightly they ached.

"He says," said the interpreter, "to get the hell out."

The grinning face snapped off the screen, but the cackling laughter continued to reverberate in the control room until the radio shack finally turned off the receiver.

"Reverse course," the admiral ordered quietly. "Maximum drive."

A thousand missile launchers, designed to disintegrate solar systems, were deactivated, hundreds of gyros swung the mile-long ship end for end and stabilized her on a reverse course, drive units big enough to power several major cities whined into operation, anti-grav generators with the strength to shift small planets counterbalanced the external acceleration, and the ship moved, away, with a speed approaching that of light.

"Well," muttered Heselton, "that's the very first time Big Joe has ever had to retreat." As if it were his own personal failure, he walked slowly across the control room and down the corridor towards his cabin.

"Admiral!" Lost in thought, Heselton barely heard the call.

"Admiral, look!" Pausing at the door to his cabin, Heselton turned to face the ship's chief astronomer running up waving two large photographs.

"Look, sir," the professor gasped for breath. "We thought this was a spot on the negative, but one of the men got curious and enlarged it about a hundred times." He held up one of the photos. It showed a small, fuzzy, but unmistakable spaceship. "No wonder we couldn't spot it with our instruments."

Heselton snatched it out of his hand. "I see what you mean. This ship must have been thousands of miles ..."

The professor shook his head. "No, sir. As a matter of fact, it was quite close by."

"But ..."

"We figure that the total length of the alien ship was roughly an inch and a half."

THE END

Contents

HOULIHAN'S EQUATION

by Walt Sheldon

The tiny spaceship had been built for a journey to a star. But its small, mischievous pilots had a rendezvous with destiny--on Earth.

I must admit that at first I wasn't sure I was hearing those noises. It was in a park near the nuclear propulsion center--a cool, green spot, with the leaves all telling each other to hush, be quiet, and the soft breeze stirring them up again. I had known precisely such a secluded little green sanctuary just over the hill from Mr. Riordan's farm when I was a boy.

Now it was a place I came to when I had a problem to thrash out. That morning I had been trying to work out an equation to give the coefficient of discharge for the matter in combustion. You may call it gas, if you wish, for we treated it like gas at the center for convenience--as it came from the rocket tubes in our engine.

Without this coefficient to give us control, we would have lacked a workable equation when we set about putting the first moon rocket around those extraordinary engines of ours, which were still in the undeveloped blueprint stage.

I see I shall have to explain this, although I had hoped to get right along with my story. When you start from scratch, matter discharged from any orifice has a velocity directly proportional to the square root of the pressure-head driving it. But when you actually put things together, contractions or expansions in the gas, surface roughness and other factors make the velocity a bit smaller.

At the terrible discharge speed of nuclear explosion--which is what the drive amounts to despite the fact that it is simply water in which nuclear salts have been previously dissolved--this small factor makes quite a difference. I had to figure everything into it--diameter of the nozzle, sharpness of the edge, the velocity of approach to the point of discharge, atomic weight and structure-- Oh, there is so much of this that if you're not a nuclear engineer yourself it's certain to weary you.

Perhaps you had better take my word for it that without this equation--correctly stated, mind you--mankind would be well advised not to make a first trip to the moon. And all this talk of coefficients and equations sits strangely, you might say, upon the tongue of a man named Kevin Francis Houlihan. But I am, after all, a scientist. If I had not been a specialist in my field I would hardly have found myself engaged in vital research at the center.

Anyway, I heard these little noises in the park. They sounded like small working sounds, blending in eerily mysterious fashion with a chorus of small voices. I thought at first it might be children at play, but then at the time I was a bit absent-minded. I tiptoed to the edge of the trees, not wanting to deprive any small scalawags of their pleasure, and peered out between the branches. And what do you suppose I saw? Not children, but a group of little people, hard at work.

There was a leader, an older one with a crank face. He was beating the air with his arms and piping: "Over here, now! All right, bring those electrical connections over here--and see you're not slow as treacle about it!"

There were perhaps fifty of the little people. I was more than startled by it, too. I had not seen little people in--oh, close to thirty years. I had seen them first as a boy of eight, and then, very briefly again, on my tenth birthday. And I had become convinced they could never be seen here in America. I had never seen them so busy, either. They were building something in the middle of the glade. It was long and shiny and upright and a little over five feet in height.

"Come along now, people!" said this crotchety one, looking straight at me. "Stop starin' and get to work! You'll not be needin' to mind that man standin' there! You know he can't see nor hear us!"

Oh, it was good to hear the rich old tongue again. I smiled, and the foreman of the leprechauns--if that's what he was--saw me smile and became stiff and alert for a moment, as though suspecting that perhaps I actually could see him. Then he shrugged and turned away, clearly deeming such a thing impossible.

I said, "Just a minute, friend, and I'll beg your pardon. It so happens I can see you."

He whirled to face me again, staring open-mouthed. Then he said, "What? What's that, now?"

"I can see you," I said.

"Ohhh!" he said and put his palms to his cheekbones. "Saints be with us! He's a believer! Run everybody--run for your lives!"

And they all began running, in as many directions as there were little souls. They began to scurry behind the trees and bushes, and a sloping embankment nearby.

"No, wait!" I said. "Don't go away! I'll not be hurting you!"

They continued to scurry.

I knew what it was they feared. "I don't intend catching one of you!" I said. "Come back, you daft little creatures!"

But the glade was silent, and they had all disappeared. They thought I wanted their crock of gold, of course. I'd be entitled to it if I could catch one and keep him. Or so the legends affirmed, though I've wondered often about the truth of them. But I was after no gold. I only wanted to hear the music of an Irish tongue. I was lonely here in America, even if I had latched on to a fine job of work for almost shamefully generous pay. You see, in a place as full of science as the nuclear propulsion center there is not much time for the old things. I very much wanted to talk to the little people.

I walked over to the center of the glade where the curious shiny object was standing. It was as smooth as glass and shaped like a huge cigar. There were a pair of triangular fins down at the bottom, and stubby wings amidships. Of course it was a spaceship, or a miniature replica of one. I looked at it more closely. Everything seemed almost miraculously complete and workable.

I shook my head in wonder, then stepped back from the spaceship and looked about the glade. I knew they were all hiding nearby, watching me apprehensively. I lifted my head to them.

"Listen to me now, little people!" I called out. "My name's Houlihan of the Roscommon Houlihans. I am descended from King Niall himself--or so at least my father used to say! Come on out now, and pass the time o' day!"

Then I waited, but they didn't answer. The little people always had been shy. Yet without reaching a decision in so many words I knew suddenly that I had to talk to them. I'd come to the glen to work out a knotty problem, and I was up against a blank wall. Simply because I was so lonely that my mind had become clogged.

I knew that if I could just once hear the old tongue again, and talk about the old things, I might be able to think the problem through to a satisfactory conclusion.

So I stepped back to the tiny spaceship, and this time I struck it a resounding blow with my fist. "Hear me now, little people! If you don't show yourselves and come out and talk to me, I'll wreck this spaceship from stem to stern!"

* * * * *

I heard only the leaves rustling softly.

"Do you understand? I'll give you until I count three to make an appearance! One!"

The glade remained deathly silent.

"Two!"

I thought I heard a stirring somewhere, as if a small, brittle twig had snapped in the underbrush.

"Three!"

And with that the little people suddenly appeared.

The leader--he seemed more wizened and bent than before--approached me slowly and warily as I stood there. The others all followed at a safe distance. I smiled to reassure them and then waved my arm in a friendly gesture of greeting.

"Good morning," I said.

"Good morning," the foreman said with some caution. "My name is Keech."

"And mine's Houlihan, as I've told you. Are you convinced now that I have no intention of doing you any injury?"

"Mr. Houlihan," said Keech, drawing a kind of peppered dignity up about himself, "in such matters I am never fully convinced. After living for many centuries I am all too acutely aware of the perversity of human nature."

"Yes," I said. "Well, as you will quickly see, all I want to do is talk." I nodded as I spoke, and sat down cross-legged upon the grass.

"Any Irishman wants to talk, Mr. Houlihan."

"And often that's all he wants," I said. "Sit down with me now, and stop staring as if I were a snake returned to the Island."

He shook his head and remained standing. "Have your say, Mr. Houlihan. And afterward we'll appreciate it if you'll go away and leave us to our work."

"Well, now, your work," I said, and glanced at the spaceship. "That's exactly what's got me curious."

The others had edged in a bit now and were standing in a circle, intently staring at me. I took out my pipe. "Why," I asked, "would a group of little people be building a spaceship here in America--out in this lonely place?"

Keech stared back without much expression, and said, "I've been wondering how you guessed it was a spaceship. I was surprised enough when you told me you could see us but not overwhelmingly so. I've run into believers before who could see the little people. It happens every so often, though not as frequently as it did a century ago. But knowing a spaceship at first glance! Well, I must confess that does astonish me."

"And why wouldn't I know a spaceship when I see one?" I said. "It just so happens I'm a doctor of science."

"A doctor of science, now," said Keech.

"Invited by the American government to work on the first moon rocket here at the nuclear propulsion center. Since it's no secret I can advise you of it."

"A scientist, is it," said Keech. "Well, now, that's very interesting."

"I'll make no apologies for it," I said.

"Oh, there's no need for apology," said Keech. "Though in truth we prefer poets to scientists. But it has just now crossed my mind, Mr. Houlihan that you, being a scientist, might be of help to us."

"How?" I asked.

"Well, I might try starting at the beginning," he replied.

"You might," I said. "A man usually does."

Keech took out his own pipe--a clay dudeen--and looked hopeful. I gave him a pinch of tobacco from my pouch. "Well, now," he said, "first of all you're no doubt surprised to find us here in America."

"I am surprised from time to time to find myself here," I said. "But continue."

"We had to come here," said Keech, "to learn how to make a spaceship."

"A spaceship, now," I said, unconsciously adopting some of the old manner.

"Leprechauns are not really mechanically inclined," said Keech. "Their major passions are music and laughter and mischief, as anyone knows."

"Myself included," I agreed. "Then why do you need a spaceship?"

"Well, if I may use an old expression, we've had a feelin' lately that we're not long for this world. Or let me put it this way. We feel the world isn't long for itself."

I scratched my cheek. "How would a man unravel a statement such as that?"

"It's very simple. With all the super weapons you mortals have developed, there's the distinct possibility you might be blowin' us all up in the process of destroying yourselves."

"There is that possibility," I said.

"Well, then, as I say," said Keech, "the little people have decided to leave the planet in a spaceship. Which we're buildin' here and now. We've spied upon you and learned how to do it. Well--almost how to do it. We haven't learned yet how to control the power--"

"Hold on, now," I said. "Leaving the planet, you say. And where would you be going?"

"There's another committee working on that. 'Tis not our concern. I was inclined to suggest the constellation Orion, which sounds as though it has a good Irish name, but I was hooted down. Be that as it may, my own job was to go into your nuclear center, learn how to make the ship, and proceed with its construction. Naturally, we didn't understand all of your high-flyin' science, but some of our people are pretty clever at gettin' up replicas of things."

"You mean you've been spying on us at the center all this time? Do you know, we often had the feeling we were being watched, but we thought it was by the Russians. There's one thing which puzzles me, though. If you've been constantly around us--and I'm still able to see the little people--why did I never see you before?"

"It may be we never crossed your path. It may be you can only see us when you're thinkin' of us, and of course truly believin' in us. I don't know--'tis a thing of the mind, and not important at the moment. What's important is for us to get our first ship to workin' properly and then we'll be on our way."

"You're determined to go."

"Truly we are, Mr. Houlihan. Now--to business. Just during these last few minutes a certain matter has crossed my mind. That's why I'm wastin' all this time with you, sir. You say you are a scientist."

"A nuclear engineer."

"Well, then, it may be that you can help us--now that you know we're here."

"Help you?"

"The power control, Mr. Houlihan. As I understand it, 'tis necessary to know at any instant exactly how much thrust is bein' delivered through the little holes in back. And on paper it looks simple enough--the square of somethin' or other. I've got the figures jotted in a book when I need 'em. But when you get to doin' it it doesn't come out exactly as it does on paper."

"You're referring to the necessity for a coefficient of discharge."

"Whatever it might be named," said Keech, shrugging. "'Tis the one thing we lack. I suppose eventually you people will be gettin' around to it. But meanwhile we need it right now, if we're to make our ship move."

"And you want me to help you with this?"

"That is exactly what crossed my mind."

I nodded and looked grave and kneaded my chin for a moment softly. "Well, now, Keech," I said finally, "why should I help you?"

"Ha!" said Keech, grinning, but not with humor, "the avarice of humans! I knew it! Well, Mr. Houlihan, I'll give you reason enough. The pot o' gold, Mr. Houlihan!"

"The one at the end of the rainbow?"

"It's not at the end of the rainbow. That's a grandmother's tale. Nor is it actually in an earthen crock. But there's gold, all right, enough to make you rich for the rest of your life. And I'll make you a proposition."

"Go ahead."

"We'll not be needin' gold where we're goin'. It's yours if you show us how to make our ship work."

"Well, now, that's quite an offer," I said. Keech had the goodness to be quiet while I sat and thought for a while. My pipe had gone out and I lit it again. I finally said, "Let's have a look at your ship's drive and see what we can see."

"You accept the proposition then?"

"Let's have a look," I said, and that was all.

Well, we had a look, and then several looks, and before the morning was out we had half the spaceship apart, and were deep in argument about the whole project.

It was a most fascinating session. I had often wished for a true working model at the center, but no allowance had been inserted in the budget for it. Keech brought me paper and pencil and I talked with the aid of diagrams, as engineers are wont to do. Although the pencils were small and I had to hold them between thumb and forefinger, as you would a needle, I was able to make many sensible observations and even a few innovations.

I came back again the next day--and every day for the following two weeks. It rained several times, but Keech and his people made a canopy of boughs and leaves and I was comfortable enough. Every once in a while someone from the town or the center itself would pass by, and stop to watch me. But of course they wouldn't see the leprechauns or anything the leprechauns had made, not being believers.

I would halt work, pass the time of day, and then, in subtle fashion, send the intruder on his way. Keech and the little people just stood by and grinned all the while.

At the end of sixteen days I had the entire problem all but whipped. It is not difficult to understand why. The working model and the fact that the small people with their quick eyes and clever fingers could spot all sorts of minute shortcomings was a great help. And I was hearing the old tongue and talking of the old things every day, and truly that went far to take the clutter out of my mind. I was no longer so lonely that I couldn't think properly.

On the sixteenth day I covered a piece of paper with tiny mathematical symbols and handed it to Keech. "Here is your equation," I said. "It will enable you to know your thrust at any given moment, under any circumstances, in or out of gravity, and under all conditions of friction and combustion."

"Thank you, Mr. Houlihan," said Keech. All his people had gathered in a loose circle, as though attending a rite. They were all looking at me quietly.

"Mr. Houlihan," said Keech, "you will not be forgotten by the leprechauns. If we ever meet again, upon another world perchance, you'll find our friendship always eager and ready."

"Thank you," I said.

"And now, Mr. Houlihan," said Keech, "I'll see that a quantity of gold is delivered to your rooms tonight, and so keep my part of the bargain."

"I'll not be needing the gold," I said.

Keech's eyebrows popped upward. "What's this now?"

"I'll not be needing it," I repeated. "I don't feel it would be right to take it for a service of this sort."

"Well," said Keech in surprise, and in some awe, too, "well, now, musha Lord help us! 'Tis the first time I ever heard such a speech from a mortal." He turned to his people. "We'll have three cheers now, do you hear, for Mr. Houlihan--friend of the little people as long as he shall live!"

And they cheered. And little tears crept into the corners of some of their turned-up eyes.

We shook hands, all of us, and I left.

* * * * *

I walked through the park, and back to the nuclear propulsion center. It was another cool, green morning with the leaves making only soft noises as the breezes came along. It smelled exactly like a wood I had known in Roscommon.

And I lit my pipe and smoked it slowly and chuckled to myself at how I had gotten the best of the little people. Surely it was not every mortal who could accomplish that. I had given them the wrong equation, of course. They would never get their spaceship to work now, and later, if they tried to spy out the right information I would take special measures to prevent it, for I had the advantage of being able to see them.

As for our own rocket ship, it should be well on its way by next St. Patrick's Day. For I had indeed determined the true coefficient of discharge, which I never could have done so quickly without those sessions in the glade with Keech and his working model.

It would go down in scientific literature now, I suppose, as Houlihan's Equation, and that was honor and glory enough for me. I could do without Keech's pot of gold, though it would have been pleasant to be truly rich for a change.

There was no sense in cheating him out of the gold to boot, for leprechauns are most clever in matters of this sort and he would have had it back soon enough--or else made it a burden in some way.

Indeed, I had done a piece of work greatly to my advantage, and also to the advantage of humankind, and when a man can do the first and include the second as a fortunate byproduct it is a most happy accident.

For if I had shown the little people how to make a spaceship they would have left our world. And this world, as long as it lasts--what would it be in that event? I ask you now, wouldn't we be even more likely to blow ourselves to Kingdom Come without the little people here for us to believe in every now and then?

Contents

MY FATHER, THE CAT

by HENRY SLESAR

He wondered if I'd told her everything, and, faltering, I had to admit that I hadn't. She was wonderful--but human.

My mother was a lovely, delicate woman from the coast of Brittany, who was miserable sleeping on less than three mattresses, and who, it is said, was once injured by a falling leaf in her garden. My grandfather, a descendant of the French nobility whose family had ridden the tumbrils of the Revolution, tended her fragile body and spirit with the same loving care given rare, brief-blooming flowers. You may imagine from this his attitude concerning marriage. He lived in terror of the vulgar, heavy-handed man who would one day win my mother's heart, and at last, this persistent dread killed him. His concern was unnecessary, however, for my mother chose a suitor who was as free of mundane brutality as a husband could be. Her choice was Dauphin, a remarkable white cat which strayed onto the estate shortly after his death.

Dauphin was an unusually large Angora, and his ability to speak in cultured French, English, and Italian was sufficient to cause my mother to adopt him as a household pet. It did not take long for her to realize that Dauphin deserved a higher status, and he became her friend, protector, and confidante. He never spoke of his origin, nor where he had acquired the classical education which made him such an entertaining companion. After two years, it was easy for my mother, an unworldly woman at best, to forget the dissimilarity in their species. In fact, she was convinced that Dauphin was an enchanted prince, and Dauphin, in consideration of her illusions, never dissuaded her. At last, they were married by an understanding clergyman of the locale, who solemnly filled in the marriage application with the name of M. Edwarde Dauphin.

I, Etienne Dauphin, am their son.

To be candid, I am a handsome youth, not unlike my mother in the delicacy of my features. My father's heritage is evident in my large, feline eyes, and in my slight body and quick movements. My mother's death, when I was four, left me in the charge of my father and his coterie of loyal servants, and I could not have wished for a finer upbringing. It is to my father's patient tutoring that I owe whatever graces I now possess. It was my father, the cat, whose gentle paws guided me to the treasure houses of literature, art, and music, whose whiskers bristled with pleasure at a goose well cooked, at a meal well served, at a wine well chosen. How many happy hours we shared! He knew more of life and the humanities, my father, the cat, than any human I have met in all my twenty-three years.

Until the age of eighteen, my education was his personal challenge. Then, it was his desire to send me into the world outside the gates. He chose for me a university in America, for he was deeply fond of what he called "that great raw country," where he believed my feline qualities might be tempered by the aggressiveness of the rough-coated barking dogs I would be sure to meet.

I must confess to a certain amount of unhappiness in my early American years, torn as I was from the comforts of the estate and the wisdom of my father, the cat. But I became adapted, and even upon my graduation from the university, sought and held employment in a metropolitan art museum. It was there I met Joanna, the young woman I intended to make my bride.

Joanna was a product of the great American southwest, the daughter of a cattle-raiser. There was a blooming vitality in her face and her body, a lustiness born of open skies and desert. Her hair was not the gold of antiquity; it was new gold, freshly mined from the black rock. Her eyes were not like old-world diamonds; their sparkle was that of sunlight on a cascading river. Her figure was bold, an open declaration of her sex.

She was, perhaps, an unusual choice for the son of fairy-like mother and an Angora cat. But from the first meeting of our eyes, I knew that I would someday bring Joanna to my father's estate to present her as my fiancee.

I approached that occasion with understandable trepidation. My father had been explicit in his advice before I departed for America, but on no point had he been more emphatic than secrecy concerning himself. He assured me that revelation of my paternity would bring ridicule and unhappiness upon me. The advice was sound, of course, and not even Joanna knew that our journey's end would bring us to the estate of a large, cultured, and conversing cat. I had deliberately fostered the impression that I was orphaned, believing that the proper place for revealing the truth was the atmosphere of my father's home in France. I was certain that Joanna would accept her father-in-law without distress. Indeed, hadn't nearly a score of human servants remained devoted to their feline master for almost a generation?

We had agreed to be wed on the first of June, and on May the fourth, emplaned in New York for Paris. We were met at Orly Field by Francois, my father's solemn manservant, who had been delegated not so much as escort as he was chaperone, my father having retained much of the old world proprieties. It was a long trip by automobile to our estate in Brittany, and I must admit to a brooding silence throughout the drive which frankly puzzled Joanna.

However, when the great stone fortress that was our home came within view, my fears and doubts were quickly dispelled. Joanna, like so many Americans, was thrilled at the aura of venerability and royal custom surrounding the estate. Francois placed her in charge of Madame Jolinet, who clapped her plump old hands with delight at the sight of her fresh blonde beauty, and chattered and clucked like a mother hen as she led Joanna to her room on the second floor. As for myself, I had one immediate wish: to see my father, the cat.

He greeted me in the library, where he had been anxiously awaiting our arrival, curled up in his favorite chair by the fireside, a wide-mouthed goblet of cognac by his side. As I entered the room, he lifted a paw formally, but then his reserve was dissolved by the emotion of our reunion, and he licked my face in unashamed joy.

Francois refreshed his glass, and poured another for me, and we toasted each other's well-being.

"To you, mon purr," I said, using the affectionate name of my childhood memory.

"To Joanna," my father said. He smacked his lips over the cognac, and wiped his whiskers gravely. "And where is this paragon?"

"With Madame Jolinet. She will be down shortly."

"And you have told her everything?"

I blushed. "No, mon purr, I have not. I thought it best to wait until we were home. She is a wonderful woman," I added impulsively. "She will not be--"

"Horrified?" my father said. "What makes you so certain, my son?"

"Because she is a woman of great heart," I said stoutly. "She was educated at a fine college for women in Eastern America. Her ancestors were rugged people, given to legend and folklore. She is a warm, human person--"

"Human," my father sighed, and his tail swished. "You are expecting too much of your beloved, Etienne. Even a woman of the finest character may be dismayed in this situation."

"But my mother--"

"Your mother was an exception, a changeling of the Fairies. You must not look for your mother's soul in Joanna's eyes." He jumped from his chair, and came towards me, resting his paw upon my knee. "I am glad you have not spoken of me, Etienne. Now you must keep your silence forever."

I was shocked. I reached down and touched my father's silky fur, saddened by the look of his age in his gray, gold-flecked eyes, and by the tinge of yellow in his white coat.

"No, mon purr," I said. "Joanna must know the truth. Joanna must know how proud I am to be the son of Edwarde Dauphin."

"Then you will lose her."

"Never! That cannot happen!"

My father walked stiffly to the fireplace, staring into the gray ashes. "Ring for Francois," he said. "Let him build the fire. I am cold, Etienne."

I walked to the cord and pulled it. My father turned to me and said: "You must wait, my son. At dinner this evening, perhaps. Do not speak of me until then."

"Very well, father."

When I left the library, I encountered Joanna at the head of the stairway, and she spoke to me excitedly.

"Oh, Etienne! What a beautiful old house. I know I will love it! May we see the rest?"

"Of course," I said.

"You look troubled. Is something wrong?"

"No, no. I was thinking how lovely you are."

We embraced, and her warm full body against mine confirmed my conviction that we should never be parted. She put her arm in mine, and we strolled through the great rooms of the house. She was ecstatic at their size and elegance, exclaiming over the carpeting, the gnarled furniture, the ancient silver and pewter, the gallery of family paintings. When she came upon an early portrait of my mother, her eyes misted.

"She was lovely," Joanna said. "Like a princess! And what of your father? Is there no portrait of him?"

"No," I said hurriedly. "No portrait." I had spoken my first lie to Joanna, for there was a painting, half-completed, which my mother had begun in the last year of her life. It was a whispering little watercolor, and Joanna discovered it to my consternation.

"What a magnificent cat!" she said. "Was it a pet?"

"It is Dauphin," I said nervously.

She laughed. "He has your eyes, Etienne."

"Joanna, I must tell you something--"

"And this ferocious gentleman with the moustaches? Who is he?"

"My grandfather. Joanna, you must listen--"

Francois, who had been following our inspection tour at shadow's-length, interrupted. I suspected that his timing was no mere coincidence.

"We will be serving dinner at seven-thirty," he said. "If the lady would care to dress--"

"Of course," Joanna said. "Will you excuse me, Etienne?"

I bowed to her, and she was gone.

At fifteen minutes to the appointed dining time, I was ready, and hastened below to talk once more with my father. He was in the dining room, instructing the servants as to the placement of the silver and accessories. My father was proud of the excellence of his table, and took all his meals in the splendid manner. His appreciation of food and wine was unsurpassed in my experience, and it had always been the greatest of pleasures for me to watch him at table, stalking across the damask and dipping delicately into the silver dishes prepared for him. He pretended to be too busy with his dinner preparations to engage me in conversation, but I insisted.

"I must talk to you," I said. "We must decide together how to do this."

"It will not be easy," he answered with a twinkle. "Consider Joanna's view. A cat as large and as old as myself is cause enough for comment. A cat that speaks is alarming. A cat that dines at table with the household is shocking. And a cat whom you must introduce as your--"

"Stop it!" I cried. "Joanna must know the truth. You must help me reveal it to her."

"Then you will not heed my advice?"

"In all things but this. Our marriage can never be happy unless she accepts you for what you are."

"And if there is no marriage?"

I would not admit to this possibility. Joanna was mine; nothing could alter that. The look of pain and bewilderment in my eyes must have been evident to my father, for he touched my arm gently with his paw and said:

"I will help you, Etienne. You must give me your trust."

"Always!"

"Then come to dinner with Joanna and explain nothing. Wait for me to appear."

I grasped his paw and raised it to my lips. "Thank you, father!"

He turned to Francois, and snapped: "You have my instructions?"

"Yes, sir," the servant replied.

"Then all is ready. I shall return to my room now, Etienne. You may bring your fiancee to dine."

I hastened up the stairway, and found Joanna ready, strikingly beautiful in shimmering white satin. Together, we descended the grand staircase and entered the room.

Her eyes shone at the magnificence of the service set upon the table, at the soldiery array of fine wines, some of them already poured into their proper glasses for my father's enjoyment: Haut Medoc, from St. Estephe, authentic Chablis, Epernay Champagne, and an American import from the Napa Valley of which he was fond. I waited expectantly for his appearance as we sipped our aperitif, while Joanna chatted about innocuous matters, with no idea of the tormented state I was in.

At eight o'clock, my father had not yet made his appearance, and I grew ever more distraught as Francois signalled for the serving of the bouillon au madere. Had he changed his mind? Would I be left to explain my status without his help? I hadn't realized until this moment how difficult a task I had allotted for myself, and the fear of losing Joanna was terrible within me. The soup was flat and tasteless on my tongue, and the misery in my manner was too apparent for Joanna to miss.

"What is it, Etienne?" she said. "You've been so morose all day. Can't you tell me what's wrong?"

"No, it's nothing. It's just--" I let the impulse take possession of my speech. "Joanna, there's something I should tell you. About my mother, and my father--"

"Ahem," Francois said.

He turned to the doorway, and our glances followed his.

"Oh, Etienne!" Joanna cried, in a voice ringing with delight.

It was my father, the cat, watching us with his gray, gold-flecked eyes. He approached the dining table, regarding Joanna with timidity and caution.

"It's the cat in the painting!" Joanna said. "You didn't tell me he was here, Etienne. He's beautiful!"

"Joanna, this is--"

"Dauphin! I would have known him anywhere. Here, Dauphin! Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!"

Slowly, my father approached her outstretched hand, and allowed her to scratch the thick fur on the back of his neck.

"Aren't you the pretty little pussy! Aren't you the sweetest little thing!"

"Joanna!"

She lifted my father by the haunches, and held him in her lap, stroking his fur and cooing the silly little words that women address to their pets. The sight pained and confused me, and I sought to find an opening word that would allow me to explain, yet hoping all the time that my father would himself provide the answer.

Then my father spoke.

"Meow," he said.

"Are you hungry?" Joanna asked solicitously. "Is the little pussy hungry?"

"Meow," my father said, and I believed my heart broke then and there. He leaped from her lap and padded across the room. I watched him through blurred eyes as he followed Francois to the corner, where the servant had placed a shallow bowl of milk. He lapped at it eagerly, until the last white drop was gone. Then he yawned and stretched, and trotted back to the doorway, with one fleeting glance in my direction that spoke articulately of what I must do next.

"What a wonderful animal," Joanna said.

"Yes," I answered. "He was my mother's favorite."

Contents

INSTINCT

BY GEORGE O. SMITH

You can keep a good man down, if you've got enough headstart, are alert and persistent ... so long as he limits himself to acting like a good man....

It was 047-63-10 when he opened the door. Before his superior could chew him for prepunctuality, Huvane said as the chief looked up and opened his mouth to start:

"Sorry, but you should know. Terra is at it again."

Chelan's jaw snapped shut. He passed a hand over his face and asked in a tone of pure exasperation. "The same?" and as Huvane nodded, Chelan went on, "Why can't they make a mistake and blow themselves out of our hair? How far did they get this time?"

"All the way."

"And out?"

Huvane sat down shaking his head slowly. "Not yet, but they're over the hump, you know." Huvane's face brightened ever so slightly. "I can't be criticized for not counting them, chief. But I'll estimate that there must be at least a couple of hundred atoms of 109 already. And you know that nobody could make 109 if they hadn't already evolved methods of measuring the properties of individual atoms. So as soon as they find that their boom-sample doesn't behave like the standard mess out of a bombardment chamber, they won't rest until they find out why. They'll find out. Then it'll be 109, 109, 109 until we're forced to clobber them again."

Bitterly Chelan looked up. "I don't think I need the lecture. I admire their tenacity. I admire their ambition. I admire their blasphemous, consignatory, obscenity attitude of acting as if the Great Creator had concocted the whole glorious Universe for their own playground. Yes," said the chief wearily, "singly they aren't bad traits. Boiled down into the self-esteem of a single race, I don't admire them any more. I'm simply scared."

"Yeah. Well, we've got time."

"Not much. What's their space potential this time?"

"Still scragged on the mass-inertia-relativity barrier. Tailburners ... er, chemical reaction engines. Manned and unmanned orbital flights. Half a dozen landings on their sister planet. No," said Huvane as he saw the chief's puzzlement, "I don't mean Number Two ... the one they call Venus this time. I mean their co-orbital companion. The Moon. They still call it that."

The chief looked up wonderingly. "Do you suppose," he asked solemnly, "that there is really something called a 'racial memory'?"

"It's against all the theory," objected Huvane. "But there seems to be--" his voice trailed off absently. It returned after some thought: "I've tried to sort it out, just as if I were one of them. The recurrence of their ... er ... 'names of antiquity' as they call them, seem to recur and recur. Their Planet Two, now called Venus, was called Astarte last time, and before that it was Ishtar."

"Other way around."

"No matter. The names are still being used and, according to their belief, merely parallel names culled out of local pagan religious beliefs."

The chief nodded. "That's only part of the parallelism. The big thing is the way they follow the same pattern. Savage, agrarian, urban, right on up the ladder according to the rules of civic science but squabbling and battling all the way right on up and out into space. Hell, Huvane, warfare and conflict I can both understand and cope with, but not the Terran flavor. They don't come out bent on conquest or stellar colonialism. They come out with their little private fight still going on and each side lines up its volume of influence and pits one against the other until the whole section of that spiral arm is glittering like a sputtering spark along a train of black powder. I wish," he said savagely, "that we could cut off that arm and fling it deep into extragalactic space."

Huvane shook his head. "And leave the problem for our children to solve?"

"They'll have one to solve, I think," said Chelan. "In another twenty thousand years the Terrans will be right back doing business at the same old stand. Unless we can solve it for once and for all right now."

Huvane looked around as if he were seeking another door to the chief's office. "How?" he asked sarcastically. "The first time we greeted them and they took both our welcome and us for everything they could before we pulled the rug out from under them. The second time we boxed them off and they broke out after converting the isolation screen into an offensive weapon. The third time we tried to avoid them and they ran wild exploiting less ambitious races. The fourth time we missed the boat and they were chewing at our back door before we knew about them; containing them was almost a nova job. The fifth time we went in and tried to understand them, they traded us two for one. Two things they didn't want for one they did," Huvane's lips curled, "and I'm not sure that they didn't trade us the other way around; two they needed for one they declared useless. Sixth? that was the last time and they just came out shooting as if the whole galaxy automatically objected. This time? Who knows?" Huvane sat down again and put his hands between his knees.

"They don't operate like people. Sensible folk settle their own problems, then look for more. Terra? One half of the globe is against the other half of the globe. Fighting one another tooth and nail, they still find time to invent and cross space to other planets and continue their fight on unknown territory."

"Maybe we'd better just admit that we don't know the solution. Then we can clobber Terra back to the swamp, juggle the place into another ice age, put the details down in History, and hope that our remote progeny will be smarter than we."

"Like maybe we're smarter than our remote ancestors?" jeered Huvane.

"Got a better idea?"

"Maybe. Has anybody really taken a couple of them and analyzed them?"

"It's inhumane."

"I agree, but--?"

"Get me a healthy, well-balanced specimen of somewhat better-than-average education and training. Can do?"

"Can do. But how are you going to keep him?"

"I don't intend to study him like I'd study a bug under a microscope. This one won't get away. Make it in fourteen versaids, Huvane."

"Make it in ten plus or minus a radite or two. So long!"

* * * * *

The beast at Cape Canaveral stood three hundred and fifteen feet tall dwarfing her creators into microscopic proportions. Swarming up and down the gantry, bug-sized humans crawled in and out of check ports with instrument checks, hauling hoses, cables, lines. Some thousand feet away, a puff-bomb of red smoke billowed out and a habit-flattened voice announced: "At the mark, X Minus Fifteen Minutes ... ... ... Mark! X Minus Fifteen Minutes!"

Jerry Markham said, "That's me!" He looked up at the lofty porthole and almost lost his balance over backwards sighting it. He was a healthy specimen, about twenty-four and full of life. He had spent the day going through two routines that were sometimes simultaneous and at other times serially; one re-stating his instructions letter by letter including the various alternatives and contingencies that involved his making decisions if the conditions on Venus were according to this theory or that. The other was a rigorous medical checkup. Neither of them showed that Jerry Markham had spent the previous night in activities not recommended by his superiors but nothing that would bounce him if they knew. He could hardly be broken for living it up at a party.

He shook hands with the boss and stepped into the elevator. It was not his idea of a proper send-off. There should be bands playing and girls throwing paper tape, flowers and a few drinks. Sally should send him off with a proud smooch of lipstick and a tearful promise to wait. Instead it was all very military and strict and serious--which is why he'd whooped it up the night before. He'd had his good night and good by with Sally Forman, but now eighteen hours later he was fit and raring for a return match.

Jerry's mind was by no means concerned with this next half hour, which would be the most perilous part of his flight. Tomorrow would take care of itself. The possibility that thirty minutes from now he might be dead in a flaming pyre did not cross his mind, the chance that an hour from now he could be told that his bird was off-course and his fate starvation if it obtained an untrue orbit or abrupt destruction if it didn't orbit at all--nothing bothered him.

He sat there chanting the count down with the official timer and braced himself when the call came:

"Zero! Fire!"

Inwardly, Jerry Markham's mind said, "We're off!" and he began to look forward to his landing on Venus. Not the problems of landing, but what he would find there when he soared down through the clouds.

Determined to hold up through the high-G even though nobody watched, he went on and on and up and up, his radio voiced the progress tinnily. Shock followed roaring pressure, release followed shock. Orientation was lost; only logic and intellect told him where he was and which way he was going.

Then he was free. Free to eat and drink and read and smoke one cigarette every three hours and, in essence, behave in about the same way as a prisoner confined in solitary. The similarity did not bother Jerry Markham, for this was honor, not punishment.

* * * * *

Huvane collected him with the ease of a fisherman landing a netted crab. Easily, painlessly. Shockingly, for the crab doesn't exactly take to the net with docility.

Huvane collected the whole shebang, man and machinery; then opened the spacecraft with the same attitude as a man peeling the lid from a can of sardines. He could have breached the air lock, but he wanted the Terran to understand the power behind the act.

Jerry Markham came out blinking; very mildly wondering about the air. It was good. Without considering the rather high probability that nobody spoke the language, he blurted:

"What gives?"

He was not very much surprised when one of them in uniform said curtly, "This way and make it snappy, Terran!"

No, he was not surprised. He was too stunned to permit anything as simple as surprise. And through the shock and the stun, his months of training came through. Jerry Markham worried his first worry: How was he going to get the word back home?

Confinement in the metal cell of his top-stage hadn't bothered him. The concept of landing on a planet that couldn't come closer to home than some twenty-seven million miles was mere peanuts. Isolation for a year was no more than a hiatus, a period of adventure that would be rewarded many-fold. Sally? So she might not wait but there were others; he'd envisioned himself fighting them off with a club after his successful return. Hell, they'd swarmed him before his take-off, starting with the moment his number had come up as possible candidate.

No, the meeting with competence in space did not shock him greatly. What bothered him was his lack of control over the situation. Had he seen them and passed on about his business, he recounted the incident.

As it was, his desire to tell somebody about it was cut off. As he sat, alone and helpless, it occurred to him that he did not mind so much the dying, if that was to be his lot. What mattered was the unmarked grave. The mourning did not move him; the physical concept of "grave" and its fill of moldering organic substances was nothing. It was mere symbol. So long as people knew how and where, it made little difference to Jerry Markham whether he was planted in a duridium casket guaranteed to preserve the dead flesh for a thousand years or whether he went out in a bright swift flame that glinted in its tongues of the color-traces of incandescent elements of human organic chemistry.

So long as people knew. Where and how. Vague, vague, mass-volumized concept. Granite tomb was one idea, here was a place. Point a spread-fingered hand in a waving sweep across the sky that encompasses the Plane of The Ecliptic and say, "It is there," and another place is identified. Lost on Venus is no more than a phrase; from Terra Haute or Times Square, Venus is a tiny point in the sky smaller to the vision than the granite of Grant's Tomb.

Imagination breeds irritation. Would they call it pilot error or equipment unreliability? Dying he could face. Goofing would be a disgrace that he would have to meet in fact or in symbol. Hardware crackup was a matter of the laws of probability. Not only his duty demanded that he report, his essence cried out for a voice to let them know.

Anybody.

Just the chance to tell one other human soul.

Chelan asked, "Who are you? Your name and rank?"

He said sullenly, "Go to hell."

"We have ways and means."

He said, "Use 'em."

"If we said that we mean no harm; if we asked what we could do to prove it, what would be your reply?"

"Take me back and let me go."

"Who are you? Will you identify yourself?"

"No."

"Stubborn Terran!"

"I know my rights. We are not at war. I'll tell you nothing. Why did you capture me?"

"We'll ask the questions, Terran."

"You'll get no answers." He sneered at them angrily. "Torture me--and then wonder whether my screamings tell the truth. Dope me and wonder whether what I truly believe is fact or fantasy."

"Please," said Chelan, "we only want to understand your kind. To know what makes you tick."

"Then why didn't you ask?"

"We've tried and we get no answers. Terran, the Universe is a vastness beyond comprehension. Co-operate and give us what we want to know and a piece of it is yours."

"Nuts!"

"Terran, you have friends."

"Who doesn't?"

"Why can't we be your friends?"

Angrily, resentfully, "Your way isn't friendly enough to convince me."

Chelan shook his head. "Take him away," he directed in his own tongue.

"Where? And how shall we keep him?"

"To the place we've prepared. And keep him safe."

Huvane asked, "Safe? Who knows what is safe? One bribed his guards. One seduced her guards. One dug his way out scratch by scratch. Disappeared, died, dead, gone, mingled off with the myriad of worlds--did one get home, perhaps, to start their legend of the gods in the sky; the legend that never dies through the rise and fall of culture from savagery to ... to ... to Element 109?"

Chelan looked at Jerry Markham, the Terran looked back defiantly as if he were guest instead of captive. "Co-operate," breathed Chelan.

"I'll tell you nothing. Force me. I can't stop that."

Chelan shook his head sorrowfully. "Extracting what you know would be less than the play of a child," he said. "No, Terran. We can know what you know in the turn of a dial. What we need is that which you do not know. Laugh? Or is that a sneer? No matter. What you know is worthless. Your problems and your ambitions, both racial and personal, are minor. We know them already. The pattern is repetitive, only some of the names are changed.

"But why? Ah, that we must know. Why are you what you are? Seven times in History Terra has come up from the mud, seven times along the same route. Seven times a history of ten thousand years from savage to savant, from beast to brilliance and always with the same will to do--to do what? To die for what? To fight for what?"

Chelan waved Huvane to take the Terran away.

* * * * *

Huvane said, "He's locked in air-tight with guards who can be trusted. Now what do we do with him?"

"He will co-operate."

"By force?"

"No, Huvane. By depriving him of the one thing that Life cannot exist without."

"Food? Safety?"

Chelan shook his head. "More primitive than these." He lowered his voice. "He suffers now from being cut off from his kind. Life starts, complaining about the treatment it receives during the miracle of birth and crying for its first breath of air. Life departs gasping for air, with someone listening for the last words, the last message from the dying. Communication, Huvane, is the primary drive of all Life, from plant to animal to man--and if such exists, superman.

"Through communication Life goes on. Communication is the prime requisite to procreation. The firefly signals his mate by night, the human male entices his woman with honeyed words and is not the gift of a jewel a crystalline, enduring statement of his undying affection?"

Chelan dropped his flowery manner and went on in a more casual vein: "Huvane, boil it down to the least attractive form of simplification, no life stands alone. And no viable life goes on without communication, I shall shut off the Terran's communication."

"Then he will go rank staring, raving mad."

"No, for I shall offer him the alternative. Co-operate, or molder in utter blankness."

Huvane shrugged. "Seems to me that any Terran locked in a duralim cell so far from home the distance means nothing is already cut from communication."

"Deeper, deeper, Huvane. The brain lies prisoner within a cell of bone. Its contact with the Outside world lies along five channels of sensory communication. Everything that the brain believes about the Universe is the product of sensory information carried inward by sight, touch, sound, taste and smell. From five basic bits of information, knowledge of the Great Truth is formed through logic and self-argument. Everything."

"But--"

"Oh, now stop. I am not expressing my own singular opinion. I believe a rather great proportion of the things that I was taught, and I was taught through the self-same five sensory channel."

"Um-m-m."

"Good. Just plain 'Um-m-m.' Now we shall shut off the Terran's channels of communication until he consents as an alternative. This, Huvane, hasn't been tried before. It may bring us the final important bit of information."

* * * * *

Slowly the lights went out. Jerry Markham was prepared for dark isolation, he could do nothing about it so he accepted it by the simple process of assuring himself that things were going to get worse before they got better.

The darkness became--absolute. Utter. Complete. Not even the dots and whorls and specks that are technically called "Visual noise" occurred. A level of mental alertness niggled at him; for nearly twenty-four years it had been a busy little chunk of his mind. It was that section that inspected the data for important program material and decided which was trivial and which was worthy of the Big Boy's attention. Now it was out of a job because there wasn't even a faint background count of plateau-noise to occupy its attention.

The silence grew--vast. Brain said that the solid walls were no more than ten feet from him; ears said that he was in the precise middle of absolutely nowhere. Feeling said that the floor was under his feet, ears said that upward pressure touched his soles. Deeper grew the deadening of his ears, and orientation was lost. Feeling remained and he felt his heart beating in a hunting rhythm because the sound-feedback through the ear was gone, and the hortator had lost his audible beat.

Feeling died and he knew not whether he stood or sat or floated askew. Feeling died and with it went that delicate motor control that directs the position of muscle and limb and enables a man to place his little finger on the tip of his nose with his eyes closed.

Aside from the presence of foreign matter, the taste of a clean mouth is--tasteless. The term is relative. Jerry Markham learned what real tastelessness was. It was flat and blank and--nothingness.

Chemists tell us that air is tasteless, colorless, and odorless, but when sense is gone abruptly one realizes that the air does indeed have its aroma.

In an unemployed body the primitive sensors of the mind had nothing to do, and like a man trained to busy-ness, loafing was their hardest task. Gone was every sensory stimulus. His heart pumped from habit, not controlled by the feedback of sound or feeling. He breathed, but he did not hear the inrush of air. Brain told him to be careful of his mouth, the sharp teeth could bite the dead tongue and he could bleed to death never feeling pain nor even the swift flow of salty warmth. Habit-trained nerves caused a false tickle in his throat; he never knew whether he coughed or whether he thought that he coughed.

The sense of time deserted him when the metronome of heartbeat died. Determined Brain compromised by assuming that crude time could be kept by the function of hunger, elimination, weariness. Logical Brain pointed out that he could starve to death and feel nothing; elimination was a sensory thing no more; weariness was of the body that brought no information anyway--and what, indeed was sleep?

Brain considered this question. Brain said, I am Jerry Markham. But is it true that no brain can think of nothing? Is it possible that "Sleep" is the condition that obtains when the body stops conveying reliable information to the brain, and then says to Hell with Everything and decides to stop thinking?

The Brain called Jerry Markham did not stop thinking. It lost its time sense, but not completely. A period of time passed, a whirlwind of thoughts and dreamlike actions went on, and then calmness came for a while.

Dreams? Now ponder the big question. Does the brain dream the dream as a sensory experience--or is a dream no more than a sequence of assorted memories? Would a dying brain expire in pleasure during a pleasant dream--or is the enjoyment of a pleasant dream only available to the after-awakened brain?

What is Man but his Memories?

* * * * *

In one very odd manner, the brain of Jerry Markham retained its intellectual orientation, and realized that its physical orientation was uncontrollable and undetectable and therefore of no importance. Like the lighthouse keeper who could not sleep when the diaphone did not wrneeee-hrnawwww for five seconds of each and every minute, Jerry Markham's brain was filled with a mild concern about the total lack of unimportant but habitual data. There was no speckle of light to classify and ignore, no susurrus of air molecules raining against the eardrum. Blankness replaced the smell and taste and their absence was as disturbing as a pungence or a poison. And, of course, one should feel something if it is no more than the tonus of muscle against the mobile bones.

Communication is the prime drive of life. Cut off from external communication entirely, section A, bay 6, tier 9, row 13 hollered over to box Q, line 23, aisle F and wanted to know what was going on. The gang on the upper deck hailed the boiler room, and the crew in the bleacher seats reported that the folks in charge of C.I.C.--Communication Information Center--were sitting on their hands because they didn't have anything to do. One collection of bored brain cells stirred. They hadn't been called upon since Jerry Markham sang "Adeste Fidelis" in memorized Latin some fifteen years earlier and so they started the claque. Like an auditorium full of people impatient because the curtain had not gone up on time, bedlam broke loose.

Bedlam is subject to the laws of periodicity, stochastic analysis, and with some rather brilliant manipulation it can be reduced to a Fourier Series. Fourier says that Maxwell is right and goes on to define exactly when, in a series of combined periodicities of apparently random motion, all the little particles will be moving in the same direction. Stochastic analysis says that if the letter "U" follows the letter "Q" in most cases, words beginning with "Q" will have "U" for a second letter.

Jerry Markham began to think. Isolated and alone, prisoner in the cell of bone, with absolutely nothing to distract him, the Brain by common consent pounded a gavel, held a conference, appointed a chairman and settled down to do the one job that the Brain was assembled to do. In unison, ten to the sixteenth storage cells turned butter side up at the single wave of a mental flag.

He thought of his father and his mother; of his Sally. He thought of his commanding officer and of the fellows he liked and disliked. The primitive urge to communicate was upon him, because he must first establish communication before he could rise from the stony mineral stage to the exalted level of a vegetable. Bereft of his normal senses, undistracted by trivia such as noise and pain and the inestimable vastness of information bits that must be considered and evaluated, his brain called upon his memory and provided the background details.

The measured tread of a company of marching soldiers can wreck a bridge.

The cadence of ten to the sixteenth brain cells, undivided by the distraction of incoming information, broke down a mental barrier.

As vividly as the living truth, Jerry Markham envisioned himself sauntering down the sidewalk. The breeze was on his face and the pavement was beneath his feet, the air was laden with its myriad of smells and the flavor of a cigarette was on his tongue. His eyes saw Sally running toward him, her cry of greeting was a welcome sound and the pressure of her hug was strong and physical as the taste of her lips.

Real.

She hugged his arm and said, "Your folks are waiting."

Jerry laughed. "Let the general wait a bit longer," he said. "I've got a lot to tell him."

* * * * *

Huvane said, "Gone!" and the sound of his voice re-echoed back and forth across the empty cell.

"Gone," repeated Chelan. "Utterly incomprehensible, but none the less a fact. But how--? Isolated, alone, imprisoned--cut off from all communication. All communication--?"

"I'll get another specimen, chief."

Chelan shook his head. "Seven times we've slapped them down. Seven times we've watched their rise--and wondered how they did it. Seven times they would have surpassed us if we hadn't blocked them. Let them rise, let them run the Universe. They're determined to do that anyway. And now I think it's time for us to stop annoying our betters. I'd hate to face them if they were angry."

"But chief, he was cut off from all communication--?"

"Obviously," said Chelan, "not!"

THE END

Contents

NO HIDING PLACE

By Richard R. Smith

The Earth was enveloped in atomic fire and the ship was a prize of war. But disaster may make victory mandatory.

The ship leaped toward the stars, its engines roaring with a desperate burst of energy and its bulkheads audibly protesting the tremendous pressures.

In the control room, Emmett Corbin listened to the screech of tormented metal and shuddered. The heat was suffocating, and acrid fumes assailed his nostrils and burned his eyes until he almost cried out in pain.

Despite the agony, his gaze did not waver from the video set across the room. In the screen, Earth was a rapidly diminishing orb, charred and mottled with glowing atomic fires.

Everything, a far corner of his mind whispered. Everything on Earth is dead!

He was a carpenter and luckily, he had been working inside the barricades of an Army spaceport when the news came that the enemy had broken through the defense ring beyond Pluto. He had continued nailing the cedar siding on the building, knowing that if he stopped his work and waited, he would start screaming.

An MP running by the building several minutes later had shouted at him, urging him to board one of the ships on the landing field. In those last hours, they had loaded the few remaining spaceships as quickly as possible, ignoring the importance of the passengers. He reflected that many millionaires and influential politicians were now dead simply because they hadn't been close enough to the spaceports when the unexpected news came. Watching the pilots as they sat tense before the controls, he felt overcome with helplessness.

The passenger on his right was a girl--red-haired and undeniably attractive. He remembered her name. It was Gloria White, and she was the daughter of Colonel White who had led the expedition to Venus. Her father had died months before but his friends had used their influence to establish her as a secretary on the spaceport where it was assumed she would be comparatively safe.

He had seen her frequently but almost always at a distance. She had been friendly enough, but she had never exchanged more than a few casual words with him. He had often paused in his work to admire her. But now, aboard one of the last ships to leave Earth, he evaluated her only as another passenger.

The man on his left was dressed expensively. His general appearance radiated prestige although his fleshy face was filled with disbelief as if he were witnessing a fantastic nightmare.

Rinnnng! Rinnnng! Corbin's thoughts were interrupted by a clamoring alarm bell declaring by its volume and insistence that the danger was still acute. That bell will ring until the ship is destroyed, he thought wildly. It could very well mean that the ship will be destroyed!

The pilots leaped away from the controls as if they had abruptly become white hot. "Rocket," one of them screamed. "Enemy rocket on our tail!"

Corbin turned suddenly and ran across the room in sudden, blind panic. "We can't shake it! Nobody can shake one!" Mumbling incoherently, he grabbed a spacesuit and began to don it.

The room was suddenly a seething mass of confusion. The pilots distributed spacesuits and helped passengers into them while the cabin continued to sway and lurch. Fear-crazed passengers ran aimlessly in circles. Some fainted and others were shocked into immobility.

Emmett had barely finished securing his helmet when the ship shook violently and he was knocked to the floor. The lights fluttered, then went out.

When the trembling at last subsided, he struggled to his feet and looked about the room. His eyes gradually adjusted to the faint light from the luminous paint on the walls and he was able to make out two shadowy figures moving hesitantly about the wreckage.

He remained motionless as one of the two men approached him, reached out and adjusted the dials on his spacesuit controls. The earphones in his helmet blared with a familiar voice, "Are you all right?"

"Y-Yeah. Just a little shaken."

The man walked toward the third passenger and presently Emmett heard a quick, sobbing breath through the earphones.

"Are you hurt?" the man asked.

"No." Even under the abnormal conditions Gloria White's calm voice came through clearly.

They wandered aimlessly about the room, each engrossed in his private mental turmoil. Finally the pilot broke the silence, "Since we're probably the last ones alive on the ship, we should know each other. My name is George Hartman."

"Emmett Corbin."

"Gloria ... Gloria White."

The pilot said with grim urgency: "We've got to do something. There's no sense in just standing here--waiting for the enemy to come."

"Come?" Emmett inquired. "You mean that the Agronians will actually board our ship?"

"They always examine disabled ships. They are determined to learn as much as they can about us."

"Well, let's get some weapons and be ready. I'm no hero, understand. But I agree with you that there's no sense in just waiting."

The pilot said: "There are no hand weapons on the ship. Our only possible course of action would be to hide." His emphasis conveyed to the others how much he disliked the thought.

"But where?" Gloria asked. "If they make a thorough search--"

"We can't hide in the ship," George said, with absolute conviction. "Our reports indicate that they examine every square foot inside a bombed vessel. We'll have to conceal ourselves outside."

"Outside?"

"We can use the magnetic shoes on our spacesuits to walk on the ship's hull. If luck favors us they may never even think of searching the forward section of the hull."

Emmett shrugged his shoulders, not realizing that in the faint light no one could see the gesture. Gloria said, "It's better than making no attempt at all to save ourselves."

George led the way from the control room, and across a passenger compartment that was filled with the crumpled, lifeless forms of almost a hundred men and women.

"There were no spacesuits in this room," he explained simply.

They operated the air lock by utilizing the emergency manual controls, and were soon standing on the hull of the ship. For several seconds they remained motionless and silent, grimly surveying their awesome surroundings. The billions of stars above were terrifyingly vivid against the dark emptiness of space. The ship's hull was fantastically twisted and pitted, and the enemy ship--it hovered a few miles distant--had been transformed into a brilliantly burning star by the reflected sunlight.

"We've got to find cover," George said quickly. "If they're watching the ship with telescopes we'll stand out like fireflies in a dark room!"

Cautiously sliding their feet across the hull, Gloria and Emmett followed the pilot. Presently he pointed to a spot where a large section of the hull had been twisted back upon itself, forming a deep pocket. "This should be good enough," he said.

They followed his example as he knelt and crawled through the small opening. To Emmett it was like crawling into a sardine can. The space was barely large enough to accommodate the three of them, and through the spacesuit's tough fabric, he could feel faint, shifting pressures that indicated he was leaning against someone's back and sitting on someone's legs. They shuffled about in the total darkness until they reached a fairly comfortable position and then crouched in silence until light flashed all about them.

"Look!" Gloria whispered. Emmett stared through a narrow gash in the metal near his head and saw a group of Agronians approaching the ship. The starlight, glittering on their strange spacesuits, transformed them into weird apparitions.

Emmett closed his eyes and breathed a silent prayer. When he opened them again he could see only the unwinking stars and the enemy ship, which was still hovering nearby like a huge glaring eye.

"They're inside the ship analyzing our navigational instruments," George said as if he could somehow see through the solid metal. "They're a very thorough race. They probably know far more about us than we know about them."

"What are we going to do?" Gloria asked. "We can't just sit here until breathing becomes a torment--"

"What can we do? There's no place to go!" Emmett's heart had begun a furious pounding. His plight reminded him of how, in a recurrent nightmare, he had often found himself standing frozen before an oncoming truck, his legs immobile as he waited for death. He had always awakened with his heart beating furiously and his body bathed in a cold sweat, his mind filled with a sickening fear.

And now it was as if the nightmare had become a reality. He was waiting for death not in the form of a truck, but in the regular swish of air that tickled his ears as his oxygen supply was purified and replenished. Eventually the sound would change its timbre as the purifying agents became less efficient. The faint sound was not as impressive as the sight of a truck. But he knew that in a short time it would be just as deadly. And, as in the nightmare, he was powerless ...

* * * * *

A long silence followed--broken only by the swish of Emmett's oxygen-rejuvenating machinery. He listened intently and the swish grew in volume until it became a roar in his ears--a sound more thunderous than that of a thousand trucks.

"There is a place where we'd be completely safe," Gloria exclaimed, her voice suddenly loud in his ears. "I don't know how we could get there. But if a way could be found--"

"Venus?" George inquired. "The colony your father started?"

"Yes. There are only a few colonists there--not more than twenty-five. The war with the Agronians started just after the settlement was established and the government never had a chance to send out more colonists. Father showed me the approximate location--"

"The Agronians have probably destroyed the base by now," Emmett said. But his senses were tingling with new hope.

Gloria shook her head. "I don't think so. The enemy has studied the remains of our warships but there's a good chance that the information never fell into their hands."

"How do we get there? We haven't got a ship, and we can't walk!"

"We haven't got a ship," George agreed. "But we can try to get one."

Emmett felt suddenly cold when he realized what the pilot had in mind. "The enemy ship?" he asked.

George nodded. "During the skirmish at Arcturus, we managed to capture one of their ships and I was a member of a group that studied it. I'm sure I can fly one of their vessels, for the controls are far simpler than ours. Most of the Agronians have left their ship to study ours, and that leaves only a skeleton crew on board. We can use our spacesuit jets to cross the distance. As you can see, it isn't too far."

"And precisely what happens when we reach their ship?"

"Who knows? Maybe we'll get killed. But getting killed in a struggle for survival is better than just waiting to die."

Gloria shuddered. "It looks so cold out there. We'll get separated--hopelessly lost. I don't even know how to operate the spacesuit's rockets!"

"I don't either," Emmett admitted.

"It's simple." George carefully explained the operation of the rockets in detail and ended by instructing them, "We'll get separated on the way. But when we reach the ship, we'll try to meet at the air lock. It resembles the air lock of an Earth ship."

* * * * *

Floating through space toward the enemy ship, Emmett felt overcome with an absurd sensation of freedom. Completely surrounded by billions of motionless, pin-point stars and securely hidden by the vast blackness of space, the aliens and the problem of survival seemed dream-like and unreal.

A sharp pain stabbed at his left arm and he heard a brief hissing sound. Oxygen was escaping from his spacesuit. The sound abruptly stopped when the suit automatically sealed the puncture. And yet the throbbing pain remained and he felt the wetness of blood against his flesh, seeping slowly down his leg.

A meteor! People usually visualized meteors as tons of metal hurtling through space. But there were small ones as well, and perhaps this one had been no larger than a grain of sand. He dismissed it from his mind, and after what seemed an eternity, his feet touched the hull of the enemy ship. Quickly he activated the magnetic boots.

A distant figure gestured as George's voice came loudly over the intercom system, "This way. Here's the air lock!"

You should whisper, he thought. It would be more fitting.

He shuffled in the indicated direction. His legs were rubbery beneath him and there was a growing tingling sensation in his left arm. It was just barely possible that he was bleeding to death. And encased as he was in the spacesuit, it would be impossible for him to treat the wound.

If they reached the colony on Venus he would receive medical attention, of course. But they must first overpower the ship's crew, and it would take approximately two hours to reach the colony. Could he hold out that long?

He didn't know.

George knelt and carefully examined the rectangular outline in the metal beneath their feet. "It's only a sort of button," he said. "It could be a device that opens the lock by means of a code sequence--or it could be a signal to notify those inside to open the lock."

"What should we do?" Gloria asked nervously.

Instead of replying, George pushed the button firmly. The section of hull beneath them instantly dropped several feet. Emmett looked up in time to see an outer air-lock panel swiftly blot out the stars.

Brief seconds later, the compartment was filled with a brilliant light and tiny nozzles in the ceiling sprayed a bluish gas about them.

Gloria leapt quickly to one side. "What's that?" she asked, in alarm.

"It's the Agronian atmosphere," George said. "Although their locks are mechanically different, the principle behind them is the same as ours."

"It's a strange-looking atmosphere," Emmett remarked. The pain in his arm and the numbness that was gradually spreading throughout his body had relaxed his mind. He felt so physically detached from his surroundings that he could look at the fog-like gas that swirled about them with interest rather than concern.

"It's poisonous," George said. "We managed to analyze some. One breath is enough to kill a human--"

An inner door abruptly glided to one side and George leaped into the room beyond. Emmett followed as quickly as possible, although he felt sleepy and his every action seemed a study in slow motion.

Except for the level expanse of the floor, the room before them was entirely alien. The thick atmosphere swirled eerily. The control board was recognizable as such, but being adapted for tentacles instead of human hands, it appeared to be a meaningless maze of equipment. Strange, angular devices lined the walls and hung from the low ceiling on thin wires. As Emmett scanned the odd artifacts, he could understand only one--a group of web-like hammocks that were obviously used by the aliens to sleep in.

Two Agronians stood before the large control board at the far side of the room. It was the first time Emmett had seen the enemy other than in pictures and the sight of the thousands of snakelike, wriggling antennae nauseated him.

George hesitated briefly and then ran toward the Agronians. Again Emmett followed the pilot's lead. One of the creatures aimed a weapon before George had crossed half the distance and Gloria's shrill scream of warning brought him up short. But before the weapon could be discharged, the other Agronian viciously flung a tentacle and sent it spinning from his companion's clasp.

George leaped at the nearest Agronian but the creature easily eluded him. He made another attempt and failed again.

The man and the alien cautiously surveyed each other.

"They're too fast for us," George admitted. His voice was filled with the bitterness of defeat and his shoulders sagged visibly.

"Do something!" Gloria screamed. "Do something before the others come back!"

Emmett glanced apprehensively at the air lock. She was right. At the moment they outnumbered the enemy, but when the others returned the Agronians could overpower them by sheer weight of number. And they could return without warning, at any instant.

"Why did one prevent the other from killing us?" George asked.

"He may have been afraid the other would miss and damage the ship," Emmett said. "Or possibly--"

"No. They're trained from birth to be soldiers. They're expert marksmen and their weapons are foolproof. They can adjust the blast from a weapon to travel any distance."

"Why should one enemy prevent another from killing us?" Emmett repeated wonderingly. He remembered another question that had nagged at his mind: Why had the Agronians totally destroyed Earth? Why hadn't they eliminated Earthmen and preserved the planet for exploitation--as a colony, a military base, any one of a thousand uses?

There was only one possible answer. A race might destroy a planet if it was useless. Earthmen had discovered useless planets, planets with poisonous atmospheres. Was Earth's atmosphere poisonous to the Agronians?

One Agronian had prevented another from killing them with a viciousness and an urgency that indicated it had been a life-and-death necessity.

Why? What would happen if they were to die?

Something clicked in his mind and a startling certainty occurred to him. Oxygen was poisonous to the Agronians!

That was why his life had been spared. And the pilot's--and Gloria's. Their spacesuits would have been punctured and their oxygen supply would have spread with deadly rapidity throughout the room.

Without hesitation he removed his helmet and adjusted the controls of his oxygenating machine until it was discharging oxygen at maximum capacity.

With a shrill outcry the two aliens darted toward him. But a thin, ghostly vapor of oxygen spread rapidly through the fog-like atmosphere, and halted them in their tracks.

"You deserve to die," Emmett whispered.

The enemy collapsed at his feet and writhed helplessly on the floor. Their bodies quivered spasmodically and were still.

* * * * *

Gloria's hysterical, joyous laughter rang in his ears like triumphant bells, and through the Agronian atmosphere that burned his face and smarted his eyes he dimly saw George's image as he rushed to the control board. He held his breath but realized that his death was certain. He could never hold his breath long enough to replace the helmet and wait for the purifying agents to cleanse the poison that now filled his spacesuit.

When he could hold his breath no longer, he inhaled quickly and deeply.

It was like inhaling a warm, comforting darkness....

Contents

JUBILATION, U.S.A.

By G. L. VANDENBURG

You've heard, I'm sure, about the two Martians who went into a bar, saw a jukebox flashing and glittering, and said to it, "What's a nice girl like you doing in a joint like this?" Well, here's one about two Capellans and a slot-machine....

Toryl pointed the small crypterpreter toward the wooden, horseshoe-shaped sign. The sign's legend was carved in bright yellow letters. Sartan, Toryl's companion, watched up and down the open highway for signs of life. In seconds the small cylindrical mechanism completed the translation.

The sign said:

JUBILATION, U.S.A.!!

The doggondest, cheeriest little town in America!

The two aliens smiled at each other. Unaccustomed to oral conversation, they exchanged thoughts.

"The crypterpreter worked incredibly fast. The language is quite simple. It would seem safe to proceed. The sign indicates friendliness," thought Toryl, the older of the two Capellans.

"Very well, Brother," replied Sartan, "though I still worry for the safety of the ship."

"Sartan, our instruments tell us that anyone who discovers the ship," Toryl explained, a trifle impatient, "will show a remarkable degree of curiosity before they display any hostility."

Sartan agreed to dismiss his worries and the two aliens began to walk along the barren highway. Before them, at a great distance, they could see a cluster of small frame buildings. When they had walked a hundred feet or more they encountered another sign.

JUBILATION, U.S.A.!!

WELCOME, STRANGER! See America first and begin with JUBILATION!

And several hundred feet further two more signs.

THE ROTARY CLUB of Jubilation welcomes and extends the warm hand of friendship to you!!!! You are now entering Paradise, brother!

HOWDY, STRANGER! COME RIGHT ON IN, STAY AWHILE AND MAKE YOURSELF TO HOME!

--Jubilation Chamber of Commerce--

As members of a peaceful race, Toryl and Sartan naturally found the signs encouraging. They walked at a sprightly pace.

A whirring noise behind them brought the two to a halt. They turned to discover a pre-war Chevy choking its way along the road. The aliens edged their way to a gulley along the side of the road. They were confident of a friendly reception but, in the event their calculations had been wrong, they poised themselves to make a break in the direction of their ship.

The ancient Chevy sputtered by. The driver was almost as ancient as the car, a bearded fellow with a stogy stuck between his teeth and a crushed hat on his head.

The driver slowed down when he saw the aliens. "Howdy, strangers!" he yelled cheerily. "Say, ain't you fellers a mite warm in them coveralls?" He cackled merrily, put his foot to the floor and sped on by.

Sartan looked at his companion. "I am sorry, I should not have doubted you, Brother. You were right. These people will welcome our visit. They seem very cordial."

"Good, Sartan. Let us continue."

One hundred yards further they were confronted by still another brace of signs. They stopped once more.

CITY LIMITS (Gambling allowed)

JUBILATION! WHERE TROUBLES never come due, 'cause the Good Lord takes a likin' to YOU!

Where gloom and doom are outlawed and there's never any sadness.

Where a smile lights up the midnight sky and gives off only gladness!

(Gambling allowed)

The second sign was another in the shape of a horseshoe.

BEYOND THIS POINT YOU HAVE 4372 FRIENDS YOU NEVER HAD BEFORE!!!

(Gambling allowed)

Suddenly Toryl stopped and played with several switches and dials on the crypterpreter.

"What is wrong, Brother?" asked the puzzled Sartan.

"I receive no direct translation for the term 'gambling'."

"What is the closest term the machine gives?"

"Fraternizing."

Sartan laughed. "Now it is you who fret, Toryl. According to the signpost legends 'fraternizing' would seem to be accurate."

* * * * *

A steady rolling sound of passionless one-armed bandits drowned out all other noise in Okie's Oasis Bar. As a result, Toryl and Sartan drew little attention when they entered. Except for their blue-metallic space suits they looked like and were ordinary humans.

They proceeded rather timidly toward the bar. Okie, the proprietor, was on duty readying the place for the night shift. Toryl held up his hand. The crypterpreter had already informed him that oral conversation was the manner of communication on the strange planet. Such conversation had long ago been abandoned on the planet Capella, but learned men such as Toryl and Sartan were familiar with how it was done, though when they spoke they sometimes had to halt between syllables.

"How-dy!" Toryl flashed a wide grin at the barkeep.

"Just hold your horses there, mister!" was Okie's sharp reply. "You ain't the only snake in this desert. There's four customers ahead of you!"

Sartan transmitted an admonishing thought to his companion. "Toryl, you should have noticed that the man was busy. He has only two hands."

"Forgive me, Brother, I was blinded by my own excitement."

The two Capellans waited and were soon attracted by the silver-handled machines that seemed to have most of the customers fascinated.

Sartan wandered over to where a small crowd of men was gathered around a single machine. A huge man, raw-boned and crimson-faced, wearing surplus army suntans, was operating the machine.

The big man dropped a large coin into a slot. He gave the silver handle a vicious snap. It made a discordant, bone-crushing sound. Three little wheels, visible under glass, spun dizzily. Anxious, screwed-up faces looked on as the first little wheel stopped. Bell Fruit.

A collective gasp came from the small crowd. The second little wheel stopped. Bell Fruit.

Another gasp.

Sartan touched the arm of the man operating the gambling device. "I beg your pardon, but could you please tell me--"

The big man wheeled around like a bear aroused from hibernation. "Hands off, mister! You trying to jinx me?"

The third little wheel stopped. Lemon.

The crowd groaned. The big man turned on Sartan again, a wild and furious look in his eye. "You jinxed me! Damn you, I oughta' bust you one right in the snout!!"

"My humble apol-o-gies, sir," the bewildered Sartan began.

"I'll give you your humble apologies right back with my fist," roared the gambler.

Toryl quickly made his way through the small crowd which by now was itching to witness a fight. "Ex-cuse me, sir, but my friend did not real-ize--"

"The hell he didn't!" The gambler fumed. "He was trying to jinx me, by God! And I'm gonna teach him to keep his paws--"

"Okay, okay, you guys, break it up!!" It was Okie, massive and mean looking, using his barrel belly to push his way through to the two aliens and the unlucky gambler. "What's goin' on here, Smokey?" he inquired of the gambler.

"Okie, I had a jackpot workin' when this dumb jerk here ups and grabs my arm--"

Toryl interrupted with, "My friend is sorry for what he did, sir."

Okie stabbed a cigar into his mouth. "Who are you guys anyhow? Where'd you dig up them crazy coveralls?"

"Sure a queer way to dress in this heat," spoke a voice from the crowd.

This was the moment of pride that Toryl and Sartan had looked forward to. They both grinned confident grins. "We have come to you from Capella," he said with some exultation.

Okie's face went blank. "Capella! Where the hell is that?"

"Sounds like one of them damn hick towns in California," said Smokey, the gambler.

Toryl, somewhat deflated, but by no means defeated, hastened to elucidate. "Capella is lo-cat-ed in the con-stell-a-tion which you call Auriga."

"Anybody know what the hell he's talking about?" asked the annoyed saloonkeeper.

Toryl and Sartan exchanged troubled glances. Sartan took up the cudgel. "Auriga is a constellation, a star cluster, sir. It is forty-two million light years away."

"What in tarnation is a light year?" asked an old-timer in the group.

Another replied, "They must be from Alaska. They got light years up there, sometimes stays light the whole confounded year 'round."

"That must be it," agreed Okie, "and that's why they're wearin' them crazy suits." The saloonkeeper unloosed a grim laugh. "You can take them arctic pajamas off now, boys. Weather's kinda warm in these parts!"

"Hey, fellas!" a voice shot out, "didya bring any Eskimo babes down with you?"

* * * * *

The crowd roared approval at the witticism.

Toryl transmitted a depressing thought to his companion. "I fear they do not believe us, Sartan."

Sartan did not get the opportunity to answer immediately.

"Listen, you guys," Okie pounded his fat finger into Sartan's chest. "I want you to behave yourselves, understand? Now that means lay off the customers while they're at the games. You wanna gamble there is plenty of machines available. I got a respectable place, I wanna keep it that way!" He turned and addressed the other men. "All right, boys, fun's over! No fight today! Drink up and gamble your money away. Let's get back to the games."

* * * * *

It was necessary for Toryl to use the crypterpreter to translate the various signs along the bar. Okie saw the small cylindrical machine sitting on the bar. His curiosity bested him. He gave it a more thorough examination than a dog gives a fireplug.

Some of the signs read: "DOUBLE BOURBON--$2.10" "COOL GIN RICKEY--$1.25" "IN GOD WE TRUST, BUT NOBODY ELSE!" "RUM COLLINS--$1" "A FRIEND IN NEED IS A FRIEND INDEED" "NO INDIANS SERVED HERE" and "SCOTCH--IMPORTED, $1.50--DOMESTIC, $1.30."

"Cool gin rick-ey," said Toryl.

"Comin' right up," Okie mumbled, his attention still wrapped around the crypterpreter. "Say, what is this gadget anyway?"

"It is a cryp-terp-reter," Toryl beamed with pride. "It en-ables us to un-der-stand and speak your lan-guage."

"Aw, go on!" Okie managed a fainthearted grin, uncertain of whether his leg was being pulled. "Come on now, tell me what it is."

"But I have just told you, sir."

The barkeep cursed under his breath. "Two gin rickeys, did you say?"

"Yes."

Okie brought the drinks.

Sartan smiled broadly. "Thank you ex-ceed-ing-ly."

"That'll be two-fifty."

Toryl raised his glass as though making a toast. "Two-fif-ty!" he repeated.

Okie caught his arm and brought the glass down.

"Two-fifty!" the barkeep said with grim insistence.

Sartan pursed his lips comprehendingly. He removed a large pentagonal piece of metal from his pocket and gave it to Okie.

Okie took the piece between his fingers, examined it and frowned. "I give up. What is it?"

Sartan had to glance at Toryl for an answer. Toryl threw a switch on the crypterpreter.

"Money," Toryl silently advised him.

"Money," said Sartan to Okie.

"You guys hold on and don't drink up yet," growled the barkeep. He then yelled in the direction of the blackjack table. "Hey, Nugget! Get on over here, I need you!!"

A wiry little man with a full, unkempt beard, hustled over to the bar. "Nugget McDermott at yer service, Okie! What's yer pleasure?" he asked with a sunny smile.

"Take a look at this." Okie handed him the piece of metal.

The old prospector turned it over in his hands, bit it and then held it in his palm as though to judge its weight. His expert opinion was, "It's gold, Okie," and was uttered without a shred of modesty.

"Are you sure?"

The old-timer was highly insulted. "Am I sure!! Why you lop-eared, sun-stroked jackass, of course I'm sure!!! Nugget McDermott is drawed to gold like nails to a magnet! Why when this here town was nothin' but a patch of cactus--"

"All right, all right," Okie waved him off, "don't get your gander up! Go on back to the blackjack table and tell Sam to give you a drink on the house."

"Much obliged, Okie, much obliged," said Nugget, doffing his hat and trotting back to the blackjack table.

The barkeep's face was pure sunshine when he turned to the aliens again. "Gentlemen, with this kind of a substitute you don't need money in my place. Drink up!"

"Thank you ex-ceed-ing-ly," said Sartan.

Okie arbitrarily judged the gold piece to be worth ten dollars. "The management invites you to try your luck, gentlemen. Go on give it a whirl."

Toryl and Sartan wore blank expressions as Okie slapped seven dollars and fifty cents change on the bar--four silver dollars, four half-dollars and six quarters.

"Don't be bashful, gentlemen. Okie's machines are friendly to one and all," said the barkeep.

* * * * *

Toryl removed the change and gave his companion two silver dollars, two half-dollars and three quarters.

"What is the purpose of the machines?" thought Sartan as they approached the one-armed bandits.

"I suppose that is what the one called Okie wishes us to learn."

"Perhaps it is some type of registration machine."

"It is doubtful. The gentleman you disturbed has been at the same machine since we arrived."

Sartan gripped the handle of a vacant machine. "Do you think it might be a kind of intelligence test?"

In lieu of an answer Toryl focused his attention on a small card, above the machine, which gave the winning combinations.

"There is that term again."

"What term?"

"Gambling." Toryl pointed to a line on the card warning minors not to gamble. A look of perplexity fell upon his face. "I am no longer sure the term has anything to do with fraternizing," he observed mentally.

"Let us find out."

Sartan placed a quarter in the coin slot. The three little wheels went spinning. Cherry. Lemon. Lemon.

Nothing.

Toryl and Sartan looked at each other, their faces blanker than ever.

"Try it again."

Sartan disposed of another quarter. They waited. Lemon. Plum. Plum.

Nothing.

Toryl inspected the machine from every angle, like a man on the outside trying to figure a way in. "Let me try it."

He put a quarter in the slot.

Three lemons.

"It isn't very interesting, is it?" thought Sartan.

"Why don't we try the larger pieces?"

"A splendid idea, Brother."

The larger coins did not fit. Toryl proceeded to report this sad state of affairs to Okie and was amazed when, for the eight large coins, Okie rewarded him with twenty-four smaller ones. He went back to his companion at the one-armed bandit.

They then dropped twenty consecutive quarters into the appropriately named machine without getting so much as a single quarter in return.

"It is puzzling, is it not, Brother?"

"Yes, Sartan. From all indications it would seem to be a machine totally without purpose."

"It does consume money."

"But why would one build a machine whose sole purpose is to consume money?"

Sartan gave it some hard thought. "I don't know!"

"Remarkable!" Toryl concluded. "But nothing is done without a purpose."

"Obviously we've found something that is."

"No, I do not believe that. Let me have the electro-analyzer."

* * * * *

The aliens were so engrossed in their problem as to be unaware that Okie and two men at the bar were casting suspicious eyes on them.

Sartan fished around in his pocket and produced a small object in the shape of an irregular triangle. Toryl took the electro-analyzer from him, removed the cover and moved his finger around inside. He replaced the cover and slapped the electro-analyzer against the side of the one-armed bandit. When he took his hand away the small object stuck to the machine like a leech.

Okie scratched his head and addressed one of the two men at the bar. "What the hell you suppose they're doin', Sam? What's that gadget for?"

"Search me," replied Sam, a well dressed, stoop-shouldered gent, "but if you want my opinion it doesn't look legal."

"Hey, Nugget!" yelled the barkeep.

Again the little old prospector hustled himself over to the bar.

"Nugget McDermott at your service! What'll it be, Okie?"

"Go on over and get the sheriff. Tell him there's two queer characters here trying to jimmy one of my machines in broad daylight."

The old man's feet kicked up sawdust as he scampered out the door. Okie kept his attention riveted to the two aliens.

Toryl was busy adjusting the electro-analyzer to the best possible position.

"What if it does not respond to this machine?" Sartan wanted to know.

"I do not think the machine contains any type of metal with which we are unfamiliar. We will have a reading in one minute."

The aliens took a step backward and waited.

A sudden noise, like that of a television tube exploding, jolted everyone in the room, including Toryl and Sartan. The blackjack table emptied. Gamblers left their machines. A semi-circle of the curious formed around the two aliens. Okie lit out from behind the bar and elbowed his way through the crowd.

The aliens' concentration was unbroken by the attention they had aroused. With all the single mindedness of religious fanatics they continued to observe the strange mechanical device.

Okie was dumbfounded to find the machine still in one piece and doubly dumbfounded to discover it was behaving in a most unconventional manner. It was emitting a low steady gurgling sound and an occasional sputter or burp. The legs of the machine seemed unsteady. Its body shifted back and forth in herky-jerky motions like an old-fashioned washing machine. The three little Bell Fruit wheels were spinning at the speed of an airplane propellor. Okie thought they might never stop again.

"What the hell are you crazy galoots doing to my machine!" he bellowed.

Before the aliens could answer there was another explosive sound, causing the crowd to jump back several steps. Quarters fell from the mouth of the machine, slowly at first, then at an alarming rate. The coins fell, bounced and rolled all over the floor. The crowd gulped with fascination.

"Holy catfish!" said one of the men, "how long since that blasted thing's paid off?"

"Looks like this is the first time," said one of the others.

"You guys keep quiet!" yelled Okie.

The coins continued to fall for what seemed like a record time. The crowd was spellbound. Okie watched in silent fury.

And the aliens were more confused than they had been when the machine wasn't paying off.

* * * * *

The one-armed bandit finally coughed out its last quarter. The three Bell Fruit wheels came to an abrupt halt, as though an inner spring had snapped. The machine broke down. Certain observers later reported that the poor thing actually looked exhausted.

The sheriff burst in the door with Nugget McDermott close behind.

"Sheriff, I want you to arrest these two tinhorns!" cried Okie.

"Tinhorns??" Sartan's face was creased with bewilderment.

"What's wrong, Okie?" asked the sheriff.

"Take a look for yourself! These two bugged my machine and then broke it down! Look at that money all over the floor!"

Toryl smiled. "We meant no harm, sir--"

"The hell you didn't mean no harm! You were out to rob me!"

"We were only ex-per-i-ment-ing--"

"There's their crooked experimenting right there!" said Okie, pointing a finger at the deactivated one-armed bandit. "I want them locked up until that machine's paid for!"

"All right," said the sheriff, "you two better come with me."

"But, sir," Sartan protested, "we merely wanted to know how the machine functioned. You see, we are from Capella and--"

"Capella!" exclaimed the sheriff. "Where is that? I never heard of the place."

"Well, it is not a part of your Earth."

"Oh, well why didn't you say so before!" The sheriff winked at the crowd. "You mean you boys are from out of this world?"

"That is correct," Sartan grinned proudly.

"Well, well! That makes a big difference!" The sheriff turned to the crowd. "All right, boys, grab them and hustle them over to the jail house!"

* * * * *

A group of men slowly closed in on the two aliens.

Toryl and Sartan backed away toward the wall.

"I believe they are angry, Brother," thought Sartan.

"But why?" inquired Toryl.

"I do not know. Do you suppose the machine represented some form of religious deity?"

"Exceed-ing-ly possible," Toryl answered.

As the men came closer Okie yelled, "Just get them two crackpots! I'll plug the first man that touches that money!"

The men were diverted by Okie's warning. They didn't notice, until it was almost too late, that the two strangers were halfway out the door.

"Get after them!!" the sheriff bellowed.

The aliens ran as though their lives were at stake, which was true, following the same route they had taken into town.

* * * * *

The crowd followed them as far as the edge of town. From there they hurled rocks.

Toryl and Sartan continued to run at breakneck speed, praying they would reach the safety of the ship. Once they looked behind them and saw that the crowd of angry men had given up the chase.

Halfway back to their ship they passed a sign, though they didn't bother to stop and read it.

YOU ARE NOW LEAVING JUBILATION, U.S.A.!!

The doggondest, cheeriest little town in America! Come back soon!!

THE END

Contents

THE TERROR OF AIR-LEVEL SIX

By Harl Vincent

It was a sweltering evening in mid-August, during that unprecedented heat wave which broke Weather Bureau records in 2011. New York City had simmered under a blazing sun for more than three weeks, and all who were able had deserted the city for spots of lesser torridity. But I was one of those unfortunates who could not leave on account of the pressing urgency of business matters and, there being nothing else to do, kept doggedly at my work until it seemed that nerves and body must soon give way under the strain. To-night, as I boarded the pneumatic tube, I dropped into the nearest seat and could not even summon the energy to open my newspaper.

For some minutes I sat as in a daze, wishing merely that the journey was over, and that I was on my own front porch out in Rutherford. After awhile I stirred and looked around. Seeing none of my acquaintances in the car, I finally opened the newspaper and was considerably startled by the screaming headlines that confronted me from its usually conservative first page:

SECOND COAST TRANSPORT PLANE LOST!

Disaster Like First in Air-Level Six!

No wonder the newsboys had been crying an extra on Broadway! I had given no heed to the import of their shoutings, but this was real news and well worthy of an extra edition. Since the mysterious loss of the SP-61, only four days previously, the facilities of the several air transportation systems were seriously handicapped on account of the shaken confidence of the general public. It was not surprising that there was widespread reluctance at trusting human lives and valuable merchandise to the mercies of the inexplicable power which had apparently wiped out of existence the SF-61, together with its twenty-eight passengers and the consignment of one-half million dollars in gold. And now the NY-18 had gone the way of the other!

Details were meager. Both ships had failed to reply to the regular ten-minute radio calls from headquarters and had not since been seen or heard from. In both cases the last call had been answered when the ship was proceeding at full speed on its regular course in air-level six. The SF-61 last reported from a position over Mora in New Mexico, and four days of intensive search by thousands of planes had failed to locate ship or passengers. To-day, in the early hours of the morning, the NY-18 reported over Colorado Springs, on the northern route, and then, like the SF-61, dropped out of existence insofar as any attempts at communicating with or locating her were concerned. She, too, carried a heavy consignment of specie, though only eleven passengers had risked the westward journey.

* * * * *

Someone had dropped into a seat at my side, and I looked up from my reading to meet the solemn eyes of Hartley Jones, a young friend whom I had not seen for several months.

"Why, hello, Hart," I greeted him. "Glad to see you, old man. Where in Sam Hill have you been keeping yourself?"

"Glad to see you, too, Jack," he returned warmly. "Been spending most of my time out at the hangar."

"Oh, that's right. You fellows built a new one at Newark Airport, didn't you?"

"Yeah. Got a great outfit there now, too. Why don't you drop around and see us one of these days?"

"I will, Hart, and I want you to take me up some time. You know I have never been in one of these new ships of yours. But what do you think of this mess?" I pointed to the black headlines.

He grinned joyously and flipped back the lapel of his coat, displaying a nickeled badge. "George and I are starting out to-night to look around a little," he gloated. "Just been appointed deputy air commissioners; and we got a couple of guns on our newest plane. Air Traffic Bureau thinks there's dirty work afoot. Twelve-motored planes don't disappear without leaving a trace. Anyhow, we've got a job, and we're going to try and find out what's wrong. How'd you like to come along?"

"What?" I replied. "You know darn well I'm too busy. Besides, I'd be no good to you. Just extra load, and not pay load at that. And then, I'm broke--as usual."

* * * * *

Hartley Jones grinned in his engaging way. "You'd be good company," he parried; "and, what's more, I think the trip would do you a lot of good. You look all shot to pieces."

"Forget it," I laughed. "It's just the heat. And I'll have to leave you here, Hart. Drop in and see us, will you? The wife was asking for you only yesterday."

"Jack, dear," my wife greeted me at the door of my modest suburban home, "Mr. Preston just called, and he wants you to call him right back."

"Oh, Lord," I groaned, "can't I forget the office for one evening?" Preston was manager of the concern for which I worked.

Nevertheless, though our two fine youngsters were clamoring for their dinner, I made the telephone call at once.

"Makely," came the voice of the boss, when the connection was completed, "I want you to take the night plane for Frisco. Hate to ask you, but it must be done. Townley is sick and someone has to take those Canadian Ex. bonds out to Farnsworth. You're the only one to do it, and after you get there, you can start on that vacation you need. Take a month if you wish."

The thought of Hartley Jones' offer flashed through my mind. "But have you read of the loss of the NY-18?" I asked Preston.

"I have, Makely. There'll be another hundred a month in your check, too, to make up for the worry of your family. But the government is sending thirty Secret Service men along on the SF-22, which leaves to-night. In addition, there will be a convoy of seven fighting planes, so there is not likely to be a repetition of the previous disasters."

That hundred a month sounded mighty good, for expenses had been mounting rapidly of late. "All right, Mr. Preston," I agreed. "I will be at the airport before midnight. But how about the bonds?"

"I'll drive around after dinner and deliver them to you. And thanks for your willingness, Makely. You'll not be sorry."

* * * * *

My wife had listened intently and, from my words, she knew what to expect. Her face was a tragic mask when I replaced the receiver on its hook, and my heart sank at her expression.

Then there came the ring of the telephone and, for some reason, my pulse raced as I went to the hall to answer it. Hartley Jones' cheerful voice greeted me and he was positively gleeful when I told him of my projected trip.

"Hooray!" he shouted. "But you'll not take the SF-22. You'll take the trip with me as I wanted. I tell you what: You be out at Newark Airport at eleven-thirty, but come to my hangar instead of to that of the transportation company. We'll leave at the same time as the regular liner, and we'll get your old bonds to Frisco, regardless of what might happen to the big ship. Also we might learn something mighty interesting."

I argued with him, but to no avail. And the more I argued, the greater appeal was presented by his proposition. Finally there was nothing to do but agree.

* * * * *

Preston arrived with the bonds shortly after the children were tucked in their beds. I did not tell him of my change in plans. He did not stay long, and I could see that he was uncomfortable under the accusing eyes of Marie, for all his own confidence in the safety of the trip in the closely-guarded SF-22.

At precisely eleven-thirty I reached the great steel and glass hangar where Hart Jones and George Boehm carried on their experiments with super-modern types of aircraft. Hart Jones had inherited more than two million dollars, and was in a fair way to spend it all on his favorite hobby, though those who knew him best vowed that he would make many times that amount through royalties on his ever-growing number of valuable inventions.

The immense doors were open, and I gazed for the first time into the hangar whose spacious interior provided storage and manufacturing facilities for a dozen or more planes of Hart Jones' design. A curiously constructed example of his handiwork stood directly before me, and several mechanics were engaged in making it ready for flight. My friend advanced from their midst to meet me, a broad smile on his grease smeared countenance.

"Greetings, Jack," he said, taking my small bag from my hands. "Right on time, I see. And I can't tell you how glad I am that you are coming with us. So is George."

"Well, I didn't expect to," I admitted; "but there is no need of telling you that I had far rather be in your ship than in the big one."

* * * * *

George Boehm, the same jolly chap I had several times met in Hart's company, but fatter than ever, crawled from beneath the shiny metal body of the plane and scrambled to his feet at my side.

"Going in for a bit of adventuring, Mr. Makely?" he asked, wiping his hand with a piece of cotton waste before extending it.

"Yes," I replied, as I squeezed his chubby fingers. "Can't stick in the mud all my life, George. And I wouldn't want to be in better company for my first attempt either."

"Nor we," he returned, a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. "Rather have a greenhorn on the Pioneer than some government agent, who'd be butting in and trying to run everything. Think you'll be scared?"

"Probably," I admitted; "but I guess I can stand it."

"Hear the latest news broadcast?" interrupted Hart Jones.

"No. What was it?" I asked.

"There has been a report from out near Cripple Creek," said Hart solemnly, "that a pillar of fire was observed in the mountains shortly after the time the NY-18 last reported. The time and the location coincide with her probable position and the report was confirmed by no less than three of the natives of that locality. Of course the statements are probably extravagant, but they claim this pillar of fire extended for miles into the heavens and was accompanied by a tremendous roaring sound that ceased abruptly as the light of the flame disappeared, leaving nothing but blackness and awe-inspiring silence behind."

* * * * *

"Lot of bunk!" grunted George, who was vigorously scrubbing the back of his neck.

"Sounds like a fairy tale," I commented.

"Nevertheless, there may be something in it. In fact, there must be. Three of these mountaineers observed practically the same phenomenon from quite widely separated points, though one of them said there were three pillars of fire and that these looked more like the beams of powerful search-lights. All agreed on the terrific roar. And, after all, these two liners did disappear. There must be something quite out of the ordinary about the way in which they were captured or destroyed, and this occurrence may well be supposed to have a bearing on the matter."

"Possibly they were destroyed by some freak electrical storm," I suggested.

"Where then are the wrecked vessels?" asked Hart. "No, Jack, electrical storms do not destroy huge air liners and then suck them out into space beyond our vision. These two ships are no longer on the surface of the earth, else they would have been long since located. The magnetic direction finders of the transportation people have covered every inch of the United States, as well as Mexico and Canada."

"Of course they might have been carried halfway around the world by a wind of unprecedented velocity." I commenced a silly argument in favor of the theory that the elements had accounted for the two vessels, but was interrupted by the mounting roar of great engines throbbing overhead.

"Hurry up there, George!" shouted Hart. "It's the SF-22 coming in. We have to be ready for the take-off in five minutes!"

* * * * *

He hastened to take George's place at the washbowl and all was activity within the confines of our hangar. George and I left the office and went out to the landing field, which was now brilliant with the glare of floodlights. The Pioneer had been trundled into the open and stood ready for the flight. Not a hundred feet above the field, the huge silver moth that was the SF-22 swept by in a wide circle that would bring her into the wind. The roar of her engines died as she swung out of the circle of light into the surrounding darkness.

The crowds which had gathered to witness her landing buzzed with excited comment and speculation. Her nose brought slightly up, she dropped to a perfect three-point landing, the brakes screeching as she was brought to a standstill at the hangar of the transportation company.

"Come on now, you fellows," came the voice of Hart Jones from the hangar entrance, "there's no time to lose. The Pioneer takes off immediately after the big fellow."

We hurried to the waiting ship, which seemed like a tiny toy when compared with the giant SF-22. I had observed very little of the construction of the Pioneer, but I could now see that she was quite different in design from the ordinary plane. A monoplane she was, but the wing structure was abnormally short and of great thickness, and there were a number of tubes projecting from the leading edge that gave the appearance of a battery of small cannon. The body, like all planes designed for travel in air-level six, was cigar-shaped, and had hermetically sealed ports and entrance manholes. A cluster of the cannon-shaped tubes enclosed the tail just back of the fins and rudder and, behind the wing structure atop the curved upper surface of the body, there was a sphere of gleaming metal that was probably three feet in diameter.

* * * * *

Before I could formulate questions regarding the unusual features of the design, we were within the Pioneer's cabin and Hart Jones was engaged in clamping the entrance manhole cover to its rubber seat. A throbbing roar that penetrated our double hull attracted my attention and, looking through a nearby porthole, I saw that the convoy of army planes had taken off and was circling over the SF-22 in anticipation of her start. Trim, speedy fighting ships these were, with heavy caliber machine-guns in turrets fore and aft and normally manned by crews of twelve each. The under surfaces of their bodies glistened smooth and sleek in the light from the field, for the landing gears had been drawn within and the openings sealed by the close-fitted armor plate that protected these ordinarily vulnerable portions when in flight.

The SF-22 was ready to take off and the crowds were drawing back into the obscurity beyond the huge circle of blinding light. One after another her twelve engines sputtered into life, and ponderously she moved over the field, gathering speed as the staccato barking of the exhausts gradually blended into a smooth though deafening purr. The tail of the great vessel came up, then the wheels, and she was off into the night.

* * * * *

Hart Jones sat at a bewildering array of instruments that covered almost the entire forward partition of the cabin. He pressed a button and the starting motor whined for a moment. Then the single engine of the Pioneer coughed and roared. Slowly we taxied in the direction taken by the SF-22, whose lights were now vanishing in the darkness. I saw George open a valve on the wall and Hart stretched the fingers of his left hand to what appeared to be the keyboard of a typewriter set into the instrument board. He pressed several of the keys and pulled back his stick. There was a whistling scream from astern and I was thrown back in my seat with painful force. With that, the motor roared into full speed and we had left the airport far behind.

"What on earth?" I gasped.

"Rocket propulsion," laughed Hart. "I should have warned you. Those tubes you saw outside at the tail and along the leading edge of the wings. Only used three of them, but that was sufficient for the take-off."

"But I thought this rocket business was not feasible on account of the wastage of fuel due to its low efficiency," I objected.

"We should worry about fuel," said Hart.

I looked about me and saw that there was very little space for the storage of this essential commodity. "Why?" I inquired. "What fuel do you use?"

"Make our own," he replied shortly. He was busy at the moment, maneuvering the Pioneer into a position above and behind the SF-22 and her convoy.

"You make your own fuel enroute?" I asked in astonishment.

"Yes. That sphere you saw on top. It is the collecting end of an electrical system for extracting nitrogen and other elements, from the air. This extraction goes on constantly while we are in the atmosphere and my fuel is an extremely powerful explosive of which nitrates are the base. The supply is replenished continuously, so we have no fear of running short even in the upper levels."

* * * * *

George had crawled through a small opening into some inaccessible region in the stern of the vessel. I pondered over what Hart had just told me, still keeping my eyes glued to the port, through which could be seen the fleet we were following. The altimeter registered thirty-five thousand feet. We were entering air-level six--the stratosphere! Below us the troposphere, divided into five levels, each of seven thousand feet, teemed with the life of the air. The regular lanes were filled with traffic, the lights of the speeding thousands of freight and pleasure craft moving in orderly procession along their prescribed routes.

Up here in the sixth level, which was entirely for high-speed traffic of commercial and government vessels making transcontinental or transoceanic voyages, we were the only adventurers in sight--we and the convoyed liner we were following. The speed indicator showed six hundred miles an hour, and the tiny spot of light that traveled over the chart to indicate our position showed that we were nearing Buffalo.

Glancing through one of the lower ports, I saw the lights of the city shining dimly through a light mist that fringed the shore of Lake Erie and extended northward along the Niagara. Then we were out over the lake, and the luminous hue was slipping rapidly behind. I looked ahead and saw that the distance to the SF-22 and her convoy had somewhat increased. We were a mile behind and some two thousand feet above them. Evidently Hart was figuring on keeping at a safe distance for observation of anything that might happen.

* * * * *

Our motor was running smoothly and the angle of the propeller blades had been altered to take care of the change in air density from the lower altitudes. It flashed across my mind that this was an ideal location for an attack, if such was to be made on the SF-22.

Then, far ahead, I saw a beam of light stab through the darkness and strike the tossing surface of the lake. Another and another followed, and I could see that the SF-22 and her convoy were surrounded by these unearthly rays. They converged from high above to outline a brilliant circle where they met on the surface of the waters, and in the midst of the cone formed by the beams, the liner and its seven tiny followers could be seen to falter, and huddle more closely together.

It all happened in the twinkling of an eye--so quickly, in fact, that Hart and I had not the time to exchange remarks over the strange occurrence. For a moment the eight vessels hovered, halted suddenly by this inexplicable force from out the heavens. Then there rose from the apex of the inverted cone of light a blinding column of blue-white radiance that poured skyward an instant and was gone. To our ears came a terrific roaring that could be likened to nothing we had heard on earth. The Pioneer was tossed and buffeted as by a cyclone, and George came tumbling from the opening he had entered, his round face grown solemn. Then came eery silence, for the Pioneer's motor had gone dead. Ahead there was utter darkness. The liner and her convoy had completely vanished and the Pioneer was slipping into a spin!

* * * * *

"What's up?" asked George of Hart, who was tugging frantically at the controls.

"The liner has gone the way of the first two," he replied: "and the yarn about the pillar of fire was not so far wrong after all."

"You saw the same thing?" asked George incredulously.

"Yes, and so did Jack. There came some beams of light from the sky; then the pillar of fire and the roaring you heard, after which the vessels were gone and our electrical system paralyzed."

"Holy smoke!" ejaculated George. "What to do now?"

As he spoke, the Pioneer came out of the spin, and we were able to resume our positions in the seats. None of us was strapped in, and we had been clinging to whatever was handiest to keep from being tossed about in the cabin. Hart wiped his forehead and growled out an oath. The instrument board was still illuminated, for its tiny lamps were supplied with current from the storage battery. But the main lights of the cabin and the ignition system refused to function. We were gliding now, but losing altitude rapidly, having already dropped to the lower limits of level five.

"Can't you use the rocket tubes?" I inquired hesitatingly.

"They are fired in the same manner as the motor," replied Hart; "but we might try an emergency connection from the storage battery, which is ordinarily used only in starting and for the panel lights."

* * * * *

George was already fussing with the connections in a small junction box from which he had removed the cover. Meanwhile, the black waters of Lake Erie were rushing upward to meet us, and the needle of the altimeter registered twelve thousand feet.

"Here's the trouble!" shouted George, triumphantly holding up a small object he had removed from the junction box. "Ignition fuse is blown."

"Probably by some radiations from the cone of light and the column that destroyed the liner. Lucky we were no closer," were Hart's muttered comments.

George produced a spare fuse and inserted it in its proper place. The cabin lights glowed instantly and the motor started at once.

"Well, I'm going up after the generators of this mysterious force that is destroying our cross-country ships and killing our people," asserted Hart. "The rays came from high above, but the Pioneer can go as high as anything that ever flew--higher."

He snapped a switch and a beam of light that rivalled the so-called pillar of fire bored far into the night, dimming the stars by its brilliance. Again his fingers strayed to the rows of white keys and the rocket tubes shrieked in response to his pressure. This time I was prepared for the shock of acceleration, but the action was maintained for several seconds and I found the pressure against my back growing painful. Then it was relieved, and I glanced at the altimeter. Its needle had reached the end of the scale, which was graduated to eighty thousand feet!

"Good Lord!" I exclaimed. "Do you mean to tell me that we are more than sixteen miles in the air?"

"Nearly thirty," replied Hart, pointing to another dial which I had not seen. This one was graduated in miles above sea-level, and its needle wavered between the twenty-nine and thirty mark!

* * * * *

Again Hart pressed the rocket buttons, and we shot still higher into the heavens. Thirty, forty, fifty miles registered the meter, and still we climbed.

"Great Scott!" blurted a voice I knew was my own, though I had no consciousness of willing the speech. "At this rate we'll reach the moon!"

"We could, if we wished," was Hart's astounding reply; "I wish you wouldn't say too much about it when we return. We have oxygen to breathe and an air-tight vessel to retain it. With the fuel we are using, we could easily do it, provided a sufficient supply were available. However, the Pioneer does not have large enough storage tanks as yet, and, of course, we cannot now replenish our supply with sufficient rapidity, for the atmosphere has become very rare indeed--where we are. My ultimate object, though, in building the Pioneer, was to construct a vessel that is capable of a trip to the moon."

"You think you could reach a great enough velocity to escape the gravitational pull of the earth?" I asked, marveling more and more at the temerity and resourcefulness of my science-minded friend.

"Absolutely," he replied. "The speed required is less than seven miles a second, and I have calculated that the Pioneer can do no less than twenty."

Mentally I multiplied by sixty. I could hardly credit the result. Twelve hundred miles a minute!

"But, how about the acceleration?" I ventured. "Could the human body stand up under the strain?"

"That is the one problem remaining," he replied; "and I am now working on a method of neutralizing it. From the latest results of our experiments, George and I are certain of its feasibility."

* * * * *

The Pioneer was now losing altitude once more, and Hart played the beam of the searchlight in all directions as we descended. He and George watched through one of the floor ports and I followed suit. We were falling, unhampered by air resistance, and our bodies were practically weightless with reference to the Pioneer. It was a strange sensation: there was the feeling of exhilaration one experiences when inhaling the first whiff of nitrous oxide in the dentist's chair--a feeling of absolute detachment and care-free confidence in the ultimate result of our precipitous descent.

I found considerable amusement in pushing myself from side to side of the cabin with a mere touch of a finger. There was no up nor down, and sometimes it seemed to me that we were drifting sideways, sometimes that we fell upward rather than downward. Hart and George were unconcerned. Evidently they were quite accustomed to the sensations. They bent their every energy toward discovering what had caused the disaster to the SF-22 and its convoy.

For several hours we cruised about on the strangest search ever made in the air. Alternately shooting skyward to unconscionable altitudes and dropping to levels five and six to replenish our fuel supply, we covered the greater portion of the United States before the night was over. But the powerful searchlight of the Pioneer failed to disclose anything that might be remotely connected with the disappearance of the SF-22.

For me it was a never-to-be-forgotten experience. Lightning dashes from coast to coast which required but a few minutes of time--circling many miles above New York or Washington or Savannah in broad daylight with the sun low on the up-curved horizon; then shooting westward into the darkness and skirting the Pacific coast less than fifteen minutes later, but with four hours' actual time difference. Space and time were almost one.

* * * * *

Hart had not provided the Pioneer with a radio or television transmitter, but there was an excellent receiver, and, through its agency we learned that the world was in a veritable uproar over the latest visitation of the mysterious terror of the sixth air level. All commercial traffic in levels four, five and six was ordered discontinued, and the government air control stations were flashing long messages in code, the import of which could but be guessed. Vision flashes showed immense gatherings at the large airports and in the public squares of the great cities, where the general populace become more and more excited and terrified by the awful possibilities pictured by various prominent speakers.

The governments of all foreign powers made haste to disclaim responsibility for the air attacks or for any attempt at making war on the United States. News broadcasts failed to mention Hart Jones or the Pioneer, since the mission had been kept secret. The phenomenon of the rays and the roaring column of light had been observed from many points on this occasion and there was no longer any doubt as to the nature of the terror as visible to the eye, though theories as to the action and source of the rays conflicted greatly and formed the basis of much heated discussion.

Eventually the advancing dawn reached San Francisco, and with its advent Hart decided to make a landing in that city so that my bonds could be delivered.

* * * * *

Jones was apparently a very much mystified and discouraged man. "Jack," he said, "it seems to me that this thing is but the beginning of some tremendous campaign that is being waged against our country by a clever and powerful enemy. And I feel that our work in connection with the unraveling of the mystery and overcoming the enemy or enemies is but begun. It's a cinch that the thing is organized by human minds and is not any sort of a freak of the elements. Our work is cut out for us, all right, and I wish you would stick to George and me through the mess. Will you?"

"Sure," I agreed, readily enough. "After these bonds are delivered I am free for a month."

"Ha! Ha!" cackled George, without mirth. "A month! We're doggoned lucky if we get to the bottom of this in a year."

"Nonsense!" snapped Hart, who was considerably upset by the failure to locate the source of the disastrous rays. "There is nothing supernatural about this, and anything that can be explained on a scientific basis can be run to earth in short order. These rays are man-made and, as such, can be accounted for by man. Our greatest scientists must be put to work on the problem at once--in fact, they have quite probably been called in by the government already."

* * * * *

He was maneuvering the Pioneer to a landing on the broad field of the San Francisco airport. Hundreds of idle planes of all sizes lined the field, and, unmindful of the earliness the hour, a great crowd was collected in expectation of sensational reports from the occupants of arriving ships. The unusual construction of the Pioneer attracted considerable attention and it was with difficulty that the police kept back the crowd when she rolled to a stop near the office of the local government supervisor. We hustled inside and were greeted by that official with open arms.

"Glory be!" he exclaimed. "Hart Jones and the Pioneer. Every airport in the land has been on the lookout for you all night. It was feared you had been lost with the SF-22 and the others. Code messages to the supervisors of all districts advised of your mission, though it has been kept out of the general news, as has the message from the enemy."

"Message from the enemy!" gasped Hart, George and I, echoing the words like parrots.

"Yes. A demand that the United States surrender, and a threat to descend into the lower levels if the demand is not complied with in twenty-four hours!"

"Who is this enemy?" asked Hart, "and where?"

"Who they are is not known," replied the official gravely; "and as to the location, the War Department is puzzled. Direction finders throughout the country took readings on the position of their radio transmitter and these readings differed widely in result. But the consensus of opinion is that the messages originate somewhere out in space, probably between fifty and one hundred thousand miles from our earth."

"Great guns!" Hart glanced at George and me, where we stood with stupidly hanging jaws. "And what does the government want of me now?"

"You are considered to be the one man who might be able to cope with the problem, and are ordered to report to the Secretary of War, in person, immediately."

* * * * *

Hart was electrified into instant activity. "Here," he said in a voice of authority that commanded the official's attention and respect, "see that this package of bonds is delivered at once to the addressee and that the addressor is advised of its safe arrival. We're off at once."

Suiting action to the words, he thrust my packet into the hands of the astonished supervisor. Then, turning sharply on his heel, he flung back, "Advise the Secretary of War that I shall report to him in person in less than one hour."

As we stepped through the entrance of the Pioneer, he shot a final look at the official and laughed heartily at his sudden accession of energy. We had not the slightest doubt that Hart's orders would be immediately and efficiently carried out.

* * * * *

In precisely forty-five minutes, we stood before the desk of Lawrence Simler, then Secretary of War, in Washington.

"You are Mr. Hartley Jones?" inquired the stern-visaged little man.

"I am, Mr. Secretary, and these are my friends and co-workers, George Boehm and John Makely."

The Secretary acknowledged the introduction gravely, then plunged into the heart of the matter at hand with the quick energy for which he was famed.

"It may or may not be a serious situation," he said, "but certainly it has thus far been quite alarming. In any event, we have taken the matter out of the hands of the Air Traffic Bureau. We are prepared to defy the ultimatum of the enemy, whoever he may be. But we want your help, Mr. Jones. Every ship of the Air Navy will be in the upper levels within the prescribed twenty-four hours, and we will endeavor to stave off their attacks until such time as you can fit the Pioneer for a journey to their headquarters."

"How can your antiquated war vessels, capable of hurling a high explosive shell no more than fifty miles, fight off an enemy that is thousands of miles distant?" asked Hart.

"It is believed by the research engineers of the government that, though their headquarters may be located at a great distance, the raiders drop to a comparatively low altitude at the time of one of their attacks, returning immediately thereafter to their base."

Hart Jones shook his head. "The engineers may be correct," he stated; "but how on earth can you expect a little vessel like the Pioneer to battle an enemy who is possessed of these terribly destructive weapons and who has sufficient confidence in his own invulnerability to declare war on the greatest country on earth?"

* * * * *

Secretary Simler dropped his voice to a confidential tone, and his keen gray eyes flashed excitement as he unfolded the details of the discoveries and plans of the War Department. We three listened in undisguised amazement to a tale of the unceasing labors of our Secret Service agents in foreign countries, of elaborate experiments with deadly weapons and the chemicals of warfare.

We heard of marvelous new rays that could be projected for many miles and destroy whole armies at a single blast; rays that would, in less time than that required to tell of the feat, reduce to a mass of fused metal the greatest firstline battleships of the old days of ocean warfare. We heard of preparations for defensive warfare throughout the civilized world, preparedness that insured so terrible and final a war that it was literally impossible for a great world conflagration to again break out. We learned that the present mysterious signs of a coming war could not possibly have originated in any country on earth, else they would have been known of long in advance, due to the network of the Secret Service system. This war, so unexpectedly thrust upon us, was undoubtedly a war of planets!

"But," objected Hart, "the messages were in English, were they not?"

"They were," continued Secretary Simler, "and that puzzled our experts in the beginning. But, it may well be that our enemy from out the skies has had spies among us for many years and could thus have learned our languages and radio codes. In any event, we are to meet destructive rays with others equally destructive, and you, Hartley Jones, are the man who can make our effectiveness certain."

"I?"

"Yes. How long a time will be required in fitting out the Pioneer for reliable space flying?"

* * * * *

Hart Jones pondered the matter and I could see that he was overjoyed at the prospect of getting into the thing in earnest. "About one week," he replied, "providing you can send a force of fifty expert mechanics to my hangar at once and supply all material as fast as I shall require it."

"Excellent," said the Secretary. "We'll have the men there in a few hours and will obtain whatever you need, regardless of cost, for immediate delivery. Incidentally, there will be several scientists as well, who will supervise the installation of two types of ray generators and their projecting mechanisms on the Pioneer. You will need them later."

"I don't doubt we shall," said Hart. "And now, with your permission, we shall leave for the hangar. I'm ready to start work."

"Capital!" Secretary Simler pressed every one of a row of buttons set in his desk top. We were dismissed.

"Well," said I, when we reached the outside, "he has given you quite a job, Hart!"

"You said something," he replied. "But, if this threat from the skies proves as real and as calamitous as I think it will, we all have our work cut out for us."

"Do you really believe this enemy comes from another planet?" asked George as we entered the Pioneer for the trip home.

"Where else can they be from?" countered Hart. "But, really it makes no difference to us now. We have to go after them in earnest. Don't want to quit, do you, George?"

"Wha-a-at?" shouted George, as he jerked savagely at the main switch of the Pioneer. "You know me better than that, Hart. Did I ever let you down in anything?"

"No," admitted the smiling Hart, "you never did, bless your heart. But Jack here is another matter. He has a wife and two kids to look after. That lets him out automatically."

* * * * *

My heart sank at the words, for I knew that he meant what he said. And, truth to tell, I saw the justice in his remarks.

"But, Hart," I faltered, "I'd like to be in on this thing."

"I know you would, old man. But I think it's out of the question, for the present at least. You can help with the reconstruction of the Pioneer, however."

And meekly I accepted his dictum, though with secretly conflicting emotions. Little did I realize at the time that Hart knew far more than he pretended and that he had merely attempted to salve his own conscience in this manner.

I was very anxious to return to my family, and, as I sped homeward in a taxicab after the Pioneer landed at her own hangar, my mind was filled with doubts and fears. Secretary Simler had been very brief in his talk, but his every word carried home the gravity of the situation. What if these invaders carried the war to the surface? Suppose they seared the countryside and the cities and suburbs with rays of horrible nature that would shrivel and blast all that lay in their path? My heart chilled at the thought and it was a distinct relief when I gazed on my little home and saw that it was safe--so far. I paid the driver with a much too large bank note and dashed up my own front steps two at a time.

A few hours later I tore myself away and returned to the hangar, where the Pioneer now reposed in a scaffolded cradle. The sight which met my eyes was astonishing in the extreme, for the hangar had been transformed into a huge workshop with seemingly hundreds of men already at work. It was a scene of furious activity, and, to my utter amazement, I observed that the Pioneer was already in an advanced stage of disassembly.

* * * * *

I had no difficulty in locating Hart Jones, for he was striding from lathe to workbench to boring mill, issuing his orders with the sureness and decision of a born leader of men. He welcomed me in his most brisk manner and immediately assigned me to a portion of the work in the chemical laboratory--something I was at least partly fitted for.

We labored far into the night, when a siren called us to rest and food. This was to be a night and day job, and not a man of those on duty gave thought to the intense nervous and physical strain. Sixty-five of us I learned there were, though it had seemed there were several times that number.

During the rest period, Hart switched on the large television and sound mechanism of the public news broadcasts. Great excitement prevailed throughout the United States, for there had been a leak and the news had gone abroad regarding the message from the enemy. There was widespread panic and disorder and the government was besieged with demands for authentic news. The twenty-four hours of grace had nearly expired.

Finally the public was told of what actually was happening. Our entire fleet of one thousand air cruisers was in air-level six, waiting for the enemy. America was going to fight in earnest!

* * * * *

Flashes of our air cruisers in construction and in action came over the screen; voice-vision records of the popular officers of the fleet followed in quick succession. Then came the blow--the first of the strange war.

Two vessels of the air fleet had been destroyed by the triple rays and pillar of fire! Fifty cruisers rushing to the scene had been unable to find any traces of the source of the deadly rays. And, this time, there was an alarming added element. The pillar of fire had risen from a point near Gadsden in Alabama and, in its wake, there spread a sulphurous, smoldering fire that crept along the ground and destroyed all in its path. Farms, factories, and even the steel rails of the railroads were consumed and burned into the ground as if by the breath of some tremendous blast furnace. Hundreds of inhabitants of the section perished, and it was reported that the fumes from the strange fires were drifting in the direction of Birmingham, terrifyingly visible in blue-green clouds of searing vapor.

With the first news of the disaster came a wave of fear that spread over the country with the rapidity of the ether waves that carried the news. Then came stern determination. This enemy must be swept from the skies! Gatherings in public places volunteered en masse for whatever service the government might ask of them. The entire world was in an uproar, and from Great Britain, France, Germany and Russia, came immediate offers of their air fleets to assist in fighting off the Terror.

* * * * *

In less than an hour there were nearly five thousand cruisers in air-level six, patroling its entire depth from thirty-five thousand to one hundred thousand feet altitude.

We resumed work in the hangar, but the news service was kept in operation as far as the amplifiers were concerned, though the television screen was switched off on account of the likelihood of its distracting the workers.

Again came the report of a major disaster, this time over Butte in Montana. Four American vessels and one British were the victims in level six. And the city of Butte was in flames; blue, horrible flames that literally melted the city into the ground. Again there was no trace of the invaders.

How puny were the efforts of the five thousand air cruisers! Marvels of engineering and mechanical skill, these vessels were. Deadly as were the weapons they carried--weapons so terrible that war on earth was considered impossible since their development--they were helpless against an enemy who could not be located. Though our vessels were capable of boring high into the stratosphere, the enemy worked from still higher.

"Holy smoke!" gasped Hart Jones, who had stopped at my side. "What a contract I have on my hands!"

* * * * *

He looked in the direction of the partly dismantled Pioneer, and I could see by the fixedness of his stare that he was thinking of her insignificant size in comparison with the job she was to undertake.

Above the din of the machines in the hangar rang the startled voice of a news announcer. Panic-stricken he seemed, and we stopped to listen. Another blow of the terror of the skies--and now close by! Over Westchester County in New York State there was a repetition of the previous attacks. Only two of the cruisers had vanished this time; but several towns, including Larchmont and Scarsdale, were pools of molten fire!

Sick at heart, I thought of my little home in Rutherford and of the dear ones it contained. I thought of telephoning, but, what was the use? There was no warding off of this terrible thing that had so suddenly come to our portion of the world. It was the blowing of the last trumpet, the way things looked.

The announcer had calmed himself. His voice droned tonelessly now, as was the custom. Another raid, on the Mexican Border now. We were stupefied by the rapidity of the enemy's attacks; then electrified once more by the most astounding news of all. Alexandria, in Egypt, was the base of a pillar of fire! Fully half of the city was wiped out, and the remainder in a mortal funk, terrorized and riotous. The United States was not alone in the war!

The foreign fleets which reinforced our own were ordered home immediately. But to what avail? The world was doomed!

* * * * *

In the morning, after nine fearful attacks during the night, there came another message from the enemy and this was repeated in five languages and addressed to the entire world:

"People of Earth," it read, "this is our final warning. One chance has been given and you have proved stubborn. Consider well that your civilization be not entirely destroyed, and answer as the expiration of forty-eight hours, using our transmitting frequency. Our hand is to be withheld for that period only, when, unless our demands are met, all of your large cities and towns will be destroyed. Our terms for peace are that we be permitted to land without resistance on your part; that you surrender farm and forest lands, cities and towns, able-bodied men of twenty to forty, selected women of seventeen to thirty, and tribute in the form of such supplies and precious metals as we may specify, all to the extent of forty per cent of your resources. No compromise will be accepted."

That was all. It was during a rest period at the Jones hangar and I had brought Hart and George to my home for breakfast. We sat at the table when the news instrument brought the message. Marie was pouring the coffee, and my two small boys, Jim and Jack, had gone to the playroom, from whence their joyous voices could be heard. We four were struck dumb at the announcement, and Marie looked at me with so awful an expression of dread that my coffee turned bitter in my mouth. Marie was just twenty-eight!

"What beasts!" cried Hart. "Allow them to land without resistance? I should say not! Rather we should fight them off until all of us perish."

* * * * *

He had risen from his chair in his anger. Now he sat down suddenly and shook a forefinger in my face.

"Say!" he exploded. "You can't tell me that some master mind of our own world is not back of this!"

"I'm not telling you," I replied, startled at the fierce fire that flashed from his eyes.

"I know. I'm just trying to think aloud and I'm liable to say anything. But this sort of business is the work of humans as sure as you're born. Still I believe that what Simler says is true. I can't believe that any country on earth is back of the thing. It must be an attack from beings of another planet, but I think they have as a leader a man who is of our own earth."

Marie's eyes opened wide at this. "But how could that be?" she asked. "Surely no one from our earth has made the trip to one of the other planets?"

"It may be that someone has," replied Hart. "Do you remember Professor Oradel? Remember, about ten years ago, I think it was, when he and a half dozen or more of extremely radical scientists built a rocket they claimed would reach the moon? They were ridiculed and hissed and relegated to the position of half-baked, crazy inventors. But Oradel had a large private fortune, and he and his crowd built themselves a workshop and laboratory in a secluded region in the Ozarks. Here they labored and experimented and eventually the rocket ship was constructed. No person was in their confidence, but when the machine was completed they issued a statement to the press to the effect that they were ready for the voyage to the moon, and that, when they returned, a reckoning with the world was to be made for its disbelief and total lack of sympathy. Again the press subjected Oradel to a series of scathing denunciations, and the scientific publications refused to take cognizance of his claims in any way, shape or form."

* * * * *

"Then, one night, a great rocket roared into the heavens, leaving a terror-stricken countryside in the wake of its brilliantly visible tail. Several observatories whose telescopes picked up and followed the trail of the contraption reported that it described a huge parabola, mounting high into the stratosphere and falling back to earth, where it was lost in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. There the thing ended and it was soon forgotten. But I believe that this rocket ship of Oradel's reached Mars or Venus and that the peoples of whichever planet they reached have been prevailed upon and prepared to war upon the world."

"That would explain their knowledge of our languages and codes." I ventured, "and would likewise account for the fact that the first of our ships to be attacked were those carrying large shipments of currency. Though if these were destroyed by the fire columns, I can not see what good the money would do them."

"Don't believe the first three were destroyed," grunted Hart. "You'll remember that in these cases the pillars of fire, or whatever you want to call them, were of a cold light, whereas now they are viciously hot and leave behind them the terrible destructive fires that spread and spread and seemingly never are extinguished. No, I think that the force used is something of the nature of an atom-disrupting triad of beams and that these set up the column as a veritable tornado, a whirling column of roaring wind rushing skyward with tremendous velocity. The first ships, I believe, were carried into the stratosphere and captured intact by the enemy.

"Since the declaration of war the nature of the column has altered. The three beams, instead of meeting at or near the surface of the earth, now join high in the heavens and the column strikes downward instead of expending its force upward. An added energy is used which produces the terribly destructive force below. And now we are able to locate fragments of the ships destroyed above, whereas previously there were no traces."

* * * * *

"Sounds reasonable," commented George. "But why have they not landed and waged their war right here without warning, if that is what they now intend to do?"

"A natural question, George. But I have a hunch that the space flier or fliers of the enemy are conserving fuel by remaining beyond gravity. You know, in space flying, the greatest expenditures of energy are in leaving or landing on a body and, once landed, they might not have sufficient fuel for a getaway. They know we are not exactly helpless, once they are in our midst, and are taking this means of reducing us to the point of complete subjection before risking their precious selves among us."

The telephone startled us by its insistent ring. It was a call from the hangar for Hart. The news broadcast announcer was in the midst of a long dissertation regarding the discovery only this morning that there were certain apparent discrepancies in the movements of the tides and unwonted perturbations of the moon's orbit. There flashed on the screen a view of the great observatory at Mount Wilson, and Professor Laughlin of that institution stepped into the foreground of the scene to take up the discussion so mechanically repeated by the announcer.

"Must leave for the hangar at once," declared Hart, returning from the telephone. "Simler and his staff are there and we are wanted immediately."

"Oh, Jack!" Marie begged with her eyes.

"Got to be done, Honey," I responded, "and, believe me, I am going to do what little I can to help. Suppose we surrendered!"

* * * * *

I shuddered anew at the very thought and took hurried leave of my family, Hart and George awaiting me in the hall. Had I known what was to transpire before the end of the war, I am certain I would have been in much less of a hurry.

We rushed to the hangar, where Secretary Simler and his party awaited us in the office. Rather, I should say, they waited for Hart Jones.

"Mr. Jones," said the Secretary of War, when the introductions were over, "it is up to you to get the Pioneer in shape to go out after these terrible creatures before the forty-eight hours have expired. We have replied to their ultimatum and have told them we will have our answer ready within the appointed time, but it is already agreed between the nations of the World Alliance that our reply is to be negative. Better far that we submit to the utter destruction of our civilization than agree to their terms."

"I believe I can do it, Mr. Secretary," was Hart Jones' simple comment. "At least I will try. But you must let me have an experienced astronomer at once with whom to consult."

"Astronomer?"

"Yes--immediately. I have a theory, but am not enough of a student of astronomy myself to work it out."

"You shall have the best man in the Air Naval Observatory at once." Secretary Simler chewed his cigar savagely. "And anything else you might need," he concluded.

"There is nothing else, sir." Hart turned from the great men who regarded him solemnly, some with expressions of hope, others with plain distrust written large on their countenances.

* * * * *

They left in silence and we returned to our work with renewed vigor. Within an hour there arrived by fast plane an undersized, thick-spectacled man can who presented himself as Professor Linquist from the government observatory. He was immediately taken into the office by Hart and the two remained behind closed doors for the best part of four hours.

Meanwhile the hangar hummed with activity as usual. We in the chemical laboratory were engaged in compounding the high explosive used as fuel in the Pioneer. This was being compressed to its absolute limit and was stored in long steel cylinders in the form of a liquid of extremely low temperature. These cylinders were at once transferred to a special steel vault where the temperature was kept at a low enough point to prevent expansion and consequent loss of the explosive, not to speak of the danger of destroying the entire lot of us in its escape.

The generating apparatus of the Pioneer was to be dispensed with for this trip, since it was of no value outside the atmosphere where there was no air from which to extract the elements necessary for the production of the explosive. Instead, the entire supply of fuel for the trip was to be carried aboard the vessel in the cylinders we were engaged in filling. Hart had calculated that there was just sufficient room to store fuel for a trip of about two hundred thousand miles from the earth and a safe return. We hoped this would be enough.

* * * * *

On the scaffolding around the Pioneer there were now so many workers that it seemed they must forever be in one another's way. But the work was progressing with extreme rapidity. Already there projected from her blunt nose a slender rod of shining metal which was the projector of one of the destructive rays whose generator and auxiliaries were being installed under the supervision of the government experts. The force had been trebled and was now working in shifts of two hours each, the pace being so exhausting that highest efficiency was obtained by using these short periods.

Additional rocket rubes were being installed, and the steel framework of a bulge now showed on the hull, this bulge being an additional fuel storage compartment that would provide a slight additional resistance and consequently lower speed in the lower levels, but would prove little hindrance in level six and none at all in outer space.

When Hart emerged from his office he appeared to be very tired, indeed, but his face bore an expression of triumph that could not be mistaken. He and this little scientist from Washington had evidently arrived at some momentous conclusion regarding the enemy.

"Jack," he said, when he reached my bench during his first round of the hanger, "celestial mechanics is a wonderful thing. I had a hunch, and this astronomer chap has proved it correct with his mathematics. Our friend the enemy is out there in space at a point where his own mass and velocity are exactly counteracted by those of the earth and its satellite, the moon. He is just floating around in space, doing no work whatsoever to maintain his own position. He has temporarily assumed the rôle of a second satellite to us and is revolving around us at a definite period that was calculated by Lindquist. The gravitational pull of the moon keeps him from falling to the earth and that of the earth keeps him from approaching the moon. The resultant of the set of forces is what determines his orbit and the disturbance in the normal balance is what has been observed by the astronomers who reported changes in the tides and in the moon's orbit."

* * * * *

"But Lindquist's figures prove that the vessel or fleet of the enemy must be of tremendous size to produce such discrepancies, infinitesimally small though they might seem. We have a big fellow with whom to deal, but we know where to find him now."

"How can he work from a fixed position to make his attacks on the earth at such widely separated points?" I asked.

"It isn't a fixed position in the first place, and besides the earth rotates once in twenty-four hours, while the moon travels around the earth once in about twenty-eight days. But, even so, the widespread destruction could not be accounted for. He must send out scouting parties or something of that sort. That is one of the things we are to learn when we get out there. We'll have some fun, Jack."

"Will the Pioneer be ready?" I asked. Evidently I was to go.

"She will, with the exception of the acceleration neutralizers. But I'm having some heavily-cushioned and elastic supports made that will, I believe, save us from injury. And I guess we can stand the discomfort for once."

"Yes," I agreed, "in such a cause, I, for one, am willing to go through anything to help keep this overwhelming disaster from our good old world."

"Jack," he whispered, "we must prevent it. We've got to!"

Then he was gone, and I watched him for a moment as he dashed headlong from one task to another. He was a whirlwind of energy once more.

* * * * *

Forty-three hours and twenty minutes had passed since the receipt of the enemy's ultimatum. The last bolt was being tightened in the remodeled Pioneer, and Secretary Simler and his staff were on hand to witness the take-off of the vessel on which the hopes of the world were pinned. The news of our attempt had been spread by cable and printed news only, for there was fear that the enemy might be able to pick up the broadcasts of the news service and thus be able to anticipate us. As usual, there were many scoffers, but the concensus of opinion was in favor of the project. At any rate, what better expedient was there to offer?

The huge airport, now unused on account of the complete cessation of air traffic, was closed to the public. But there was quite a crowd to witness the take-off, the visitors from Washington, the officials of the field, and the two hundred workers who had enabled us to make ready for the adventure in time. There were four to enter the Pioneer: Hart, George, Professor Lindquist, and myself. And when the entrance manhole was bolted home behind us, the watchers stood in silence, waiting for the roar of the Pioneer's motor. As the starter took hold, Hart waved his hand at one of the ports and every man of those two hundred and some watchers stood at attention and saluted is if he were a born soldier and Hart a born commander-in-chief.

* * * * *

We taxied heavily across the field, for the Pioneer was much overloaded for a quick take-off. She bumped and bounced for a quarter-mile before taking to the air and then climbed very slowly indeed, for several minutes. Our speed was a scant two hundred miles an hour when we swung out over New York and headed for the Atlantic. And then Hart made first use of the rocket tubes, not daring to discharge the hot gases below while over populated land at so low an altitude. He touched one button, maintaining the pressure for but a fraction of a second. The ocean slipped more rapidly away from beneath our feet and he touched the button once more. Our speed was now nearly seven hundred miles an hour and we made haste to buckle ourselves into the padded, hammocklike contrivances which had been substituted for the former seats. In a very few minutes we entered level six and the motor was cut off entirely.

A blast from a number of the tail rockets drove me into my supporting hammock so heavily that I found difficulty in breathing, and could scarcely move a muscle to change position. The rate of acceleration was terrific, and I am still unable to understand how Hart was able to manipulate the controls. For myself, I could not even turn my head from its position in the padding and I felt as if I were being crushed by thousands of tons of pressure. Then, the pressure was somewhat relieved and I glanced to the instruments. We were more than a thousand miles from our starting point and the speed indicator read seven thousand miles an hour. We were traveling at the rate of nearly two miles a second!

* * * * *

Another blast from the rockets, this one of interminable length, and I must have lost consciousness. For when I next took note of things I found that we had been out for nearly two hours and that the tremendous pressure of acceleration was relieved. I moved my head, experimentally and found that my senses were normal, though there was a strange and alarming sensation of being wrong side up. Then I remembered that I had experienced the same thing when we first searched the upper levels of the atmosphere for the origin of the destructive rays of the enemy.

But this was different! I gazed through a nearby port and saw that the sky was entirely black, the stars shining magnificently brilliant against their velvet background. Streamers of brilliant sunlight from the floor ports struck across the cabin and patterned the ceiling. Looking between my feet I saw the sun as a flaming orb with streamers of incandescence that spread in every direction with such blinding luminosity that I could not bear the sight for more than a few seconds. Off to what I was pleased to think of as our left side, there was a huge globe that I quickly made out as our own earth. Eerily green it shone, and, though a considerable portion of the surface was obscured by patches of white that I recognized as clouds, I could clearly make out the continents of the eastern hemisphere. It was a marvelous sight and I lost several minutes in awed contemplation of the wonder. Then I heard Hart laugh.

"Just coming out of it, Jack?" he asked.

* * * * *

I stared at him foolishly. It had seemed to me that I was alone in this vast universe, and the sound of his voice startled me. "Guess I'm not fully out of it yet," I said. "Where are we?"

"Oh, about sixty thousand miles out," he replied carelessly; "and we are traveling at our maximum speed--that is, the maximum we need for this little voyage."

"Little voyage!" I gasped. And then I looked at George and the professor and saw that they, too, were grinning at my discomfiture. I laughed crazily, I suppose, for they all sobered at once.

Traveling through space at more than forty thousand miles an hour, it seemed that we were stationary. Movement was now easy--too easy, in fact, for we were practically weightless. The professor was having a time of it manipulating a pencil and a pad of paper on which he had a mass of small figures that were absolutely meaningless to me. He was calculating and plotting our course and, without him, we should never have reached the object we sought.

Time passed rapidly, for the wonders of the naked universe were a never-ending source of fascination. Occasionally a series of rocket charges was fired to keep our direction and velocity, but these were light, and the acceleration so insignificant that we were put to no discomfort whatever. But it was necessary that we keep our straps buckled, for, in the weightless condition, even the slightest increase or decrease in speed or change in direction was sufficient to throw us the length of the cabin, from which painful bruises might be received.

* * * * *

The supports to which we were strapped and which saved us from being crushed by the acceleration and deceleration, were similar to hammocks, being hooked to the floor and ceiling of the cabin rather than suspended horizontally in the conventional manner. This was for the reason that the energy of the rockets was expended fore and aft, except for steering, and the forces were therefore along the horizontal axis of the vessel. The supports were elastic and the padding deep and soft. Being swiveled at top and bottom, they could swing around so that deceleration as well as acceleration was relieved. For this reason the controls had been altered so that the flexible support in which Hart was suspended could rotate about their pedestal, thus allowing for their operation by the pilot either when accelerating or decelerating. How he could control the muscles of his arms and hands under the extreme conditions is still a mystery to me, however, and George agrees with me in this. We found ourselves to be utterly helpless.

My next impression of the trip is that of swinging rapidly around and finding myself facing the rear wall of the cabin. Then the tremendous pressure once more at a burst from the forward tubes. We had commenced deceleration. For me there were alternate periods of full and semi-consciousness and, to this day, I can remember no more than the high spots of that historical expedition.

* * * * *

Then we were free to move once more, and I turned to face the instrument board. Our relative velocity had become practically zero; that is, we were traveling through space at about the same speed and in the same direction as the earth. The professor and Hart were consulting a pencil chart and excitedly looking first through the forward ports and then into the screen of the periscope.

"This is the approximate location," averred the professor.

"But they are not here," replied Hart.

George and I peered in all directions and could see nothing excepting the marvels of the universe we had been viewing. The moon now seemed very close and its craters and so-called seas were as plainly visible as in a four-inch telescope on earth. But we saw nothing of the enemy.

The earth was a huge ball still, but much smaller than when I had first observed it from the heavens. The sun's corona--the flaming streamers which the professor declared extended as much as five million miles into space--was partly hidden behind the rim of the earth and the effect was blinding. A thin crescent of brilliant light marked the rim of our planet and the rest was in shadow, but a shadow that was lighted awesomely in cold green by reflected light from her satellite.

"I have it!" suddenly shouted the professor. "We are all in very nearly the same line with reference to the sun, and the enemy is between the blazing body and ourselves. We must shift our position, move into the shadow of the earth. We have missed our calculation by a few hundred miles, that is all."

All! I thought. These astronomers, so accustomed to dealing in tremendous distances that must be measured in light-years, thought nothing of an error of several hundred miles. But I suppose it was really an inconsiderable amount, at that.

At any rate, we shifted position and looked around a bit more. We saw nothing at first. Then Hart consulted the chronometer.

"Time is up!" he shouted.

* * * * *

On the instant there was a flash of dazzling green light from a point not a hundred miles from our position, a flash that was followed by a streaking pencil of the same light shooting earthward with terrific velocity. Breathlessly we followed its length, saw it burst like a bomb and hurl three green balls from itself which sped at equally spaced angles to form a perfect triangle. They hovered a moment at about two thousand miles above the surface of the earth, according to the professor, who was using the telescope at the time, and shot their deadly rays toward our world. We were too late to prevent the renewal of hostilities!

Another and another streak of green light followed and we knew that great havoc was being wrought back home. But these served to locate the enemy's position definitely and we immediately set about to draw nearer. We were still somewhat on the dark side of the object, which had prevented our seeing it. Now we swung about so that it was plainly visible. And, what a strange appearance it presented, out here in space!

Fully fifteen miles in diameter, it was a huge doughnut, a great ring of tubing with a center-opening that was at least eighty per cent of its maximum diameter. There it hovered, sending out those deadly missiles in a continuous stream toward our poor world. As we approached the weird space flier, we saw that a number of objects floated about within the great circle of its inner circumference. The NY-18, the SF-61 and the SF-22, without doubt! The theory of Hart's was correct in every detail.

* * * * *

We were still at about ten miles distance from the great ring and the streaking light pencils were speeding earthward at the rate of one a minute now. There was no time to lose. Already there was more destruction on its way than had been previously wrought--several times over.

Hart was sighting along a tiny tube that projected into the forward partition and he maneuvered the Pioneer until she was nose on to the great ring. He pulled a switch and there came a purring that was entirely new. A row of huge vacuum tubes along the wall lighted to vivid brilliancy and a throbbing vibration filled the artificial air of the cabin.

He pulled a small lever at the side of the tube and the vessel rocked to the energy that was released from those vacuum tubes. The thin rod which had been installed at the Pioneer's nose burst into brilliant flame--orange tinted luminescence that grew to a sphere of probably ten feet in diameter. Then there was a heavy shock and the ball of fire left its position and, with inconceivable velocity, sprang straight for the side of the great ring. It was a fair hit and, when the weird missile found its mark, it simply vanished--swallowed up in the metal walls of the monster vessel. For a moment we thought nothing was to result. Then we burst into shouts of joy, for a great section of the ring fused into nothingness and was gone! Fully a quarter of the circumference of the ring had disappeared into the vacuum of space. Truly, the governments of Earth had developed some terrible weapons of their own!

We watched, breathless.

* * * * *

The green light pencils no longer streaked their paths of death in the direction of our world, which now seemed so remote. The great ring with the vacant space in its rim wabbled uncertainly for a moment as though some terrific upheaval from within was tearing it asunder. Then it lurched directly for the Pioneer. We had been observed!

But Hart was equal to the occasion and he shot the Pioneer in the direction of the earth with such acceleration that we all were flattened into our supports with the same old violence. Then, with equal violence, we decelerated. The ring was following so closely that it actually rushed many hundreds of miles past us before it was brought to rest. From it there sprang one of the light pencils, and the Pioneer was rocked as by a heavy gale when it rushed past on its harmless way into infinity. The enemy had missed.

Meanwhile, Hart was operating another mechanism that was new to the Pioneer and again he sighted along the tiny tube. This time there was no sound within, no ball of fire without, no visible ray. But, when he had pressed the release of this second energy, the ring seemed to shrivel and twist as if gripped by a giant's hand. It reeled and spun. Then, no longer in a balance of forces, it commenced its long drop earthward.

His job finished and finished well, Hart Jones collapsed.

* * * * *

Following his more than three days and four nights of superhuman endeavor, it seemed strange to see Hart slumped white and still over the control pedestal. He who had energy far in excess of that of any of the rest of us had worn himself out. Having had no rest or sleep in nearly a hundred hours, the body that housed so wonderful a spirit simply refused to carry on. Tenderly we stretched him on the cabin floor, the Pioneer drifting in space the while. The professor, who was likewise something of a physician, listened to his heart, drew back his eyelids, and pronounced him in no danger whatever.

We slapped his wrists, sprinkled his face and neck with cold water from the drinking supply, and were soon rewarded by his return to consciousness. He smiled weakly and fell sound asleep. No war in the universe could have wakened him then, so we lifted him to his feet--rather I should say, we guided his practically floating body--and strapped him in George's hammock, preparing for the homeward journey. Though dangling from the straps in a position that would be vertical were we on earth, he slept like a baby. George took the controls in Hart's place and the professor and I returned to our accustomed supports.

The return trip was considerably slower, as George did not wish to push the Pioneer to its limit as had been necessary when coming out to meet the enemy, nor was he able to keep control of the ship against a too-rapid acceleration. Consequently, the rate of acceleration was much lower and we were not nearly as uncomfortable as on the outgoing trip. Thus, nearly ten hours were required for the return. And Hart slept through it all.

* * * * *

In order to make best use of the small amount of fuel still in the cylinders, George circled the earth five times before we entered the upper limits of the atmosphere, the circles becoming of smaller diameter at each revolution and the speed of the ship proportionately reduced. An occasional discharge from one of the forward rocket tubes assisted materially in the deceleration, yet, when we slipped into level five, our speed was so great that the temperature of the cabin rose alarmingly, due to the friction of the air against the hull of the vessel. It was necessary to use the last remaining ounce of fuel to reduce the velocity to a safe value. A long glide to earth was then our only means of landing and, since we were over the Gulf of Mexico at the time, we had no recourse other than landing in the State of Texas.

Passing over Galveston in level three, we found that the Humble oil fields and a great section of the surrounding country had been the center of one of the enemy bombardments. All was blackness and ruin for many miles between this point and Houston. At Houston Airport we landed, unheralded but welcome.

The lower levels were once more filled with traffic, and one of the southern route transcontinental liners had just made its stop at this point. The arrival of the Pioneer was thus witnessed by an unusually large crowd, and, when the news was spread to the city, their numbers increased with all the rapidity made possible by the various means of transportation from the city.

So it was that Hart Jones, after we finally succeeded in awakening him and getting him to his feet, was hailed by a veritable multitude as the greatest hero of all time. The demonstrations become so enthusiastic that police reserves, hastily summoned from the city, were helpless in their attempts to keep the crowd in order.

* * * * *

It was with greatest difficulty that Hart was finally extricated from the clutches of the mob and conveyed to the new Rice Hotel in Houston, where it was necessary to obtain medical attention for him immediately. He was in no condition at the time to receive the richly deserved plaudits of the multitude, and, truth to tell, we others from the Pioneer were in much the same shape.

To me that night will always be the most terrible of nightmares. My first thought was of my family and, when I had been assigned to a room, I immediately asked the switchboard operator for a long-distance connection to my home in Rutherford. There was complete silence for a minute and I jangled the hook impatiently, my head throbbing with a thousand aches and pains. Then, to my surprise, the voice of the hotel manager greeted me.

"Mr. Makely," he said softly, and I thought there was a peculiar ring in his voice, "I think you had better not try to get Rutherford this evening. We are sending the house physician to your room at once and--there are orders from Washington, you know--you are to think of nothing at the present but sleep and a long rest."

"Why--why--" I stammered, "can't you see? I must communicate with my family. They must know of my return. I must know if they're safe and well."

"I'm sorry, sir," apologized the manager, "Government orders, you know." And he hung up.

Something in that soft voice brought to me an inkling of the truth. An icy hand gripped my heart as I heard a knock at the door. With palsied fingers I turned the key and admitted the professor and a kindly-faced elderly gentleman with a small black bag. One look at the professor told me the truth. I seized his two arms in a grip that made him wince.

"Tell me! Tell me!" I demanded, "Has anything happened to my family?"

"Jack," said the professor slowly, "while we were out there watching Hart destroy the enemy vessel, Rutherford was destroyed!"

* * * * *

It must be that I frightened him by my answering stare, for he backed away from me in apparent fear. I noticed that the doctor was rummaging in his bag. I know I did not speak, did not cry out, for my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth. It seemed I must go mad. The professor still backed away from me; then, wiry little athlete that he was, he sprang directly for my knees in a beautiful football tackle. I remember that point clearly and how I admired his agility at the time. I remember the glint of a small instrument in the doctor's hand. Then all was blackness.

Eight days later, they tell me it was, I returned to painful consciousness in a hospital bed. But let me skip the agony of mind I experienced then. Suffice it to say that, when I was able, I set forth for Washington. Hart Jones was there and he had sent for me. But I took little interest in the going; did not even bother to speculate as to the reason for his summons. I had devoured the news during my convalescence and now, more than two weeks after the destruction of the Terror, I knew the extent of the damage wrought upon our earth by those deadly green light pencils we had seen issuing from the huge ring up there in the skies. The horror of it all was fresh in my mind, but my own private horror overshadowed all.

* * * * *

I was glad that Hart had been so signally honored by the World Peace Board, that he was now the most famous and popular man in the entire world. He deserved it all and more. But what cared I--I who had done least of all to help in his great work--that the Terror had been found where it buried itself in the sand of the Sahara when falling to earth? What cared I that the discoveries made in the excavating of the huge metal ring were of inestimable value to science?

It gave me passing satisfaction to note that all of Hart Jones' theories were borne out by the discoveries; that Oradel and his minions were responsible for this terrible war; that the planet they aligned against us was Venus and that more than a hundred thousand of the Venerians had been carried in that weird engine of destruction which had been brought down by Hart.

It was interesting to read of the fall of that huge ring; how it was heated to incandescence when it entered our atmosphere at such tremendous velocity; of the tidal waves of concentric billows in the sand that led to its discovery by Egyptian Government planes. The broadcast descriptions and the television views of the stunted and twisted Venerians whose bodies were recovered from the partly consumed wreckage were interesting. But it all left me cold. I had no further interest in life. That the world had escaped an overwhelming disaster was clear, and it gave me a certain pleasure. But for me it might as well have been completely destroyed.

Nevertheless, I went to Washington. I felt somehow that I owed it to Hart Jones, the greatest world hero since Lindbergh. I would at least listen to what he had to say.

* * * * *

A fast plane carried me, a plane chartered by the government. To me it seemed that it crawled, though it was a sixth-level ship, and made the trip in record time. Why I was impatient to reach Washington I do not know, for I was absolutely disinterested in anything that might occur there. It was merely that my nerves were on edge, I suppose, and everything annoyed me.

Hart met me at the airport and greeted me like a long-lost brother. He talked incessantly and jumped from one subject to the other with the obvious intention of trying to get my mind off my troubles until we reached his office in the Air Traffic building.

On his door there was the legend, "Director of Research," and, when we had entered, I observed that the office was furnished with all the luxury that suited his new position. I dropped into a deeply upholstered chair at the side of his mahogany desk, and, for the space of several minutes, Hart regarded me with concern, speaking not a word.

"Jack, old man," he finally ventured. "I can't talk to you of this thing. But it makes me feel very badly to see you take it so hard. There are many things you have to live for, old top, and it is to talk about these that I sent for you."

"You mean work?" I asked.

"Yes. That is the best thing for us all, in any emergency or under any circumstances whatever. Preston wants you back for one thing, and he authorized me to tell you that the job of office manager is waiting for you at double your former salary."

* * * * *

My eyes misted at this. Preston was a good old scout! But I could never bear it to return to the old surroundings, even in the city. "No, Hart," I said, "I'd rather be away from New York and from that part of the country. Associations, you know."

"I understand," he replied, "and that is just what I had hoped you would decide. Because I have a job for you in the Air Service. A good one, too.

"You know there is much reconstruction work to be done on earth. More than forty cities and towns have been wiped out of existence and these must be rebuilt. That will occupy the minds and energies of thousands who have been bereaved as you have. But, in the Air Service, we have a program that I believe will be more to your liking. The log of the Terror, in Oradel's handwriting, was found intact, as were a number of manuscripts pertaining to plans of the Venerians.

"These misshapen creatures were quite evidently educated by Oradel to a hatred of our world. We have reason to believe that other attacks may follow, for they were obviously intending to migrate here in millions. And, according to records found aboard the Terror, they are of advanced scientific accomplishment. We may expect them to construct other vessels similar to the Terror and to come here again. We must be prepared to fight them off, to carry the war to their own planet if necessary. My work is to organize a world fleet of space ships for this purpose, and I'd like you to help me in this. The work will take you all over the world and will keep you too busy to think about--things."

It was just like Hart, and I thanked him wordlessly, but from the bottom of my heart. Yes, I would accept his generous offer. Though I was no engineer, I had a knowledge of scientific subjects a little above the average, and I could follow instructions. By George, it was the very thing! Suddenly I grew enthusiastic.

* * * * *

There was the sound of voices in the outer office, and Hart's secretary entered to announce the arrival of George Boehm and Professor Lindquist. This was great!

Chubby George, red-faced and smiling as ever, embraced me with one short arm and pounded me on the back with his other fist in his jovial, joking manner. It was good to have friends like these! The professor held forth his hand timidly. He was thinking of that tackle and the half-Nelson he had used on me while the doctor slipped that needle into my arm back there in Houston.

"Don't remove your glasses, Professor," I laughed; "I'm not going to hit you. That was a swell tackle of yours, and you did me a big service down there in the Rice Hotel."

He beamed with pleasure and gripped my hand--mightily, for such a little fellow. George was whispering to Hart, and I could see that they were greatly excited over something.

"Jack," said Hart, when the professor and I finished talking things over, "George here wants you to take a little trip over to Philly with him. He has something there he wants to show you."

I looked from one to the other for signs of a hoax. These two, under normal circumstances, were always up to something. But what I saw in their expressions convinced me that I had better go, and somehow, there rose in my breast a forlorn hope.

"All right," I agreed. "Let's go!"

* * * * *

Once more we four took off together, this time in a speedy little first-level cabin plane of Hart's design, piloted by the irrepressible George. I was brimming with questions, but George kept up such a running fire of small talk that I was unable to get in a single word throughout the short trip to the Quaker City. It was quite evident that something was in the wind.

Instead of landing at the airport, George swung across the city and dropped to the roof landing space of a large building which I recognized as the Germantown Hospital. We had no sooner landed when I was rushed from the plane to the penthouse over the elevator shafts. We were soon on the main floor and George went immediately to the desk at the receiving office, where he engaged in earnest conversation with the nurse in charge.

"What are you doing--committing me?" I asked, half joking only. For, from the mysterious expression of my friends' faces, I was not sure what to expect.

"No," laughed Hart. "George learned of the existence of a patient here who may turn out to be a very good friend of yours."

I turned this over in my mind, which did not yet function quite normally. A friend? Why, I had very few that could really be termed good friends outside of those that accompanied me. It could mean but one thing. Possibly one of my children--or even my dear wife--might have escaped somehow. I followed in a daze as a white-capped and gowned nurse led us along the corridor and into a ward where there were dozens of high, white beds.

* * * * *

Some of the patients were swathed in bandages; some sat up in their beds, reading or just staring; others lay inert and pale. The reek of iodoform pervaded the large room.

We stopped at the bedside of one of the staring patients, a young woman who looked unseeingly at our party. Great heavens, it was Marie!

A physician stood at the other side of her bed, finger on her pulse. The others drew back as I approached her side, raised her free hand to my lips and spoke to her.

"Marie, dear," I asked gently, forcing the lump from my throat as best I could, "don't you know me? It's Jack, Honey."

The fixed stare of the great blue eyes shifted in my direction. It seemed that they looked through and past me into some terrible realm where only horror held sway. She drew her hand from my grasp and passed it before those staring, unnatural eyes. There was an audible gulp from George. But the doctor smiled encouragement to me. I tried once more.

"Marie," I said, "where are Jim and Jackie?"

* * * * *

The hand fluttered to her lap, where it lay, blue-veined and pitifully thin. The stare focussed on me, seemed to concentrate. Then the film was gone from the eyes and she saw--she knew me!

"Oh, Jack!" she wailed, "I have been away. Don't you know where they are?"

My heart nearly stopped at this, but I sat on the edge of the bed and took her in my arms, looking at the doctor for approval. He nodded his head brightly and beckoned to the nurse.

"Bring the children," I heard him whisper.

My cup was full. But I must be calm for Marie's sake. She had closed her eyes now and great tears coursed down her waxen cheeks. Her body shook with sobs.

"She'll recover?" I asked the doctor.

"You bet. Just an aggravated case of amnesia. Hasn't eaten. Didn't even know her children. Cured now, but she'll need a few weeks to build up." He snapped shut the lid of his watch.

Those succinct sentences were the finest I had ever heard.

Marie clung to me like an infant to its mother. Her sobs gradually ceased and she looked into my eyes. Little Jim and Jack had come in and were clamoring for recognition.

"Oh, Jack," Marie whispered, "I'm so happy."

She relinquished me and turned her attention to the children. I saw that my friends had left and that an orderly was placing screens about us. So I'll close the screen on the remainder of this most happy reunion.

* * * * *

It was several days before I had the complete story. Being lonesome during my absence when we were preparing for the voyage into space, and not knowing just when I would return, Marie had packed a grip and taken the train for Philadelphia, deciding to spend a few days with her Aunt Margaret, or at least to remain there with the children until I returned.

She had boarded the train at Manhattan Transfer at about the time we reached the location of the Terror and the train was just pulling out of the station when there came the first of the new attacks of the enemy. She thought that the pillar of fire rose from the approximate location of Rutherford, but was not sure until they reached Newark, when the news was spread throughout the train by passengers who boarded it there. She worried and cried over the loss of our little home and had worked herself into a state of extreme nervousness and near-hysteria by the time they reached New Brunswick.

Then, as the long train left New Brunswick, there was another attack, this one on the town they had just left. The last two cars of the train were blown from the track by the initial concussion, and the remainder of the train brought to a grinding, jerking stop that threw the passengers into a panic.

Already hysterical, Marie was in no condition to bear up under the shock, and the loss of memory followed. Jack and Jim clung to her, of course, and were taken to the Germantown Hospital with her when the wreck victims were transferred to that point. She had no identification on her person, and it was by sheerest luck that George, who was visiting a friend in the same hospital, chanced to see her and thought he recognized her.

That was all of it, but to me it was more than enough. From the depths of despondency, I rose to the peaks of elation. It was true that we would have to establish a new home, but this would be a joy as never before. Those I had given up as lost were restored to me and I was content. Hart would have to make some changes in the duties of that new job--the world travel was out of the picture. I had had my fill of adventure.

Besides, the hot spell was over.

Contents

DAWN OF FLAME

by Stanley G. Weinbaum

ONE.

THE WORLD

Hull Tarvish looked backward but once, and that only as he reached the elbow of the road. The sprawling little stone cottage that had been home was visible as he had seen it a thousand times, framed under the cedars. His mother still watched him, and two of his younger brothers stood staring down the Mountainside at him. He raised his hand in farewell, then dropped it as he realized that none of them saw him now; his mother had turned indifferently to the door, and the two youngsters had spied a rabbit. He faced about and strode away, down the slope out of Ozarky.

He passed the place where the great steel road of the Ancients had been, now only two rusty streaks and a row of decayed logs. Beside it was the mossy heap of stones that had been an ancient structure in the days before the Dark Centuries, when Ozarky had been a part of the old state of M'souri. The mountain people still sought out the place for squared stones to use in building, but the tough metal of the steel road itself was too stubborn for their use, and the rails had rusted quietly these three hundred years.

That much Hull Tarvish knew, for they were things still spoken of at night around the fireplace. They had been mighty sorcerers, those Ancients; their steel roads went everywhere, and everywhere were the ruins of their towns, built, it was said, by a magic that lifted weights. Down in the valley, he knew, men were still seeking that magic; once a rider had stayed by night at the Tarvish home, a little man who said that in the far south the secret had been found, but nobody ever heard any more of it.

So Hull whistled to himself, shifted the rag bag on his shoulder, set his bow more comfortably on his mighty back, and trudged on. That was why he himself was seeking the valley; he wanted to see what the world was like. He had been always a restless sort, not at all like the other six Tarvish sons, nor like the three Tarvish daughters. They were true mountainies, the sons great hunters, and the daughters stolid and industrious. Not Hull, however; he was neither lazy like his brothers nor stolid like his sisters, but restless, curious, dreamy. So he whistled his way into the world, and was happy.

At evening he stopped at the Hobel cottage on the edge of the mountains. Away before him stretched the plain, and in the darkening distance was visible the church spire of Norse. That was a village; Hull had never seen a village, or no more of it than this same distant steeple, shaped like a straight white pine. But he had heard all about Norse, because the mountainies occasionally went down there to buy powder and ball for their rifles, those of them who had rifles.

Hull had only a bow. He didn't see the use of guns; powder and ball cost money, but an arrow did the same work for nothing, and that without scaring all the game a mile away.

Morning he bade goodbye to the Hobels, who thought him, as they always had, a little crazy, and set off. His powerful, brown bare legs flashed under his ragged trousers, his bare feet made a pleasant soosh in the dust of the road, the June sun beat warm on his right cheek. He was happy; there never was a pleasanter world than this, so he grinned and whistled, and spat carefully into the dust, remembering that it was bad luck to spit toward the sun. He was bound for adventure.

Adventure came. Hull had come down to the plain now, where the trees were taller than the scrub of the hill country, and where the occasional farms were broader, well tilled, more prosperous. The trail had become a wagon road, and here it cut and angled between two lines of forest. And unexpectedly a man--no, two men--rose from a log at the roadside and approached Hull. He watched them; one was tall and light-haired as himself, but without his mighty frame, and the other was a head shorter, and dark. Valley people, surely, for the dark one had a stubby pistol at his belt, wooden-stocked like those of the Ancients, and the tall man's bow was of glittering spring steel.

"Ho, mountainy!" said the dark one. "Where going?"

"Norse," answered Hull shortly,

"What's in the bag?"

"My tongue," snapped the youth.

"Easy, there," grunted the light man. "No offense, mountainy. We're just curious. That's a good knife you got. I'll trade it."

"For what?"

"For lead in your craw," growled the dark one. Suddenly the blunt pistol was in his hand. "Pass it over, and the bag too."

Hull scowled from one to the other. At last he shrugged, and moved as if to lift his bag from his shoulders. And then, swift as the thrust of a striking diamondback, his left foot shot forward, catching the dark one squarely in the pit of his stomach, with the might of Hull's muscles and weight behind it.

The man had breath for a low grunt; he doubled and fell, while his weapon spun a dozen feet away into the dust. The light one sprang for it, but Hull caught him with a great arm about his throat, wrenched twice, and the brief fight was over. He swung placidly on toward Norse with a blunt revolver primed and capped at his hip, a glistening spring-steel bow on his shoulder, and twenty-two bright tubular steel arrows in his quiver.

He topped a little rise and the town lay before him. He stared. A hundred houses at least. Must be five hundred people in the town, more people than he'd ever seen in his life all together. He strode eagerly on, goggling at the church that towered high as a tall tree, at the windows of bits of glass salvaged from ancient ruins and carefully pieced together, at the tavern with its swinging emblem of an unbelievably fat man holding a mammoth mug. He stared at the houses, some of them with shops before them, and at the people, most of them shod in leather.

He himself attracted little attention. Norse was used to the mountainies, and only a girl or two turned appraising eyes toward his mighty figure. That made him uncomfortable, however; the girls of the mountains giggled and blushed, but never at that age did they stare at a man. So he gazed defiantly back, letting his eyes wander from their bonnets to the billowing skirts above their leather strap-sandals, and they laughed and passed on.

Hull didn't care for Norse, he decided. As the sun set, the houses loomed too close, as if they'd stifle him, so he set out into the countryside to sleep. The remains of an ancient town bordered the village, with its spectral walls crumbling against the west. There were ghosts there, of course, so he walked farther, found a wooded spot, and lay down, putting his bow and the steel arrows into his bag against the rusting effect of night-dew. Then he tied the bag about his bare feet and legs, sprawled comfortably, and slept with his hand on the pistol grip. Of course there were no animals to fear in these woods save wolves, and they never attacked humans during the warm parts of the year, but there were men, and they bound themselves by no such seasonal laws.

He awoke dewy wet. The sun shot golden lances through the trees, and he was ravenously hungry. He ate the last of his mother's brown bread from his bag, now crumbled by his feet, and then strode out to the road. There was a wagon creaking there, plodding northward; the bearded, kindly man in it was glad enough to have him ride for company.

"Mountainy?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Bound where?"

"The world," said Hull.

"Well," observed the other, "it's a big place, and all I've seen of it much like this. All except Selui. That's a city. Yes, that's a city. Been there?"

"No."

"It's got," said the farmer impressively, "twenty thousand people in it. Maybe more. And they got ruins there the biggest you ever saw. Bridges. Buildings. Four--five times as high as the Norse church, and at that they're fallen down. The Devil knows how high they used to be in the old days."

"Who lived in 'em?" asked Hull.

"Don't know. Who'd want to live so high up it'd take a full morning to climb there? Unless it was magic. I don't hold much with magic, but they do say the Old People knew how to fly."

Hull tried to imagine this. For a while there was silence save for the slow clump of the horses' hooves. "I don't believe it," he said at last.

"Nor I. But did you hear what they're saying in Norse?"

"I didn't hear anything."

"They say," said the farmer, "that Joaquin Smith is going to march again."

"Joaquin Smith!"

"Yeah. Even the mountainies know about him, eh?"

"Who doesn't?" returned Hull. "Then there'll be fighting in the south, I guess. I have a notion to go south."

"Why?"

"I like fighting," said Hull simply.

"Fair answer," said the farmer, "but from what folks say, there's not much fighting when the Master marches. He has a spell; there's great sorcery in N'Orleans, from the merest warlock up to Martin Sair, who's blood-son of the Devil himself, or so they say."

"I'd like to see his sorcery against the mountainy's arrow and ball," said Hull grimly. "There's none of us can't spot either eye at a thousand paces, using rifle. Or two hundred with arrow."

"No doubt; but what if powder flames, and guns fire themselves before he's even across the horizon? They say he has a spell for that, he or Black Margot."

"Black Margot?"

"The Princess, his half-sister. The dark witch who rides beside him, the Princess Margaret."

"Oh--but why Black Margot?"

The farmer shrugged. "Who knows? It's what her enemies call her."

"Then so I call her," said Hull.

"Well, I don't know," said the other. "It makes small difference to me whether I pay taxes to N'Orleans or to gruff old Marcus Ormiston, who's eldarch of Ormiston village there." He flicked his whip toward the distance ahead, where Hull now descried houses and the flash of a little river. "I've sold produce in towns within the Empire, and the people of them seemed as happy as ourselves, no more, no less."

"There is a difference, though. It's freedom."

"Merely a word, my friend. They plow, they sow, they reap, just as we do. They hunt, they fish, they fight. And as for freedom, are they less free with a warlock to rule them than I with a wizened fool?"

"The mountainies pay taxes to no one."

"And no one builds them roads, nor digs them public wells. Where you pay little you get less, and I will say that the roads within the Empire are better than ours."

"Better than this?" asked Hull, staring at the dusty width of the highway.

"Far better. Near Memphis town is a road of solid rock, which they spread soft through some magic, and let harden, so there is neither mud nor dust."

Hull mused over this. "The Master," he burst out suddenly, "is he really immortal?"

The other shrugged. "How can I say? There are great sorcerers in the southlands, and the greatest of them is Martin Sair. But I do know this, that I have seen sixty-two years, and as far back as memory goes here was always Joaquin Smith in the south, and always an Empire gobbling cities as a hare gobbles carrots. When I was young it was far away, now it reaches close at hand; that is all the difference. Men talked of the beauty of Black Margot then as they do now, and of the wizardry of Martin Sair."

Hull made no answer, for Ormiston was at hand. The village was much like Norse save that it huddled among low hills, on the crest of some of which loomed ancient ruins. At the near side his companion halted, and Hull thanked him as he leaped to the ground.

"Where to?" asked the farmer.

Hull thought a moment. "Selui," he said.

"Well, it's a hundred miles, but there'll be many to ride you."

"I have my own feet," said the youth. He spun suddenly about at a voice across the road: "Hi! Mountainy!"

It was a girl. A very pretty girl, slim waisted, copper haired, blue eyed, standing at the gate before a large stone house. "Hi!" she called. "Will you work for your dinner?"

Hull was ravenous again. "Gladly!" he cried.

The voice of the farmer sounded behind him. "It's Vail Ormiston, the dotard eldarch's daughter. Hold her for a full meal, mountainy. My taxes are paying for it."

But Vail Ormiston was above much converse with a wandering mountain-man. She surveyed his mighty form approvingly, showed him the logs he was to quarter, and then disappeared into the house. If, perchance, she peeped out through the clearest of the ancient glass fragments that formed the window, and if she watched the flexing muscles of his great bare arms as he swung the axe--well, he was unaware of it.

So it happened that afternoon found him trudging toward Selui with a hearty meal inside him and three silver dimes in his pocket, ancient money, with the striding figure of the woman all but worn away. He was richer than when he had set out by those coins, by the blunt pistol at his hip, by the shiny steel bow and arrows, and by the memory of the copper hair and blue eyes of Vail Ormiston.

TWO.

OLD EINAR.

Three weeks in Selui had served to give Hull Tarvish a sort of speaking acquaintancy with the place. He no longer gaped at the sky-piercing ruins of the ancient city, or the vast fallen bridges, and he was quite at home in the town that lay beside it. He had found work easily enough in a baker's establishment, where his great muscles served well; the hours were long, but his pay was munificent--five silver quarters a week. He paid two for lodging, and food--what he needed beyond the burnt loaves at hand from his employment cost him another quarter, but that left two to put by. He never gambled other than a wager now and then on his own marksmanship, and that was more profitable than otherwise.

Ordinarily Hull was quick to make friends, but his long hours hindered him. He had but one, an incredibly old man who sat at evening on the step beyond his lodging, Old Einar. So this evening Hull wandered out as usual to join him, staring at the crumbling towers of the Ancients glowing in the sunset. Trees sprung on many, and all were green with vine and tussock and the growth of wind-carried seeds. No one dared build among the ruins, for none could guess when a great tower might come crashing down.

"I wonder," he said to Old Einar, "what the Ancients were like. Were they men like us? Then how could they fly?"

"They were men like us, Hull. As for flying--well, it's my belief that flying is a legend. See here; there was a man supposed to have flown over the cold lands to the north and those to the south, and also across the great sea. But this flying man is called in some accounts Lindbird and in others Bird and surely one can see the origin of such a legend. The migrations of birds, who cross land and seas each year, that is all."

"Or perhaps magic," suggested Hull.

"There is no magic. The Ancients themselves denied it and I have struggled through many a moldy book in a curious, archaic tongue."

Old Einar was the first scholar Hull had ever encountered. Though there were many during the dawn of that brilliant age called the Second Enlightenment, most of them were still within the Empire. John Holland was dead, but Olin was yet alive in the world, and Kohlmar, and Jorgensen, and Teran, and Martin Sair, and Joaquin Smith the Master. Great names--the names of demigods.

But Hull knew little of them. "You can read!" he exclaimed. "That in itself is a sort of magic. And you have been within the Empire, even in N'Orleans. Tell me, what is the Great City like? Have they really learned the secrets of the Ancients? Are the Immortals truly immortal? How did they gain their knowledge?"

Old Einar settled himself on the step and puffed blue smoke from his pipe filled with the harsh tobacco of the region. "Too many questions breed answers to none," he observed. "Shall I tell you the true story of the world, Hull--the story called History?"

"Yes. In Ozarky we spoke little of such things."

"Well," said the old man comfortably, "I will begin then, at what to us is the beginning, but to the Ancients was the end. I do not know what factors, what wars, what struggles, led up to the mighty world that died during the Dark Centuries, but I do know that three hundred years ago the world reached its climax. You cannot imagine such a place, Hull. It was a time of vast cities, too--fifty times as large as N'Orleans with its hundred thousand people."

He puffed slowly. "Great steel wagons roared over the iron roads of the Ancients. Men crossed the oceans to east and west. The cities were full of whirring wheels, and instead of the many little city-states of our time, there were giant nations with thousands of cities and a hundred million--a hundred and fifty million people."

Hull stared. "I do not believe there are so many people in the world," he said.

Old Einar shrugged. "Who knows?" he returned. "The ancient books--all too few--tell us that the world is round, and that beyond the seas lie one, or several continents, but what races are there today not even Joaquin Smith can say." He puffed smoke again. "Well, such was the ancient world. These were warlike nations, so fond of battle that they had to write many books about the horrors of war to keep themselves at peace, but they always failed. During the time they called their twentieth century there was a whole series of wars, not such little quarrels as we have so often between our city-states, nor even such as that between the Memphis League and the Empire, five years ago. Their wars spread like storm clouds around the world, and were fought between millions of men with unimaginable weapons that flung destruction a hundred miles, and with ships on the seas, and with gases."

"What's gases?" asked Hull.

Old Einar waved his hand so that the wind of it brushed the youth's brown cheek. "Air is a gas," he said. "They knew how to poison the air so that all who breathed it died. And they fought with diseases, and legend says that they fought also in the air with wings, but that is only legend."

"Diseases!" said Hull. "Diseases are the breath of Devils, and if they controlled Devils they used sorcery, and therefore they knew magic."

"There is no magic," reiterated the old man. "I do not know how they fought each other with diseases, but Martin Sair of N'Orleans knows. That was his study, not mine, but I know there was no magic in it." He resumed his tale. "So these great fierce nations flung themselves against each other, for war meant more to them than to us. With us it is something of a rough, joyous, dangerous game, but to them it was a passion. They fought for any reason, or for none at all save the love of fighting."

"I love fighting," said Hull.

"Yes, but would you love it if it meant simply the destroying of thousands of men beyond the horizon? Men you were never to see?"

"No. War should be man to man, or at least no farther than the carry of a rifle ball."

"True. Well, some time near the end of their twentieth century, the ancient world exploded into war like a powder horn in a fire. They say every nation fought, and battles surged back and forth across seas and continents. It was not only nation against nation, but race against race, black and white and yellow and red, all embroiled in a titanic struggle."

"Yellow and red?" echoed Hull. "There are a few black men called Nigs in Ozarky, but I never heard of yellow or red men."

"I have seen yellow men," said Old Einar. "There are some towns of yellow men on the edge of the western ocean, in the region called Friscia. The red race, they say, is gone, wiped out by the plague called the Grey Death, to which they yielded more readily than the other races."

"I have heard of the Grey Death," said Hull. "When I was very young, there was an old, old man who used to say that his grand-father had lived in the days of the Death."

Old Einar smiled. "I doubt it, Hull. It was something over two and a half centuries ago. However," he resumed, "the great ancient nations were at war, and as I say, they fought with diseases. Whether some nation learned the secret of the Grey Death, or whether it grew up as a sort of cross between two or more other diseases, I do not know. Martin Sair says that diseases are living things, so it may be so. At any rate, the Grey Death leaped suddenly across the world, striking alike at all people. Everywhere it blasted the armies, the cities, the countryside, and of those it struck, six out of every ten died. There must have been chaos in the world; we have not a single book printed during that time, and only legend tells the story.

"But the war collapsed. Armies suddenly found themselves unopposed, and then were blasted before they could move. Ships in mid-ocean were stricken, and drifted unmanned to pile in wreckage, or to destroy others. In the cities the dead were piled in the streets, and after a while, were simply left where they fell, while those who survived fled away into the country. What remained of the armies became little better than roving robber bands, and by the third year of the plague there were few if any stable governments in the world."

"What stopped it?" asked Hull.

"I do not know. They end, these pestilences. Those who take it and live cannot take it a second time, and those who are somehow immune do not take it at all, and the rest--die. The Grey Death swept the world for three years; when it ended, according to Martin Sair, one person in four had died. But the plague came back in lessening waves for many years; only a pestilence in the Ancient's fourteenth century, called the Black Death, seems ever to have equaled it.

"Yet its effects were only beginning. The ancient transport system had simply collapsed, and the cities were starving. Hungry gangs began raiding the countryside, and instead of one vast war there were now a million little battles. The weapons of the Ancients were everywhere, and these battles were fierce enough, in all truth, though nothing like the colossal encounters of the great war. Year by year the cities decayed until by the fiftieth year after the Grey Death, the world's population had fallen by three-fourths, and civilization was ended. It was barbarism now that ruled the world, but only barbarism, not savagery. People still remembered the mighty ancient civilization, and everywhere there were attempts to combine into the old nations, but these failed for lack of great leaders."

"As they should fail," said Hull. "We have freedom now."

"Perhaps. By the first century after the Plague, there was little left of the Ancients save their ruined cities where lurked robber bands that scoured the country by night. They had little interest in anything save food or the coined money of the old nations, and they did incalculable damage. Few could read, and on cold nights was usual to raid the ancient libraries for books to burn and to make things worse, fire gutted the ruins of all cities, and there was no organized resistance to it. The flames simply burned themselves out, and priceless books vanished."

"Yet in N'Orleans they study, don't they?" asked Hull.

"Yes, I'm coming to that. About two centuries after the Plague--a hundred years ago, that is--the world had stabilized itself. It was much as it is here today, with little farming towns and vast stretches of deserted country. Gunpowder had been rediscovered, rifles were used, and most of the robber bands had been destroyed. And then, into the town of N'Orleans, built beside the ancient city, came young John Holland.

"Holland was a rare specimen, anxious for learning. He found the remains of an ancient library and began slowly to decipher the archaic words in the few books that had survived. Little by little others joined him, and as the word spread slowly, men from other sections wandered in with books, and the Academy was born. No one taught, of course; it was just a group of studious men living a sort of communistic, monastic life. There was no attempt at practical use of the ancient knowledge until a youth named Teran had a dream--no less a dream than to recondition the centuries-old power machines of N'Orleans, to give the city the power that travels on wires!"

"What's that?" asked Hull. "What's that, Old Einar?"

"You wouldn't understand, Hull. Teran was an enthusiast; it didn't stop him to realize that there was no coal or oil to run his machines. He believed that when power was needed, it would be there, so he and his followers scrubbed and filed and welded away, and Teran was right. When he needed power, it was there.

"This was the gift of a man named Olin, who had unearthed the last, the crowning secret of the Ancients, the power called atomic energy. He gave it to Teran, and N'Orleans became a miracle city where lights glowed and wheels turned. Men came from every part of the continent to see, and among these were two called Martin Sair and Joaquin Smith, come out of Mexico with the half-sister of Joaquin, the Satanically beautiful being sometimes called Black Margot.

"Martin Sair was a genius. He found his field in the study of medicine, and it was less than ten years before he had uncovered the secret of the hard rays. He was studying sterility but he found--immortality!"

"Then the Immortals are immortal!" murmured Hull.

"It may be, Hull. At least they do not seem to age, but---- Well, Joaquin Smith was also a genius, but of a different sort. He dreamed of the re-uniting of the peoples of the country. I think he dreams of even more, Hull; people say he will stop when he rules a hundred cities, but I think he dreams of an American Empire, or"--Old Einar's voice dropped--"a world Empire. At least, he took Martin Sair's immortality and traded it for power. The Second Enlightenment was dawning and there was genius in N'Orleans. He traded immortality to Kohlmar for a weapon, he offered it to Olin for atomic power, but Olin was already past youth, and refused, partly because he didn't want it, and partly because he was not entirely in sympathy with Joaquin Smith. So the Master seized the secret of the atom despite Olin, and the Conquest began.

"N'Orleans, directly under the influence of the Master's magnetic personality, was ready to yield, and yielded to him cheering. He raised his army and marched north, and everywhere cities fell or yielded willingly. Joaquin Smith is magnificent, and men flock to him, cities cheer him, even the wives and children of the slain swear allegiance when he forgives them in that noble manner of his. Only here and there men hate him bitterly, and speak such words as tyrant, and talk of freedom."

"Such are the mountainies," said Hull.

"Not even the mountainies can stand the ionic beams that Kohlmar dug out of ancient books, nor the Erden resonator that explodes gunpowder miles away. I think that Joaquin Smith will succeed, Hull. Moreover, I do not think it entirely bad that he should, for he is a great ruler, and a bringer of civilization."

"What are they like, the Immortals?"

"Well, Martin Sair is as cold as mountain rock, and the Princess Margaret is like black fire. Even my old bones feel younger only to look at her, and it is wise for young men not to look at her at all, because she is quite heartless, ruthless, and pitiless. As for Joaquin Smith, the Master--I do not know the words to describe so complex a character, and I know him well. He is mild, perhaps, but enormously strong, kind or cruel as suits his purpose, glitteringly intelligent, and dangerously charming."

"You know him!" echoed Hull, and added curiously, "What is your other name, Old Einar, you who know the Immortals?"

The old man smiled. "When I was born," he said, "my parents called me Einar Olin."

THREE.

THE MASTER MARCHES

Joaquin Smith was marching.

Hull Tarvish leaned against the door of File Ormson's iron worker's shop in Ormiston, and stared across the fields and across the woodlands, and across to the blue mountains of Ozarky in the south. There is where he should have been, there with the mountainy men, but by the time the tired rider had brought the news to Selui, and by the time Hull had reached Ormiston, it was already too late, and Ozarky was but an outlying province of the expanding Empire, while the Master camped there above Norse, and sent representations to Selui.

Selui wasn't going to yield. Already the towns of the three months old Selui Confederation were sending in their men, from Bloom'ton, from Cairo, even from distant Ch'cago on the shores of the saltless sea Mitchin. The men of the Confederation hated the little, slender, dark Ch'cagoans, for they had not yet forgotten the disastrous battle at Starved Rock, but any allies were welcome against Joaquin Smith. The Ch'cagoans were good enough fighters, too, and heart and soul in the cause, for if the Master took Selui, his Empire would reach dangerously close to the saltless seas, spreading from the ocean on the east to the mountains on the west, and north as far as the great confluence of the M'sippi and M'souri.

Hull knew there was fighting ahead, and he relished it. It was too bad that he couldn't have fought in Ozarky for his own people, but Ormiston would do. That was his home for the present, since he'd found work here with File Ormson, the squat iron-worker, broad-shouldered as Hull himself and a head shorter. Pleasant work for his mighty muscles, though at the moment there was nothing to do.

He stared at the peaceful countryside. Joaquin Smith was marching, and beyond the village, the farmers were still working in their fields. Hull listened to the slow Sowing Song:

"This is what the ground needs: First the plow and then the seeds, Then the harrow and then the hoe, And rain to make the harvest grow.

"This is what the man needs: First the promises, then the deeds, Then the arrow and then the blade, And last the digger with his black spade.

"This is what his wife needs: First a garden free of weeds, Then the daughter, and their the son, And a fireplace warm when the work is done.

"This is what his son needs--"

Hull ceased to listen. They were singing, but Joaquin Smith was marching, marching with the men of a hundred cities, with his black banner and its golden serpent fluttering. That serpent, Old Einar had said, was the Midgard Serpent, which ancient legend related had encircled the earth. It was the symbol of the Master's dream, and for a moment Hull had a stirring of sympathy for that dream.

"No!" he growled to himself. "Freedom's better, and it's for us to blow the head from the Midgard Serpent."

A voice sounded at his side. "Hull! Big Hull Tarvish! Are you too proud to notice humble folk?"

It was Vail Ormiston, her violet eyes whimsical below her smooth copper hair. He flushed; he was not used to the ways of these valley girls, who flirted frankly and openly in a manner impossible to the shy girls of the mountains. Yet he--well, in a way, he liked it, and he liked Vail Ormiston, and he remembered pleasantly an evening two days ago when he had sat and talked a full three hours with her on the bench by the tree that shaded Ormiston well. And he remembered the walk through the fields when she had shown him the mouth of the great ancient storm sewer that had run under the dead city, and that still stretched crumbling for miles underground toward the hills, and he recalled her story of how, when a child, she had lost herself in it, so that her father had planted the tangle of blackberry bushes that still concealed the opening.

He grinned, "Is it the eldarch's daughter speaking of humble folk? Your father will be taxing me double if he hears of this."

She tossed her helmet of metallic hair. "He will if he sees you in that Selui finery of yours." Her eyes twinkled. "For whose eyes was it bought, Hull? For you'd be better saving your money."

"Save silver, lose luck," he retorted. After all, it wasn't so difficult a task to talk to her. "Anyway, better a smile from you than the glitter of money."

She laughed. "But how quickly you learn, mountainy! Still, what if I say I liked you better in tatters, with your powerful brown muscles quivering through the rips?"

"Do you say it, Vail?"

"Yes, then!"

He chuckled, raising his great hands to his shoulders. There was the rasp of tearing cloth, and a long rent gleamed in the back of his Selui shirt. "There, Vail!"

"Oh!" she gasped. "Hull, you wastrel! But it's only a seam." She fumbled in the bag at her belt. "Let me stitch it back for you."

She bent behind him, and he could feel her breath on his skin, warm as spring sunshine. He set his jaw, scowled, and then plunged determinedly into what he had to say. "I'd like to talk to you again this evening, Vail."

He sensed her smile at his back. "Would you?" she murmured demurely.

"Yes, if Enoch Ormiston hasn't spoken first for your time."

"But he has, Hull."

He knew she was teasing him deliberately. "I'm sorry," he said shortly.

"But--I told him I was busy," she finished.

"And are you?"

Her voice was a whisper behind him. "No. Not unless you tell me I am."

His great roar of a laugh sounded. "Then I tell you so, Vail."

He felt her tug at the seam, then she leaned very close to his neck, but it was only to bite the thread with her white teeth. "So!" she said gaily. "Once mended, twice new."

Before Hull could answer there came the clang of File Ormson's sledge, and the measured bellow of his Forge Song. They listened as his resounding strokes beat time to the song.

"Then it's ho--oh--ho--oh--ho! While I'm singing to the ringing Of each blow--blow--blow! Till the metal's soft as butter Let my forge and bellows sputter Like the revels of the devils down below--low--LOW! Like the revels of the devils down below!"

"I must go," said Hull, smiling reluctantly. "There's work for me now."

"What does File make?" asked Vail.

Instantly Hull's smile faded. "He forges--a sword!"

Vail too was no longer the joyous one of a moment ago. Over both of them had come a shadow, the shadow of the Empire. Out in the blue hills of Ozarky Joaquin Smith was marching.

* * *

Evening. Hull watched the glint of a copper moon on Vail's copper hair, and leaned back on the bench. Not the one near the pump this time; that had been already occupied by two laughing couples, and though they had been welcomed eagerly enough, Hull had preferred to be alone. It wasn't mountain shyness any more, for his great, good-natured presence had found ready friendship in Ormiston village; it was merely the projection of that moodiness that had settled over both of them at parting, and so they sat now on the bench near Vail Ormiston's gate at the edge of town. Behind them the stone house loomed dark, for her father was scurrying about in town on Confederation business, and the help had availed themselves of the evening of freedom to join the crowd in the village square. But the yellow daylight of the oil lamp showed across the road in the house of Hue Helm, the farmer who had brought Hull from Norse to Ormiston.

It was at this light that Hull stared thoughtfully. "I like fighting," he repeated, "but somehow the joy has gone out of this. It's as if one waited an approaching thunder cloud."

"How," asked Vail in a timid, small voice, "can one fight magic?"

"There is no magic," said the youth, echoing Old Einar's words. "There is no such thing--"

"Hull! How can you say such stupid words?"

"I say what was told me by one who knows."

"No magic!" echoed Vail. "Then tell me what gives the wizards of the south their power. Why is it that Joaquin Smith has never lost a battle? What stole away the courage of the men of the Memphis League, who are good fighting men? And what--for this I have seen with my own eyes--pushes the horseless wagons of N'Orleans through the streets, and what lights that city by night? If not magic, then what?"

"Knowledge," said Hull. "The knowledge of the Ancients."

"The knowledge of the Ancients was magic," said the girl. "Everyone knows that the Ancients were wizards, warlocks, and sorcerers. If Holland, Olin, and Martin Sair are not sorcerers, then what are they? If Black Margot is no witch, then my eyes never looked on one."

"Have you seen them?" queried Hull.

"Of course, all but Holland, who is dead. Three years ago during the Peace of Memphis my father and I traveled into the Empire. I saw all of them about the city of N'Orleans."

"And is she--what they say she is?"

"The Princess?" Vail's eyes dropped. "Men say she is beautiful."

"But you think not?"

"What if she is?" snapped the girl almost defiantly. "Her beauty is like her youth, like her very life--artificial, preserved after its allotted time, frozen. That's it--frozen by sorcery. And as for the rest of her--" Vail's voice lowered, hesitated, for not even the plain-spoken valley girls discussed such things with men. "They say she has outworn a dozen lovers," she whispered.

Hull was startled, shocked. "Vail!" he muttered.

She swung the subject back to safer ground, but he saw her flush red. "Don't tell me there's no magic!" she said sharply.

"At least," he returned, "there's no magic will stop a bullet save flesh and bone. Yes, and the wizard who stops one with his skull lies just as dead as an honest man."

"I hope you're right," she breathed timidly. "Hull, he must be stopped! He must!"

"But why feel so strongly, Vail? I like a fight--but men say that life in the Empire is much like life without, and who cares to whom he pays his taxes if only--" He broke off suddenly, remembering. "Your father!" he exclaimed. "The eldarch!"

"Yes, my father, Hull. If Joaquin Smith takes Ormison, my father is the one to suffer. His taxes will be gone, his lands parceled out, and he's old, Hull--old. What will become of him then? I know many people feel the way you--the way you said, and so they fight halfheartedly, and the Master takes town after town without killing a single man. And then they think there is magic in the very name of Joaquin Smith, and he marches through armies that outnumber him ten to one." She paused. "But not Ormiston!" she cried fiercely. "Not if the women have to bear arms!"

"Not Ormiston," he agreed gently.

"You'll fight, Hull, won't you? Even though you're not Ormiston born?"

"Of course. I have bow and sword, and a good pistol. I'll fight."

"But no rifle? Wait, Hull." She rose and slipped away in the darkness.

In a moment she was back again. "Here. Here is rifle and horn and ball. Do you know its use?"

He smiled proudly. "What I can see I can hit," he said, "like any mountain man."

"Then," she whispered with fire in her voice, "send me a bullet through the Master's skull. And one besides between the eyes of Black Margot--for me!"

"I do not fight women," he said.

"Not woman but witch!"

"None the less, Vail, it must be two bullets for the Master and only the captive's chains for Princess Margaret, at least so far as Hull Tarvish is concerned. But wouldn't it please you fully as well to watch her draw water from your pump, or shine pots in your kitchen?" He was jollying her, trying to paint fanciful pictures to lift her spirit from the somber depths.

But she read it otherwise. "Yes!" she blazed. "Oh, yes, Hull, that's better. If I could ever hope to see that--" She rose suddenly, and he followed her to the gate. "You must go," she murmured, "but before you leave, you can--if you wish it, Hull--kiss me."

Of a sudden he was all shy mountainy again. He set the rifle against the fence with its horn swinging from the trigger guard. He faced her flushing a furious red, but only half from embarrassment, for the rest was happiness. He circled her with his great arms and very hastily, fire touched his lips to her soft ones.

"Now," he said exultantly, "now I will fight if I have to charge the men of the Empire alone."

FOUR.

THE BATTLE OF EAGLEFOOT FLOW

The men of the Confederation were pouring into Ormiston all night long, the little dark men of Ch'cago and Selui, the tall blond ones from the regions of Iowa, where Dutch blood still survived, mingled now with a Scandinavian infusion from the upper rivers. All night there was a rumble of wagons, bringing powder and ball from Selui, and food as well for Ormiston couldn't even attempt to feed so many ravenous mouths. A magnificent army, ten thousand strong, and all of them seasoned fighting men, trained in a dozen little wars and in the bloody War of the Lakes and Rivers, when Ch'cago had bitten so large a piece from Selui territories.

The stand was to be at Ormiston, and Norse, the only settlement now between Joaquin Smith and the Confederation, was left to its fate. Experienced leaders had examined the territory, and had agreed on a plan. Three miles south of the town, the road followed an ancient railroad cut, with fifty-foot embankments on either side, heavily wooded for a mile north and south of the bridge across Eaglefoot Flow.

Along this course they were to distribute their men, a single line where the bluffs were high and steep, massed forces where the terrain permitted. Joaquin Smith must follow the road; there was no other. An ideal situation for ambush, and a magnificently simple plan. So magnificent and so simple that it could not fail, they said, and forgot completely that they were facing the supreme military genius of the entire Age of the Enlightenment.

It was mid-morning when the woods-runners that had been sent into Ozarky returned with breath-taking news. Joaquin Smith had received the Selui defiance of his representations, and was marching. The Master was marching, and though they had come swiftly and had ridden horseback from Norse, he could not now be far distant. His forces? The runners estimated them at four thousand men, all mounted, with perhaps another thousand auxiliaries. Outnumbered two to one! But Hull Tarvish remembered tales of other encounters where Joaquin Smith had overcome greater odds than these.

The time was at hand. In the little room beside File Ormson's workshop, Hull was going over his weapons while Vail Ormiston, pale and nervous and very lovely, watched him. He drew a bit of oiled rag through the bore of the rifle she had given him, rubbed a spot of rust from the hammer, blew a speck of dust from the pan. Beside him on the table lay powder horn and ball, and his steel bow leaned against his chair.

"A sweet weapon!" he said admiringly, sighting down the long barrel.

"I--I hope it serves you well," murmured Vail tremulously. "Hull, he must be stopped. He must!"

"We'll try, Vail." He rose. "It's time I started."

She was facing him. "Then, before you go, will you--kiss me, Hull?"

He strode toward her, then recoiled in sudden alarm, for it was at that instant that the thing happened. There was a series of the faintest possible clicks, and Hull fancied that he saw for an instant a glistening of tiny blue sparks on candle-sticks and metal objects about the room, and that he felt for a brief moment a curious tingling. Then he forgot all of these strange trifles as the powder horn on the table roared into terrific flame, and flaming wads of powder shot meteor-like around him.

For an instant he froze rigid. Vail was screaming; her dress was burning. He moved into sudden action, sweeping her from her feet, crashing her sideways to the floor, where his great hands beat out the fire. Then he slapped table and floor; he brought his ample sandals down on flaming spots, and finally there were no more flames.

He turned coughing and choking in the black smoke, and bent over Vail, who gasped half overcome. Her skirt had burned to her knees, and for the moment she was too distraught to cover them, though there was no modesty in the world in those days like that of the women of the middle river regions. But as Hull leaned above her she huddled back.

"Are you hurt?" he cried. "Vail, are you burned?"

"No--no!" she panted.

"Then outside!" he snapped, reaching down to lift her.

"Not--not like this!"

He understood. He snatched his leather smith's apron from the wall, whipped it around her, and bore her into the clearer air of the street.

Outside there was chaos. He set Vail gently on the step and surveyed a scene of turmoil. Men ran shouting, and from windows along the street black smoke poured. A dozen yards away a powder wagon had blasted itself into a vast mushroom of smoke, incinerating horses and driver alike. On the porch across the way lay a writhing man, torn by the rifle that had burst in his hands.

He comprehended suddenly. "The sparkers!" he roared. "Joaquin Smith's sparkers! Old Einar told me about them." He groaned. "There goes our ammunition."[2]

The girl made a great effort to control herself. "Joaquin Smith's sorcery," she said dully. "And there goes hope as well."

He started. "Hope? No! Wait, Vail."

He rushed toward the milling group that surrounded bearded old Marcus Ormiston and the Confederation leaders. He plowed his way fiercely through, and seized the panic-stricken greybeard. "What now?" he roared. "What are you going to do?"

"Do? Do?" The old man was beyond comprehending.

"Yes, do! I'll tell you." He glared at the five leaders. "You'll carry through. Do you see? For powder and ball there's bow and sword, and just as good for the range we need. Gather your men! Gather your men and march!"

And such, within the hour, was the decision. Hull marched first with the Ormiston men, and he carried with him the memory of Vail's farewell. It embarrassed him cruelly to be kissed thus in public, but there was great pleasure in the glimpse of Enoch Ormiston's sour face as he had watched her.

The Ormiston men were first on the line of the Master's approach, and they filtered to their forest-hidden places as silently as foxes. Hull let his eyes wander back along the cut and what he saw pleased him, for no eye could have detected that along the deserted road lay ten thousand fighting men. They were good woodsmen too, these fellows from the upper rivers and the saltless seas.

Down the way from Norse a single horseman came galloping. Old Marcus Ormiston recognized him, stood erect, and hailed him. They talked; Hull could hear the words. The Master had passed through Norse, pausing only long enough to notify the eldarch that henceforth his taxes must be transmitted to N'Orleans, and then had moved leisurely onward. No, there had been no sign of sorcery, nor had he even seen any trace of the witch Black Margot, but then, he had ridden away before the Master had well arrived.

Their informant rode on toward Ormiston, and the men fell to their quiet waiting. A half hour passed, and then, faintly drifting on the silent air, came the sound of music. Singing; men's voices in song. Hull listened intently, and his skin crept and his hair prickled as he made out the words of the Battle Song of N'Orleans:

"Queen of cities, reigning

Empress, starry pearled

See our arms sustaining

Battle flags unfurled!

Hear our song rise higher,

Fierce as battle fire,

Death our one desire

Or the Empire of the World!"

Hull gripped his bow and set feather to cord. He knew well enough that the plan was to permit the enemy to pass unmolested until his whole line was within the span of the ambush, but the rumble of that distant song was like spark to powder. And now, far down the way beyond the cut, he saw the dust rising. Joaquin Smith was at hand.

Then--the unexpected! Ever afterward Hull told himself that it should have been the expected, that the Master's reputation should have warned them that so simple a plan as theirs must fail. There was no time now for such vain thoughts, for suddenly, through the trees to his right, brown-clothed, lithe little men were slipping like charging shadows, horns sounding, whistles shrilling. The woods runners of the Master! Joaquin Smith had anticipated just such an ambush.

Instantly Hull saw their own weakness. They were ten thousand, true enough, but here they were strung thinly over a distance of two miles, and now the woods runners were at a vast advantage in numbers, with the main body approaching. One chance! Fight it out, drive off the scouts, and retire into the woods. While the army existed, even though Ormiston fell, there was hope.

He shouted, strung his arrow, and sent it flashing through the leaves. A bad place for arrows; their arching flight was always deflected by the tangled branches. He slung bow on shoulder and gripped his sword; close quarters was the solution, the sort of fight that made blood tingle and life seem joyous.

Then--the second surprise! The woods runners had flashed their own weapons, little blunt revolvers.[3] But they sent no bullets; only pale beams darted through leaves and branches, faint blue streaks of light. Sorcery? And to what avail?

He learned instantly. His sword grew suddenly scorching hot in his hands, and a moment later the queerest pain he had ever encountered racked his body. A violent, stinging, inward tingle that twitched his muscles and paralyzed his movements. A brief second and the shock ceased, but his sword lay smoking in the leaves, and his steel bow had seared his shoulders. Around him men were yelling in pain, writhing on the ground, running back into the forest depths. He cursed the beams; they flicked like sunlight through branched and leafy tangles where an honest arrow could find no passage.

Yet apparently no man had been killed. Hands were seared and blistered by weapons that grew hot under the blue beams, bodies were racked by the torture that Hull could not know was electric shock, but none was slain. Hope flared again, and he ran to head off a retreating group.

"To the road!" he roared. "Out where our arrows can fly free! Charge the column!"

For a moment the group halted. Hull seized a yet unheated sword from someone, and turned back. "Come on!" he bellowed. "Come on! We'll have a fight of this yet!"

Behind him he heard the trample of feet. The beams flicked out again, but he held his sword in the shadow of his own body, gritted his teeth, and bore the pain that twisted him. He rushed on; he heard his own name bellowed in the booming voice of File Ormson, but he only shouted encouragement and burst out into the full sunlight of the road.

Below in the cut was the head of the column, advancing placidly. He glimpsed a silver helmeted, black haired man on a great white mare at its head, and beside him a slighter figure on a black stallion. Joaquin Smith! Hull roared down the embankment toward him.

Four men spurred instantly between him and the figure with the silver helmet. A beam flicked; his sword scorched his skin and he flung it away. "Come on!" he bellowed. "Here's a fight!"

Strangely, in curious clarity, he saw the eyes of the Empire men, a smile in them, mysteriously amused. No anger, no fear--just amusement. Hull felt a sudden surge of trepidation, glanced quickly behind him, and knew finally the cause of that amusement. No one had followed him; he had charged the Master's army alone!

Now the fiercest anger he had ever known gripped Hull. Deserted! Abandoned by those for whom he fought. He roared his rage to the echoing bluffs, and sprang at the horseman nearest him.

The horse reared, pawing the air. Hull thrust his mighty arms below its belly and heaved with a convulsion of his great muscles. Backward toppled steed and rider, and all about the Master was a milling turmoil where a man scrambled desperately to escape the clashing hooves. But Hull glimpsed Joaquin Smith sitting statuelike and smiling on his great white mare.

He tore another rider from his saddle, and then caught from the corner of his eye, he saw the slim youth at the Master's side raise a weapon, coolly, methodically. For the barest instant Hull faced icy green eyes where cold, passionless death threatened. He flung himself aside as a beam spat smoking against the dust of the road.

"Don't!" snapped Joaquin Smith, his low voice clear through the turmoil. "The youth is splendid!"

But Hull had no mind to die uselessly. He bent, flung himself halfway up the bluff in a mighty leap, caught a dragging branch, and swung into the forest. A startled woods runner faced him; he flung the fellow behind him down the slope, and slipped into the shelter of leaves. "The wise warrior fights pride," he muttered to himself. "It's no disgrace for one man to run from an army."

He was mountain bred. He circled silently through the forest, avoiding the woods runners who were herding the Confederation army back towards Ormiston. He smiled grimly as he recalled the words he had spoken to Vail. He had justified them; he had charged the army of the Master alone.

Notes:

2: The Erden resonators. A device, now obsolete, that projected an inductive field sufficient to induce tiny electrical discharges in metal objects up to a distance of many miles. Thus it ignited inflammables like gunpowder.

3: Koblmar's ionic beams. Two parallel beams of highly actinic light ionize a path of air, and along these conductive lanes of gas an electric current can he passed, powerful enough to kill or merely intense enough to punish.

FIVE.

BLACK MARGOT

Hull circled wide through the forest, and it took all his mountain craft to slip free through the files of woods runners. He came at last to the fields east of Ormiston, and there made the road, entering from the direction of Selui.

Everywhere were evidences of rout. Wagons lay overturned, their teams doubtless used to further the escape of their drivers. Guns and rifles, many of them burst, littered the roadside, and now and again he passed black smoking piles and charred areas that marked the resting place of an ammunition cart.

Yet Ormiston was little damaged. He saw the firegutted remains of a shed or two where powder had been stored, and down the street a house roof still smoked. But there was no sign of battle carnage, and only the crowded street gave evidence of the unusual.

He found File Ormson in the group that stared across town to where the road from Norse elbowed east to enter. Hull had outsped the leisurely march of the Master, for there at the bend was the glittering army, now halted. Not even the woods runners had come into Ormiston town, for there they were too, lined in a brown-clad rank along the edge of the wood-lots beyond the nearer fields. They had made no effort, apparently, to take prisoners but had simply herded the terrified defenders into the village. Joaquin Smith had done it again; he had taken a town without a single death, or at least no casualties other than whatever injuries had come from bursting rifles and blazing powder.

Suddenly Hull noticed something. "Where are the Confederation men?" he asked sharply.

File Ormson turned gloomy eyes on him. "Gone. Flying back to Selui like scared gophers to their holes." He scowled, then smiled. "That was a fool's gesture of yours at Eaglefoot Flow, Hull. A fool's gesture, but brave."

The youth grimaced wryly. "I thought I was followed."

"And so you should have been, but that those fiendish ticklers tickled away our courage. But they can kill as well as tickle; when there was need of it before Memphis they killed quickly enough."

Hull thought of the green-eyed youth. "I think I nearly learned that," he said smiling.

Down the way there was some sort of stir. Hull narrowed his eyes to watch, and descried the silver helmet of the Master. He dismounted and faced someone; it was--yes, old Marcus Ormiston. He left File Ormson and shouldered his way to the edge of the crowd that circled the two.

Joaquin Smith was speaking. "And," he said, "all taxes are to be forwarded to N'Orleans, including those on your own lands. Half of them I shall use to maintain my government, but half will revert to your own district, which will be under a governor I shall appoint in Selui when that city is taken. You are no longer eldarch, but for the present you may collect the taxes at the rate I prescribe."

Old Marcus was bitterly afraid; Hull could see his beard waggling like an oriole's nest in a breeze. Yet there was a shrewd, bargaining streak in him. "You are very hard," he whined. "You left Pace Helm as eldarch undisturbed in Norse. Why do you punish me because I fought to hold what was mine? Why should that anger you so?"

"I am not angry," said the Master passively. "I never blame any for fighting against me, but it is my policy to favor those eldarchs who yield peacefully." He paused. "Those are my terms, and generous enough."

They were generous, thought Hull, especially to the people of Ormiston, who received back much less than half their taxes from the eldarch as roads, bridges, or wells.

"My--my lands?" faltered the old man.

"Keep what you till," said Joaquin Smith indifferently. "The rest of them go to their tenants." He turned away, placed foot to stirrup, and swung upon his great white mare.

Hull caught his first fair glimpse of the conqueror. Black hair cropped below his ears, cool greenish grey eyes, a mouth with something faintly humorous about it. He was tall as Hull himself, more slender, but with powerful shoulders, and he seemed no older than the late twenties, or no more than thirty at most, though that was only the magic of Martin Sair, since more than eighty years had passed since his birth in the mountains of Mexico. He wore the warrior's garb of the southlands, a shirt of metallic silver scales, short thigh-length trousers of some shiny, silken material, cothurns on his feet. His bronzed body was like the ancient statues Hull had seen in Selui, and he looked hardly the fiend that most people thought him. A pleasant seeming man, save for something faintly arrogant in his face--no, not arrogant, exactly, but proud or confident, as if he felt himself a being driven by fate, as perhaps he was.

He spoke again, now to his men. "Camp there," he ordered, waving at Ormiston square, "and there," pointing at a fallow field. "Do not damage the crops." He rode forward, and a dozen officers followed. "The Church," he said.

A voice, a tense, shrieking voice behind Hull. "You! It is, Hull! It's you!" It was Vail, teary eyed and pale. "They said you were--" She broke off sobbing, clinging to him, while Enoch Ormiston watched sourly.

He held her. "It seems I failed you," he said ruefully. "But I did do my best, Vail."

"Failed? I don't care." She calmed. "I don't care, Hull, since you're here."

"And it isn't as bad as it might be," he consoled. "He wasn't as severe as I feared."

"Severe !" she echoed. "Do you believe those mild words of his, Hull? First our taxes then our lands, and next it will be our lives--or at least my father's life. Don't you understand? That was no eldarch from some enemy town, Hull--that was Joaquin Smith. Joaquin Smith! Do you trust him?"

"Vail, do you believe that?"

"Of course I believe it!" She began to sob again. "See how he has already won over half the town with--with that about the taxes. Don't you be won over, Hull. I--couldn't stand it!"

"I will not," he promised.

"He and Black Margot and their craft! I hate them, Hull. I--Look there! Look there!"

He spun around. For a moment he saw nothing save the green-eyed youth who had turned death-laden eyes on him at Eaglefoot Flow, mounted on the mighty black stallion. Youth! He saw suddenly that it was a woman--a girl rather. Eighteen--twenty-five? He couldn't tell. Her face was averted as she scanned the crowd that lined the opposite side of the street, but the sunset fell on a flaming black mop of hair, so black that it glinted blue--an intense, unbelievable black. Like Joaquin Smith she wore only a shirt and very abbreviated shorts, but a caparison protected the slim daintiness of her legs from any contact with the mount's ribs. There was a curious grace in the way she sat the idling steed, one hand on its haunches, the other on withers, the bridle dangling loose. Her Spanish mother's blood showed only in the clear, transparent olive of her skin, and of course, in the startling ebony of her hair.

"Black Margot!" Hull whispered, "Brazen! Half naked! What's so beautiful about her?"

As if she heard his whisper, she turned suddenly, her emerald eyes sweeping the crowd about him, and he felt his question answered. Her beauty was starkly incredible--audacious, outrageous. It was more than a mere lack of flaws; it was a sultry, flaming positive beauty with a hint of sullenness in it. The humor of the Master's mouth lurked about hers as mockery; her perfect lips seemed always about to smile, but to smile cruelly and sardonically. Hers was a ruthless and pitiless perfection, but it was nevertheless perfection, even to the faintly Oriental cast given by her black hair and sea-green eyes.

Those eyes met Hull's and it was almost as if he heard an audible click. He saw recognition in her face, and she passed her glance casually over his mighty figure. He stiffened, stared defiantly back, and swept his own gaze insolently over her body from the midnight hair to the diminutive cothurns on her feet. If she acknowledged his gaze at all, it was by the faintest of all possible smiles of mockery as she rode coolly away toward Joaquin Smith.

Vail was trembling against him, and it was a great relief to look into her deep but not at all mysterious blue eyes, and to see the quite understandable loveliness of her pale features. What if she hadn't the insolent brilliance of the Princess, he thought fiercely. She was sweet and honest and loyal to her beliefs, and he loved her. Yet he could not keep his eyes from straying once more to the figure on the black stallion.

"She--she smiled at you, Hull!" gasped Vail. "I'm frightened. I'm terribly frightened."

His fascination was yielding now to a surge of hatred for Joaquin Smith, for the Princess, for the whole Empire. It was Vail he loved, and she was being crushed by these. An idea formed slowly as he stared down the street to where Joaquin Smith had dismounted and was now striding into the little church. He heard an approving murmur sweep the crowd, already half won over by the distribution of land. That was simply policy, the Master's worshipping in Ormiston church, a gesture to the crowd.

He lifted the steel bow from his back and bent it. The spring was still in it; it had been heated enough to scorch his skin but not enough to untemper it. "Wait here!" he snapped to Vail, and strode up the street toward the church.

Outside stood a dozen Empire men, and the Princess idled on her great black horse. He slipped across the churchyard, around behind where a tangle of vines stretched toward the roof. Would they support his weight? They did, and he pulled himself hand over hand to the eaves, and thence to the peak. The spire hid him from the Master's men, and not one of the Ormiston folk glanced his way.

He crept forward to the base of the steeple. Now he must leave the peak and creep precariously along the steep slope around it. He reached the street edge and peered cautiously over.

The Master was still within. Against his will he glanced at Black Margot, and even put cord to feather and sighted at her ivory throat. But he could not. He could not loose the shaft.

Below him there was a stir. Joaquin Smith came out and swung to his white horse. Now was the moment. Hull rose to his knees, hoping that he could remain steady on the sharp pitch of the roof. Carefully, carefully, he drew the steel arrow back.

There was a shout. He had been seen, and a blue beam sent racking pain through his body. For an instant he bore it, then loosed his arrow and went sliding down the roof edge and over.

He fell on soft loam. A dozen hands seized him, dragged him upright, thrust him out into the street. He saw Joaquin Smith still on his horse, but the glistening arrow stood upright like a plume in his silver helmet, and a trickle of blood was red on his cheek.

But he wasn't killed. He raised the helmet from his head, waved aside the cluster of officers, and with his own hands bound a white cloth about his forehead. Then he turned cool grey eyes on Hull.

"You drive a strong shaft," he said, and then recognition flickered in his eyes. "I spared your life some hours ago, did I not?"

Hull said nothing.

"Why," resumed the Master, "do you seek to kill me after your eldarch has made peace with me? You are part of the Empire now, and this is treason."

"I made no peace!" growled Hull.

"But your leader did, thereby binding you."

Hull could not keep his gaze from the emerald eyes of the Princess, who was watching him without expression save faint mockery.

"Have you nothing to say," asked Joaquin Smith.

"Nothing."

The Master's eyes slid over him. "Are you Ormiston born?" he asked. "What is your name?"

No need to bring troubles on his friends. "No," said Hull. "I am called Hull Tarvish."

The conqueror turned away. "Lock him up," he ordered coolly. "Let him make whatever preparations his religion requires, and then--execute him."

Above the murmur of the crowd Hull heard Vail Ormiston's cry of anguish. He turned to smile at her, watched her held by two Empire men as she struggled to reach him. "I'm sorry," he called gently. "I love you, Vail." Then he was being thrust away down the street.

He was pushed into Hue Helm's stonewalled tool shed. It had been cleared of everything, doubtless for some officer's quarters. Hull drew himself up and stood passively in the gathering darkness where a single shaft of sunset light angled through the door, before which stood two grim Empire men.

One of them spoke. "Keep peaceful, Weed," he said in his N'Orleans drawl.[4] "Go ahead with your praying, or whatever it is you do."

"I do nothing," said Hull. "The mountainies believe that a right life is better than a right ending, and right or wrong a ghost's but a ghost anyway."

The guard laughed. "And a ghost you'll be."

"If a ghost I'll be," retorted Hull, turning slowly toward him, "I'd sooner turn one--fighting!"

He sprang suddenly, crashed a mighty fist against the arm that bore the weapon, thrust one guard upon the other, and overleaped the tangle into the dusk. As he spun to circle the house, something very hard smashed viciously against the back of his skull, sending him sprawling half dazed against the wall.

Notes:

4: Weed: The term applied by Dominists [the Master's partisans] to their opposers. It originated in Joaquin Smith's remark before the Battle of Memphis: "Even the weeds of the fields have taken arms against me."

SIX.

THE HARRIERS

After a brief moment Hull sprawled half stunned, then his muscles lost their paralysis and he thrust himself to his feet, whirling to face whatever assault threatened. In the doorway the guards still scrambled, but directly before him towered a rider on a black mount, and two men on foot flanked him. The rider, of course, was the Princess, her glorious green eyes luminous as a cat's in the dusk as she slapped a short sword into its scabbard. It was a blow from the flat of its blade that had felled him.

She held now the blunt weapon of the blue beam. It came to him that he had never heard her speak, but she spoke now in a voice low and liquid, yet cold, cold as the flow of an ice-crusted winter stream. "Stand quiet, Hull Tarvish," she said. "One flash will burst that stubborn heart of yours forever."

Perforce he stood quiet, his back to the wall of the shed. He had no doubt at all that the Princess would kill him if he moved; he couldn't doubt it with her icy eyes upon him. He stared sullenly back, and a phrase of Old Einar's came strangely to his memory. "Satanically beautiful," the old man had called her, and so she was. Hell or the art of Martin Sair had so fashioned her that no man could gaze unmoved on the false purity of her face, no man at least in whom flowed red blood.

She spoke again, letting her glance flicker disdainfully over the two appalled guards. "The Master will be pleased," she said contemptuously, "to learn that one unarmed Weed outmatches two men of his own cohort."

The nearer man faltered, "But your Highness, he rushed us unexpect--"

"No matter," she cut in, and turned back to Hull. For the first time now he really felt the presence of death as she said coolly, "I am minded to kill you."

"Then do it!" he snapped.

"I came here to watch you die," she observed calmly. "It interests me to see men die, boldly or cowardly or resignedly. I think you would die boldly."

It seemed to Hull that she was deliberately torturing him by this procrastination. "Try me!" he growled.

"But I think also," she resumed, "that your living might amuse me more than your death, and"--for the first time there was a breath of feeling in her voice--"God knows I need amusement!" Her tones chilled again. "I give you your life."

"Your Highness," muttered the cowed guard, "the Master has ordered--"

"I countermand the orders," she said shortly. And then to Hull. "You are a fighter. Are you also a man of honor?"

"If I'm not," he retorted, "the lie that says I am would mean nothing to me."

She smiled coldly. "Well, I think you are, Hull Tarvish. You go free on your word to carry no weapons, and your promise to visit me this evening in my quarters at the eldarch's home." She paused. "Well?"

"I give my word."

"And I take it." She crashed her heels against the ribs of the great stallion, and the beast reared and whirled. "Away, all of you!" she ordered. "You two, carry tub and water for my bath." She rode off toward the street.

Hull let himself relax against the wall with a low "whew!" Sweat started on his cold forehead, and his mighty muscles felt almost weak. It wasn't that he had feared death, he told himself, but the strain of facing those glorious, devilish emerald eyes, and the cold torment of the voice of Black Margot, and the sense of her taunting him, mocking him, even her last careless gesture of freeing him. He drew himself erect. After all, fear of death or none, he loved life, and let that be enough.

He walked slowly toward the street. Across the way lights glowed in Marcus Orison's home, and he wondered if Vail were there, perhaps serving the Princess Margaret as he had so lately suggested the contrary. He wanted to find Vail; he wanted to use her cool loveliness as an antidote for the dark poison of the beauty he had been facing. And then, at the gate, he drew back suddenly. A group of men in Empire garb came striding by, and among them, helmetless and with his head bound, moved the Master.

His eyes fell on Hull. He paused suddenly and frowned. "You again!" he said. "How is it that you still live, Hull Tarvish?"

"The Princess ordered it."

The frown faded. "So," said Joaquin Smith slowly, "Margaret takes it upon herself to interfere somewhat too frequently. I suppose she also freed you?"

"Yes, on my promise not to bear arms."

There was a curious expression in the face of the conqueror. "Well," he said almost gently, "it was not my intention to torture you, but merely to have you killed for your treason. It may be that you will soon wish that my orders had been left unaltered." He strode on into the eldarch's dooryard, with his silent men following.

Hull turned his steps toward the center of the village. Everywhere he passed Empire men scurrying about the tasks of encampment, and supply wagons rumbled and jolted in the streets. He saw files of the soldiers passing slowly before cook-wagons and the smell of food floated on the air, reminding him that he was ravenously hungry. He hurried toward his room beside File Ormiston's shop, and there, tragic-eyed and mist-pale, he found Vail Ormiston.

She was huddled on the doorstep with sour Enoch holding her against him. It was Enoch who first perceived Hull, and his jaw dropped and his eyes bulged, and a gurgling sound issued from his throat. And Vail looked up with uncomprehending eyes, stared for a moment without expression, and then, with a little moan, crumpled and fainted.

She was unconscious only a few moments, scarcely long enough for Hull to bear her into his room. There she lay now on his couch, clinging to his great hand, convinced at last of his living presence.

"I think," she murmured, "that you're as deathless as Joaquin Smith, Hull. I'll never believe you dead again. Tell me--tell me how it happened."

He told her. "Black Margot's to thank for it," he finished.

But the very name frightened Vail. "She means evil, Hull. She terrifies me with her witch's eyes and her hellstained hair. I haven't even dared go home for fear of her."

He laughed. "Don't worry about me, Vail. I'm safe enough."

Enoch cut in. "Here's one for the Harriers, then," he said sourly. "The pack needs him."

"The Harriers?" Hull looked up puzzled.

"Oh, Hull, yes!" said Vail. "File Ormson's been busy. The Harriers are what's left of the army--the better citizens of Ormiston. The Master's magic didn't reach beyond the ridge, and over the hills there's still powder and rifles. And the spell is no longer in the valley, either. One of the men carried a cup of powder across the ridge, and it didn't burn."

The better citizens, Hull thought smiling. She meant, of course, those who owned land and feared a division of it such as Marcus Ormiston had suffered. But aloud he said only, "How many men have you?"

"Oh, there'll be several hundred with the farmers across the hills." She looked into his eyes, "I know it's a forlorn hope, Hull, but--we've got to try. You'll help, won't you?"

"Of course. But all your Harriers can attempt is raids. They can't fight the Master's army."

"I know. I know it, Hull. It's a desperate hope."

"Desperate?" said Enoch suddenly. "Hull, didn't you say you were ordered to Black Margot's quarters this evening?"

"Yes."

"Then--see here! You'll carry a knife in your armpit. Sooner or later she'll want you alone with her, and when that happens, you'll slide the knife quietly into her ruthless heart! There's a hope for you--if you've courage!"

"Courage!" he growled. "To murder a woman?"

"Black Margot's a devil!"

"Devil or not, what's the good of it? It's Joaquin Smith that's building the Empire, not the Princess."

"Yes," said Enoch, "but half his power is the art of the witch. Once she's gone the Confederation could blast his army like ducks in a frog pond."

"It's true!" gasped Vail. "What Enoch says is true!"

Hull scowled. "I swore not to bear weapons!"

"Swore to her!" snapped Enoch. "That needn't bind you."

"My word's given," said Hull firmly. "I do not lie."

Vail smiled. "You're right," she whispered, and as Enoch's face darkened, "I love you for it, Hull."

"Then," grunted Enoch, "if it's not lack of courage, do this. Lure her somehow across the west windows. We can slip two or three Harriers to the edge of the woodlot, and if she passes a window with the light behind her--well, they won't miss."

"Oh, I won't," said Hull wearily. "I won't fight women, nor betray even Black Margot to death."

But Vail's blue eyes pleaded. "That won't be breaking your word, Hull. Please. It isn't betraying a woman. She's a sorceress. She's evil. Please, Hull."

Bitterly he yielded. "I'll try, then." He frowned gloomily. "She saved my life, and--Well, which room is hers?"

"My father's. Mine is the western chamber, which she took for her--her maid," Vail's eyes misted at the indignity of it. "We," she said, "are left to sleep in the kitchen."

An hour later, having eaten, he walked somberly home with Vail while Enoch slipped away toward the hills. There were tents in the dooryard, and lights glowed in every window, and before the door stood two dark Empire men who passed the girl readily enough, but halted Hull with small ceremony. Vail cast him a wistful backward glance as she disappeared toward the rear, and he submitted grimly to the questioning of the guards.

"On what business?"

"To see the Princess Margaret."

"Are you Hull Tarvish?"

"Yes."

One of the men stepped to his side and ran exploratory hands about his body. "Orders of Her Highness," he explained gruffly.

Hull smiled. The Princess had not trusted his word too implicitly. In a moment the fellow had finished his search and swung the door open.

Hull entered. He had never seen the interior of the house, and for a moment its splendor dazzled him. Carved ancient furniture, woven carpets, intricately worked standards for the oil lamps, and even--for an instant he failed to comprehend it--a full-length mirror of ancient workmanship wherein his own image faced him. Until now he had seen only bits and fragments of mirrors.

To his left a guard blocked an open door whence voices issued. Old Marcus Ormiston's voice. "But I'll pay for it. I'll buy it with all I have." His tones were wheedling.

"No." Cool finality in the voice of Joaquin Smith. "Long ago I swore to Martin Sair never to grant immortality to any who have not proved themselves worthy." A note of sarcasm edged his voice. "Go prove yourself deserving of it, old man, in the few years left to you."

Hull sniffed contemptuously. There seemed something debased in the old man's whining before his conqueror. "The Princess Margaret?" he asked, and followed the guard's gesture.

Upstairs was a dimly lit hall where another guard stood silently. Hull repeated his query, but in place of an answer came the liquid tones of Margaret herself. "Let him come in, Corlin."

A screen within the door blocked sight of the room. Hull circled it, steeling himself against the memory of that soul-burning loveliness he remembered. But his defense was shattered by the shock that awaited him.

The screen, indeed, shielded the Princess from the sight of the guard in the hall, but not from Hull's eyes. He stared utterly appalled at the sight of her lying in complete indifference in a great tub of water, while a fat woman scrubbed assiduously at her bare body. He could not avoid a single glimpse of her exquisite form, then he turned and stared deliberately from the east windows, knowing that he was furiously crimson even to his shoulders.

"Oh, sit down!" she said contemptuously. "This will be over in a moment."

He kept his eyes averted while water splashed and a towel whisked sibilantly. When he heard her footsteps beside him he glanced up tentatively, still fearful of what he might see, but she was covered now in a full robe of shiny black and gold that made her seem taller, though its filmy delicacy by no means concealed what was beneath. Instead of the cothurns she wore when on the march, she had slipped her feet into tiny high-heeled sandals that were reminiscent of the footgear he had seen in ancient pictures. The black robe and her demure coif of short ebony hair gave her an appearance of almost nunlike purity, save for the green hell-fires that danced in her eyes.

In his heart Hull cursed that false aura of innocence, for he felt again the fascination against which he had steeled himself.

"So," she said. "You may sit down again. I do not demand court etiquette in the field." She sat opposite, and produced a black cigarette, lighting it at the chimney of the lamp on the table. Hull stared; not that he was unaccustomed to seeing women smoke, for every mountainy woman had her pipe, and every cottage its tobacco patch, but cigarettes were new to him.

"Now," she said with a faintly ironic smile, "tell me what they say of me here."

"They call you witch."

"And do they hate me?"

"Hate you?" he echoed thoughtfully. "At least they will fight you and the Master to the last feather on the last arrow."

"Of course. The young men will fight--except those that Joaquin has bought with the eldarch's lands--because they know that once within the Empire, fighting is no more to be had. No more joyous, thrilling little wars between the cities, no more boasting and parading before the pretty provincial girls." She paused. "And you, Hull Tarvish--what do you think of me?"

"I call you witch for other reasons."

"Other reasons?"

"There is no magic," said Hull, echoing the words of Old Einar in Selui. "There is only knowledge."

The Princess looked narrowly at him. "A wise thought for one of you," she murmured, and then, "You came weaponless."

"I keep my word."

"You owe me that. I spared your life."

"And I," declared Hull defiantly, "spared yours. I could have sped an arrow through that white throat of yours, there on the church roof. I aimed one."

She smiled. "What held you?"

"I do not fight women." He winced as he thought of what mission he was on, for it belied his words.

"Tell me," she said, "was that the eldarch's pretty daughter who cried so piteously after you there before the church?"

"Yes."

"And do you love her?"

"Yes." This was the opening he had sought, but it came bitterly now, facing her. He took the opportunity grimly. "I should like to ask one favor."

"Ask it."

"I should like to see"--lies were not in him but this was no lie--"the chamber that was to have been our bridal room. The west chamber." That might be--should be--truth.

The Princess laughed disdainfully. "Go see it then."

For a moment he feared, or hoped, perhaps, that she was going to let him go alone. Then she rose and followed him to the hall, and to the door of the west chamber.

SEVEN.

BETRAYAL

Hull paused at the door of the west chamber to permit the Princess to enter. For the merest fraction of a second her glorious green eyes flashed speculatively to his face, then she stepped back. "You first, Weed," she commanded.

He did not hesitate. He turned and strode into the room, hoping that the Harrier riflemen, if indeed they lurked in the copse, might recognize his mighty figure in time to stay their eager trigger fingers. His scalp prickled as he moved steadily across the window, but nothing happened.

Behind him the Princess laughed softly. "I have lived too long in the aura of plot and counterplot in N'Orleans," she said. "I mistrust you without cause, honest Hull Tarvish."

Her words tortured him. He turned to see her black robe mold itself to her body as she moved, and, as sometimes happens in moments of stress, he caught an instantaneous picture of her with his senses so quickened that it seemed as if she, himself, and the world were frozen into immobility. He remembered her forever as she was then, with her limbs in the act of striding, her green eyes soft in the lamplight, and her perfect lips in a smile that had a coloring of wistfulness. Witch and devil she might be, but she looked like a dark-haired angel, and in that moment his spirit revolted.

"No!" he bellowed, and sprang toward her, striking her slim shoulders with both hands in a thrust that sent her staggering back into the hallway, there to sit hard and suddenly on the floor beside the amazed guard.

She sprang up instantly, and there was nothing angelic now in 'her face. "You--hurt me!" she hissed. "Me! Now, I'll--" She snatched the guard's weapon from his belt, thrust it full at Hull's chest, and sent the blue beam humming upon him.

It was pain far worse than that at Eaglefoot Flow. He bore it stolidly, grinding into silence the groan that rose in his throat, and in a moment she flicked it off and slapped it angrily into the guard's holster. "Treachery again!" she said. "I won't kill you, Hull Tarvish. I know a better way." She whirled toward the stair-well. "Lebeau!" she called. "Lebeau! There's--" She glanced sharply at Hull, and continued, "Il y a des tirailleurs dans le bois. Je vais les tireer en avant!" It was the French of N'Orleans, as incomprehensible to Hull as Aramaic.

She spun back. "Sora!" she snapped, and then, as the fat woman appeared, "Never mind. You're far too heavy." Then back to Hull. "I've a mind," she blazed, "to strip the Weed clothes from the eldarch's daughter and send her marching across the window!"

He was utterly appalled. "She--she was in town!" he gasped, then fell silent at the sound of feet below.

"Well, there's no time," she retorted. "So, if I must--" She strode steadily into the west chamber, paused a moment, and then stepped deliberately in front of the window!

Hull was aghast. He watched her stand so that the lamplight must have cast her perfect silhouette full on the pane, stand tense and motionless for the fraction of a breath, and then leap back so sharply that her robe billowed away from her body.

She had timed it to perfection. Two shots crashed almost together, and the glass shattered. And then, out in the night, a dozen beams crisscrossed, and, thin and clear in the silence after the shots, a yell of mortal anguish drifted up, and another, and a third.

"There are snipers in the copse. I'll draw them out!"

The Princess Margaret smiled in malice, and licked a crimson drop from a finger gashed by flying glass. "Your treachery reacts," she said in the tones of a sneer. "Instead of my betrayal, you have betrayed your own men."

"I need no accusation from you," he said gloomily. "I am my own accuser, and my own judge. Yes, and my own executioner as well. I will not live a traitor."

She raised her dainty eyebrows, and blew a puff of grey smoke from the cigarette still in her hand. "So strong Hull Tarvish will die a suicide," she remarked indifferently. "I had intended to kill you now. Should I leave you to be your own victim?"

He shrugged. "What matter to me?"

"Well," she said musingly, "you're rather more entertaining than I had expected. You're strong, you're stubborn, and you're dangerous. I give you the right to do what you wish with your own life, but"--her green eyes flickered mockingly--"if I were Hull Tarvish, I should live on the chance of justifying myself. You can wipe out the disgrace of your weakness by an equal courage. You can sell your life in your own cause, and who knows?--perhaps for Joaquin's--or mine!"

He chose to ignore the mockery in her voice. "Perhaps," he said grimly, "I will."

"Why, then, did you weaken, Hull Tarvish? You might have had my life."

"I do not fight women," he said despondently. "I looked at you--and turned weak." A question formed in his mind. "But why did you risk your life before the window? You could have had fifty woods runners scour the copse. That was brave, but unnecessary."

She smiled, but there was a shrewd narrowness in her eyes. "Because so many of these villages are built above the underground ways of the Ancients--the subways, the sewers. How did I know but that your assassins might slip into some burrow and escape? It was necessary to lure them into disclosure."

Hull shadowed the gleam that shot into his own eyes. He remembered suddenly the ancient sewer in which the child Vail had wandered, whose entrance was hidden by blackberry bushes. Then the Empire men were unaware of it! He visioned the Harriers creeping through it with bow and sword--yes, and rifle, now that the spell was off the valley--springing suddenly into the center of the camp, finding the Master's army, sleeping, disorganized, unwary. What a plan for a surprise attack!

"Your Highness," he said grimly, "I think of suicide no more, and unless you kill me now, I will be a bitter enemy to your Empire army."

"Perhaps less bitter than you think," she said softly. "See, Hull, the only three that know of your weakness are dead. No one can name you traitor or weakling."

"But I can," he returned somberly. "And you."

"Not I, Hull," she murmured. "I never blame a man who weakens because of me--there have been many. Men as strong as you, Hull, and some that the world still calls great." She turned toward her own chamber. "Come in here," she said in altered tones. "I will have some wine. Sora!" As the fat woman padded off, she took another cigarette and lit it above the lamp, wrinkling her dainty nose distastefully at the night-flying insects that circled it.

"What a place!" she snapped impatiently.

"It is the finest house I have ever seen," said Hull stolidly.

She laughed. "It's a hovel. I sigh for the day we return to N'Orleans, where windows are screened, where water flows hot at will, where lights do not flicker as yellow oil lamps nor send heat to stifle one. Would you like to see the Great City, Hull?"

"You know I would."

"What if I say you may?"

"What could keep me from it if I go in peace?"

She shrugged. "Oh, you can visit N'Orleans, of course, but suppose I offered you the chance to go as the--the guest, we'll say, of the Princess Margaret. What would you give for that privilege?"

Was she mocking him again? "What would you ask for it?" he rejoined guardedly.

"Oh, your allegiance, perhaps. Or perhaps the betrayal of your little band of Harriers, who will be the devil's own nuisance to stamp out of these hills."

He looked up startled that she knew the name. "The Harriers? How?"

She smiled. "We have friends among the Ormiston men. Friends bought with land," she added contemptuously. "But what of my offer, Hull?"

He scowled. "You say as your guest. What am I to understand by that?"

She leaned across the table, her exquisite green eyes on his, her hair flaming blue-black, her perfect lips in a faint smile. "What you please, Hull. Whatever you please."

Anger was rising. "Do you mean," he asked huskily, "that you'd do that for so small a thing as the destruction of a little enemy band? You, with the whole Empire at your back?"

She nodded. "It saves trouble, doesn't it?"

"And honesty, virtue, honor, mean as little to you as that? Is this one of your usual means of conquest? Do you ordinarily sell your--your favors for--?"

"Not ordinarily," she interrupted coolly. "First I must like my co-partner in the trade. You, Hull--I like those vast muscles of yours, and your stubborn courage, and your slow, clear mind. You are not a great man, Hull, for your mind has not the cold fire of genius, but you are a strong one, and I like you for it."

"Like me!" he roared, starting up in his chair. "Yet you think I'll trade what honor's left me for--that! You think I'll betray my cause! You think-- Well, you're wrong, that's all. You're wrong!"

She shook her head, smiling. "No. I wasn't wrong, for I thought you wouldn't."

"Oh, you did!" he snarled. "Then what if I'd accepted? What would you have done then?"

"What I promised." She laughed at his angry, incredulous face. "Don't look so shocked, Hull. I'm not little Vail Ormiston. I'm the Princess Margaret of N'Orleans, called Margaret the Divine by those who love me, and by those who hate me called-- Well, you must know what my enemies call me."

"I do!" he blazed. "Black Margot, I do!"

"Black Margot!" she echoed smiling. "Yes, so called because a poet once amused me, and because there was once a very ancient, very great French poet named François Villon, who loved a harlot called Black Margot." She sighed. "But my poet was no Villon; already his works are nearly forgotten."

"A good name!" he rasped. "A good name for you!"

"Doubtless. But you fail to understand, Hull. I'm an Immortal. My years are three times yours. Would you have me follow the standards of death-bound Vail Ormiston?"

"Yes! By what right are you superior to all standards?"

Her lips had ceased to smile, and her deep green eyes turned wistful. "By the right that I can act in no other way, Hull," she said softly. A tinge of emotion quavered in her voice. "Immortality!" she whispered. "Year after year after year of sameness, tramping up and down the world on conquest! What do I care for conquest? I have no sense of destiny like Joaquin, who sees before him Empire--Empire--Empire, ever larger, ever growing. What's Empire to me? And year by year I grow bored until fighting, killing, danger, and love are all that keep me breathing!"

His anger had drained away. He was staring at her aghast, appalled.

"And then they fail me!" she murmured. "When killing palls and love grows stale, what's left? Did I say love? How can there be love for me when I know that if I love a man, it will be only to watch him age and turn wrinkled, weak, and flabby? And when I beg Joaquin for immortality for him, he flaunts before me that promise of his to Martin Sair, to grant it only to those already proved worthy. By the time a man's worthy he's old." She went on tensely, "I tell you, Hull, that I'm so friendless and alone that I envy you death-bound ones! Yes, and one of these days I'll join you!"

He gulped. "My God!" he muttered. "Better for you if you'd stayed in your native mountains with friends, home, husband, and children."

"Children!" she echoed, her eyes misting with tears. "Immortals can't have children. They're sterile; they should be nothing but brains like Joaquin and Martin Sair, not beings with feelings--like me. Sometimes I curse Martin Sair and his hard rays. I don't want immortality; I want life!"

Hull found his mind in a whirl. The impossible beauty of the girl he faced, her green eyes now soft and moist and unhappy, her lips quivering, the glisten of a tear on her cheek--these things tore at him so powerfully that he scarcely knew his own allegiance. "God!" he whispered. "I'm sorry!"

"And you, Hull--will you help me--a little?"

"But we're enemies--enemies!"

"Can't we be--something else?" A sob shook her.

"How can we be?" he groaned.

Suddenly some quirk to her dainty lips caught his attention. He stared incredulously into the green depths of her eyes. It was true. There was laughter there. She had been mocking him! And as she perceived his realization, her soft laughter rippled like rain on water.

"You--devil!" he choked. "You black witch! I wish I'd let you be killed!"

"Oh, no," she said demurely. "Look at me, Hull."

The command was needless. He couldn't take his fascinated gaze from her exquisite face.

"Do you love me, Hull?"

"I love Vail Ormiston," he rasped.

"But do you love me?"

"I hate you!"

"But do you love me as well?"

He groaned. "This is bitterly unfair," he muttered.

She knew what he meant. He was crying out against the circumstances that had brought the Princess Margaret--the most brilliant woman of all that brilliant age, and one of the most brilliant of any age--to flash all her fascination on a simple mountainy from Ozarky. It wasn't fair; her smile admitted it, but there was triumph there, too.

"May I go?" he asked stonily.

She nodded. "But you will be a little less my enemy, won't you, Hull?"

He rose. "Whatever harm I can do your cause," he said, "that harm will I do. I will not be twice a traitor." But he fancied a puzzling gleam of satisfaction in her green eyes at his words.

EIGHT.

TORMENT

Hull looked down at noon over Ormiston valley, where Joaquin Smith was marching. At his side Vail paused, and together they gazed silently over Selui road, now black with riding men and rumbling wagons on their way to attack the remnant of the Confederation army in Selui. But Ormiston was not entirely abandoned, for three hundred soldiers and two hundred horsemen remained to deal with the Harriers, under Black Margot herself. It was not the policy of the Master to permit so large a rebel band to gather unopposed in conquered territory; within the Empire, despite the mutual hatred among rival cities, there existed a sort of enforced peace.

"Our moment comes tonight," Hull said soberly. "We'll never have a better chance than now, with our numbers all but equal to theirs, and surprise on our side."

Vail nodded. "The ancient tunnel was a bold thought, Hull. The Harriers are shoring up the crumbled places. Father is with them."

"He shouldn't be. The aged have no place in the field."

"But this is his hope, Hull. He lives for this."

"Small enough hope! Suppose we're successful, Vail. What will it mean save the return of Joaquin Smith and his army? Common sense tells me this is a fool's hunt, and if it were not for you and the chance of fairer fighting than we've had until now--well, I'd be tempted to concede the Master his victory."

"Oh, no!" cried Vail. "If our success means the end of Black Margot, isn't that enough? Besides, you know that half the Master's powers are the work of the witch. Enoch--poor Enoch--said so."

Hull winced. Enoch had been one of the three marksmen slain outside the west windows, and the girl's words brought memory of his own part in that. But her words pricked painfully in yet another direction, for the vision of the Princess that had plagued him all night long still rose powerfully in his mind, nor could he face the mention of her death unmoved.

But Vail read only distress for Enoch in his face. "Enoch," she repeated softly. "He loved me in his sour way, Hull, but once I had known you, I had no thoughts for him."

Hull slipped his arm about her, cursing himself that he could not steal his thought away from Margaret of N'Orleans, because it was Vail he loved, and Vail he wanted to love. Whatever spell the Princess had cast about him, he knew her to be evil, ruthless, and inhumanly cold--a sorceress, a devil. But he could not blot her Satanic loveliness from his inward gaze.

"Well," he sighed, "let it be tonight, then. Was it four hours past sunset? Good. The Empire men should be sleeping or gaming in Tigh's tavern by that time. It's for us to pray for our gunpowder."

"Gunpowder? Oh, but didn't you hear what I told File Ormson and the Harriers, back there on the ridge? The casters of the spell are gone; Joaquin Smith has taken them to Selui. I watched and listened from the kitchen this morning."

"The sparkers? They're gone?"

"Yes. They called them reson--resators--"

"Resonators," said Hull, recalling Old Einar's words.

"Something like that. There were two of them, great iron barrels on swivels, full of some humming and clicking magic, and they swept the valley north and south, and east and west, and over toward Norse there was the sound of shots and the smoke of a burning building. They loaded them on wagons and dragged them away toward Selui."

"They didn't cross the ridge with their spell," said Hull.[5] "The Harriers still have powder."

"Yes," murmured Vail, drawing his arm closer about her. "Tell me," she said suddenly, "what did she want of you last night?"

Hull grimaced. He had told Vail little enough of that discreditable evening, and he had been fearing her question. "Treason," he said finally. "She wanted me to betray the Harriers."

"You? She asked that of you?"

"Do you think I would?" countered Hull.

"I know you never would. But what did she offer you for betrayal?"

Again he hesitated. "A great reward," he answered at last. "A reward out of all proportion to the task."

"Tell me, Hull, what is she like face to face?"

"A demon. She isn't exactly human."

"But in what way? Men say so much of her beauty, of her deadly charm. Hull--did you feel it?"

"I love you, Vail."

She sighed, and drew yet closer. "I think you're the strongest man in the world, Hull. The very strongest."

"I'll need to be," he muttered, staring gloomily over the valley. Then he smiled faintly as he saw men plowing, for it was late in the season for such occupation. Old Marcus Ormiston was playing safe; remembering the Master's words, he was tilling every acre across which a horse could drag a blade.

Vail left him in Ormiston village and took her way hesitantly homeward. Hull did what he could about the idle shop, and when the sun slanted low, bought himself a square loaf of brown bread, a great slice of cheese, and a bottle of the still, clear wine of the region. It was just as he finished his meal in his room that a pounding on the door of the shop summoned him.

It was an Empire man. "Hull Tarvish?" he asked shortly. At Hull's nod he continued, "From Her Highness," and handed him a folded slip of black paper.

The mountain youth stared at it. On one side, in raised gold, was the form of a serpent circling a globe, its tail in its mouth--the Midgard Serpent. He slipped a finger through the fold, opened the message, and squinted helplessly at the characters written in gold on the black inner surface.

"This scratching means nothing to me," he said.

The Empire man sniffed contemptuously. "I'll read it," he said, taking the missive. "It says, 'Follow the messenger to our quarters,' and it's signed Margarita Imperii Regina, which means Margaret, Princess of the Empire. Is that plain?" He handed back the note. "I've been looking an hour for you."

"Suppose I won't go," growled Hull.

"This isn't an invitation, Weed. It's a command."

Hull shrugged. He had small inclination to face Black Margot again, especially with his knowledge of the Harriers' plans. Her complex personality baffled and fascinated him, and he could not help fearing that somehow, by some subtle art, she might wring that secret from him. Torture wouldn't force it out of him, but those green eyes might read it. Yet--better to go quietly than be dragged or driven; he grunted assent and followed the messenger.

He found the house quiet. The lower room where Joaquin Smith had rested was empty now, and he mounted the stairs again steeling himself against the expected shock of Black Margot's presence. This time, however, he found her clothed, or half clothed by Ormiston standards, for she wore only the diminutive shorts and shirt that were her riding costume, and her dainty feet were bare. She sat in a deep chair beside the table, a flagon of wine at hand and a black cigarette in her fingers. Her jet hair was like a helmet of ebony against the ivory of her forehead and throat, and her green eyes like twin emeralds.

"Sit down," she said as he stood before her. "The delay is your loss, Hull. I would have dined with you."

"I grow strong enough on bread and cheese," he growled.

"You seem to." Fire danced in her eyes. "Hull, I am as strong as most men, but I believe those vast muscles of yours could overpower me as if I were some shrinking provincial girl. And yet--"

"And yet what?"

"And yet you are much like my black stallion Eblis. Your muscles are nearly as strong, but like him, I can goad you, drive you, lash you, and set you galloping in whatever direction I choose."

"Can you?" he snapped. "Don't try it." But the spell of her unearthly beauty was hard to face.

"But I think I shall try it," she cooed gently. "Hull, do you ever lie?"

"I do not."

"Shall I make you lie, then, Hull? Shall I make you swear such falsehoods that you will redden forever afterward at the thought of them? Shall I?"

"You can't!"

She smiled, then in altered tones, "Do you love me, Hull?"

"Love you? I hate--" He broke off suddenly.

"Do you hate me, Hull?" she asked gently.

"No," he groaned at last. "No, I don't hate you."

"But do you love me?" Her face was saint-like, earnest, pure, even the green eyes were soft now as the green of spring. "Tell me, do you love me?"

"No!" he ground out savagely, then flushed crimson at the smile on her lips. "That isn't a lie!" he blazed. "This sorcery of yours isn't love. I don't love your beauty. It's unnatural, hellish, and the gift of Martin Sair. It's a false beauty, like your whole life!"

"Martin Sair had little to do with my appearance," she said gently. "What do you feel for me, Hull, if not love?"

"I--don't know. I don't want to think of it!" He clenched a great fist. "Love? Call it love if you wish, but it's a hell's love that would find satisfaction in killing you!" But here his heart revolted again. "That isn't so," he ended miserably. "I couldn't kill you."

"Suppose," she proceeded gently, "I were to promise to abandon Joaquin, to be no longer Black Margot and Princess of the Empire, but to be only--Hull Tarvish's wife. Between Vail and me, which would you choose?"

He said nothing for a moment. "You're unfair," he said bitterly at last. "Is it fair to compare Vail and yourself? She's sweet and loyal and innocent, but you--you are Black Margot!"

"Nevertheless," she said calmly, "I think I shall compare us. Sora!" The fat woman appeared. "Sora, the wine is gone. Send the eldarch's daughter here with another bottle and a second goblet."

Hull stared appalled. "What are you going to do?"

"No harm to your little Weed. I promise no harm."

"But--" He paused. Vail's footsteps sounded on the stairs, and she entered timidly, bearing a tray with a bottle and a metal goblet. He saw her start as she perceived him, but she only advanced quietly, set the tray on the table, and backed toward the door.

"Wait a moment," said the Princess. She rose and moved to Vail's side as if to force the comparison on Hull. He could not avoid it; he hated himself for the thought, but it came regardless. Barefooted, the Princess Margaret was exactly the height of Vail in her lowheeled sandals, and she was the merest shade slimmer. But her startling black hair and her glorious green eyes seemed almost to fade the unhappy Ormiston girl to a colorless dun, and the coppery hair and blue eyes seemed water pale. It wasn't fair; Hull realized that it was like comparing candlelight to sunbeam, and he despised himself even for gazing.

"Hull," said the Princess, "which of us is the more beautiful ?"

He saw Vail's lips twitch fearfully, and he remained stubbornly silent.

"Hull," resumed the Princess, "which of us do you love?"

"I love Vail!" he muttered.

"But do you love her more than you love me?"

Once again he had recourse to silence.

"I take it," said the Princess, smiling, "that your silence means you love me the more. Am I right?"

He said nothing.

"Or am I wrong, Hull? Surely you can give little Vail the satisfaction of answering this question! For unless you answer I shall take the liberty of assuming that you love me the more. Now do you?"

He was in utter torment. His white lips twisted in anguish as he muttered finally, "Oh, God! Then yes!"

She smiled softly. "You may go," she said to the pallid and frightened Vail.

But for a moment the girl hesitated. "Hull," she whispered, "Hull, I know you said that to save me. I don't believe it, Hull, and I love you. I blame--her!"

"Don't!" he groaned. "Don't insult her."

The Princess laughed, "Insult me! Do you think I could be insulted by a bit of creeping dust as it crawls its way from cradle to grave?" She turned contemptuous green eyes on Vail as the terrified girl backed through the door.

"Why do you delight in torture?" cried Hull. "You're cruel as a cat. You're no less than a demon."

"That wasn't cruelty," said the Princess gently. "It was but a means of proving what I said, that your mighty muscles are well-broken to my saddle."

"If that needed proof," he muttered.

"It needed none. There's proof enough, Hull, in what's happening even now, if I judge the time rightly. I mean your Harriers slipping through their ancient sewer right into my trap behind the barn."

He was thunderstruck. "You--are you--you must be a witch!" he gasped.

"Perhaps. But it wasn't witchcraft that led me to put the thought of that sewer into your head, Hull. Do you remember now that it was my suggestion, given last evening there in the hallway? I knew quite well that you'd put the bait before the Harriers."

His brain was reeling. "But why-- Why--?"

"Oh," she said indifferently, "it amuses me to see you play the traitor twice, Hull Tarvish."

Notes:

5: The field of the Erden resonator passes readily through structures and walls, but it is blocked by any considerable natural obstructions, hills, and for some reason fog-banks or low clouds.

NINE.

THE TRAP

The princess stepped close to him, her magnificent eyes gentle as an angel's, the sweet curve of her lips in the ghost of a pouting smile. "Poor, strong, weak Hull Tarvish!" she breathed. "Now you shall have a lesson in the cost of weakness. I am not Joaquin, who fights benignly with his men's slides in the third notch. When I go to battle, my beams flash full, and there is burning flesh and bursting heart. Death rides with me."

He scarcely heard her. His gyrating mind struggled with an idea. The Harriers were creeping singly into the trap, but they could not all be through the tunnel. If he could warn them-- His eyes shifted to the bell-pull in the hall beside the guard, the rope that tolled the bronze bell in the belfry to summon public gatherings, or to call aid to fight fires. Death, beyond doubt, if he rang it, but that was only a fair price to pay for expiation.

His great arm flashed suddenly, sweeping the Princess from her feet and crashing her dainty figure violently against the wall. He heard her faint "O--o--oh" of pain as breath left her and she dropped slowly to her knees, but he was already upon the startled guard, thrusting him up and over the rail of the stair-well to drop with a sullen thump below. And then he threw his weight on the bellrope, and the great voice of bronze boomed out, again, and again.

But Black Margot was on her feet, with the green hell-sparks flickering in her eyes and her face a lovely mask of fury. Men came rushing up the stairs with drawn weapons, and Hull gave a last tug on the rope and turned to face death. Half a dozen weapons were on him.

"No--no!" gasped the Princess, struggling for the breath he had knocked out of her. "Hold him--for me! Take him--to the barn!"

She darted down the stairway, her graceful legs flashing bare, her bare feet padding softly. After her six grim Empire men thrust Hull past the dazed guard sitting on the lower steps and out into a night where blue beams flashed and shots and yells sounded.

Behind the barn was comparative quiet, however, by the time Hull's captors had marched him there. A closepacked mass of dark figures huddled near the mouth of the ancient tunnel, where the bushes were trampled away, and a brown-clad file of Empire woods runners surrounded them. A few figures lay sprawled on the turf, and Hull smiled a little as he saw that some were Empire men. Then his eyes strayed to the Princess where she faced a dark-haired officer.

"How many, Lebeau?"

"A hundred and forty or fifty, Your Highness."

"Not half! Why are you not pursuing the rest through the tunnel?"

"Because, Your Highness, one of them pulled the shoring and the roof down upon himself, and blocked us off. We're digging him out now."

"By then they'll have left their burrow. Where does this tunnel end?" She strode over to Hull. "Hull, where does this tunnel end?" At his silence, she added. "No matter. They'd be through it before we could reach it." She spun back. "Lebeau! Burn down what we have and the rest we'll stamp out as we can." A murmur ran through the crowd of villagers that was collecting, and her eyes, silvery green in the moonlight, flickered over them. "And any sympathizers," she added coldly. "Except this man, Hull Tarvish."

File Ornison's great voice rumbled out of the mass of prisoners. "Hull! Hull! Was this trap your doing?"

Hull made no answer, but Black Margot herself replied. "No," she snapped, "but the warning bell was."

"Then why do you spare him?"

Her eyes glittered icy green. "To kill in my own way, Weed," she said in tones so cold that it was as if a winter wind had sent a shivering breath across the spring night. "I have my own account to collect from him."

Her eyes blazed chill emerald fire into Hull's. He met her glance squarely, and said in a low voice, "Do you grant any favors to a man about to die?"

"Not by custom," she replied indifferently. "Is it the safety of the eldarch's daughter? I plan no harm to her."

"It isn't that."

"Then ask it--though I am not disposed to grant favors to you, Hull Tarvish, who have twice laid hands of violence on me."

His voice dropped almost to a whisper. "It is the lives of my companions I ask."

She raised here eyebrows in surprise, then shook her ebony flame of hair. "How can I? I remained here purposely to wipe them out. Shall I release the half I have, only to destroy them with the rest?"

"I ask their lives," he repeated.

A curious, whimsical fire danced green in her eves. "I will try," she promised, and turned to the officer, who was ranging his men so that the cross-fire of execution could not mow down his own ranks. "Lebeau!" she snapped. "Hold back a while."

She strode into the gap between the prisoners and her own men. Hand on hip she surveyed the Harriers, while moonlight lent her beauty an aura that was incredible, unearthly. There in the dusk of night she seemed no demon at all, but a girl, almost a child, and even Hull, who had learned well enough what she was, could not but sweep fascinated eyes from her jet hair to her tiny white feet.

"Now," she said, passing her glance over the group, "on my promise of amnesty, how many of you would join me?"

A stir ran through the mass. For a moment there was utter immobility, then, very slowly, two figures moved forward, and the stir became an angry murmur. Hull recognized the men; they were stragglers of the Confederation army, Ch'cago men, good fighters but merely mercenaries, changing sides as mood or advantage moved them. The murmur of the Harriers became an angry growl.

"You two," said the Princess, "are you Ormiston men?"

"No," said one. "Both of us come from the shores of Mitchin."

"Very well," she proceeded calmly. With a movement swift as arrow flight she snatched the weapon from her belt, the blue beam spat twice, and the men crumpled, one with face burned carbon-black, and both sending forth an odorous wisp of flesh-seared smoke.

She faced the aghast group. "Now," she said, "who is your leader?"

File Ormson stepped forth, scowling and grim. "What do you want of me?"

"Will you treat with me? Will your men follow your agreements?"

File nodded. "They have small choice."

"Good. Now that I have sifted the traitors from your ranks--for I will not deal with traitors--I shall make my offer." She smiled at the squat ironsmith. "I think I've served both of us by so doing," she said softly, and Hull gasped as he perceived the sweetness of the glance she bent on the scowling File. "Would you, with your great muscles and warrior's heart, follow a woman?"

The scowl vanished in surprise. "Follow you? You?"

"Yes." Hull watched her in fascination as she used her voice, her eyes, her unearthly beauty intensified by the moonlight, all on hulking File Ormson, behind whom the Harrier prisoners stood tense and silent. "Yes, I mean to follow me," she repeated softly. "You are brave men, all of you, now that I have weeded out the two cowards." She smiled wistfully, almost tenderly at the squat figure before her. "And you--you are a warrior."

"But--" File gulped, "our others--"

"I promise you need not fight against your companions. I will release any of you who will not follow me. And your lands--it is your lands you fight for, is it not? I will not touch, not one acre save the eldarch's." She paused. "Well?"

Suddenly File's booming laugh roared out. "By God!" he swore. "If you mean what you say, there's nothing to fight about! For my part, I'm with you!" He turned on his men. "Who follows me?"

The group stirred. A few stepped forward, then a few more, and then, with a shout, the whole mass. "Good!" roared File. He raised his great hard hand to his heart in the Empire salute. "To Black--to the Princess Margaret!" he bellowed. "To a warrior!"

She smiled and dropped her eyes as if in modesty. When the cheer had passed, she addressed File Ormson again. "You will send men to your others?" she asked. "Let them come in on the same terms."

"They'll come!" growled File.

The Princess nodded. "Lebeau," she called, "order off your men. These are our allies."

The Harriers began to separate, drifting away with the crowd of villagers. The Princess stepped close to Hull, smiling maliciously up into his perplexed face. He scarcely knew whether to be glad or bitter, for indeed, though she had granted his request to spare his companions, she had granted it only at the cost of the destruction of the cause for which he had sacrificed everything. There were no Harriers any more, but he was still to die for them.

"Will you die happy now?" she cooed softly.

"No man dies happy," he growled.

"I granted your wish, Hull."

"If your promises can be trusted," he retorted bitterly. "You lied coolly enough to the Ch'cago men, and you made certain they were not loved by the Harriers before you killed them."

She shrugged. "I lie, I cheat, I swindle by whatever means comes to hand," she said indifferently, "but I do not break my given word. The Harriers are safe."

Beyond her, men came suddenly from the tunnel mouth, dragging something dark behind them.

"The Weed who pulled down the roof, Your Highness," said Lebeau.

She glanced behind her, and pursed her dainty lips in surprise. "The eldarch! The dotard died bravely enough." Then she shrugged. "He had but a few more years anyway."

But Vail slipped by with a low moan of anguish, and Hull watched her kneel desolately by her father's body. A spasm of pity shook him as he realized that now she was utterly, completely alone. Enoch had died in the ambush of the previous night, old Marcus lay dead here before her, and he was condemned to death. The three who loved her and the man she loved--all slain in two nights passing. He bent a slow, helpless, pitying smile on her, but there was nothing he could do or say.

And Black Margot, after the merest glance, turned back to Hull, "Now," she said, the ice in her voice again, "I deal with you!"

He faced her dumbly. "Will you have the mercy to deal quickly, then?" he muttered at last.

"Mercy? I do not know the word where you're concerned, Hull. Or rather I have been already too merciful. I spared your life three times--once at Joaquin's request at Eaglefoot Flow, once before the guardhouse, and once up there in the hallway." She moved closer. "I cannot bear the touch of violence, Hull, and you have laid violent hands on me twice. Twice!"

"Once was to save your life," he said, "and the other to rectify my own unwitting treason. And I spared your life three times too, Black Margot--once when I aimed from the church roof, once from the ambush in the west chamber, and once but a half hour ago, for I could have killed you with this fist of mine, had I wished to strike hard enough. I owe you nothing."

She smiled coldly. "Well argued, Hull, but you die none the less in the way I wish." She turned. "Back to the house!" she commanded, and he strode away between the six guards who still flanked him.

She led them into the lower room that had been the Master's. There she sat idly in a deep chair of ancient craftsmanship, lit a black cigarette at the lamp, and thrust her slim legs carelessly before her, gazing at Hull. But he, staring through the window behind her, could see the dark blot that was Vail Ormiston weeping beside the body of her father.

"Now," said the Princess, "how would you like to die, Hull?"

"Of old age!" he snapped. "And if you will not permit that, then as quickly as possible."

"I might grant the second," she observed. "I might."

The thought of Vail was still torturing him. At last he said, "Your Highness, is your courage equal to the ordeal of facing me alone? I want to ask something that I will not ask in others' ears."

She laughed contemptuously. "Get out," she snapped at the silent guards. "Hull, do you think I fear you? I tell you your great muscles and stubborn heart are no more than those of Eblis, the black stallion. Must I prove it again to you?"

"No," he muttered. "God help me, but I know it's true. I'm not the match for Black Margot."

"Nor is any other man," she countered. Then, more softly, "But if ever I do meet the man who can conquer me, if ever he exists, he will have something of you in him, Hull. Your great, slow strength, and your stubborn honesty, and your courage. I promise that." She paused, her face now pure as a marble saint's. "So say what you have to say, Hull. What do you ask?"

"My life," he said bluntly.

Her green eyes widened in surprise. "You, Hull? You beg your life? You?"

"Not for myself," he muttered. "There's Vail Ormiston weeping over her father. Enoch, who would have married her and loved her, is dead in last night's ambush, and if I die, she's left alone. I ask my life for her."

"Her troubles mean nothing to me," said Margaret of N'Orleans coldly.

"She'll die without someone--someone to help her through this time of torment."

"Let her die, then. Why do you death-bound cling so desperately to life, only to age and die anyway? Sometimes I myself would welcome death, and I have infinitely more to live for than you. Let her die, Hull, as I think you'll die in the next moment or so!"

Her hand rested on the stock of the weapon at her belt. "I grant your second choice," she said coolly. "The quick death."

TEN.

OLD EINAR AGAIN

Black Margot ground out her cigarette with her left hand against the polished wood of the table top, but her right rested inexorably on her weapon. Hull knew beyond doubt or question that he was about to die, and for a moment he considered the thought of dying fighting, of being blasted by the beam as he flung himself at her. Then he shook his head; he revolted at the idea of again trying violence on the exquisite figure he faced, who, though witch or demon, had the passionless purity and loveliness of divinity. It was easier to die passively, simply losing his thoughts in the glare of her unearthly beauty.

She spoke. "So die, Hull Tarvish," she said gently, and drew the blunt weapon.

A voice spoke behind him, a familiar, pleasant voice. "Do I intrude, Margaret?"

He whirled. It was Old Einar, thrusting his good-humored, wrinkled visage through the opening he had made in the doorway. He grinned at Hull, flung the door wider, and slipped into the room.

"Einar!" cried the Princess, springing from her chair. "Einar Olin! Are you still in the world?" Her tones took on suddenly the note of deep pity. "But so old--so old!"

The old man took her free hand. "It is forty years since last I saw you, Margaret--and I was fifty then."

"But so old!" she repeated. "Einar, have I changed?"

He peered at her. "Not physically, my dear. But from the stories that go up and down the continent, you are hardly the gay madcap that N'Orleans worshipped as the Princess Peggy, nor even the valiant little warrior they used to call the Maid of Orleans."

She had forgotten Hull, but the guards visible through the half open door still blocked escape. He listened fascinated, for it was almost as if he saw a new Black Margot.

"Was I ever the Princess Peggy?" she murmured. "I had forgotten--Well, Martin Sair can stave off age but he cannot halt the flow of time. But Einar--Einar, you were wrong to refuse him!"

"Seeing you, Margaret, I wonder instead if I were not very wise. Youth is too great a restlessness to bear for so long a time, and you have borne it less than a century. What will you be in another fifty years? In another hundred, if Martin Sair's art keeps its power? What will you be?"

She shook her head; her green eyes grew deep and sorrowful. "I don't know, Einar. I don't know."

"Well," he said placidly, "I am old, but I am contented. I wonder if you can say as much."

"I might have been different, Einar, had you joined us. I could have loved you, Einar."

"Yes," he agreed wryly. "I was afraid of that, and it was one of the reasons for my refusal. You see, I did love you, Margaret, and I chose to outgrow the torture rather than perpetuate it. That was a painful malady, loving you, and it took all of us at one time or another. 'Flame-struck', we used to call it." He smiled reflectively. "Are any left save me of all those who loved you?"

"Just Jorgensen," she answered sadly. "That is if he has not yet killed himself in his quest for the secret of the Ancient's wings. But he will."

"Well," said Olin dryly, "my years will yet make a mock of their immortality." He pointed a gnarled finger at Hull. "What do you want of my young friend here?"

Her eyes flashed emerald, and she drew her hand from that of Old Einar. "I plan to kill him."

"Indeed? And why?"

"Why?" Her voice chilled. "Because he struck me with his hands. Twice."

The old man smiled. "I shouldn't wonder if he had cause enough, Margaret. Memory tells me that I myself have had the same impulse."

"Then it's well you never yielded, Einar. Even you."

"Doubtless. But I think I shall ask you to forgive young Hull Tarvish."

"You know his name! Is he really your friend?"

Old Einar nodded. "I ask you to forgive him."

"Why should I?" asked the Princess. "Why do you think a word from you can save him?"

"I am still Olin," said the aged one, meeting her green eyes steadily with his watery blue ones. "I still carry Joaquin's seal."

"As if that could stop me!" But the cold fire died slowly in her gaze, and again her eyes were sad. "But you are still Olin, the Father of Power," she murmured. With a sudden gesture she thrust her weapon back into her belt. "I spare him again," she said, and then, in tones gone strangely dull, "I suppose I wouldn't have killed him anyway. It is a weakness of mine that I cannot kill those who love me in a certain way--a weakness that will cost me dear some day."

Olin twisted his lips in that skull-like smile, turning to the silent youth. "Hull," he said kindly, "you must have been born under fortunate stars. But if you're curious enough to tempt your luck further, listen to this old man's advice." His smile became a grin. "Beyond the western mountains there are some very powerful, very rare hunting cats called lions, which Martin Sair says are not native to this continent, but were brought here by the Ancients to be caged and gazed at, and occasionally trained. As to that I know nothing, but I do say this, Hull--go twist the tail of a lion before you again try the wrath of Black Margot. And now get out of here."

"Not yet, Hull," snapped the Princess. "I have still my score to settle with you." She turned back to Olin. "Where do you wander now, Einar?"

"To N'Orleans. I have some knowledge to give Jorgensen, and I am homesick besides for the Great City."

He paused. "I have seen Joaquin. Selui has fallen."

"I know. I ride to meet him tonight."

"He has sent representations to Ch'cago."

"Good!" she flashed. "Then there will be fighting." Then her eyes turned dreamy. "I have never seen the saltless seas," she added wistfully, "but I wonder if they can be as beautiful as the blue Gulf beyond N'Orleans."

But Old Einar shook his thin white hair. "What will be the end of this, Margaret?" he asked gently. "After Ch'cago is taken--for you will take it--what then?"

"Then the land north of the saltless seas, and east of them. N'York, and all the cities on the ocean shore."

"And then?"

"Then South America, I suppose."

"And then, Margaret?"

"Then? There is still Europe veiled in mystery, and Asia, Africa--all the lands known to the Ancients."

"And after all of them?"

"Afterwards," she replied wearily, "we can rest. The fierce destiny that drives Joaquin surely cannot drive him beyond the boundaries of the world."

"And so," said Olin, "you fight your way around the world so you can rest at the end of the journey. Then why not rest now, Margaret? Must you pillow your head on the globe of the planet?"

Fury flamed green in her eyes. She raised her hand and struck the old man across his lips, but it must have been lightly, for he still smiled.

"Fool!" she cried. "Then I will see to it that there is always war! Between me and Joaquin, if need be--or between me and anyone--anyone--so that I fight!" She paused panting. "Leave me, Einar," she said tensely. "I do not like the things you bring to mind."

Still smiling, the old man backed away. At the door he paused. "I will see you before I die, Margaret," he promised, and was gone.

She followed him to the doorway. "Sora!" she called. "Sora! I ride!"

Hull heard the heavy tread of the fat Sora, and in a moment she entered bearing the diminutive cothurns and a pair of glistening silver gauntlets on her hands, and then she too was gone.

Slowly, almost wearily, the Princess turned to face Hull, who had as yet permitted no gleam of hope to enter his soul, for he had experienced too much of her mockery to trust the promise of safety Old Einar had won for him. He felt only the fascination that she always bound about him, the spell of her unbelievable black hair and her glorious sea-green eyes, and all her unearthly beauty.

"Hull," she said gently, "what do you think of me now?"

"I think you are a black flame blowing cold across the world. I think a demon drives you."

"And do you hate me so bitterly?"

"I pray every second to hate you."

"Then see, Hull." With her little gauntleted fingers she took his great hands and placed them about the perfect curve of her throat. "Here I give you my life for the taking. You have only to twist once with these mighty hands of yours and Black Margot will be out of the world forever." She paused. "Must I beg you?"

Hull felt as if molten metal flowed upward through his arms from the touch of her white skin. His fingers were rigid as metal bars, and all the great strength of them could not put one feather's weight of pressure on the soft throat they circled. And deep in the lambent emerald flames that burned in her eyes he saw again the fire of mockery--jeering, taunting.

"You will not?" she said, lifting away his hands, but holding them in hers. "Then you do not hate me?"

"You know I don't," he groaned.

"And you do love me?"

"Please," he muttered. "Is it necessary again to torture me? I need no proof of your mastery."

"Then say you love me."

"Heaven forgive me for it;" he whispered, "but I do!"

She dropped his hands and smiled. "Then listen to me, Hull. You love little Vail with a truer love, and month by month memory fades before reality. After a while there will be nothing left in you of Black Margot, but there will be always Vail. I go now hoping never to see you again, but"--and her eyes chilled to green ice--"before I go I settle my score with you."

She raised her gauntleted hand. "This for your treachery!" she said, and struck him savagely across his right check. Blood spouted, there would be scars, but he stood stolid. "This for your violence!" she said, and the silver gauntlet tore his left check. Then her eyes softened. "And this," she murmured, "for your love!"

Her arms circled him, her body was warm against him, and her exquisite lips burned against his. He felt as if he embraced a flame for a moment, and then she was gone, and a part of his soul went with her. When he heard the hooves of the stallion Eblis pounding beyond the window, he turned and walked slowly out of the house to where Vail still crouched beside her father's body. She clung to him, wiped the blood from his cheeks, and strangely, her words were not of her father, nor of the sparing of Hull's life, but of Black Margot.

"I knew you lied to save me," she murmured. "I knew you never loved her."

And Hull, in whom there was no falsehood, drew her close to him and said nothing.

But Black Margot rode north from Selui through the night. In the sky before her were thin shadows leading phantom armies, Alexander the Great, Attila, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon, and clearer than all, the battle queen Semiramis. All the mighty conquerors of the past, and where were they, where were their empires, and where, even, were their bones? Far in the south were the graves of men who had loved her, all except Old Einar, who tottered like a feeble grey ghost across the world to find his.

At her side Joaquin Smith turned as if to speak, stared, and remained silent. He was not accustomed to the sight of tears in the eyes and on the cheeks of Black Margot.

(All conversation ascribed to the Princess Margaret in this story is taken verbatim from an anonymous volume published in Urbs in the year 186, called "Loves of the Black Flame." It is credited to Jacques Lebeau, officer in command of the Black Flame's personal guard.)

THE END

Contents

PROTEUS ISLAND

by Stanley G. Weinbaum

The brown Maori in the bow of the outrigger stared hard at Austin Island slowly swimming nearer; then he twisted to fix his anxious brown eyes on Carver. "Taboo!" he exclaimed. "Taboo! Aussitan taboo!"

Carver regarded him without change of expression. He lifted his gaze to the island. With an air of sullen brooding the Maori returned to his stroke. The second Polynesian threw the zoologist a pleading look.

"Taboo," he said. "Aussitan taboo!"

The white man studied him briefly, but said nothing. The soft brown eyes fell and the two bent to their work. But as Carver stared eagerly shoreward there was a mute, significant exchange between the natives.

The proa slid over green combers toward the foam-skirted island, then began to sheer off as if reluctant to approach. Carver's jaw squared. "Malloa! Put in, you chocolate pig. Put in, do you hear?"

He looked again at the land. Austin Island was not traditionally sacred, but these natives had a fear of it for some reason. It was not the concern of a zoologist to discover why. The island was uninhabited and had been charted only recently. He noted the fern forests ahead, like those of New Zealand, the Kauri pine and dammar--dark wood hills, a curve of white beach, and between them a moving dot--an apteryx mantelli, thought Carver--a kiwi.

The proa worked cautiously shoreward.

"Taboo," Malloa kept whispering. "Him plenty bunyip!"

"Hope there is," the white man grunted. "I'd hate to go back to Jameson and the others at Macquarie without at least one little bunyip, or anyway a ghost of a fairy." He grinned. "Bunyip Carveris. Not bad, eh? Look good in natural-history books with pictures."

On the approaching beach the kiwi scuttled for the forest--if it was a kiwi after all. It looked queer, somehow, and Carver squinted after it. Of course, it had to be an apteryx; these islands of the New Zealand group were too deficient in fauna for it to be anything else. One variety of dog, one sort of rat, and two species of bat--that covered the mammalian life of New Zealand.

Of course, there were the imported cats, pigs and rabbits that ran wild on the North and Middle Islands, but not here. Not on the Aucklands, not on Macquarie, least of all here on Austin, out in the lonely sea between Macquarie and the desolate Balleny Islands, far down on the edge of Antarctica. No; the scuttling dot must have been a kiwi.

The craft grounded. Kolu, in the bow, leaped like a brown flash to the beach and drew the proa above the gentle inwash of the waves. Carver stood up and stepped out, then paused sharply at a moan from Malloa in the stern.

"See!" he gulped. "The trees, wahi! The bunyip trees!"

Carver followed his pointing figure. The trees--what about them? There they were beyond the beach as they had fringed the sands of Macquarie and of the Aucklands. Then he frowned. He was no botanist; that was Halburton's field, back with Jameson and the Fortune at Macquarie Island. He was a zoologist, aware only generally of the variations of flora. Yet he frowned.

The trees were vaguely queer. In the distance they had resembled the giant ferns and towering kauri pine that one would expect. Yet here, close at hand, they had a different aspect--not a markedly different one, it is true, but none the less, a strangeness. The kauri pines were not exactly kauri, nor were the tree ferns quite the same Cryptogamia that flourished on the Aucklands and Macquarie. Of course, those islands were many miles away to the north, and certain local variations might be expected. All the same--

"Mutants," he muttered, frowning. "Tends to substantiate Darwin's isolation theories. I'll have to take a couple of specimens back to Halburton."

"Wahi," said Kolu nervously, "we go back now?"

"Now!" exploded Carver. "We just got here! Do you think we came all the way from Macquarie for one look? We stay here a day or two, so I have a chance to take a look at this place's animal life. What's the matter, anyway?"

"The trees, wahi!" wailed Malloa. "Bunyip!--the walking trees, the talking trees!"

"Bah! Walking and talking, eh?" He seized a stone from the pebbled beach and sent it spinning into the nearest mass of dusky green. "Let's hear 'em say a few cuss words, then."

The stone tore through leaves and creepers, and the gentle crash died into motionless silence. Or not entirely motionless; for a moment something dark and tiny fluttered there, and then soared briefly into black silhouette against the sky. It was small as a sparrow, but bat-like, with membranous wings. Yet Carver stared at it amazed, for it trailed a twelve-inch tail, thin as a pencil, but certainly an appendage no normal bat ought to possess.

For a moment or two the creature fluttered awkwardly in the sunlight, its strange tail lashing, and then it swooped again into the dusk of the forest whence his missile had frightened it. There was only an echo of its wild, shrill cry remaining, something that sounded like "Wheer! Whe-e-e-r!"

"What the devil!" said Carver. "There are two species of Chiroptera in New Zealand and neighboring islands, and that was neither of them! No bat has a tail like that!"

Kolu and Malloa were wailing in chorus. The creature had been too small to induce outright panic, but it had flashed against the sky with a sinister appearance of abnormality. It was a monstrosity, an aberration, and the minds of Polynesians were not such as to face unknown strangeness without fear. Nor for that matter, reflected Carver, were the minds of whites; he shrugged away a queer feeling of apprehension. It would be sheer stupidity to permit the fears of Kolu and Malloa to influence a perfectly sane zoologist.

"Shut up!" he snapped. "We'll have to trap that fellow, or one of his cousins. I'll want a specimen of his tribe. Rhimolophidae, I'll bet a trade dollar, but a brand-new species. We'll net one tonight."

The voices of the two brown islanders rose in terror. Carver cut in sharply on the protests and expostulations and fragmentary descriptions of the horrors of bunyips, walking and talking trees, and the bat-winged spirits of evil.

"Come on," he said gruffly. "Turn out the stuff in the proa. I'll look along the beach for a stream of fresh water. Mawson reported water on the north side of the island."

Malloa and Kolu were muttering as he turned away. Before him the beach stretched white in the late afternoon sun; at his left rolled the blue Pacific and at his right slumbered the strange, dark, dusky quarter; he noted curiously the all but infinite variety of the vegetable forms, marveling that there was scarcely a tree or shrub that he could identify with any variety common on Macquarie or the Aucklands, or far-away New Zealand. But, of course, he mused, he was no botanist.

Anyway, remote islands often produced their own particular varieties of flora and fauna. That was part of Darwin's original evolution theory, this idea of isolation. Look at Mauritius and its dodo, and the Galapagos turtles, or for that matter, the kiwi of New Zealand, or the gigantic, extinct moa. And yet--he frowned over the thought--one never found an island that was entirely covered by its own unique forms of plant life. Windblown seeds of ocean borne debris always caused an interchange of vegetation among islands; birds carried seeds clinging to their feathers, and even the occasional human visitors aided in the exchange.

Besides, a careful observer like Mawson in 1911 would certainly have reported the peculiarities of Austin Island. He hadn't; nor, for that matter, had the whalers, who touched here at intervals as they headed into the antarctic, brought back any reports. Of course, whalers had become very rare of late years; it might have been a decade or more since one had made anchorage at Austin. Yet what change could have occurred in ten or fifteen years?

Carver came suddenly upon a narrow tidal arm into which dropped a tinkling trickle of water from a granite ledge at the verge of the jungle. He stooped, moistened his finger, and tasted it. It was brackish but drinkable, and therefore quite satisfactory. He could hardly expect to find a larger stream on Austin, since the watershed was too small on an island only seven miles by three. With his eyes he followed the course of the brook up into the tangle of fern forest, and a flash of movement arrested his eyes. For a moment he gazed in complete incredulity, knowing that he couldn't possibly be seeing--what he was seeing!

The creature had apparently been drinking at the brink of the stream, for Carver glimpsed it first in kneeling position. That was part of the surprise--the fact that it was kneeling--for no animal save man ever assumes that attitude, and this being, whatever it might be, was not human.

Wild, yellow eyes glared back at him, and the thing rose to an erect posture. It was a biped, a small travesty of man, standing no more than twenty inches in height. Little clawed fingers clutched at hanging creepers. Carver had a shocked glimpse of a body covered in patches with ragged gray fur, of an agile tail, of needle-sharp teeth in a little red mouth. But mostly he saw only malevolent yellow eyes and a face that was not human, yet had a hideous suggestion of humanity gone wild, a stunning miniature synthesis of manlike and feline characteristics. Carver had spent much time in the wastelands of the planet. His reaction was almost in the nature of a reflex, without thought or volition; his blue-barreled gun leaped and flashed as if it moved of itself. This automatism was a valuable quality in the wilder portions of the earth; more than once he had saved his life by shooting first when startled, and reflecting afterward. But the quickness of the reaction did not lend itself to accuracy.

His bullet tore a leaf at the very cheek of the creature. The thing snarled, and then, with a final flash of yellow flame from its wild eyes, leaped headlong into the tangle of foliage and vanished.

Carver whistled. "What in Heaven's name," he muttered aloud, "was that?" But he had small time for reflection; long shadows and an orange tint to the afternoon light warned that darkness--sudden, twilightless darkness--was near. He turned back along the curving beach toward the outrigger.

A low coral spit hid the craft and the two Maoris, and the ridge jutted like a bar squarely across the face of the descending sun. Carver squinted against the light and trudged thoughtfully onward--to freeze into sudden immobility at the sound of a terrified scream from the direction of the proa!

He broke into a run. It was no more than a hundred yards to the coral ridge, but so swiftly did the sun drop in these latitudes that dusk seemed to race him to the crest. Shadows skittered along the beach as he leaped to the top and stared frantically toward the spot where his craft had been beached.

Something was there. A box--part of the provisions from the proa. But the proa itself--was gone!

Then he saw it, already a half dozen cables' lengths out in the bay. Malloa was crouching in the stern, Kolu was partly hidden by the sail, as the craft moved swiftly and steadily out toward the darkness gathering in the north.

His first impulse was to shout, and shout he did. Then he realized that they were beyond earshot, and very deliberately, he fired his revolver three times. Twice he shot into the air, but since Malloa cast not even a glance backward, the third bullet he sent carefully in the direction of the fleeing pair. Whether or not it took effect he could not tell, but the proa only slid more swiftly into the black distance.

He stared in hot rage after the deserters until even the white sail had vanished; then he ceased to swear, sat glumly on the single box they had unloaded, and fell to wondering what had frightened them. But that was something he never discovered.

Full darkness settled. In the sky appeared the strange constellations of the heaven's under hemisphere; southeast glowed the glorious Southern Cross, and south the mystic Clouds of Magellan. But Carver had no eyes for these beauties; he was already long familiar with the aspect of the Southern skies.

He mused over his situation. It was irritating rather than desperate, for he was armed, and even had he not been, there was no dangerous animal life on these tiny islands south of the Aucklands, nor, excepting man, on New Zealand itself. But not even man lived in the Aucklands, or on Macquarie, or here on remote Austin. Malloa and Kolu had been terrifically frightened, beyond doubt; but it took very little to rouse the superstitious fears of a Polynesian. A strange species of bat was enough, or even a kiwi passing in the shadows of the brush, or merely their own fancies, stimulated by whatever wild tales had ringed lonely Austin Island with taboos.

And as for rescue, that too was certain. Malloa and Kolu might recover their courage and return for him. If they didn't, they still might make for Macquarie Island and the Fortune expedition. Even if they did what he supposed they naturally would do--head for the Aucklands, and then to their home on the Chathams--still Jameson would begin to worry in three or four days, and there'd be a search made.

There was no danger, he told himself--nothing to worry about. Best thing to do was simply to go about his work. Luckily, the box on which he sat was the one that contained his cyanide jar for insect specimens, nets, traps, and snares. He could proceed just as planned, except that he'd have to devote some of his time to hunting and preparing food.

Carver lighted his pipe, set about building a fire of the plentiful driftwood, and prepared for the night. He delivered himself of a few choice epithets descriptive of the two Maoris as he realized that his comfortable sleeping bag was gone with the proa, but the fire would serve against the chill of the high Southern latitude. He puffed his pipe reflectively to its end, lay down near his driftwood blaze, and prepared to sleep.

When, seven hours and fifty minutes later, the edge of the sun dented the eastern horizon, he was ready to admit that the night was something other than a success. He was hardened to the tiny, persistent fleas that skipped out of the sand, and his skin had long been toughened to the bloodthirsty night insects of the islands. Yet he had made a decided failure at the attempt to sleep.

Why? It surely couldn't be nervousness over the fact of strange surroundings and loneliness. Alan Carver had spent too many nights in wild and solitary places for that. Yet the night sounds had kept him in a perpetual state of half-wakeful apprehension, and at least a dozen times he had started to full consciousness in a sweat of nervousness. Why?

He knew why. It was the night sounds themselves. Not their loudness nor their menace, but their--well, their variety. He knew what darkness ought to bring forth in the way of noises; he knew every bird call and bat squeak indigenous to these islands. But the noises of night here on Austin Island had refused to conform to his pattern of knowledge. They were strange, unclassified, and far more varied than they should have been; and yet, even through the wildest cry, he fancied a disturbing note of familiarity.

Carver shrugged. In the clear daylight his memories of the night seemed like foolish and perverse notions, quite inexcusable in the mind of one as accustomed to lonely places as himself. He heaved his powerful form erect, stretched, and gazed toward the matted tangle of plant life under the tree ferns.

He was hungry, and somewhere in there was breakfast, either fruit or bird. Those represented the entire range of choice, since he was not at present hungry enough to consider any of the other possible variations--rat, bat, or dog. That covered the fauna of these islands.

Did it, indeed? He frowned as sudden remembrance struck him. What of the wild, yellow-eyed imp that had snarled at him from the brookside? He had forgotten that in the excitement of the desertion of Kolu and Malloa. That was certainly neither bat, rat, nor dog. What was it?

Still frowning, he felt his gun, glancing to assure himself of its readiness The two Maoris might have been frightened away by an imaginary menace, but the thing by the brook was something he could not ascribe to superstition. He had seen that. He frowned more deeply as he recalled the tailed bat of earlier in the preceding evening. That was no native fancy either.

He strode toward the fern forest. Suppose Austin Island did harbor a few mutants, freaks, and individual species. What of it? So much the better; it justified the Fortune expedition. It might contribute to the fame of one Alan Carver, zoologist, if he were the first to report this strange, insular animal world. And yet--it was queer that Mawson had said nothing of it, nor had the whalers.

At the edge of the forest he stopped short. Suddenly he perceived what was responsible for its aspect of queerness. He saw what Malloa had meant when he gestured toward the trees. He gazed incredulously, peering from tree to tree. It was true. There were no related species. There were no two trees alike. Not two alike. Each was individual in leaf, bark, stem. There were no two the same. No two trees were alike!

But that was impossible. Botanist or not, he knew the impossibility of it. It was all the more impossible on a remote islet where inbreeding must of necessity take place. The living forms might differ from those of other islands, but not from each other--at least, not in such incredible profusion. The number of species must be limited by the very intensity of competition on an island. Must be!

Carver stepped back a half dozen paces, surveying the forest wall. It was true. There were ferns innumerable; there were pines; there were deciduous trees--but there were, in the hundred yard stretch he could scan accurately, no two alike! No two, even, with enough similarity to be assigned to the same species, perhaps not even to the same genus.

He stood frozen in uncomprehending bewilderment. What was the meaning of it? What was the origin of this unnatural plenitude of species and genera? How could any one of the numberless forms reproduce unless there were somewhere others of its kind to fertilize it? It was true, of course, that blossoms on the same tree could cross-fertilize each other, but where, then, were the offspring? It is a fundamental aspect of nature that from acorns spring oaks, and from kauri cones spring kauri pines.

In utter perplexity, he turned along the beach, edging away from the wash of the waves into which he had almost backed. The solid wall of forest was immobile save where the sea breeze ruffled its leaves, but all that Carver saw was the unbelievable variety of those leaves. Nowhere--nowhere--was there a single tree that resembled any he had seen before.

There were compound leaves, and digitate, palmate, cordate, acuminate, bipinnate, and ensiform ones. There were specimens of every variety he could name, and even a zoologist can name a number if he has worked with a botanist like Halburton. But there were no specimens that looked as if they might be related, however distantly, to any one of the others. It was as if, on Austin Island, the walls between the genera had dissolved, and only the grand divisions remained.

Carver had covered nearly a mile along the beach before the pangs of hunger recalled his original mission to his mind. He had to have food of some sort, animal or vegetable. With a feeling of distinct relief, he eyed the beach birds quarreling raucously up and down the sand; at least, they were perfectly normal representatives of the genus Larus. But they made, at best, but tough and oily fare, and his glance returned again to the mysterious woodlands.

He saw now a trail or path, or perhaps just a chance thinning of the vegetation along a subsoil ridge of rock, that led into the green shades, slanting toward the forested hill at the western end of the island. That offered the first convenient means of penetration he had encountered, and in a moment he was slipping through the dusky aisle, watching sharply for either fruit or bird.

He saw fruit in plenty. Many of the trees bore globes and ovoids of various sizes, but the difficulty, so far as Carver was concerned, was that he saw none he could recognize as edible. He dared not chance biting into some poisonous variety, and Heaven alone knew what wild and deadly alkaloids this queer island might produce.

Birds fluttered and called in the branches, but for the moment he saw none large enough to warrant a bullet. And besides, another queer fact had caught his attention; he noticed that the farther he proceeded from the sea, the more bizarre became the infinite forms of the trees of the forest. Along the beach he had been able at least to assign an individual growth to its family, if not its genus, but here even those distinctions began to vanish.

He knew why. "The coastal growths are crossed with strays from other islands," he muttered. "But in here they've run wild. The whole island's run wild."

The movement of a dark mass against the leaf-sprinkled sky caught his attention. A bird? If it were, it was a much larger one than the inconsiderable passerine songsters that fluttered about him. He raised his revolver carefully, and fired.

The weird forest echoed to the report. A body large as a duck crashed with a long, strange cry, thrashed briefly among the grasses of the forest floor, and was still. Carver hurried forward to stare in perplexity at his victim.

It was not a bird. It was a climbing creature of some sort, armed with viciously sharp claws and wicked, needle-pointed white teeth in a triangular little red mouth. It resembled quite closely a small dog--if one could imagine a tree-climbing dog--and for a moment Carver froze in surprise at the thought that he had inadvertently shot somebody's mongrel terrier, or at least some specimen of Canis.

But the creature was no dog. Even disregarding its plunge from the treetops, Carver could see that. The retractile claws, five on the forefeet, four on the hind, were evidence enough, but stronger still was the evidence of those needle teeth. This was one of the Felidae. He could see further proof in the yellow, slitted eyes that glared at him in moribund hate, to lose their fire now in death. This was no dog, but a cat!

His mind flashed to that other apparition on the bank of the stream. That had borne a wild aspect of feline nature, too. What was the meaning of it? Cats that looked like monkeys; cats that looked like dogs!

He had lost his hunger. After a moment he picked up the furry body and set off toward the beach. The zoologist had superseded the man; this dangling bit of disintegrating protoplasm was no longer food, but a rare specimen. He had to get to the beach to do what he could to preserve it. It would be named after him--Felis Carveri--doubtless.

A sound behind him brought him to an abrupt halt. He peered cautiously back through the branch-roofed tunnel. He was being trailed. Something, bestial or human, lurked back there in the forest shadows. He saw it --or them--dimly, as formless as darker shades in the shifting array that marked the wind-stirred leaves.

For the first time, the successive mysteries began to induce a sense of menace. He increased his pace. The shadows slid and skittered behind him, and, lest he ascribe the thing to fancy, a low cry of some sort, a subdued howl, rose in the dusk of the forest at his left, and was answered at his right.

He dared not run, knowing that the appearance of fear too often brought a charge from both beasts and primitive humans. He moved as quickly as he could without the effect of flight from danger, and at last saw the beach. There in the opening he would at least distinguish his pursuers, if they chose to attack.

But they didn't. He backed away from the wall of vegetation, but no forms followed him. Yet they were there. All the way back to the box and the remains of his fire, he knew that just within the cover of the leaves lurked wild forms.

The situation began to prey on his mind. He couldn't simply remain on the beach indefinitely, waiting for an attack. Sooner or later he'd have to sleep, and then--Better to provoke the attack at once, see what sort of creatures he faced, and try to drive them off or exterminate them. He had, after all, plenty of ammunition.

He raised his gun, aimed at the skittering shadow, and fired. There was a howl that was indubitably bestial; before it had quivered into silence, others answered. Then Carver started violently backward, as the bushes quivered to the passage of bodies, and he saw what sort of beings had lurked there.

A line of perhaps a dozen forms leaped from the fringe of underbrush to the sand. For the space of a breath they were motionless, and Carver knew that he was in the grip of a zoologist's nightmare, for no other explanation was at all adequate.

The pack was vaguely doglike; but by no means did its members resemble the indigenous hunting dogs of New Zealand, nor the dingoes of Australia. Nor, for that matter, did they resemble any other dogs in his experience, nor, if the truth be told, any dogs at all, except perhaps in their lupine method of attack, their subdued yelps, their slavering mouths, and the arrangement of their teeth--what Carver could see of that arrangement.

But the fact that bore home to him now was another stunning repetition of all his observations of Austin Island--they did not resemble each other! Indeed, it occurred to Carver with the devastating force of a blow that, so far on this mad island, he had seen no two living creatures, animal or vegetable, that appeared to belong to related species!

The nondescript pack inched forward. He saw the wildest extremes among the creatures--beings with long hind legs and short forelimbs; a creature with hairless, thorn-scarred skin and a face like the half-human visage of a werewolf; a tiny, rat-sized thing that yelped with a shrill, yapping voice; and a mighty, barrel-chested creature whose body seemed almost designed for erect posture, and who loped on its hinder limbs with its fore-paws touching the ground at intervals like the knuckles of an orangutan. That particular being was a horrible, yellow-fanged monstrosity, and Carver chose it for his first bullet.

The thing dropped without a sound; the slug had split its skull. As the report echoed back and forth between the hills on the east and west extremities of Austin, the pack answered with a threatening chorus of bays, howls, growls, and shrieks. They shrank back momentarily from their companion's body, then came menacingly forward.

Again Carver fired. A red-eyed hopping creature yelped and crumpled. The line halted nervously, divided now by two dead forms. Their cries were no more than a muffled growling as they eyed him with red and yellowish orbs.

He started suddenly as a different sound rose, a cry whose nature he could not determine, though it seemed to come from a point where the forested bank rose sharply in a little cliff. It was as if some watcher urged on the nondescript pack, for they gathered courage again to advance. And it was at this moment that a viciously flung stone caught the man painfully on the shoulder.

He staggered, then scanned the line of brush. A missile meant humankind. The mad island harbored something more than aberrant beasts.

A second cry sounded, and another stone hummed past his ear. But this time he had caught the flash of movement at the top of the cliff, and he fired instantly.

There was a scream. A human figure reeled from the cover of foliage, swayed, and pitched headlong into the brush at the base, ten feet below. The pack of creatures broke howling, as if their courage had vanished before this evidence of power. They fled like shadows into the forest.

But something about the figure that had fallen from the cliff struck Carver as strange. He frowned, waiting a moment to assure himself that the nondescript pack had fled, and that no other menace lurked in the brush, then he darted toward the place where his assailant had fallen.

The figure was human, beyond doubt--or was it? Here on this mad island where species seemed to take any form, Carver hesitated to make even that assumption. He bent over his fallen foe, who lay face down, then turned the body over. He stared.

It was a girl. Her face, still as the features of the Buddha of Nikko, was young and lovely as a Venetian bronze figurine, with delicate features that even in unconsciousness had a wildness apparent in them. Her eyes, closed though they were, betrayed a slight, dryadlike slant.

The girl was white, though her skin was sun-darkened almost to a golden hue. Carver was certain of her color, nevertheless, for at the edges of her single garment--an untanned hide of leopard-like fur, already stiffening and cracking--her skin showed whiter.

Had he killed her? Curiously perturbed, he sought for the wound, and found it, at last, in a scarcely bleeding graze above her right knee. His shot had merely spun her off balance; it was the ten-foot fall from the cliff that had done the damage, of which the visible evidence was a reddening bruise of her left temple. But she was living. He swung her hastily into his arms and bore her across the beach, away from the brush in which her motley pack was doubtless still lurking.

He shook his nearly empty canteen, then tilted her head to pour water between her lips. Instantly her eyes flickered open, and for a moment she stared quite uncomprehendingly into Carver's eyes, not twelve inches from her own. Then her eyes widened, not so much in terror as in startled bewilderment; she twisted violently from his arms, tried twice to rise, and twice fell back as her legs refused to support her. At last she lay quite passive, keeping her fascinated gaze on his face.

But Carver received a shock as well. As her lids lifted, he started at the sight of the eyes behind them. They were unexpected, despite the hint given by their ever-so-faint Oriental cast, for they flamed upon him in a tawny hue. They were amber, almost golden, and wild as the eyes of a votary of Pan. She watched the zoologist with the intentness of a captive bird, but not with a bird's timidity, for he saw her hand fumbling for the pointed stick or wooden knife in the thong about her waist.

He proffered the canteen, and she shrank away from his extended hand. He shook the container, and at the sound of gurgling liquid, she took it gingerly, tilted a trickle into her hand, and then, to Carver's surprise, smelled it, her dainty nostrils flaring as widely as her diminutive, uptilted nose permitted. After a moment she drank from her cupped palm, poured another trickle, and drank that. It did not occur to her, apparently, to drink from the canteen.

Her mind cleared. She saw the two motionless bodies of the slain creatures, and murmured a low sound of sorrow. When she moved as if to rise, her gashed knee pained her, and she turned her strange eyes on Carver with a renewed expression of fear. She indicated the red streak of the injury.

"C'm on?" she said with a questioning inflection. Carver realized that the sound resembled English words through accident only. "Where to?" He grinned.

She shook a puzzled head. "Bu-r-r-o-o-on!" she said "Zee-e-e!"

He understood that. It was her attempt to imitate the sound of his shot and the hum of the bullet. He tapped the revolver. "Magic!" he said warningly. "Bad medicine. Better be good girl, see?" It was obvious that she didn't understand. "Thumbi?" he tried. "You Maori?" No result save a long look from slanting, golden eyes. "Well," he grunted, "Sprechen zie Deutsch, then? Or Kanaka? Or--what the devil! That's all I know--Latinum intelligisne?"

"C'm on?" she said faintly, her eyes on the gun. She rubbed the scratch on her leg and the bruise on her temple, apparently ascribing both to the weapon.

"All right," Carver acceded grimly. He reflected that it could do no harm to impress the girl with his powers. "I'll come on. Watch this!"

He leveled his weapon at the first target he saw--a dead branch that jutted from a drifted log at the end of the coral spit. It was thick as his arm, but it must have been thoroughly rotted, for instead of stripping a bit of bark as he expected, the heavy slug shattered the entire branch.

"O-o-oh!" gasped the girl, clapping her hands over her ears. Her eyes flickered sidewise at him; then she scrambled wildly to her feet. She was in sheer panic.

"No, you don't!" he snapped. He caught her arm. "You stay right here!"

For a moment he was amazed at the lithe strength of her. Her free arm flashed upward with the wooden dagger, and he caught that wrist as well. Her muscles were like tempered steel wires. She twisted frantically; then, with sudden yielding, stood quietly in his grasp, as if she thought, "What use to struggle with a god?"

He released her. "Sit down!" he growled.

She obeyed his gesture rather than his voice. She sat on the sand before him, gazing up with a trace of fear but more of wariness in her honey-hued eyes.

"Where are your people?" he asked sharply, pointing at her and then waving in an inclusive gesture at the forest.

She stared without comprehension, and he varied his symbolism. "Your home, then?" he pantomimed the act of sleeping.

The result was the same, simply a troubled look from her glorious eyes.

"Now what the devil!" he muttered. "You have a name, haven't you? A name? Look!" He tapped his chest. "Alan. Get it? Alan. Alan."

That she understood instantly. "Alan," she repeated dutifully, looking up at him.

But when he attempted to make her assign a name to herself, he failed utterly. The only effect of his efforts was a deepening of the perplexity in her features. He reverted, at last, to the effort to make her indicate in some fashion the place of her home and people, varying his gestures in every way he could devise. And at last she seemed to comprehend.

She rose doubtfully to her feet and uttered a strange, low, mournful cry. It was answered instantly from the brush, and Carver stiffened as he saw the emergence of that same motley pack of nondescript beings. They must have been watching, lurking just beyond view. Again they circled the two slain members as they advanced.

Carver whipped out his revolver. His movement was followed by a wail of anguish from the girl, who flung herself before him, arms outspread as if to shield the wild pack from the menace of the weapon. She faced him fearfully, yet defiantly, and there was puzzled questioning in her face as well. It was as if she accused the man of ordering her to summon her companions only to threaten them with death.

He stared. "O.K.," he said at last. "What's a couple of rare specimens on an island that's covered with 'em? Send 'em away."

She obeyed his gesture of command. The weird pack slunk silently from view, and the girl backed hesitantly away as if to follow them, but halted abruptly at Carver's word. Her attitude was a curious one, partly fear, but more largely composed, it seemed, of a sort of fascination, as if she did not quite understand the zoologist's nature.

This was a feeling he shared to a certain extent, for there was certainly something mysterious in encountering a white girl on this mad Austin Island. It was as if there were one specimen, and only one, of every species in the world here on this tiny islet, and she were the representative of humanity. But still he frowned perplexedly into her wild, amber eyes.

It occurred to him again that on the part of Austin he had traversed he had seen no two creatures alike. Was this girl, too, a mutant, a variant of some species other than human, who had through mere chance adopted a perfect human form? As, for instance, the doglike cat whose body still lay on the sand where he had flung it. Was she, perhaps, the sole representative of the human form on the island, Eve before Adam, in the garden? There had been a woman before Adam, he mused.

"We'll call you Lilith," he said thoughtfully. The name fitted her wild, perfect features and her flame-hued eyes. Lilith, the mysterious being whom Adam found before him in Paradise, before Eve was created. "Lilith," he repeated. "Alan--Lilith. See?"

She echoed the sounds and the gesture. Without question she accepted the name he had given her, and that she understood the sound as a name was evident by her response to it. For when he uttered it a few minutes later, her amber eyes flashed instantly to his face and remained in a silent question.

Carver laughed and resumed his puzzled thoughts. Reflectively, he produced his pipe and packed it, then struck a match and lighted it. He was startled by a low cry from the girl Lilith, and looked up to see her extended hand. For a moment he failed to perceive what she sought, and then her fingers closed around the hissing stem of the match! She had tried to seize the flame as one takes a fluttering bit of cloth.

She screamed in pain and fright. At once the pack of nondescripts appeared at the edge of the forest, voicing their howls of anger, and Carver whirled again to meet them. But again Lilith, recovering from the surprise of the burn, halted the pack with her voice, and sent them slinking away into the shadows. She sucked her scorched fingers and turned widened eyes to his face. He realized with a start of disbelief that the girl did not comprehend fire!

There was a bottle of alcohol in the box of equipment; he produced it and, taking Lilith's hand, bound a moistened strip of handkerchief about her two blistered fingers, though he knew well enough that alcohol was a poor remedy for burns. He applied the disinfectant to the bullet graze on her knee; she moaned softly at the sting, then smiled as it lessened, while her strange amber eyes followed fixedly the puffs of smoke from his pipe, and her nostrils quivered to the pungent tobacco odor.

"Now what," queried Carver, smoking reflectively, "am I going to do with you?"

Lilith had apparently no suggestion. She simply continued her wide-eyed regard.

"At least," he resumed, "you ought to know what's good to eat on this crazy island. You do eat, don't you?" He pantomimed the act.

The girl understood instantly. She rose, stepped to the spot where the body of the doglike cat lay, and seemed for an instant to sniff its scent. Then she removed the wooden knife from her girdle, placed one bare foot upon the body, and hacked and tore a strip of flesh from it. She extended the bloody chunk to him, and was obviously surprised at his gesture of refusal.

After a moment she withdrew it, glanced again at his face, and set her own small white teeth in the meat. Carver noted with interest how daintily she managed even that difficult maneuver, so that her soft lips were not stained by the slightest drop of blood.

But his own hunger was unappeased. He frowned over the problem of conveying his meaning, but at last hit upon a means. "Lilith!" he said sharply. Her eyes flashed at once to him. He indicated the meat she held, then waved at the mysterious line of trees. "Fruit," he said. "Tree meat. See?" He went through the motions of eating.

Again the girl understood instantly. It was odd, he mused, how readily she comprehended some things, while others equally simple seemed utterly beyond her. Queer, as everything on Austin Island was queer. Was Lilith, after all, entirely human? He followed her to the tree line, stealing a sidelong look at her wild, flame-colored eyes, and her features, beautiful, but untamed, dryadlike, elfin--wild.

She scrambled up the crumbling embankment and seemed to vanish magically into the shadows. For a moment Carver felt a surge of alarm as he clambered desperately after her; she could elude him here as easily as if she were indeed a shadow herself. True, he had no moral right to restrain her, save the hardly tenable one given by her attack; but he did not want to lose her--not yet. Or perhaps not at all.

"Lilith!" he shouted as he topped the cliff.

She appeared almost at his elbow. Above them twined a curious vine like a creeping conifer of some kind, bearing white-greenish fruits the size and shape of a pullet's egg. Lilith seized one, halved it with agile fingers, and raised a portion to her nostrils. She sniffed carefully, daintily, then flung the fruit away.

"Pah bo!" she said, wrinkling her nose distastefully.

She found another sort of queerly unprepossessing fruit composed of five finger-like protuberances from a fibrous disk, so that the whole bore the appearance of a large, malformed hand. This she sniffed as carefully as she had the other, then smiled sidewise up at him.

"Bo!" she said, extending it.

Carver hesitated. After all, it was not much more than an hour ago that the girl had been trying to kill him. Was it not entirely possible that she was now pursuing the same end, offering him a poisonous fruit?

She shook the unpleasantly bulbous object. "Bo!" she repeated, and then, exactly as if she understood his hesitancy, she broke off one of the fingers and thrust it into her own mouth. She smiled at him.

"Good enough, Lilith." He grinned, taking the remainder.

It was much pleasanter to the tongue than to the eye. The pulp had a tart sweetness that was vaguely familiar to him, but he could not quite identify the taste. Nevertheless, encouraged by Lilith's example, he ate until his hunger was appeased.

The encounter with Lilith and her wild pack had wiped out thoughts of his mission. Striding back toward the beach he frowned, remembering that he was here as Alan Carver, zoologist, and in no other role. Yet--where could he begin? He was here to classify and to take specimens, but what was he to do on a mad island where every creature was of an unknown variety? There was no possibility of classification here, because there were no classes. There was only one of everything--or so it appeared.

Rather than set about a task futile on the very face of it, Carver turned his thoughts another way. Somewhere on Austin was the secret of this riotous disorder, and it seemed better to seek the ultimate key than to fritter away his time at the endless task of classifying. He would explore the island. Some strange volcanic gas, he mused vaguely, or some queer radioactive deposit--analogous to Morgan's experiments with X-rays on germ plasm. Or--or something else. There must be some answer.

"Come on, Lilith," he ordered, and set off toward the west, where the hill seemed to be higher than the opposing eminence at the island's eastern extremity.

The girl followed with her accustomed obedience, with her honey-hued eyes fastened on Carver in that curious mixture of fear, wonder, and--perhaps--a dawning light of worship.

The zoologist was not too preoccupied with the accumulation of mysteries to glance occasionally at the wild beauty of her face, and once he caught himself trying to picture her in civilized attire--her mahogany hair confined under one of the current tiny hats, her lithe body sheathed in finer textile than the dried and cracking skin she wore, her feet in dainty leather, and her ankles in chiffon. He scowled and thrust the visualization away, but whether because it seemed too anomalous or too attractive he did not trouble to analyze.

He turned up the slope. Austin was heavily wooded, like the Aucklands, but progress was easy, for it was through a forest, not a jungle. A mad forest, true enough, but still comparatively clear of underbrush.

A shadow flickered, then another. But the first was only a queen's pigeon, erecting its glorious feather crest, and the second only an owl parrot. The birds on Austin were normal; they were simply the ordinary feathered life of the southern seas. Why? Because they were mobile; they traveled, or were blown by storms, from island to island.

It was mid-afternoon before Carver reached the peak, where a solemn outcropping of black basalt rose treeless, like a forester's watchtower. He clambered up its eroded sides and stood with Lilith beside him, gazing out across the central valley of Austin Island to the hill at the eastern point, rising until its peak nearly matched their own.

Between sprawled the wild forest, in whose depths blue-green shadows shifted in the breeze like squalls visible here and there on the surface of a calm lake. Some sort of soaring bird circled below, and far away, in the very center of the valley, was the sparkle of water. That, he knew must be the rivulet he had already visited. But nowhere--nowhere at all--was there any sign of human occupation to account for the presence of Lilith--no smoke, no clearing, nothing.

The girl touched his arm timidly, and gestured toward the opposite hill.

"Pah bo!" she said tremulously. It must have been quite obvious to her that he failed to understand, for she amplified the phrase. "R-r-r-r!" she growled, drawing her perfect lips into an imitation of a snarl. "Pah bo, lay shot." She pointed again toward the east.

Was she trying to tell him that some fierce beasts dwelt in that region? Carver could not interpret her symbolism in any other way, and the phrase she had used was the same she had applied to the poisonous fruit.

He narrowed his eyes as he gazed intently toward the eastern eminence, then started. There was something, not on the opposing hill, but down near the flash of water midway between.

At his side hung the prism binoculars he used for identifying birds. He swung the instrument to his eyes. What he saw, still not clearly enough for certainty, was a mound or structure, vine-grown and irregular. But it might be the roofless walls of a ruined cottage.

The sun was sliding westward. Too late in the day now for exploration, but to-morrow would do. He marked the place of the mound in his memory, then scrambled down.

As darkness approached, Lilith began to evince a curious reluctance to move eastward, hanging back, sometimes dragging timidly at his arm. Twice she said "No, no!" and Carver wondered whether the word was part of her vocabulary or whether she had acquired it from him. Heaven knew, he reflected amusedly, that he had used the word often enough, as one might use it to a child.

He was hungry again, despite the occasional fruits Lilith had plucked for him. On the beach he shot a magnificent Cygnus Atratus, a black Australian swan, and carried it with its head dragging, while Lilith, awed by the shot, followed him now without objection.

He strode along the beach to his box; not that that stretch was any more desirable than the next, but if Kolu and Malloa were to return, or were to guide a rescue expedition from the Fortune, that was the spot they'd seek first.

He gathered driftwood, and, just as darkness fell, lighted a fire.

He grinned at Lilith's start of panic and her low "O-o-oh!" of sheer terror as the blaze of the match caught and spread. She remembered her scorched fingers, doubtless, and she circled warily around the flames, to crouch behind him where he sat plucking and cleaning the great bird.

She was obviously quite uncomprehending as he pierced the fowl with a spit and set about roasting it, but he smiled at the manner in which her sensitive nostrils twitched at the combined odor of burning wood and cooking meat.

When it was done, he cut her a portion of the flesh, rich and fat like roast goose, and he smiled again at her bewilderment. She ate it, but very gingerly, puzzled alike by the heat and the altered taste; beyond question she would have preferred it raw and bleeding. When she had finished, she scrubbed the grease very daintily from her fingers with wet sand at a tidal pool.

Carver was puzzling again over what to do with her. He didn't want to lose her, yet he could hardly stay awake all night to guard her. There were the ropes that had lashed his case of supplies; he could, he supposed, tie her wrists and ankles; but somehow the idea appealed to him not at all. She was too naive, too trusting, too awe-struck and worshipful. And besides, savage or not, she was a white girl over whom he had no conceivable rightful authority.

At last he shrugged and grinned across the dying fire at Lilith, who had lost some of her fear of the leaping flames. "It's up to you," he remarked amiably. "I'd like you to stick around, but I won't insist on it."

She answered his smile with her own quick, flashing one, and the gleam of eyes exactly the color of the flames they mirrored, but she said nothing. Carver sprawled in the sand; it was cool enough to dull the activities of the troublesome sand fleas, and after a while he slept.

His rest was decidedly intermittent. The wild chorus of night sounds disturbed him again with its strangeness, and he woke to see Lilith staring fixedly into the fire's dying embers. Some time later he awakened again; now the fire was quite extinct, but Lilith was standing. While he watched her silently, she turned toward the forest. His heart sank; she was leaving.

But she paused. She bent over something dark--the body of one of the creatures he had shot. The big one, it was; he saw her struggle to lift it, and, finding the weight too great, drag it laboriously to the coral spit and roll it into the sea.

Slowly she returned; she gathered the smaller body into her arms and repeated the act, standing motionless for long minutes over the black water. When she returned once more she faced the rising moon for a moment, and he saw her eyes glistening with tears. He knew he had witnessed a burial.

He watched her in silence. She dropped to the sand near the black smear of ashes; but she seemed in no need of sleep. She stared so fixedly and so apprehensively toward the east that Carver felt a sense of foreboding. He was about to raise himself to sitting position when Lilith, as if arriving at a decision after long pondering, suddenly sprang to her feet and darted across the sand to the trees.

Startled, he stared into the shadows, and out of them drifted that same odd call he had heard before. He strained his ears, and was certain he heard a faint yelping among the trees. She had summoned her pack. Carver drew his revolver quietly from its holster and half rose on his arm.

Lilith reappeared. Behind her, darker shadows against the shadowy growths, lurked wild forms, and Carver's hand tightened on the grip of his revolver.

But there was no attack. The girl uttered a low command of some sort, the slinking shadows vanished, and she returned alone to her place on the sand.

The zoologist could see her face, silver-pale in the moonlight, as she glanced at him, but he lay still in apparent slumber, and Lilith, after a moment, seemed ready to imitate him. The apprehension had vanished from her features; she was calmer, more confident. Carver realized why, suddenly; she had set her pack to guard against whatever danger threatened from the east.

Dawn roused him. Lilith was still sleeping, curled like a child on the sand, and for some time he stood gazing down at her. She was very beautiful, and now, with her tawny eyes closed, she seemed much less mysterious; she seemed no island nymph or dryad, but simply a lovely, savage, primitive girl. Yet he knew---or he was beginning to suspect--the mad truth about Austin Island. If the truth were what he feared, then he might as well fall in love with a sphinx, or a mermaid, or a female centaur, as with Lilith.

He steeled himself. "Lilith!" he called gruffly.

She awoke with a start of terror. For a moment she faced him with sheer panic in her eyes; then she remembered, gasped, and smiled tremulously. Her smile made it very hard for him to remember what it was that he feared in her, for she looked beautifully and appealingly human save for her wild, flame-colored eyes, and even what he fancied he saw in those might be but his own imagining.

She followed him toward the trees. There was no sign of her bestial bodyguards, though Carver suspected their nearness. He breakfasted again on fruits chosen by Lilith, selected unerringly, from the almost infinite variety, by her delicate nostrils. Carver mused interestedly that smell seemed to be the one means of identifying genera on this insane island.

Smell is chemical in nature. Chemical differences meant glandular ones, and glandular differences, in the last analysis, probably accounted for racial ones. Very likely the differences between a cat, say, and a dog was, in the ultimate sense, a glandular difference. He scowled at the thought and stared narrowly at Lilith; but, peer as he might, she seemed neither more nor less than an unusually lovely little savage--except for her eyes.

He was moving toward the eastern part of the island, intending to follow the brook to the site of the ruined cabin, if it was a ruined cabin. Again he noted the girl's nervousness as they approached the stream that nearly bisected this part of the valley. Certainly, unless her fears were sheer superstition, there was something dangerous there. He examined his gun again, then strode on.

At the bank of the brook Lilith began to present difficulties. She snatched his arm and tugged him back, wailing, "No, no, no!" in frightened repetition.

When he glanced at her in impatient questioning, she could only repeat her phrase of yesterday. "Lay shot" she said, anxiously and fearfully. "Lay shot!"

"Humph!" he growled. "A cannon's the only bird I ever heard of that could--" He turned to follow the watercourse into the forest.

Lilith hung back. She could not bring herself to follow him there. For an instant he paused, looking back at her slim loveliness, then turned and strode on. Better that she remained where she was. Better if he never saw her again, for she was too beautiful for close proximity. Yet Heaven knew, he mused, that she looked human enough. But Lilith rebelled. Once she was certain that he was determined to go on, she gave a frightened cry. "Alan!" she called. "Al-an!"

He turned, astonished that she remembered his name, and found her darting to his side. She was pallid, horribly frightened, but she would not let him go alone.

Yet there was nothing to indicate that this region of the island was more dangerous than the rest. There was the same mad profusion of varieties of vegetation, the same unclassifiable leaves, fruits, and flowers. Only--or he imagined this--there were fewer birds.

One thing slowed their progress. At times the eastern bank of the rivulet seemed more open than their side, but Lilith steadfastly refused to permit him to cross. When he tried it, she clung so desperately and so violently to his arms that he at last yielded, and plowed his way through the underbrush on his own bank. It was as if the watercourse were a dividing line, a frontier, or--he frowned--a border.

By noon they had reached a point which Carver knew must be close indeed to the spot he sought. He peered through the tunnel that arched over the course of the brook, and there ahead, so overgrown that it blended perfectly with the forest wall, he saw it.

It was a cabin, or the remains of one. The log walls still stood, but the roof, doubtless of thatch, had long ago disintegrated. But what struck Carver first was the certainty, evident in design, in window openings, in doorway, that this was no native hut. It had been a white man's cabin of perhaps three rooms.

It stood on the eastern bank; but by now the brook had narrowed to a mere rill, gurgling from pool to tiny rapids. He sprang across, disregarding Lilith's anguished cry. But at a glimpse of her face he did pause. Her magnificent honey-hued eyes were wide with fear, while her lips were set in a tense little line of grimmest determination. She looked as an ancient martyr must have looked marching out to face the lions, as she stepped deliberately across to his side. It was almost as if she said, "If you are bound to die, then I will die beside you."

Yet within the crumbling walls there was nothing to inspire fear. There was no animal life at all, except a tiny, ratlike being that skittered out between the logs at their approach. Carver stared around him at the grassy and fern grown interior, at the remnants of decaying furniture and the fallen debris. It had been years since this place had known human occupants, a decade at the very least.

His foot struck something. He glanced down to see a human skull and a human femur in the grass. And then other bones, though none of them were in a natural position. Their former owner must have died there where the ruined cot sagged, and been dragged here by--well, by whatever it was that had feasted on human carrion.

He glanced sidewise at Lilith, but she was simply staring affrightedly toward the east. She had not noticed the bones, or if she had, they had meant nothing to her. Carver poked gingerly among them for some clue to the identity of the remains, but there was nothing save a corroded belt buckle. That, of course, was a little; it had been a man, and most probably a white man.

Most of the debris was inches deep in the accumulation of loam. He kicked among the fragments of what must once have been a cupboard, and again his foot struck something hard and round--no skull this time, but an ordinary jar.

He picked it up. It was sealed, and there was something in it. The cap was hopelessly stuck by the corrosion of years; Carver smashed the glass against a log. What he picked from the fragments was a notebook, yellowedged and brittle with time. He swore softly as a dozen leaves disintegrated in his hands, but what remained seemed stronger. He hunched down on the log and scanned the all-but-obliterated ink.

There was a date and a name. The name was Ambrose Callan, and the date was October 25th, 1921. He frowned. In 1921 he had been--let's see, he mused; fifteen years ago--he had been in grade school. Yet the name Ambrose Callan had a familiar ring to it.

He read more of the faded, written lines, then stared thoughtfully into space. That was the man, then. He remembered the Callan expedition because as a youngster he had been interested in far places, exploration, and adventure, as what youngster isn't? Professor Ambrose Callan of Northern; he began to remember that Morgan had based some of his work with artificial species--synthetic evolution--on Callan's observations.

But Morgan had only succeeded in creating a few new species of fruit fly, of Drosophila, by exposing germ plasm to hard X-rays. Nothing like this--this madhouse of Austin Island. He stole a look at the tense and fearful Lilith, and shuddered, for she seemed so lovely--and so human. He turned his eyes to the crumbling pages and read on, for here at last he was close to the secret.

He was startled by Lilith's sudden wail of terror. "Lay shot!" she cried. "Alan, lay shot!"

He followed her gesture, but saw nothing. Her eyes were doubtless sharper than his, yet--There! In the deep afternoon shadows of the forest something moved. For an instant he saw it clearly--a malevolent pygmy like the cat-eyed horror he had glimpsed drinking from the stream. Like it? No, the same; it must be the same, for here on Austin no creature resembled another, nor ever could, save by the wildest of chances.

The creature vanished before he could draw his weapon, but in the shadows lurked other figures, other eyes that seemed alight with nonhuman intelligence. He fired, and a curious squawling cry came back, and it seemed to him that the forms receded for a time. But they came again, and he saw without surprise the nightmare horde of creatures.

He stuffed the notebook in his pocket and seized Lilith's wrist, for she stood as if paralyzed by horror. He backed away out of the doorless entrance, over the narrow brook. The girl seemed dazed, half hypnotized by the glimpses of the things that followed them. Her eyes were wide with fear, and she stumbled after him unseeing. He sent another shot into the shadows.

That seemed to rouse Lilith. "Lay shot!" she whimpered, then gathered her self-control. She uttered her curious call, and somewhere it was answered, and yet further off, answered again.

Her pack was gathering for her defense, and Carver felt a surge of apprehension for his own position. Might he not be caught between two enemies?

He never forgot that retreat down the course of the little stream. Only delirium itself could duplicate the wild battles he witnessed, the unearthly screaming, the death grips of creatures not quite natural, things that fought with the mad frenzy of freaks and outcasts. He and Lilith must have been slain immediately save for the intervention of her pack; they slunk out of the shadows with low, bestial noises, circling Carver cautiously, but betraying no scrap of caution against--the other things.

He saw or sensed something that had almost escaped him before. Despite their forms, whatever their appearance happened to be, Lilith's pack was doglike. Not in looks, certainly; it was far deeper than that. In nature, in character; that was it.

And their enemies, wild creatures of nightmare though they were, had something feline about them. Not in appearance, no more than the others, but in character and actions. Their method of fighting, for instance--all but silent, with deadly claw and needle teeth, none of the fencing of canine nature, but with the leap and talons of feline. But their aspect, their--their catness was more submerged by their outward appearance, for they ranged from the semi-human form of the little demon of the brook to ophidian-headed things as heavy and lithe as a panther. And they fought with a ferocity and intelligence that was itself abnormal.

Carver's gun helped. He fired when he had any visible target, which was none too often; but his occasional hits seemed to instill respect into his adversaries.

Lilith, weaponless save for stones and her wooden knife, simply huddled at his side as they backed slowly toward the beach. Their progress was maddeningly slow, and Carver began to note apprehensively that the shadows were stretching toward the east, as if to welcome the night that was sliding around from that half of the world. Night meant--destruction.

If they could attain the beach, and if Lilith's pack could hold the others at bay until Carver could build a fire, they might survive. But the creatures that were allied with Lilith were being overcome. They were hopelessly outnumbered. They were being slain more rapidly with each one that fell, as ice melts more swiftly as its size decreases.

Carver stumbled backward into orange-tinted sunlight. The beach! The sun was already touching the coral spit, and darkness was a matter of minutes---brief minutes.

Out of the brush came the remnants of Lilith's pack, a half dozen nondescripts, snarling, bloody, panting, and exhausted. For the moment they were free of their attackers, since the catlike fiends chose to lurk among the shadows. Carver backed farther away, feeling a sense of doom as his own shadow lengthened in the brief instant of twilight that divided day from night in these latitudes. And then swift darkness came just as he dragged Lilith to the ridge of the coral spit.

He saw the charge impending. Weird shadows detached themselves from the deeper shadows of the trees. Below, one of the nondescripts whined softly. Across the sand, clear for an instant against the white ground coral of the beach, the figure of the small devil with the half-human posture showed, and a malevolent sputtering snarl sounded. It was exactly as if the creature had leaped forward like a leader to exhort his troops to charge.

Carver chose that figure as his target. His gun flashed; the snarl became a squawl of agony, and the charge came.

Lilith's pack crouched; but Carver knew that this was the end. He fired. The flickering shadows came on. The magazine emptied; there was no time now to reload, so he reversed the weapon, clubbed it. He felt Lilith grow tense beside him.

And then the charge halted. In unison, as if at command, the shadows were motionless, silent save for the low snarling of the dying creature on the sand. When they moved again, it was away--toward the trees!

Carver gulped. A faint shimmering light on the wall of the forest caught his eye, and he spun. It was true! Down the beach, down there where he had left his box of supplies, a fire burned, and rigid against the light, facing toward them in the darkness, were human figures. The unknown peril of fire had frightened off the attack. He stared. There in the sea, dark against the faint glow of the West, was a familiar outline. The Fortune! The men there were his associates; they had heard his shots and lighted the fire as a guide.

"Lilith!" he choked. "Look there. Come on!"

But the girl held back. The remnant of her pack slunk behind the shelter of the ridge of coral, away from the dread fire. It was no longer the fire that frightened Lilith, but the black figures around it, and Alan Carver found himself suddenly face to face with the hardest decision of his life.

He could leave her here. He knew she would not follow, knew it from the tragic light in her honey-hued eyes. And beyond all doubt that was the best thing to do; for he could not marry her. Nobody could ever marry her, and she was too lovely to take among men who might love her--as Carver did. But he shuddered a little as a picture flashed in his mind. Children! What sort of children would Lilith bear? No man could dare chance the possibility that Lilith, too, was touched by the curse of Austin Island.

He turned sadly away--a step, two steps, toward the fire. Then he turned.

"Come, Lilith," he said gently, and added mournfully, "other people have married, lived, and died without children. I suppose we can, too."

The Fortune slid over the green swells, northward toward New Zealand. Carver grinned as he sprawled in a deck chair. Halburton was still gazing reluctantly at the line of blue that was Austin Island.

"Buck up, Vance," Carver chuckled. "You couldn't classify that flora in a hundred years, and if you could, what'd be the good of it? There's just one of each, anyway."

"I'd give two toes and a finger to try," said Halburton. "You had the better part of three days there, and might have had more if you hadn't winged Malloa. They'd have gone home to the Chathams sure, if your shot hadn't got his arm. That's the only reason they made for Macquarie."

"And lucky for me they did. Your fire scared off the cats."

"The cats, eh? Would you mind going over the thing again, Alan? It's so crazy that I haven't got it all yet."

"Sure. Just pay attention to teacher and you'll catch on." He grinned. "Frankly, at first I hadn't a glimmering of an idea myself. The whole island seemed insane. No two living things alike! Just one of each genus, and all unknown genera at that. I didn't get a single clue until after I met Lilith. Then I noticed that she differentiated by smell. She told good fruits from poisonous ones by the smell, and she even identified that first cat-thing I shot by smell. She'd eat that because it was an enemy, but she wouldn't touch the dog-things I shot from her pack."

"So what?" asked Halburton, frowning.

"Well, smell is a chemical sense. It's much more fundamental than outward form, because the chemical functioning of an organism depends on its glands. I began to suspect right then that the fundamental nature of all living things on Austin Island was just the same as anywhere else. It wasn't the nature that was changed, but just the form. See?"

"Not a bit."

"You will. You know what chromosomes are, of course. They're the carriers of heredity, or rather, according to Weissman, they carry the genes that carry the determinants that carry heredity. A human being has forty-eight chromosomes, of which he gets twenty-four from each parent."

"So," said Halburton, "has a tomato."

"Yes, but a tomato's forty-eight chromosomes carry a different heredity, else one could cross a human being with a tomato. But to return to the subject, all variations in individuals come about from the manner in which chance shuffles these forty-eight chromosomes with their load of determinants. That puts a pretty definite limit on the possible variations.

"For instance, eye color has been located on one of the genes on the third pair of chromosomes. Assuming that this gene contains twice as many brown-eye determinants as blue-eye ones, the chances are two to one that the child of whatever man or woman owns that particular chromosome will be brown-eyed--if his mate has no marked bias either way. See?"

"I know all that. Get along to Ambrose Callan and his notebook."

"Coming to it. Now remember that these determinants carry all heredity, and that includes shape, size, intelligence, character, coloring--everything. People--or plants and animals--can vary in the vast number of ways in which it is possible to combine forty-eight chromosomes with their cargo of genes and determinants. But that number is not infinite. There are limits, limits to size, to coloring, to intelligence. Nobody ever saw a human race with sky-blue hair, for instance."

"Nobody'd ever want to!" grunted Halburton.

"And," proceeded Carver, "that is because there are no blue-hair determinants in human chromosomes. But--and here comes Callan's idea--suppose we could increase the number of chromosomes in a given ovum. What then? In humans or tomatoes, if, instead of forty-eight, there were four hundred eighty, the possible range of variation would be ten times as great as it is now.

"In size, for instance, instead of the present possible variation of about two and a half feet, they might vary twenty-five feet! And in shape--a man might resemble almost anything! That is, almost anything within the range of the mammalian orders. And in intelligence--" He paused thoughtfully.

"But how," cut in Halburton, "did Callan propose to accomplish the feat of inserting extra chromosomes? Chromosomes themselves are microscopic; genes are barely visible under the highest magnification, and nobody ever saw a determinant."

"I don't know how," said Carver gravely. "Part of his notes crumbled to dust, and the description of his method must have gone with those pages. Morgan uses hard radiations, but his object and his results are both different. He doesn't change the number of chromosomes."

He hesitated. "I think Callan used a combination of radiation and injection," he resumed. "I don't know. All I know is that he stayed on Austin four or five years, and that he came with only his wife. That part of his notes is clear enough. He began treating the vegetation near his shack, and some cats and dogs he had brought. Then he discovered that the thing was spreading like a disease."

"Spreading?" echoed Halburton.

"Of course. Every tree he treated strewed multi-chromosomed pollen to the wind, and as for the cats--Anyway, the aberrant pollen fertilized normal seeds, and the result was another freak, a seed with the normal number of chromosomes from one parent and ten times as many from the other. The variations were endless. You know how swiftly kauri and tree ferns grow, and these had a possible speed of growth ten times as great.

"The freaks overran the island, smothering out the normal growths. And Callan's radiations, and perhaps his injections, too, affected Austin Island's indigenous life--the rats, the bats. They began to produce mutants. He came in 1918, and by the time he realized his own tragedy, Austin was an island of freaks where no child resembled its parents save by the merest chance."

"His own tragedy? What do you mean?"

"Well, Callan was a biologist, not an expert in radiation. I don't know exactly what happened. Exposure to X-rays for long periods produces burns, ulcers, malignancies. Maybe Callan didn't take proper precautions to shield his device, or maybe he was using a radiation of peculiarly irritating quality. Anyway, his wife sickened first--an ulcer that turned cancerous.

"He had a radio--a wireless, rather, in 1921--and he summoned his sloop from the Chathams. It sank off that coral spit, and Callan, growing desperate, succeeded somehow in breaking his wireless. He was no electrician, you see.

"Those were troubled days, after the close of the War. With Callan's sloop sunk, no one knew exactly what had become of him, and after a while he was forgotten. When his wife died, he buried her; but when he died there was no one to bury him. The descendants of what had been his cats took care of him, and that was that."

"Yeah? What about Lilith?"

"Yes," said Carver soberly. "What about her? When I began to suspect the secret of Austin Island, that worried me. Was Lilith really quite human? Was she, too, infected by the taint of variation, so that her children might vary as widely as the offspring of the--cats? She spoke not a word of any language I knew--or I thought so, anyway--and I simply couldn't fit her in. But Callan's diary and notes did it for me."

"How?"

"She's the daughter of the captain of Callan's sloop, whom he rescued when it was wrecked on the coral point. She was five years old then, which makes her almost twenty now. As for language--well, perhaps I should have recognized the few halting words she recalled. C'm on, for instance, was comment--that is, 'how?' And pah bo was simply pas bon, not good. That's what she said about the poisonous fruit. And lay shot was les chats, for somehow she remembered, or sensed, that the creatures from the eastern end were cats.

"About her, for fifteen years, centered the dog creatures, who despite their form were, after all, dogs by nature, and loyal to their mistress. And between the two groups was eternal warfare."

"But are you sure Lilith escaped the taint?"

"Her name's Lucienne," mused Carver, "but I think I prefer Lilith." He smiled at the slim figure clad in a pair of Jameson's trousers and his own shirt, standing there in the stern looking back at Austin. "Yes, I'm sure. When she was cast on the island, Callan had already destroyed the device that had slain his wife and was about to kill him. He wrecked his equipment completely, knowing that in the course of time the freaks he had created were doomed."

"Doomed?"

"Yes. The normal strains, hardened by evolution, are stronger. They're already appearing around the edges of the island, and some day Austin will betray no more peculiarities than any other remote islet. Nature always reclaims her own."

THE END

Contents

DEVIL CRYSTALS OF ARRET

By Hal K. Wells

Facing a six-hour deadline of death, young Larry raids a hostile world of rat-men and tinkling Devil Crystals.

Benjamin Marlowe and his young assistant, Larry Powell, opened the door of the Marlowe laboratory, then stopped aghast at the sight which greeted their startled eyes.

There on the central floor-plate directly in the focus of the big atomic projector stood the slender figure of Joan Marlowe, old Benjamin Marlowe's niece and Larry Powell's fiancee.

The girl had apparently only been awaiting their return to the laboratory for around her gray laboratory smock was already fastened one of their Silver Belts, and a cord was already in place running from her wrist to the main switch of the projection mechanism.

Joan's clear blue eyes sparkled with the thrill of high adventure as she swiftly raised a slender hand in a gesture of warning to the two men.

"Don't try to stop me," she warned quietly. "I can jerk the switch and be in Arret, before you've taken two steps. I'm going to Arret, anyway. I was only waiting for you to return to the laboratory so I'd be sure of having you here to bring me back to Earth again before I have time to get into any serious trouble over there."

"But, Joan," Benjamin Marlowe protested, "this is sheer madness! No one can possibly guess what terrible conditions you may confront in Arret. We've never dared to send a human being across the atomic barrier yet!"

"We've sent all kinds of animals across, though," Joan retorted calmly, "and as long as we recalled them within the twelve-hour limit they always came back alive and unhurt. There's no reason why a human being should not be able to make the round trip just as safely. Ever since our Silver Belts first came back with the weird plant and mineral fragments which proved that there really is such a place as Arret, I've been wild to see with my own eyes the incredible things that must exist there."

Joan waved her hand in gay farewell. "Good-by, Uncle Ben and Larry! I know that you'll drag me back just as quickly as you can possibly dash over to the recall switch, but I'll at least have had a few precious seconds of sightseeing as Earth's first human visitor to Arret!"

* * * * *

Larry Powell was already sprinting for the mechanism as Joan jerked the cord that ran to the switch, but he was barely half-way across the intervening space when the big atomic projector flared forth in a brilliant gush of roseate flame.

For a fraction of a second Joan's slender figure was outlined in the very heart of the ruddy glow, then vanished completely. There was left only a short length of the switch cord to indicate that the girl had ever stood there.

Powell reached the mechanism and shut off the projector's flame, then turned swiftly to the control-panel of the recall mechanism. As he closed the switch on this panel, three banks of tubes set in triangular form around the floor-plate upon which Joan had stood glowed a brilliant and blinding green.

Shielding his eyes from the glare with an upraised forearm, Powell began stepping a rheostat up to more and more power. In his anxiety, he increased the power far too quickly. There was a sudden gush of blue-white flame from the heart of the mechanism, together with the hissing crackle of fusing metal. The green light in the tubes promptly died.

Benjamin Marlowe was bending over the apparatus almost instantly. A moment later he raised a face that had suddenly gone white. There was terror in his eyes as he turned to his assistant.

"The entire second series of coils is burned out, Larry!" he gasped in consternation. "Joan is marooned over there in Arret--marooned in that grim unknown land as completely beyond our reach as though she were upon one of the moons of Mars!"

For a long moment the two men gazed at each other with horror-stricken faces, dazed and shaken. Then they quickly drew themselves together again and set about the herculean task of making the necessary repairs to the damaged mechanism in time to rescue Joan before the twelve-hour limit should doom the girl to forever remain an exile in that land of alien mystery beyond the atomic barrier.

* * * * *

Their previous experiments with animals had proved that no living creature from Earth could be brought back after it had been in Arret over twelve hours. After that time the change in the atoms constituting living tissues apparently became permanently Arretian, for the Silver Belts returned without any trace of their original wearers.

The necessary repairs to the damaged coils were of such an exacting and intricate nature that any great speed was impossible. Hours passed while the two men bent to their work with grim concentration. Neither of them dared think too much of what nameless dangers might be confronting Joan during those weary hours. Their actual knowledge of Arret was so pitiably slight.

Some months ago, while they were experimenting upon apparatus for reversing the electrical charges of an atom's electrons and protons, they had first stumbled upon the incredible fact that such a place as Arret really existed. They found that it was another world occupying the same position in space as Earth, with the fundamental difference in the two interwoven planes of existence lying in the electrical make-up of the atoms that constituted matter in each plane.

On Earth all atoms are composed of small heavy protons that are always positive in charge, and larger lighter electrons that are always negative. In Arret the protons were negative, and the electrons positive. The result was two worlds occupying the same space at the same time, yet with matter so essentially and completely different that each world was intangible to the other. They had named the unseen world Arret, the reverse of Terra.

Finding it impossible to work directly upon most forms of matter, the experimenters had finally evolved a silver alloy that served as a medium both for sending objects into Arret and then bringing them back to Earth. By focussing the flame of the projection apparatus upon a Silver Belt of this alloy, the electrical charges of the Belt's atoms were reversed, automatically causing the Belt to vanish from Earth and materialize in Arret. At the same time the atoms of any object within the Belt's immediate radius were similarly transformed, and that object was taken into Arret with the Belt.

The recall mechanism functioned by broadcasting a power wave that again reversed the atomic charge of the Belt and its contained object back to that of Earth. At the same time the recall wave exerted an attractive force that drew the atoms back to a central point in the laboratory, where they were re-materialized upon the same floor-plate from which they had originally been sent.

* * * * *

The twelve-hour time limit was half up when Benjamin Marlowe and Larry Powell finally straightened up wearily from their work over the recall mechanism, their repairs completed. It had been one o'clock in the afternoon when Joan Marlowe vanished from Earth in the roseate flare of the projector. It was now nearly seven o'clock.

With nerves tense from anxiety, the two men crossed over to the control-panel of the recall apparatus. This time they donned goggles of dark glass to shield their eyes from the blinding green glare. Marlowe threw the main switch, and the banked tubes came to life in a flood of vivid emerald light.

Marlowe began stepping the rheostat up gradually to more power, advancing it with cautious slowness to avoid any chance of a repetition of the previous accident. The green radiance streaming from the tubes in every direction began to throb with an electric force that the two men could feel pulsing through their own bodies.

There was a click as the rheostat struck the last notch. The green radiance was now a searing flame that half-blinded them even through the thick dark glass of their protective goggles, while the vibrant force of the green rays was sweeping through their bodies with a tingling shock that nearly took their breath away.

Tensely the two men stared at the metal floor-plate in the center of the area bounded by the flaming green tubes. Just over the plate the green radiance seemed to be thickening and swirling oddly. The swirling eddy became a small dense cloud of darker green light. Then abruptly, like the fade-in on a moving picture screen, from the cloud over the plate the misty outlines of an object swiftly cleared and solidified into a bizarre something at whose unfamiliar aspect both Marlowe and Powell gasped in amazement.

Marlowe snapped the switch off, and the green radiance vanished. Stripping the dark goggles from their eyes, the two men hurried over for a closer view of the thing that rested quiescent and apparently lifeless there on the metal floor-plate.

* * * * *

It was shaped like a huge egg, a little over a yard long, and was apparently composed of a solid lump of some unknown crystalline substance that closely resembled very clear, pale amber. Embedded in the heart of the strange egg were clearly visible objects which caused Marlowe and Powell to gasp in mingled horror and amazement.

Chief among the things imprisoned in that amber shroud was the Silver Belt that Joan had worn, but the Belt was now looped over the bony shoulder of a skeleton that by no possible stretch of the imagination could ever have been that of a creature of this Earth.

The skeleton was still perfectly articulated, and gleamed through the crystalline amber as though its bony surfaces were encrusted with diamond dust. The bones were apparently those of a creature that in life had been half dwarf-ape and half giant rat.

The beast had stood a little under a yard in height. The legs were short, powerful, and bowed. The long arms ended in claw-like travesties of hands. The skull was relatively small, with a sharply sloping forehead and projecting squirrel-like teeth that were markedly rodent.

Around the skeleton's neck there was a wide band of some strange gray metal, with its smooth outer surface roughly scratched in characters that resembled primitive hieroglyphics.

Marlowe's face was white with grief as he turned to Powell. "Joan must be dead, Larry," he said sadly. "Otherwise, she would surely never have allowed her Silver Belt to pass into the possession of--this! She knew that the Belt represented her only hope of ever being brought back to this world."

* * * * *

For a moment Powell stared intently into the heart of the crystalline egg without answering. Then suddenly he straightened up with marked excitement upon his face.

"There's a small sheet of paper entwined in the coils of that Belt!" he exclaimed. "It may be a message from Joan!"

Swiftly the two men lifted the amber egg up to the top of a workbench. Powell took a small hammer to test the hardness of the strange translucent substance.

He struck it a sharp rap, then recoiled in surprise at the effect of his blow, for the entire egg instantly shattered with a tinkling crash like the bursting of a huge glass bubble. So complete was the disintegration of the egg and the skeleton within it that all that remained of either was a heap of diamond and amber dust. The only things left intact were the Silver Belt and the metal collar.

Powell snatched up the Belt and extracted the small piece of paper that had been firmly tucked into its coils. Hurriedly written in pencil upon the paper was a message in a handwriting familiar to both Powell and Marlowe:

Help! I am held prisoner in the Cave of Blue Flames! --Joan.

"Larry, Joan must still be alive over there in Arret!" There was new hope in Benjamin Marlowe's voice.

"Yes, alive and held captive by whatever monstrosities may inhabit that unknown plane," Powell agreed grimly. "There's only one way in which we can possibly rescue her now. That is for you to send me into Arret with a reserve Belt for Joan. I'll be ready to start as soon as I get a couple of automatic pistols that I have up in my room. It's a sure thing that I'll need them over there in Arret."

* * * * *

Five minutes later Powell stood ready and waiting upon the floor-plate in the focus of the big atomic projector, with the central lens of the apparatus levelled down upon him like a huge searchlight. Around Powell's waist were strapped two Silver Belts, and a cartridge belt with a holstered .45-calibre automatic on either side. His wrist-watch was synchronized to the second with Benjamin Marlowe's watch.

"Joan's twelve-hour time limit in Arret will expire at one o'clock tomorrow morning." Powell reminded Marlowe. "That gives me nearly six hours in which to find her and equip her with a Silver Belt. You will broadcast the recall wave at exactly one o'clock. If I haven't succeeded in finding Joan by then, I'll discard my own Belt and stay on over there in Arret with her.... I'm ready to start now, whenever you are."

Benjamin Marlowe raised his hand to the switch in the projector's control panel. "Good-by, Larry,"--the old man's voice shook a trifle in spite of himself--"and may God be with you!" He closed the switch.

A great burst of roseate flame leaped toward Powell from the projector. The laboratory was instantly blotted out in a swirling chaos of ruddy radiance that swept him up and away like a chip upon a tidal wave. There was a long moment during which he seemed to hurtle helplessly through a universe of swirling tinted mists, while great electric waves tingled with exquisite poignancy through every atom of his body.

Then the mists suddenly cleared like the tearing away of a mighty curtain, and with startling abruptness Powell found himself again in a solid world of material things. For a moment as he gazed dazedly about him he thought that the roseate glow of the projector must still be playing tricks with his eyesight, for the landscape around him was completely and incredibly red!

* * * * *

He soon realized that the monochrome of scarlet was a natural aspect of things in Arret. The weird vegetation all around him was of a uniform glossy red. The sandy soil under his feet was dull brick-red. High in the reddish-saffron sky overhead there blazed a lurid orb of blood-red hue, the intense heat of its ruddy radiance giving the still dry air a nearly tropical temperature. From this orb's position in the sky and its size, Powell was forced to conclude that it must be the Arretian equivalent of Earth's moon.

For a moment he stood motionless as he peered cautiously around him, trying to decide what should be his first step in this scarlet world that was so utterly alien in every way to his own. On every side the landscape stretched monotonously away from him in low rolling dunes like the frozen ground swell of a crimson sea--dunes covered with vegetation of a kind never seen upon Earth.

Not a leaf existed in all that weird flora. Instead of leaves or twigs the constituent units of bushes and grasses consisted of globules, glossy spheres of scarlet that ranged in size from pinheads to the bulk of large pumpkins. The branches of the vegetation were formed from strings of the globules set edge to edge and tapering in size like graduated beads strung upon wire, dwindling in bulk until the tips of the branches were as fragile as the fronds of maidenhair fern. The bulk of the shrubbery was head-high, and so dense that Powell could see for only a couple of yards into the thicket in any direction.

The stillness around Powell was complete. Not even a globular twig stirred in the hot dry air. Powell decided to head for the crest of one of the low dunes some fifty feet away. From its top he might be able to sight something that would give a clue to the location of the "Cave of Blue Flames" of which Joan had written.

* * * * *

He arrived at the foot of the dune's slope without incident. But there he came to an abrupt halt as the silence was suddenly shattered by a strange sound from the shrubbery-covered crest just above him. It was a musical, tinkling crash, oddly suggestive of a handful of thin glass plates shattering upon a stone floor. A second later there came the agonized scream of some creature in its death throes.

The tinkling, crashing sound promptly swelled to a steady pulsing song like that of a brittle river of crystalline glass surging and breaking over granite boulders. There was an eery beauty in that tinkling burst of melody, yet with the beauty there was an intangible suggestion of horror that made Powell's flesh creep.

The crystalline song swelled to a crescendo climax. Then there came another sound, a single resonant note like that given when a string of a bass viol is violently plucked--and the tinkling melody abruptly died. Immediately following the resonant twang some object was ejected from the midst of the thicket on the dune's crest, and came rolling and bounding down the gentle slope toward Powell.

It finally came to rest against the base of a bush almost at his feet. He whistled softly in surprise as he saw the nature of the thing. It was another of the yard-long egg-shaped crystals of translucent amber like the one that had been materialized in Benjamin Marlowe's laboratory. Imprisoned in the clear depths of this amber egg was the sparkling, diamond-encrusted skeleton of what had apparently been a small quadruped about the size of a fox.

Powell's eyes narrowed in speculation as he realized that he had before him the first slight clue as to what might have happened to Joan. Her Silver Belt had been enclosed in one of those amber, crystalline eggs. Apparently her capture had been in some way connected with that sinister, unseen Tinkling Death.

* * * * *

Powell began cautiously working his way up the slope of the dune, with an automatic pistol ready for use in his right hand. Silence reigned unbroken now in the thicket on the crest, but with each upward step that he took there came with constantly increasing force a feeling of some vast, alien intelligence lurking up there, watching and waiting.

Nearer and nearer the crest he worked his wary way, until he was so close that he fancied he could see the vague outline of some monstrous silvery bulk looming there in the heart of the red thicket. He took another cautious step forward--and then his careful stalking was sharply interrupted.

Without a second's warning there came the roaring rush of great wings beating the air just above him. Powell tried to dive for cover, but he was too late. A slender snaky tentacle came lashing down and struck his shoulder with a force that sent him sprawling forward upon his face. Before he could rise, two of the tentacles twined around him, and he was jerked up into the air like a wood-grub captured by a husky robin.

Again the great wings above him threshed the air in tremendous power, as the unseen monster started away with its prey. Then the tentacles from which he was dangling shifted their grip slightly, turning Powell's body in the air so that he could look up and get his first glimpse of the thing that had captured him. He shuddered at what he saw. The creature was a hideous combination of octopus and giant bat.

Naked wings of membrane spanned twenty feet from tip to tip. There was a pursy sac-like body, ending in a head with staring, lidless eyes and a great black beak that looked strong enough to shear sheet steel. From the body descended half a dozen long writhing tentacles.

* * * * *

Powell's one hundred and eighty pounds made a weight that was apparently a burden for even this flying monster. It flew jerkily along, scarcely a dozen feet from the ground, and there was laborious effort obvious in every movement of its flapping wings. Powell decided to make a prompt break for escape before the octopus-bat succeeded in fighting its way any higher. His left arm was still pinioned to his body by one of the constricting tentacles, but his right hand, with the automatic in it, was free.

He swung the weapon's muzzle into line with the hideous face above him, then sent a stream of lead crashing upward into the creature's head. The bullet struck squarely home. The tentacles tightened convulsively with a force that almost cracked Powell's ribs. Then in another paroxysm of agony the tentacles flung him free.

The impetus of his fall sent him rolling for a dozen feet. Unhurt, save for minor scratches and bruises, he scrambled to his feet just in time to see the mortally wounded octopus-bat come crashing down in the red vegetation some thirty yards away. For a few minutes there was audible a convulsive threshing; and then there was silence.

Powell refilled the automatic's clip, then looked about, trying to regain his bearings. He wanted to return to the thicket of the Tinkling Death, but the octopus-bat had carried him hundreds of yards from there and he was now uncertain even of the direction in which the thicket was.

As he paused in indecision, there came to Powell's ears a new sound that promptly drove all thought of the Tinkling Death from his mind.

* * * * *

The sound of his gun against the octopus-bat had apparently attracted new and unseen assailants--and their number was legion. Swiftly closing in upon him from every side there came the rustle and whisper of countless thousands of unseen foes advancing through the dense red thickets.

Completely hemmed in as he was, flight was out of the question. He sought the center of a small clearing, some ten feet in diameter, in order to gain at least a moment's sight of his adversaries before they swarmed in upon him. With an automatic in each hand, he waited tense and ready.

The encircling rush came swiftly nearer, until Powell was suddenly aware that the unseen horde had arrived. The thicket bordering his tiny clearing was literally alive with yard-high furry bodies of creatures that dodged about too swiftly in the cover of the red bushes for him to get a clear view of any of them. There was a constant babel of snarling, chattering sound as the things called back and forth to each other.

Then the chattering stopped abruptly, as though at the command of some unseen leader. The next moment one of the creatures stepped boldly out into full view in the clearing. Powell's scalp crinkled in disgust as he realized the nature of the thing confronting him.

It was literally a rat-man. Its upright posture upon two powerful, bowed hind legs was that of a man, but its human-like points were overshadowed by a dozen indelible marks of the beast. A coat of short, dirty gray fur covered the creature from head to foot. Its hands and feet were claw-like travesties of human members. Its pointed, chinless face with its projecting teeth and glittering little beady eyes was that of a giant rodent.

The beast in the clearing was apparently a leader of some sort, for around his throat was a wide collar of gray metal, with its flat surface marked in rudely scratched hieroglyphics. Powell's heart leaped as he noted the collar. In this creature before him he had his second clue to the whereabouts of Joan Marlowe.

Not only was the collar practically identical to the one worn by the skeleton that had been materialized in the egg back in the laboratory, but the skeleton itself was obviously that of one of the rat-men. Could it be this grotesque horde of human-like rodents that was holding Joan captive in the Cave of Blue Flames?

* * * * *

Powell tried desperately to think of some way of communicating with the gray-collared leader. Then the beast shrilled a command that brought hundreds of the beasts swarming into the clearing from every side, and in the face of the menace of their countless glittering eyes and bared fangs Powell abandoned all thought of attempting to parley with the beasts.

There was another shrill command from the leader, and the horde closed in. Both of Powell's guns flamed in a crashing leaden hail that swept the close-packed ranks of furry bodies with murderous effect. But he was doomed by sheer weight of numbers.

The rat-men directly in front of the blazing pistols wavered momentarily, but the press of the hundreds behind them swept them inexorably forward. Powell emptied both guns in a last vain effort. Then he was swept from his feet, and the horde surged over him.

Blinded and smothered by the dozens of furry bodies that swarmed over him, he had hardly a chance to even try to fight back. His cartridge-belt and guns, his Silver Belts and his wrist-watch were stripped from him by the dozens of claw-like hands that searched his body. Other claw-hands jerked his arms behind his back and lashed them firmly together with rope.

A blanketing sheet of some heavy fabric was crammed over his head and tied in place so tightly that he was completely blindfolded and half-suffocated. A noose was knotted around his neck. A suggestive jerk of this noose brought Powell lurching to his feet; there was another commanding jerk, and he obediently started walking.

* * * * *

The march that followed soon became torture for the captive. Blindfolded as he was, and having only the occasional jerks of rope to guide his footsteps, he stumbled and fell repeatedly, until his aching body seemed one solid mass of bruises.

As nearly as he could judge, the horde had conducted him nearly two miles when the path abruptly sloped downward. A moment later the sudden coolness of the air and the echoes about him told him that they had entered an underground passage of some kind. After traversing this passage for several yards they emerged into what was apparently a large open area, for he could hear the excited chattering and squealing of countless thousands of rat-men on every side of him.

He was dragged forward a dozen steps more, then brought to a halt. The blindfolding fabric was roughly stripped from his head. For a moment he blinked dazedly, half-blinded by a glare of blue light that flooded the place.

He was standing in a vast cavern. From dozens of fissures high in the rock walls streamed flickering sheets of blue flame which both warmed and lighted the place. There was a weird tingling glow in the air that suggested that the strange blue fires might be electrical in their origin.

Powell looked eagerly around for Joan, but he could see no trace of her. The only other living beings in the big cavern were the swarming thousands of the rat-people. The brutes were apparently too low in the evolutionary scale to have any but the most primitive form of tribal organization.

Sitting on a rude rock throne just in front of Powell was a grotesquely fat, mangy-furred old rat-man who was obviously the king of the horde. Some thirty or forty rat-men, larger and stronger than their fellows, wore the gray-metal collars that apparently marked them as minor leaders.

* * * * *

The great bulk of the horde, numbering far into the thousands, swarmed in the cavern in one vast animal pack, sleeping, feeding, snarling, fighting. As Powell was halted before the king's throne, most of them abandoned their other pursuits to come surging around the captive in a jostling, curious mob.

The metal-collared leader of the pack that had captured Powell presented the rat-king with the captive's gun-belt and two Silver Belts, accompanying the gifts with a squealing oration that was apparently a recital of the capture. The old monarch took the trophies with delight.

The two Silver Belts were promptly draped over his own furry shoulders by the king--seemingly following the same primitive love for adornment that inspires an African savage to ornament his person with any new and glittering object he happens to acquire. The rat-king then graciously draped the cartridge-belt and holstered automatics around the shoulders of the metal-collared leader who had captured Powell.

The king turned his attention back to his prisoner. He studied the captive curiously for a moment or two, then squealed a brief command. A score of the rat-men promptly closed in upon Powell, and began herding him toward a far back corner of the big cavern.

Stopping a few yards away from the edge of what seemed to be a wide deep pit in the rock floor, the guard stripped Powell's bonds from him. Powell made no move to take advantage of his freedom, realizing that the swarming thousands of rodents in the cave made escape out of the question for the moment. He allowed himself to be docilely herded on to the edge of the pit.

And the next moment he exclaimed aloud in delighted surprise as he gazed down at the floor of the pit ten feet beneath him. There, sitting on a low heap of stones on the pit's sandy floor, white-faced and weary but apparently unhurt, was Joan Marlowe.

* * * * *

The girl's face brightened in relief as she looked up and recognized him.

"Larry! Oh, thank God you've come!"

The leader of the guards motioned for Powell to jump down into the pit. He needed no urging. A moment later he landed lightly on the sandy floor of the pit, and Joan was in his arms.

The rat-men left a dozen of their number scattered as sentries around the edge of the pit. The rest of them returned to the main horde, leaving the prisoners to their own devices.

"I knew that you'd come, Larry, as soon as you got my note," Joan exclaimed happily. "But how did you ever succeed in finding this Cave of Blue Flame?"

"I didn't find it myself," Powell admitted. "I was captured like a boob and dragged here." He told Joan of his mishaps since arriving in Arret.

The girl nodded when he had finished. "Much the same happened to me, Larry, only the red moon wasn't shining then. The only light was from what looked like the dim ghost of a big yellow sun. I materialized in Arret almost in the middle of a scouting group of rat-men. They took me captive immediately. When several minutes passed without you and Uncle Benjamin broadcasting the recall wave for me, I knew that something terrible must have happened back in the laboratory, and that I might be marooned in Arret for hours.

"I tried to hang onto my Silver Belt, of course," the girl continued, "but when I was brought to the cavern here I saw that the king was going to take it. There was a notebook and a pencil in my laboratory smock. I managed to write the note and twine it into the belt just before it was taken from me. The king seemed to think the note enhanced the Belt's value as an ornament. He was wearing it when I last saw it. Was he materialized in the laboratory with the Belt?"

Powell told her of the amber egg and the skeleton.

"The same sort of crystalline amber egg that accompanied the work of the mysterious Tinkling Death, wasn't it?" Joan mused. "One of the king's lieutenants must have stolen the Belt, and reaped prompt retribution when he tried to flee. I wonder what that weird Tinkling Death is?"

"Possibly some strange weapon of the rat-men," Powell hazarded.

"No, they are as afraid of it as we are. While I was being brought here to this cave the Tinkling Death was heard several times in the distance, and the rat-men were obviously terrified at the sound."

* * * * *

The prisoners' conversation was abruptly interrupted by a rhythmic, snarling chant from the vast horde of rat-men in the cavern above. The chant rose and fell in a rude cadence that was suggestively ritual in nature.

"They've been doing that at intervals ever since I was first brought here," Joan commented. "It sounds almost like the beginning of some primitive religious ceremony, doesn't it?"

Powell nodded, without telling Joan the depressing thought in his mind. The rat-men were so low in the evolutionary scale as to be little more than beasts, and a prominent feature of nearly all primitive religious rites is the sacrifice of living beings. Powell could not help but wonder whether the chanting might not mark the beginning of rites which would end with the sacrifice of himself and Joan to some monstrous deity of theirs.

The snarling chant continued with monotonous regularity for hours, while the prisoners huddled helplessly together there on the floor of the pit, awaiting the next move of the rat-men. Any thought of escape was out of the question. The sheer walls of the pit were always guarded by alert sentries who had only to call to bring the entire horde to their help.

Without Powell's wrist-watch, the captives had no way of accurately following the lapse of time, but they both realized that the twelve-hour time limit upon Joan's rescue from Arret must be coming perilously near its end. They waited in momentary fear lest a sudden turmoil in the cavern above them should indicate that Benjamin Marlowe had broadcast the recall wave, whisking the two Belts back to Earth, together with the old rat-king who presumably still wore them.

* * * * *

The chanting above rose slowly to a snarling climax, then swiftly died away into silence. A moment later there came the sound of thousands of claw-like feet scratching over the rocky floor as the main horde apparently began marching out of the cavern. A detachment of fifty rat-men appeared at the pit's edge.

A rude metal ladder was shoved down to the captives, and a metal-collared leader motioned for them to climb up. Seeing nothing to be gained by refusal, they obeyed. They were seized as they reached the top, and their hands again bound behind them. The overwhelming numbers of the rat-men made any attempt at resistance futile.

There was no sign of the main horde as Joan and Powell were herded out through the empty cavern and out into the open air again. With their prisoners in the center of their group, the rat-men started along a well-worn path that wound through the red vegetation. Overhead the blood-red moon still blazed down in lurid splendor.

From somewhere ahead of them the captives began to again hear the distant squealing chant of the main horde. They steadily approached the sound, until abruptly they emerged into a huge clearing that had apparently been a ceremonial assembly place for generations, for its smooth sandy floor was packed down nearly to the hardness of rock.

The main horde of rat-men was there now, countless thousands of them, packed in a roughly crescent-shaped mob, with the open side of their formation facing what seemed to be a large deep pit, some seventy yards in circumference. In the clear space left between the horde and the edge of the pit was a smaller group, among them the old king himself.

Powell's heart leaped as he noted that the Silver Belts were still draped over the mangy old monarch's shoulders. If only he and Joan could get their hands on those precious Belts before Benjamin Marlowe broadcast the recall wave that would forever snatch them out of their reach!

* * * * *

The captives were hurried through the main horde and taken in charge by a score of picked guards who herded them on to join a small group of four rat-men near the pit's edge. These four rodents were apparently also prisoners, for their arms were firmly bound behind them.

The rat-king, accompanied only by the metal-collared leader, around whose shoulders the gun-belt was still draped, stood near the pit's edge some ten yards distant from the guards and captives. Between the prisoners and the rodent monarch the edge of the pit jutted out in a narrow tongue of rock that extended outward for about twenty feet over the pit.

Joan and Powell had barely taken their place with the other captives when an abrupt and familiar sound drew their attention to the floor of the pit some thirty feet beneath them. Its smooth sandy bottom was clearly visible from where they stood. And there on that sandy floor were six great gleaming shapes of menace which brought involuntary gasps of horrified amazement to the captives' lips.

The faint musical tinkling sound as the things moved in occasional ponderous restlessness was unmistakable. Joan and Powell realized that the amazing organisms responsible for the mysterious Tinkling Death were at last before them.

The things were giant living crystals--great silvery semi-transparent shapes nearly ten feet in height, their faceted sides pulsing in sinister and incredible life as they gleamed in unearthly beauty beneath the blazing rays of the red moon!

Near the center of each of the giant crystals there was visible through the semi-transparent wall a large inner nucleus of sullen opalescence that ceaselessly swirled and eddied.

Their powers of movement were apparently limited to a slow, ponderous, half-rocking, half-rolling progress on their heavy rounded bases. They were now grouped in a rough semicircle just under the edge of the rocky projection that extended out over the pit. The opalescent nucleus in every silvery faceted form seemed to be "watching" with frightening intensity the figures on the pit's edge above them.

* * * * *

There was no mistaking the meaning of the scene. The giant carnivorous crystals had obviously been lured from their normal habitat in Arret's red vegetation, and established there in the big pit by the rat-men to act as principals in their primitive religious ceremonies.

Those Devil Crystals waiting down there on the pit's floor were waiting to be fed--and the small group of captives, rat-men and human beings, were to be the feast!

Utterly sick at heart, Powell wondered if they would at least be given the boon of a merciful death before being hurled over the brink to those lurking shapes. He was not left long in doubt.

At a shrill command from the rat-king the guards closed in upon the captives and herded two of the bound rat-men from among them. A guard placed to the lips of each of the captive brutes a small cup containing a faintly cloudy white liquid. Apparently resigned to their fate, the creatures docilely drained the cups.

The drugged drinks acted with startling rapidity. Scarcely a minute passed before the rodents' eyes clouded dully, their jaws dropped slackly open, and their bodies stiffened in almost complete rigidity.

The bonds were quickly stripped from the two stupefied creatures. The ceremonial rites apparently required that the victims go to their doom unbound and of their own volition. The guards maneuvered the two over to the rocky projection that jutted out over the pit.

Moving with the stiffly wooden steps of automatons, the two victims started out along the narrow projection, leaving the guards behind. On they marched, straight for the end of the rocky strip--and then, without a second's hesitation, they plunged on and over.

Their bodies crashed to the pit's floor squarely among the group of waiting crystals. One of the rat-men lay motionless. The other dazedly tried to struggle to his feet--but was too late.

* * * * *

From the side of the nearest Devil Crystal, some fifteen feet away from the dazed rat-man, a cone-shaped projection budded with startling swiftness.

A fraction of a second more and the projection had lengthened into a long slender arm of crystalline silver that streaked across the intervening space with the swiftness of a spear.

There was a crashing, tinkling sound as the point of the arm struck the furry body of the rat-man. Then the arm's point sprayed into a web of shining filaments that laced the rodent's body inexorably in their web.

The arm immediately contracted, jerking the victim irresistibly toward the waiting crystal. A second later the rat-man was pinned against the faceted crystalline side just under the opalescent nucleus.

The moment the furry body made contact with the crystal's side a terrifying phenomenon occurred. Crystals grew and spread all over its form with the lightning growth of water-glass. Faster and faster clustered the crystalline shroud, until the furry body was lanced through and through--and all the time the air was filled with eldritch music as of a thousand sheets of thinnest glass crashing, tinkling and shattering.

The crystal growths over the imprisoned body rounded their contours and merged together until they were in the form of a great crystalline egg. The outlines of the rodent's body blurred and vanished, melting swiftly until only a diamond-encrusted skeleton was left. The color of the great Devil Crystal began to gleam pink as the victim's flesh and blood were absorbed.

The egg-like excrescence under the nucleus turned in hue to pale translucent amber in whose depths the diamond skeleton gleamed with weird brilliance. Then there came a sudden twang, as of a violently plucked string on a bass viol, and the amber egg dropped from the faceted side. The Crystal's feast was over.

One of the most terrifying aspects of the whole thing had been its incredible speed. The entire tragedy had occurred in but little over two minutes from the time the lance-arm had first struck the rat-man.

In the meantime the body of the second rodent had been drawn in and devoured by another of the carnivorous crystalline monsters. There came a second twang now, as its skeleton in its amber shroud was discarded.

* * * * *

Powell's brain reeled as he saw the other crystals move sluggishly nearer the foot of the rocky projection in anticipation of the next victims.

The remaining two captive rat-men came next. They were swiftly drugged, unbound, and started on their dazed march. They trudged woodenly out the rocky projection to its end, then on and over; and again the grim tragedy of the Devil Crystal's feast was repeated, to the accompaniment of that eerily beautiful crashing, tinkling song.

The four Devil Crystals that had completed their gruesome feast moved sluggishly away, leaving the space clear for the two crystals that remained unfed. The score of guards closed in upon Joan and Powell.

With the crystalline doom at last staring them squarely in the face, Powell went berserk in a final desperate effort to gain even a moment's respite. He lashed out in a writhing, kicking flurry that almost cleared the space around them.

Then three of the rat-men slipped behind him, and a second later his feet were jerked from under him. His bound arms made him helpless to avert his fall, and he crashed heavily to the ground. Then a dozen of the powerful little beasts swarmed over him, completely overpowering him by their numbers.

Claw-like hands pried his set jaws apart. A cup of the cloudy white liquid was pressed to his lips. He choked; then, unable to help himself, he had to let the stuff pour down his throat. It had an acid taste faintly reminiscent of lemons. The rat-men apparently wanted to make sure of giving him enough, for they poured another full cup of the liquid down his throat before releasing him.

The guards then fell back and Powell stumbled to his feet. Joan was already up again, standing close beside him. From the wry expression upon her face, Powell knew that she had also been given the drugged potion.

* * * * *

For a long minute the two stood there with every nerve trembling as they helplessly waited for the paralyzing numbness to sweep over their bodies. The seconds passed slowly, and still their minds remained as clear as though the drug had been water. Another full minute elapsed without effect, before they could finally convince themselves of the amazing truth.

The drugged drink of the rat-men, instantly paralyzing to those of their own rodent race, was utterly harmless to the human being from another world!

Powell instantly realized the forlorn last chance their unexpected immunity to the drug gave them.

"Play 'possum, Joan!" he whispered tensely. "Then we'll make a break for the king and those Belts!"

Joan nodded slightly in quick understanding. Powell let his jaw drop slack and open, and stiffened his body in imitation of the stupor the rodent drug victims had shown. Joan promptly followed his lead. The alertly watching guards relaxed their tense vigilance in obvious relief.

The guards waited another minute to be sure of the drug's effects. Then, apparently satisfied, they stepped forward and unbound the two prisoners. Powell let his bonds drop from him without making a hostile move of any kind. He wanted first to wait until he was free of the encircling guards.

The rat-men maneuvered the two into position, and prodded them forward toward the projecting point of rock. They obediently began their march, simulating as best they could the wooden mechanical gait of the drug victims. Powell saw from the corner of his eye that Joan was tensely watching his face for a sign from him.

As the captives reached the narrow projection the guards dropped a couple of yards behind and halted to watch. It was the chance for which Powell had been waiting.

"Let's go!" he shouted to Joan. The girl, alert for his signal, was right beside him as they wheeled and dashed at break-neck speed for the rat-king and his sole lieutenant, some ten yards away.

* * * * *

They were upon the two startled rodent leaders before they even realized what was happening. Powell swept the squirming old king up in the air, tore the Silver Belts from about the monarch's shoulders, and flung the creature sprawling and senseless at the pit's edge.

The lieutenant leaped for Powell's throat in a belated effort at rescue, but Powell smashed a solid fist squarely into its snarling face, and the brute collapsed with a broken neck.

Snatching his gun-belt from the fallen rat-man, Powell crammed new clips of ammunition into the two guns and wheeled to confront the rest of the rat-men. The detachment of guards, demoralized by the dazzling speed of the captives' sortie, were milling in obvious uncertainty.

Behind them the thousands of the main horde were chattering and squealing in excited frenzy, dazed and bewildered by their king's swift overthrow. The whole clearing was a seething mob of excited beasts, stunned for the moment, but ready at any second to rally from their shock and surge forward in a furious charge that would sweep everything before it.

Powell menaced the rat-men with levelled guns while Joan, with fingers that shook from excitement and haste, quietly buckled one of the Silver Belts around each of them.

The guards rallied from their panic first. At a shrill command from their leader, they began cautiously edging forward toward Joan and Powell. The two gave ground slowly, working their way back over toward the projecting tongue of rock. Out on the end of that narrow strip, Powell knew that he could hold the horde at bay for a few moments at least.

* * * * *

They reached the rocky projection, and began backing slowly and carefully out toward its end. The guards, galvanized into action by their captives' retreat, suddenly came surging forward in a furious charge.

Powell emptied the two automatics in a crashing volley that nearly wiped out the charging guards. The few survivors turned and fled in panic back to the main horde. Powell reloaded his clips with feverish haste.

The thousands of rat-men in the main horde were now milling in what was apparently a last moment of hesitation before surging forward in an irresistible stampede toward the beleaguered two out on the rocky strip.

Several bolder individuals at the edge of the horde edged a step forward. Their example was followed by a hundred others. Another hesitant step or two--and then the whole horde was in motion.

Powell swept the front rank with a rain of lead from one of the automatics, holding the other as a reserve. The heavy bullets plowed murder into the close-packed furry bodies. The charge wavered momentarily. Then Powell felt Joan tugging frantically at his arm.

"Larry, the rocks under us are crumbling!" she cried. "We'll be hurled down into the pit!"

Even as she spoke, Powell felt the narrow strip of rock under them quiver and settle. He looked quickly down. All along its length, the narrow rocky projection, weakened by their weight, was breaking swiftly away from the pit's edge. And on the floor of the pit below them the two waiting Devil Crystals moved with musical, tinkling sounds as they waited restlessly for their prey to fall among them.

The horde of rat-men rallied and swept on forward in a wave that nothing could have stopped this time--but their charge was too late. The entire rocky projection collapsed with a final sickening lurch, and slid to the pit's floor, carrying Joan and Powell with it in a miniature avalanche of rocky rubble.

* * * * *

Even in the chaos of their wild descent, Powell retained his grip upon the loaded automatic in his hand. They struck the bottom and staggered half-dazed to their feet, to confront the two crystalline monsters rocking on their rounded bases scarcely ten feet away.

The fatal cone-shaped projection was already beginning to form upon the silver-faceted side of the nearest Devil Crystal. Before the lance-like arm of crystal could flash outward, Powell sent two bullets crashing into the crystal's side just over the opalescent nucleus.

The leaden missiles caromed harmlessly off, as though they had struck armor-plate, but the nucleus clouded momentarily and the cone-shaped projection dissolved back into the side.

With lightning speed Powell shifted his aim to the other crystal just as its partly-formed arm was flashing toward them. His bullet crashed into the silvery side squarely over the nucleus. Again the bullet's effect was the same. This crystal nucleus clouded murkily, and the lance-like arm telescoped back into the faceted bulk.

But the effect of the bullets was only momentary. Swiftly the nuclei of both crystals cleared. A deep blue film, apparently protective in nature, formed between the outer wall and each nucleus. The cones budded, and again the arms started forth.

Powell fired again, and this time uselessly. His bullet struck squarely, but the shock of its impact was apparently nullified by the protective blue film. He emptied his gun in a last crashing fusillade, but without effect of any kind upon the film-guarded nuclei of the giant crystals.

Their forming arms never wavered as they came lancing forward with deadly accuracy straight toward Joan and Powell. In a last effort to save Joan from the terrible doom of the crystal lances as long as possible, Powell flung his own body as a shield in front of the half-fainting girl. The tip of one of the crystalline arms struck his chest with a crashing tinkle of musical glass.

Instantly the tip sprayed into a web of fine filaments that laced on around his body. A tinkling shock raced through his every nerve from the contact with the weird life force of the great crystal.

The arm began contracting. Powell was helpless against the terrific power of the slender, diamond-hard lance of crystal. He felt himself irresistibly drawn toward the silver-faceted wall of the Devil Crystal.

His senses reeled in the babel of alien sounds--the crashing, glass-like music of the crystalline monsters and the snarling, squealing, paean of jubilant triumph from the thousands of rat-men now lining the rim of the pit above.

* * * * *

Then suddenly the pit, the Devil Crystals, and everything else in the nightmare world of Arret was blotted out in a vast swirling cloud of pulsing roseate flame that seemed to sweep him bodily up into the air and whirl him dizzily around.

His dazed brain staggered from the shock of the cataclysmic force that was disintegrating an entire world around him, but through the utter chaos one thought rang clear and exultant in his consciousness.

Benjamin Marlowe had finally broadcast the recall wave!

For what seemed endless eons of time Powell hurried through a limitless universe of swirling, tinted fires, while vibrations of a mighty force tingled with poignant ecstasy in every atom of his body.

Then the eddying clouds of flame began to coalesce and solidify with startling suddenness. A moment later, like the abrupt lighting of a room when an electric switch is snapped, the mists vanished and Powell felt firm footing again under his feet. Around him were the familiar objects of Benjamin Marlowe's laboratory.

He was standing upon the floor-plate in the center of the area bounded by the banked green tubes, and beside him stood Joan, sobbing with relief at their last-minute rescue from the Devil Crystals of Arret. And over by the control panel of the recall mechanism was the slight figure of old Benjamin Marlowe, with a great joy now shining in his faded eyes.

Contents

THE QUANTUM JUMP

By ROBERT WICKS

Captain Brandon was a pioneer. He explored the far reaches of space and reported back on how things were out there. So it was pretty disquieting to find out that the "far reaches of space" knew more about what went on at home than he did.

Brandon was looking at the Milky Way. Through his perma-glas canopy, he could see it trailing across the black velvet of space like a white bridal veil. Below his SC9B scout-ship stretched the red dust deserts of Sirius Three illuminated by the thin light of two ice moons. He looked at the Milky Way.

He looked at it as a man looks at a flickering fireplace and thinks of other things. He thought of the sun, 52 trillion miles away, a pinpoint of light lost in the dazzle of the Milky Way--the Earth a speck of dust in orbit just as this planet was to its master, Sirius.

Nine light years away. Of course, thirteen years had passed on Earth since they had left, because the trip took four years by RT--relative time. But even four years is a long time to be shut up in Astro One with five other men, especially when one of them was the imperious Colonel Towers.

"A quantum jump--that's the way to beat the Reds," the colonel had said a thousand times. His well-worn expression had nothing to do with quantum mechanics--the actual change in atomic configuration due to the application of sufficient energy. Rather, it was a slang expression referring to a major advance in inter-planetary travel due to a maximum scientific and technological effort.

"Let 'em have Mars and Venus," the colonel would say--"Let 'em have the whole damn Solar System! We'll make a quantum jump--leap-frog ahead of 'em. We'll be the first men to set foot on a planet of another solar system."

Four years had gone by in the ship; thirteen years on Earth. Four years of Colonel Towers. Military discipline grew more strict each day. Space does funny things to some men. The "we'll be the first men" had turned into, "I'll be the first man."

But it was Captain Brandon who drew the assignment of scouting Sirius Three for a suitable landing place for Astro, of sampling its atmosphere and observing meteorological conditions. Even as Brandon climbed into the scout-ship, Towers had cautioned him.

"Remember, your assignment is to locate a firm landing site with ample protection from the elements. Under no circumstances are you to land yourself. Is that clearly understood?"

Brandon nodded, was launched and now was cruising one hundred thousand feet above the alien planet.

Brandon tilted the ship up on one wing and glanced down at the brick-red expanse of desert. Tiny red mists marked dust storms. Certainly this was no place to set down the full weight of Astro nor to protect the crew and equipment from abrasive dust.

He righted the ship. Far on the horizon was a bank of atmospheric clouds. Perhaps conditions were more promising there. He shoved the power setting to 90 per cent.

A fire warning indicator light blinked on. Instantly Brandon's eyes were on the instrument panel. The tailpipe temperature seemed all right. It could be a false indication. He eased back on the power setting. Maybe the light would go out. But it didn't. Instead he felt a surging rumble deep in the bowels of the ship. Luminous needles danced and a second red light flashed on.

He snapped the vidio switch and depressed the mike button.

"Astro One, this is Brandon. Over."

A steady crackling sound filled his earphones; a grid of light and shadow fluttered on the screen. A thought entered his mind. Maybe he had put too much planet curvature between Astro and himself.

"Astro One, this is Brandon. Come in, please."

A series of muffled explosions rocked the ship. He chopped the power back all the way and listened intently.

"May Day! May Day! Astro, this is Brandon. May Day!"

A faint voice sputtered in his ear, the face of Reinhardt, the radioman appeared before him. "Brandon, this is Astro One. What is your position? Over."

Brandon's voice sounded strange and distant as he talked to his oxygen mask. "Heading--one-eight-zero. Approximately six hundred miles from you. Altitude one hundred thousand feet."

"What is the nature of your trouble, Brandon?"

Before Brandon could answer, the face of Colonel Towers appeared beside the radioman's.

"Brandon, what're you trying to pull?"

"Engine trouble, sir. Losing altitude fast."

"Do you know the nature of the trouble?"

"Negative. Might have thrown a compressor blade. Got a fire indication, then a compressor surge. Chopped off the power."

Towers frowned. "Why didn't you use straight rocket power?"

"Well, sir--"

"Never mind now. You may have encountered oxygen or hydrogen-rich atmosphere--melted your compressor blades. Try an air start on straight rocket. I want that ship back, Brandon. Repeat, I want that ship back!"

"I may be able to ride it down. Get it on the deck intact."

"Try an air start, Brandon." Towers leaned forward, his eyes fixed on Brandon. "I don't want you to set foot on that planet, get me?"

But there wasn't time to try anything. The cabin was filling with fumes. Brandon looked down. A fringe of blue flame crept along between the floor and the bottom of the pilot's capsule. A cold ache filled the cavity of his stomach.

"Too late. I'm on fire! Capsuling out. Repeat, capsuling out."

"Brandon--!"

The colonel's glaring face flicked off as Brandon pushed the pre-ejection lever into the lock position severing all connections between the ship and the pilot's capsule. Brandon had a strange, detached feeling as he pushed the ejection button.

There was an explosion and the pilot's capsule shot up like a wet bar of soap squeezed out of a giant's hand.

The ship turned into a torch and sank beneath him. Brandon closed his eyes for a moment.

When he opened them he was staring at the Milky Way, then the desert as he tumbled over and over. He talked to the Milky Way.

"Ten seconds. Should wait at least ten seconds before releasing the drogue chute so I'll clear the ship." Then he spoke to the desert. "And maybe another ten to give the capsule time to slow down."

He counted then pulled the chute release. Nylon streamed out behind him and snapped open with a tremendous jar. A moment later, bundles of metal ribbons floated out and billowed into a giant umbrella. The last thing he remembered was the taste of blood on his lips.

When Brandon opened his eyes he was staring at the silvery disks of the twin moons. They were high in the sky, obscuring the center of the Milky Way. Funny he should be lying on his back looking at the sky, he thought. Then he remembered.

The capsule was on its back and Brandon was still strapped securely to the seat. His whole body ached. Tendons had been pulled, muscles strained from the force of the ejection. His oxygen mask was still in place, but his helmet hung partly loose. He adjusted it automatically, then unbuckled the seat straps. He took a deep breath. Under the oxygen mask, he was aware of dried blood clotted in his nostrils, caked around the corners of his lips.

With an effort he sat up on the seat back and looked through the perma-glas. A tangle of cords stretched out to the nylon of the main chute draped over a dust dune. Beyond it he could see the gleaming metal ribbons of the drogue chute.

Ahead of him, behind some low hills, he could see a dull red glow. The ship, he thought. Astro may already be hovering over it.

He dragged the survival kit from behind the seat and pulled out some rations, a first-aid kit, finally a tele-talkie. Raising the antenna, he plugged in the mike cord from his mask and held down the "talk" key with his thumb.

"Astro One, this is Brandon. Come in."

As he talked a picture flickered on the screen. It was the radio room on Astro One. Colonel Towers was pacing back and forth in front of the radioman.

"Shall I keep trying to raise him?" he heard Reinhardt ask.

"Damn fool stunt," Towers sputtered. "Know what I think? I think he went down deliberately. Just to be the first human being to walk the ground of a planet of another solar system."

"Astro, this is Brandon. Come in please."

Towers continued to pace and talk. "He did it to spite me."

"But we can't raise him sir," the radio operator said. "Maybe he didn't get out of it alive."

"Colonel Towers, can't you hear me?" Brandon yelled into his oxygen mask.

"He got out all right," the colonel said. "He's just stalling to make it look good."

"We aren't going to give up the search are we, sir?" asked the radioman.

"It would serve his soul right." The colonel stopped pacing and faced the radioman. "Keep trying to raise him, Reinhardt. I'm going to bring us down to forty thousand feet and search the area where he went down. Helluva waste of rocket fuel tooling around in the atmosphere," he muttered, disappearing through a bulkhead door.

"Wait! Colonel Towers!" Brandon called. But he knew it was no use. Obviously he could pick up Astro but they could neither see nor hear him.

"Captain Brandon, this is Astro calling. Over." The radioman repeated the phrase a dozen times and each time Brandon acknowledged, swore and acknowledged again. Finally, in desperation, he switched off the tele-talkie.

He snapped open the back of the unit and studied the maze of transistors, resistors, and capacitators. If there was something wrong it was subtle, like a burned out resistor or a shorted condenser. Whatever it was, it was beyond emergency repair. He dropped the tele-talkie behind the seat and examined the gauge on his oxygen tank. There was enough to last the night but not much more.

He sat down in the capsule to think. The first thing they'd locate is the burning ship, he decided. Then they would probably start searching in ever-widening circles. But would they see him in the faint light of the ice moons?

He looked back at the nylon chute again. Another thought ran through his mind. Suppose they don't spot me in the dark. When the sun--Sirius, I mean--comes up, there's a good chance they'll spot the parachute and search for him.

He slid the canopy open and looked down at the red soil of Sirius Three. He hesitated for a moment, then swung his feet over the side and dropped to the ground.

"At least I'll have that satisfaction," he said, grinning under his oxygen mask.

Very much aware of gravity after years of weightlessness, he walked to the canopy of the chute and spread it out on the flat ground in a full circle. It billowed in the wind. He searched around, found some glassy black rocks and anchored down the chute.

Then he looked at the orange glow that marked the funeral pyre of the ship. He had a decision to make; stay here with the capsule or head for the fire.

Couldn't be more than a thousand yards away, he decided. Charging a walk-around oxygen bottle, he transferred his oxygen hose to it. He snapped the survival kit to his belt and picked up the tele-talkie.

The ship was more than a thousand yards away. The first mile was across flat desert. He picked his way cautiously, his boots churning up clouds of powdery dust. He remembered the Russian reports of the weird and deadly creatures they had encountered in the Martian deserts.

But aside from a few gray patches of brush there seemed to be no sign of life. After all, he thought, the Earth held no life for the better part of its existence. And Towers had selected this planet because it bore relatively the same relationship to the brighter, hotter Sirius as did the Earth to the sun. While farther away it should have approximately the same conditions as did the Earth. And it had seas, not as large as on Earth, but seas, nevertheless.

Yet there was a fallacy in the argument. Presumably all of the stars in the outer arms of the Milky Way and their planets were about the same age. With similar conditions as the Earth, life must have been born and walked out of the seas of Sirius Three just as it did on Earth.

Something scurried into a wisp of brush, as if to bear out Brandon's realization. He froze, his eyes on the brush, his hand reaching for his hydro-static shock pistol. He could hear nothing but the wind hollowing his ears. He stood for a long moment, then cautiously skirted the brush, and continued on toward the burning ship. There was an odd clicking sound and he stopped. It sounded again. Brandon realized he was perspiring despite the chill of the desert night. Again he moved on, the sound fading in the distance behind him.

The next mile brought him to a great sheet of ancient lava laid bare by the elements. He climbed to the top. The fire still seemed to be about a thousand yards ahead, beyond a ridge of low hills.

A distant flare lit up the sky ahead of him. It glowed for a few moments and died. They've found the ship, he thought. After four years, I had completely forgotten about the store of photo-flash flares.

He watched for awhile but saw no more flares. Finally he scrambled down the other side of the lava sheet and continued on toward the wreck, moving slowly but steadily.

The third mile brought him to the scene of the crash. A smoking cylinder of fused metal lay in a gully. Parts were strewn along the bottom. A wing, untouched by the fire, was leaning tip down against the edge of another lava sheet some distance away.

He sat down. Another flare flashed in the sky behind him silhouetting a row of grotesque trees. I'm over here, you fools, he thought. He watched until the flare flickered out, then turned his head back toward the remains of the ship. There wasn't much of a glow to it now. It would be hard to see unless Astro was right on top of it.

He raised the antenna on the tele-talkie and snapped it on. The screen glowed into life. Towers was stepping through the bulkhead door into the radio room. Just like a television play in installments, Brandon thought. Scene two coming up.

"No sign of him at the scene of the crash," Towers told Reinhardt.

"If he got out," observed Reinhardt, "he could be a hundred miles away or more."

"If he got out," Towers said in a tone that irritated Brandon.

"I got out," Brandon said. "And right now I'm walking around your precious planet like a boy scout. Damn this tele-talkie! I'd give a year's pay if you could see me now, Towers."

"We may yet spot the escape capsule," Reinhardt was saying.

"We're still continuing the search," put in Towers. "But I don't mind telling you I'm not wasting much more fuel."

The radio operator started to say something, hesitated and finally settled for, "yes, sir."

Brandon swore and snapped off the set. He looked at his walk-around bottle.

"Can't stay here any longer," he muttered.

He couldn't find the capsule. He walked three, perhaps four miles. He stopped and blotted his moist brow with his sleeve. He wasn't going to find it. Before him stretched an endless carpet of red dust. The light from the two moons was growing dim, as each settled toward different horizons.

He sat down. A cloud of powdery dust settled over his legs. The lightness in his head told him that his oxygen was running out. The weakness in his muscles reminded him that it had been a long time since he had walked in a planet's gravity. A distant flare lit up the horizon. He choked off a sob, and beat his fist in the red dust. A wave of nausea swept over him. Bitter stomach juices welled up in his throat but he swallowed them down again.

Desperately he turned on the tele-talkie.

"Astro, this is Brandon," he said.

"Brandon, this is Astro," Reinhardt said.

Brandon's body tensed. "Thank God I finally got through to you. Listen, Reinhardt, I must be about three--"

"Brandon, this is Astro," said Reinhardt in a monotone. He said it again and again and again.

Brandon fell back on the ground. His breathing was short, strained. His face was bathed in perspiration. The oxygen, he realized, was giving out.

What are the odds, that the air of Sirius Three is breathable, he wondered. One in a hundred? The planet has water and both animal and plant life. Certainly it has sufficient gravity to hold its oxygen. But what other elements--noxious gases might be present. Maybe the odds are closer to one in fifty, he decided.

"But it's no gamble when you have nothing to lose," he told the Milky Way.

Ripping off his oxygen mask, he took a deep breath of the alien atmosphere. The dust choked him, his ears rang. Black spots danced before his eyes, then melted into solid blackness.

Brandon could hear Towers' voice in a vortex of darkness.

"Let's face it--Brandon is dead. Must have burned with the ship, at least that's the way the report will read. Get me, Reinhardt?"

"Yes, sir," the disembodied voice of Reinhardt replied quietly.

"We're going to set her down on a solid piece of ground near one of the oceans." There was a pause and Brandon could almost see Colonel Towers drawing up to his full height. "I'm going to be the first man to set foot on a planet of another solar system. Know what that means, Reinhardt?"

"A quantum jump sir?"

"Right. Leap-frogging ahead of the Reds. Wait till they read the name Colonel John Towers--maybe General John Towers--General."

Brandon opened his eyes. Sirius was turning the sky to gray, trimming a few scattered clouds with gold. As he stared at the sky, Sirius rose with a brassy glare. Near it he could see its white hot dwarf star companion. It was going to be a real scorcher, he decided; worse than any desert on Earth. He sat up stiffly.

On the tele-talkie screen, Reinhardt, alone in the radio room, was calling quietly for Brandon. The bulkhead door swung open and Towers poked his head through.

"Knock that off," said Towers sternly, "and take your landing station." As Reinhardt rose to his feet, Brandon reached over and turned off the set.

Brandon took a deep breath. His head spun and for the first time he realized that he was still alive. He gazed across the shimmering desert to a ridge of scrubby hills. Blue mountains rose up beyond them. Great floes of black lava had rolled down onto the desert floor at some distant time. They were spotted with clumps of gray grass even as was the desert. The hills were studded with weird trees standing stiff, branches outstretched, like an army of scarecrows.

The air of Sirius Three was doing strange things to him. Two of the trees seemed to be moving. He swayed and sat heavily.

As he watched through a haze of red dust whipped up by the morning breeze, the two trees came closer, turned into men wearing desert uniforms and leaned over him.

"Are you okay?" one of them asked.

Brandon said nothing.

"We saw you from our observation station over on the hill," said the other pointing.

They helped Brandon to his feet and gave him a swig of cool, sweet water from a canteen.

"I'm Captain Brandon, of the Astro One."

"Astro One?" The man removed his pith helmet to wipe his brow and Brandon noticed the gleaming US insignia on the front of the helmet. "The Astro One left Earth thirteen years ago," the man said.

"Only four years by RT," Brandon said.

The man smiled and put his helmet back on his head. "A lot of things have happened since you left. There was a war which we won, and I guess you guys were almost forgotten. And there was a lot of technological development."

"You mean you had a quantum jump?" asked Brandon parroting Colonel Towers' favorite expression.

"Odd you would know that," replied the second man. "It was through quantum mechanics that we learned to approximate the speed of light. While nine years pass on Earth when we make the trip, our RT is mere moments."

"Good Lord!" Brandon said. "You must have passed us up."

"Been on this planet for nearly a year," the first man said. "Got men on dozens of planetary systems throughout the Milky Way. One ship went a thousand light years out. By the time they come back, civilization on Earth will be two thousand years older."

"Have you got a tele-talkie?" Brandon asked.

"Sure," said the first man, producing a set one-third the size of Brandon's.

"Could you tune it to 28.6 microcycles?"

"Sure," the man said again. He turned a dial with his thumb and handed the unit to Brandon. Brandon depressed the "talk" button. A crystal clear image of Colonel Towers, putting the finishing touches on his full dress uniform, appeared on the screen.

"This is an historic occasion," Colonel Towers was announcing to his crew. "Open the hatch--and, Reinhardt, be sure to stand by with the motion picture camera."

"Excuse me, Colonel Towers," said Brandon quietly.

Towers swung around and looked out at Brandon. The colonel's face paled.

"I have something to tell you," said Brandon grinning, "about the quantum jump."

THE END

Contents

DOUBLE TAKE

By Richard Wilson

Paul Asher, 27, men's furnishings buyer, leaned back and let the cloth band be fastened across his chest, just under his armpits. He adjusted his heavy spectacles, closed his eyes for a moment, breathed deeply, and was off.

The semi-darkness was dispelled as he shot out of a tunnel into dazzling sunlight. The high-powered vehicle he was driving purred smoothly as it took the long, rising curve. The road climbed steadily toward the mountaintop city ahead. He looked around to satisfy himself that he was alone in the car.

He wasn't.

The girl was a pretty one. He'd seen her somewhere before, he thought. She was looking insolently at him, her wide red mouth in a half smile. Her dark hair stirred in the breeze coming through the window, next to her, which was open just a slit.

She said: "Just keep going, Sweetheart, as fast as you can." And she patted the oversized pocketbook that lay in her lap.

He pressed down on the accelerator and the car responded with a flow of power. The countryside fell away from the road on either side. Far below he could see a river, winding broadly to the far-off sea. The summer day sent its heat-shimmers across the miniature landscape.

The road curved again. Theirs was the only car he had seen since he'd come out of the tunnel. But now, far ahead, he saw another. It was standing at the side of the road, next to a gate that came down in the manner of one at a railroad crossing. But he knew by its black and white diagonals and by the little sentry hut half hidden behind the other car that it marked the frontier. A man with a rifle on his shoulder stood there. They drew up to it fast, but his foot automatically eased up on the floorboard pedal until the girl spoke sharply.

"Right through it, Sweetheart."

In the rear-view mirror he saw her leaning forward, her face tense.

In a moment it would be time to stop, if he were going to.

Paul Asher hesitated a moment. Then he too leaned forward, the band pressing into his chest. He was breathing heavily. There was an almost inaudible click.

He trod on the accelerator. He had a glimpse of the guard unslinging his rifle from his shoulder and of another man running toward the parked car as his vehicle smashed into the flimsy gate and sent it, cracked and splintered, to the side of the road. He fought the slight wrench of the wheel and sped on. He thought he heard a shot.

"Nice work," the girl said. She seemed to be appraising him as she looked at him. "My name, incidentally, is Naomi."

"Hello," he heard himself saying as he whipped the car around a curve that hid the frontier behind a hill. "You seem to know who I am."

"That I do," she said.

"Then why don't you call me by my name, instead of 'Sweetheart'?"

"That's because I like you, Sweetheart." She was looking out the rear window. "Now just step on the gas, because we've got company."

The car that had been parked near the sentry hut was whipping into view around the curve. It was lighter than his, but it was fast, too. He stepped on it.

* * * * *

Now the road had become narrow and twisting. The grade was steep but the surface was good. Abruptly, it entered a forest.

The girl said: "Two more curves. Then you'll see a field and a barn. Off the road and into the barn, fast."

He took the curves with rubber screaming and almost without braking sent the car bumping across the field and into the barn. It was bigger than it had seemed from the outside. As he brought the car to a lurching halt the barn door closed.

Where he had expected to see stalls and milking machines and hay he saw an expanse of metal floor and monstrous machinery. The barn door which had been a rickety wooden slab from the outside was a gleaming sheet of metal from the inside. It glided silently shut and left no joint or seam to show where there had been an opening.

"Out," said Naomi.

As they left the car, a flexible metal arm snaked from one of the smooth walls, attached itself to the front bumper of the vehicle, and whisked it into a cubicle which opened to receive it and closed behind it.

A power-driven wheelchair sped up to them. Sitting in it was a fat man of middle age, with pendulous jowls and a totally bald head. His expression was a sardonic scowl.

"You have the plans?" he asked the girl.

"Sweetheart here has them."

"I don't know what you're talking about," the young man said.

"He knows, all right," the girl said. "He pretends to be innocent, but that is merely his training. He has them under a sticking plaster on the small of his back."

"Remove your coat and shirt," commanded the man in the wheelchair.

At that moment the floor shuddered under their feet, a gong began to clang insistently, and the giant machinery, which had been silent, throbbed into life.

The man in the wheelchair whirled and was off, shouting commands to men who materialized high on the walls in cylindrical turrets which the visitor could only think of as battle stations.

"What is this place?" he asked.

He got no answer. Instead the girl grabbed his arm and pulled him off to the edge of the gigantic metal room. An opening appeared in the wall and she pushed him through it into a room beyond. The entranceway snapped shut behind them and when he looked he could see no door. The room also was windowless.

Naomi went to a metal table and as she looked down into its surface it became a screen. Mirrored in it was the mountainous countryside they had driven through to get to the barn--or what had seemed to be a barn from the outside. He looked over her shoulder.

They saw as from a height. There was the light car that had chased them from the frontier. Standing near it was a man in an officer's uniform and another in civilian clothes. They were talking and gesturing. Beside the car was a tank. As they watched, its gun fired and the structure they were in shuddered, but they heard no sound.

Lumbering up the mountain road were more tanks and a self-propelled gun. One of the tanks became enveloped in smoke and flames as they watched. After a moment the smoke cleared. The tank was gone; where it had been there was a deep crater.

Gradually, the figures in the drama below grew smaller. At the same time the vista widened, so that they saw more and more countryside. It twisted beneath them and the horizon came giddily into view. A few moments later the curvature of the earth could be plainly seen.

Everything fitted together at once. Some of the things, anyway.

"We're in a ship," he said. "Some kind of rocket-ship."

"It's a planet plane," the girl said. "We're safe now."

"Safe from what?" he asked. "What's this all about?"

She smiled enigmatically. "Hafitz could tell you, if he chose. He's the boss."

"The man in the wheelchair?"

She nodded and took out a compact. As she added lipstick to her mouth, she looked him over, between glances in her mirror.

"You don't look like the spy type. If there is a type."

"I'm not a spy. I don't know what you're talking about."

"The innocent! Go on, take off your coat and shirt. We'll save Hafitz some time."

"I'll be glad to, just to prove this is all ridiculous. A case of mistaken identity. You've made a mistake, that's what you've done."

He stood there, hesitating.

The girl gave a burst of laughter. Then she said: "All right, Sweetheart. I'll turn my back."

She did, and he pulled his shirt out of his trousers. Then he froze. Taped to the skin of his back was a flat package.

Paul Asher made the decision. He bent forward, feeling perspiration in the palms of his hands. There was a faint click.

* * * * *

Quickly he ripped the adhesive from his back. There was an instant of pain as the plaster came free. He wadded up the sticky package, dropped it to the floor and kicked it under the desk.

Then he took off his coat, tie and shirt.

"You can turn around now," he said.

"A more modest spy I've never seen. Okay," she said, "now you turn around."

"As you see," he said, "there are no plans--no papers."

"No--not now. But there is a red mark on your back. What is it?"

"Oh," he said. "Oh--that's a birthmark."

She spun him around to face her. Her face was harsh. She slapped his cheek. "Where is the sticking plaster? Don't trifle with me."

Her eyes bored into his. He returned the gaze, then shrugged.

"Under the desk," he said. "I tore it off and kicked it under the desk."

"You are sensible to confess," she said.

She bent down, unwisely.

Paul Asher felt the familiar tightening in his chest as he leaned forward. The click was barely heard.

He raised his hand and brought the edge of it down hard on the back of her neck.

She crumpled and fell to the metal floor. He noticed that a smear of her freshly-applied lipstick came off on it.

He pushed the unconscious body aside and fished the packet out from under the desk. He searched the room for another hiding place.

But it was too late. A section of wall opened and Hafitz, the fat man in the wheelchair, sped in.

He wheeled past the young man, looked briefly at the unconscious girl, then whisked himself around.

"You will pay for this, my friend," he said. "But first we will have the plans for the way-station. Where are they?"

"I don't know anything about any plans and I don't know anything about a way-station. I tried to tell the girl: it's all a crazy mistake."

"We will see," said Hafitz. He pressed a button on the arm of his wheelchair and two bruisers appeared through the walls, in the abrupt way people had of materializing here. Bruisers was the only way they could be described. They were human brutes, all muscle and malevolence.

"Take them," said Hafitz, indicating the unconscious girl and the young man. "Take them and search them for a small packet. If you do not find it, search this room. If you do not find it still, hurt the male animal. They persuade well with pain here, I understand. But do not kill him. I will be in the communications room."

He sped off, through a wall opening.

One of the bruisers picked up the girl, roughly, and disappeared with her. The other grabbed the young man and hauled him off in a third direction. The young man hastily snatched up his coat, shirt and tie en route.

They ended up in a cell of a room, about seven feet in all directions, in which the bruiser stripped him, methodically went through each piece of clothing, and then satisfied himself that he didn't have the packet anywhere on his body.

The muscle-man then raised a fist.

"Wait," his prospective victim said. He thought back quickly. "Hafitz didn't say you could bat me around till you searched the room, too."

The other spoke for the first time. "You say the truth." He put his arm down.

The young man watched intently as the bruiser went through the wall of the cell-like room.

He dressed fast. By placing his fingers in exactly the same position as the other had done, was able to make the wall open for him.

The silver-metal corridor had two directions. He went to the right. After many turnings, at each of which he reconnoitered carefully, he came to a passageway that was damp. Why it was damp he couldn't tell, but there in the wetness were tracks which could have been made by a wheelchair.

He followed them, feeling the throb of giant engines underfoot.

* * * * *

The wheelchair tracks abruptly made a ninety-degree turn and ended at a blank wall. Somewhere beyond it must be the communications room.

He retreated and waited.

In time the wall snapped open and Hafitz sped out. The young man retreated into the maze of corridors and hoped chance would be on his side. It was. Hafitz went another way.

The young man ran back to the wall and used his fingers on it in the combination he had learned. It opened for him.

He closed it behind him and blinked at the huge instrument panel which filled almost the entire room.

One of the instruments was a color vision screen, tuned in to a room in which there was a mahogany desk, at which was seated a man in uniform. Behind him was a map of the United States.

The man in uniform was a major general in the Air Force. An aide, a lieutenant colonel, was leaning over the desk. He had a sheaf of papers in his hand. The men's conversation was audible.

"Messages have been coming in from all over Europe," the colonel was saying. "Here's the way it reconstructs:

"Our agent was en route to the rendezvous when he was intercepted by Naomi. That's the only name we have for her. She's a spy. She's worked for half a dozen countries and her present employer could be any one of them. They were spotted as they crossed the frontier between Italy and France. Their car went into a barn and we thought we had them. But the barn turned out to be a spaceship in disguise. It took off."

So I'm their agent, Paul Asher thought. So that's what it's all about. I'm a secret agent for the United States, but they didn't tell me anything about it. This is real George, this is ... He expected to hear a faint click and leaned forward experimentally, but nothing happened. He leaned backward. Still nothing.

The colonel was answering a question from the general. "We don't know who they are, Sir. They're not from Earth, obviously. And the best scientific minds go still further--they're not even from our solar system. Whoever they are, it's clear that they don't want us to build a way-station in space."

"Those spaceships started buzzing around right after our first Moon trip," the general said. "This is the first time they've become really troublesome--now that we've got the Moon under control and are ready to build the way-station so we can get to Mars."

"That's right, Sir," said the colonel.

"Progress is a wonderful thing," said the general. "Things certainly have changed since those early days of strategic atomic bombing and guided missile experiments."

"Yes, Sir," said the colonel.

The young man in the communications room of the spaceship let his attention wander away from the scene back on Earth and experimented with some of the switches and controls. Trial and error led him to one which lit up a signal on the desk of the general.

The general flicked it on.

"Yes?" he said. He looked puzzled when he got no picture, just a voice saying, "Hello, hello."

"Yes?" he said. "Hello. Speak up, man."

"This is your agent aboard the enemy spaceship," said the young man. "Do you read me?"

"Yes," said the general. "We read you. Go ahead."

"I may not have much time. Get a fix on me if you can. And send help."

"What's your position?" the general was reacting well. He was alert and all business.

"I don't know. I've been taken prisoner, but I'm temporarily free. There isn't much time. Hafitz is bound to be back soon. He seems to be the brains of this outfit--this part of the outfit, anyway. Naomi is here, too, but I don't know whether she's with them or against them."

"Where are the plans, son?" asked the general.

"They're safe, for the moment. I can't guarantee for how long."

"I'm getting the fix," the colonel said. He was beyond the range of the young man's vision screen. "I've got him. He's still within range, but accelerating fast. We can intercept if we get up a rocket soon enough."

"Get it up," ordered the general. "Get up a squadron. Scramble the Moon patrol and send out reserves from Earth at once."

"Right!" said the colonel.

The young man was so engrossed in the makings of his rescue party that he didn't see the wall open up behind him.

There was a squeak of rubber tires and he whirled to see Hafitz, in his wheelchair, slamming toward him. The fat man's hand held a weird-looking gun.

The young man recoiled. His back pushed against a row of control buttons.

Then everything went white.

* * * * *

Paul Asher blinked his eyes, like a man awakening from a vivid dream.

The house lights went on and the manager of the theater came on the stage. He stood in front of the blank master screen with its checkerboard pattern of smaller screens, on which the several lines of action had taken place simultaneously. Paul took off his selectorscope spectacles with the earphone attachments.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the manager said. "I regret very much having to announce that this vicarion of the production Spies from Space was defective. The multifilm has broken and, because of the complexity of the vikie process, it will be impossible to splice it without returning it to the laboratory.

"Ushers are at the exits with passes good for any future performance. Those of you who prefer can exchange them at the box office for a full refund of your admission price."

Paul Asher unstrapped the wired canvas band from across his chest. He put the selectorscope spectacles into the pouch on the arm of the seat and walked out of the R.K.O. Vicarion into High Street and around the corner to where his car was parked.

His roommate at the communapt, MacCloy, was still up when he got there, going over some projectos. Mac snapped off the screen and quickly swept the slides together and into a case.

"You're back early," MacCloy said.

"The multifilm broke," Paul told him.

"Oh." Mac seemed abstracted, as he often did, and again Paul wondered about this man he knew so casually and who had never confided in him about anything--especially about his government job.

"So I missed the ending," Paul said. "I guess it was near the end, anyhow. The space patrol was on the way, but the villain, that Hafitz, was just about to blast me with his gun and I don't know how I would have got out of that."

"I remember that," Mac said. He laughed. "You must have been Positive all the way through. Like I was when I saw it. If you'd had any negative reactions--if you'd leaned back against the strap instead of forward--you'd have been at some other point in the multiplot and I wouldn't have recognized that part. Want me to tell you how it ends?"

"Go ahead. Then if I do see it again I'll change the ending somewhere along the line with a lean-back."

"Okay. There really wasn't much more. It takes so much film to provide all the plot choices that they can't make them very long.

"Well, Hafitz blasts me and misses," Mac went on, "--or blasts you and misses, to keep it in your viewpoint. When you jump back, you set off a bunch of controls. That was the control room, too, not just the communications room. Well, those controls you lean back against take the ship out of automatic pilot and send it into some wild acrobatics and that's why Hafitz misses. Also it knocks him out of the wheelchair so he's helpless and you get his gun. Also you see that the plans are still there--right where you put them, stuck to the bottom of his wheelchair."

"So that was it," said Paul.

"Yes," said Mac. "And then you cover Hafitz while he straightens out the ship and you rendezvous with the space control and they take you all into custody. You get a citation from the government. That's about it. Corny, huh?"

"But what about the girl?" Paul asked. "Is she really a spy?"

"Girl? What girl?"

"Naomi, her name was," Paul said. "You couldn't miss her. She was in the vikie right at the beginning--that brunette in the fast car."

"But there wasn't any girl, Paul," Mac insisted. "Not when I saw it."

"Of course there was. There had to be--the vikies all start out the same way, no matter who sees them."

"It beats me, pal. I know I didn't see her. Maybe you dreamed up the dame."

"I don't think so," Paul said. "But of course it's possible." He yawned. "I wouldn't mind dreaming of her tonight, at that. Think I'll turn in now, Mac. I've got that long trip tomorrow, you know. Up to Canada to look over a new line of Marswool sport jackets at the All-Planets Showroom."

"Driving or flying?"

"The weather prognosis is zero-zero. I'll drive."

"Good," said Mac.

* * * * *

Paul Asher woke up late. He had a confused recollection of a dream. Something about a beautiful brunette giving him a backrub.

A look at the chrono sent the dream out of his head and he hurried through shaving and dressing.

His car was waiting for him, engine idling, at the curb. He got in, tossing his briefcase and topcoat ahead of him to the far side of the front seat. His back began to itch, insistently, and he rubbed it against the leather upholstery.

Paul adjusted the safety belt around him, and fastened it. Might as well do it now, instead of having to fool around with it later. Damn that itch, anyway! It was as if something were stuck to his skin--like a sticking plaster....

The high-powered vehicle purred smoothly as it took a long, rising curve. The road climbed steadily toward the mountaintop city ahead.

The scene was familiar.

The itching of his back spread and became a prickly feeling in the small hairs at the nape of his neck.

He knew now that he was not alone in the car. He looked in the rear-view mirror.

Naomi.

She was looking at him insolently, her wide red mouth in a half smile.

She said: "Just keep going, Sweetheart, as fast as you can."

THE END

Contents

WITH A VENGEANCE

By J. B. WOODLEY

Keep this in mind in teaching apprentices: They are future journeymen--and even masters!

October 10, 2119 New San Francisco

Today, at precisely 9:50 a.m., Kyle became First Imperator of Terra. His coup was so fantastically direct and facile that I am almost tempted to believe that old cliche "the time was right."

Well, however badly it can be expressed, I suppose the world was ripe for this sort of thing. I can remember when much the same used to happen in elections. One man would win over another by a tremendous majority, and historians would then set about to show how "the time was right."

Why do I persist in tormenting myself with that phrase! Analytically, I might say I resent this new aristocracy of politics. Specifically, I might say I resent Kyle.

And both are true, both are true.

This swing, though, to absolute monarchy, complete with the installation of the Kyle Dynasty--damn him! This is something which psychologists, not historians, must explain. Has the age of the Common Man, so bravely flaunted for over one hundred years, truly come to nothing? Would people really prefer a figurehead and a symbol of undisputed authority?

In this instance, one may again conclude that "the time was right." Contact with planets like Mars and Venus undoubtedly had its influence. I must confess that the televised audiences with the Mrit of Venus and the Znam of Mars did make Terra's President--I should say, late President--look a bit seedy. I daresay there is such a thing as a too common Common Man.

Kyle was such, twenty years ago. His name wasn't Kyle then, although it was something very like that. I must see if any of the old ledgers are about! I'd like to see what the Imperator's name was when His Most Imperial Majesty was an apprenticed nobody!

* * * * *

October 12, 2119 New San Francisco

I found it! Buried in stacks of dust behind the old printing press that was once the heart of my Beacon-Sentinel. There were others there too. Spent a delightful morning with them, reading back through those old account books.

I wonder whatever happened to Hastings? And Drew? Best linotype men I ever had. They became pilots, or something, as I recall. Too bad, too bad. They could have had such brilliant futures, both of them. Why they felt they must ally themselves with the non-thinking, muscle-flexing variety of mankind--of which our Ruler is an excellent example--I'll never know.

Ah, yes, Kyle! In those days he was Kilmer Jones. I don't remember him too well, actually, except for the day I fired him.

I suppose he was right in changing his name. We couldn't very well have an Imperator named Kilmer the First, or Jones the First. Much too common, not at all in keeping.

Gawky fellow--that Kilmer. When Bard brought me a sample of his work--I guess I'll have to call it that--we both had a good laugh over it! Atrocious spelling! Couldn't follow the proofreader's marks. Indeed, I wonder if the fellow could even read! The punctuation! And the grammar!

I called the boy to the office that morning--or was it the next day? No matter. I called him in and told him, as kindly as possible, that I thought there were other vocations to which he might be better suited. The irony of it! Kilmer Jones--Kyle I!

And he stood there, I remember, with those seventeen-year-old hands that were all knuckles and bone and chapped skin, twisting those hands and shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

"Please, Mr. Booth," he said, his voice cracking. "I ain't got no other job in mind. I wanna be a noospaper man. I ain't got no--"

If not for that "ain't got no," I think I might have relented. But no one is going to ruin the English language as he did! Not in my offices!

I took him to task severely for his offensive usage, outlined a correct example of what he had attempted to say, gave him a brief lesson in the history of the tongue, and explained why it had been chosen as the official Terran speech. I think my conclusion was, "You'll be much better off in a position which requires you to quote neither Milton nor Shakespeare nor any author save possibly those who write the comic strips."

"Got no training," he said softly. (I supposed it was to keep his voice from exhibiting its usual adolescent gymnastics.)

I shuddered slightly, I remember. "You mean, 'I have no training.'"

"Yeah ..." softly again. "Yeah, Mr. Booth."

"Yes!" I cried impatiently. "Not 'yeah,' but yes!"

I searched for his severance pay on my desk, wondering who the devil had hired him in the first place. Gave him three weeks pay, as I recall it, one more than necessary.

Unmannerly pup! He just stood there for a minute and then finally left without even a "Thank you," or "Good-by."

And this is the man who is Kyle the First, Ruler of Terra at the age of thirty-seven! I wonder what he is like now....

* * * * *

January 1, 1 New San Francisco

There is no longer any need to wonder. Surprisingly few heads have rolled, but apparently Jonesy chooses to exhibit his power in other ways.

Thanksgiving Day, a custom preserved in certain portions of the Directorate of North America, is three weeks away--even though it is January.

The Year One. There used to be some childish joke about the Year One. Don't remember it just now.

Thanksgiving harvest in January. Christmas celebration in February. Spring planting in July! To say nothing of the inconvenience this has caused in my bookkeeping department! I suppose the man will now try to change the weather to suit his new calendar!

* * * * *

January 8, 1 New San Francisco

He can't last! He can't! A dictator is one thing. A monarch is another. But Kyle is something else!

Naturally he had to remove certain persons from his way. And his summer palace in the plains region of America--that's all right, that's all right! An authority of Kyle's stature is expected to remove undesirables, and to have a summer palace, and a winter palace, and anything else he wants! Of course!

But why this? Why this of all things!

No newspapers! Just like that! He waves an edict, and just like that, no newspapers! The Beacon-Sentinel has been a great paper for the last twenty-five years! It was nothing, and I was nothing, and together we became a Voice! And now again, we are nothing!

Oh, I see what's behind it! It's revenge, that's what it is! Because he once couldn't become a "noospaper" man, he's taking his vengeance this way.

A man as petty as that shall be overthrown! Mark my words! And the clumsiness of it!

I see what he is! I know him! He's still that pup of seventeen, playing king with the world, twisting his hands in glee over his childish triumph.

No subtlety! Just a direct pushing over an applecart he couldn't steer! Doesn't matter whose apples you destroy, does it, Jonesy? Just push it over--push it over!

* * * * *

January 16, 1 New San Francisco

Closed the Beacon-Sentinel yesterday. My savings are enough to take care of me for a few years. After that--ah, well, I am no longer a young man. I am glad that Elsa is not here to see this.

* * * * *

February 12, 1 New San Francisco

Received a letter this morning, requesting me to appear at the chambers of His Most Imperial Majesty, Kyle the First, on Tuesday of next week. His Most Imperial Majesty can see me between 10:15 and 10:25 on that morning.

Ten minutes--rather a brief spell in which to roll another head.

I find myself amazed, though. Is this man so truly powerful that he needs no police to make his arrests for him? Can he really send messages via jetmail and be certain his enemies will not try to escape?

I don't want to attempt flight. Life without my work is no longer life.

* * * * *

February 17, 1 Kyleton Palace, North America

I don't understand. I've gone over it twice, and I don't understand. If only Elsa were still with me! I could talk to her. She would help me decipher what it's all about.

This morning, at 10:15 sharp, I was taken to the public audience chamber in the palace.

His Majesty was seated behind a desk facing the doors. Behind him, on the wall, was His Coat of Arms.

He stood up and walked toward me, waving away the guards. "How are you, Mr. Booth?" he said. And offered me His Hand!

I recovered my presence of mind, of course, and replied as was fitting.

And then He said it! "I shall be at liberty later this week to discuss more fully the details of these past years." (Shades of "ain't got no!") "Meanwhile, my secretary will give you a complete dossier on my planned Official Bulletin." He lighted a cigarette after offering me one. "I should deem it an honor," he continued, "to have a man of your literary versatility and--I must add--your vast practical experience become Chief Editor of that Bulletin. The publication, which I should enjoy christening The Terran Beacon-Sentinel--with your permission, sir--shall be more than my official organ. It shall set the standards for the coming newspaper world."

He cocked an eyebrow at me and smiled. "I believe we are in perfect accord about certain standards, are we not, Mr. Booth? The deplorable grammatical practices of some newspapers! Well, really, Mr. Booth! I feel assured of your agreement!"

He led me around the desk and pointed to the Coat of Arms. As He stood silent, I felt obliged to look more closely. I had seen it before, of course, but seeing it now, greatly enlarged, I was able to make out its detail.

What I had thought was a mere decorative border, I now realized was a motif I have seen all my life! A tiny lighthouse sending forth a beam! The trademark of my paper!

As I stood there, gaping, His Majesty laughed softly and said, "That, Mr. Booth, I felt impelled to include. For, without your most fortuitous termination of my apprenticeship in your organization, I should not have risen to my present position."

* * * * *

Again He took my hand and shook it, warmly. His hair is just a bit gray at the temples, and there are signs of strain on His finely featured face. Those awkward hands are now strong and purposeful.

He apologized that He must return to His duties, and went with me to the door. "My secretary will fill in further details about your new position. Newspapers shall once again be published. No--don't say a word, Mr. Booth! I know what you are thinking.

"Your salary," he continued as we stood at the open door, "shall, of course, be commensurate to your high authority in this new field. Allow me, now, to thank you most deeply and sincerely for your unwitting aid in my youth. I assure you, Mr. Booth, I have often thought of that day we talked. And I hope to repay you, in some measure, for what you did."

He said more, mostly polite phrases of good-by. And then I was outside after being handed a folder by some man.

An official jetmobile took me to my residence--which turned out to be in the East Wing. Here I am, and I don't understand. I came prepared to suffer heaven only knows what as part of Kilmer Jones's childish pattern for revenge.

Instead, here I am, head of the Official Bulletin, titular ruler and ruler-in-fact of the future journalism of the world!

There is something behind this--I keep feeling there is. But what? What? Or is he truly generous, to a degree never before known among absolute monarchs?

* * * * *

February 13, 1 Kyleton Palace, North America

I am a suspicious and most humble old man. I see now that Kyle's generosity amazed me only because I myself would have been incapable of such an action.

Just now, I fear for His Majesty. I was right, before, when I said there was no subtlety in the man. He is too open, too fair, too forgiving. A ruler with such greatness of heart might easily allow some small insignificant person in too far, too close. I fear for him!

* * * * *

February 14, 1 Kyleton Palace, North America

Tomorrow we begin publication! The pressroom is magnificent! I can hardly wait. It's been a long time since I've felt such exuberance.

This afternoon I am to conduct a conference of some eight hundred editors! His Majesty's secretary has sent me an outline on Journalistic Standards, which I shall study after lunch.

There was a note attached, in His Majesty's handwriting--such beautiful penmanship, too. "A mere formality," it said, "for, of course, you and I know full well what the future of journalism shall be, Mr. Booth."

* * * * *

Later--

How wrong can one man be in one lifetime?

I wonder now why he changed the calendar. I wonder now what poor devil he destroyed then. But I'll cheat him!

I'll cheat him yet!

* * * * *

Obituary, Trran Bacon-Sntinl, Fbruary 16, 1

Th unfortunat and untimly dmis of Gorg W. Booth is hrby notd with sorrow by thos who knw and lovd him.

Mr. Booth, formr ditor and publishr of th Bacon-Sntinl of Nw San Francisco, Dirctorat of North Amrica, had apparntly bn in poor helth for som tim. It is blivd that worry ovr th succss of his nw policy-stting Trran Bacon-Sntinl was a contributing factor in his suicid lat in th aftrnoon of Fbruary 14.

His Most Imprial Majsty Kyl th First has ordrd a fitting monumnt to his lat lamntd frind. A simpl shaft of granit shall b rctd in th gardn facing th Ast Wing of Kylton Palac, whr Mr. Booth mad his residnc. On th shaft shall b inscribd th lgnd:

"How bautous mankind is! Oh brav nw world, That has much peepl in't!"

Th quotation is from Th Tmpst. Mr. Booth was a grat admirr of Shakspar.

An vn mor fitting and long-livd mmorial is xprssd in th dict rlasd through th offics of His Majsty on th vry day of Mr. Booth's dath. It reeds in part:

"Th nw linguistic policy on Trra, as dmonstratd in th Trran Bacon-Sntinl, shall hncforth b known as Boothtalk."

Mr. Booth bfrindd Our Imprial Rulr in His youngr days, and, as w all know, His Majsty nvr forgts a frind.

Contents

THE DEATH TRAPS OF FX-31

By Sewell Peaslee Wright

I do not wish to appear prejudiced against scientists. I am not prejudiced, but I have observed the scientific mind in action, on a great many occasions, and I find it rather incomprehensible.

It is true that there are men with a scientific turn of mind who, at the same time, you can feel safe to stand with shoulder to shoulder, in an emergency. Young Hendricks, who was my junior officer on the Ertak, back in those early days of the Special Patrol Service, about which I have written so much, was one of these.

Nor, now that I come to think of the matter in the cool and impartial manner which is typical of me, was young Hendricks the only one. There was a chap--let's see, now. I remember his face very well; he was one of those dark, wiry, alert men, a native of Earth, and his name was--Inverness! Carlos Inverness. Old John Hanson's memory isn't quite as tricky as some of these smart young officers of the Service, so newly commissioned that the silver braid is not yet fitted to the curve of their sleeves, would lead one to believe.

I met Inverness in the ante-room of the Chief of Command. The Chief was tied up in one of the long-winded meetings which the Silver-sleeves devoted largely to the making of new rules and regulations for the confusion of both men and officers of the Service, but he came out long enough to give me the Ertak's orders in person.

"Glad to see you here at Base again, Commander," he said, in his crisp, business-like way. "Hear some good reports of your work; keep it up!"

"Thank you, sir," I said, wondering what was in the air. Any time the Chief was complimentary, it was well to look out for squalls--which is an old Earth term for unexpected trouble.

"Not at all, Commander, not at all. And now, let me present Carlos Inverness, the scientist, of whom you have undoubtedly heard."

I bowed and said nothing, but we shook hands after the fashion of Earth, and Inverness smiled quite humanly.

"I imagine the good captain has been too busy to follow the activities of such as myself," he said, sensibly enough.

"A commander"--and I laid enough emphasis on the title to point out to him his error in terminology--"in the Special Patrol Service usually finds plenty to occupy his mind," I commented, wondering more than ever what was up.

[Illustration: At the same instant two other trap-doors swung up.]

"True," said the Chief briskly. "You'll pardon me if I'm exceedingly brief, Commander, but there's a sizeable group in there waiting my return.

"I have a special mission for you; a welcome relief from routine patrol. I believe you have made special requests, in the past, for assignments other than the routine work of the Service, Commander?"

He was boxing me up in a corner, and I knew it, but I couldn't deny what he said, so I admitted it as gracefully as I could.

"Very well," nodded the Chief, and it seemed to me his eyes twinkled for an instant. "Inverness, here, is head of a party of scientists bent upon a certain exploration. They have interested the Council in the work, and the Council has requested the cooperation of this Service."

He glanced at me to make sure I understood. I certainly did; when the Supreme Council requested something, that thing was done.

"Very well, sir," I said. "What are your orders?"

The Chief shrugged.

"Simply that you are to cooperate with Inverness and his party, assisting them in every possible way, including the use of your ship for transporting them and a reasonable amount of equipment, to the field of their activities. The command of the ship remains, of course, in you and your officers, but in every reasonable way the Ertak and her crew are to be at the disposal of Inverness and his group. Is that clear, Commander?"

"Perfectly, sir." Nothing could have been clearer. I was to run the ship, and Inverness and his crew were to run me. I could just imagine how Correy, my fighting first officer, would take this bit of news. The mental picture almost made me laugh, disgusted as I was.

"Written orders will, of course, be given you before departure. I believe that's all. Good luck, Commander!" The Chief offered his hand briefly, and then hurried back to the other room where the Silver-sleeves had gathered to make more rulings for the confusion of the Service.

* * * * *

"Since when," asked Correy bitterly, "are we running excursions for civilians? We'll be personally conducting elderly ladies next thing."

"Or put on Attached Police Service," growled Hendricks, referring to the poor devils who, in those days, policed the air-lanes of the populated worlds, cruising over the same pitiful routes day after day, never rising beyond the fringe of the stratosphere.

"Perhaps," suggested the level-headed Kincaide, "it isn't as bad as it sounds. Didn't you, say, sir, that this Inverness was rather a decent sort of chap?"

I nodded.

"Very much so. You'd scarcely take him for a scientist."

"And our destination is--what?" asked Kincaide.

"That I don't know. Inverness is to give us that information when he arrives, which will be very shortly, if he is on time."

"Our destination," said Correy, "will probably be some little ball of mud with a tricky atmosphere or some freak vegetation they want to study. I'd rather--"

A sharp rap on the door of the navigating room, where we had gathered for an informal council of war, interrupted.

"Party of three civilians at the main exit port, Port Number One, sir," reported the sub-officer of the guard. "One sent his name: Carlos Inverness."

"Very good. Admit them at once, and recall the outer guards. We are leaving immediately."

As the guard saluted and hurried away, I nodded to Correy. "Have the operating room crew report for duty at once," I ordered, "and ask Sub-officer Scholey to superintend the sealing of the ports. Mr. Kincaide, will you take the first watch as navigating officer? Lift her easily until we determine our objective and can set a course; this is like shoving off with sealed orders."

"Worse," said Hendricks unhappily. "Sealed orders promise something interesting, and--"

"Carlos Inverness and party," announced the guard from the doorway.

Inverness nodded to me in friendly fashion and indicated his two companions.

"Commander Hanson," he said, "permit me to present Godar Tipene and Cleve Brady, who are my companions on this expedition." I bowed, and shook hands with Brady; Tipene was a Zenian, and hence did not offer me this greeting of Earth. Then, quickly, I completed the round of introductions, studying Inverness's companions with interest as I did so.

* * * * *

Brady was short, and rather red-faced; a beefy, taciturn type, with a trap-like mouth and thoughtful discerning eyes. He struck me as being one with whom most men would like to be friendly, but who would have exceedingly few friends.

The Zenian was a perfect foil for him. Tipene was exceedingly tall and slender, like all his race, and very dark. His eyes were almost womanly in their softness, and he had the nervous grace of a thoroughbred--which is an Earth animal of particularly high breeding, raised for show purposes. He had the happy faculty of speaking the language of Earth without a trace of Zenian or Universal accent; the Zenians are exceeded by none in linguistic ability, which was a real accomplishment before these decadent days when native languages are slipping so rapidly into obscurity.

"And now," said Inverness crisply, when the introductions were over, "I presume you'll wish to know something about our destination and the objects of this expedition, sir?"

"It would be helpful in charting our course," I admitted, smiling.

Inverness, with beautiful disregard for the necessities of space navigation, spread voluminous papers over the table whose surface was formed by the pair of three-dimensional charts which were the Ertak's eyes in outer space.

"Our destination," he said, "is a body designated on the charts as FX-31. You are familiar with it, Commander Hanson?"

"Hardly familiar," I admitted, smiling at Correy. "The universe is rather sizable, and even the named bodies are so numerous that one is able to be familiar with but an exceedingly small percentage. Its designation, of course, gives me certain information regarding its size, location and status, however."

"How much information, Commander?" asked Tipene nervously.

"Well, 'F' indicates that it is large; larger than Earth, for example. The numerals tells me where to locate it upon our space charts. And the 'X' would indicate that it is inhabited, but not by intelligent beings. Or that there is reasonable doubt as to the nature of those inhabiting it."

"A very good summary of the knowledge we have," nodded Inverness approvingly. "I can add but one bit of information which may or may not be accurate: that the sphere known as FX-31 is populated by a ruling class decidedly unusual in type, and possessed of a degree of intelligence which has made them virtual masters of the sphere."

"What are they like?" asked Correy. "Will they put up a fight? Are they dangerous?"

* * * * *

"Our knowledge came from a luckless tramp liner which set down on FX-31 in search of water, their water-producing equipment having been damaged by carelessness. They found water, a great river of it, and sent a party of five men to determine its fitness for human consumption. They were snapped up before they had gone a hundred feet from the ship--and no more men were sent out. They hovered over the stream and drew up the water in containers devised for the purpose."

"Snapped up?" asked Correy impatiently. "By whom? Or what?"

"By spiders!" replied Inverness, his eyes shining with the fanatical gleam of a scientist who scents something strange. "Great spiders--perhaps not true spiders, but akin to them, from the descriptions we have--of what is known on Earth as the trap-door variety, but possessed of a high degree of intelligence, the power of communication, and definitely organized."

"Organized," put in Tipene, "in the sense that they work together instead of individually; that there are those to command and those to obey."

"You say they are large," I commented. "How large?"

"Large enough," said Inverness grimly, "to enable one of them to instantly overpower a strong man."

I saw Correy glance forward, where our largest disintegrator-ray tubes were located, and his eyes lit up with the thought of battle.

"If there's anything I hate," he gritted, "it's a spider. The hairy, crawling beasts! I'll man one of the tubes myself, just for the fun of seeing them dissolve into nice brown dust, and--"

"I'm afraid not, Mr. Correy," said Inverness, shaking his head. "We're going to study them--not to exterminate them. Our object is to learn their history, their customs, their mode of communication, and their degree of intelligence--if possible."

"Yes," grunted Brady. "If possible."

* * * * *

Kincaide set the Ertak down on FX-31, close to the shore of a river, as gently as a feather settling to earth. Correy and I made our way to the exit port, where Inverness and his companions had gathered, with a considerable amount of scientific apparatus, and what seemed to be a boat, ingeniously taken down for shipment.

All three of the scientists were clad in suits of some gray material, flexible as cloth, but possessed of a certain metallic sheen, which completely covered them. The material had been stiffened to form a sort of helmet, with a broad band of transparent material set in at the eye level, so that the wearer could see to both sides, as well as to the front. I could also discern the outlines of menores--the crude and cumbersome type of thought-transference instrument used in that day--apparently built into the helmets. Belted around their middles were atomic pistols of the latest and most deadly model.

"For emergency use only, Commander," explained Inverness, observing my glance. His voice came quite clearly through the fabric which covered his face, so I gathered it was sufficiently porous to admit air for breathing. "This garment we wear will be sufficient protection, we believe; their mandibles are the weapons of the creatures we are to study, and this fabric should be ample protection against much more deadly weapons.

"Now, we shall walk to the shore of the river; if we are not molested--and I believe we shall not be, here, because the infiltration of water would quickly fill any passage sunk into this sandy earth so close to the river--please have your men bring our supplies to us, the boat first."

I nodded, and the three men walked through the open port, out across the gleaming, golden sand, to the water's edge. A number of great scarlet birds, with long, fiercely taloned legs, swooped about them curiously, croaking hoarsely and snapping their hawkish beaks, but offering no real molestation.

My men quickly carried their supplies to them, and before the last of the equipment had been delivered, the boat was assembled and afloat: a broad-beamed craft with hollow metal ribs, covered with some shining fabric which was unfamiliar to me. There was a small cabin forward and a small atomic engine housed back near the stern.

I walked to the edge of the water and shook hands with Inverness and Brady; with Tipene I exchanged bows.

"I am sorry," said Inverness, "that I am facing you with what will, undoubtedly, be a monotonous and wearying vigil, for we shall probably be gone several weeks." He referred, I must explain, to a period of seven Earth days, a common unit of time on Earth.

"We'll make the best of it," I said, thinking of Correy, and how he would rage at such a period of inaction. "The best of luck to you!"

"Thanks; we'll remain no longer than necessary," smiled Inverness, smiling, his shining eyes already fixed on the river ahead.

"And that will be no short time," said the taciturn Brady. "Shall we start?"

* * * * *

Correy raged. I had expected that, and I was in complete sympathy with him. Routine patrol was better than being earth-fast on this barren and uninteresting ball of mud.

"Have I your permission, sir," asked Correy on the fourth day, "to make a little tour of inspection and exploration? We might run into some fresh meat."

"I'm not sure that would be wise. These spider creatures--"

"Pardon me, sir," interrupted Correy eagerly, "but we could take a small landing force, armed with pistols and grenades. Even a field ray tube. Certainly we could handle anything which might turn up, then."

"And, you rather hope that something will turn up, Mr. Correy?"

Correy grinned and shrugged his shoulders.

"It would break the monotony, wouldn't it, sir? And, too, if anything should happen to them"--and he glanced up the river, in the direction taken by the three scientists--"we'd know something about what we had to contend with, wouldn't we?"

I'm not sure whether it was Correy's argument or my own venturesome disposition which swayed me, but immediately after lunch Correy and I, with a picked crew of men, started out from the ship.

Up until that time, we had confined our activities to the area between the ship and the shore--a small enough space at best. Now we rounded the shining blunt bow of the Ertak and headed inland, Correy and myself in the lead, the two portable disintegrator ray-men immediately behind us, and the four other men of the party flanking the ray operators, two on each side.

It was hot, but the air was dry and invigorating. There was not a cloud visible in the sky. Far ahead was a low line of bluish, fronded, vegetation; whether small trees or some fern-like undergrowth, we could not determine. The ground between the ship and the line of vegetation was almost completely barren, the only growth being a lichenous sort of vegetation, gray-green in color.

* * * * *

Here and there on the ground were the imprints of sharp, split hoofs, and Correy pointed these out to me with the comment that one of the guards had reported seeing a number of slender-legged animals roaming here in the star-light, apparently seeking water, but frightened by the strange apparition of our ship.

"From the way he described them, they're something like the deer we used to have on Earth," he said. "I've seen the fossils in the museums, and they had little sharp, split hoofs like--"

One of the men behind us shouted a warning at that instant, and we both whirled in our tracks. My eyes fell instantly upon one of the strangest and most fearsome sights I have ever seen--and I have explored many strange and terrible worlds.

To our left, a huge circular section of the earth had lifted, and was swinging back on a hinge of glistening white fibers; a disk as great in diameter as the height of a man, and as thick as a man's body.

Where the disk had been, gaped a tunnel slanting down into the earth, and lined with the same glistening white fibers which covered the bottom of the disk, and hinged it in place. As I looked, there sprang from this tunnel a thing which I shall call a spider, yet which was too monstrous to be called by such an innocuous name.

It was rust red in color, with eight bristling legs, each tipped with three curved and tufted claws. On each side of its face was an armored mandible, tipped with shining fangs, and beside them, slender, six-jointed palps stretched hungrily.

The man who had seen the disk fly up opened fire without orders, and if he had not done so, some of us would not have returned to the ship. As it was, the atomic pistol whispered a steady stream of death which spattered the hairy body into an oozing pulp while it was still in mid-air. We leaped away, adding our fire to that of the alert guard who had first seen the apparition, and the spider, a twitching bundle of bespattered legs, fell on the spot where, an instant before, we had been.

Almost at the same instant two other great circular trap-doors swung up, just beyond the first, and their hairy, malignant occupants leaped toward us.

* * * * *

Our pistols were ready, now, however, and the portable ray equipment was humming. The ray dissolved the first into a sifting of reddish dust, and our pistols slashed the other into ribbons.

"Back to the ship!" I shouted. "Look, Mr. Correy--there are hundreds of them!"

Before us score upon score of the great disks were lifting, and from the tunnel each revealed, monstrous rust-red bodies were pouring.

Our retreat covered by the two ray operators, we made our way swiftly to the ship. The great spiders, apparently alarmed by the magical disappearance of those of their comrades upon which the disintegrator ray rested, hesitated for a moment, their tremendous legs tensed, and their mandibles quivering with venomous anger, and then scuttled back into their holes, swinging their covers into place as they did so.

"We didn't do so badly, at that," grinned Correy rather breathlessly, as we gained the welcome shelter of the Ertak. "There are a score and more of those potlids still standing open--which means that many spiders didn't go back to tell about what happened to them."

"True--but had they waited until they could have surrounded us, the Ertak would have been short-handed on the return trip. She would have been just two officers and six men short."

I have never seen a real expression of fear on Correy's face, but I came as close to it then as I ever did.

"They're tough customers," he said. "I never did like spiders, and I like them less, now. Those things stood half again as high as a man on their long legs, and could jump half the length of the ship."

"Hardly that," I said. "But I'll say this: if they're the gentry Inverness and the other two are investigating, they're welcome to their jobs!"

* * * * *

There wasn't any difficulty in keeping the men close to the ship after that, although waiting was a tedious and nerve-racking procedure.

We watched the spider-infested territory closely, however, and found that they fed at night upon the deer-like creatures Correy had mentioned. These unwary beasts, seeking water, were pounced upon the instant they came close to one of the hidden dens, and dragged swiftly out of sight. These observations were made by television, and Correy in particular would sit up half the night watching the creatures at work.

It was the second day of the fourth week that the sentry on duty called out that the boat was returning. We hastened down to the river to welcome them back, and I for one felt very much relieved.

But as the boat approached, I felt my fears returning, for there was only one man visible: Tipene.

The Zenian, bedraggled and weary, had lost or discarded the protective suit he had worn, and his lean, dark face was haggard.

"We leave immediately, Commander Hanson," he said as he disembarked. "Please give the necessary orders."

"But the others, sir? Where are Inverness and Brady?"

"Dead," said Tipene. "The Aranians got them. I barely escaped myself."

"And who are the Aranians?" I asked.

"The creatures which control this world. The spider creatures. Aranians, they call themselves. Do we leave at once, as I ordered?"

I thought quickly. I didn't like Tipene, and never had, and I fancied even less the high-handed attitude he was taking.

"I would suggest, sir, that you first give us an account of what has happened," I said shortly. "If there is anything we can do for the other two, perhaps--"

"I said they were dead," snapped Tipene. "You can't do anything for dead men, can you?"

"No. But we must have a report to enter on our log, you understand, and--I'll be very busy on the return trip. I'd like to have your story before we start." Somehow, I was suspicious of Tipene.

"Very well. Although I warn you I shall report your delay to your superiors." I shrugged, and led the way to the dining saloon which, small as it was, held chairs enough to seat us all.

* * * * *

"My story is very brief," he said, when my three officers, Tipene, and myself were seated. "We proceeded up the river to a spot which we deemed suited as a point of entry into the country, and far enough from the ship so that its presence would not be alarming to the inhabitants.

"We permitted ourselves to be captured by the Aranians, knowing that our protective suits would prevent them from doing us serious bodily injury.

"You have seen the creatures--word of your adventure with them precipitated our misfortune, I might say here--and you know of their tunnels. We were taken down one of these tunnels, and into a still larger one. This in turn gave onto a veritable subterranean avenue, and, in time, led to a sort of underground metropolis."

"What?" growled Correy. "An underground city of those things?"

"I should like to ask that you do not interrupt," said Tipene coldly. "This metropolis was really no more than a series of cubicles, opening off the innumerable crisscrossing tunnels, and many layers in thickness. Passage from one level to another was by means of slanting tunnels.

"Some of these cubicles were very large, and utilized as storage rooms. Others were used for community activities, schools, entertainments, and so forth. We learned these things later, and explored them by means of our ethon lamps--the entire system of tunnels being, of course, in utter darkness.

"The first few days they were exceedingly hostile, and tried to tear us to pieces. When they could not do this, word was sent to some of their more learned members, and we were investigated. By the use of extra menores we had brought with us, we established a contact with their minds; first by the usual process of impressing pictures of our thoughts upon their minds, and later by more direct process."

* * * * *

"I will say nothing of the great scientific value of our discoveries, for you would neither understand nor appreciate them--although they will set the scientific universe agog," continued Tipene, his eyes gleaming suddenly with a triumphant light. "As we perfected communication, we convinced them that we were friendly, and we gained their complete confidence.

"They are a very ancient race. Very slowly have they come to their present stage of mental development, but they now possess reasoning faculties, a language--and a form of community government. There is much more, which, as I have said, would be of no significance to you.

"And then word came that beings like ourselves had attacked and killed many of the Aranians. The news had traveled slowly, for their system of communication is crude, but it reached the community center in which we were staying.

"Instantly, all was hostility. They felt they had been betrayed, and that we might betray them. Brady and Inverness, always rash and thoughtless, had discarded their protective suits, feeling sure they were perfectly safe, and they were torn to pieces.

"I, having a more scientific and cautious mind, doubting everything as a true scientific mind must, still wore my armor. By the liberal use of my pistol, I managed to fight my way to the surface, and to the boat. And now, Commander Hanson, will you start back, as I have ordered?"

I don't know what I would have said if I had not caught a peculiar glance from Correy, a glance accompanied by a significant, momentary closing of one eye (a gesture of Earth which means many things, and which is impossible to explain) and a slight nod.

"Very well, Mr. Tipene," I said shortly. "We'll start at once. Gentlemen, will you join me in the navigating room?"

* * * * *

Correy was the last to arrive in the navigating room, and when he came in his eyes were dancing.

"I've just transferred Tipene to another stateroom, sir," he said. "A specially equipped stateroom."

"You what?"

"If you'll give orders, sir, for an immediate start, I'll tell you all about it," chuckled Correy. "Tipene says he's worn out, and is going to retire as soon as we start. And when he does--we'll learn something."

I nodded to Kincaide, and he gave the general attention signal. In a few seconds the outer sentry was recalled, and the exit port had been sealed. Slowly, the Ertak lifted.

"Maybe I'm wrong, sir," said Correy then, "but I'm convinced that Tipene is lying. Something's wrong; he was in altogether too much of a hurry to get away.

"So, before I transferred him to the other stateroom, I concealed a menore under the mattress of his bunk, immediately under where his head will lie. It's adjusted to full strength, and I believe it will pick up enough energy to emanate what he's thinking about. We'll be in the next stateroom and see what we can pick up. How does that sound, sir?"

"Like something you'd cook up, Mr. Correy!" I said promptly. "And I believe, as you do, that if it works at all, we'll find out something interesting."

We equipped ourselves with menores, adjusted to maximum power, and silently filed into the stateroom adjacent to Tipene's.

He was moving about slowly, apparently undressing, for we heard first one boot and then another drop to the floor. And we could sense vague emanations, too faint to be intelligible, and unmistakably coming from him.

"Probably sitting on the edge of his bunk," whispered Correy. "When he lies down, it'll work like a charm!"

It did--almost too well. Suddenly we caught a strong emanation, in the Universal language.

* * * * *

"Surly individual, that Hanson--didn't like my giving orders--hurt his dignity. But I had my own way, and that's all that's important. Seemed to be suspicious--they all were. Maybe I was a bit urgent--but I was afraid--those damned Aranians might have changed their spidery minds.

"They can't be very intelligent--to think I'd come back with tribute to pay for the spiders that fool Hanson and his men killed. Why, the ship's rays could wipe them all out, drill a hole in the ground--they didn't realize that. Thought that by holding Brady and that conceited Inverness for hostages, they'd be safe--and I'd be idiotic enough to not see this chance to get all the glory of the expedition for myself--instead of sharing it with those two. You're a quick thinker, Tipene--the true, ruthless, scientific mind...."

I motioned for my officers to follow me, and we made our way, silent and grim-faced, to the navigating room.

"Nice, friendly lad, isn't he?" snarled Correy. "I thought there was something up. What are your plans, sir?"

"We'll go to the rescue of Inverness and Brady, of course. Mr. Correy, place Tipene under arrest, and bring him here at once. Mr. Kincaide, take over the ship; give orders to set her down where we were. And you, Mr. Hendricks, will take personal command of the forward ray tubes."

My officers sprang to obey orders, and I paced restlessly up and down the room, thinking. Just as the Ertak settled softly to earth, Correy returned with his prisoner. Two men stood on guard with drawn atomic pistols at the door.

"What's the meaning of this indignity, sir?" flared Tipene. He had dressed hurriedly, and was by no means an imposing spectacle. He drew himself up to his full height, and tried to look domineering, but there was fear in his eyes. "I shall report you--"

"You'll do no reporting, Tipene," I broke in coldly. "I'll do the reporting. You see, we know all about your little plan to desert your comrades, held by the Aranians as hostages, and to grasp all the glory of your findings for yourself. But--the plan doesn't work. We're going back."

* * * * *

Tipene's face drained a dirty yellow--a Zenian can never be actually pale.

"You ... how...." he floundered.

"A menore, under your pillow," I explained crisply. "But that doesn't matter, now. You will guide us to the spot where you found the Aranian city, and establish communication with the Aranians. When that's done, I'll give you further orders."

"And if I won't?" breathed Tipene, his teeth clenched in a shaking rage.

"But you will. Otherwise, we'll permit you to continue your explorations on this interesting little sphere--minus your protective suit."

Tipene stared at me with horror-stricken eyes. I think he saw that I meant exactly what I said--and I was not bluffing.

"I--I'll do it," he said.

"Then watch the river carefully," I ordered. "Kincaide, lift her just enough so we can get a good view of the river. Tipene will tell you where to set her down."

Navigating visually, Kincaide followed the winding course of the river, covering in a few minutes a distance it had taken the scientists a day to navigate.

"There--there is the place," said Tipene suddenly. "Just this side of the patch of vegetation."

"Very good. And remember what happens if you play any tricks," I nodded grimly. "Descend to within a few yards of the ground, Mr. Kincaide; we'll drop Tipene through the trap."

Correy hurried the prisoner away, and I ordered the trap in the bottom of the Ertak's hull to be opened.

"Now," I informed Tipene, "we'll let you down and you will establish communication with the Aranians. Tell them you have brought back, not tribute, but an enemy powerful enough to blast their entire city out of existence. It will be a simple matter for you to picture what an atomic grenade or one of the ship's rays will do. We'll arrange a little demonstration, if they're not convinced. And tell them that if they don't want to be wiped out, to bring Inverness and Brady to us, unharmed, as fast as their eight long legs will manage."

"They won't do it," whined Tipene. "They were very angry over the killing of those others. I'm just risking my life without the possibility of gain."

"You obey my orders, or you go down and stay there," I said abruptly. "Which?"

"I'll do as you say," he said, and the cage dropped with him swiftly.

* * * * *

As soon as he was on the ground he reached up and adjusted his menore, peering around anxiously. For several minutes nothing happened, and then, the length of the ship away, one of the great trap-doors flew open. Out of it came one of the spiders, not rust-red like those we had seen, but faded to a dirty yellow. Close behind him were two of the rust-red Aranians, which fell in one on each side of the yellow chap.

The first Aranian, I presumed--and rightly--was one of the old learned members of the race. As he scuttled closer to the cowering Tipene, I saw that, amidst the bristles which covered his head and thorax, was a menore.

The three great spiders approached the ship warily, watching it constantly with huge, glittering eyes. A safe distance away they paused, and the old one fixed his attention on Tipene.

Evidently, what Tipene emanated caused the old fellow to become very angry; I could see his legs quivering, and his withered old mandibles fairly clattered.

"He says he won't do it!" Tipene called up to me, excitedly. "Says we can't reach them underground, and that they'll kill their hostages if we try to harm them."

"Ask him if there are any tunnels between the ship and the river," I commanded. "We'll demonstrate what we can do if he harms Inverness and Brady."

The two were in silent communion for a moment, and Tipene looked up and shook his head.

"No," he shouted. "No tunnels there. The water would seep into them."

"Then tell him to watch!"

I stepped back and pressed an attention signal.

"Mr. Hendricks?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Open up with the starboard tube, full power, concentrated beam, at any spot halfway between here and the river. At once."

"At once, sir!"

* * * * *

The ray generators hummed instantly, their note deepening a moment later. The ray bit into the dry, sandy soil, boring steadily into the earth, making an opening over twice the height of a man in diameter.

The fine, reddish-brown dust of disintegration hung swirling above the mouth of the tunnel at first, and then, as the ray cut deeper into the earth, settled quickly and disappeared.

"Cease operation, Mr. Hendricks!" I commanded. "Keep the generators on, and stand by for further orders."

As soon as Hendricks' quick acknowledgment came back, I called down to Tipene.

"Tell your friend to inspect the little hole we drilled," I said. "Tell him to crawl down into it, if he wishes to see how deep it is. And then inform him that we have several ray tubes like this one, and that if he does not immediately produce his hostages, unharmed, we'll rise above his city and blast out a crater big enough to bury the Ertak."

Tipene nodded and communicated with the aged Aranian, who had cowered from the shaft in the earth disintegrated by our ray, and who now, very cautiously, approached it, flanked by his two far from eager guards.

At the lip of the slanting tunnel he paused, peered downward, and then, circling cautiously, approached the lidded tunnel whence he had emerged.

"He agrees," Tipene called up sullenly. "He will deliver Inverness and Brady to us. But we must come and get them; he says they have barricaded themselves in one of the cubicles, and will not permit any Aranian to approach. They still have their atomic pistols; the Aranians did not realize they were weapons."

"Very well; tell him a party from the ship will be ready in a few seconds. You will go with us as interpreter; you understand how to communicate with them."

* * * * *

I pressed Correy's attention signal and he answered instantly.

"Pick five good men for a landing party, two of them portable disintegrator ray operators, with equipment. The others will be provided with ethon lamps, pistols, and atomic grenades. Get the men to the trap as quickly as possible, please."

"Immediately, sir!"

I had the cage drawn up, and by the time I had secured my own equipment and returned, Correy was waiting with his men.

"One second, Mr. Correy, and we'll leave," I said, calling the navigating room. "Mr. Kincaide, I'm leaving you in command. We are going into the Aranian city to pick up Inverness and Brady. I anticipate no trouble, and if there is no trouble, we shall return within an hour. If we are not back within three hours, blast this entire area with atomic grenades, and riddle it with the rays. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir," said Kincaide.

"And then proceed immediately to Base and report. I have made an entry in the log regarding this expedition, as official evidence, if needed."

"Right, sir," said Kincaide, who was as near a perfect officer as I have ever seen.

"Mr. Correy, you've heard my orders. So have you, men. We're going underground, into a veritable warren of these spider creatures. If any of you wish to refuse this service, you have my permission to withdraw."

Not a man moved. Correy hardly repressed a grin. He knew the men he had picked for the job.

"Good!" I said, and signaled to the cage operator. Swiftly we dropped to earth, where Tipene and our three hairy guides awaited us.

* * * * *

The descent into the white-lined tunnel was a terrifying experience. The lining was tough and fibrous, a sort of coarse material corresponding to the silk of a spider of normal size, although these strands were as large as my little finger, and strong as cables.

A close inspection of our guides added nothing to my confidence or bravery; their eight beady eyes, set at strategic spots about their heads, seemed unwinkingly ominous. And their mandibles, with fangs folded back like the blades of a pocket-knife, paired with their bristly palps, seemed like very capable weapons.

The Aranians ran ahead of us, our ethon lamps making strange and distorted shadows on the curving walls of the tunnel. Correy and I herded the unwilling Tipene just ahead of us, and the five picked men brought up the rear.

About forty feet down, the floor of the tunnel curved sharply and leveled off; a short distance farther on a number of other level tunnels merged with it, and the shape changed; from a tube perfectly circular in cross-section, it became a flattened oval, perhaps half again the height of a man, and at least three times that dimension in width.

Our party was joined by scores of other Aranians, who darted in from side passages; some going ahead, some closing in behind us, until the tunnel was filled with the peculiar brittle sound of their walking.

"They don't lack for numbers," muttered Correy softly. "Think they'll make trouble, sir?"

"Your guess is as good as mine. I showed them what the ray would do; I believe it threw a scare into the old chap. Did you tell them what we would do if they played any tricks, Tipene?"

"Certainly; my own life is endangered, isn't it?" snapped the Zenian.

"It certainly is," I told him grimly. "And not only by the spiders, if you make any suspicious moves."

* * * * *

We went on without further conversation, until we came to the beginning of the cubicles Tipene had mentioned.

Each of these was closed, or could be closed, by a circular door such as those which concealed the outer entrance to the tunnels, save that these were swung on a side hinge. From the central passage we were following, smaller ones branched off in all directions: to the left, to the right; upward and downward. And all were lined with the cubicles, from which a constantly increasing army of Aranians emerged to accompany us.

We had gone but a short distance into the "city" when our ancient guide paused, turning to stare down a deserted passage.

"He says," grunted Tipene--as near a grunt as the high-pitched Zenian voice is capable of, "that they're down there. He asks that we go and get them; he is afraid. They have killed two of the Aranians already with their atomic pistols."

"For which I don't blame them in the least," said Correy. "I'd get as many as I could before I let them sink their mandibles into me."

"But I thought they were hostages, and being treated as such?"

"The Aranians got tired of waiting; some of the younger ones tried to do their own executing," explained Tipene. "The whole brood of them is in an ugly mood, the old fellow tells me. We were fools to come!"

I didn't argue the matter. You can't argue such a matter with a man like Tipene. Instead, I lifted my voice in a shout which echoed down the long corridors.

"Brady! Inverness! Can you hear us?"

For a moment there was no reply, and then, as our ethon lights played hopefully along the passage, a circular door opened, and Inverness, his pistol drawn, peered out at us. A moment later, both he and Brady were running toward us.

"Hanson!" cried Inverness. "Man, but we're glad to see a human face again--but why did you come? Now they've got us all."

"But they'll let us all go," I said, with a confidence I did not feel. "I've demonstrated to one of their leaders just what the Ertak can do--and will do--if we aren't aboard, safe and unhurt, in three hours."

"The young bloods don't obey well, though," said Brady, shaking his head. "Look at them, milling around there in the central passage! They didn't see your demonstration, whatever it was. They started for us some time back, and we had to rip a couple of them to pieces, and barricade ourselves."

"Well," said Correy grimly, "we'll soon find out. Ready to start back, sir?"

* * * * *

I turned to Tipene, who was staring at the packed mass of Aranians, who choked the tunnel in both directions.

"Tell them to make way," I commanded. "We're leaving."

"I've--I've been in communication with him," moaned Tipene. "And he hasn't any power over these youngsters. They want blood. Blood! They say the ship won't dare do anything so long as so many of us are here."

"It will, though," I snapped. "Kincaide will obey my orders to the letter. It'll be a wholesale slaughter, if we're not there by the specified time."

"I know! I know!" groaned Tipene. "But I can't make them understand that. They can't appreciate the meaning of such discipline."

"I believe that," put in Brady. "Their state of society is still low in the scale. You shouldn't have come, Commander. Better the two of us than the whole group."

"It may not be so simple as they think. Mr. Correy, shall we make a dash for it?"

"I'd be in favor of that, sir!" he grinned.

"Very well, you take three of the enlisted men, Mr. Correy, and give us a brisk rear-guard action when we get into the main passage--if we do. Use the grenades if you have to, but throw them as fast as possible, or we'll have the roof coming down on us.

"The two ray operators and myself will try to open a way, backed up by Inverness and Brady. Understand, everybody?" The men took the places I had indicated, nodding, and we stood at the mouth of the side tunnel, facing the main passage which intersected it at a right angle. The mouth of the passage was blocked by a crowded mass of the spider creatures, evidently eager to pounce on us, but afraid to start an action in those narrow quarters.

As we came toward them, the Aranians packed about the entrance gave way grudgingly, all save two or three. Without an instant's hesitation, I lifted my pistol and slashed them into jerking pulp.

"Hold the ray," I ordered the two men by my side, "until we need it. They'll get a surprise when it goes into action."

* * * * *

We needed it the moment we turned into the main corridor, for here the passage was broad, and in order to prevent the creatures from flanking us, we had to spread our front and rear guards until they were no more than two thin lines.

Seeing their advantage, the Aranians rushed us. At a word from me, the ray operators went into action, and I did what I could with my comparatively ineffective pistol. Between us, we swept the passage clean as far as we could see--which was not far, for the reddish dust of disintegration hung in the quiet air, and the light of our ethon lamps could not pierce it.

For a moment I thought we would have clear sailing; Correy and his men were doing fine work behind us, and our ray was sweeping everything before us.

Then we came to the first of the intersecting passages, and a clattering horde of Aranians leaped out at us. The ray operators stopped them, but another passage on the opposite side was spewing out more than I could handle with my pistol.

Two of the hairy creatures were fairly upon me before the ray swung to that side and dissolved them into dust. For an instant the party stopped, checked by these unexpected flank attacks.

And there would be more of these sallies from the hundreds of passages which opened off the main corridor; I had no doubt of that. And there the creatures had us: our deadly ray could not reach them out ahead; we must wait until we were abreast, and then the single ray could work upon but one side. Correy needed every man he had to protect our rear, and my pistol was not adequate against a rush at such close quarters. That fact had just been proved to me with unpleasant emphasis.

It was rank folly to press on; the party would be annihilated.

"Down this passage, men," I ordered the two ray operators. "We'll have to think up a better plan."

They turned off into the passage they had swept clean with their ray, and the rest of the party followed swiftly. A few yards from the main corridor the passage turned and ran parallel to the corridor we had just left. Doors opened off this passage on both sides, but all the doors were open, and the cubicles thus revealed were empty.

* * * * *

"Well, sir," said Correy, when we had come to the dead end of the passage, "now what?"

"I don't know," I confessed. "If we had two ray machines, we could make it. But if I remember correctly, it's seven hundred yards, yet, to the first of the tunnels leading to the surface--and that means several hundred side passages from which they can attack. We can't make it."

"Well, we can try again, anyway, sir," Correy replied stoutly. "Better to go down fighting than stay here and starve, eh?"

"If you'll pardon me, gentlemen," put in Inverness, "I'd like to make a suggestion. We can't return the way we came in; I'm convinced of that. It was the sheerest luck that Commander Hanson wasn't brought down a moment ago--luck, and excellent work on the part of the two ray operators.

"But an analysis of our problem shows that our real objective is to reach the surface, and that need not be done the most obvious way, by returning over the course by which we entered."

"How, then?" I asked sharply.

"The disintegrator ray you have there should be able to cut a passage for us," said Inverness. "Then all we need do is protect our rear while the operators are working. Once on the surface, we'll be able to fight our way to the ship, will we not?"

"Of course! You should be in command, Inverness, instead of myself." His was the obvious solution to our difficulty; once proposed, I felt amazingly stupid that the thought had not occurred to me.

I gave the necessary orders to the ray men, and they started immediately, boring in steadily at an angle of about forty-five degrees.

The reddish dust came back to us in choking clouds, and the Aranians, perhaps guessing what we were doing--at least one of their number had seen how the ray could tunnel in the ground--started working around the angle of the passage.

* * * * *

At first they came in small groups, and our pistols readily disposed of them, but as the dust filled the air, and it became increasingly difficult to see their spidery bodies, they rushed us in great masses.

Correy and I, shoulder to shoulder, fired at the least sign of movement in the cloud of dust. A score of times the rushes of the Aranians brought a few of them scuttling almost to our feet; inside of a few minutes the passage was choked, waist high, with the riddled bodies--and still they came!

"We're through, sir!" shouted one of the ray operators. "If you can hold them off another fifteen minutes, we'll have the hole large enough to crawl through."

"Work fast!" I ordered. Even with Inverness, Brady, and the three of the Ertak's crew doing what they could in those narrow quarters, we were having a hard time holding back the horde of angry, desperate Aranians. Tipene was useless; he was cowering beside the ray operators, chattering at them, urging them to hurry.

Had we had good light, our task would have been easy, but the passage was choked now with dust. Our ethon lamps made little more than a dismal glow. The clattering Aranians were almost within leaping distance before we could see them; indeed, more than one was stopped in mid-air by a spray from one pistol or another.

"Ready, sir," gasped the ray man who had spoken before. "I think we've got it large enough, now."

"Good!" I brought down two scuttling Aranians, so close that their twitching legs fell in an untidy heap almost at my feet. "You go first, and protect our advance. Then the rest of you; Mr. Correy and I will bring up the--"

"No!" screamed Tipene, shouldering aside the ray men. "I...." He disappeared into the slanting shaft, and the two ray men followed quickly. The three members of the crew went next; then Brady and Inverness.

Correy and I backed toward the freshly cut passage.

"I'll be right behind you," I snapped, "so keep moving!"

* * * * *

Correy hesitated an instant; I knew he would have preferred the place of danger as the last man, but he was too good an officer to protest when time was so precious. He climbed into the slanting passage the ray had cut for us, and as he did so, I heard, or thought I heard, a cry from beyond him, from one of those ahead.

I gave Correy several seconds before I followed; when I did start, I planned on coming fast, for in that shoulder-tight tube I would be utterly at the mercy of any who might attack from behind.

Fairly spraying the oncoming horde, I drove them back, for a moment, beyond the angle in the corridor; then I fairly dived into the tunnel and crawled as fast as hands and knees could take me toward the blessed open air.

I heard the things clatter into the space I had deserted. I heard them scratching frantically in the tunnel behind me, evidently handicapped by their long legs, which must have been drawn up very close to their bodies.

Light came pouring in on me suddenly, and I realized that Correy had won free. Behind me I could hear savage mandibles snapping, and cold sweat broke out on me. How close a terrible death might be, I had no means of knowing--but it was very close.

My head emerged; I drew my body swiftly out of the hole and snatched a grenade from my belt. Instantly I flung it down the slanting passage, with a shout of warning to my companions.

With a muffled roar, the grenade shook the earth; sent a brown cloud spattering around us. I had made a desperate leap to get away, but even then I was covered by the shower of earth.

I looked around. Trapdoors were open everywhere, and from hundreds of these openings, Aranians were scuttling toward us.

But the ray operators were working; not only the little portable machine, but the big projectors on the Ertak, five or six hundred yards away; laying down a deadly and impassable barrage on either side of us.

* * * * *

"They got Tipene, sir!" said Correy. "He dodged out ahead of the ray men, and two of them pounced on him. They were dragging him away, tearing him. The ray men wiped them out. Tipene was already dead--torn to fragments, they said. Back to the ship now, sir?"

"Back to the ship," I nodded, still rather breathless. "Let the ray men cover our retreat; we can take care of those between us and the ship with our pistols--and the Ertak's projectors will attend to our flanks. On the double, men!"

We fought every step of the way, in a fog of reddish dust from the big disintegrator rays playing on either side of us--but we made it, a torn, weary, and bedraggled crew.

"Quite an engagement, sir," gasped Correy, when we were safely inside the Ertak. "Think they'll remember this little visit of ours, sir?"

"I know we'll remember it, anyway," I said, shaking some of the dust of disintegration from my clothes. "Just at the moment, I'd welcome a tour of routine patrol."

"Sure, sir," grinned Correy. "So would I--until we were a day or two out from Base!"

Contents

THE FORGOTTEN PLANET

By Sewell Peaslee Wright

I have been asked to record, plainly and without prejudice, a brief history of the Forgotten Planet.

That this record, when completed, will be sealed in the archives of the Interplanetary Alliance and remain there, a secret and rather dreadful bit of history, is no concern of mine. I am an old man, well past the century mark, and what disposal is made of my work is of little importance to me. I grow weary of life and living, which is good. The fear of death was lost when our scientists showed us how to live until we grew weary of life. But I am digressing--an old man's failing.

The Forgotten Planet was not always so named. The name that it once bore had been, as every child knows, stricken from the records, actual and mental, of the Universe. It is well that evil should not be remembered. But in order that this history may be clear in the centuries to come, my record should go back to beginnings.

So far as the Universe is concerned, the history of the Forgotten Planet begins with the visit of the first craft ever to span the space between the worlds: the crude, adventuresome Edorn, whose name, as well as the names of the nine Zenians who manned her, occupy the highest places in the roll of honor of the Universe.

Ame Baove, the commander and historian of the Edorn, made but brief comment on his stop at the Forgotten Planet. I shall record it in full:

"We came to rest upon the surface of this, the fourth of the planets visited during the first trip of the Edorn, eighteen spaces before the height of the sun. We found ourselves surrounded immediately by vast numbers of creatures very different from ourselves, and from their expressions and gestures, we gathered that they were both curious and unfriendly.

"Careful analysis of the atmosphere proved it to be sufficiently similar to our own to make it possible for us to again stretch our legs outside the rather cramped quarters of the Edorn, and tread the soil of still another world.

"No sooner had we emerged, however, than we were angrily beset by the people of this unfriendly planet, and rather than do them injury, we retired immediately, and concluded our brief observations through our ports.

"The topography of this planet is similar to our own, save that there are no mountains, and the flora is highly colored almost without exception, and apparently quite largely parasitical in nature. The people are rather short in stature, with hairless heads and high foreheads. Instead of being round or oval, however, the heads of these people rise to a rounded ridge which runs back from a point between and just above the eyes, nearly to the nape of the neck behind. They give evidence of a fair order of intelligence, but are suspicious and unfriendly. From the number and size of the cities we saw, this planet is evidently thickly populated.

"We left about sixteen spaces before the height of the sun, and continued towards the fifth and last planet before our return to Zenia."

* * * * *

This report, quite naturally, caused other explorers in space to hesitate. There were so many friendly, eager worlds to visit, during the years that relations between the planets were being established, that an unfriendly people were ignored.

However, from time to time, as space-ships became perfected and more common, parties from many of the more progressive planets did call. Each of them met with the same hostile reception, and at last, shortly after the second War of the Planets, the victorious Alliance sent a fleet of the small but terrible Deuber Spheres, convoyed by four of the largest of the disintegrator ray-ships, to subjugate the Forgotten Planet.

Five great cities were destroyed, and the Control City, the seat of the government, was menaced before the surly inhabitants conceded allegiance to the Alliance. Parties of scientists, fabricators, and workmen were then landed, and a dictator was appointed.

From all the worlds of the Alliance, instruments and equipment were brought to the Forgotten Planet. A great educational system was planned and executed, the benign and kindly influence of the Alliance made every effort to improve the conditions existing on the Forgotten Planet, and to win the friendship and allegiance of these people.

For two centuries the work went on. Two centuries of bloodshed, strife, hate and disturbance. No where else within the known Universe was there ill feeling. The second awful War of the Planets had at last succeeded in teaching the lesson of peace.

Two centuries of effort--wasted effort. It was near the end of the second century that my own story begins.

Commander at that time of the super-cruiser Tamon, a Special Patrol ship of the Alliance, I was not at all surprised to receive orders from the Central Council to report at emergency speed. Special Patrol work in those days, before the advent of the present de-centralized system, was a succession of false starts, hurried recalls, and urgent, emergency orders.

* * * * *

I obeyed at once. In the Special Patrol service, there is no questioning orders. The planet Earth, from which I sprang, is and always has been proud of the fact that from the very beginning, her men have been picked to command the ships of the Special Patrol. No matter how dangerous, how forlorn and hopeless the mission given to a commander of a Special Patrol ship, history has never recorded that any commander has ever hesitated. That is why our uniform of blue and silver commands the respect that it does even in this day and age of softening and decadence, when men--but again an old man digresses. And perhaps it is not for me to judge.

I pointed the blunt nose of the Tamon at Zenia, seat of the Central Council, and in four hours, Earth time, the great craft swept over the gleaming city of the Central Council and settled swiftly to the court before the mighty, columned Hall of the Planets.

Four pages of the Council, in their white and scarlet livery, met me and conducted me instantly to a little anteroom behind the great council chamber.

There were three men awaiting me there; three men whose faces, at that time, were familiar to every person in the known Universe.

Kellen, the oldest of the three, and the spokesman, rose as I entered the room. The others did likewise, as the pages closed the heavy doors behind me.

"You are prompt, and that is good," thought Kellen. "I welcome you. Remove now thy menore."

I glanced up at him swiftly. This must surely be an important matter, that I was asked to remove my menore band.

It will, of course, be understood that at that time we had but a bulky and clumsy instrument to enable us to convey and receive thought; a device consisting of a heavy band of metal, in which were imbedded the necessary instruments and a tiny atomic energy generator, the whole being worn as a circlet or crown upon the head.

Wonderingly, I removed my menore, placed it upon the long, dark table around which the three men were standing, and bowed. Each of the three, in turn, lifted their gleaming circlets from their heads, and placed them likewise upon the table before them.

* * * * *

"You wonder," said Kellen, speaking of course, in the soft and liquid universal language, which is, I understand, still disseminated in our schools, as it should be. "I shall explain as quickly and as briefly as possible.

"We have called you here on a dangerous mission. A mission that will require tact and quickness of mind as well as bravery. We have selected you, have called you, because we are agreed that you possess the qualities required. Is it not so?" He glanced at his two companions, and they nodded gravely, solemnly, without speaking.

"You are a young man, John Hanson," continued Kellen, "but your record in your service is one of which you can be proud. We trust you--with knowledge that is so secret, so precious, that we must revert to speech in order to convey it; we dare not trust it, even in this protected and guarded place, to the menore's quicker but less discreet communication."

He paused for a moment, frowning thoughtfully as though dreading to begin. I waited silently, and at last he spoke again.

"There is a world"--and he named a name which I shall not repeat, the name of the Forgotten Planet--"that is a festering sore upon the body of the Universe. As you know, for two centuries we have tried to pass on to these people an understanding of peace and friendship. I believe that nothing has been left undone. The Council and the forces behind it have done everything within their power. And now--"

He stopped again, and there was an expression of deepest pain written upon his wise and kindly face. The pause was for but an instant.

"And now," he went on firmly, "it is at an end. Our work has been undone. Two centuries of effort--undone. They have risen in revolt, they have killed all those sent by the Alliance of which this Council is the governing body and the mouthpiece, and they have sent us an ultimatum--a threat of war!"

"What?"

* * * * *

Kellen nodded his magnificent old head gravely.

"I do not wonder that you start," he said heavily. "War! It must not be. It cannot be! And yet, war is what they threaten."

"But, sir!" I put in eagerly. I was young and rash in those days. "Who are they, to make war against a united Universe?"

"I have visited your planet, Earth," said Kellen, smiling very faintly. "You have a tiny winged insect you call bee. Is it not so?"

"Yes."

"The bee is a tiny thing, of little strength. A man, a little child, might crush one to death between a thumb and finger. But the bee may sting before he is crushed, and the sting may linger on for days, a painful and unpleasant thing. Is that not so?"

"I see, sir," I replied, somewhat abashed before the tolerant, kindly wisdom of this great man. "They cannot hope to wage successful war, but they may bring much suffering to others."

"Much suffering," nodded Kellen, still gently smiling. "And we are determined that this thing shall not be. Not"--and his face grew gray with a terrible and bitter resolve--"not if we have to bring to bear upon that dark and unwilling world the disintegrating rays of every ship of the Alliance, so that the very shell of the planet shall disappear, and no life ever again shall move upon its surface.

"But this," and he seemed to shudder at the thought, "is a terrible and a ruthless thing to even contemplate. We must first try once again to point out to them the folly of their ways. It is with this mission that we would burden you, John Hanson."

* * * * *

"It is no burden, but an honor, sir," I said quietly.

"Youth! Youth!" Kellen chided me gently. "Foolish, yet rather glorious. Let me tell you the rest, and then we shall ask for your reply again.

"The news came to us by a small scout ship attached to that unhappy world. It barely made the journey to Jaron, the nearest planet, and crashed so badly, from lack of power, that all save one man were killed.

"He, luckily, tore off his menore, and insisted in speech that he be brought here. He was obeyed, and, in a dying condition, was brought to this very chamber." Kellen glanced swiftly, sadly, around the room, as though he could still visualize that scene.

"Every agent of the Alliance upon that hateful planet was set upon and killed, following the working out of some gigantic and perfectly executed plan--all save the crew of this one tiny scout ship, which was spared to act as a messenger.

"'Tell your great Council,' was the message these people sent to us, 'that here is rebellion. We do not want, nor will we tolerate, your peace. We have learned now that upon other worlds than ours there are great riches. These we shall take. If there is resistance, we have a new and a terrible death to deal. A death that your great scientists will be helpless against; a horrible and irresistable death that will make desolate and devoid of intelligent life any world where we are forced to sow the seeds of ultimate disaster.

"'We are not yet ready. If we were, we would not move, for we prefer that your Council have time to think about what is surely to come. If you doubt that we have the power to do what we have threatened to do, send one ship, commanded by a man whose word you will trust, and we will prove to him that these are no empty words.'"

* * * * *

"That, as nearly as I can remember it," concluded Kellen, "is the message. The man who brought it died almost before he had finished.

"That is the message. You are the man we have picked to accept their challenge. Remember, though, that there are but the four of us in this room. There are but four of us who know these things. If you for any reason do not wish to accept this mission, there will be none to judge you, least of all, any one of us, who know best of all the perils."

"You say, sir," I said quietly, although my heart was pounding in my throat, and roaring in my ears, "that there would be none to judge me.

"Sir, there would be myself. There could be no more merciless judge. I am honored that I have been selected for this task, and I accept the responsibility willingly, gladly. When is it your wish that we should start?"

The three presiding members of the Council glanced at each other, faintly smiling, as though they would say, as Kellen had said a short time before: "Youth! Youth!" Yet I believe they were glad and somewhat proud that I had replied as I did.

"You may start," said Kellen, "as soon as you can complete the necessary preparations. Detailed instructions will be given you later."

He bowed to me, and the others did likewise. Then Kellen picked up his menore and adjusted it.

The interview was over.

* * * * *

"What do you make it?" I asked the observer. He glanced up from his instrument.

"Jaron, sir. Three degrees to port; elevation between five and six degrees. Approximate only, of course, sir."

"Good enough. Please ask Mr. Barry to hold to his present course. We shall not stop at Jaron."

The observer glanced at me curiously, but he was too well disciplined to hesitate or ask questions.

"Yes, sir!" he said crisply, and spoke into the microphone beside him.

None of us wore menores when on duty, for several reasons. Our instruments were not nearly as perfect as those in use to-day, and verbal orders were clearer and carried more authority than mental instructions. The delicate and powerful electrical and atomic mechanism of our ship interfered with the functioning of the menores, and at that time the old habit of speech was far more firmly entrenched, due to hereditary influence, than it is now.

I nodded to the man, and made my way to my own quarters. I wished most heartily that I could talk over my plans with someone, but this had been expressly forbidden.

"I realize that you trust your men, and more particularly your officers," Kellen had told me during the course of his parting conversation with me. "I trust them also--yet we must remember that the peace of mind of the Universe is concerned. If news, even a rumor, of this threatened disaster should become known, it is impossible to predict the disturbance it might create.

"Say nothing to anyone. It is your problem. You alone should leave the ship when you land; you alone shall hear or see the evidence they have to present, and you alone shall bring word of it to us. That is the wish of the Council."

"Then it is my wish," I had said, and so it had been settled.

* * * * *

Aft, in the crew's quarters, a gong sounded sharply: the signal for changing watches, and the beginning of a sleep period. I glanced at the remote control dials that glowed behind their glass panel on one side of my room. From the registered attraction of Jaron, at our present speed, we should be passing her within, according to Earth time, about two hours. That meant that their outer patrols might be seeking our business, and I touched Barry's attention button, and spoke into the microphone beside my bunk.

"Mr. Barry? I am turning in for a little sleep. Before you turn over the watch to Eitel, will you see that the nose rays are set for the Special Patrol code signal for this enar. We shall be close to Jaron shortly."

"Yes, sir! Any other orders?"

"No. Keep her on her present course. I shall take the watch from Mr. Eitel."

Since there have been changes since those days, and will undoubtedly be others in the future, it might be well to make clear, in a document such is this, that at this period, all ships of the Special Patrol Service identified themselves by means of invisible rays flashed in certain sequences, from the two nose, or forward, projectors. These code signals were changed every enar, a period of time arbitrarily set by the Council; about eighteen days, as time is measured on the Earth, and divided into ten periods, as at present, known as enarens. These were further divided into enaros, thus giving us a time-reckoning system for use in space, corresponding roughly to the months, days and hours of the Earth.

I retired, but not to sleep. Sleep would not come. I knew, of course, that if curious outer patrol ships from Jaron did investigate us, they would be able to detect our invisible ray code signal, and thus satisfy themselves that we were on the Council's business. There would be no difficulty on that score. But what I should do after landing upon the rebellious sphere, I had not the slightest idea.

* * * * *

"Be stern, indifferent to their threats," Kellen, had counseled me, "but do everything within your power to make them see the folly of their attitude. Do not threaten them, for they are a surly people and you might precipitate matters. Swallow your pride if you must; remember that yours is a gigantic responsibility, and upon the information you bring us may depend the salvation of millions. I am convinced that they are not--you have a word in your language that fits exactly. Not pretending ... what is the word?"

"Bluffing?" I had supplied in English, smiling.

"Right! Bluffing. It is a very descriptive word. I am sure they are not bluffing."

I was sure of it also. They knew the power of the Alliance; they had been made to feel it more than once. A bluff would have been a foolish thing, and these people were not fools. In some lines of research they were extraordinarily brilliant.

But what could their new, terrible weapon be? Rays we had; at least half a dozen rays of destruction; the terrible dehydrating ray of the Deuber Spheres, the disintegrating ray that dated back before Ame Baove and his first voyage into space, the concentrated ultra-violet ray that struck men down in fiery torment.... No, it could hardly be a new ray that was their boasted weapon.

What, then? Electricity had even then been exhausted of its possibilities. Atomic energy had been released, harnessed, and directed. Yet it would take fabulous time and expense to make these machines of destruction do what they claimed they would do.

Still pondering the problem, I did fall at last into a fitful travesty of sleep.

* * * * *

I was glad when the soft clamor of the bell aft announced the next change of watch. I rose, cleared the cobwebs from my brain with an icy shower, and made my way directly to the navigating room.

"Everything tidy, sir," said Eitel, my second officer, and a Zenian. He was thin and very dark, like all Zenians, and had the high, effeminate voice of that people. But he was cool and fearless and had the uncanny cerebration of his kind; I trusted him as completely as I trusted Barry, my first officer, who, like myself, was a native of Earth. "Will you take over?"

"Yes," I nodded, glancing at the twin charts beneath the ground glass top of the control table. "Get what sleep you can the next few enaros. Presently I shall want every man on duty and at his station."

He glanced at me curiously, as the observer had done, but saluted and left with only a brief, "Yes, sir!" I returned the salute and turned my attention again to the charts.

The navigating room of an interplanetary ship is without doubt unfamiliar ground to most, so it might be well for me to say that such ships have, for the most part, twin charts, showing progress in two dimensions; to use land terms, lateral and vertical. These charts are really no more than large sheets of ground glass, ruled in both directions with fine black lines, representing all relatively close heavenly bodies by green lights of varying sizes. The ship itself is represented by a red spark and the whole is, of course, entirely automatic in action, the instruments comprising the chart being operated by super-radio reflexes.

* * * * *

Jaron, the charts showed me at a glance, was now far behind. Almost directly above--it is necessary to resort to these unscientific terms to make my meaning clear--was the tiny world Elon, home of the friendly but impossibly dull winged people, the only ones in the known Universe. I was there but once, and found them almost laughably like our common dragon-flies on Earth; dragon-flies that grow some seven feet long, and with gauzy wings of amazing strength.

Directly ahead, on both charts, was a brilliantly glowing sphere of green--our destination. I made some rapid mental calculations, studying the few fine black lines between the red spark that was our ship, and the nearest edge of the great green sphere. I glanced at our speed indicator and the attraction meter. The little red slide that moved around the rim of the attraction meter was squarely at the top, showing that the attraction was from straight ahead; the great black hand was nearly a third of the way around the face.

We were very close; two hours would bring us into the atmospheric envelope. In less than two hours and a half, we would be in the Control City of what is now called the Forgotten Planet!

I glanced forward, through the thick glass partitions, into the operating room. Three men stood there, watching intently; they too, were wondering why we visited the unfriendly world.

The planet itself loomed up straight ahead, a great half-circle, its curved rim sharp and bright against the empty blackness of space; the chord ragged and blurred. In two hours ... I turned away and began a restless pacing.

* * * * *

An hour went by; an hour and a half. I pressed the attention button to the operating room, and gave orders to reduce our speed by half. We were very close to the outer fringe of the atmospheric envelope. Then, keeping my eye on the big surface-temperature gauge, with its stubby red hand, I resumed my nervous pacing.

Slowly the thick red hand of the surface-temperature gauge began to move; slowly, and then more rapidly, until the eyes could catch its creeping.

"Reduce to atmospheric speed," I ordered curtly, and glanced down through a side port at one end of the long navigating room.

We were, at the moment, directly above the twilight belt. To my right, as I looked down, I could see a portion of the glistening antarctic ice cap. Here and there were the great flat lakes, almost seas, of the planet.

Our geographies of the Universe to-day do not show the topography of the Forgotten Planet: I might say, therefore, that the entire sphere was land area, with numerous great lakes embedded in its surface, together with many broad, very crooked rivers. As Ame Baove had reported, there were no mountains, and no high land.

"Altitude constant," I ordered. "Port three degrees. Stand by for further orders."

The earth seemed to whirl slowly beneath us. Great cities drifted astern, and I compared the scene below me with the great maps I took from our chart-case. The Control City should be just beyond the visible rim; well in the daylight area.

"Port five degrees," I said, and pressed the attention button to Barry's quarters.

"Mr. Barry, please call all men to quarters, including the off-duty watch, and then report to the navigating room. Mr. Eitel will be under my direct orders. We shall descend within the next few minutes."

"Very well, sir."

I pressed the attention button to Eitel's room.

"Mr. Eitel, please pick ten of your best men and have them report at the forward exit. Await me, with the men, at that place. I shall be with you as soon as I turn the command over to Mr. Barry. We are descending immediately."

"Right, sir!" said Eitel.

* * * * *

I turned from the microphone to find that Barry had just entered the navigating room.

"We will descend into the Great Court of the Control City, Mr. Barry," I said. "I have a mission here. I am sorry, but these are the only instructions I can leave you.

"I do not know how long I shall be gone from the ship, but if I do not return within three hours, depart without me, and report directly to Kellen of the Council. To him, and no other. Tell him, verbally, what took place. Should there be any concerted action against the Tamon, use your own judgment as to the action to be taken, remembering that the safety of the ship and its crew, and the report of the Council, are infinitely more important than my personal welfare. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir. Too damned clear."

I smiled and shook my head.

"Don't worry," I said lightly. "I'll be back well within the appointed time."

"I hope so. But there's something wrong as hell here. I'm talking now as man to man; not to my commanding officer. I've been watching below, and I have seen at least two spots where large numbers of our ships have been destroyed. The remaining ships bear their own damned emblem where the crest of the Alliance should be--and was. What does it mean?"

"It means," I said slowly, "that I shall have to rely upon every man and officer to forget himself and myself, and obey orders without hesitation and without flinching. The orders are not mine, but direct from the Council itself." I held out my hand to him--an ancient Earth gesture of greeting, good-will and farewell--and he shook it vigorously.

"God go with you," he said softly, and with a little nod of thanks I turned and quickly left the room.

* * * * *

Eitel, with his ten men, were waiting for me at the forward exit. The men fell back a few paces and came to attention; Eitel saluted smartly.

"We are ready, sir. What are your orders?"

"You are to guard this opening. Under no circumstances is anyone to enter save myself. I shall be gone not longer than three hours; if I am not back within that time, Mr. Barry has his orders. The exit will be sealed, and the Tamon will depart immediately, without me."

"Yes, sir. You will pardon me, but I gather that your mission is a dangerous one. May I not accompany you?"

I shook my head.

"I shall need you here."

"But, sir, they are very excited and angry; I have been watching them from the observation ports. And there is a vast crowd of them around the ship."

"I had expected that. I thank you for your concern, but I must go alone. Those are the orders. Will you unseal the exit?"

His "Yes, sir!" was brisk and efficient, but there was a worried frown on his features as he unlocked and released the switch that opened the exit.

The huge plug of metal, some ten feet in diameter, revolved swiftly and noiselessly, backing slowly in its fine threads into the interior of the ship, gripped by the ponderous gimbals which, as the last threads disengaged, swung the mighty disc to one side, like the door of some great safe.

"Remember your orders," I smiled, and with a little gesture to convey an assurance which I certainly did not feel, I strode through the circular opening out into the crowd. The heavy glass secondary door shot down behind me, and I was in the hands of the enemy.

* * * * *

The first thing I observed was that my menore, which I had picked up on my way to the exit, was not functioning. Not a person in all that vast multitude wore a menore; the five black-robed dignitaries who marched to meet me wore none.

Nothing could have showed more clearly that I was in for trouble. To invite a visitor, as Kellen had done, to remove his menore first, was, of course, a polite and courteous thing to do if one wished to communicate by speech; to remove the menore before greeting a visitor wearing one, was a tacit admission of rank enmity; a confession that one's thoughts were to be concealed.

My first impulse was to snatch off my own instrument and fling it in the solemn, ugly faces of the nearest of the five dignataries; I remembered Kellen's warning just in time. Quietly, I removed the metal circlet and tucked it under my arm, bowing slightly to the committee of five as I did so.

"I am Ja Ben," said the first of the five, with an evil grin. "You are the representative of the Council that we commanded to appear?"

"I am John Hanson, commander of the ship Tamon of the Special Patrol Service. I am here to represent the Central Council," I replied with dignity.

"As we commanded," grinned Ja Ben. "That is good. Follow us and you shall have the evidence you were promised."

Ja Ben led the way with two of his black-robed followers. The other two fell in behind me. A virtual prisoner, I marched between them, through the vast crowd that made way grudgingly to let us pass.

* * * * *

I have seen the people of most of the planets of the known Universe. Many of them, to Earth notions, are odd. But these people, so much like us in many respects, were strangely repulsive.

Their heads, as Ame Baove had recorded, were not round like ours, but possessed a high bony crest that ran from between their lashless, browless eyes, down to the very nape of their necks. Their skin, even that covering their hairless heads, was a dull and papery white, like parchment, and their eyes were abnormally small, and nearly round. A hateful, ugly people, perpetually scowling, snarling; their very voices resembled more the growl of wild beasts than the speech of intelligent beings.

Ja Ben led the way straight to the low but vast building of dun-colored stone that I knew was the administration building of the Control City. We marched up the broad, crowded steps, through the muttering, jeering multitude into the building itself. The guards at the doors stood aside to let us through and the crowd at last was left behind.

A swift, cylindrical elevator shot us upward, into a great glass-walled laboratory, built like a sort of penthouse on the roof. Ja Ben walked quickly across the room towards a long, glass-topped table; the other four closed in on me silently but suggestively.

"That is unnecessary," I said quietly. "See, I am unarmed and completely in your power. I am here as an ambassador of the Central Council, not as a warrior."

"Which is as well for you," grinned Ja Ben. "What I have to show you, you can see quickly, and then depart."

From a great cabinet in one corner of the room he took a shining cylinder of dark red metal, and held it up before him, stroking its sleek sides with an affectionate hand.

* * * * *

"Here it is," he said, chuckling. "The secret of our power. In here, safely imprisoned now, but capable of being released at our command, is death for every living thing upon any planet we choose to destroy." He replaced the great cylinder in the cabinet, and picked up in its stead a tiny vial of the same metal, no larger than my little finger, and not so long. "Here," he said, turning again towards me, "is the means of proving our power to you. Come closer!"

With my bodyguard of four watching every move, I approached.

Ja Ben selected a large hollow hemisphere of crystal glass and placed it upon a smooth sheet of flat glass. Next he picked a few blossoms from a bowl that stood, incongruously enough, on the table, and threw them under the glass hemisphere.

"Flora," he grinned.

Hurrying to the other end of the room, he reached into a large flat metal cage and brought forth three small rodent like animals, natives of that world. These he also tossed carelessly under the glass.

"Fauna," he grunted, and picked up the tiny metal vial.

One end of the vial unscrewed. He turned the cap gently, carefully, a strained, anxious look upon his face. My four guards watched him breathlessly, fearfully.

* * * * *

The cap came loose at last, disclosing the end of the tube, sealed with a grayish substance that looked like wax. Very quickly Ja Ben rolled the little cylinder under the glass hemisphere, and picked up a beaker that had been bubbling gently on an electric plate close by. Swiftly he poured the thick contents of the beaker around the base of the glass bell. The stuff hardened almost instantly, forming an air-tight seal between the glass hemisphere and the flat plate of glass upon which it rested. Then, with an evil, triumphant smile, Ja Ben looked up.

"Flora," he repeated. "Fauna. And death. Watch! The little metal cylinder is plugged still, but in a moment that plug will disappear--simply a volatile solid, you understand. It is going rapidly ... rapidly ... it is almost gone now! Watch ... In an instant now ... ah!"

I saw the gray substance that stopped the entrance of the little metal vial disappear. The rodents ran around and over it, trying to find a crevice by which they might escape. The flowers, bright and beautiful, lay untidily on the bottom of the glass prison.

Then, just as the last vestige of the gray plug vanished; an amazing, a terrible thing happened. At the mouth of the tiny metal vial a greenish cloud appeared. I call it a cloud, but it was not that. It was solid, and it spread in every direction, sending out little needles that lashed about and ran together into a solid mass while millions of little needles reached out swiftly.

One of these little needles touched a scurrying animal. Instantly the tiny brute stiffened, and from his entire body the greenish needles spread swiftly. One of the flowers turned suddenly thick and pulpy with the soft green mass, then another, another of the rodents ... God!

In the space of two heart beats, the entire hemisphere was filled with the green mass, that still moved and writhed and seemed to press against the glass sides as though the urge to expand was insistent, imperative....

* * * * *

"What is it?" I whispered, still staring at the thing.

"Death!" grunted Ja Ben, thrusting his hateful face close to mine, his tiny round eyes, with their lashless lids glinting. "Death, my friend. Go and tell your great Council of this death that we have created for every planet that will not obey us.

"We have gone back into the history of dealing death and have come back with a death such as the Universe has never known before!

"Here is a rapacious, deadly fungus we have been two centuries in developing. The spores contained in that tiny metal tube would be invisible to the naked eye--and yet given but a little time to grow, with air and vegetation and flesh to feed upon, and even that small capsule would wipe out a world. And in the cabinet,"--he pointed grinning triumphantly--"we have, ready for instant use, enough of the spores of this deadly fungas to wipe out all the worlds of your great Alliance.

"To wipe them out utterly!" he repeated, his voice shaking with a sort of frenzy now. "Every living thing upon their faces, wrapped in that thin, hungry green stuff you see there under that glass. All life wiped out; made uninhabitable so long as the Universe shall endure. And we--we shall be rulers, unquestioned, of that Universe. Tell your doddering Council that!" He leaned back against the table, panting with hate.

"I shall tell them all I have seen; all you have said," I nodded.

"You believe we have the power to do all this?"

"I do--God help me, and the Universe," I said solemnly.

* * * * *

There was no doubt in my mind. I could see all too clearly how well their plans had been laid; how quickly this hellish growth would strangle all life, once its spores began to develop.

The only possible chance was to get back to the Council and make my report, with all possible speed, so that every available armed ship of the universe might concentrate here, and wipe out these people before they had time to--

"I know what you are thinking, my friend," broke in Ja Ben mockingly. "You might as well have worn the menore! You would have the ships of the Alliance destroy us before we have time to act. We had foreseen that, and have provided for the possibility.

"As soon as you leave here, ships, provided with many tubes like the one just used for our little demonstration, will be dispersed in every direction. We shall be in constant communication with those ships, and at the least sign of hostility, they will be ordered to depart and spread their death upon every world they can reach. Some of them you may be able to locate and eliminate; a number of them are certain to elude capture in infinite space--and if only one, one lone ship, should escape, the doom of the Alliance and millions upon millions of people will be pronounced.

"I warn you, it will be better, much better, to bow to our wishes, and pay us the tribute we shall demand. Any attempt at resistance will precipitate certain disaster for your Council and all the worlds the Council governs."

"At least, we would wipe you out first," I said hoarsely.

"True," nodded Ja Ben. "But the vengeance of our ships would be a terrible thing! You would not dare to take the chance!"

I stood there, staring at him in a sort of daze. What he had said was so true; terribly, damnably true.

If only--

* * * * *

There was but one chance I could see, and desperate as it was, I took it. Whirling the heavy metal ring of my menore in my hand, I sprang towards the table.

If I could break the sealed glass hemisphere, and loose the fungus upon its creators; deal to them the doom they had planned for the universe, then perhaps all might yet be well.

Ja Ben understood instantly what was in my mind. He and his four aides leaped between me and the table, their tiny round eyes blazing with anger. I struck one of the four viciously with the menore, and with a gasp he fell back and slumped to the floor.

Before I could break through the opening, however, Ja Ben struck me full in the face with his mighty fist; a blow that sent me, dazed and reeling, into a corner of the room. I brought up with a crash against the cabinet there, groped wildly in an effort to steady myself, and fell to the floor. Almost before I struck, all four of them were upon me.

They hammered me viciously, shouted at me, cursed me in the universal tongue, but I paid no heed. I pretended to be unconscious, but my heart was beating high with sudden, glorious hope, and in my brain a terrible, merciless plan was forming.

When I had groped against the cabinet in an effort to regain my balance, my fingers had closed upon one of the little metal vials. As I fell, I covered that hand with my body and hastily hid the tiny tube in a deep pocket of my blue and silver Service uniform.

* * * * *

Slowly, after a few seconds, I opened my eyes and looked up at them, helplessly.

"Go, now!" snarled Ja Ben, dragging me to my feet. "Go, and tell your Council we are more than a match for you--and for them." He thrust me, reeling, towards his three assistants. "Take him to his ship, and send aid for Ife Rance, here." He glanced at the still unconscious figure of the victim of my menore, and then turned to me with a last warning.

"Remember, one thing more, my friend: you have disintegrator ray equipment upon your ship. You have the little atomic bombs that won for the Alliance the Second War of the Planets. I know that. But if you make the slightest effort to use them, I shall dispatch a supply of the green death to our ships, and they will depart upon their missions at once. You would take upon yourself a terrible responsibility by making the smallest hostile move.

"Go, now--and when you return, bring with you members of your great Council who will have the power to hear our demands, and see that they are obeyed. And do not keep us waiting over long, for we are an impatient race." He bowed, mockingly, and passed his left hand swiftly before his face, his people's sign of parting.

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak, and, hemmed in by my three black-robed conductors, was hurried down the elevator and back through the jeering mob to my ship.

* * * * *

The glass secondary door shot up to permit me to enter, and Eitel gripped my shoulder anxiously, his eyes smoldering angrily.

"You're hurt, sir!" he said in his odd, high-pitched voice, staring into my bruised face. "What--"

"It's nothing," I assured him. "Close the exit immediately; we depart at once."

"Yes, sir!" He closed the switch, and the great threaded plug swung gently on its gimbals and began to revolve, swiftly and silently. A little bell sounded sharply, and the great door ceased its motion. Eitel locked the switch and returned the key to his pocket.

"Good. All men are at their stations?" I asked briskly.

"Yes, sir! All except these ten, detailed to guard the exit."

"Have them report to their regular stations. Issue orders to the ray operators that they are to instantly, and without further orders, destroy any ship that may leave the surface of this planet. Have every atomic bomb crew ready for an instant and concentrated offensive directed at the Control City, but command them not to act under any circumstances unless I give the order. Is that clear, Mr. Eitel?"

"Yes, sir!"

I nodded, and turned away, making my way immediately to the navigating room.

"Mr. Barry," I said quickly and gravely, "I believe that the fate of the known Universe depends upon us at this moment. We will ascend vertically, at once--slowly--until we are just outside the envelope, maintaining only sufficient horizontal motion to keep us directly over the Control City. Will you give the necessary orders?"

"Immediately, sir!" He pressed the attention button to the operating room and spoke swiftly into the microphone; before he completed the order I had left.

* * * * *

We were already ascending when I reached the port forward atomic bomb station. The man in charge, a Zenian, saluted with automatic precision and awaited orders.

"You have a bomb in readiness?" I asked, returning the salute.

"Those were my orders, sir."

"Correct. Remove it, please."

I waited impatiently while the crew removed the bomb from the releasing trap. It was withdrawn at last; a fish-shaped affair, very much like the ancient airplane bombs save that it was no larger than my two fists, placed one upon the other, and that it had four silvery wires running along its sides, from rounded nose to pointed tail, held at a distance from the body by a series of insulating struts.

"Now," I said, "how quickly can you put another object in the trap, re-seal the opening, and release the object?"

"While the Commander counts ten with reasonable speed," said the Zenian with pride. "We won first honors in the Special Patrol Service contests at the last Examination, the Commander may remember."

"I do remember. That is why I selected you for this duty."

With hands that trembled a little, I think, I drew forth the little vial of gleaming red metal, while the bombing crew watched me curiously.

"I shall unscrew the cap from this little vial," I explained, "and drop it immediately into the releasing trap. Re-seal the trap and release this object as quickly as it is possible to do so. If you can better the time you made to win the honors at the Examination--in God's name, do so!"

"Yes, sir!" replied the Zenian. He gave brisk orders to his crew, and each of the three men sprang alertly into position.

* * * * *

As quickly as I could, I turned off the cap of the little metal vial and dropped it into the trap. The heavy plug, a tiny duplicate of the exit door, clicked shut upon it and spun, whining gently, into the opening. Something clicked sharply, and one of the crew dropped a bar into place. As it shot home, the Zenian in command of the crew pulled the release plunger.

"Done, sir!" he said proudly.

I did not reply. My eye fixed upon the observation tube that was following the tiny missile to the ground.

The Control City was directly below us. I lost sight of the vial almost instantly, but the indicating cross-hairs showed me exactly where the vial would strike; at a point approximately half way between the edge of the city and the great squat pile of the administrating building, with its gleaming glass penthouse--the laboratory in which, only a few minutes before, I had witnessed the demonstration of the death which awaited the Universe.

"Excellent!" I exclaimed. "Smartly done, men!" I turned and hurried to the navigating room, where the most powerful of our television discs was located.

The disc was not as perfect as those we have to-day; it was hooded to keep out exterior light, which is not necessary with the later instruments, and it was more unwieldy. However, it did its work, and did it well, in the hands of an experienced operator.

With only a nod to Barry, I turned the range band to maximum, and brought it swiftly to bear upon that portion of the city in which the little vial had fallen. As I drew the focusing lever towards me, the scene leaped at me through the clear, glowing glass disc.

* * * * *

Froth! Green, billowing froth that grew and boiled and spread unceasingly. In places it reached high into the air, and it moved with an eager, inner life that was somehow terrible and revolting. I moved the range hand back, and the view seemed to drop away from me swiftly.

I could see the whole city now. All one side of it was covered with the spreading green stain that moved and flowed so swiftly. Thousands of tiny black figures were running in the streets, crowding away from the awful danger that menaced them.

The green patch spread more swiftly always. When I had first seen it, the edges were advancing as rapidly as a man could run; now they were fairly racing, and the speed grew constantly.

A ship, two of them, three of them came darting from somewhere, towards the administration building, with its glass cupola. I held my breath as the deep, sudden humming from the Tamon told me that our rays were busy. Would they--

One of the enemy ships disappeared suddenly in a little cloud of dirty, heavy dust that settled swiftly. Another ... and the third. Three little streaks of dust, falling, falling....

A fourth ship, and a fifth came rushing up, their sides faintly glowing from the speed they had made. The green flood, thick and insistent, was racing up and over the administration building now. It reached the roof, ran swiftly....

The fourth ship shattered into dust. The fifth settled swiftly--and then that ship also disappeared, together with a corner of the building. Then the thick green stuff flowed over the whole building and there was nothing to be seen there but a mound of soft, flowing, gray-green stuff that rushed on now with the swiftness of the wind.

* * * * *

I looked up, into Barry's face.

"You're ill!" he said quickly. "Is there anything I can do, sir?"

"Yes," I said, forming the words with difficulty. "Give orders to ascend at emergency speed!"

For once my first officer hesitated. He glanced at the attraction meter and then turned to me again, wondering.

"At this height, sir, emergency speed will mean dangerous heating of the surface; perhaps--"

"I want it white hot, Mr. Barry. She is built to stand it. Emergency speed, please--immediately!"

"Right, sir!" he said briskly, and gave the order.

I felt my weight increase as the order was obeyed; gradually the familiar, uncomfortable feeling left me. Silently, Barry and I watched the big surface temperature gauge as it started to move. The heat inside became uncomfortable, grew intense. The sweat poured from us. In the operating room forward, I could see the men casting quick, wondering glances up at us through the heavy glass partition that lay between.

The thick, stubby red hand of the surface temperature gauge moved slowly but steadily towards the heavy red line that marked the temperature at which the outer shell of our hull would become incandescent. The hand was within three or four degrees of that mark when I gave Barry the order to arrest our motion.

When he had given the order, I turned to him and motioned towards the television disc.

"Look," I said.

* * * * *

He looked, and when at last he tore his face away from the hood, he seemed ten years older.

"What is it?" he asked in a choked whisper. "Why--they're being wiped out; the whole of that world--"

"True. And some of the seeds of that terrible death might have drifted upward, and found a lodging place upon the surface of our ship. That is why I ordered the emergency speed while we were still within the atmospheric envelope, Barry. To burn away that contamination, if it existed. Now we are safe, unless--"

I pressed the attention button to the station of the chief of the ray operators.

"Your report," I ordered.

"Nine ships disintegrated, sir," he replied instantly. "Five before the city was destroyed, four later."

"You are certain that none escaped?"

"Positive, sir."

"Very good."

I turned to Barry, smiling.

"Point her nose for Zenia, Mr. Barry," I said. "As soon as it is feasible, resume emergency speed. There are some very anxious gentlemen there awaiting our report, and I dare not convey it except in person."

"Yes, sir!" said Barry crisply.

* * * * *

This, then, is the history of the Forgotten Planet. On the charts of the Universe it appears as an unnamed world. No ship is permitted to pass close enough to it so that its attraction is greater than that of the nearest other mass. A permanent outpost of fixed-station ships, with headquarters upon Jaron, the closest world, is maintained by the Council.

There are millions of people who might be greatly disturbed if they knew of this potential menace that lurks in the midst of our Universe, but they do not know. The wisdom of the Council made certain of that.

But, in order that in the ages to come there might be a record of this matter, I have been asked to prepare this document for the sealed archives of the Alliance. It has been a pleasant task; I have relived, for a little time, a part of my youth.

The work is done, now, and that is well. I am an old man, and weary. Sometimes I wish I might live to see the wonders that the next generation or so will witness, but my years are heavy upon me.

My work is done.

Contents

COLLECTOR'S ITEM

by Robert F. Young

Very trivial things can go into the weaving of a nest. The human race, for instance--

The condensation of the histories of ten thousand races into a text concise enough to fit into a single volume had been a task of unprecedented proportions. There had been times when the Galactic Historian had doubted whether even his renowned abilities were up to the assignment that the Galactic Board of Education had so lightly tossed his way, times when he had thrown up his hands--all five of them--in despair. But at last the completed manuscript lay before him on his desk with nothing but the final reading remaining between it and publication.

The Galactic Historian repeatedly wiped his brows as he turned the pages. It was a warm night, even for Mixxx Seven. Now and then, a tired breeze struggled down from the hills and limped across the lowlands to the Galactic University buildings. It crept into the Galactic Historian's study via the open door and out again via the open windows, fingering the manuscript each time it passed but doing nothing whatsoever about the temperature.

The manuscript was something more than a hammered-down history of galactic achievement. It was the ultimate document. The two and seventy thousand jarring texts that it summarized had been systematically destroyed, one by one, after the Galactic Historian had stripped them of their objective information. If an historical event was not included in the manuscript, it failed as an event. It ceased to have reality.

The responsibility was the Galactic Historian's alone and he did not take it lightly. But he had a lot on his minds and, of late, he hadn't been sleeping well. He was overworked and over-tired and over-anxious. He hadn't seen his wives for two Mixxx months and he was worried about them--all fifty of them.

He never should have let them take the Hub cruise in the first place. But they'd been so enthusiastic and so eager that he simply hadn't had the hearts to let them down. Now, despite his better judgments, he was beginning to wonder if they might not be on the make for another coordinator.

Wives trouble, on top of all his chronological trouble, was too much. The Galactic Historian could hardly be blamed for wanting to see the last of the manuscript, for wanting to transmit it to his publishers, potential hiatuses and all, and take the next warp for the Hub.

But he was an historian--the historian, in fact--and he persisted heroically in his task, rereading stale paragraphs and checking dreary dates, going over battles and conquests and invasions and interregnums. Despite his mood and despite the heat, the manuscript probably would have arrived at his publishers chronologically complete. So complete, in fact, that schoolteachers all over the galaxy would have gotten the textbook they had always wanted--a concise chronicle of everything that had ever happened since the explosion of the primeval atom, a history textbook that no other history textbook could contradict for the simple reason that there were no other history textbooks.

As it was, they got the textbook, but it did not contain everything that had ever happened. Not quite.

Two factors were responsible for the omission. The first was an oversight on the part of the Galactic Historian. With so much on his minds, he had forgotten to number the pages of the manuscript.

The second factor was the breeze.

The breeze was the ultimate archfiend and there can be no question as to its motivation. Nothing short of sheer malice could have caused it suddenly to remember its function after neglecting that function all evening.

All evening it had been tiptoeing down the hillsides and across the lowlands as though it was afraid of disturbing a single blade of grass or a single drooping leaf. And then, at the crucial moment, it huffed and puffed itself up into a little hurricane, charged down upon the Galactic University buildings and whooshed through the Galactic Historian's study like a band of interstellar dervishes.

Unfortunately, the Galactic Historian had begun to wipe his brows at the very moment of the breeze's entry. While the act was not a complicated one, it did consume time and monopolize attention. It is not surprising, therefore, that he failed to witness the theft. Neither is it surprising that he failed to notice afterwards that the page he had been checking was gone.

He was, as previously stated, overworked, over-tired, and over-anxious and, in such a state, even a Galactic Historian can skip a whole series of words and dates and never know the difference. A hiatus of twenty thousand years is hardly noticeable anyway. Galactically speaking, twenty thousand years is a mere wink in time.

The breeze didn't carry the page very far. It simply whisked it through a convenient window, deposited it beneath a xixxix tree and then returned to the hills to rest. But the choice of a xixxix tree is highly significant and substantiates the malicious nature of the breeze's act. If it had chosen a muu or a buxx tree instead, the Galactic Historian might have found the page in the morning when he took his constitutional through the university grounds.

However, since a xixxix tree was selected, no doubt whatever can remain as to the breeze's basic motivation. Articles of a valuable nature just aren't left beneath xixxix trees. Everybody knows that squixes live in xixxix trees and everybody knows that squixes are collectors. They collect all sorts of things, buttons and pins and twigs and pebbles--anything at all, in fact, that isn't too big for them to pick up and carry into their xixxix tree houses.

They have been called less kind things than collectors. Thieves, for example, and scavengers. But collectors are what they really are. Collecting fulfills a basic need in their mammalian makeup; the possession of articles gives them a feeling of security. They love to surround their little furry bodies with all sorts of odds and ends, and their little arboreal houses are stuffed with everything you can think of.

And they simply adore paper. They adore it because it has a practical as well as a cultural value.

Specifically, they adore it because it is wonderful to make hammocks out of.

When the two squixes in the xixxix tree saw the page drift to the ground, they could hardly believe their eyes. They chittered excitedly as they skittered down the trunk. The page had hardly stopped fluttering before it was whisked aloft again, clenched in tiny squix fingers.

The squixes wasted no time. It had been a long while since the most cherished of all collector's items had come their way and they needed a new hammock badly. First, they tore the page into strips, then they began to weave the strips together.

--1456, Gut. Bi. pr.; 1492, Am. dis.; 1945, at. b. ex. Almgdo.; 1971, mn. rchd., they wove.

--2004, Sir. rchd.; 2005-6, Sir.--E. wr.; 2042, Btlgs. rchd.; 2043-4, Btlgs.--E. wr.

They wove and wove and wove.

15,000, E. Emp. clpsd.; 15,038, E. dstryd.; Hist. E., end of.

It was a fine hammock, the best the two squixes had ever wove. But they didn't sleep well that night. They twisted and turned and tossed, and they dreamed the most fantastic dreams--

Which isn't particularly surprising, considering what they were sleeping on. Sleeping on the history of Earth would be enough to give anybody nightmares.

Even squixes.

Contents

CHILDREN OF TOMORROW

by Arthur Leo Zagat

Chapter I

: NIGHT WINGS

"Dikar," Marilee said, low-voiced.

"Of all the day between sunrise and sunrise, I am most happy in this quiet hour just before bedtime." Lying on the grass beside him, the warmth of her love enfolded Dikar like the warmth of the fire behind them and the scent of her in his nostrils was sweet and clean as the breath of the woods that enclosed the wide, long clearing. "I am so happy that I'm afraid," Marilee went on. "Something out there in the night hates to see me so happy."

Dikar's great paw tightened on the slim, small hand of his mate, but he said nothing. "I'm afraid," Marilee's gray eyes widened, "that someday it will take you away from me, and leave me all empty."

Dikar's high forehead was deeply lined with thought, his lips pressed tightly together within his blond, silken beard. From the logs on the Fire Stone the crackling flames leaped high, reaching always for the leafy canopy a giant oak held above them, never quite touching it. The ruddy light of the flames filled the clearing, from the long Boys' House on one side to the Girls' House on the other, from the Fire Stone at this end to the table and benches under the pole-upheld roof of the eating place at the other. The light played on the brown, strong limbs of the Boys of the Bunch, on the slender bodies of the Girls, as they walked slowly or lay, like Dikar and Marilee, in pairs on the grass, murmuring.

Over the clearing the purple-black Mountain hung, and the forest enclosed the clearing with night. The forest was silent with its own queer silence that is made up of countless little noises; the piping of insects, the chirp of nesting birds, the scurry of small beasts in the brush, the babble of streamlets hurrying to leap over the edge of the Drop.

Dikar thought of the Drop, of how its high wall of riven rock completely circled the Mountain, so barren of foothold that no living thing could hope to scale it unaided. He thought of the tumbled stones below the Drop, stones big as the Boys' House and bigger, and of how the water of the streamlets foamed white and angry between the stones, and of how beneath stones and water slept the Old Ones who brought the Bunch to the Mountain in the Long-Ago Time of Fear that none of the Bunch remembered clearly, most not at all.

"Dikar!" As Marilee's head rolled to him, a gap formed in the rippling mantle of her soft, brown hair and a round, naked shoulder peeped through. "You won't let it take you away from me, will you? Will you, Dikar?"

Beyond the tumbled stones, as far as Dikar could see from the topmost bough of the tallest tree on top of the Mountain, stretched the far land where they lived from whom the Old Ones had hidden the Bunch on this Mountain.

"Why don't you answer me, Dikar?" There was sharpness in Marilee's voice. "Don't you hear me? Dikar! What are you thinking about?"

Dikar smiled slowly, his blue eyes finding Marilee. "I am boss of the Bunch, Marilee," he rumbled. "And I've a lot to think about. You know that."

"Yes," she whispered. "I know. But sometimes you could think about me."

"I do. Always." Dikar loosed his hand from Marilee's and, sliding it under her supple waist, drew her close to his great body. "Whatever else I think about, I am always thinking about you too." The trouble within him was a little eased as he looked into her bright and lovely face. "Do I have to tell you that?"

"No," she murmured, nesting warm against him. "You don't have to tell me." She sighed with contentment. Her eyelids drooped drowsily, but Dikar's remained open as his gaze returned to the Boys and the Girls in the clearing.

All the Boys had grown in the long years since the Old Ones brought them here, their cheeks and chins fuzzed, their flat muscles banding torsos naked save for small aprons of green twigs split and plaited. Slim the Girls had grown, slim as the white birches in the woods, and graceful as the fawns that bedded in the forest.

Their loose hair fell rippling and silken to their ankles but as they moved Dikar glimpsed lean flanks, firm thighs brushed by short skirts woven from reeds, ever-deepening breasts hidden by circlets woven of leaves for the unmated, of gay flowers for each who had taken a Boy as mate.

Near the middle of the clearing three or four of the younger Boys knelt, playing with small, round stones the game called aggies. They were beardless as yet, their faces rashed with small pimples, and as they argued about the game their voices were now deep as Dikar's own, now broke into thin squeals.

Abruptly their chatter hushed, and then one of them was on his feet, was running towards where Dikar lay. He was Jimlane, thin-faced, puny, but keenest-eared of all the Bunch.

Dikar put Marilee out of his arms and was rising when Jimlane got to him. "I hear one, Dikar!" the kid gasped. "It's far away, but I hear it."

"Shut up, everybody!" the boss called aloud. "Listen."

There was no sound in the clearing, save for the crackle of the fire. For a long time Dikar heard no sound except the crackle of the flames behind him, the tiny noises from the woods. And then there was another sound, so faint that he was not quite certain he heard it. In the star-prickled sky, it was a buzz like the buzz of a bee although no bee flies at night.

"There!" Jimlane pointed. Where he pointed a star moved, a sparkle of light like a star. "See it?"

"I see it," Dikar said, quietly. Then, more loudly but just as calmly. "Out the fire, Bunch. Quick."

They came running toward him, the Boys and the Girls, and past him into the edge of the woods and then out again, and now each had in his hands a birch bark bucket of earth. Marilee snatched a burning stick from the fire and darted with it into the woods, and the others threw earth on the fire, till the flames flickered and were gone, and the clearing was dark as the forest.

Dikar stared into the sky.

The buzzing was louder now, and nearer. The dot of light came nearer and nearer, moving among the stars, and about it the stars blotted out, and shone again behind it, and now Dikar could make out a black shape in the sky.

"In the houses, Bunch," he ordered, and he heard swift movement in the darkness, the padding of many feet. He was alone, standing under the canopy of the great oak, with the hot smell of burned wood in his nostrils and of baking earth.

The noise in the sky was no longer a buzz but a great roaring and the black shape was very distinct now; its spread wings, its long body, the yellow light at its very tip. Like a bird, it was, but larger than any bird. Its wings lay flat and without motion, like a soaring bird's, but no bird soared so long without wing flap, no bird soared so straight. It was a plane and there were men in it, and it was flying straight toward the Mountain. At the height it flew, it would just clear the tall tree that stood on the tip of the Mountain.

The roar of the plane beat at Dikar. The plane was almost overhead now and Dikar was afraid.

Dikar was afraid as he was in the dream that so often came to him in his sleep, dream of the dark Time of Fear when was a very little boy called Dick Carr, and the sky over the city would fill with screaming of sirens, and he would run hand in hand with his mother to crouch in the subway, the ground heaving and rolling under their feet. A dream it was, but also a memory so vague Dikar could not be sure which was memory, which dream. But this was no dream, this rattling thunder that clubbed at him out of the sky.

"It will go by," he said to himself. "They always go by."

* * * *

Every once in awhile a plane would fly over the Mountain. At the first sound of it the Bunch would hide--if at night, first outing the fire. The Bunch knew, not quite knowing how, what the planes were, but they were not afraid of the planes. They hid from them because it was one of the musts the Old Ones had left, and the musts of the Old Ones must be obeyed.

No more than the rest of the Bunch Dikar had been afraid of the planes until the day not long ago when he had gone down into the far land from which they came.

Dikar had gone far and wide that day, a shadow flitting through the fields and the woods, a silent shadow none saw; but who had seen white men and women huddled within fences of thorn-covered wire, had seen them beaten by yellow men till the blood ran. He had seen a thing, dried and gray, swing from a tall pole at the end of a rope, and the rags that fluttered about the thing had told him it once had been a man. He had seen white men and women working, thin and sunken-eyed and so weak they could hardly stand; when they fell, had seen them lashed to work again by men dressed in green, black men with yellow faces.

Dikar had seen many terrible things that day, and he had learned how terrible they were who ruled the far land that had seemed so pleasant from his perch on the Mountain's tallest tree.

It was they who rode in the planes, and Dikar knew what it would mean to the Bunch if they found out the Bunch lived on the Mountain, and this was why Dikar was afraid when there was a roar in the sky and a plane flew overhead. But this plane was now hidden from Dikar by the oak's canopy, and the roar in the sky was lessening.

"It's gone by," he said to himself, "like they always--" The roar in the sky was loud again, the plane, lower now was again blotting out the stars--A white light blazed in the sky, a great white light like the sun! It floated down, making the woods green, filling the clearing with brightness!

Terror was ice in Dikar's veins.

This too was out of his dream, a white light floating down out of the sky, a noise like hundreds of sticks rattling along a hundred fences, screams and crashes, the screams of kids who were fleeing a destroyed city, the crashes of the trucks in which they fled. The truck in which was eight-year-old Dick Carr, in which were Mary Lee and the other kids who now were the Bunch, rocking to a halt on a tree-roofed side road. The two Old Ones stiff with terror on the front seat of the truck...

That white light floating down, showed only an empty clearing, weather-grayed houses about which there was no sign of life. The light was fading. The black plane was turning again to its course, was blotting the stars no longer, itself was blotted by the purple-dark Mountain. The roar in the sky became the buzz of a monstrous bee. Dikar wiped cold sweat from his forehead with the edge of his hand.

From the plane, held high by the tall forest and steep slope, they had seen nothing of life in the blaze of their white light and they had flown away. But why had they turned back? Why had they lit the clearing with their white light? Always before the planes had flown straight on, over the Mountain.

The bee-buzz in the sky faded to nothingness. The shrilling of insects in the woods began again. Dikar cupped hands about his mouth and called, "Come out. Come out wherever you are."

Forms began to come out of the doors of the houses. Dikar turned to face the woods. "Come out, Marilee," he called through his cupped hands. "M-a-a-arilee."

His shout rolled away into the purple-dark woods, seeking the cave where Marilee hid with the burning stick that must light the fire again, as was her job when a plane came in the night. "M-a-a-rilee." Behind Dikar the Bunch chattered, but no light from Marilee's flaming stick moved among the black tree trunks.

"Ma-a-rilee," Dikar called again, sending his shout into the whispering night of the woods. The woods sent his shout back to him. "Ma-arilee," hollow and mocking, and that was all the answer that came to his shout.

Chapter II

: TO FIGHT NO-FAIR

Breath pulled in between Dikar's teeth and he was lunging past the oak's enormous bole, plunging into the dark woods. Earth was cold and wet to the soles of his feet. Cold, wet-earth smell was in his nostrils and the green smell of the woods and the smell of mouldering leaves and of the pale things that overnight grew among the leaves. Faintly in his nostrils, too, was the sharp tang of smoke, and that could only be from the stick Marilee had carried off to the cave.

Even to Dikar's eyes, keen as they were, there was no light here, but he moved swiftly, never stumbling, avoiding tree trunks and bushes with the sure deftness of the small woods creatures, no more aware than they how he did so. The ground lifted under his feet, and then there was no longer ground under his feet but rock.

Dikar stopped, sensing walls about him, a roof above him, and so knowing he was in the cave he sought. "Marilee," he called into the sightless blackness. "Marilee. Where are you?"

No answer came. But in his nostrils the smoke-tang he'd followed was sharp, so Dikar knew that Marilee had been here. In his nostrils was the warm, sweet smell of his mate, so that Dikar knew she was still here, somewhere in this blackness-filled cave.

He started moving again, slowly, groping with his feet in the dark. And his feet found her, found her form outstretched on the cave's rocky floor, unmoving even when his feet thudded against her.

"Marilee!" Dikar choked and went to his knees beside Marilee, gathered her into his arms.

She stirred in his arms! "Dikar." Breath gusted from Dikar's great chest at that uncertain murmur, breath he did not know till now had been caught in his chest, "Oh, Dikar."

"What happened to you, Marilee? What-?"

"I--Someone sprang on me from behind, just as I reached the cave and hit me! Dikar! The fire stick! Where-?"

"Not here. Or if here, gone out. No. Not here. Even if gone out its smell would be stronger--"

"The fire, Dikar!" Sudden terror in Marilee's voice, of life without fire, of food without fire to cook, of winter without fire to warm. She was out of his arms and on her feet. "I've lost the fire, Dikar."

Dikar whirled out of the cave, was running through the woods, Marilee at his side. They burst out of the woods into the clearing and Dikar was shouting, "Get the dirt off the fire logs, everybody. Quick."

Dikar went on without stopping, darting to the door of the Boys' House, into it. He lifted an axe from its pegs on the wall, was out in the open again, was running toward where the Bunch were scooping earth off the piled logs on the Fire Stone.

He shoved through the Boys and Girls, made out, by the dim light of the stars, a log they had uncovered, black, lifeless. His axe swept up, smashed down.

Chunk!

The log split open. Red' sparks flew, stinging Dikar's legs. He did not feel them. He was staring at the redness from which they had flown, the glowing red heart of the log that still had life in it, the life of the fire, the life of the Bunch. "Dry leaves," he commanded. "Bring dry leaves. Quick! Bring dry twigs. Billthomas! Halcross! Build up the fire. Fredalton! Take this axe and split up one of those logs into little sticks."

Dikar watched Billthomas put dry leaves on the glowing redness, watched the leaves take flame from the log's heart. Watched Halross feed little dry twigs to the leaves and the twigs catch flame from the leaves, and the sticks from the twigs. The fire grew again on the Fire Stone, and the light of the fire grew again in the clearing, but Dikar's forehead was deep-lined and his eyes were no longer blue, and in the darkness of them was a red light that did not come from the fire.

Dikar's eyes moved over the red-lit faces of the Bunch that stood about the Fire Stone watching the fire grow again; and his eyes seemed to ask a question of each face and pass on. They came to one face, and stayed on it, Dikar's brow-lines deepening.

That face was chunk-jawed, black-stubbled, the eyes too small, too closely set, but what held Dikar's gaze was the odd, leering grin that sat on the thick lips.

Tomball had had little to grin about since the day Dikar had returned from the far land and ended Tomball's short time as boss, forcing him to confess to the Bunch how he had tricked his way to being boss in place of Dikar. Why, then, was he grinning now?

"Do you think it was he who hit me?" Marilee whispered in Dikar's ear, "and ran away with the fire stick?"

"Who else of the Bunch would do a thing like that?"

"But why should he, Dikar? He's smart enough to know that if we lost the fire it would be as bad for him as for the rest of us."

"That's what I don't--Wait! I've got a hunch. Look. Walk along with me like we were just talking about nothing important. Laugh a little, you know, and hold on to my arm."

Marilee's fingers were cold on Dikar's arm, but her laugh rippled like a little stream running over pebbles in its bed. They walked slowly away from the fire reached the shadowy edge of the woods, were closed around by the forest darkness.

"Now!" Dikar said, and he was flitting through the forest night, Marilee a silent shadow behind him. It was like her to stay close behind, like her to ask no questions as he ran through the woods to the cave again.

At the cave-mouth Dikar stopped a moment, sniffing the air. "Yes," he said, more to himself than to Marilee. "I can still smell the smoke of the fire-stick. The wet night air holds smells a long time." Then he was moving again, following the sharp tang of smoke in the air, following it away from the cave and away from the clearing.

The scent-trail led him downhill. Soon the laugh of a streamlet came to his ears and then Dikar pushed through tangling bushes and came out into starlight on the edge of the brook that he heard. The smoke smell was very strong here--

"Look, Marilee!" Dikar pointed to a black something at, his feet, half in, half out of the water. "Here is your fire stick." He squatted to it.

"He brought it here to put it in the water," Marilee said, squatting beside him.

"'No," Dikar answered, his voice a growl deep in his chest. "No. He slipped on a wet stone and fell, and the water outed it. See. Here are the marks of his knees on the bank. But he brought it here because this was the nearest open place in the woods, the nearest place where its light could be seen from the sky."

"From the sky? Dikar! What do you mean?"

"I mean that I know now why the plane turned back." Even in the dimness Marilee could see that Dikar's face was hard and still, his lips tight and gray. "If he hadn't slipped and dropped the stick in the water, so that they were not sure they'd seen--" Dikar stood up. "Come," he said, grimly.

When they came again into the clearing, it was filled once more with the wavering light of the fire and everything was as it had been before Jimlane had heard the plane. Dikar paused beside the Fire Stone, stood there straddle-legged and glowering, a muscle twitching in his cheek.

Marilee laid finger tips on Dikar's arm. "There's Tomball," she whispered. "Talking to Bessalton down there near the eating place."

Dikar's gaze moved to where she had said. Bessalton was boss of the Girls and tallest of them, her cloak of hair black as deepest night, her legs long and slender, her hips wide. Tomball was heavy-built beside her, bulging arms hanging loose almost to his knees, great chest black-matted, his belly black with matted hair. Black-haired was Tomball, and squat. He was strongest of the Bunch, and there was shrewdness in him too, a shrewdness Dikar already had learned to fear.

The little muscle twitched in Dikar's cheek. "Marilee," he said, low-toned. "Find Jimlane and Billthomas, and tell them to come to me first chance they can without anyone seeing them."

She slipped away. Dikar watched her, slim and lovely, the fire's red light caressing her, and there was pain in his arms and his chest, sweet pain of the knowing that she was his.

Tomball too watched Marilee, small eyes following her, thick lips a little parted. Seeing this Dikar felt a tightness in his neck and across the back of his shoulders. His hands closed into fists. If he wasn't boss of the Bunch!

Dikar's hands opened and lifted, cupping around his mouth. "Ho Bunch!" he called through his cupped hands.

The talk in the clearing stopped, and the strollers turned to him. "Bedtime, Bunch," Dikar shouted. "A good sleep and happy dreams to you all."

"A good sleep to you, Dikar!" they cried to him, but Tomball did not cry Dikar a good sleep as he went toward the Boys' House with the others of the mateless Boys, while the mateless Girls went toward the Girls' House, and the mated pairs went hand in hand past the end of the eating place and into the dark woods behind. Dikar saw Marilee waiting for him by the eating place, but he did not go to her till Steveland and Halross, pimply-faced youngsters whose turn it was to stay awake the night and watch the fire, had taken their places on the smooth bench-rock near the Fire Stone.

"Be sure that one of you stays always awake," he told them. "Be sure to listen always for the sound of a plane in the sky. If you hear one wake the Bunch right away to out the fire."

"Yes, Dikar," Steveland said, his blue eyes wide. "We get you. A good sleep, Dikar."

"A quiet night to you both," Dikar said and went to join Marilee and go with her to the little house in the woods behind the eating place that, when they took each other for mates, he had built from logs to be theirs and theirs alone.

"Dikar," Marilee said, her eyes puzzled in the ruddy dusk that sifted through to her from the fire. "Why didn't you tell the Bunch about Tomball's hitting me and taking the fire stick to where the plane could see it? Why didn't you punish him for it?"

"Would it be fair, Marilee, to say to the Bunch that it was Tomball, when we do not know that it was? Would it be fair to punish him for doing it, when we do not know that he did it?"

"But we do know!"

"No, Marilee. We do not. You saw nothing and I saw nothing that would make us sure it was him. Or did you see something--something you have not told me?"

She stopped, Dikar stopped, looking at her face on which the dim red light fell leaving the rest of her in shadow, thinking how lovely her face was, the red light tangled in the cloudy softness of her hair, her gray eyes grave and thoughtful, her small mouth puckered.

"No-o," Marilee breathed at last. "No, I saw nothing that would make me sure it was Tomball. But I am sure, and you are sure, because we know that Tomball is the only one of the Bunch who would do a thing like that. Look, Dikar. Tomball wants to be boss, and if he cannot be boss of the Bunch he would destroy the Bunch, and he would stop at nothing to do it. You know all that as well as I do."

Sadness came into Dikar's face, and trouble in his eyes. "Yes, Marilee, I know that as well as you do. Tomball has always wanted to be boss, and when he couldn't get to be boss by fighting fair he fought no fair, and now that he knows he can't get to be boss by fighting either fair or no fair, he would destroy the Bunch rather than have me or anyone but him be boss. But it would not be right for me to fight him any other way than fair."

"Why, Dikar? If Tomball wants to destroy the Bunch, it seems to me it would be right for you to fight him any way you can, fair or no fair. Why isn't it?"

The lines were back in Dikar's forehead. Very clearly he knew the answer to what Marilee asked, but it was very hard to think of how to say it in words. "Look, Marilee," he cried. "When we were littler we played lots of games, and we always picked someone for umpire to see that everybody played according to the rules of the game, because if there were no rules there would be no game. Remember?"

"Yes, Dikar. I remember."

"Now sometimes the umpire himself would be no fair, letting one side break the rules. And then the other side would break the rules too, and pretty soon the game would bust up because with all the rules broken there was no game any more. Right?"

"Yes. But I don't see--"

His gesture stopped her.

"You will in a minute. Look. The life of the Bunch is no game, but it is lived according to rules, because if there were no rules, if every one of the Bunch did just as he or she wanted to, all the time, there would be no Bunch. Now, I don't think you or anybody else would say that if we hadn't lived all these years as a Bunch; sharing what we had, sharing the work, each doing what he can do best, all helping one another; any but the strongest of us would be alive and happy today. Would you?"

"No. We are all alive and happy after the long years here on the Mountain because we have helped each other."

"And played fair with each other. You call me boss and obey me, but you really obey the rules the Old Ones left us and the rules the Bunch has made for themselves, and all I am is an umpire to see that everybody obeys the rules, to see that everybody plays fair. Now, suppose I played no fair myself. Suppose, whenever I felt like it, I broke the rules. What would happen?"

She answered slowly:

"Everybody else would break the rules too. I see. Because if the umpire is no fair, all the ones playing the game feel it's all right to be no fair too."

"Exactly. And pretty soon there would be no rules any more, and the Bunch would bust up. If Tomball is trying to destroy the Bunch, I've got to fight him. But if I fight him no fair, that will destroy the Bunch, sooner or later, much more surely than anything Tomball could do, or anything they who live in the far land can do. Now do you understand, Marilee?"

"I understand," Marilee said. And then she cried, "But you've got to do something, Dikar! You can't let him--" She stopped short, twisted to a noise in the brush behind her. "Dikar! There's somebody-!"

Dikar thrust her behind him. "Who's there?" he demanded, his neck thickening. "Who is it?"

Shadows moved in the shadows of the brush, where the red light from the fire could not reach.

Chapter III

: THE GUN ON THE ROOF

"Who's there?" Dikar cried again, and then the shadows were coming out into the light, and they were Jimlane and Billthomas.

"Marilee told us you wanted us," Jimlane said. "We waited till everyone was asleep in the Boys' House."

"Did anyone see you come here?"

"No. They were all asleep."

"All right," Dikar said. "Listen, Jimlane and Billthomas. I have a job for you, but I am not going to order you to do it. I'm going to ask you to."

"We'll do it, Dikar," Billthomas said. He was shorter than Jimlane, yellow-haired, blue-eyed, his skin as smooth as any of the Girls', his movements as graceful. "We'll do anything you ask us."

"Anything at all," Jimlane agreed.

"Wait, youngsters," Dikar warned, "You may not be so ready to promise that when you hear what it is. I hate asking you to do it, but it needs to be done, for the good of the Bunch. It won't be easy. You may be hurt doing it, you may even be killed. Nobody but Marilee and me will know that you're doing it."

Two pairs of bright eyes were fixed on his face. "If it's for the Bunch, we'll do it," Jimlane said. "Whatever it is. Tell us what you want us to do, Dikar."

"Before I tell you, you must promise, cross your hearts and hope to die, that you will say nothing about it to anyone. Whether you will do it or not, you will always keep silent."

"Cross my heart and hope to die," Billthomas said solemnly. "I will say nothing." Jimlane said the same and then the two spat over their left shoulders to show that they could never take back what they had said.

"Now listen," Dikar said when they had done that. "The job is to watch Tomball, by day and by night. You sleep in the Boys' House with him, and I'll always make sure to put you on the same jobs with him, so that part ought to be easy.

"If he slips off any time, day or night, by himself, I want you to follow him without his knowing it. Do you think you can do that?"

"We once followed a deer all day," Jimlane said, "All over the Mountain, and it never knew we was anywheres near."

"I know that," Dikar nodded. "And that's why I picked you to ask first to do this job. I also know you two are champeens of the Bunch at shooting with bonarrers, an' that's another part of the job."

The eyes of the youngsters widened, but they said nothing.

Dikar went on. "Keep your bonarrers near you all the time, and if Tomball does go off by himself, take 'em along. If you see him start to make a fire where it can be seen from the sky, or from the kind of woods that will make a smoke go up through the tops of the trees, shoot him in the legs, right away, and out the fire. If he starts to go out of the woods to the edge of the Drop, in the daytime when they who live in the far land might see him, shoot him in the legs and drag him back. Stop him if he does anything else that might show Them that someone lives here on the Mountain. Do you get me?"

"We get you, Dikar." Billthomas looked puzzled. "But all those things are Must-Nots of the Old Ones. Why do we need to shoot him to stop him from doing them? If he tries to, the Old Ones would wake from their sleep under the rocks at the bottom of the Drop and strike him down. He wouldn't dare to do 'em, and if he tried, the Old Ones wouldn't let him."

"Look, Billthomas." Dikar put his hand on the kid's shoulder. "Do you remember the time when the Bunch stoned me away from the clearing and made Tomball boss?"

"And you came back with a little gun that made a noise and killed our fawn, and you made the Bunch listen to you while you proved why we shouldn't have stoned you away. And then you threw the gun up on the roof of the Boys' House and fought Tomball who should be boss, and licked him. Sure I remember."

"Well, between the time I was stoned away and the time I came back, I went to the edge of the Drop, and I climbed down the Drop to the rocks under which the Old Ones sleep. That is the most terrible of all the Must-Nots of the Old Ones, but they didn't wake from their sleep, and they didn't strike me down. Nothing happened to me. I went into the far land, and I came back, and the Old Ones did nothing to me."

"You went into the far land," Jimlane repeated in awed tones. "Dikar! Did you see Them?"

"I saw Them, Jimlane, an' I saw many things that made me know how very terrible it would be if they found out the Bunch lives on the Mountain. But the Old Ones did nothin' to stop me. The Old Ones sleep under the rocks, Jimlane, an' under the water that foams over the rocks, an' they cannot awaken to stop Tomball from lettin' Them who live in the far land know that the Bunch is here on the Mountain."

"But Dikar!" Billthomas broke out. "Tomball wouldn't do anythin' like that!"

"I hope not," Dikar answered slowly. "Honest Injun, I hope that he wouldn't. But I must be sure, an' I'm askin' you two to help me be sure--No wait," he said as he saw their mouths start to open. "Before you answer I want you to remember how strong Tomball is, an' how he said he would kill you, Jimlane, that time when you wanted to tell the Bunch why they were wrong in stonin' me away, an' how afraid of him you were, that time. I want you youngsters to think of that before you say that you will do this job."

"I've thought about it, Dikar." Jimlane stood very straight in the firelight. "I won't say I'm not afraid of Tomball, but afraid or not, I will watch him, an' I will do my best to stop him from doin' anythin' that will hurt the Bunch."

"Me too, Dikar," Billthomas said his voice clear and steady, his eyes steady as Dikar's own. "I am afraid of Tomball, but I will do this job the best I can."

"Good kids," Dikar said. Something had him by the throat, so that it was hard to say it, and he could not answer when the Boys wished him and Marilee a good sleep and slipped away, their naked young bodies ruddy one moment in the firelight, then merged with the noiseless dark.

"Oh Dikar," Marilee's soft voice said in his ear. "They're so young. Are you right in what you are doin'?"

"I don't know," Dikar sighed. "I don't know, Marilee." And then he said, "It is a hard job to be boss of the Bunch. A dreadful hard job."

* * * *

Her hand reached up to his cheek, her cool fingers touched it, lightly, "A hard job, Dikar," she said softly. "But it is night, an' just past these bushes is our little house, an' there you are not boss of the Bunch but my mate..."

He drew her close to him, her softness close against the hardness of his body. He looked into her eyes, and then his head sank and his lips found hers.

A little later they knelt by their bed of pine boughs covered with a white blanket of rabbit fur. "Now I lay me down to sleep," they said together. "An, should I die before I wake..."

What was it like to die, Dikar wondered. He had seen death, of course, a deer killed by his arrow, a squirrel stiff and glazed-eyed under last year's leaves. What was it like to lie stiff like that, never seeing again the flaming colors of the sunrise, the shimmer of sunlight on water, never feeling again the coolness of the wind on one's skin, the warm touch of the rain? "God bless the Bunch," he said, along with Marilee. "God bless Marilee..."

Marilee rose but Dikar stayed on his knees. He heard the piping of the insects outside the little house, the peep of the nesting birds, the whisper of the trees. They were trying to tell him something, but he could not quite make out what it was.

"Poor Dikar," Marilee said. "You're so tired you've fallen asleep on your knees."

"No," Dikar said, rising, nor could he sleep, even with Marilee in his arms, their cover of rabbit-fur warm over him. Something was troubling him. Something that he must do, and he could not think what it was.

He lay wide-eyed, watching the open door of the little house grow pale with the light of the moon that was rising over the Mountain, watching the leaf shadows dance in the pale moonlight. With the moon a wind rose in the forest and the rustle of the treetops was louder, and bough-tips tapped on the roof--

The roof! That was it! Billthomas had spoken of the little gun Dikar had taken from one of them down in the far land, a black faced one, and had thrown up on the roof of the Boys' House and forgotten. Dikar had seen what that small thing could do, and Tomball had seen what it could do. Dikar must get it. Now. Tonight. Get it and hide it...

Marilee stirred in her sleep as Dikar slowly took his arms from about her. She muttered something, but she did not awaken. Dikar stole, more silent than the shadows, through the woods, reached a tree whose boughs overhung the Boys' House, swung himself up into those boughs and from them to the roof of Boys' House.

The moonlight was bright on that roof, every crack in its gray boards, every mark of them, distinct. There were faded, dried leaves on it, broken twigs...

But no gun.

Chapter IV

: THE SOUND OF GUNFIRE

The sun struck brightness through Dikar's eyelids and though the night had held very little sleep for him, he was instantly awake. He flung out his arm to waken Marilee--found only the fur of the bed-covering!

He rolled over. She wasn't there beside him. She wasn't anywhere in the little house. Dikar was on his feet, his eyes wide, his heart bumping his ribs. The door of the house darkened and Marilee stood there.

"Marilee!" Dikar exclaimed. "I thought--What's the matter?" She had hold of the doorpost, as if to hold herself up by it. There was green under the bronze of her skin and her forehead was wet with sweat. "Marilee!" Dikar made the single long stride that took him to her. "What's wrong with you?"

"Wrong?" Her eyes refused to meet his. "Nothin', Dikar." She laughed, but it was not the merry tinkle that her laugh always was. "Listen, sleepyhead. The Boys are already on their way to the bathing pool." Gay shouts, the threshing of many bodies through the brush, came to him. "Go quick, or they'll be through before you have rubbed the sand from your eyes."

"Marilee." Dikar's hand was on her shoulder. "What-?" She jerked free of his hold, faced him, her lips tight and white.

"Go, you fool!" she yelled at him and thrust past him into the house, threw herself on the bed. "Let me alone."

Dikar stared at her, unbelieving. Never before had she yelled at him in anger, never before had her morning smile failed him. She lay face down, unmoving.

"Marilee," Dikar named her. "If I've done somethin' to make you angry at me, I ask your pardon, but what have I done?"

"Nothin'." He could hardly hear her. "You have done nothin'," she sobbed. "But please go, Dikar. Please leave me alone."

Dikar turned slowly away, heard his name called from outside. "Comin'," he answered red-bearded Johnstone, who called from the little house where he lived with Annjordan, "Last one in the bathing pool's a yellow belly."

They ran through the dew-sprinkled greenery, downhill to where a stream leaped from a ledge into a shining pool that foamed with the flashing limbs, the brown torsos of the Boys of the Bunch.

Dikar dived low into the icy water, swam to the opposite bank, stood up, shaking his head to clear his sight, the shining drops spattering about him. He saw Tomball, squat and shaggy under the foaming waterfall, saw Jimlane swimming nearby. Dikar dived again, swam under water to where the drooping, slender boughs of a willow dipped into the pool and made a screen behind which he came up unseen.

The Boys' House was empty when Dikar went into it by the door away from the clearing, He darted to Tomball's bed, lifted the coverings from it, pressed hands on grass-filled bag under them. There was no hard lump inside the bag. He looked under the cot--a darkening of the light straightened him, whipped him around.

Tomball stood spraddle-legged just inside the open door from the woods. His hands were stretching a bow taut, and laid across the bow was a stone-pointed hunting arrow that could kill a deer--or a Boy.

"Got you," Tomball grunted, his eyes, small and red, hating Dikar. "This is Fredalton's bonarrer. Nobody saw me leave the bathing pool just like nobody except me saw you, an' I'll be back there before they find you." The head of the arrow was pulled back to the curve of the bow's wood. Dikar's muscles tightened to dodge the arrow, but he knew he could not hope--

Whang!

Tomball's arrow was broken in two parts, was clattering to the floor! Dikar threw himself headlong down the length of the Boys' House, tripped over the bow that Tomball had flung in his path. Thrust at the floor to get up and saw another arrow quivering in the wall toward the clearing, saw Tomball dive out of the door toward the woods, got to that door only in time to see Tomball vanish in the brush.

Dikar shook his head to clear it of its stunned surprise that he was still alive, that Tomball's arrow had broken at the exact moment it was loosed at him.

"Dikar!" Billthomas, slender brown body wet-shining, face gray-white, was suddenly there in front of him. "He didn't hurt you?" There was a bow in his one hand, the other reached out to Dikar. "He didn't-?"

"No, Billthomas," Dikar said, guessing now the meaning of that second arrow. "Thanks to you." His voice was steady enough, but inside him he was shaking, knowing suddenly how close he had been to death. "That was as fine a shot as ever was made on the Mountain."

Billthomas' blue eyes shone with the praise. "It was nothin', Dikar. The sun was on Tomball's bonarrer through the other door, makin' it a good mark, an' I was only ten paces away. Any of the Boys could have hit it."

"How did you come here, just in time?"

"Carlberger ducked Jimlane," Billthomas answered. "While he was under Tomball got to shore. I saw him from the other end of the pool an' I followed, I stopped to pick up my bonarrer where I'd hidden it near by, like you told us to last night. That let Tomball get out of sight, but I tracked him. When I got to the edge of the woods he was already in here, was pullin' tight his bow. But why're we wastin' time? I'll call the Bunch to hunt him down--"

"No!" Dikar commanded. "No, Billthomas. I will not have the Bunch know that one of them has tried to kill an other. For then there will be only two things left for the Bunch to do. Either they must stone him from the clearing; an' that will make certain of his hate for the Bunch, with no hope that he will ever change; or they must kill him, which is worse. That the Bunch shall kill one of themselves coldly and with thought before, is more dreadful than that Tomball should have tried to kill me, excited an' angry."

"But, Dikar-?"

"But nothin'! This is a thing I will take care of myself, in my own way, an' it will remain a secret between you an' me. You will not call the Bunch." Dikar said sharply, his eyes commanding. "You will call Jimlane only. The two of you must track Tomball an' keep him always in sight, but you will not let him know you are around unless he does one of the things I talked about last night, or unless he tries again to hurt one of the Bunch. If that should happen, stop him, but hurt him as little as you can help, an' tell me about it. Get me?"

"I get you, Dikar."

"Then call Jimlane, an' get busy."

"Yes, Dikar." Billthomas was gone into the woods and Dikar heard the trill of a lark from where Billthomas had vanished, three times, and from far off he heard the answering three trills of a lark, and he knew that Billthomas had called Jimlane, and that there would not be a moment from now on that Tomball would not be under the eyes of the two youngsters. But Dikar's forehead was furrowed and his heart heavy within him as he turned to pluck Billthomas' arrow from the wall and the pieces of Tomball's arrow from the floor, and went out into the woods to hide them.

* * * *

It was queer, he thought, how he had talked to Billthomas the way he did just now, without thinking about what he was going to say beforehand. It was as if someone else had talked with his voice, someone much wiser than he was.

It was queer, too, how he knew now that what he had said was the right thing to say. How he knew now, sure as that his name was Dikar, that what he was doing was the best thing for the Bunch.

And for Tomball too. After what had happened Tomball would stay away from the Bunch, afraid of what Dikar would do if he came back. The youngsters would be watching him, but Tomball wouldn't know that. He would think he was alone on the Mountain, and he would learn what it meant to be alone, as Dikar had, and he would learn what it meant to be one of the Bunch and have a place in its life.

After awhile Dikar would send Tomball word by Jimlane or Billthomas that he need not be afraid to come back, and when he did come back he would be ready to take his place in the life of the Bunch, and he would give Dikar and the Bunch no more trouble.

That was what Dikar hoped would happen.

The Boys came back, shouting and happy, from their morning swim in their bathing pool, and the Girls came back to the clearing from their pool on the other side of the clearing, and they all ate breakfast at the long table of the eating place.

Marilee came to sit beside Dikar when breakfast was all on the table. Dikar looked sharply at her, but her color was all right now, her eyes bright again. She didn't say anything about what had happened in the morning, and Dikar didn't say anything about it, only too glad to forget about it and to let her forget.

It was Steveland who first said something about Tomball and Jimlane and Billthomas not being there. Across the table so that all could hear, Dikar told him that he had sent them on a special job on the other side of the Mountain, a job that might take them three or four days, and that they would not come back till it was finished.

Before anyone could ask what the job was, Dikar started telling what everybody was to do that day, although he usually didn't do that till after breakfast.

There was a lot to do, because it was time to start getting ready for the winter.

Dikar sent some of the Bunch to hunt for deer whose meat would be dried over the fire, and whose skins the Girls would make into clothing against the cold days to come. He sent some to pick berries that would be cooked with the sugar that they'd gotten from the maple trees in the spring, and others to search for honey in hollow bee-trees, and he set some to stopping up cracks in the walls of the houses with mud.

He himself took four of the older Boys, Johnstone and Danhall and Henfield and Bengreen, up near the top of the Mountain, to where some big trees had been blown down by a storm last year, to cut them up into logs for the fire now that they were dried out and would burn well and without smoke.

When they went to the Boys' House to get their axes, Danhall said that it would be a good idea for them to take their bonarrers along too, in case they happened to see a deer or some squirrels, and Dikar agreed. They hung their quivers of arrows on low bushes, and rested their bows against the bushes, and set to work.

It was shady and cool where they worked, and the kerchunk-kerchunk of their axes was a pleasant sound. Soon Dikar had almost forgotten what had happened last night and this morning, and the day seemed no different from all the other days on the Mountain. He liked the way the flying chips shone bright yellow against the dark green of the moss and the almost black brown of the ground, and he liked the way little spots of sunlight filtered through the leaves high overhead and danced on the ground. He liked the smell of new-cut wood in his nostrils, and the smell of damp earth and of last year's leaves, and the sweet smell of the breeze that was like the scent of Marilee's breath.

It was grand to feel the swell of his muscles, their smooth swell in his arms and across his back, to feel the chunk of his axe into a great tree-trunk, to feel the wood break apart under his strength; grandest of all to feel the touch of the other sweaty shoulders against his own as together the five would yank and haul at a hewn log.

Marilee and Annjordan, Johnstone's mate, brought lunch up to the choppers--cooked rabbit meat and dandelion greens and blackberries big as the end of Dikar's thumb. Dikar and Marilee sat a little apart from the rest, eating their lunch, washing it down with icy water brought from a nearby stream in a cup of birch bark.

"Dikar," Marilee murmured. "I have often wondered about the Drop." Her finger touched a little blue flower that grew out of the moss by her knee, but she didn't quite seem to know she touched it. "It goes all around the Mountain, an' it's so high an' steep. We were very little, Dikar, when the Old Ones brought us here. How did they climb the Drop with us?"

"They didn't." Dikar recalled his dream, recalled the memory that gave form to his dream. "The Drop didn't go all around the Mountain then. A sort of narrow hill slanted up to the top of the Drop, left by men who had been cutting away rock from the Mountain, the same men who built the houses in the clearing an' left cots here, an' these axes an' all the other tools we use. A road ran on top of that narrow hill, an' the Old Ones brought us up that road."

"What became of the hill an' the road?"

"The Old Ones hid us on the Mountain from the terrible hordes who came out of the East an' across the continent from the West an' up from the South," (Dikar was repeating words a Voice had said in his dream). "But some of them came to the foot of the Mountain, so the Old Ones brought the narrow hill down, on them and on themselves," he told Marilee what his dream had helped him to remember. "That is why there is no road to the top of the Drop, an' why the Old Ones sleep under the rocks, down there below the Drop."

"I know you went down there once, Dikar, but you never told me how you got down there, nor how you got up again."

"I plaited a rope of vines, Marilee, as long as the Drop is high. One night I tied the rope's end to a tree an' let it down where a stream leaps out an' down, so that the rope hangs behind the white curtain of the stream an' cannot be seen from below. I climbed down the rope, an' by it I climbed up again the next night, havin' seen what they have made of the far land that looks so green an' pleasant from the top of our Mountain."

"You climbed down a rope of vines!" Marilee's hand went to the flowery circlet that covered her breast. "You might have been killed, Dikar!"

Dikar nodded. "Yes, I might have been killed, an' I didn't care much whether I was or not. I'd been stoned from the Bunch, remember, an' you had cried me no fair. Have some more of these berries, Marilee. They are swell."

"No. You have them." Marilee fed them to Dikar, placing them one by one between his lips. Then they were finished. Dikar lay back, and Marilee lay by his side, quiet and drowsy, and Dikar was dreamily content.

Marilee stirred. "Dikar. Does the rope still hang behind the stream where it leaps down?"

Dikar sat up, pounding his knee with his fist. "Jeeze! It does! I did not lift it when I came back to the Mountain, an' I've forgotten it since. I must do that. Tonight I must do it, as soon as it is dark enough that I cannot be seen from below when I go to the edge of the Drop. Do not let me forget."

"I sure will not," Marilee answered. And then, with that curiosity Dikar had noticed all the Girls had so much more than the Boys, she asked, "Just where is the rope?"

Dikar looked about him, thinking how he could tell her. He knew every inch of the Mountain as well as he knew the lines on his palm. "That's funny," he laughed suddenly. "That brook, there, is the very one at whose end the rope hangs. By following it down the Mountain you would get to it. But look," he went on, rising, "the sun no longer strikes straight down through the treetops, an' much as I hate to send you away, it is time for work again."

"Yes, Dikar," Marilee sighed, reaching a hand for him to take hold of and lift her by. "Time for work." As she came up she swung close to him, and her arms went around his neck and her lips pressed against his, and they were flame on Dikar's lips, burning flame in his veins. "Oh, Dikar," Marilee sobbed. "I hate not to be with you."

"It is only for a little while," Dikar murmured. "Only till night." He held her away from him, drinking her in with his eyes. "What are you goin' to do till night, Marilee?" he asked. "I like to know what you do, all the time, because that way I can think myself with you, an' am not so lonely for you when we are apart."

"That's sweet, Dikar," Marilee smiled, touching Dikar's cheek with her fingertips. "I shall be somewhere in the woods. Bessalton wants me to hunt for a certain kind of grass that is best for sewin' with. Think of me a lot, Dikar," she said, and Annjordan called her, and she was gone.

Dikar and the rest set to work again. Marilee's lips still burned on Dikar's, and the touch of Marilee's fingertips lingered on his cheek, and he would not wipe the sweat from his face lest he wipe that touch from it too.

The kerchunk-kerchunk of the axes ran loud and long through the woods, and the pile of cut logs grew slowly but steadily. The beams of sunlight striking down from the leafy roof of the forest slanted more and more, and the shadows lengthened. At last Dikar rested.

"Enough for today, fellows," he said. "Tomorrow we'll--" The words caught in his throat. He'd heard a sound from far down the Mountain, a sound that should not be in the woods.

The sound came again, very far off, but Dikar knew what it was. He'd heard it down in the far land, and once, only once, on the Mountain. That time he'd made the sound himself, shooting the little gun out of the great oak that canopied the Fire Stone.

Chapter V

: OVER THE DROP

"Come, fellows," Dikar snapped, springing to the bush where hung his bow and arrows, snatching them up. "Quick." He was off through the woods, running down toward along the bank of the stream because there it was clearest of bushes and trees. The other four ran after him.

Long the time seemed, endless, that Dikar ran thus through familiar woods suddenly grown strange and fearful. Dreadful the thoughts that Dikar thought as he ran. Who had shot off a gun on the Mountain? Had that plane, last night, seen something to tell those who rode it that someone lived here? Had they climbed the Mountain, the men dressed in green that he'd seen in the far land, the men with yellow faces and black who were so brutishly cruel?

Never had Dikar run so fast. The others could not keep up with him, so fast he ran, but still he saw nothing but the flicking shadows of the woods and the glinting sun on the stream beside which he ran. The stream was rushing faster now, was hurrying to throw itself over the Drop, just ahead--

Dikar dug heels to stop himself. Something in the water--Jimlane! Jimlane lay face down in the water, very still, and the water that swirled away from the still, small body was pink and dreadful. Jimlane lay in the water, but on the bank of the stream lay Billthomas, limp as an arrowed deer, his side red and terrible with blood.

Dikar dropped to his knees beside Billthomas, and inside him Dikar was cold, cold as ice. "My fault," he heard himself groan. "I set you to watch Tomball, an' Tomball had the gun hid in the woods, an' he got it an' shot you. My fault, Billthomas."

Dikar touched Billthomas, and Billthomas moved under Dikar's hand, Billthomas' eyes opened and stared up into Dikar's face, unseeing. Then they smiled. A faint smile touched Billthomas' gray lips and they moved, but Dikar could not hear what they said.

"What?" Dikar's voice was hoarse, strange to him. "What, Billthomas?" He bent, got his ear near Billthomas' lips.

"What are you tryin' to tell me?"

"Tomball--" the faint whisper came. "Went--over Drop--Took--Marilee--with him..." The whisper faded, Billthomas' eyes closed.

"What?" Dikar yelled. "What was that about Marilee? Billthomas! Did you say Marilee-?" But he saw that Billthomas did not hear him.

Shouts, exclamations, above him told Dikar the Boys had meanwhile come up. "Jumped over the Drop!" someone exclaimed. "They must be smashed on the rocks--"

"No," something shrieked inside Dikar's head. "Not Marilee!" and he was on his feet, was twisting toward the edge of the Drop.

The stream rushed away from Jimlane's still body, rushed down to the end of the woods. Not five paces away it leaped out--up from where it leaped slanted a thick rope of plaited vines to the great trunk of the last tree of all and it was wound round and round that trunk, tight-fastened.

Tomball and Marilee had not jumped over the Drop-!

Somehow Dikar was at the edge of the Drop, careless whether from below they saw him or not. Dikar was looking down, his eyes burning.

Down and down fell the white spume of the stream, down and down fell the awful wall of the Drop, gray-shadowed. Far, far below, the stream smashed itself on a great, jagged rock and joined the waters that brawled white and angry among huge rocks that might have been tumbled there by some unimaginable giants at play.

For a wide space from the foot of the Drop the ground was covered by the great rocks, and that space was made somehow fearful by the shadow of the Mountain that lay on it, but beyond it the sun still lay on a green forest that stretched away to the far land.

Dikar's staring eyes found the edge of that forest, found two figures, small as the dolls the Girls used to make out of rags when first the Bunch came to the Mountain. Two figures clambered over the rocks, nearing the edge of the forest, and the one behind was chunky, black-haired, and the one ahead was brown with her mantle of brown hair!

Till now Dikar had clung to a hope that he had not understood Billthomas rightly, that Billthomas had been mistaken, but now that hope was ended. A terrible rage flared up in Dikar, a rage hotter than the heart of the fire on the Fire Stone. He snatched an arrow from the quiver hung on his shoulder, fitted it to his bow.

"This was why she asked me how I climbed down the Drop," ran searing through his mind. "She planned it this mornin' with Tomball. This mornin' she stole from our bed to seek Tomball an' warn him I'd set the kids to watch him, an' they planned then to kill the youngsters as soon as they'd found out how to flee from the Mountain, together."

He had Tomball on the angle of his arrowhead. The muscles in his arms swelled, the bow grew taut. Careful, now. Careful. The distance was great. He must not miss.

He might miss Tomball and hit Marilee.

What matter? She was as much to blame as he.

Dikar couldn't! His fingers wouldn't open on the bowstring, wouldn't loose the arrow that might bury itself in the flesh of Marilee.

But he must! Not because they fled him. Not even because they had killed Billthomas, and Jimlane. Because even if they didn't want to, the men in green would make them tell where they'd come from, make them tell about the Bunch. That thought opened Dikar's fingers.

Whang!

Dikar's arrow flew straight and fast and true--far out over the rocks it veered, was no longer a live and deadly dart, was a dead stick tumbling aimlessly down, a plaything of the wind.

Another arrow lay ready across Dikar's bow, but he did not loose it. No use. They were too far--Marilee reached the woods, and Tomball. The woods swallowed them. They were making their way through those woods to Them--

Dikar turned to voices behind him, saw Danhall and Henfield, Johnstone and Bengreen, huddled just within the edge of the woods, pale-faced, mouths agape, eyes wide and dark. "Johnstone," Dikar snapped, banging his bow over his shoulder. "Take over as Boss. Take care of Billthomas an' Jimlane. I'm goin' down."

"You dare not," Danhill gasped. "Dikar, you dare not. The Old Ones will strike you--"

"Damn the Old Ones," Dikar snarled and was in the stream, had hands on the rope. He was lowering himself over the edge of the Drop. His legs caught around the vine-rope.

* * * *

The water battered Dikar. The water filled Dikar's mouth and his eyes and his nose, so that he could not see nor breathe nor hear anything but the roar of the waters. The water had a hundred clubs that pounded Dikar, bruised him. Suddenly the water was only a stinging cold spray on Dikar's naked skin, and he was swinging free between the wet-black face of the Drop and the roar of the stream as it fell, and he was climbing down the rope of plaited vines.

This was as it had been that other time Dikar had climbed down this rope of plaited vines, but that time it had been night and once he had gotten through that first rush of waters it had been black-dark. Bad enough it had been to climb down into dizzy dark, but now there was light, and Dikar could see how the Drop came down from nothingness above and went straight down to nothingness below.

He could look down, endlessly down the swinging frail thread of the rope, down to where the jagged points of rock waited for him if he fell, and the stream smashed itself on the rocks as Dikar would smash if he fell.

From the rocks, so far below, there reached up hands that Dikar could not see, and they pulled at him, pulled him down to the rocks, his climbing too slow for them. Dikar wanted to let go of the rope, wild the desire was in him to let go and fall, fast and faster, down to those gray painted rocks.

Dikar was sick, sick with the terror that he would let go and with the wanting to let go. Suddenly his arms and his legs were without strength to move. He clung to the rope, unmoving, knowing that in the next moment, the very next, he would no longer have even the strength to hang on. "Dikar!" His name came through the mists that swirled around him. "Go on, Dikar. Go on." Dikar looked up to the voice, and he saw that it came not from far above, as it ought, but from the rope itself, from Danhall, hanging on the rope not far above him.

Down through the seething waters at the top of the rope, Bengreen climbed, the water streaming from him! They were following Dikar down. Danhall and Bengreen were following him where he went, in spite of their fear of the Old Ones, in spite of their fear of what might await them down below the Mountain. He was their leader, and they followed him--

Strength was back in Dikar's legs and his arms and he was climbing down again, but he kept his eyes on the wall of the Drop and did not look down. And at last his feet found rock beneath him and Danhall was beside him, and Bengreen; and then Henfield dropped off the rope.

"We wouldn't let Johnstone come," Danhall said, squeezing water from his brown beard, "because you said he should be Boss. What do we do next, Dikar?"

Dikar looked across the waste of tumbled rock to where Tomball and Marilee had been swallowed by the woods. "We go after 'em an' bring 'em back," he said through tight lips, "or we don't go back ourselves. Come on."

They climbed across the stony space, slipping and falling. When they reached the woods, that seemed no different from their own woods, it was easy at first to follow the trail of those they followed, by the small growth they had trodden down, by twigs bent with their passage. Marilee and Tomball had gone carelessly, not knowing they would be followed.

The shadow of the Mountain lengthened with the fast-dropping sun, and it grew dim about the four who hunted a Boy and a Girl. The green faded out of the bushes about them, the brown out of the tree trunks. All color grayed in the dimness, and suddenly there were no marks by which the four could tell which ways Marilee and Tomball had passed.

They cast around, their keen eyes searching each depression in the mossy floor of the woods, the way each tiny leaf hung on the brush, but they could find no sign of where Tomball and Marilee had gone, no sign that they'd ever been farther than where a twig pressed into the last mark of Tomball's foot.

The four Boys from the Mountain came together again, and huddled close, and they became aware that the graying air was chill against their skin, and the forest seemed strangely hushed about them.

"I don't like it here," Henfield said, and it seemed right that he spoke low-toned, as though someone were near to overhear what he said, someone or some thing no one could see. "There's somethin' wrong about these woods. They're too--too quiet." He was yellow-haired as Dikar, his chin fuzzed with what would soon be a beard like Dikar's. "The birds are still, an' the insects, an' I've not seen or heard a rabbit or a squirrel, or anythin' livin'."

"I don't get it." Bengreen was the shortest of the four, his face sharp, his eyes black and deep as a forest pool at night. "I don't get it at all. It's like--like Tomball an' Marilee got this far an' then--an' then were not."

"The Old Ones!" Henfield's voice was thin and piercing, louder it would be a scream. "The Old Ones have taken 'em an' they'll take us. We're lost! Dikar, we're dead an' worse than dead!"

Chapter VI

: DEATH IN THE WOODS

A chill struck deep into Dikar as he heard Henfield's cry. All his life, all his life that was real to him and not a dream of Long-Ago, Dikar had believed that anyone who broke a Must-Not of the Old Ones would meet with a punishment the more awful because none knew what it was. By climbing down the Drop Marilee and Tomball had broken the most fearful of those Must-Nots.

Dikar recalled that he was the first of the Bunch to have broken that Must-Not, and that he had not been punished. "The Old Ones sleep under the rocks," he snapped, angrily because of the tremble of fear that had not yet left him. "They're not in these woods an' there is nothin' else here that could have taken Tomball an' Marilee without leavin' a sign. Stop talkin' foolishness an' use your eyes, an' you will find some sign of what took 'em, or of which way they went."

"Maybe," Danhall grunted. "Maybe you can, Dikar, seein' you're so smart."

"Maybe I can," Dikar answered. "Wait here, an' I'll try." He turned from them, moved to a big tree near which they were standing, ran up into its top as swiftly and easily as any squirrel. Thick boughs made steps for Dikar's feet, leaves rustled against his face, stroked his body, and then his head came out through the roof of the tree into a sunlight strangely ruddy.

The top of the forest stretched away from Dikar, a strange, bright green in that light, and solid seeming. About as far from him as from the clearing to the edge of the Drop, the forest ended and past its end the ground rose in a hill that was neither green nor stone--gray like any other ground Dikar remembered ever seeing, but a pale yellow that seemed to be striped.

Up through this yellow ground a wide brown stripe curved to the top of the hill, where, sharp-lined against the darkening sky, was a house not as long as the Boys' House but higher, its roof curiously shaped. Midway up the front of the house another roof stuck out, and the outer edge of this was post-propped like the roof of the eating place.

Just above this smaller roof, a row of windows flashed red as though there was fire within, but no smoke rose from the house, so Dikar knew this could not be.

Dikar's eyes came back to the leafy canopy of the woods. A low exclamation guttered in his throat. All that green stretch swayed a little with the wind, but, quarter way between him and the edge of the forest a tree swayed against the wind, and then another, just beyond, did the same.

Dikar marked the direction in which the trees moved so strangely, and dropped down to the waiting Boys. "Found 'em!" he cried. "They've taken to the treetops. They're goin' that way." Dikar threw out his arm to show.

"Come on then," Bengreen cried.

"Not in such a hurry," Dikar checked him. "They don't know we follow 'em, an' they'll be goin' slow, not sure of what is ahead. We can take time to think, an' we must, for remember Tomball has the gun an' can kill us, one by one, before we get near enough to him to bring him down with our arrows."

"What then, Dikar?"

Dikar told them the plan that had come into his head, and, as he had ordered, they spread out wide either side of the path Tomball and Marilee traveled, wide of each other because that way there was less chance of making noise to warn Tomball. Then they moved in the direction those they hunted moved, swift and soundless as when they hunted a deer downwind.

* * * *

Now that Dikar was alone he needed no longer to pretend to be unafraid. These woods were fear-filled, as Danhall had sensed, but not for the reason Danhall had named. The Old Ones did not prowl them, nor were there any other strange beings in them that could make a Boy vanish.

The dread that lay heavy here was the dread that lay over all this far land, of Them who were more cruel than any beast, of their fists and whips and guns and the fearful things they did to the people who once had lived peacefully in this land.

There was no longer an endless, rolling thunder in the sky, such as Dikar remembered from his dream of the Long-Ago, but in the sky was a dark, dark cloud, unseen but very real, that laid over all the land, over the forests and the fields and the cities, a night of the soul that had lasted long, too long.

Only on the Mountain had there been any light, this long time, any hope of a tomorrow. Dikar was thinking of his dream, as he ran naked and silent through the woods, was thinking of the Voice he had heard in his dream, the Voice that had spoken to the mothers who, with their very littlest children and the very oldest of the men, were the last ones left in the last city untaken by the hordes, the city there no longer had been any hope of saving from them.

"This is the dusk of our day," the Voice had said, "of the America we lived for, and die for. If there is to be any hope of a tomorrow, it must rest with these little children in an attempt to save whom you are about to sacrifice yourselves. If they perish, America shall have perished. If by some chance they survive, then, in some tomorrow we cannot foresee, America will live again and democracy, liberty, freedom, shall reconquer the green and pleasant fields that tonight lie devastated."

The little children of whom that Voice had spoken, all of them who survived the flight from the city, had grown now to be the Bunch on the Mountain. And now, when almost they were ready for their task of bringing that tomorrow to these once green and pleasant fields, two of them swung through the treetops to betray them to their enemies, and destroy them.

It was of this that Dikar thought as he ran through the woods. Had Tomball been only his own enemy, only one who had taken his mate from him, if Marilee had been only the mate who was false to him, Dikar would have sent Danhall and Henfield and Bengreen back to the Mountain and pursued them alone. But it was the enemies of the Bunch he hunted, the enemies of an America, love for which, though he had never known it, was part of Dikar's blood, part of his breath, part of his soul.

And so Dikar came to the edge of the forest and fell to his hands and knees and crawled a little way out into the high, yellow grasses that striped with yellow the hill beyond the forest, and lay there waiting.

Somewhere in these grasses, Dikar knew, along the front of the woods, lay the three others, their eyes on the tops of the trees, on the green brush that met the grasses, arrows fitted to their bows, as his was. For this was his plan.

When Tomball and Marilee came to the edge of the woods, and came out into the open, the nearest Boy would shoot them down at once, before they were seen, before Tomball had a chance to use his gun. That they would come into the open, Dikar did not question. Had not Tomball tried, last night, to show the flame of the fire stick to the plane? Tomball was not afraid of Them. Tomball had come down to the far land to look for Them.

If only it did not get too dark to see Tomball, and Marilee, before they came out of the woods. The sun no longer lay on the grasses here. It just touched the roof of the house, there on top of the hill, soon would leave that too.

The sun no longer lay on the grasses, here where Dikar hid, but the hot smell of the sun was in his nostrils, and the ground was still warm with it. The ground was warmer than the ground on the Mountain ever got, it was warm as the body of Marilee when Marilee lay against Dikar's body, and the scent of the grasses was like the scent of Marilee's breath.

A lump rose in Dikar's throat. He was waiting here for Marilee, waiting to send an arrow into her slim, brown body. As so many times he had waited hidden in the forest to kill a deer, he was waiting to kill Marilee.

In that very instant that her lips lay on his, burning, Marilee had been thinking how she would find Tomball, how she would tell him of the rope that hung over the edge of the Drop! With her arms about Dikar, she had planned how to help Tomball kill Jimlane and Billthomas!

If ever anyone deserved to be killed, it was Marilee!

The ache in Dikar's breast was not an ache but a terrible, tearing pain--his muscles tightened. His head lifted, his lips tight-pressed within his beard, his nostrils flaring, ears and eyes straining.

Dikar started to ease, tensed again. No, that rustle in the treetops was not made by the wind. It came nearer. Nearer. Something brown, moving, showed among the leaves. Vanished. An' arm it had been, of this Dikar was sure, though he could not be sure whether it was Marilee's or Tomball's. They had come straight to him. He it was who must kill Tomball. Who must kill Marilee.

The pain within Dikar was as if someone had plunged an arrow into his vitals, was twisting it--

Dikar saw a form, crawling out on a thick bough. It was screened by the leaves at first, then Dikar saw black hair, a thick-lipped face. Tomball! Peering out of the tree with narrowed eyes. Dikar leaped erect, his bow taut--

Whang!

A feather quivered where Tomball's eye had been. Tomball, sprawling, black-shaggy, tumbled out of the tree, thudded into the brush beneath. A scream, a Girl's scream, came out of the tree and Dikar had another arrow laid across his bow, was tautening his bowstring once more. Shadowy in the treetop he could see Marilee. Marilee's voice came out from among the leaves. "Dikar!"

Marilee was out now, where Dikar could see her plain. Erect on the bough where Tomball had been, she held to an upper bough with one hand, stretched the other out to Dikar.

She was crying his name again. Her long hair was caught back among the leaves out of which she'd come, and Dikar could see her satin body, her lovely body he had held in his arms. His eyes fastened on the flowery circlet over Marilee's left breast. He would shoot her there--

"Dikar! What are you doing, Dikar? You're not going to--" Marilee's cry was checked by the arrow that was in her side, caught by its head in her flesh. She swayed, started to fall. Dikar's shot had gone wrong!

Dikar hadn't shot at all. His arrow was still across his tautened bow! Marilee fell! She caught the tree's lowermost bough with blind hands, hung from them, red streaking her side from where the arrow was caught in it. Someone else had shot her with that arrow. One of the other Boys. Marilee's left hand dropped from the bough by which she hung. The right hand let go and she fell--

Into Dikar's arms, somehow he was under the tree in time to catch her. Her weight crashed him down into the brush, but he fell sitting, with Marilee in his arms.

"Dikar." Her lips were white, her nostrils flaring. "You killed Tomball." There was pain in her brown eyes, but they were shining. "I'm glad. He was awful. I saw him shoot Jimlane and Billthomas, an' then he turned the gun on me--said he'd shoot me if I didn't go with him. He had the gun an' Jimlane's bonarrer, an' he'd found the rope long ago. First I was going to let him--kill me--but then I went with him, hoping to get a chance to take the gun away from him an' shoot him before--before--he told Them--"

Marilee's voice, strong at first, faded away. Her head rolled sidewise to Dikar's shoulder, lay there. She lay limp in Dikar's arms, as so often she'd lain asleep. But she wasn't asleep now. She was--

"Dikar!" Danhall was standing above them. "I was too far away to hear what she was saying." Dikar hadn't heard anyone come up, but Danhall and the other two were there. "I shot her. I couldn't hear what she was sayin' to you, thought you were holdin' your arrow because you couldn't get a clear aim at her. I could, so I shot her. Can you forgive me, Dikar? Can you-?"

"Forgive you, Danhall?" The words fell like stones from Dikar's lips. "You didn't know--Sure, I forgive you for killin' Marilee."

"Killin' her!" Bengreen exclaimed. "Bunk! She's not killed. Look at the way she's bleedin'. I've killed too many deer not to know bleedin' stops when one's dead. She's alive, you nuts, but she won't be alive long if you keep on sittin' there, holdin' her like a ninny an' lettin' her bleed."

"Not dead," Dikar whispered, staring down at the redness that welled out of Marilee's side and ran down over his thighs. "She's not--"

He could think again, could move again. He lifted Marilee across his arms, laid her gently down on a bed of soft moss near the foot of the tree out of which Danhall had shot her, knelt again.

"Find me some of those leaves that stop bleedin'," he threw over his shoulder. "Quick." He saw now that the arrow had gone deep in Marilee's side, but its point had hit bone and so it had not gone in far enough to kill her, not even far enough for its barbs to be held except by a little skin. Dikar pulled the arrow out, flung it away. Blood spurted and he put his hands down on the wound, pressed.

"Lift han's up, you fella!" a new voice ordered, hoarse and terrible. "Hurry befoh you get one big lot lead in you."

Dikar's hands were red with Marilee's blood, but the bleeding had stopped and if he lifted them it would start again. He turned his head to say so, saw a great long gun pointing from out in the light, saw the black hands that held the gun, and the man against whose shoulder the hands held the gun.

The man stood straddle-legged out in the yellow field. He was dressed in dark green, and the little round things that held the green together were yellow bright in the fading light. His black face was flat-nosed and shiny, animal like. His thick, purplish lips snarled like those of a wildcat, just before it pounces on its prey.

Chapter VII

: REFUGE

The brush rustled, a little way from Dikar, where Bengreen and Danhall and Henfield had been looking for the leaves Dikar needed. "Come out you fella," the black man ordered. His big eyes, that had too much white in them, moved back and forth a little and his long gun moved back and forth. "Come out fom dere."

Dikar's heart bumped his ribs. Neither eyes nor gun were moving quite to where he was. The black man hadn't seen him! The black man was out there in the light but Dikar, bent down behind the tall brush that marked off the field and the woods, was in the deep shadow of the woods and so the man with the gun hadn't seen Dikar at all.

Arms above his head, Bengreen came out in the field, and Henfield and Danhall came out beside him. "Stop dere," the man said, and the look on his black face, gaping at them, was funny. "Wat kind fella you are?" the black gasped. "W'ere your clo'es?"

"What clothes?" Bengreen asked, grinning. "This ain't winter, is it?" Dikar looked down at his hands. They were red with Marilee's blood but she wasn't bleeding any more. If he took his hands away she would start bleeding again, and she would die.

"You one fella tink you smart, huh?" Dikar heard the black man's hoarse voice, but Dikar was remembering what he had seen men like him do to white women, that dreadful day when he had been in this far land before. Better for Marilee to die than that. "But Jubal smarter," he heard. "Jubal know you 'scape from one fella jail camp an' take all clo'es off so if you get killed nobody know wat guards you pay to let you 'scape. See? No use try fool Jubal. You tell Jubal were you come from, so Jubal get rewahd, an' Jubal make fings easier foh you."

Dikar took his hands away from the wound in Marilee's side. "A good sleep to you, Marilee," he whispered. "A good night. I'll be with you soon."

"W'ere you come from?" Jubal asked again, slow and hoarse, and there was something in his voice that made Dikar shiver. A gust of wind brought the smell of Jubal to Dikar, and that was worse than his voice.

Dikar pulled an arrow from his quiver, looked around for his bow. "If we told you,"--the grin was still in Bengreen's voice--"you would know as much as we do." Dikar remembered that his bow was out there in the field, dropped there when he jumped to catch Marilee. The arrow was no good without the bow.

"W'at you gonna know after Jubal blow you to little pieces wit' dis gun? Don't fink Jubal, no do it. T'ree more dead 'Merican make no diff'rence, Jubal kill plenty already."

"Go ahead. Blow us to pieces an' see if we care. I dare you, an' double--" Dikar didn't hear the rest of what Bengreen was saying because Dikar had slithered silent as a snake, behind the great trunk of the tree. And now he was erect, was leaping high to the tree's lowermost bough, was lying motionless along that bough while all about him was the rustle of leaves, loud and terrifying.

"W'at dat," he heard Jubal's shout. "W'at dat in de tree?" All of Dikar, inside him, pulled together, waiting for the thunder of Jubal's gun, waiting for Jubal's lead to tear through him, but he managed to make a sound through his rounded mouth, the "koooo-hooo" of an owl.

"Nothin' but an owl, Jubal," Danball laughed. "Ain't you ashamed, bein' scared by an owl?"

Dikar slid along the bough, slowly, very slowly, very carefully, and now the tree's leaves made no more sound than as if the wind were blowing through them.

"Jubal no scared," the black's voice came up to him. "Jubal not scared of not'in', but you better be big fella scared of Jubal. You tell were you come from, befoh Jubal count five or Jubal shoot. One on end, with yella hair, first. All right. One--"

Dikar could see them now, through the leaves, the three Boys from the Mountain standing in a line, their arms over their beads, brown and naked except for their little aprons, Jubal, spraddle-legged, black and huge, his eyes small now, and red, his long gun butted against his green shoulder and pointing straight at Henfield.

"Two--"

The Boys were under the tip of the tree boughs, but Jubal was farther out in the field, seven paces at least. Dikar slid further out along the swaying bough.

"Three--"

Dikar was almost to the end of the bough, and it was bending with his weight. If Jubal looked up now, he would see Dikar, couldn't help but see him.

"Four--"

Dikar, gathering his legs under him, saw cords stand out on the back of the black hand whose finger was curled around the little thing on the gun that, pulled, would shoot it off. Jubal was going to say five now, and then--

"No," Henfield screamed. "Don't shoot. Don't shoot me. I'll tell. We're from--"

Dikar leaped, the whip of the bough added to the lash of his muscles sending him out, far out over the heads of the Boys. He hurtled down, straight down on top of Jubal, pounding the black down. Thunder deafened Dikar but his hand slashed down, the arrow clenched in it, lifted and slashed down again on the heaving, screaming thing beneath him, and warm wetness spurted over Dikar's hand and that which was beneath him heaved no longer.

Dikar was on his feet, and the Boys were around him, jabbering words he could not get. Dikar saw Henfield's face, eyes still wide, mouth still agape. Dikar's hand lashed out, slapped, open-palmed, across Henfield's cheek.

"You yellow-belly," Dikar heard himself say. "You lousy yellow-belly," and then he was striding, stiff-legged, back to Marilee, was once more kneeling beside her.

Marilee lay on the green moss, terribly still and terribly white except where the blood was scarlet on her side and browning at the edges. Browning! The blood flowed no more out of Marilee's wound. She'd stopped bleeding--

But Dikar saw the pale nostrils flutter, and he breathed again. Her wound, he saw, had closed of itself. That was why she'd stopped bleeding. The wound wasn't bad, Dikar saw now. Many of the Bunch had been hurt lots worse and none had died...

"Here's your bow, Dikar," Bengreen said, bending to him, "An' Jubal's gun." Dikar looked up.

"You keep the gun," he said, "an' take the Boys back to the Mountain. Go in the tops of the trees, that way you'll leave no trail. It will be night very soon now, an' you have a good chance to get back without their bein' able to follow you."

"To follow us!" Bengreen exclaimed. "What about you? What about Marilee?"

"Marilee can't be carried through the treetops," Dikar sat back on his haunches, "without openin' her wound, an' so she will surely bleed to death on the way. If we make somethin' on which to carry her along the ground, we will make so many signs that we would lead them straight to the Mountain. So Marilee must stay here. I will stay with her, but I promise you that if they come, they will not find either of us alive. Now go, Boys. The quicker you start, the better your chances. Go."

Bengreen shook his head. "No, Dikar. We do not go without you an' Marilee. But you are right about leavin' a trail to the Mountain if we carry her, so we must stay here with you. I must stay, I should say. I have no right to speak for the others."

"You speak also for me, Bengreen," Danhall said. "I do not go back to the Bunch without you an' Dikar and Marilee."

"I speak for myself." Henfield stood straight in the forest shadows that had grown so dark that he too, seemed a shadow. "Dikar! You slapped my face. You called me a yellow-belly. Did you have a gun pointin' at you? Did you bear a voice count, 'One, two, three, four,' very slow, an' know that when it counted 'five,' you would die?"

"No, Henfield."

"Then what right did you have to slap my face an' call me a yellow-belly?"

"I suppose I had no right, Henfield. I suppose I was no fair."

"You had no right, Dikar, but you were right to call me that. I was a yellow-belly, but I am not, an' never will be again. I looked death in the face, an' I did not die, an' I never again will be afraid to die. Dikar, will you let me stay with you an' Bengreen an' Danhall an' Marilee? Because I want to. I want to very much."

Dikar lifted to his feet, put his arm around Henfield's shoulder, and smiled. "You are no yellow-belly," he said, very quietly. "But I will not let you stay, an' I will not let Bengreen or Danhall stay. The Bunch needs you three, an' you can do nothin' by stayin' here. I am still your Boss, Boys, an' I order you to go, an' it is for the good of the Bunch that I order you--" Dikar whirled to a rustle in the brush, saw that a formless shape blotched the fading yellow of the field beyond, saw that Bengreen and Danhall had their bows lifted, arrows across them.

"Don't shoot them things off at me," the shape said, its voice thin as a Girl's but higher-pitched and very tired sounding. "Not that I got much to live for, but I'm a friend, and I came to help you."

"Don't shoot, Boys," Dikar said, and moved nearer, peering. He made out that it was a woman who stood waiting for him, her dress gray and shapeless about her thin, bent frame, the skin of her face stretched tight over the bones beneath, her hands like birds' claws, her hair brown as Marilee's, but drab and lifeless. "You are white," he said. "You are not one of them." In one of her hands was something Dikar could not make out.

"No," the woman laughed, and the sound of her laugh sent a chill through Dikar. "No. I'm not one of them. My name's Martha Dawson and I was born in that house on the hill, and my father was born there, and his father before him. But who and what I am doesn't matter, and it's better for me not to know who you are. I can see that you must have escaped from one of their concentration camps, and I came down to warn you to get away quick, before the patrol comes along to change the guard here, and finds you."

"I can't go away," Dikar said. "My Marilee is hurt too bad to be taken away."

"Your who?" Martha Dawson looked in the direction Dikar had motioned. "Oh. The Girl who fell out of the tree. I heard her scream and I looked out of the window and saw you catch her." She was bending over Marilee. "She is hurt bad, isn't she? She must have been cut by a stone when she fell. Oh, the poor thing."

The woman went down on her knees, putting what she carried down on the ground. "So pretty too, and her hair's long. I never seen--Why, she has no clothes on, only this queer grass skirt. You all must have been hiding in the woods a long time. Yes, I can see that you were. You look too well fed to have been living on the scraps they give us. Your wife has lost an awful lot of blood. She is your wife, isn't she?"

"My--" Dikar checked himself. He'd remembered what "wife" meant. It was the same as mate. "Yes. She is my wife."

"I thought so when you called her 'my Marilee.' Well, don't you worry about her. I saw the way you fought the soldier and I thought one of you might be hurt, so I brought some stuff along. I'll just put a plaster on this cut to hold it together, and then you can carry her up to the house and I'll fix her up right."

"Carry her-!" The way Martha Dawson's hands were working at Marilee's side, Dikar knew that she could heal her, but--"But won't They find her there? Won't that get you into trouble with Them?"

"I've had trouble enough. A little more won't hurt. Besides, I don't think They'll find her, or you neither, unless they search a lot harder than they have already--Oh!" She rocked back on her heels, her eyes widening. "But they will. They'll find that soldier dead in the field and they'll know I couldn't have killed him but they'll be sure I know who did it."

"We can hide Jubal in the woods."

She shook her head.

"No. That won't do. They'll see the blood all around here, and they'll find him, never fear, them blacks is like Indians. Oh goodness. I don't know what to do."

"I do," Dikar exclaimed. "Look, Martha Dawson. One of us wanted to give us away to them an' we had to kill him." By the calm way the woman had acted when she saw how bad hurt Marilee was he knew he could tell her that without her getting excited. "We'll fix things so it will look like he shot Jubal with an arrow, an' that Jubal killed him with his gun before he died."

"Good!" The woman nodded. "That will do it. But you better carry your wife up the hill while your friends are fixing things. We'll go up by the road, the way come down, so as not to leave more tracks than can be helped."

* * * *

Dikar told the others what to do and then be picked Marilee up in his arms, and went to the road, Martha Dawson beside him, went up the road toward where the house was a pale glimmer in the deep dusk that now had come down over the hill and the fields. just as they reached the house, Dikar heard a shot, and he knew that Tomball had no face any longer, knew that Bengreen was laying the long gun back in Jubal's dead hands, and that Danhall and Henfield were wiping out as much as they could of the marks that would show there had been more there than just Jubal and Tomball.

Martha Dawson opened a door for Dikar, and he went into darkness that smelled a little like the eating place on the Mountain. The door closed behind him, and he felt a hand on his arm.

"Bring her upstairs," the woman said. "This way."

Dikar didn't know what she meant, but he went the way her hand guided him. His toes struck wood, and he half stumbled. "Come on," the woman said, tugging at his arm.

"But there's somethin' in the way here. I can't go any further."

"Something? Oh dear Lord! Don't you know what stairs are?"

"Stairs?"

"Wait. I'll strike a match." Dikar stood stock-still, listening to the sound of her going away from him. He didn't like this place. He was afraid of it. It was too closed in. He could hardly breathe. The woman was coming back, and there was a strange, scratching sound and then there was a little flame growing on the end of a tiny piece of wood in her hand, and her other hand was cupped over it, and she was looking at Dikar as if she'd never seen a Boy before.

"Don't know what stairs are," she said again. "Well, I never-! Look. There they are in front of you." Dikar looked and he saw a kind of hill built out of wood. "Hurry and take her up, before someone comes."

Dikar climbed up what Martha Dawson called stairs, and came to a level place, and they went along the level place, and came to more stairs that he climbed. At the top of these stairs they came into a big room whose roof was high in the middle but slanted down low towards the sides, so that there were hardly any walls at all except in one place where the wall was made higher to make space for a little window.

Dikar stood still, Marilee nestled in his arms, and looked around him. By the light of another match Martha Dawson held he saw that the room was full of tables and little benches, and boxes, and a lot of things Dikar had never seen before, all old-looking and dirty and piled every which way on top of one another, right up to the roof. So full was the room that Dikar couldn't see where he was to put Marilee.

"Wait," the woman said and went past Dikar to a box that stood on end in the middle of the pile's front, a black box almost as big as she was. She knocked on this in a funny way.

The box moved--not the box but the side that was all Dikar could see of it. The side swung out on one up-and-down edge, like a door, and inside the box was a tall man with a thin white face and gray hair. The man was stooped over, and his eyes, deep-sunk in his face, glittered in the matchlight like the eyes of animals glitter in the night-blackened woods.

The man saw Dikar. His lips pulled away from his teeth and his hand came up, and in his hand was a little gun that aimed right at Dikar.

Chapter VIII

: SEARCH

"It's all right, John," Martha Dawson said. "They're all right. They escaped from a concentration camp, and this young man's wife is bad hurt and I've promised to hide her here with you."

The man John peered past Martha Dawson, looking more closely at Dikar. "From a camp?" His voice was deep, much deeper than Dikar thought could come from so thin a chest, and it was a very tired voice. The woman moved so that the match light from inside her cupped hand fell on Dikar. "Aye, I see now. I could only see a black shape in the dark, and I thought that I had been betrayed, and that they had forced you to show them where I was."

"Never!" Martha Dawson cried out, and then. "Who would betray you, John? Who would tell them you are here?"

John looked at her, and Dikar saw that there were deep lines in his face, lines of pain, and that his lips were gray. "I've just had bad news, Martha. They raided zee-seven this morning, so suddenly there was no chance to blow it up, and they took Ed Stone alive. But we're keeping our friends standing. Bring her in here, my friend," he said to Dikar, moving back into his box. "Bring her in."

John's voice came out of blackness inside the box, but something in that voice told Dikar he need not be afraid of him, nor of anything in the blackness, and he went into the box carrying Marilee. Martha Dawson's match went out, and Dikar stopped short, the blackness thumbing his eyes.

Martha Dawson pushed against Dikar's back, and he got moving again, and the other side of the box wasn't there, as he'd expected, but he went right on into a feel of bigger space. He heard sound of door-closing behind him, felt a hand on his arm stopping him, and then there was light.

The light came from a shining thing that hung by a wire over Dikar's head, and Dikar saw that he'd gone right through the box into a room hidden behind the pile.

"Lay her there," John said, pointing to a bed that stood against one side of the room. "It's clean and comfortable, I assure you."

Dikar put Marilee down on the bed, and Martha Dawson was beside the bed. Her hand took hold of Marilee's wrist and she seemed to be listening for something, and then she smiled and said, "Her pulse is strong." She put her hand on Marilee's forehead, and said, "She has no fever at all."

Dikar didn't know what the words meant, but he knew that Martha Dawson meant that Marilee would be all right, and breath hissed from between his teeth. "Martha," John said. "You'd better go down and make some hot water to wash her with, and bring it up with the iodine and bandages. You ought to have light on down there anyway, or our sweet guardian might start wondering what you're up to."

Martha (the man called her that, Dikar noticed, instead of the longer Martha Dawson) looked queerly at John. "Our guardian won't notice anything," she said. "He's dead. This young man killed him."

"Ah," John nodded. "That means trouble, of course. Well, we can only hope and pray as we've done all along. Go on, my dear."

He moved, and there was darkness again. Dikar heard the boxdoor open and shut. The light came back, and Dikar was peering around the room, so much in it strange to him.

There was the bed on which Marilee lay and a little table in the middle of the room, and a little bench with a back. The wall of the room in which was the door was covered with things Dikar vaguely recalled were named "books." The roof slanted down to the wall opposite this, and this was low except for a narrow space where it was built higher to make space for a window, but the window was covered over with a gay-colored, thick rug so that Dikar couldn't see them.

But it was at the fourth wall at which Dikar stared longest. A narrow table along the full width of this. Under the table were a lot of small black boxes, and on top of it was a jumble of wires and black boards standing up and lying down, and round things marked with little white lines, and a lot of shining things like what hung from the ceiling and made light in the room. In the middle of the wall above the table was something that Dikar recognized.

It was from a thing like it that the Voice in Dikar's dream had come, the Voice that had spoken about the dusk that had come to America, and the tomorrow that might never be. Dikar remembered the name of this thing, and said it aloud.

"A radio," he said.

"Yes," John said. "And now you know that you're in one of the stations of the Secret Net." His hands went wide. "The oldest of them, my friend. Five years I've operated it from here, five long years since I escaped from a concentration camp and in all the five years I have not seen the sun. In those five years I have had from that loud speaker"--he pointed to the thing on the wall that Dikar had recognized--"news of the unearthing of hundreds of our stations, news of the death of hundreds of our co-workers. Time and time again that speaker has brought me word that we were almost ready to rise against the invaders, and time and time again it has brought me word that they had found our leaders and hung them, and that all the work was to be done over again.

"Yes," John said. "This is the oldest of the stations, now that at last Ed Stone's gone, and I am the luckiest of the agents of the Secret Net, but tonight, my friend, I somehow have a feeling that my luck has run out. Perhaps that is only because I am tired and hungry, for Martha dares not bring me food until dark. They do not, I know, suspect that I am here, but they know I am alive, somewhere, and always they keep a sentry, out there in the woods, watching my wife and waiting for me to contact her." He smiled, and his smile was bitter. "That is why they have permitted her so long to live on here, unmolested. But I must hear your story. I thought that the prison camps were now too well guarded for anyone to escape from them. How did you and your wife manage it? What camp do you come from?"

Dikar shook his head. "We come from no camp. I don't even know what you mean by that word, camp."

"You--you don't-! You're American, aren't you?"

"Yes," Dikar said. "We are American." He knew, without just knowing how, that he could talk to this man freely and that it was important that he talk to him. "We come from the Mountain, off there beyond those woods."

And then Dikar went on to tell John about the Bunch, and about how they came to live on the Mountain, and about their life there.

John listened without interrupting, except to ask a low-toned question or two, when Dikar stopped, and soon after Dikar started talking, Martha came in and listened too, while she tended Marilee. Dikar told about his dream, and how he had come down into this far land and seen what went on here, and how he had gone back to the Mountain.

"I knew then that somehow, sometime, I must lead the Bunch down off the Mountain and try to take back this land for America," he came near the end of his story. "But I could not think how we few could do anything against the black and yellow men when you who are so many could do nothin' against them. Perhaps you can tell me, John?"

"Perhaps I can," John said, his eyes shining. "I must think. But you did come down again to us, Dikar." (Dikar had told them his name.) "And without any plans. Why did you do that?"

Dikar told him about Tomball, and what Tomball had done, and how Tomball died.

"There you are," John turned to Martha. "There's the innate depravity of human nature for you. Here are these youngsters who were isolated from the world when the oldest of them was only eight, who grew up together in such an ideal communion as man has not known since Eden, and yet a renegade turns up among them who would sacrifice them all because his personal ambitions were thwarted. Doesn't that make you despair, my dear?"

"No!" Martha answered, her hands still busy with Marilee. "No, John. Because if Dikar's story has in it one black-souled renegade, it also has in it forty who have worked for one another and lived for one another, sweetly and unselfishly, from childhood to young man--and womanhood. Because it has in it courage and loyalty and self-sacrifice and love that was not taught out of books. Despair, John? No. Dikar's story gives me new hope, new courage."

John moved to Martha, where she knelt by Marilee's bedside, and laid his hand on her head. "I'm wrong, Martha. You are wiser than I. Far wiser--" Just then Marilee stirred, and her eyes opened.

"Dikar," she whispered. Then, fright in her voice: "Dikar!"

Dikar leaped to her. "It's all right, Marilee. Everything is all right. We've found fr--"

"Hush," John broke in. "Quiet. Listen." At once the room was throbbing with silence.

Into that silence, well-muffled, came the sound of men's voices, shouts. "The patrol's here," John said low-voiced. "They're looking for the sentry you killed. You'd better get downstairs quick, Martha. They might come to ask you about him."

Martha was on her feet, her face set, her hands trembling. John's arm went around her, and he was holding her close to him. He was saying something Dikar could not quite make out, and then they were apart and Martha was going toward the door, straight, trembling no longer. The light went out, and the door opened and closed.

"Let's take a look outside," Dikar heard John say, and he heard him moving in the darkness. Then there was pale light in the darkness, starlight breaking the blackness of a wall, John's hand blotching it as it held aside that which hung over the window.

Dikar darted across the floor and was pressed against John, looking out.

Just below was the smaller roof Dikar had seen from the woods, and below that, yellow light lay on the ground. Down at the bottom of the hill, bright lights danced in the yellow grass and on the brush and trees at the edge of the woods. Black against these lights were the forms of men, and it was from these men that the shouting came.

"Look," John whispered, "there in the wheat." Dikar saw the black shape of his finder pointing, and looked in the direction the finger pointed.

Where the finger pointed, in the middle of the field, was one man who did not move. The arm held a light, and the light was on his face, and Dikar could see that the face was round and yellow. The mouth of that face was a straight, thin line and the eyes were slanted slits in the yellow skin, and there was a look on the face that made Dikar afraid.

"That's Captain Li Logo," John said. "He's provost for this district. He's shrewd as a fox and cruel as a tiger. It's hard luck that he had to come along with the patrol, on this night of all nights."

Dikar felt Marilee press against him from behind. "Go back to bed, sweet," he said. "You'll hurt yourself more."

"I'm all right, Dikar," Marilee whispered. "I feel fine. And I want to see too."

A louder shout came through the window. "They found the body," John said quietly but, pressed against him, Dikar could feel that now he was trembling.

The lights moved together, clustering at one place just at the edge of the woods. Captain Logo went down to where the lights clustered, and the babble of shouts from there stopped, and all Dikar could hear was a single high-pitched voice.

"I'll open the window," John said, "if you'll let me get at it." Dikar and Marilee moved back a little.

"Are you sure you're feelin' all right?" Dikar whispered under cover of a scraping noise in front of them.

"Sure. The woman gave me something to drink, before I quite woke up, and it's made me all warm inside, and strong again."

Cold wind came in on them, and the sounds from outside were louder, the sound of that single high-pitched voice, but Dikar could not understand what it said. Then there was another shout, hoarse like Jubal's, and a light showed within the edge of the woods, and Captain Logo went in there.

"They've found Tomball," Dikar said. "We'll soon know if we've fooled them."

Logo's high voice stopped the shouting again. The other shapes were separating. They were running back and forth in what John had called wheat, their lights shining on the yellow grass, and on their black faces. They were all dressed in green, like Jubal, and had queer round things on their heads, and they all had long guns like Jubal's.

"There are seven of them," Marilee said. "I counted."

One of the lights stopped, suddenly, and the one that carried it bent low, and straightened again, and as a shout came from him Dikar saw what the light shone on.

"Jeeze!" he grunted. "It's my bow. I forgot all about it. There was one by Tomball, so now they know there was at least one more of us."

Captain Logo came to the black who had found Dikar's bow, and he looked at it, and then he put his band to his mouth, and there was shrill sound from him. The blacks all came running to him, and clustered about him a minute, and then they were all running up the hill toward the house, their long guns in their hands, slanted across the front of them, their lights out.

"That's torn it," John said, low-toned. "They're coming to search the house, and they're certain to find this hideout. My premonition was right. My luck has run out. Well," he said, pushing back from the window. "There's only one thing left to do."

"What?" Dikar asked.

"To let them get inside," came the answer in John's tired voice, "and then push a button on this radio table, a button that will blow the house and everyone in it to pieces. If you kids are afraid to die, you can get out by this window and surrender, but I wouldn't advise it. No," he sighed. "I would not advise you to surrender to them."

"Wait," Dikar said. "Maybe--" He was still looking out and down. They had reached the house, and had stopped in front of it, and Li Logo was saying something to the black men he bossed, was waving his arms around. "Maybe something will happen to save us yet. Maybe they'll go away without searching the house."

"Not Logo," John answered. "Not when he's on the scent of something. But I'll wait as long as I dare."

Down below, the black men were separating. One moved a little away from the house and stood in the field, his gun in his two hands, looking watchfully around him. Two went one way, one another, and disappeared around the corners of the house.

"They're going to watch," Marilee whispered, "on all sides to see that nobody gets away."

An owl hooted, somewhere in the dark. The three blacks left went with Logo under the little roof that stuck out from the front of the house, and there was the sound of knocking from down there. The sound of knocking was in the room! Dikar whirled around.

"It's all right," John said. "I've just turned on the speaker system--something that lets me hear everything that happens downstairs--" He checked as another voice came into the room. It was Martha's voice.

"What shall I do, John?" she asked, very quietly.

"Let them in, dear, as we always planned," John answered her, just as quietly. "And--Martha. I'll meet you--on the Other Side."

"On the Other Side, John dear," Martha's voice came through the knocking.

There was the sound of footsteps going across the floor. There was a rattle, and the sound of knocking stopped, and Dikar heard a door open.

"Good evening, Missee Dawson," he heard Captain Logo's voice, very gentle, very smooth. "So sorry I must bother you, but I wish to come in with my men. You have no objections, of course."

"Of course I have objections, but they won't do me any good, will they?"

"Sorry, no. So very sorry." Feet trampled, many feet. Then, "Well, Missee Dawson. Where is he?"

"'He'? I don't understand."

"You understand quite well. One of my men was murdered, down there in your field, some time today. He got one of the assassins, but there was another. That other is your husband, come home at last. I want him."

"Go ahead and look for him, if you think he's here. Search the house."

"I do not wish to bother. You will call him to surrender."

"I will not."

"I think you will, Missee Dawson," and then there was a scream in Dikar's ears, a scream loud and shrill and very dreadful. "So sorry," Captain Logo hissed. "So very sorry."

Chapter IX

: TOMORROW WILL COME

Dikar heard that from the sill of the window on which he was crouched Marilee's hand was pulling John's hand away from the button on the radio table. "Shut the talkin' thing off." Dikar heard her whisper, as he'd told her to, and while she was telling John the rest of what Dikar had told her to, Dikar dropped to the little roof below. He crouched out there, looking down to where, quite suddenly, quite silently, the black who watched the front of the house had crumpled into the wheat.

"Hooo-" the hoot of an owl came from his lips, and "Hoooo-" came an answer from near the still, black heap in the wheat. What little sound Dikar made jumping from the roof to the ground was covered by Martha's screams inside the house. The yellow light from the house's windows glimmered on the naked brown skin of Henfield, lifting up out of the wheat to meet Dikar.

"There were four outside," Dikar whispered.

"We got 'em all," the answer came. "I took two an' Bengreen an' Danhall each took one." Two other shadowy forms rose out of the wheat beside them. "What next, Dikar?"

Dikar hooted twice, then whispered his plan. "Give me your bonarrer, Danhall," he finished. "I'm a better shot than you." He took them, turned to the open door of the house, where Martha's screams had stopped.

The door was wide and Dikar could see everybody in the room inside. One of the blacks had hold of Martha. The top part of her clothes were torn and a knife in Li Logo's hand was red-tipped, and now Martha's flesh was bleeding, but Martha and Logo and the blacks were looking at the stairs that came down out of the roof of the room, at the gray-haired man who stood halfway down the stairs, hands behind his back, tall and straight and proud.

One of the blacks held Martha and the other two pointed their long guns at John, but it was Logo who spoke to John, what he said coming clear and distinct to Dikar. "Ah, John Dawson," Captain Logo said in that soft, thin voice of his. "I thought your wife's screams would bring you out of your hole."

Once more Dikar hooted, and in the same instant he loosed the arrow, and the twang of his bow was joined by the twang of two other bows in his ears. Inside the house the three blacks crumpled to the floor, an arrow in each of their backs, and John's hand came out from behind his back and the little gun in it flashed fire, and Captain Li Logo was down on top of one of his blacks, but his head was lifted, his eyes looking hate at John.

"So sorry," John Dawson said. "So very sorry, Captain Li Logo," and his little gun flashed fire again, and Li Logo's head fell down, and he was as dead as the men he had bossed for the last time.

* * * *

The cool, green-smelling dark of the woods closed around the five from the Mountain, and around John Dawson and Martha. The Bunch would have wondered, could they have seen, what strange, heavy loads they were that the Boys and John carried, and they would have wondered at the light without fire that came to life in the hand of Marilee as she followed behind Martha and the men, smoothing out such signs of their passage through the woods as she could.

"Eight rifles, nine revolvers, and all the stuff necessary to rebuild my wireless," John chuckled. "Quite a beginning for what we'll need to bring tomorrow to America, as you put it. But you did a good job with your bows and arrows, you four."

The pallid, gaunt man seemed now to have found a new vitality; he walked with the step of a young man, and the memory of horror no longer lived in his eyes.

"We did only our best," Dikar muttered, looking back uneasily. "Martha said their blacks are good trackers. Is that right, John?"

Thunder blotted out the start of John Dawson's answer, a great clap of thunder from where they'd just come, and back there the sky was lit with red light. And then the sky was black again, and the thunder had ended, and John was chuckling.

"Yes. Dikar," he said. "Their blacks are good trackers, but I doubt very much that they will be tracking us. Now you know why I had you carry all the corpses into the house. It was already mined, as you know, and I set a time-fuse before we left, and all that anyone will ever find back there will be a big, charred hole in the ground and a mass of fragments too small to be identified. It isn't the first station of the Secret Net that has been blown up during a raid, and not the first in which everyone, prisoners and raiders, have perished. That is what they will think happened there, and they will not bother to look for Martha and me, nor will they ever know you and your friends were there."

"Ah," Dikar said, and felt eased. There was yet a long way to go to the Mountain, and there was still all these people and all these things to be gotten to the top of the Drop, and the load on his shoulders was heavy, but when he thought of what they would do with the load, of all the plans John and he would make, the load and his heart were light as the feathers of a bird.

* * * *

The sun struck brightness through Dikar's eyelids and woke him, and though the night had held very little sleep, he was instantly awake. He flung out his arm to waken Marilee found nothingness--remembered that he had given his place in the bed in his little house to Martha Dawson, was back again, for this night, in the Boys' House.

Dikar leaped from his cot, and all around him the flashing brown bodies of the Boys of the Bunch leaped from theirs, and there were shouts of welcome to him, but Dikar ran out of the house and through the woods toward his little house, and Marilee. He went quietly when he neared the little house, and stood in the doorway peering in, and then his heart bumped his ribs as he saw that only Martha was inside on the bed.

"Where's Marilee?" Dikar demanded. "Where's my Marilee?"

Martha smiled at him. "Come in," she said. "Come in, son, I want to give you a little piece of advice."

Dikar went in, wondering, and squatted on the floor by the bed. Martha's fleshless hand reached out and took his, and she said, very softly, "Listen son. Don't bother your Marilee mornings. And be very gentle with her, very tender."

"I am," he said. "I try always to be."

"I know," Martha answered. "But try harder now. Don't mind it if she is irritable with you, and unreasonable, and angry over trifles."

"What do you mean?" Dikar cried. "What are you talkin' about?"

He had drawn taut now, staring at her and fear had come suddenly into his eyes.

"Go ask her," Martha said. "She is the one to tell you what I mean, though I had to tell her, myself, this morning. You children," she said, and there was a wetness in her eyes. "You precious infants. Go, Dikar, I hear her outside."

Dikar rose and he went out again, and Marilee was coming toward him out of the bushes, and her face was greenish as it had been the morning before, but her eyes were shining. "Dikar!" she cried, lifting her arms wide to him, and Dikar ran to her. "Oh, Dikar. I have something to tell you."

And then Dikar was holding Marilee close, close to him, and she was whispering something in his ears, and his heart leaped within him and in his veins his blood ran laughing and glad as the streams that laugh down the Mountain.

But after awhile Dikar sobered, and his face was grave, his voice solemn. "Now indeed, Marilee," Dikar said, "I must work hard for the day when I shall lead the Bunch down from the Mountain to an America retaken for freedom and liberty. For you an' I, Marilee, were the children of a dark yesterday, but ours must be the child of a bright an' shinin' tomorrow."

THE END

Golden Age of Science Fiction Vol VIII
Various
Halcyon Press Ltd. (2010)