The Ant And The Eye

by Chad Oliver

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An A\NN/A Preservation Edition.
Notes

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Robert Quinton could feel it coming.

He opened his eyes, yawned, and tried not to look at the multiple color tones that rioted over the walls of the sleep sphere. He let the fresher work him over briefly and tried to pretend that this was just a day like any other day. He selected a predominantly blue-toned tunic, which was downright hypocrisy, and checked to make sure all the viewers were off. Then he secretively lit a cigarette.

“Getting to be a regular sot,” he observed.

It was curious how the local customs got under your hide. The Merans on Procyon III took their stimulants via the smoking route, with a fair-sized cigarette being about the equivalent of a straight shot of high-powered Scotch. He had to be cautious about his smoking. By now, he actually did feel like he was sneaking a quick one whenever he fired up for a smoke.

Quinton finished the cigarette, carefully destroyed the butt in a disposer, and walked out of the sleep sphere into the open air. It was morning on Meran, and the primary sun was radiating a cheerful greenish-yellow. Cool, fresh breezes whispered up from the valley floor, and the world smelled like flowers. Quinton took a tube to a Five Transfer, where Ncarl was waiting for him.

“Blue harmony,” greeted Ncarl, smiling. He was dressed in a gray tunic, indicating that he was in rather mediocre spirits.

“Blue harmony,” Robert Quinton returned the greeting, quite as naturally as he would have said “good morning” on Earth.

“An odd time for a message, I believe,” Ncarl said courteously. “I hope nothing is clashing.”

“That makes two of us,” Quinton agreed, settling himself in the tube for Communications.

Ncarl shook his head, somewhat self-consciously. It was a trick he had picked up from Quinton. “Black is in the air,” he said.

“It may just be a routine message,” Quinton suggested, knowing full well that it wasn’t.

“You’re a liar,” Ncarl said.

“Isn’t everybody?” asked Quinton.

The tube hummed to a halt. Quinton tried to ignore the cold knot of worry that chewed in his stomach, and followed his friend into the hum of Communications.

Quinton kept his mouth thoroughly shut. Even now, he did not trust himself to attempt casual contacts with Merans he did not know. The system was too intricate; he let Ncarl guide him through the color maze to the Contact Booth. Speaking a bit too rapidly to enable Quinton to follow his words, he checked with the booth operator, a dour-looking individual dressed almost entirely in black. Not for the first time, Quinton was grateful that he had Ncarl around. In making relatively early connections with diverse cultures, you saved a lot of time by having a more-or-less objective informer on hand—in this case a man who corresponded to the Meranian version of a fellow anthropologist.

“All harmony,” Ncarl said finally, as the black-clad operator left. “He’s got it all set up for you.”

“Thanks, Ncarl. I’ll check with you as soon as I find out what the deal is.”

Robert Quinton stepped into the booth and closed the door behind him. He sat down in the operator’s chair and closed the contact switch. For a long moment, there was nothing. Quinton sat there, a tall, rather thin man, beginning to gray at the temples, with his usual quiet smile absent from his face. He was outwardly calm, but he wasn’t kidding himself. The boys wouldn’t call him off schedule just to pass the time of day. Of course, they might just be after information…

A bell dinged with its customary abruptness and the communicator rattled briefly. Quinton read the message: THIS IS BAC XII. IDENTIFY.

He jabbed the keys in return. QUINTON BAC UN. PROCYON III. XX5L. WHAT’S COOKING, DAN?

Again, a moment of silence. Then: UN BAC IMPERATIVE OFFICIAL. RETURN AT ONCE VIA BAC XII PICKUP POINT SIX UNIT 12.7. REPLACEMENT CUMMINGS. REPEAT IMPERATIVE. END OFFICIAL. THE JIG IS UP DARLING. MY HUSBAND KNOWS ALL.

Quinton grinned and tapped out his acknowledgment of the orders. Dan had a way of taking the bite out of unpleasant situations—but the situation remained. He opened the contact switch again and took a deep breath. Back to Earth again, after less than a year. What could have gone wrong? He didn’t fool himself—no man was utterly indispensable in the UNBAC setup. If they had to yank him home in a hurry, that meant that things were in the stage where shades of ability and slight favorable factors were considered vital. And that meant—

He got slowly to his feet. The old uncertainty flooded him with doubt, but it didn’t show on his face. He kept his thoughts to himself and left the booth. Ncarl was waiting for him and guided him out of Communications back to the tube.

“I’ve got to go home, Ncarl,” he answered his friend’s unspoken question. “They’re sending a replacement—name is Lloyd Cummings, a good man—and I don’t know when I’ll get back.”

The hum of the tube filled the silence.

“When?” Ncarl asked finally.

“Tonight. I’d appreciate it if you’d come along to the pickup and let me introduce you to Cummings. This doesn’t mean the end of our work, of course—but I regret the delay.” “No. But I will miss you, Bob.” “Yeah. I know.”

The two men parted at the Five Transfer. Ncarl walked off through the green forest, and Robert Quinton went back to his Meranian home to pack his gear. It would be good to be with Lynn and Baby again—a man needed his family. And Earth, old Earth, for all his acid comments, was still his planet—and the strangest of them all.

But—What had gone wrong?

It was soft night on Meran, and sad as only the hush of night can be. The warm wind played in the summer grasses and the crystal stars looked down. There was something infinitely poignant about the night. It reminded a man of all the things that he had not done, all the loves he had never known. Sometimes, Quinton felt pretty sharp during the day—but the night whittled him down to size again.

“I hear her,” said Ncarl.

Quinton looked up, although he knew that he could not possibly see the great cruiser against the stars. He could hear her, though; or, more properly, he could feel her. From far out in space, she was only a rumbling vibration, a muted murmur. Invisible, she yet dominated the land—massive, poised.

The two men watched, and shortly a tiny streak of flame arched through the night sky and hissed out of the heavens above them. The jet flames winked out and a small spaceboat hummed in on her copter blades, landing with scarcely a jar in the open field in front of them. The entry port hissed open and warm golden light spilled out of the ship. Two men stepped down, and Quinton and Ncarl went to meet them.

“Good to see you, Bob,” greeted Lloyd Cummings, the UNBAC man. And then, switching easily to Meranian: “You must be Ncarl; I have looked forward with great harmony to meeting you.”

Quinton smiled, seeing that Cummings knew his stuff as usual. Cummings introduced him to Engerrand from the spaceboat, and that was that. Quinton had left complete notes and advice in his sphere, and Cummings was fully competent to go on from there. Quinton didn’t waste his time asking questions—Cummings wouldn’t know the answers, of course. He shook hands all around and followed Engerrand into the spaceboat.

Looking back, he could see Ncarl and Cummings walking off together under the stars. The soft Meranian night touched his face. It seemed to know that he was leaving, that he would not be back. It was trying to say good-by.

If it were important enough to call him home, it would definitely not be a case of elementary-my-dear-Watson and back to Meran again.

This was for keeps.

The entry port hissed shut behind him. Robert Quinton sank into a seat and lit a cigarette. The spaceboat lifted on her copter blades for what seemed to be a long time, and then the jets erupted with a slamming roar that dwindled slowly down into a muted rumble.

“It won’t be long now,” Engerrand said. “I’ll bet you hate to leave.”

Quinton smiled. “No,” he said. “It won’t be long now.”

Twenty-three days later, Robert Quinton by-passed the sprawling, wheeling Space City by switching over at Lunaport, and an UNBAC shuttle landed him at the division headquarters of the United Nations in New York.

He had a quick look at New York before entering the Shaft, and the New York of 2034 was the same town it had always been. It was reassuring, somehow, to know that Little Old New York was still there. The shining copters lazed along in six-level traffic under the bright afternoon sun and a transcontinental rocket flashed by high overhead. The women’s skirts were a trifle longer this year, with a faint filmy area at the knees—quite daring, really. The air was fairly clean with the piped-in solar energy, but he could see traces of New York “fog” hanging over the city. Several large freight copters were sluggishly lumbering along the lower levels, headed toward the coastal sub bases. The colorful old art vendors, with their natural-abstraction projectors, were everywhere.

New York hadn’t changed a bit.

At the Shaft, Quinton energized his credentials and went straight up to the Fifteenth Level, detouring around the showy administrative and public areas. His code signal admitted him directly into Lorraine’s private office, which was situated in an inconspicuous part of the Shaft that nobody paid much attention to. The office itself was on the prosaic side, except for the man sitting in it.

“Hi, Boss,” Quinton said, extending his hand—three weeks and two days after receiving the UNBAC imperative on Procyon III, eleven light-years from the Earth.

“What kept you?” grinned the Boss, shaking hands.

“Lovely intergalactic spy, as per usual,” Quinton said. “Good to see you, Mart.” He surveyed the Boss. A bit more gray at the temples, perhaps, but otherwise Martin Lorraine looked about the same—which was to say that he looked like the tri-di conception of a handsome scientist, which in turn was one good reason why he fronted UNBAC. Another good one was that he knew his stuff six ways from Sunday.

“Sit down,” said Mart, “and I’ll try to fill you in. I guess you’re wondering what the score is.”

Quinton smiled. “You might say that, yes,” he said. “What’s up—is the world coming to an end?”

Martin Lorraine looked him right in the eye. “Something like that,” he said, and didn’t smile.

Quinton sat down. He took his time, lit a cigarette, and blew a neat smoke ring at nothing in particular. He didn’t say anything.

“I’ll give you a quick outline,” the Boss said, leaning forward, his hair studiously awry as though to cover up his indecent good looks. “We’ll smuggle you out to New Mexico to take over pronto, if the brass doesn’t spot you first. There won’t be time to make a report on the Meranian stuff, but I’ll get Rog to fake something for the front office to keep the Wizards of Finance happy.”

Robert Quinton waited silently. He was an outwardly slow man, and had often been called a lazy man due to his habit of doing nothing when there was nothing to do. He had heard the end of the world announced before—but not by Mart. He thought of his child.

“No Judgment Day junk, of course,” the Boss said, reading his thoughts “No end in any sense if we can catch it in time. But we’re stumped, Bob—it’s getting away from us.”

“Facts,” suggested Robert Quinton.

“You live with ’em a while, then. One year ago, the computer survival probability curve took a nose dive. It’s still going down.”

A little man with an ice hammer began to beat on Quinton’s stomach with monotonous precision. “Figures?” he asked—outwardly calm. “Point ten,” Lorraine said.

Robert Quinton didn’t move. He was stunned, literally. Point ten. That meant that the odds were nine to one against the survival of civilization as he knew it. And computers didn’t make mistakes.

“Time?”

“Hard to say. Thirty, forty years, maybe.”

On the face of it, to the untrained eye, that didn’t look so bad; forty years was a long time. It was like worrying about another Ice Age. But the catch was that with every second the odds got worse. When things got that critical, it was act fast—or not at all.

“Any leads?”

“Precious few. We can’t find—”

The viewer buzzed and lit up, and broad brass-encrusted shoulders with a head on them came into view. Martin Lorraine smiled politely as though he hadn’t a care in the world, promised that he’d check on the ore constants the very second that he saw Robert Quinton, and switched off after a few concluding pleasantries.

Neither man paid the slightest attention to the interruption.

“Nobody knows?” Quinton asked.

“Outside of Little UNBAC, no. The stock-market is rising, the papers are full of rhapsodic editorials, the Space City weightless games came out as expected. The economy’s sound, most everybody is happy within human limits, and there are no ominous clouds on the horizon. There isn’t even a horizon. In short, this isn’t a crisis period. No one is viewing with alarm. Everything is just ginger-peachy.”

“Like the guy shooting marbles in that nice sunny place below the reservoir,” Quinton offered after a brief pause. “Having a fine time, but he unfortunately isn’t on to the fact that someone has opened the dam a short distance up the valley.”

“Exactly. Someone—or something.”

There was a long silence in the little office room. It was much too still. Quinton could hear his watch ticking, and he didn’t like the sound.

“I’ll be going, Mart.”

“Catch a copter on the roof. The transcon for New Mexico will be waiting at the port, and I’ve already notified Lynn and your daughter that you’re coming. I’ll be down as soon as I get through another round of bigwig conferences to get money for you guys.” He paused. “I don’t have to tell you to watch your step.”

“No. You don’t have to tell me.”

“Take care of yourself, Bob—and give Lynn a kiss for the Boss.”

“See you shortly, Mart. Maybe we’ll both get back to Meran one of these years.”

He left Lorraine’s office. No one paid any attention to him, save for a casual nod here and there; everyone was busy with Big Problems. He caught the lift for the roof. Maybe we’ll both get back, his voice echoed in his mind as he smiled vacantly at the lift’s other passenger. And another echo laughed at him: And maybe we won’t.

When Robert Quinton stepped off the transcon at New Mexico Station, Lynn and Baby were waiting for him in the desert sunshine. He walked toward them, heart pounding, the old thrill racing like electricity through his veins.

He never remembered afterward what they did or what they said in those first magic moments together after their periodic separations. There were only impressions, confused and fleeting, and the smell of the sun and the sky. Lynn was incomparably beautiful because he loved her, and Baby was ten years old and beginning to look like her mother.

“We’ve been lonely, Bob—”

“Daddy, Daddy, did you bring me a surprise—”

“Getting old, gray hairs, supper’s waiting—”

Being apart was no fun, but maybe it had its compensations. Any two people got pretty used to each other when they were together every day, but when they were forced apart and then came back to each other it was like falling,in love all over again. These meetings, these first breathless moments, were beyond value—and what else, in all the worlds, really mattered?

Nothing, nothing, nothing, his mind whispered exultantly.

But already, as they walked slowly across the tarmac to where their copter waited, the long shadows of the afternoon sun crept blackly at their side, and a cool north wind rustled across the land.

Early the next morning, Robert Quinton walked into the UNBAC computer station and went directly to Carr Siringo. Siringo hardly looked up when he entered, and Quinton didn’t try to hurry him—having found from long experience that Siringo had a distinctly negative reaction to being pushed. Quinton deposited himself on a metal stool, lit a cigarette, and waited.

If Martin Lorraine looked like a tri-di conception of a clear-eyed, noble scientist, it was equally true that Carr Siringo reminded one instantly of the prototype of all mad fiends out to blow up the planet with an invisible ray. He had been compared variously with the Devil and a cockeyed angel, usually the former, and it didn’t take much imagination to see why. Siringo was short, fat, and bald, and he was never still. He ate prodigiously, worked hugely, and lived in Gargantuan style. He worked on problems because he loved problems for their own sake, and once he had the solution he lost interest completely and launched himself into something else. He didn’t care a hoot for the world, humanity, or anything else apart from the incredible world of his own mind. There was a firm conviction among his co-workers that he would never die as other men died, but would simply vanish in a puff of blue flame on some distant day when he really got wound up on a problem he couldn’t solve. He was indispensable, of course, and Quinton respected him for what he was, although he never felt entirely comfortable in his presence. On his part, Siringo called Quinton a “humanitarian,” and when he said it, it was an insult.

“Back to save the world, hey?” Siringo said finally, without looking up from the computer, in precisely the tone of voice he would have used to remark, “I hear your wife has leprosy.”

“Probably not,” Quinton said slowly, declining to lose his temper. “There’s always a chance—a good chance—that the factors will change favorably without any help from us. There’s always a chance that a broken copter will fix itself if you just let it sit and swear at it every day as you walk to work. I just like to play Hero, that’s all.”

Siringo laughed shortly and changed the subject. “What’d you get on Meran?” he asked with a flash of interest. “How about that consanguineous family system? What about the mental tri-di? What is the significance of banded clothing? What are—”

Quinton blew a smoke ring at his face. “You tell me, I’ll tell you,” he said. “What’ve you got?”

Siringo raised his absurdly thin eyebrows. “Talk to Wonder Boy,” he advised. “And after you tell us dummies what to do to save Beloved Terra, come on back and we’ll have a beer.”

“Try not to smash anything,” Quinton told the man who was probably the finest technician in the world. He left then, and didn’t hear, or want to hear, the pungent remark that filled the room behind him.

“Wonder Boy” was John Bordie, whose official title was Chief Correlator, and whose actual job it was to sort through the mass of data sparked off by Siringo and try to make some sort of sense out of it. Prolonged contact in the tiny UNBAC station had made him regard Siringo as something either more or less than human, and he welcomed Quinton with all the enthusiasm of a fellow tourist on a desert island.

“Meran must have been nice,” he said after they had exchanged greetings. “We’ll have to talk about it sometime, Bob.”

Quinton smiled. Nice? How did you translate stars into words? “Yes,” he said. “We’ll have to talk about it.”

Bordie got down to business. “Here’s what we’ve done, Bob,” he said. “We’ve put every available man on it, sparing just enough to fake the usual station activities and make the joint look respectable. We’ve arbitrarily divided the possible causes for the down-curve into five classifications, and worked them through the Mad Genius and his computers.”

“Um-m-m. The usual five?”

“Generally speaking, yes. Extraterrestrial, embracing such star systems as we know, the planets on which we have colonies, Luna, and the space station; Cultural; Technological; Personal; and Unknown—the latter being anything not caught by the first four. We’ve been going full blast, cutting security precautions to a minimum. But the Snake dropped another point the last time we checked it; Lorraine doesn’t know that, and he won’t be happy.”

Quinton didn’t say anything.

“We’ve abstracted the essentials for you, and you can pick them up in Classified. Tentatively, I’d say we’d ruled out any non-earthly cause, but you’ll have to interpret for yourself. I don’t put any stock in that Unknown stuff—that’s Siringo’s baby. Aside from that, we know precious little. If we could only work out in the open—”

“But we can’t,” Quinton finished for him. “If anyone finds out what we’re up to, we won’t have to wait for any world to end. Our name won’t even be mud.”

John Bordie shrugged. It was too late to start worrying about that; that was something they all had to live with—or try to.

“Any concentration at all?” asked Quinton.

“Not much. There’s the usual stuff—the press yapping about the morals of the teen-agers, a couple of new religious cults, lots of good protest literature about inhuman scientists, some national incidents of a minor sort, some joker down in Mexico who says he’s the Aztec Cuauhtemoc and wants to change the name of Mexico City back to Tenochtitlan and start a holy war against Spain, a spurt in membership in the Anarchist Party, and Aunt Tillie back under a doctor’s care with a backache. You name it, we got it. What a planet.”

“There must be some concentration,” Quinton suggested, smiling.

“Well—maybe. I’d say the United States, but maybe that’s just national pride.”

“What does Siringo think?”

“God only knows, and I wouldn’t put any money on that.”

“Well, let’s start breaking the United States down into areas, John. It might turn up something, and at any rate it’ll give Siringo a chance to work off some of that nervous energy. You got an analyzer I can use, for what I don’t get done at home?”

“Sure—use Four. I’ll slap a restricted on it until you give me the clear wave.”

“Fine. I’ll go digest this stuff, and then we’ll start asking questions.” Quinton drummed his fingers absently on his knee. “Can you spare Conway? I’m going to need a bright boy.”

“Check. My best to Lynn, and tell Baby I’m waiting for her to get a little older.”

“You won’t have to wait long—and you’d better start loading the parcheesi dice; I hear the kid is getting pretty sharp.”

“Beginner’s luck,” Bordie said sourly.

Robert Quinton picked up the data abstracts at Classified, and left the Station for home. Even on viewer tape, the abstracts were bulky. He knew that he was in for a protracted siege of learning. A man couldn’t even keep up with his own planet any more, much less with the universe. He had a momentary vision of an extensive interstellar civilization, and felt decidedly sorry for anyone mixed up in it.

It was early afternoon in New Mexico, and on the hot side. The land as seen from his copter looked sleepy and pleasant, with the green farmlands rolling along under him like eternal verities. They seemed to say that they had always been there, would always be there, and that he was a fool for not tossing the abstracts overboard and taking off for the nearest trout stream.

But Robert Quinton felt oddly cold in the hot sun. A century ago, that green farmland had been desert. It only seemed eternal, obvious. Once it had been obvious that the blazing sun above his head had gone around the Earth below him—you could see that that was true, and had always been true.

A century ago, desert. And a century hence—?

The long days passed, and they were good days. Robert Quinton worked, and worked hard. There were red streaks in his eyes and he was hard to live with. There was a terrible, driving urgency behind his every move, with rest when he could fit it in. But it wasn’t exciting work, and there was nothing dramatic about it. It was grinding, digging work—and it had to be done.

Just the same, it was good to be home.

Every man has a place he calls home, no matter how many places he may live in. In Quinton’s case, it was an old-fashioned Frank Lloyd Wright type of house that blended in with the soft browns and greens of the New Mexico hillside. It had a small, clean stream that bubbled through the living room and out into the patio, and the glass-and-rock walls were open and spacious. Quinton had often wondered why he was so conservative in his housing, but somehow he just didn’t care for the turret-and-ginger-bread style of the modernists. And this was a good house, his house, made into a home by the years that he and Lynn had lived in it. It had his kind of soap, his kind of casualness, his kind of books, and it was his kind of house.

Then, too, there was the statue. It stood arrogantly on top of the piano, and it had originally been a whisky ad. It was the bust of an elderly, aristocratic gentleman with a monocle and a somewhat bemused expression. Into the base of it Quinton had carved a name: Cuthbert Pomeroy Gundelfinger. This was sort of a private deity, and a very useful one. Whenever someone came to visit him that he did not know, Quinton simply waited until he saw the statue. If he laughed, he offered him a drink. If he asked who Cuthbert Pomeroy Gundelfinger was, he made polite conversation and waited for the caller to leave.

At the moment, Lynn was picking fresh fruit out in the garden, and Baby was avidly watching the tri-di. It was a science-fiction story she was watching, and Quinton smiled to himself as he glanced at it. It was routine stuff about the Twenty-fifth Century, involving the usual space pirates, matter transmitters, a mad scientist who looked enough like Siringo to be his twin brother, and a clear-eyed hero in a blue and silver uniform who was dashingly engaged in saving the world. Why was it, he wondered, that all these stories envisaged technological marvels by the bushel, but seemed to assume that social structure and culture wouldn’t change in over four centuries? Why were they fighting all of today’s local issues in the Twenty-fifth Century? Why, it was less than a century ago that nations had still had colonies, and nobody had even heard of Charles Sirtillo or Intelism!

And why did they persist in imagining that saving the world was a popular pastime? It wasn’t, and never had been. Quinton lit a cigarette, no longer smiling. Saving the world was for crackpots, idealists, and impractical dreamers; everyone knew that. It was a standard joke, and world-savers were about as popular as plague carriers. The popular man, the practical man, was the guy who did the expected thing, the socially approved thing, and never questioned whether it was right or wrong. If everyone else was doing it, why then, naturally, it was right.

They had a name for world-savers.

Suckers.

Quinton put it out of his mind. This was a battle that he had fought with himself long ago, and he had won. He worked on, sifting through the abstracts, getting the feel of the situation. The sun was warm outside, and there was a lazy insect hum in the air, but he stuck with it.

There was nothing else to do—for him.

The days raced by and became weeks.

Computers chattered and banged and clicked. Analyzers sorted, chewed, classified. Data flowed into New Mexico station in daubs and tricklets and underground rivers. The UNBAC men sweated and argued and threw rocks at the trees.

It was all very dull, to an untrained eye. They discussed culture correlations and integrative principles, diffusion receptivity and Uncle Charlie’s beef against the tax collector. They sat up all night with a computer. They lost sleep and insulted each other with vast regularity and fineness of distinction. And they worked together on the toughest problem of all—putting two and two together to get four.

When it came, the setting was anything but impressive.

John Bordie leaned forward over the smoke-burned table and frowned at his parcheesi dice. Martin Lorraine, AWOL from his New York office, did his level best to look sloppy in a Y-shirt, but only succeeded in looking like the typical tri-di hero exhibiting Pose 7-X-4b, Casual Masculinity Without Pipe Or Dog. Bob Quinton slouched his long frame in a chair, his hands in his pockets, a cigarette glowing unhealthily from the corner of his mouth. Carr Siringo charged up and down the room like an impatient dragon; you could almost see the fire squirting out of his nostrils.

A young man hurried into the conference room with a microplate. He was terribly earnest and excited when he handed it to Lorraine, and probably didn’t even hear Siringo’s contemptuous snort.

“We’ve got it,” Lorraine announced briefly. “The curve took an upswing on M-97. It’s a man.”

Robert Quinton smiled broadly.

“Clean living,” suggested Siringo.

John Bordie fingered his dice. “We’ve got to be sure” he said.

“This is as sure as we can get it until we try it for keeps,” Martin Lorraine told him slowly. “The hypothesis has been tested from every angle we can work, and the survival curve has indicated we’re on the right track.”

“And where do we go from here?” Bordie asked.

“Well, let’s see what we’ve got,” Quinton said. “We’ve established two facts: the factor that’s causing the Snake to drop is a personal one—that is, it’s a man we’re after—and the threat is located in the United States—according to Siringo, somewhere in Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, New Mexico, or California. The obvious procedure from here is to narrow that area down, and then find him, whoever or whatever he is. And then—”

There was a short silence.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Lorraine said decisively.

“As the man said when he stepped off into the chasm,” muttered Carr Siringo with an unpleasant grin.

Quinton turned, started to speak, and then held his tongue. Carr was irritating—but he had a habit of being right. As usual, Siringo had placed his stubby finger unerringly on a very knotty aspect of the problem.

Quinton replaced his infinitesimal fraction of a cigarette with a fresh one, feeling for all the world like an alcoholic on a prize binge. They were looking for a human being, that was definite. In a way, that made it easier. In another way, it spelled out trouble.

The catch was, of course, that the man—if it was a man, and not a woman—hadn’t done anything much yet. In all probability, he was not even a well-known personality. He might even be a child. He was certainly no wild-eyed schemer in a black coat making atom bombs in a secret lab high in the mysterious Ughflutz Mountains—or at least that wasn’t likely.

He might be anyone, anything.

It was not so much who he was that made him important. It was when he was and where he was.

They were looking for Hitler—a man made dangerous by the conditions around him. They were looking for Hitler—while he was still a house painter or a corporal in the German army.

It was tough, of course. It was always tough. But it was far simpler, and a lot less bloody, than going after him when it was too late, when he was already a powerful dictator, when you had half a world to fight instead of just one man. Just one man? Quinton smiled. They were dealing with a human being, and that could be messy—and dangerous.

“O.K., Siringo,” Quinton said. “Let’s go into a huddle. We’ll see if we can’t narrow that area down to something we can work with; we can’t do anything until we do that. When we get the picture in focus, we’ll see about stepping off that chasm.”

Carr Siringo’s face was expressionless. “It’s your funeral,” he said.

The men got up from the table. John Bordie smiled a cold smile and tossed his dice on the table with a practiced hand. In spite of himself, Quinton watched the bouncing cubes of ivory with fascinated attention. Snake eyes.

The mother spider spun her web across the land.

The slender, invisible threads from UNBAC crept out across fields and towns, villages and county fairs, probing. At first, they were widely spaced, resting on Louisiana, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and a part of California. The days slipped by.

The web grew tighter, stronger.

California dropped out, and then Arizona. Only fragile wisps clung to New Mexico and Louisiana, and then even these disappeared. The web contracted over Texas, seeking, hesitating. It grew smaller, smaller—.

It tightened over Texas. It inched down from Fort Worth and Dallas, across from Laredo and San Antonio. The computers and analyzers hummed and buzzed through a haze of cigarette smoke, testing, eliminating. What would happen if—? Supposing that he were here, what would—? If the X concentration is here, and the Y factor there, then—?

The web tightened. It gripped a tiny area bounded by Bay City, Houston, Beaumont, and the Gulf of Mexico. It shrunk still more, contracting like a shallow puddle in the sun. It flowed together, stopped. The web made a black dot on the map of the Texas, coast.

“That does it,” said Martin Lorraine, his usually too-handsome face lean and ugly with strain.

“Galveston,” said Robert Quinton, sinking down into a chair. “Our man is in Galveston.”

“Chalk up another one for you, Carr,” John Bordie said. “Nice work.”

Carr Siringo stopped his pacing, shook his head impatiently, and walked swiftly out of the room. It was almost as if he had been caught off base by Bordie’s words; Siringo had lived so long in his private world apart from freely-expressed emotions that he foundered when he unexpectedly found himself being complimented. He was like a fish in air. Not for the first time, Quinton wondered what had happened, long ago, to make Siringo the kind of a man he was—and also not for the first time, he decided that he did not want to know.

So their man was in Galveston, he thought. Now they would have to start a precise screening process of the city’s fifty thousand inhabitants. It would be a difficult job, and time-consuming, but it would not be essentially different from the techniques used to narrow the critical area down to one city. Without the computers, of course, the job would have been impossible. Even with the computers, there was going to be plenty of leg work involved.

But it could be done.

Who was he, this man set by chance into the fuse area of an explosive situation yet unborn? What was he doing now? Was he a genius of a sort, or just an ordinary guy who happened to be in the wrong place at the right time? He could be anything, Quinton realized. An idiot can change history as profoundly as a brilliant schemer—or even a germ.

“Me for coffee,” said Martin Lorraine.

Quinton and Bordie nodded and followed him out of the Station into the New Mexico night. A half-moon slept in shadows. The stars twinkled as they had for the millions and billions of years of Earth’s existence, and seen so, on a summer night from Earth, they were only stars again. Robert Quinton smiled a curiously sad smile.

It was good to see them just as stars once more.

The three men walked through the cool night air to Harry’s, where a red neon sign still shone cheerily in the night. Harry’s stayed open late, catching straggling Station workers and occasional night-fliers on the road to Folsom. They walked in and perched on counter chairs, while Harry, unbidden, got the sausage and eggs and coffee working. The music box was still for once, and the men did not talk.

They were all thinking about one man. A man they had never met. A man whose very name they did not know. Quite possibly, he, too, was sitting in a late hash house, smoking and sipping coffee, thinking—

Robert Quinton sat very still, feeling the silver moon rays paint the hills outside. His thoughts turned, as they often did, to the little town of Folsom a few miles down the road, where long ago flint artifacts had been found with fossil bison, establishing positively the antiquity of man. Ancient man in a New World that Columbus had “discovered”—some twenty thousand years too late. Quinton looked down at the plastic floor. Under that floor was the land, and across that land men like himself had once hunted the mammoth with spears and sung strange songs beneath that same cold moon that still drifted through the night seas.

No man knew what had happened to the Folsom people—or to the later Pueblo groups who had walked off and left their homes to the desert winds long before the white man came. Quinton closed his eyes. Here in the southwest, men had built a civilization before—and had vanished into nowhere, leaving only ghost structures and a few mute pieces of chipped flint to mark their passing.

A cool night wind swished across the grasslands and rattled the windows.

“Let’s go home,” said Robert Quinton.

“There’s our man,” said Pat Conway, three weeks later.

Robert Quinton followed the psychologist’s pointing finger and saw him. The man came walking out of the courthouse, his hands in his pockets, absently whistling convenient extracts from “But Oh! Those Bars on Mars,” the old drinking song. He looked like the guy next door, the guy who sat next to you at lodge meetings.

He was the most dangerous man in the world.

Quinton eyed him closely. The man was of medium stature, a bit on the thin side. He looked hard and muscular, but that could have been imagination. He had very light, straw-colored hair, brushed straight back. He was dressed conservatively in a green business cape with a brown-and-yellow neckline. He was tanned and he had a ring on his left hand. As they watched, he stepped into a shuttle and hummed off westward, toward the old causeway.

“No need to follow him,” Conway explained, steering Quinton to their parked copter. “We can pick him up again on the way to his house.”

They got into the copter and lifted up into a cloudy gray sky. Quinton let Conway handle the controls, and when they had gained some altitude he looked down and watched the Gulf toss and roll restlessly off the island, sloughing off white breakers that bubbled in and broke on the colorless sands. It felt like rain, and there were very few bathers on the beach.

“Doesn’t look like much, does he?” asked Conway.

“No,” agreed Quinton. “Neither did Napoleon for that matter.”

Conway grinned. “But take Josephine, now—”

Quinton relaxed a little, listening to the hum of the copter. Conway was a good man to have around, a good man to work with on a job like this. He knew how to laugh. Pat’s appearance was deceptive, to say the least. He was thin and animated, with a lively and expressive face. He cut his hair short to the vanishing point and affected violent clothes and suspenders. He looked like he was perpetually on the verge of going into a soft-shoe routine on a burlesque stage—which he had been known to do upon occasion—and he had fooled a good many people who couldn’t look beneath the surface.

The copter intersected the shuttle route and lazed along above it, following it across the island toward where the almost abandoned causeway stretched away to the mainland. It looked like a toy dropped by a child, but Quinton could see a few old men fishing on the gray spans. His eyes returned to the shuttle beneath him, the shuttle that carried the man who had unwittingly called him home from the stars.

The man’s name was Donald Weston. It was an average sort of name, the kind that you wouldn’t look at twice. The viz books were full of names like Donald Weston. It was a non-dangerous, pleasant sort of a name. Donald Weston was twenty-seven years old, and had been educated at a small Texas secondary college. Since his graduation four years ago, he had been doing moderately well on the surface, though not sensationally so. He was an officer in the Galvez Syntho Supply Company, which was engaged in selling special supplies to the Mars and Venus colonies. It was a very ordinary sort of a job.

Recently, Weston had shown mild symptoms of political ambitions. He had announced as a candidate for City Councilman, a position of minor importance, but one that could serve as a stepping-stone toward bigger things. The UNBAC scanners had gone over Weston with a finetoothed comb—his old school records, his associates, his background—and had found very little of interest. There were a few intriguing hints of outside activity, but for the most part Weston seemed almost painfully average.

Camouflage, Quinton wondered, or accident?

The gray clouds turned a shade darker. Big, fat drops of rain began to patter down on the copter cowl, and Quinton saw the fishermen far below start to scurry for shelter. Hissing rain sheets swept in across the Gulf and thunder rolled faintly in the west.

As the copter hovered discreetly in the distance, they saw Weston hurry out of the shuttle and run through the rain to his small suburban home. There was a warm glow of light as the door opened, a glimpse of a woman with goldenhair, and Weston was gone.

“Well, back to the salt mines,” Conway said, and turned the copter in a slow arc.

Quinton looked at the slanting rain and listened to the fast drops patter on the cowl. He felt a cold chill inside him that was not due to the rain, and Conway’s light talk didn’t ease it much. They had seen their man, and both of them knew what that meant. They had to get him, and it wasn’t going to be easy. They were outside the law, men without legal status, and if they got into hot water they would have to get themselves out—or not get out at all. They could expect no help from UNBAC if they failed. They could not even ask for help.

It was cat and mouse—and no ordinary mouse, either. Sometimes the cat didn’t get back.

Below them, almost invisible, the gray buildings of the city huddled together to keep warm. A city full of people, Quinton thought, and one small copter lost in the sky. It was a deadly game they were playing, and the city didn’t even know. Had it known—if it found out—it would turn on them with the mindless ferocity of a beast gone mad.

Quinton looked down, thinking. The sea leaped and roared in a rising wind, and now the beach was deserted. An old beach umbrella rolled along the sand, waiting for the sun.

“Take a look at this,” said Pat Conway.

Robert Quinton looked up from the paper, where he had been reading one of Weston’s campaign speeches, and took a sheaf of film blowups from Conway’s outstretched hand. He glanced at the psychologist questioningly.

“We got a chance to get inside last night while the Westons were out lapping it up at a business party,” Conway explained. “A couple of the boys and myself picked the house over, and we got a sheaf of manuscript in Weston’s handwriting under a false bottom in an upstairs desk. We photographed the lot—seems that our boy fancies himself to be another Machiavelli.”

“Um-m-m,” said Quinton.

“Just a clean, red-blooded American boy,” Conway observed. “A credit to the force.”

Robert Quinton started to read the blowups and felt the cold knot tie itself like ice in his stomach. He lit a cigarette, but the smoke seemed cold, black, gritty—

Weston’s manuscript was charming stuff.

Night.

Black, black night and the red blood flowing. It swirls and eddies around my legs. It soaks me and mixes with my blood.

In the black night.

I walk through the black world, and it is red. I see it but I cannot speak. It is too red. I walk through the world, and I think.

In the black, black night.

They do not see me. I am alone. I will be one of them, a part of them. And they will be a part of me, slowly. Redly. I only want to help them, but they cannot see me. It is too black. It is very hard, but I will do it. For them.

I love them.

I walk on.

In the black, black night—“

There was more, much more, and Robert Quinton read it all. When he had finished, he did not speak. He put the blowups down, got to his feet, and walked out of the building. Out into the open air, the blue sky, the people and the sunshine.

So that was Donald Weston. Not much, now. A clever man, a warped man. Perhaps even an evil man, although Quinton was wary of the word. He wasn’t particularly dangerous—yet. Not until his moment came, a moment yet lost in the twisted paths of future time. But the moment would come, inevitably. It was in the cards.

The cards had to be reshuffled.

What was it that the man had written? “I only want to help them, but they cannot see.” Was that so very different from what UNBAC was trying to do? Was it?

Robert Quinton watched the people passing him. All kinds of people. Men, women, children. Drunks, lovers, dreamers. Kids on their way to the beach and businessmen on their way back to work. Happy people, sad people. Contented people and people who would one day throw themselves from copters just to get away from it all. They weren’t worried about survival, these people. That wasn’t fashionable, and never had been. They just wanted to be let alone, and Quinton didn’t blame them.

Was there a difference, a difference between a Weston and an UNBAC? There was one difference: reason. Reason, logic, science, humanity. Words, of course. Just words—but a man had to have something, had to believe in something down deep, even when believing wasn’t popular. Man had been given a mind, and with that mind he had evolved science. Science was a tool. Were they wrong to use it?

Were they just kidding themselves?

The people who walked by him wouldn’t like him, if they knew. They would turn on him, hate him, fear him. Weston, on the other hand, was a man they could put their trust in, believe in. He was a regular guy.

Robert Quinton walked on down the beach, alone in the crowd. The sea breeze whispered in his ears and the hot sun burned his shoulders under his shirt. Tomorrow, they would go after him.

If they failed—

“Sit down, sit down,” said Donald Weston pleasantly. “Drink?”

“Thank you,” said Robert Quinton, smiling. “Scotch and soda, if you don’t mind.”

“Fine, don’t mind at all,” Weston assured him, his voice warm and exceptionally friendly. “Honey—”

Jo, his wife, vanished into the kitchen to fix the drinks. She was a magnetic, blue-eyed blonde, the kind that dominated a room just by being in it. Quinton sat back in his chair, relaxed, and surveyed the room. It was just as Conway had described it to him; comfortable, but not pretentious, in good taste. A few books were in a case against one wall. They were of the type usually displayed in homes not much addicted to reading—several book-club best-sellers, a treatise on how to keep your figure slim by living on orange juice, a family Bible, a volume of condensations from the Reader’s Digest, and a set of Greek and Roman classics, from Homer to Marcus Aurelius. The latter were spotlessly clean and unread. Jo emerged from the kitchen, smiled engagingly, and handed him his drink. She had fixed one for herself, but her husband did without.

“I’ll try to come right to the point,” Quinton said, after sipping his drink. “I know you’re a busy man.”

Weston waved the remark aside, his straw-colored hair neatly combed as always. “Lots of time,” he assured him. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you; I’m very flattered, really, that you think I have any possibilities along those lines.”

Jo smiled.

“Our business is finding men with potentialities,” Quinton said truthfully. “Finding them and lining them up before they get too expensive. It’s just good business.”

Jo produced an ashdisposer when Quinton fumbled for a cigarette, and he paused to light up. Weston didn’t smoke, his green eyes sharply alert in contrast to his easy-going manner.

“I know you’ve read our letters with care, Mr. Weston, and looked over the literature we sent you. I think you will agree that we have made a generous offer?”

“Certainly, certainly,” Weston said. “I appreciate it.”

“Your name was suggested to us by various sources here in Galveston, Mr. Weston, and—”

Weston waved his hand. “Please,” he said. “The name is Don.”

Jo smoothed her long skirt over her silken legs.

Robert Quinton found it difficult not to let down his hidden guard. These people were charming, and no doubt about it. Sitting here with them, in their homey living room, it was virtually impossible to fear them. They were typical to an extreme, even idealized. And yet—

“Black, black night, and the red blood flowing—”

“Don, then—and my name is Bob. Your record in college, and your enviable reputation here in town, together with your often-expressed interest in the Mars Colony, has convinced us that you are one of the men we are looking for. Now, I’m not going to make you any sales-talk; you know as well as I do the prospects and opportunities you would have with our company on Mars. There’s no question of success or failure involved; it’s purely a matter of how far you can go. We think you could go a long way with us.”

Or without us, Quinton thought. He remembered: it was not so much who he was that made him deadly. It was when he was and where he was. The who and the when couldn’t be changed. That left the where. They had to get Donald Weston out of Galveston, and do it legally.

“It’s a break, all right,” Weston said. “We know that.”

Quinton nodded, feeling the sweat in his hands, and took a deep drag on his cigarette. “You bet it is. I know that you two have talked it all over, and have looked up our company’s standings and ratings to check on what we’ve told you. I’ve taken the liberty of bringing some papers with me this evening, and the rest is up to you.” Quinton crossed his mental fingers—tight. He smiled. “What do you say, Don?”

“I’m afraid our answer is no,” Donald Weston said, smiling back at him. “I’ve decided not to accept the position.”

Robert Quinton’s heart took a long nose dive to nowhere. He kept his face expressionless, except for a polite look of disappointment. Their strategy had failed, completely. Donald Weston was going to stay right where he was.

How much did the man know?

Quinton looked into the other’s eyes. They stared back at him, guilelessly. They were open, frank, friendly—on the surface. And their green depths were frigid with the cold hardness of ice.

“I’m mighty sorry to hear that, Don,” Quinton said. “I find it hard to understand—”

Jo Weston brushed a soft blond hair out of her blue eyes. “It’s just a marvelous chance for Don,” she said. “But with the election coming up and all, we really feel that our place is here, at least for the present.”

Jo Weston. What part was she playing in the invisible game?

Quinton stood up, nodding. “I see your point, of course,” he said. “I won’t overstay my welcome—but if you should happen to change your mind in the near future, just get in touch with us. We’ll be glad to see you at any time.”

“Thank you very much,” said Donald Weston, his rather boyish face very earnest. “We’ll certainly think it over.”

I’ll bet you will, thought Quinton. He said: “Well, thanks very much for the drink. Perhaps I’ll see you around sometime.”

“Perhaps,” agreed Donald Weston, smiling.

Little man, what now?

Robert Quinton said good-by and walked out through the night to his copter, and death walked at his side.

“We’ve underestimated our man,” Robert Quinton said slowly. “Weston didn’t tumble for it, period.”

“How much does he know, do you think?” asked Pat Conway, perched on the edge of the bed in Quinton’s Galveston apartment.

“No telling; I can’t read him. But Weston is a smart one, Pat, and so is that bombshell wife of his. We’re not dealing with any pawn, and that’s for sure. He must suspect something, or else why would he turn the offer down? We’ve got to watch our step, boy.”

“I don’t entirely get it, Bob,” objected Conway, his thumbs hooked in his suspender straps. “It looks like this All-American Boy pose of his is strictly for the birds, but why? He can’t possibly know he’s the key pivot in a developing cultural situation, he hasn’t done much of anything—or has he? What’s he got to be afraid of?”

Quinton shrugged. “My guess would be that he’s just plain old-fashioned smart. He’s got big ideas, and he’s playing the political game. This just-call-me-Don stuff is just about what you’d expect, after all. He’s setting himself up as a regular Joe for the voters, that’s all.”

“It’s more complex than that, I think,” Conway said. “He’s probably got his finger in some pies we haven’t even smelled yet. He’s no dope, and he’d have covered his tracks. Did you notice his eyes?”

“I noticed them,” Quinton nodded.

There was a long silence.

“Nuts,” Conway laughed shortly. “We’re still gulping over the Evil Eye.”

“Maybe,” said Quinton. “Maybe we’d better be.”

They had both seen “simple ” situations blow up in their faces before. In this game, the rules changed while you played, and you changed with them—or else.

“Well, the next step is clear, anyhow,” Conway said, breaking the uncomfortable silence.

“Unfortunately,” Quinton agreed.

He was just getting to his feet to fix himself a drink when it happened. His scalp prickled and there was an explosive poof. Quinton dropped like a stone, twisted, and fired a chair at the wall switch. The lights went out.

He lay very still, hardly breathing, listening to his heart pound in his ears. There was silence, utter and complete. Quinton strained every muscle in his body, trying to hear. But there was nothing. Not a whisper. He waited a long time, wondering why he was still alive.

“Pat.” His voice was very low. “Pat.”

Silence. Quinton felt a sick dread wash through him. The killers were gone now, but he didn’t want to turn on the lights. He didn’t want to see. He tried again, without hope.

“Pat.”

Nothing. Or—was that shallow breathing he heard in the room with him? Silently, Quinton wormed his way across the floor to the bed. He held his breath and felt ahead of him on the floor. Pat was there, and the floor was wet and sticky. Quinton let out his breath through set teeth. He felt sick and tired.

Quinton explored the body with a practiced hand, not daring to take a chance on the lights. There was a heartbeat, a faint one. The wound was in the chest, low on the right. That wasn’t good, but it could have been worse. Pat was still breathing, but he wouldn’t be for long. Not without help.

The hospital was out of the question. Quinton couldn’t afford to get mixed up with a shooting at this stage of the game. There was just one thing to do.

He crawled over to the closet and fished the special wave radio out of its hiding place in the wall. Regulations or no regulations, he wasn’t going to let Pat die if he could help it. He beamed New Mexico Station, setting the dials by means of a tiny red light in the set, and sent a code message: UNBAC IMPERATIVE OFFICIAL. CONTACT: BORDIE, NEW MEXICO STATION. CONWAY SHOT GET THE DOC AND COME A’RUNNIN’. REPEAT IMPERATIVE. QUINTON.

He lifted Conway’s wet body carefully to the bed and dressed the wound as well as he could with his first-aid box. Conway moaned once and his heartbeat remained faint. Quinton clenched his fists, the old hate trembling through his body. If Pat died—

He sat down by the still figure on the bed, his gun in his hand, and listened to the shallow, fast breathing.

It was going to be a long night.

It was four o’clock in the morning when the doctor came, and he didn’t come with Bordie. He came with Carr Siringo.

“Bordie was delayed,” Siringo told Quinton, looking him in the eye as though daring him to challenge his word. “I had to come down this way anyhow, so I brought the doc.”

Quinton ignored the words and accepted the facts. “Thanks, Carr,” he said “I won’t forget it.”

Siringo plopped himself down in the kitchen and insisted on talking about the significance of banded clothing on Meran. At first, it irritated Quinton, but then he calmed down and even became interested in the ideas Siringo was sparking off with such brilliant nonchalance. Quinton’s mind was sharp with early-morning clarity and he thrust and parried the rapierlike cuts from the short, bald man, trying grimly to hold his own.

It was after five when the doctor walked through the door and sat down on the kitchen table, and Quinton suddenly realized that Siringo had neatly and effectively been taking his mind off the still form in the next room. Quinton eyed him accusingly in the gray light of dawn, and Siringo returned his gaze imperturbably.

“Well, Doc?” Quinton asked.

The UNBAC doctor shrugged. “Maybe,” he said.

“You’d better get some sleep, son,” said Carr Siringo.

Robert Quinton hesitated, and abruptly discovered that he was exhausted. Something snapped way down deep, and told him he wasn’t as young as he once was. His throat was dry and his eyes burned. He nodded slowly, left the room, and turned in.

He didn’t look at the figure on the other bed.

Robert Quinton looked at the man sitting across from him and wanted to smash his face in. Instead, he smiled pleasantly.

“That’s it, Pond,” he said. “We’ve picked you for the job, and you can write your own ticket.”

Wiley Carruthers Pond made pyramids with his smooth hands and listened intently. He had iron-gray hair and an aristocratic, noble face. He was forty years old, was liked by small children and babies, spoke loud and often of his service to the people, and was a first-class heel.

“I’m not sure I understand you, Mr. Quinton,” he said.

“You don’t have to understand, Pond. All you have to do is sit in for four years and collect twenty thousand a year from us, plus your regular salary as Councilman. We’ll get you elected, and no strings attached.”

“It’s most irregular, Mr. Quinton,” Pond said, his eyes gleaming.

Quinton clenched his fists, thinking of Conway. He hated the guts of Wiley Carruthers Pond, a fact of no importance whatsoever. Pond had political connections in Galveston, and aside from that he didn’t matter. Donald Weston did.

“Well?” Quinton said.

“After all, Mr. Quinton, a Councilman. Then, you’re paying me—”

“Yes or no,” Quinton said, his eyes hard. “I haven’t got all day.”

Pond eyed him narrowly. “Of course,” he said, “my only interest is to help the people. If for some reason you feel that I could be of more service to them as a Councilman, then I must say that no position is too humble for service. No man can be too proud to serve, Mr. Quinton.”

“Yes or no,” Quinton repeated.

Pond leaned forward. “All I do is serve and keep quiet, and collect twenty thousand a year, right? You’ll sign a contract assuring me that I won’t be asked to act in any way contrary to my principles?”

“Of course,” Quinton assured him. “You’re in no danger. Our interest begins and ends with getting you elected.”

Wiley Carruthers Pond stuck out his well-manicured hand. “It’s a deal,” he said. “May I say that I am grateful to you for your interest in the people of Galveston? It’s men like you, Mr. Quinton, who—”

Quinton cut it as short as he could. He had played this scene before, too many times with too many people, to take any pleasure in it. He came to terms in a hurry, and walked away by himself. He felt like he needed a good bath.

Pat Conway was still alive, but he couldn’t be moved. The doctor stayed on, and Quinton and Siringo played poker on the kitchen table.

That wasn’t the only game they played.

Money was no object, and the men from UNBAC knew their stuff. What little they didn’t know, Wiley Carruthers Pond and the local machine filled in with a vengeance.

Both Galveston papers announced Pond’s candidacy on their front pages, and printed flattering, smiling pictures. Both Galveston papers began to run his life story of unselfish service to the people of Galveston, climaxed now by his decision to serve in a minor capacity where he could directly and intimately help the little people. At the same time, editorials were printed about Donald Weston that painted him as an unscrupulous political schemer, unfit to represent the people of the City of Oleanders.

Whenever one turned on the tri-di, there was the beaming, hearty, trustworthy Wiley Carruthers Pond, indulging in heart-to-heart talks with the people. Viz phones rang all over the island, and the canned face and voice of Wiley Carruthers Pond assured the listeners that he was on their side, first, last, and always.

There was more, much more. There were whispering campaigns, clever and vicious political jokes, and slanted “news” stories. Weston’s tri-di talks were edited, and commentators “interpreted ” them with cutting sarcasm.

It was dirty, slimy, and ugly. It was the Big Leagues, and it made Quinton sick of himself and of the work he had to do.

It was rotten, clean through.

Robert Quinton paid out the easy money and talked with oily voices on the blacked-out viz phone. He got down in the dirt all day long, and at night he sat up and listened to Conway’s shallow, gasping breathing in the next bed.

He talked to his soul.

Somehow, he had never imagined that it would be like this.

Robert Quinton had been born in 1994.

That meant that the first space station had been built and the Moon had been reached twenty years before his birth. It meant that the inner planets had been touched and a tentative colony set up on Venus ten years before his birth.

That meant that the United Nations, after half a century of bitter ups and downs, had gradually absorbed enough power to make itself an authority to be reckoned with in world affairs. The United Nations, of course, was an inevitable product of space expansion.

That meant that before he ever drew a breath the great solar energy stations had largely supplanted atomic energy as a cheap power source, and had brought tropical areas into positions of new importance as vast natural hothouses for the cultivation of the necessary plants.

In 1990, a practical interstellar drive had been found—and promptly hushed up as being too dangerous a toy for a still-unstable planet to play with thoughtlessly. That was four years before Robert Quinton was born.

That same year, Robert Quinton, Sr., a cattle rancher in New Mexico, had met Anne Torneson, his future bride, at a stock show. The senior Quinton had been born in 1954, and his wife in 1958.

When Quinton was a child, he hadn’t been markedly different from other children of his age and time and place. He banged around the barn and got treed by a bull and watched the rockets flash by in the blue sky over his head. While the first genuine social science was coming to life after the ferreting out of the true interrelationships between psychology, anthropology, sociology, and economics, young Bob Quinton was discovering how to pick up sleepy rattlesnakes by their tails and snap their heads off with a flick of his wrist—a practice not encouraged by his mother.

While Bob Quinton was losing sleep over traditional school baseball games, a vitally important principle began to dominate scientific thought. It was quite simple. It had been around for a long time in medicine and elsewhere. It had been succinctly stated by an old general of the ’50s named Omar Bradley: “The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.”

The principle? It’s tough, if not impossible, to cure a cultural disease such as war—but you can prevent them before they ever happen.

Preventive medicine—applied to cultures.

It wasn’t that simple in practice; neat plans never are. Culture patterns had lagged desperately behind technological advances. In a world of atomic fission, politics were hardly out of the Feudal Ages. The course of civilization was still charted by “common sense” and “everybody knows” and “the natural way to do things.” There were no legal channels through which wars could be prevented in the only way they could be prevented—and legal changes were incredibly slow with nuclear clouds on the horizons, based as they were upon prior decisions going all the way back to the Roman Empire.

The scientists had the solution.

Could they use it?

Their answer was, inevitably, a patchwork, makeshift system that operated undercover, in the shadows. They went to work, a selected few of them, to try to hold the world together until some sort of a balance was attained.

They were outlaws, of course. So was George Washington.

The survival probability curve, commonly known as the Snake, was developed by integrating the cybernetic computers with selected social data from all over the world. The curve was not designed to maintain the status quo, or to block progress in any form. It was not designed to “control” cultures or individuals in any particular direction. It was non-political, without preference for any one faction or system, whether conservative, liberal, or in-between.

The Snake was concerned with exactly one item: the survival of free civilization. It was designed solely to enable the world to last long enough to work out its own problems in its own way. When the curve nosed down, it did not mean simply that a change was coming; that didn’t matter. It meant that unless conditions were changed it was finis for Earth. Kaput.

The End.

The survival probability curve was built around one guiding principle: “Control” must be kept to an absolute minimum, and not utilized at all unless it were imperative for survival. All cultures must be allowed to develop in their own way, so long as they did not positively threaten the free existence of mankind. It was about as radical as the concept of liberty.

It was spraying the stagnant waters before the mosquitoes hatched.

Bob Quinton grew up exploring the forest preserves and the hills of New Mexico, wandering up the purple canyons and picking up beautifully chipped arrow points from the rocks. Had you asked him about man’s problems, he would have wondered what was the matter with you. He wasn’t interested, and he had more important things on his mind.

But he was hooked, nevertheless. He was hooked from the day he found his first arrow point, read his first book, looked at the stars. He went fishing along the clean mountain streams, and he soaked up the sun. But new ideas were in the air—and Bob Quinton inevitably soaked up more than just Vitamin D.

By 2010, UN exploration ships had contacted Procyon and Centaurus. They had contacted four other systems as well—and the ships had never returned. The contacts were hushed up until a major war threatened between India and China, and then life on other worlds was announced.

Bob Quinton was fourteen years old.

The patchwork pattern of the self-styled “culture tinkers” took form. It took shape as UNBAC—the Business Advisory Council of the United Nations. BAC gave tips and planned developmental patterns for the commercial interests of Earth, and it got tax-free support funds. Most of UNBAC, the part the people saw, made itself extremely useful and had the reputation for being the only practical part of the UN.

The rest, the secret part, wasted its time on survival.

Bob Quinton went to college and majored in anthropology. He had fun and drank a lot of beer and married a classmate. The world was calm and pleasant for ten years, on the surface, and the belief was loudly proclaimed that a New Golden Age had arrived—the date of the first one being tactfully not mentioned.

He saw a lot of the world, and a lot of other worlds. He went up fast and he grew up fast. In some dimly-perceived but acute way, Bob Quinton felt that a lot of things depended on him, and upon men like him. He seldom talked about them, and when others did he usually felt uncomfortable and bored. The obvious didn’t need elaboration. But he felt them.

In the silence of space.

In the stars in the eyes of a child.

It should have been dashing, romantic. There should have been bands playing and medals and people cheering. It should have been a richly rewarding and pleasant life. But it wasn’t.

It was tough and dirty and bitter.

So Robert Quinton worked on, in the late summer of 2034, in the island city of Galveston. Few people even knew he was there, and fewer still cared. He did things he hated and saw a friend cut down before his eyes.

He worked, fists clenched, a smile on his face. He worked, and when he was through the average citizen could not have told Wiley Carruthers Pond from Thomas Jefferson.

Or Donald Weston from the Devil.

They flew Conway, still alive, back to New Mexico Station and left Robert Quinton alone in his apartment. That same night, Jo Weston came to see him.

She walked in quietly, out of the darkness. She slipped off her light summer jacket and sat down in Quinton’s best chair. She crossed her astonishing legs and eyed him questioningly.

“Drink?” she asked, in a voice that was cold honey.

Quinton nodded, unsurprised. “Guess I owe you one or two,” he said. It wasn’t a particularly original remark, but he didn’t care. This, too, was a scene he had played too many times before. It was getting more than a little stale. He mixed her a stiff Scotch and soda, took one himself, and waited.

“I don’t understand you, Mr. Quinton,” Jo said finally.

“Call me Bob,” Quinton said.

Jo smiled, her teeth white and sharp. Her golden blond hair caught the soft highlights of the room and her blue lips invited.

“You’re out to get my husband,” Jo said steadily. “Why?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Quinton said. He looked into her frosted blue eyes. She knows, his mind whispered. She has to know.

“Don’t lie to me, Bob,” Jo said softly. “Another drink?”

Quinton fixed it for her, and watched the slight flush creep up her smooth neck while she drank. A flush, he thought irrelevantly, is caused by blood. There was more blood right across from where she sat, just a dark spot on the rug now. Pat’s blood. Quinton lit a cigarette.

“Bob,” Jo whispered, “I want you to stop it.”

Quinton looked at her. “I love my wife,” he said evenly.

Jo stiffened, her smile vanishing. “Don’t play games, hero,” she said quietly. “I’m not kidding.”

“Neither am I,” Quinton said.

They stared at each other. Quinton would have bet a small fortune, had he had one, that Jo could have counted the times men had said no to her without using any fingers at all.

“I… I don’t understand,” she whispered. She began to cry, softly.

“That isn’t worthy of you, beautiful,” Quinton said. “It won’t work.”‘

The crying stopped. “Fix me another drink, lover,” Jo said.

Quinton walked into the kitchen and mixed the drink. When he came back into the room he looked down the muzzle of a small pistol held in Jo’s white hand.

“You drink it, lover,” Jo said. “You’re going to need it.”

Quinton sat down and sipped at the Scotch. He didn’t say anything. He was calm, relaxed. He had played this scene before, too.

“You’re going to take the heat off,” Jo Weston said, the gun steady in her hand. “You can play this little game any way you want to play it, but the pressure’s going to stop. You’re leaving town, hero—one way or the other.”

Quinton raised his eyebrows.

“You don’t think I’d kill you,” Jo said coldly.

She fired with startling quickness and a slug slammed past Quinton’s ear and buried itself in the chair. He jumped, spilling some of his drink. He hadn’t expected that.

“I think you would,” he said, “if you could.”

The tiny Skippy from Quinton’s sleeve spring leaped into his right hand and he fired instantly, without seeming to aim. There was a light poof and Jo dropped her gun. Her hand had a sliver of silver needle through it. Her fingers were dead. She didn’t make a sound.

“Sorry, baby,” Quinton said, and meant it.

He went to her, scooped up the gun, and led her to the kitchen. He pulled out the needle with a practiced hand, washed the wound, and dressed it with the same kit he had used on Pat. Then he led her back into the living room.

Jo just looked at him, her blue eyes tight with pain.

“Here,” Quinton said, handing her the rest of the drink. “You’ll be able to use this.”

Jo tensed her slim figure, breathing hard. She smiled icily and threw the drink in his face. Then she turned on her heel and walked out the door.

Quinton wiped his dripping face with his handkerchief and watched her go. She hurried down the dark street alone, her heels clicking on the pavement. Her head was up, proudly.

A factor, Quinton thought, a number in an equation?

Or only a woman in love with her man?

Quinton watched her until she passed out of sight. She was both, of course—but that was words. What good were words?

He walked back into his apartment and closed the door.

When it was all over, Quinton didn’t wait for the final returns. The election itself hadn’t been too much of a problem—such things had been arranged on Earth long before UNBAC had come into being. Quinton didn’t bother with Pond; they were through with him, except for the money.

He went out to the Weston home, out by the causeway where the old men still sat fishing in the afternoon sun.

Jo opened the door. “What are you doing here?” she asked coldly. “Get out.”

“Let him in,” Donald Weston said over her shoulder. “Let him in, you fool.”

Jo stepped aside and Quinton walked in. The living room was just as he had left it. The volume from the Reader’s Digest was still ajar in the bookcase. But Donald Weston had changed. Quinton sat down and lit a cigarette. He didn’t look at Jo’s eyes.

“A tough break about the election,” he said. “I was sorry to hear it, Don.”

Donald Weston smiled, but only with his mouth. His deep green eyes bored through Quinton like an ice drill. Quinton felt centipedes crawling up his spine.

“Our offer is still open, Don,” he said pleasantly. “How about it?”

Donald Weston sat down, his face blank, his straw-colored hair neatly combed as always. He was breathing too fast. “Suppose I say no,” he said, his voice a little too high. “Suppose I decide to stay here.”

Quinton took a drag on his cigarette, feeling death all around him in the little room. “I wouldn’t know about that,” he said. “The decision, of course, is up to you.”

“Is it?” Weston asked, his voice tightly under control. “Is it?”

Quinton shrugged.

“Still playing games, Mr. Quinton?” Jo asked. Her hand curled tensely on her chair arm, making her white scar stand out against her white skin.

Quinton smoked his cigarette. She might have been queen of the world, he thought.

“Cards on the table, Quinton,” Donald Weston said. His green eyes were narrowed to slits. “Quickly.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Quinton said.

Donald Weston stood up, fast.

“Let’s put it this way,” Quinton went on, every nerve alert and screaming. “I don’t think you’d do very well on Earth, Don. You never would be able to do yourself justice. On the other hand, we can use you on Mars. Our company can always use men like you. You’d be comfortable there, and you’d get considerably more than your share of things. We’d want you to be happy, you understand. On Mars, you’d be set for life—although, of course, it wouldn’t be feasible for you to come back to Earth. If you should stay here… well, it’s a gamble, isn’t it?”

Weston clenched his fists, breathing hard. “I don’t have any choice,” he said flatly, keeping a steel vice on his voice. “Is that it?”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you,” Quinton said, listening to the blood race in his ears. “I’m just offering you a job, that’s all.”

Weston stared.

Jo laughed, unpleasantly.

Quinton waited, his cigarette burning down short against his fingers.

There was a long silence, filled with the hoarse breathing of the man who had called Robert Quinton light-years across the galaxy.

“I’ll take your job,” Weston said finally. “I’ll take it.”

Robert Quinton Smiled broadly and inserted his cigarette butt into the ashdisposer. “Mighty glad to hear that, Don,” he said, getting to his feet and extending his hand.

Weston ignored the hand. “When do I leave?” he asked shortly.

“I think tomorrow would be excellent,” Quinton told him.

“One time’s as good as another,” Weston said. A small muscle twitched in the side of his jaw.

“Fine. If you’ll drop by my office in the morning, we’ll fix things up. A ship will shuttle you to New York tomorrow afternoon, and by ten tomorrow night you’ll be Marsbound.”

Jo sat very still, her eyes closed.

“I’d like to say, Don,” Quinton said, “that I think you’ve made a very wise decision. We’ll do the best we can for you, and that’s straight.”

“Get out of here,” Donald Weston whispered, his voice shaking. “Get out of here.”

“See you in the morning, then,” Quinton said. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Weston.”

He walked out the door and headed for his copter. He was wet with sweat and he needed a drink. This was all wrong, he knew that. He had seen worlds saved before, on the tri-di. He had read books. He had had his own dreams. Worlds were saved by heroes, in a blaze of glory, saved cleanly out among the stars, man to man.

Not like this.

Not by an old man, down in the dirt, cold with sweat.

He walked to his copter and he didn’t look back. He didn’t have to. He felt them behind him, boring into him. Eyes. Icy green eyes, and blue ones lined with red. Eyes that had looked upon a world—full, deep eyes.

Empty, now.

It was the next night, and the lights were low.

The election had caused some local flurry, but not much. No one even knew that Donald Weston was gone. The post-election remarks of Wiley Carruthers Pond were back on the second page of the Galveston Daily News, the big headlines having gone to the space games. It all was moderately interesting to native Galvestonians, but not exactly hot copy now that it was over. The wire services, of course, didn’t even bother to pick it up.

The music throbbed across the dance floor, and Lynn was in the silver gown he liked so well. In Quintan’s pocket was a gram from Siringo that told him that Conway was improving, and had a chance to live.

“This is nice,” Quinton said, holding his wife’s hand across the little table.

Lynn smiled at him—the private smile. “We’ll never grow up,” she said. “We should be past this stage by now.”

“We’re too smart,” Quinton said. “We know better.”

A ship flashed by overhead—only a rumble and a murmur in the night outside. You could hardly hear it over the music. Quinton closed his eyes, watching the ship in his mind. He saw it climb past the planets, out to the crystal stars. To far Centaurus and to Procyon beyond.

The stars called to him, and one day he knew he would have to answer them again.

But this was for now.

He looked around him, at the soft lights, the dancers. He heard the tinkling of glasses and the relaxed laughter of men at play. They didn’t know. They had never felt the stars burning inside them. For them, there was only the night and the whispers and the music.

For Robert Quinton, too—for now.

He stood up, smiling. “Let’s dance,” he said, and held out his arms to his wife.

The End.