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Inherit the Earth

Claude Nunes

PROLOGUE

"Most people today would not agree with you. If a person wants to die, why try to prevent it? The same thing applies to a race. When it reaches the point where the future holds nothing further for it, why not allow it to perish? Why prolong the agony by supplying a proxy?"

"Just put me down as an optimist. If we can deprive a race of the aggressive instinct, it may not progress as far as we have, but at least it may not destroy itself in the effort to get nowhere… worthwhile."

"But why in this form, when you seem to be taking away just that little extra that may give them what they need for survival… ?"

Sometimes people will do things for others that they would not stretch out a little finger to do for themselves. And sometimes they tend to overreach themselves…

I

Jim Beneke came out of the vast but oppressive Mines building and drew a relieved lungfull of cigarette smoke. Inside the furnace he had just left, typewriters still clattered and fans still whirled, trying to bring comfort to the sweating clerks.

Beneke had a minor errand to perform, and had used it, and his seniority, as an excuse to escape half an hour early.

He strolled along the humid, windless streets (it looked as though there would shortly be a thunderstorm) and through an arcade, and stopped at a brightly-lit toy shop. Christmas was coming (Christmas in Africa—how different from the traditional one of the northern hemisphere!), and Marion wanted him to buy the kid a present. A doll, probably. Well, there seemed to be a good selection in this shop.

An egg-headed little man with a remarkable nose came out of the shop. "What can I do for you?" he asked.

"Can you suggest anything suitable for a little girl of five? The answer being, I suppose—a doll."

The shopkeeper eyed him for a moment, then unexpectedly he laughed. No cackle, either, but a rich, deep sound that came strangely from his stunted body. Beneke smiled in sympathy.

"I've got toys, all right," said the little man; "but take a closer look before you start asking me for dolls. These things are out of this world."

They entered the brightly-lit shop together, and Beneke looked intently at the rows and rows of little figures that lined the shelves on the walls. Bright eyes looked back at him from the faces of clowns, babies, golliwogs, and Lilliputian men, women and children. Not glazed, lifeless eyes, either. They had a sharp, quick and intelligent glance that followed his every movement.

Beneke stopped closer in wonderment. Each little being seemed as perfectly formed as if alive and growing. Where the proportions were distorted to give a weird and gnomish look, the work still appeared to have grown that way naturally.

"What on earth—?" He put out one large hand tentatively, and started as the nearest mannikin hurriedly moved away.

"Be careful; they are quite easily alarmed," advised the shopkeeper. "Try a slower approach, and they'll be friendly enough."

Beneke just stared at the mannikins.

"Surprised?" said the little man. "Well, I can't blame you. They are very new, and news of them hasn't traveled far, or I don't suppose I'd have many left to show you."

The little beings watched with an expectant air. Beneke found it difficult to turn away from them.

"What are they?"

"They're a kind of experimental android," replied the shopkeeper. "Made in a laboratory. The firm wants to test public opinion before making them life-size."

"You mean they're alive?" asked Beneke, astonished.

"As alive as you or I, and perhaps longer lived, from what they say; although they are still rather experimental. They have a kind of built-in energy source, and can use practically anything to keep alive and moving."

Beneke put forward his hand again, more cautiously this time, and felt the touch of a tiny, warm hand on his fingers. A little mannikin, only two feet high, was standing clasping hands with him, and Beneke had a distinct feeling that there was a disappointed sigh from the rest of the shelves. If they had had tails, he thought, they would have been wagging them and whining, like a bunch of puppies begging to be adopted.

The little gnome cuddled confidingly against his hands, and Beneke felt a pang of sympathy for the pathetic little people, which he tried hard to suppress.

"I suppose they can feel, just like us," he mused.

"Just like human beings. They're probably more sensitive in some ways, although in others they're not much more intelligent than dogs. They can learn to talk a little, too. It makes me quite sad to have to sell them; but after all, a man must live." He removed a drop of moisture that had wandered down his remarkable proboscis and collected at the end.

Beneke saw a motherly little figure with a minute white apron, and held out a hand to her. She came with dignity, and he held her with care, while the gnome climbed up a mountain of coat to Beneke's shoulder, where he sat in triumph, drumming his little feet against Beneke's chest.

"How much?" asked Beneke.

The shopkeeper named a figure that sent lights bursting in Beneke's brain, but he paid for the two. By check. One doesn't carry that kind of money in his wallet. It was foolish, he knew, but these little people grew on one…

"Funny time to be making luxuries like these," he said.

The little man nodded in agreement.

"If as much time went into solving our political problems as into these toys," he observed, "there wouldn't be any of this fear and suspicion in the country."

It was a long way to Beneke's house. The heat grew more oppressive, then vanished abruptly as Beneke's car purred into a region of massing stormclouds. A cold wind began to blow, and the thunder rumbled along the empty road.

Suddenly a terrific bolt of lightning struck close to the car, dazzling Beneke, and a terrified whimper caught his ear. He slowed and stopped. The rain pelted down and flooded the windshield, and he and the mannikins might have been the only living souls in a lost world of gray.

Beneke turned to investigate the whimper, and was stricken with remorse. The two little beings were huddled together in a cold, leathery corner of the back seat, and there was terror in their eyes. They were shivering with cold as well as with fright, and he made a nest for them with his khaki raincoat. They climbed into this, a little comforted, and snuggled down like puppies.

Beneke turned back to the wheel, and drove expertly on.

It was like having children in the car. The androids had a peculiarly ageless quality—not six years old, and not sixty— but they gave an impression of helplessness. "Go to sleep," he said over his shoulder; and, whether they understood him or not, they did.

With a great clicking of windshield-wipers, Beneke arrived at his home. The wipers were unnecessary, for the rain had stopped. The mist was rising from the ground, and the poplars dripped dankly all over the lawn.

Marion greeted him with a kiss. "My, but you're wet!"

"Terrific rainstorm," he said, "and there was a leak somewhere. You've had a deluge, too?"

"All of Niagara," she said. "Well, come in."

But Beneke was going back to the car.

"Have a look at this," he said when he reached it. "Now what d'you think of that?"

They were sitting by the fire, drinking coffee. The androids were huddled on the hearthrug, looking pale. Young Cherry, ignorant and innocent, was supposed to be in bed.

"They look like Punch and Judy," observed Marion, remembering her childhood.

"No," said Beneke. "More than anything else, they remind me of leprechauns. What shall we call them?"

A soft pattering of bare feet made them look up, and there was their tousled five-year-old, clutching a golliwog. She advanced a little way from the passage, then ran to the fire.

"Ohhhh—what's that?"

Her shrill squeal awakened the androids. They uncurled and sat up, blinking apprehensively.

"Androids," said her father. "Now go to bed."

"What are they for?" countered Cherry, ignoring the command. "What're their names?"

"I don't know," said her father, replying to the second question, but wisely ignoring the first. "Go to bed."

Marion looked up at him, her lips showing the faintest hint of a smile.

"It's no use, Jim," she said. "You're up against feminine curiosity. You might as well tell her all about it. We can't hide them until Christmas, anyway."

Jim sighed and capitulated.

"They're androids," he said to his daughter. "They're for you for Christmas, and I don't know what their names are. I suggest we call them Mab and Oberon. Those in favor, say 'aye.' "

"Aye," said the lady mannikin.

Everyone jumped.

"Now, do you suppose she understood you?" queried Marion.

"Search me," replied her husband. "I don't think so. Ask her."

"What's your name?" asked Marion of the android.

"Name?" asked the little lady.

"Name?" echoed the little man.

"They don't understand," Jim said. "They're only echoing our last words."

"—last words," said the little lady.

Jim turned to her and said firmly, "Mab."

She repeated the name.

"Oberon," said Jim to the other. But this was a tougher nut to crack. Even the child was struggling with it, and could produce nothing better than "Number One."

"Oh-beron," said Beneke.

The child struggled with it for some time; but then she scowled and said petulantly, "I don't want to call him Oh-anything. His name's Dickie."

But the little man, who had been shaping the word silently, with fierce concentration, said suddenly, "Oh-beron."

"Dickie!" said Cherry, turning on him.

"Oberon."

"Dickie!"

"Oh—" began the android; but the child, screaming with rage, knocked him spinning with her hand, to fall flat on his back and lie peering up at her with a comical air of astonishment, like a pug-nosed pup knocked over by a cat. Then a look of bewildered hurt filled his brown eyes, and the little woman rushed up to him and began mopping his face with her tiny apron.

Beneke watched the tableau for a moment. Then his hand descended with a resounding whack on his daughter's posterior, and her wailing filled the house. She fled back to the bedroom, and peace gradually came back.

Beneke came home with more eagerness than he liked to admit. It would have seemed peculiar to his friends if he had tried to explain how interested he was in a pair of dolls. Why, it wasn't even second childhood; it was—he shuddered at the thought. Ruin his reputation for sanity, it would!

Whistling, and trying to look nonchalant, he greeted his wife with the usual kiss. The house was remarkably silent.

"Where is everybody?" he asked.

"Everybody?" His wife looked innocent.

"Don't be a tease," said Beneke, kissing her again for good measure. "You know who I mean. The brat and the androids."

"Oh," said Marion, "I thought so. The brat, as you term her, has been playing mother to the androids. And don't you dare do so much as drop a pin, or she'll be out on the rampage, demanding to know why you're disturbing her babies. She's got them in the main bedroom, too, so you can't go in there. Better give me your coat, and I'll put it in the spare room."

Beneke groaned with mock despair.

"Made an outsider by my own daughter," he said. "Ousted from my home by a couple of animated dolls. Well, I'll reflect that it's good training for the kid, and be comforted."

A little later, he asked, "Do they understand her?"

"Remarkably well," replied his wife. "Her talk is more than half pantomime, and they're very quick at associating words with gestures. She has them fetching and carrying all sorts of things, and they don't mind in the least. But she's still a baby, and she doesn't realize that she hurts them sometimes. I spend half my time running to see whether they've survived."

Beneke was silent for a moment. Then:

"She'll learn," he said. "But in the meantime, I hope that androids, like infants, are tough. They don't look it."

Marion smiled. "Oh, we all love them—even Cherry. And a little love goes a long way with them. There's really no need to worry."

The months passed, and it was autumn in Africa. Beneke and his wife sat on the porch late one evening, enjoying the cool wind that flowed down from the hills.

"I don't know why," murmured Beneke lazily, watching a swallow dart backwards and forwards in wide circles that took it under the eaves at each swing, "but since I bought the androids, life seems to have changed."

"It's really wonderful." Marion glanced at the house entrance for a moment. "They add so much interest to every day that I don't know what I'd do without them."

"It's like teaching someone who's very interested in learning and takes all you say as gospel truth," Jim said, nodding thoughtfully. "All the same, they have me at a loss for words sometimes. Make me feel that human beings are such—bastards!" He brought out the word explosively, but Marion only chuckled.

"That's how I feel, too. They're so sweet and good-natured, and so free of vice and greed, that it makes me wonder why human beings can't be like that, too. Not," she added, "that they're saints. Oberon can be an imp of mischief without knowing it. The other day that daughter of ours got hold of a box of matches, and now I find Oberon repeating her lesson, 'Strike—fire—burn!' whenever he sees anything even remotely resembling a matchbox. It's really Cherry I should punish," she added.

"There's one other thing they lack," observed Beneke. "Real curiosity. They learn what we tell them, and remember it beautifully, but there's no comparison with Cherry's questions—"

Marion interrupted with a gigantic sigh of despair, and mimicked, "Mummy, where does an egg get its chicken? Mummy, why can't I walk up a wall? Mummy, come quick! Is this a mouse's nest?"

"Anyhow," said Jim, "look where our curiosity got us. That, and our greed, and our general cussedness—"

"I know, I know. I know it all by heart, and I don't even look at the newspapers anymore. I prefer the peace and quiet of my own home. And it is more peaceful since the androids came. They have such a restful live-and-let-live attitude—"

Suddenly there was a loud scream behind him, and the little girl came flying out of the house, her feet bare and her eyes tear-stained.

"Oberon's disappeared! He's gone! I can't find him!" she sobbed, and flung herself into her mother's arms.

"There, there," soothed Marion. "What happened?"

"I heard Mab moving about, and she was crying and looking for him, and he's gone," wept Cherry.

Beneke had already disappeared into the house. Marion and her daughter followed, their hearts beating wildly. The little man had come to mean more to them than they cared to admit.

Inside the house, Beneke was slamming doors, opening cupboards, and peering under beds; and then he was rattling at the linen-closet door, which opened with an ominous creak.

There, huddled on the bottom shelf, was Oberon. His gnomish face was ghastly pale against his soft brown suit, and his little body was hunched up as if in mortal fear. He hung limply from their hands as Marion drew him out.

"Poor baby," she said, and massaged him tenderly.

"How did he get in there?" asked Beneke.

Cherry's eyes widened.

"Oh!" she said, remembering, her hands in front of her mouth. "I put him there. He was bad, and I put him in prison—"

"And I saw the open door and turned the key," added Marion. "So we're both to blame."

Cherry picked up the gnome as though he were a cat, and he stared at her parents with tragic, owlish eyes over her shoulder as she carried him away. Then came excited little whimpers from Mab in the bedroom… then, gradually, quiet.

Marion heaved a long, quavering sigh, and said, "How we do get worked up over them. But oh, Jim, it's so—pathetic!"

They reached their own bedroom, and Beneke sat down. He drew off one sock and sat absently looking at it.

"What if we had to leave them behind?" he asked.

Marion turned around sharply.

"Leave them behind? But you said—" The hand holding her hairbrush dropped limply. "Do you really want to leave?"

"No," said Jim. "I don't. But we may have to. The situation at Geneva is terrible, and even the newspapers seem to think that the limit has been reached in the way of threats. War is nearer than you think."

Marion's legs gave way, and she sat down suddenly.

"To think," she said, "that I've been blinding my eyes to the newspapers, shutting my ears, holding onto my sanity by burying myself in Cherry and the androids. I thought that was the only way; that we would have to sit and take what comes. But now, to leave… ?"

"Many of my friends have cut and run," said Beneke. "The others all think as you do. But I'm not so sure there's not more of a future on Riga than there is here. We don't have to sit with our hands in our laps, waiting to die of war or radiation. The ships to Riga are faulty, the conditions are hard, but a few people have already left Earth for there."

"And we'll go, too?" asked Marion.

The question fell upon a silent room. They slept badly that night. And the next. And the next.

"Well, it's settled," said Beneke, coming home one day. "We're going on the twenty-fourth of May. That gives us—"

"A little over a month," said Marion, catching her breath. "And the androids?"

"They'll have to be left behind. I've done my best, but allowances for extras are cut down to such a fine limit that we'll have to take only the barest essentials. I hate to do it, but there's no help for it."

"What will we do with them?" cried Marion. "They're so helpless! What about the Moores?"

After a frantic telephone call to her old friends, Marion breathed a sigh of relief.

"They'll take them," she said. "Well pass by their house on the way to the rocket-port, and leave them there. I hope Cherry doesn't find out—it would break her heart."

"We won't tell her," said Beneke.

The month passed all too swiftly. Marion, to still the ache in her heart, tried her best to keep occupied with packing, so as not to look too long at the familiar beauty of the house —its polished floors, its soft pastel rooms, its bright garden where Jim battled unceasingly with weeds, and which absorbed all his pocket-money. It would be so easy just to walk about and mourn.

The androids sensed her mood, as dogs will, and followed her around, making plaintive little noises and getting under her feet. They fetched and carried for her, while Cherry stood beside the heaps of treasured possessions, hugging a doll and asking questions.

"Where are we going, Mummy?"

"To visit a friend for a few weeks, darling."

"Can Mab and Oberon come too?"

"Oh, yes. Now leave me to my packing, dear."

Marion sighed, forced to discard treasure after treasure. She would have to leave most of her wedding gifts behind, and her wardrobe. Finally, in despair, she put everything lovingly back into its familiar place, and filled the three pitifully small suitcases with clothing as warm and light as possible, with a few bottles of compressed food-tablets in each.

The great day arrived. On the night before, Jim had turned away from the telephone, his face white.

"The Moores—they aren't there!"

"What do you mean—aren't there?" demanded Marion.

"A strange voice answered their phone, and said that the Moores had moved out three weeks ago. No address given. Now what?"

Marion stared at him helplessly.

"We'll have to leave them here," she said sorrowfully.

"We haven't time to make other arrangements. We can send for them as soon as we get to Riga. I hope they'll be all right. They don't need food or anything." Jim squeezed her shoulders comfortingly. "We'll send for them," he said. "Don't worry." And they went to sleep, restlessly, for their last night on Earth.

The androids watched forlornly as the car sped down the hill and gradually passed from sight along the highway below. They stood there for a long time, not quite comprehending what had happened to them. The house and the garden seemed desolate, unnaturally quiet. A faint rustle stirred the leaves of the poplars, bringing down a few to scatter on the lawn; and then they were alone.

That fact took several days to penetrate their numb minds. But slowly the ice began to thaw, and small changes to take place under the surface. Knowing a freedom that had not been possible under the humans, the androids changed, without at first knowing what was happening to them.

Every community carries a weight of sorts around with it, a weight that rests on each member and tends to narrow the horizons of all and limit their opportunities. Mab and Oberon, unknowingly, were members of a new species, but, because of their association with Beneke and his family, they did not realize what they were capable of doing.

Change was what they needed, and change was overdue; but the androids carried on their daily routine without any apparent realization that they could no longer carry on in the old ways.

The company of soldiers lay in a long line just below the brow of the hill, overlooking the house. The captain focused his binoculars unnecessarily for the tenth time, and watched curiously as the small figure moved slowly around in the garden below.

"It's difficult to understand," he said suddenly, without looking at the lieutenant who squatted at his side. "There appears to be nobody in the house but two tiny children— or are they midgets?"

"A trap, perhaps?" suggested the other tentatively. "It hardly seems likely that two small children would be left alone at a time like this, in the face of our invasion of their country."

"A peculiar sort of trap. What could they hope to gain by abandoning children to the mercy of a modern army? In any case, as far as we've been able to make out, they don't seem aware of anything out of the ordinary."

He came to a sudden decision, and at his command the hill sprouted men moving rapidly forward toward the house.

Oberon was seated in his favorite chair (several sizes too large for him) in the lounge, while Mab was cleaning valiantly with an outsize mop, when suddenly there was a loud rap on the door. When they turned towards the sound, the door swung violently open with a crash, and there stood two khaki-clad Titans clutching malevolent-looking guns. Mab backed away a little, nervously, but stood her ground.

The silence was tense for a long moment. Then came the tramp of heavy boots up the veranda steps, and the captain came to inspect his quarry. He paused at the threshold, looking the androids up and down with some bewilderment.

"Children?" he asked of no one in particular. Then, to the androids: "Where are your parents?"

He was basically a kindly man, and Oberon took courage from his gentle tone of voice.

"All the people have gone away," he said, looking up at the captain, who towered above the armchair. "We are waiting for someone to come and fetch us."

The captain listened, watching them and wondering whether there was not some factor which he had missed. They seemed so incredibly tiny and childlike, and yet there was a hint of maturity, as though they were not as simple as they seemed.

He turned and called through the doorway, "Come in. There doesn't seem to be anything to stop us from taking possession."

Then he turned to the androids and said, gently, as if to very small children, "Come into the next room and tell me all about it."

Without a word, Oberon clambered down from his chair and led the way. Mab followed. But they both seemed tongue-tied when they reached the study.

As he sat down at the study table, the captain picked up some letters which seemed to have been gathering dust there for some time, and started to read them idly, wondering how to get the little people to talk. Something he read caught his attention, and he concentrated on the letter, reading rapidly and pausing only once to glance at the androids, who stood uncomfortably in front of him.

"So—animated dolls," he said with some amusement. "And we were afraid of a trap! This is a joke too good not to be shared. Lieutenant!" he called.

As his aide entered the room at a half-run, the captain sat back and pointed at the little people.

"Ever had a fancy to play with dolls, Jan?" he asked, laughing at the expression on the young man's face.

"Dolls, sir?"

"Just that your suggestion of a trap, referring to these little things, was quite a joke, as it appears. They are nothing but a pair of animated dolls—a type that seems to have become quite popular before the war."

"I don't know why it is," the captain remarked a few days later, "but the men actually seem less crude when the little people are around."

"I've noticed that," replied the lieutenant. "You would almost think they were in a convent, sir, the way they talk."

"Perhaps it's because the androids are small, and give the impression of being childlike. Most adults tend to put brakes on their language when kids are listening."

"Not only that, sir; when we first came, the men even passed… er… remarks about the little woman, sir. Now they all go out of their way to be kind to her, and if anyone did the slightest thing out of the way, he would be in danger from the others."

"Not all that badly?"

"Not yet, sir, but it's getting to be that way."

"See that it doesn't go too far, lieutenant. I'd be sorry if anything happened to her, but I wouldn't turn into a man-eating tiger on that account. Yet, war does strange things to people; so watch out for any trouble. Although, come to think of it, the war does seem curiously remote here. There is an atmosphere about this place—"

"Kind of peaceful, sir?"

"Peaceful enough. Like a cabaret on a Sunday morning! Get the men to polish up on drill. Give the place a bit more life. Oh, and—"

"Yes, sir?"

"What was that business of Sergeant Heinrich's small-arms drill?"

"That, sir? It appears that the androids were sitting on the porch while he was showing the rookies the quickest method of dismantling and re-assembling the stun-pistols. Well, you know old Heinrich when he's really annoyed, cursing and bawling at the men for being a second or so slower than they should be. Not that he was actually abusive this time, probably because the little people were watching.

"Anyway, some of the fellows were evidently on a slow-motion strike, because he really exploded. Then, for some reason or other, the two little ones on the porch caught his attention."

"I've noticed that," the captain said. "They are always remarkably interested in everything, like a pair of lively puppies. But carry on, this sounds interesting."

"Well, old Heinrich thought that getting the little man into the affair might help to ginger up the troop. So he beckoned to him, and the little chap walked up as though butter wouldn't melt in his mouth."

"I can guess what comes next. The sergeant asked Oberon to have a go at the assembly?"

"Yes, sir. But the surprising thing is that he managed the operation perfectly, as if he had done it dozens of times before. Oh, that may be a bit of an exaggeration; but even though he seemed to find the weapon a bit heavy for him, even Heinrich couldn't find fault with the way he had done the job."

"There is something going on here that I can't quite make out," said the captain, pacing restlessly up and down. "Why all this interest in our goings-on?" He sighed, and looked at his aide. "Even the tone of the letters I found showed those dolls in a different light from the one we see them in. Perfect Christmas presents for a child of five, indeed."

From the beginning, an air of tranquility seemed to have always accompanied the androids. Most people, like Jim Beneke, had only noticed it in a desultory sort of way, because they were not naturally noisy and aggressive. With the soldiers, it was different, because, like most people who live in danger, they had tended to drop their more civilized inhibitions; and so the change in their behavior was all the more noticeable.

Oberon was bewildered by his sudden ability to perform the complicated assembly of the stun-pistol, when asked to do so by the sergeant. It had been as if he carried a camera in his brain and remembered the necessary actions as a series of slow-motion films which unwound as he worked. Oberon had never heard the phrase, "total recall," and had no standard of comparison.

The soldiers' holiday (for that was how they had come to think of it) came to an end eventually. The captain cursed under his breath, and mentally consigned all radio communication to the most lurid of hells; but orders had to be obeyed.

With one consent, the ranks turned in marching salute to Mab and Oberon, as the two dolls stood watching them move away down the road. There had been wet eyes among the men, but nobody commented.

"They don't give the impression of being alien to us," the captain said, forcing himself not to glance back at the house on the hill. "Never once did I imagine that they meant anything but good towards us."

"Nor did I, sir," his aide responded. "They definitely did not seem alien, sir; more like humanity in miniature."

"Only in size, though. There was always a feeling of bigness about them, as if they made up for their lack of incites with other qualities. And yet, there was something lacking in them. Perhaps it was just that they never seemed to have any drive, any—" He fumbled for the right word.

"Ambition, sir?"

"Could be. Aggression, certainly. Sometimes I wonder whether that drive is altogether necessary. It seems to have got us into one hell of a mess; and this time it looks as if we'll never get out of it at all. A little of their spirit in our leaders, a little less self-seeking pride and arrogance, and we might have been able to have come to some sort of an agreement long ago…"

On thinking back afterward, the captain was astounded at his own attitude toward the androids while he had been in contact with them. Coming of a normally suspicious, intolerant society as he did, he had surprisingly not made an effort to find out exactly what the androids were capable of doing. The incident of the gun assembly alone, even if not coupled with the changed behavior of the men, should have been enough to have aroused his suspicions; but the fact remained that he followed his orders from headquarters, without making even a routine report about the little people.

Mab and Oberon, left alone once more, felt some of that sense of desolation that had come after the Benekes had gone away. All that night, and for many days afterwards, they watched curiously as sound thundered back from the distant hills. At night the sky was lit by flashes of fiery light; and there was an ominous grumble and mutter that shook the earth beneath them.

As the days passed, the androids could not help noticing how the traffic on the road below decreased in volume, until, eventually, days drew on to weeks, and there was no sign of any vehicle, not even a military one.

Surprisingly, they both busied themselves competently with household tasks; Oberon weeding busily in the garden, as he had seen Beneke doing in one of the latter's rare bursts of energy, and Mab sweeping and cleaning in the big house as though to the manner born. All the same, there was something mechanical about their methods, as though they remembered and performed everything parrot-fashion.

Both began to feel restive, spending more and more time together, but never talking much. They sensed vaguely that there was something lacking, something futile about their activities.

One day, something snapped.

Oberon stopped weeding suddenly, looking at the garden fork as though he had never seen it before. Then he flung it down irritably and went in search of Mab. Almost as if she had known there was something worrying him, she met him at the front door.

"It isn't right!" Oberon sank to a sitting position on one of the deep-pile rugs in the lounge, and drew his knees, child-fashion, to his chin. "Nothing we are doing makes sense any more."

"But They always did things like this," Mab said, looking at him eagerly, as though expecting him to say something out of the ordinary.

"I know," Oberon replied in a worried tone, wrinkling up his face and clutching his knees tighter than ever. "That's what makes things so difficult. Must we always think of things the way They did?"

He rubbed his head miserably, as if that would make his brains work harder.

"But we aren't big people!" Mab burst out suddenly. "That's why everything has always seemed so queer. Just because they did things like sweeping the house is no reason why we should do the same."

"Not quite what I meant." Oberon was speaking more fluently now, as though some sort of block had been lifted from his mind. "It's necessary to keep the house clean, and nice to have the garden weeded. Looks better that way. No, it's not what they did; it's the way they did it."

For a moment Mab gazed blankly at him, then at her outsize broom, as an idea slowly crystalized in her mind. Then she moved suddenly, with the precision of a ballet dancer, and did something to her broom, which went gliding across the room as fast as the little woman could move. Mab meanwhile kept rotating with a motion too fast for Oberon to see. Where the broom had touched, the floor shone and gleamed.

"That's it!" Oberon cried, jumping to his feet and giving the little woman an impetuous hug. "A much better way of doing the job. Probably there are better ways of doing everything, if only we gave a little thought to them."

"Why didn't the big people ever think of sweeping this way?" Mab asked thoughtfully. "It's so simple once you know how."

"Maybe they were too busy to think," Oberon said. "Or perhaps we don't see things the way they did. In any case, now that I know what was the matter, we should find it easier to get things done."

He discovered a new method of weeding, too, and the weeds disappeared almost overnight, and the garden flourished as never before. Repair jobs on the house became fewer and fewer as time passed, and almost imperceptibly, improvements began to appear. Every day brought something new to be learned. There were new skills, new experiences, new sensations, which neither of them had ever dreamed existed. They felt twice as alive as they had been when, puppet-like, they had lived with the Benekes. The big people, far from helping them, had unknowingly retarded their progress. Everything seemed startlingly different now.

The exhausted man staggered blindly along the road, tormented by thirst. One arm was held protectingly across his face, which was crisscrossed with reddened welts. Once or twice he stopped and glanced blearily around, as if searching for something in the veldt; then, disappointed, he stumbled weakly on again.

All the while, the voices came back to him, urging him on. After all this time, all this hellish effort, he couldn't fail them now! High above the street in his office, in the doomed town, he and his business partner (and nephew) had been discussing the futility of the war…

"It doesn't look good for us," the young man had said despondently. "The enemy advancing through the country, and the bombs—"

"The bombs! The enemy are nothing. People don't seem to realize that nobody is going to win this one," sighed the old man, his face a mask of despair. "The trouble is that if the invasion cannot be stemmed, the leaders may unleash the bombs—and the chances of escape from those are nil."

"Perhaps your starry-eyed friends had the right idea after all," the nephew mused.

"I only wish I knew." The old man walked over to the window and looked out at the stars. Somewhere in the flickering brightness was Riga. "But the starships were a forlorn hope to begin with."

"All the same, you were right to try," the younger man said. "If only a few reach their destination, there will be somebody to carry on from where we left off. Maybe they will even do better, if they can avoid the mistakes we made."

"And if they fail there are still the dolls," the uncle said. He looked at his companion as if for reassurance. "If only we had had a little more time to see how they were adapting themselves!"

"In a way," said the young man thoughtfully, "it does seem a pity that we had to play down their aggressive instinct. That one factor might have proved to be the decisive one in assuring their survival."

"They may develop something in its place," the old man said feebly.

"But wasn't that a bit of a mistake on your part, leaving it all to chance?"

"There wasn't time!" the old man answered, almost wildly. "There has never been enough time! Events moved so fast that we were forced to sell them before otir tests were complete. If it were only possible to visit even one group that had been isolated, before it is too late—"

The young man turned serious eyes towards a large metal filing cabinet in one corner of the room.

"As a matter of fact," he said, "I think there is one group fairly close to the city." He riffled through the cards. "Yes. There are the two dolls you sold to a James Beneke. Some miles out of town, on an isolated homestead."

The old man staggered a little as he stumbled along the endless dusty road. A small breeze raised little dust clouds to choke him, making his long hike that much more unbearable. He remembered how his nephew had reacted when he had insisted on leaving the city. The young man had pleaded with him to stay, warned him that he might meet the invaders, or be stranded somewhere in the country, far from help.

But now, it was too late for the people left behind in the city. He shuddered as he remembered the sound of the rockets, the frightful concussion and the gradual, throbbing return to awareness, to find himself still mobile but badly burned by the radio-activity. It seemed doubtful whether anyone else had survived that raging inferno.

It was the flash of the sun reflected from the white-painted walls of the house that attracted his attention, since he had already passed the entrance to the narrow road that ran up the hill toward it. With a sigh, more of desperation than relief, he turned and followed the vision, until he found himself walking towards the house up a pleasant, shady drive. There was a touch of disbelief in his face as he noticed the well-swept lawns and flourishing beds of flowers. The house, too, looked surprisingly well-preserved; and for the first time an expression of hope came into his eyes.

As he neared the steps of the house, there was a sudden hoarse bark, and an enormous dog bounded out of the door and advanced snarling towards him. For a moment the old man groped futilely at his belt, as though seeking a weapon. Then he started to retreat slowly, with his face turned towards the animal.

"Never mind Jock," came a soft voice from the porch. It was almost as much of a shock to his system as the dog had been. "Just continue walking and he won't harm you."

There was a note of conviction in the voice, and the tattered figure advanced again, more cautiously this time, towards the steps. He caught just a glimpse of a tiny female figure watching from the entrance to the house, and then he swayed and collapsed at the top of the steps.

The room, when he opened his eyes, felt cool after the heat of the road. It was some time before he could muster the strength to look around him. Standing beside his couch was a two-foot-high android which he vaguely remembered. In his shop… how many centuries ago… ?

"You're one of the—" he began, weakly.

"Yes!" answered Oberon, seemingly materializing from nowhere to stand beside Mab. "We're the dolls you sold to Mr. Beneke."

"I hoped I'd see you again before I died," said the ex-shopkeeper, wrinkling his face painfully and squinting at the little man. "We tried to keep track of all of you, but the war came too soon and we weren't able to carry out our plans properly." He coughed weakly as he spoke.

"So there always was a plan," said Oberon. "We have suspected it for a long time, but we had no real evidence. I think you can clear up quite a lot."

"Tell me something first," said the old man eagerly. "How well have you managed since the big ones went away?"

"There is so much to tell, and so little time," said Oberon, with pity in his voice.

"But at least I can die knowing there is someone left behind."

"Did you know, when we were first made, that we were not quite the same as ordinary humans?" Oberon was feeling his way now, trying to find out exactly what the old shopkeeper knew of their capacities.

"It was the computers that warned us of the radiation danger to our people," the old man said. "That was why we made you immune, so that when mankind died there would be someone to carry on—"

"We really are human in a way, then?" asked the android, slowly. "Only selection and breeding made us smaller, and different?"

"It wasn't only your size and capacity to resist radiation that we changed," said the old man, coughing again, and nearly faltering. "It's your attitude to life, and… other things."

"The big ones were self-seeking and envious, from what Mab and I have been able to gather. That's what we can't quite understand," said Oberon.

"For one thing, you're self-sufficient, for the time being," the old man explained. "Practically anything will supply you with energy. The lack of necessity to fight for your survival frees you from the rat-race of hunting and killing and farming. I notice that you get on very well with at least one animal—and probably with all of them."

"That's true," Mab chimed in. "We are friends with the creatures. Perhaps they sense that they have nothing to fear from us, because we won't kill them."

"Given only these two things," mourned the old man, "mankind might also have advanced further. Perhaps, even now, there is a chance for him on the other worlds he has gone to."

"But not on this one, because of the radiation?" Oberon spoke as though he had not already known, but the old man was too weak to notice. Oberon looked at him with sorrow. "If you had come sooner, there might have been something we could have done about your burns."

The old man was silent for a while, but then he spoke again, as though the previous remark had been forgotten.

"Have the two of you had any—?" His voice faded away, but Oberon answered his unfinished query.

"Mab and I have had two children. Like us in every way that matters."

"Do they—have the same quality that we have tried to give you?" The old man's voice was eager in spite of his exhaustion.

"If you mean that they are not likely to take the same path to destruction that mankind did, I think you planned correctly for the future."

For a moment the old man's face creased painfully into a smile, and then he lay back, trembled a little, and was gone.

"At least he went to his death feeling that they were not entirely doomed." He did not meet Mab's eyes as she looked at him from across the room. "He would not have believed what we could have told him, anyway. For an intelligent person, he was very slow at grasping that there is a big difference between possessing humility and allowing oneself to be trodden on."

"The mere fact that we did not try to help prevent the final explosion does not make criminals out of us," said Mab softly. "After all, they were supposedly mature beings with perfect freedom to patch up another peace."

"That would not have mattered much, in the long run," said Oberon. "The flash-point would have come sooner or later in any case, and the end would have been the same. They would never have accepted the idea that we were capable of helping them. As it was, we started to reach maturity rather late in the day."

He thought for a while, and then said, "It seems remarkable that they should have overlooked the consequences of tampering with the laws of genetics. The addition of one or two new traits, and the elimination of a few others, actually seemed enough to them. They didn't seem to think that other, unexpected, characteristics might emerge—like the telepathic ones."

"And now," said Mab, "we still have to face the fact that the future is not going to be easy, for a long time to come. The old man hinted that our built-in energy source was not likely to last forever. We could have told him that ourselves If he had been a little more observant—or perhaps his condition was to blame—he would have seen how shabby we have become, and how neglected the house and garden, in spite of our efforts to keep things looking well on the surface."

Oberon nodded grimly. "From now on, life is going to be a struggle. It is urgent that we contact more of our own kind, so that settlements can be started. Even if we do have a bit of a head-start, because there is something in the wreckage that can be salvaged, we shall still have to gather together all the survivors, just to avoid taking a big step backwards."

"The old man was only one of many," added Mab. "We may find many of the little people in isolated places. That will give us a chance to carry on until their descendants come back from the stars—if they have survived out there—and find us in possession."

"If that ever happens, they will either have to possess different ideals, or—"

"The meek," said Mab with conviction, "shall inherit the earth."

II

Oberon and Mab paused at the top of the incline above the little village. Just beyond the hill behind it, they knew without daring to admit it to each other, the large white house still stood above the road. By now it must be showing signs of dilapidation and decay, but each of them knew, realized with a faint feeling of nostalgia, that there was no going back.

The tiny android shook his head impatiently, with a quick glance at the bright-eyed little woman at his side, and another probing glance at the five others of his height who stood patiently a few feet behind them.

There was nothing about the cluster of rude shacks below that seemed to carry any promise for the future. Only the smoke from one of the chimneys seemed to have any definite objective, as it curled straight up into the windless sky. There was an air of not quite belonging about the houses, as though they had been flung together in a hurry to serve a momentary purpose that had already been forgotten. Perhaps that was because they had been constructed from the relics of a destroyed civilization; relics that had been salvaged, optimistically, in hopes that something better would replace them in due time.

"It is still not too late to go back," Oberon said without turning to look directly at Mab. "This rescue and salvage trip is not likely to be suited to a woman, and I think you would be happier at home with the children."

"Not if you manage to locate the child you are hunting for. Although she will have passed that age by now. But if she is still alive as we believe, she is going to need another woman around when you find her."

There was a murmur of agreement as Oberon looked around at the others. Nobody seemed inclined to take up the discussion, however, so he grunted and forced himself to move on over the brow of the hill, knowing that the others would follow. Once out of sight of the village, he could no longer refrain from a quick glance behind, even though he realized that the houses would already be hidden from sight.

Oberon grinned at the rubicund, big-eyed little mannikin with the long white beard and twinkling eyes as the latter joined him at the head of the column. Sometimes, he admitted, the humor of the humans had been inimitable, and the little fellow seemed to breathe the spirit of a departed and already half-misunderstood Christmas.

"So we are off to save our people from dying out like the dinosaurs?" Santa grinned cheerfully at him. "Even if not for quite the same reasons."

"Maybe for the reason of size anyway," suggested Oberon. "At least a pair of dinosaurs would have a better chance of coping, given a bit more intelligence."

"Which we like to fancy we have. But without the numbers we need to start things humming, it is not very likely that our technology—such as it is—can take over where the humans left off and proceed from there. In fact, it seems as though we can do nothing to prevent a big slide backwards. It always has been easier to retrogress than to advance."

History had numerous examples of the truth of the remark: civilizations that had waned and never again risen from the gutter, until taken over by other, more virile peoples. Or just been exterminated. But the drawback was that there were no peoples left to take over if the dolls did not succeed on their own. The bombs seemed to have wiped out all those who did not have the immunity to radiation that had been wished on the little people.

Apart from a few desultory remarks, the dollmen remained fairly silent as they crossed the rough patch of country, threading their way between the boulders that littered the hills and valleys. It was not until some hours later, when they found themselves on a deserted highway, that they started to relax again.

In any case, their thoughts had been active as they marched, which accounted to some extent for their lack of conversation. Crude as their extra-sensory powers still were (they were not capable of sensing more than a broad outline of ideas and emotions), these abilities were enough to keep their minds almost fully occupied. It was only when the more subtle nuances made conversation necessary that they broke silence.

"The roads seem to be returning to the wilderness already, after only ten years. That is one of the things that makes me feel we are missing an opportunity." Oberon gestured at the verges where the grasses and wild plants were already encroaching on the road. Every hint of a crack was fast filling with wiry bunches of grass. Another couple of decades and it would be difficult to trace the course of the road at all. Fifty years at most would leave it hidden from sight.

By early evening, the band had progressed perhaps ten miles closer to their objective. If it had not been for the road, it was doubtful whether they would have managed a quarter of that distance through the dense, sub-tropical grasslands.

Oberon watched Mab with a twinge of compassion, knowing by her half-hidden thoughts that she was feeling the fatigue of the day in earnest, now that they were resting for the evening. The fires flickered against the skies as he turned away again, leaving her lying comfortably against a sturdy clump of soft grasses.

As things had gone so far, they had nothing to complain about and they seemed to be in no immediate danger. To the East, perhaps, if any of the wild animals of the reserves had survived the war, it was possible that they would slowly spread out to repopulate the blasted areas, but for the time being the dollmen were the dominant species.

"At least that gives us a breathing space," remarked Santa, his red cheeks flushed even more than usual by the proximity of the fires. Casually he caught the gist of Oberon's thought and commented coolly on it. "As you have said time and again, it is for us to try to make something out of the opportunity."

"Sometimes I wonder if we should not have tried to get away from the humans even before they wiped themselves out." Oberon looked at his companion curiously as he spoke.

"Because of our dependency on them?"

"That as well, of course. As long as we allowed them to believe that we were little more than playthings for their children, what chance did we have to show what we were really capable of? But more important, if we had been left to ourselves, or given some incentive to make use of our abilities, by the time hell broke loose in earnest, we might at least have been able to attempt something useful."

The big-eyed little man nodded thoughtfully and continued looking at the fires for a moment or two before he turned to his companion again.

"It was a bit smothering at times," he admitted.. "But in spite of that, at the time I had no thoughts for anything but my owner. It could have been worse, you know."

"There were some of us who did not have an easy time," Oberon said. "There were some individuals who took out their sadism on us."

"I've seen dogs that were regularly beaten by their owners," Santa agreed, "that still failed to have their spirit broken by it. But there were others of us who did not come out of it as well…"

The small figure stirred uneasily on her rough bed of dried leaves and grasses. Not yet fully asleep, she trembled with agony. Continuing pain and agonizing memories seemed to obsess her every hour. Even though she could no longer remember whether it was something she had experienced herself.

She opened her eyes and stared unseeingly at the blanket of darkness that surrounded her. She had a vague feeling that she had forgotten something important, but the notion kept slipping away. After a few minutes she relaxed again and her mind slowly drifted back to the time when she had lived in the big rambling old farmhouse, the time when she had been protected, almost smothered, with love and kindness by the couple who had accepted her as a substitute for the child they could never have.

At that point Dawn trembled in her sleep, and her thoughts became disjointed as her memories confused what had actually happened with what she thought she had experienced. Perhaps it was a telepathic pickup of what had happened to someone else, but as far as she was concerned, it was indelibly engraved on her conscious mind.

The memory was of a group of bullies who were tormenting a small cowering dog, whose only crime was in being small and different—and unable to hit back. Only this time the victim was fully conscious of their brutality, although unaware of the reason for it.

The best thing that could have been said for them was that they were too young themselves to understand the harm they were doing. If there had been an adult present, the whole episode would probably have been stopped at the beginning, but as it was, there was nobody to prevent the tragedy from developing…

"Oh, it isn't a human bein' anyway!" the tallest of the young boys sneered, as if trying to convince himself. "They're just like toys, and who ever heard of a teddy-bear screaming when its arms or legs got broken off!"

"I don't know, Slim." A thin, dirty-faced boy hitched nervously at his pants. "It just sits there and cries and holds its head as if something is broken. It sounds just like a baby to me."

The bedraggled, tattered little object at the side of the road whimpered with pain and bewilderment. It had seemed such an adventure a few short hours ago, to run out of the garden to find someone to play with. It watched with misting eyes as one of the boys came closer and then it started to scream… again…

Oberon knew that someone was screaming horribly; he could hear it. At the same time, there was a bad taste in his mouth, as if he were going to be sick.

That someone was shaking him violently and shouting frantically in his ear at the same time only dawned on him by degrees, but once the idea penetrated he came instantly to awareness. And instantly wished he were still asleep. At least, then, the things he was remembering with such terrible intensity might have remained in the background of his mind.

As he gagged weakly, Oberon realized that someone else, someone soft and tender, was holding his head and rubbing gently at his back as if trying to distract his attention from his emotions.

"All right, Mab." He forced a smile and looked up at her and Santa as they watched him with troubled expressions. "I'm feeling a little better…" He gagged again, but this seemed like the last spell, and when it was over he leaned back on his elbow near the circle of ashes where the fires had been burning the night before.

"Something hit me that time," Oberon told them. "I can't really remember what it was, but it must have been quite a nightmare to upset me like this."

"You aren't the only one." Mab gestured over her shoulder without bothering to look around, and Oberon half rose to his feet as he saw that there were two other recumbent figures on the grass.

After a moment he looked at them again, realizing that they had been studying his reactions intently all the while. There was something here that just did not make sense.

He lay back thoughtfully on the grass and closed his eyes, trying to make some sense out of his predicament.

With a sudden shock, he started to remember the details of the dream, and sat up hurriedly with a shudder of distaste.

"It's beginning to come back again, isn't it Oberon?" Santa spoke wryly, and Oberon realized that he seemed to have taken control of the situation. Even Mab made no effort to join in the conversation, but merely watched them both with bright, feverish eyes.

"I wish that it wouldn't. But from appearances it seems to have hit more than one of us."

He remembered that it was not usual for a group of the dolls to experience the same dream sequence, especially when they were asleep and thus more receptive.

"But perhaps it was not a dream at all!" He saw something approaching a smile on his friend's face. "So that's it, then?" Oberon frowned as he slowly formulated the idea.

"Someone else… outside our group… must have been remembering something he experienced." He shuddered as the memory returned with sudden vividness and he held his head between his hands for a moment.

"I've got a feeling that it was one of those we're searching for," Santa suggested. "Which makes it look as though we've got more of a problem on our hands than we bargained for."

Oberon knew that none of them would discuss the matter for a while. They would be too busy trying to forget, although he doubted whether they would have much success. The thinker was obviously untrained, so much so that the thoughts came through completely unscreened by his—or her—mind, and made an enormous impact on the dolls who were not capable of putting up a good defense. It was a particularly unfortunate occurrence, because it would undoubtedly tend to crystalize the dislike some of the dolls were beginning to feel toward their dead creators.

"All the clues we have lately seem to point to our mystery dreamer being a girl," Santa said. "The idea may not be palatable, but personally I have no doubts about it. But I also think we're beginning to forget that most of the humans were decent individuals."

Oberon nodded absently without bothering to reply, remembering with a pang of sadness how badly he had felt when the Benekes had seemingly abandoned them to their fate.

Unfortunately, the humans had failed to make allowances for the inevitable deaths from blast and heat alone—even though they had made the dolls immune to the radioactivity. Which was why his own group was in danger of being unable to perpetuate itself. It was easy enough to talk about trying to amalgamate with other, larger groups of dolls, but the fact still remained that it would be better for the future of the race if as many groups as possible survived to repopulate the country. The more variety there was in the gene pool, the better.

Already, it was obvious that the dolls were no less immune to disease and accident than any other species. Even their early "built-in energy source" had proved to be a temporary stop-gap given to them by their human creators. Once the mechanical aid ceased to function they were in no better position than the animals.

"Perhaps worse," suggested Santa shrewdly, following the rough outline of what he was thinking. "The main trouble seems to be our forced adaptation to a survival pattern now that our bed of roses seems to have grown thorns…"

He stopped talking suddenly, and tilted his head in a listening attitude. Curiously, Oberon concentrated his own faculties and found that he was picking up thoughts from the same source that had disturbed his sleep a short while ago.

Dawn woke suddenly, feeling the coarse grass against her tear-stained face. There was a chill in the early morning air, and she moved her body restlessly.

Unconsciously she bared her teeth in a savage grimace as she remembered the nightmare that never seemed to be far from her once she succumbed to sleep. With a feline movement, she rose stiffly from her rude bed and started to run swiftly across the hillside…

Frank Newcombe leaned back comfortably in his chair and stretched his long legs a few inches closer to the fire. Thoughts of death and destruction were nowhere near his conscious mind. The book he was reading was interesting, but not engrossing enough to distract him from his own sense of well-being.

For a moment or two he watched the flames as they flickered and danced across the coals, then he looked across the room as a faint sound caught his ears, and smiled at June, even as he realized that as usual he had been as readable as a book to her in the midst of his preoccupation. When people lived together for long enough, it was more or less inevitable that they should drift closer together, as long as they had something in common. A bond of enduring love and affection, for example.

"I was just thinking…" He paused and glanced at her challengingly and she obliged with a comradely chuckle.

"… about Dawn, of course," she concluded, and looked back understandingly at him.

"Our friends probably think us a bit odd." He leaned forward and flicked a spot from the edge of the carpet. "But as far as I'm concerned, she is more than just a substitute…"

"… for the child we never had," June finished, with a trace of bitterness in her voice. "It is queer in a way, how so many of them seem to take that attitude. If we had filled the house with pampered cats or lap-dogs, there would have been a few snide remarks, but nobody would have commented openly to us about it."

"Just because Dawn is, at least, a close approximation to a human child, they seem to think there's something not quite right about it, something vaguely immoral or abnormal." Frank nodded impatiently at the thought.

It had been rather impulsive, he realized, to have splurged so much of his savings on the little android doll. Mainly because the dolls were supposed to have been children's playthings—at any rate that seemed a reasonable enough assumption.

Then again, it had been the understanding that June needed a more enduring interest in life, apart from the house and her friends. Neither of them had ever managed to work up much enthusiasm at the thought of a pet, so the house had always seemed rather empty.

He remembered friends telling him how awkward and clumsy they had felt when they had tried to cope with a baby in the house. Perhaps Dawn should have had the same effect on them, but the dolls seemed to start out with a small advantage over human babies. By the time they were exposed to sale as pets or chattels, whichever way you wanted to think of it, they seemed to be past the baby stage. Sometimes he doubted whether they had ever gone through infancy at all. As if she had been following his thoughts, June broke in unexpectedly:

"I wonder sometimes whether I would have welcomed her so gladly if she had been as much trouble as the average infant."

"There's no doubt about that," asserted Frank, knowing that she only wanted to be reassured. "If ever there was a woman better cut out to be a mother…" He shrugged and allowed his attention to be distracted by the fire again.

All the same, he was beginning to feel a nagging doubt in spite of himself. Eventually, as they knew, Dawn was sure to reach the stage where they would not be able to cope with her education any longer. Perhaps, he admitted to himself, that stage had already been reached.

Without saying anything further, he stood up and walked over to the windows, while June watched him with a faint frown on her face. Late as it was, there was enough light for him to make out some details of the scene outside the farmhouse. Even the hills rising toward the nearby mountainside were barely visible as looming shadows of blackness against the sky, their jagged outlines softened into gentler contours by the night-light.

"Perhaps in a way it's better like this." June spoke quietly, and Frank listened without turning his head to look at her. "While the child is still young, the farm at least gives her some protection from the other young people."

"You talk as though the human race were made up of barbarians!" Frank half turned and gestured her to silence as she started to interrupt. "No, I agree with you in a way. Children can be cruel, intentionally or otherwise, and I have heard some stories about the ill treatment that the dolls have been subjected to."

"But one of these days she will have to mix with them. We can't count on being around forever, in any case, and she learns so fast that a proper teacher is a necessity."

He grimaced and turned back to the window again. June was right, but even so he hesitated to make a final decision, knowing that it would be so easy to do the wrong thing and ruin their own and the android's life.

If things had not been so foreboding on the political side as well, he thought irritably, it would be easier to make plans for the future. But as it was, with threats of war looming closer, the only recourse seemed to be to go on living from day to day.

Upstairs, the tiny being stirred and turned over in her bed. Not yet ready to go to sleep, Dawn listened eagerly to the muffled sounds of movement in the lounge below the stairs.

As always, she could sense the warm feeling of belonging that seemed to drift to her from their proximity. Young as she was, she already understood, far better than they imagined, how dependent she was upon them for love and protection.

Nevertheless, her understanding was enveloped in a liberal coating of fantasy, as if she were deliberately forcing herself to forget how hostile the outside world could be.

She shuddered and huddled deeper into the blankets as the nightmare that usually disturbed only her sleep suddenly appeared with vivid realism.

It seemed as though Frank started running the instant the scream echoed down the stairs. June hesitated for a moment longer and then ran after him, but by the time he reached Dawn's room she was only just starting to climb the stairs.

As he moved across the upstairs room towards the bed where the tiny being lay screaming, there was a sudden flash that lit up the little room as if a searchlight had been turned on the windows.

For an endless moment Frank stopped short, half blinded by the intensity of the light. Then, even as he realized what it meant, the blast from the atomic explosion reached the house.

Had the house been a mile or so closer to the center of the explosion, there would have been no hope for anyone inside. As it was, the force of the blast caused the stairs to collapse, so that June was killed instantly.

Frank lived only long enough to experience a few minutes of agony from the searing heat and radiation.

Dawn survived the explosion mainly because of her immunity to the radiation, but also because her bed was sheltered by a small alcove which withstood the force of the blast and gave her the protection that she needed from the heat.

But she saw Frank as he was dying and watched uncomprehendingly while he writhed and screamed in helpless agony. For what might have been hours afterwards, she tried her hardest to revive the dead, shattered shell that had been her adopted father. Then she was forced to clamber over the fallen bricks and timber to the ground, as the building slowly tottered and crumbled toward final destruction.

Oberon found himself staring across the hills with a feeling of wetness in his eyes. Unashamed, he wiped them with his sleeve, picking up a faint sob from Mab as he did so. For a few moments, he continued to gaze steadily away from his companions, not admitting even to himself that he was deliberately avoiding conversation.

"It's hardly likely that we will ever know the full story of what has happened," Santa remarked slowly. "Whether we like it or not, it seems likely that the girl may have been driven insane by her experiences. I have never known such raw pain and hatred from any other person's thoughts, and we certainly have our problem children in the village."

"I agree with you," said Oberon reluctantly, a frown on his small face. "If we didn't need to increase our numbers so desperately, it would almost be better if we gave up looking for the girl and made tracks for some of the other likely survivors."

But they all knew that things were not as simple as that. Even if they had lacked the quality of mercy, it was still vitally necessary for their own survival that they should at least make the attempt to take her into their settlement. As things were, there seemed little prospect of natural increase in numbers for some time, so that their community could only remain static.

And that meant stagnation, which would make ultimate extinction inevitable. Everything seemed delicately poised, as though a slight push one way or the other could mean the difference between their life or death as a race.

He stared at Santa suddenly, knowing that something of what he had been thinking had been picked up by him. "It has to work out," Oberon said, "because we have all the natural advantages that should enable us to carry on where mankind left off. As he may have intended us to do when he created the race."

"All the advantages except one," Santa commented rather dryly. "We haven't learned to fight back yet. I think most of us—the older generation at any rate—suffer from having been treated as toys for so long.

"In fact," he continued almost immediately, "this business of the girl seems to be something that may make or break us. Either we prove that we are capable of dealing with the problem she represents, or we might as well pack up and go home, knowing what that may come to mean to us one day."

Oberon knew, with a sickening sense of despondency, that his friend made a vital point. But, although his mind churned with unspoken questions, he felt that it would be useless to ask them.

For a moment Santa watched him silently, his mind as unreadable as a mask. Then he unrolled the map he was carrying and moved over to Oberon's side.

"The house she was living in before the war ended was close to the road here." He pointed out their own approximate position, while Oberon studied the map carefully. "It seems reasonable enough that she has stayed fairly close to it. The strength of her thoughts tends to confirm that."

"Judging from her state of mind, though, once we reach the neighborhood, she is likely to leave; as her thoughts tell us how greatly she fears and hates other beings of any kind."

"Sometimes, Oberon, I wonder whether being telepathic is not more of a drawback than anything else. It seems, in this case at any rate, to have channeled everyone's thinking so that they can see only the difficulties. There are times when a little independent thinking seems more efficient than mass emotion."

"So that's why you make use of your mind shield so frequently." Oberon eyed him with new interest and respect. "If it's the sort of thing that leads you to solutions of problems we seem to find unsolvable, I think it's something I will try myself."

"The point here," Santa continued patiently as if he had never been interrupted, "is that the girl is completely wild and untrained. If we can fool her into thinking that our minds are completely open to her, it should be easy enough to lure her into a trap. In other words, we only need to send out false information."

The girl ran like a wild animal, shifting warily over the hillsides to take advantage of the contours, and with a loping stride that covered the ground with remarkable speed for a being of her size. The dreams of the past evening had subsided somewhat in her consciousness, perhaps because she had been resting throughout the daylight hours so that she could take advantage of the darkness to reach her objective unseen.

By now it was after sunset, and there was a cold, bitter wind blowing from the direction of the mountains. In spite of her involuntary shivers, she ran on with a definite goal in mind.

Coming around a curve of hillside, she quickened her pace for a few minutes, but suddenly her nostrils dilated and she stopped short, at the same time throwing herself to the ground and lying there with her china-blue eyes staring ahead of her.

Just visible around the edge of the hill, the crumbling remains of the house were unmistakable, even in the afterglow of the sunset. But that was not what the tiny being was watching so intently, with narrowed eyes and a compressed mouth.

Below the building, there were a number of twinkling fires, set close enough to the ruins to show that the makers must have had some objective in camping there overnight.

The girl hissed involuntarily between her teeth, her body tense with fear and loathing. Even as she remembered that the house had once harbored others whom she had loved and who had been kind to her, she could sense the prickling thoughts of other, alien beings that she instinctively dreaded.

The half-formed thought that strangers were there to take what they wanted from the ruins she considered her own hit her mind like a thunderclap. For a while she was incapable of any coherent thought but the desire to hit back at them in any way she could.

Slowly, as she wriggled over the rough ground, she started to see the rudiments of a plan. After seemingly endless moments of inching her way closer to the house, she was able to make out more details of the surroundings. It was obvious that the ruins were no longer in the same condition they had been when she had last visited them. Scattered bricks and broken pieces of timber littered the thick dry grass around the house, and here and there were pits which had been dug within the mounds of rubble.

Uncaring now, her mind a tangle of rioting emotion, the half-crazed girl ran along by the edge of one mouldering wall and in a crouching position moved toward the nearby fires.

Oberon sat relaxed, his back against a boulder, while he looked across the line of fires towards the house. After a moment or two, he stirred as Mab leaned companionably across him and threw a few pieces of wood onto the flames.

"She's coming closer, I think." He spoke in a low voice that could be heard only by Mab and the white-bearded little android who sat close to them, with concentrated attention.

"As savage and full of hatred as ever," Mab said sadly. "It hurts almost physically when she shoots her uncontrolled thoughts at me. I can only wish that we will be able to help the child as soon as possible."

"So far the plan seems to be working well," interjected Santa somberly, looking toward the darkening mound of hills. "But it still isn't going to be easy to lay hands on her. Fifteen years of fighting for life and living off the land will have left her as tough as an old shoe, and probably as unattractive. If we make a wrong move, we may frighten her off for good."

"Provided we keep up our shields, while the others continue to bait the trap with suggestions, I don't see why there should be much trouble," Oberon answered, carefully keeping his voice down.

Santa tensed suddenly at a sound from the other side of the fire.

And as she sensed rather than saw the small figure peer in her direction, Dawn instinctively dropped her head and relaxed flat against the ground, unaware that one of the beings she sensed had raised a finger to his lips and gestured silence at his companions.

"I think we'd better strike camp in the morning." Santa broke the silence even as he motioned at Oberon and Mab, speaking loudly and clearly while they watched him without comprehension. "Notice the way we lie between almost sheer cliffs on either side," he continued with emphasis, "when a better place would have been a little further down the valley where the ground slopes more gently up towards the house."

"I don't see…" Oberon began and sank back into silence again at the abrupt motion Santa made at him.

"For example," the little android went on earnestly, "if a fire started at the neck of the valley, we might be overwhelmed before we could escape, especially if we happened to be asleep when it started."

"Not that it's likely to happen." He stared hard at them as he spoke. "But it's always better to be prepared for eventualities."

For a moment or two longer, the girl doll lay relaxed on the ground; then she started to crawl slowly and carefully away from the fires.

After a few minutes, Santa smiled wanly at his still puzzled companions and wiped a damp brow with his hand.

"Sorry I had to change plans so suddenly, but you might say that a flash of inspiration caught me at the right time."

As Dawn coaxed flame into the little pile of twigs and leaves, she watched the dying fires lower down the narrow valley. Uneducated semi-savage though she was, she still understood, with a vague sense of bewilderment at their stupidity, that the beings by the fires had chosen a singularly bad place for their encampment. With a shrug, she dismissed the idea from her mind.

Soon a bunch of long grass was burning briskly and, with a quick glance of hatred down the valley, she started to run across the defile, dragging the bunch of burning grass behind.

Almost like magic, the grass burst into flame, until as she reached the further side of the valley, she could see the fire, aided by a brisk wind, roaring down towards the unsuspecting camp.

Half an hour later, the small figure climbed confidently along the edge of the valley, until she was parallel to the burnt-out encampment. By now there was nothing to see but a few scattered areas which still glowed red as the grass slowly sputtered into ashes.

For a while she paced like an animal, impatiently waiting for the earth and ashes to cool. Then, tiring of the vigil, she sat down on a rock, wondering whether anybody had survived the inferno. Later, when it was light again, she knew that she would be able to assess the damage more thoroughly. She felt a vague sense of satisfaction at her revenge.

But in spite of her elation she was puzzled by the fact that at no time had she heard any shouts or screams. That might be explained by her position further up the valley, but she still felt a flicker of doubt.

Coupled with her triumph, there was a reluctant feeling of regret that she had not managed to see any of the trespassers distinctly. In a way she was unable to explain to herself, she felt that their voices had sounded familiar, and yet—she shrugged, realizing that was impossible.

Without warning, there was a whisper of sound and she was on her feet in an instant, only to whirl helplessly and attempt to dart off into the darkness as she saw with terror that she was surrounded by a number of small figures.

Like a cornered animal, she tried to break out of the cordon by sheer strength and ferocity, but half a dozen hands grasped at her hard little body and she was forced helplessly to the ground, while cords rapidly rendered her helpless.

Oberon stepped closer, once she had been pulled to her feet and stood with her chin hanging against her chest.

"You were right, Santa," he said ungrudgingly. "It was a perfect scheme, but it's obvious that she's not far from insanity, as we suspected."

The white-bearded android moved up to him and examined the girl as if she were only a bale of merchandise.

"She would be attractive enough, though, if we could get some of that grime off her, and dress her in something other than those tattered rags. Still, beggars can't be choosers, so we will have to try and persuade her to settle in the town, although I would just as soon stick my head into the fire."

With a compassionate glance at the despondent figure of the ragged girl, Mab gave them a look of exasperation and shouldered past them towards her.

Unhesitatingly, she put one warm hand against Dawn's face and for a long minute everyone stood transfixed. It actually seemed as though the girl had responded for a fleeting moment. Then Dawn made a sudden motion and Mab pulled hurriedly away from her, wringing her hand, her own face white with pain and shock.

"Why, she bit me!" She looked at Oberon miserably, knowing that her gesture had not been understood or accepted, and that the other dolls were probably correct in their evaluation.

"No, I didn't think that would work." Oberon winced openly as some of the girl's hatred seeped through his defenses. It was rather like having coals of fire heaped on your head, he thought wryly.

Then, surprisingly, Santa moved closer to the girl again. Oberon watched him with a sudden tightness in his chest, as he saw the expression on the other android's face.

"Oberon," said the bearded little man, blinking in a nervous fashion that was quite out of character. "We managed to get through to the girl in a limited fashion, when we were trying to play on her subconscious. If we continued to work on that area, it might be possible to heal her mind, maybe even cure her completely."

"You're wrong, Santa." Her blonde hair windblown and her rough skirt crumpled and stained, Mab stepped into the circle. "We are just beginners in something that's far more complicated than you seem willing to admit. It would be like trying to do some delicate brain surgery with a mallet. In fact, that's exactly the sort of mess we would probably make of her mind.

"Maybe in time, generations even," she went on, "we, or our descendants, will know exactly how to proceed, but we still stand so close to the threshold of psi that you should know as well as anyone that your notion is nothing more than a pipe-dream. If anything, the child would end up more hopelessly insane than she is already."

Santa looked at the girl again, knowing that, although she could understand their speech, the concepts they were discussing were quite beyond her. Suddenly he became aware that he had been considering her for the first time as a desirable person. And he admitted that his own suggestion had been prompted more by his emotions than by common sense.

He flushed suddenly, as there was a murmur of sympathy from the others. He felt as though his mind had betrayed him.

"I like the child too," said Mab, noticing that his embarrassment was becoming obvious to the others. "Why," she continued slowly, thinking as she spoke, "did a child like this manage to survive when so many mature individuals among us failed?"

For a moment there was silence, broken only by a sudden storm of frustrated sobbing from the girl as she struggled vainly against the binding ropes.

"It seems to me," Mab went on, "that she possesses an ability we need. Call it the will to survive if you like, but she seems to have demonstrated by her very existence that we need her in the colony."

"I think you are just as wrong as Santa!" Oberon broke in. "Sorry, Mab, but both of you are wrong for different reasons, and yet you both came close to the truth.

"Just look at the way things happened on this trip—how we managed to dampen her suspicions, so that it was fairly easy to lead her into a trap. The same thing can probably be done once we're home: we can trap her into a sense of security. On the surface, I think it should be possible to screen off the memories which cause her insanity. Under the surface, of course, there will always be the same mental turbulence, and we will have to keep a wary eye out for it in case it erupts when things upset her false equilibrium. While we cannot expect a complete cure, as Mab said, second-best may have to suffice."

III

… and there were always little voices telling her how happy she was, so that she always seemed to be smiling with fearful desperation, as if she were afraid that if she stopped for a moment something terrible would happen. Sometimes she felt that the whole world had stopped working and that the little people she lived with had suddenly turned into alien creatures that she should hate.

But the nights were the worst. The nights when she woke up sweating and exhausted, knowing that someone, somewhere nearby, had been screaming horribly. And Santa grew lean and strained and spent more and more of his time on expeditions, although he seemed the same tender person she remembered—from as far back as she could remember—when he was at home.

The grass that was slowly encroaching on the mouldering remains of the ruined buildings was still sparse and straggly, but a few hundred yards away, where there had always been uncovered ground, the growth was rank—long and luxuriant. The contrast gave the impression of a fence of green encircling the ruins, rising to what would have been shoulder height to an average human.

Although there was no wind blowing, a slight movement of grass showed that something was coming closer to the edge of the rim. Eventually, a keen observer, patient and unmoving, might have seen the tawny shape that paused, as if with indecision, on the verge and then slowly backed away, as if sensing the presence of some unknown danger. And the scene was bare of life again, as the animal drifted silently back into the jungle of grass.

For some time after that the place remained silent and undisturbed, so that when the first of the little figures filtered out of the dense growth and moved along a barely defined track towards the ruins, it was hardly noticeable.

As they moved away from the grass and into the ruined city, the cloak of tense watchfulness seemed to fall from their shoulders. The straggling line of sentries fell in with the main party, and by the time they started threading their way through the shattered piles of masonry that littered the spaces between the buildings, they formed a compact body of little people.

It was obvious enough, even to the untrained doll people, that the city must have been subjected to heavy bombardment. Some other towns they had visited on their forays had merely been dusted with radioactives, but this one had taken heavy punishment as well.

Santa, his white beard neatly trimmed into military smartness, would have been the first to admit that the years had blunted the cheerful, rubicund look that had once been his trademark. Leaner now, with lines carved over his forehead, he seemed to have aged far more than would normally have been the case.

He glanced at the veldt as they moved between the ruins, wishing that it had been possible for Oberon to accompany them on this trip. Although he valued the stature that leadership gave him, he still missed the quiet unassuming companionship they had enjoyed together for so long.

Oberon, he thought with a touch of envy, was already becoming a legend with the younger people as it became more and more obvious, through the long years, that he was showing little sign of aging. Which was perhaps an advantage, because the dolls needed someone to look up to until they could work out a sound ethic of their own.

Santa roused himself from his reverie and concentrated on his surroundings again, knowing that, although it was unlikely that they had been followed, it was always better to be prepared for the unexpected.

Actually the reluctance of other animals to enter the ruined cities was something that puzzled the androids, who were not aware of the lingering lethal qualities in radioactivity.

Santa breathed a sigh of satisfaction as he saw that the taboo which appeared to surround the ruins was still working. At any rate, there was no sign of the big cats that had been following them all day.

He watched his younger lieutenant approach, with a faint twist of derision on his face. The youngster was still that much short of maturity not to have realized that the formality of the military was not necessary where telepathy served a better purpose than vocal command.

Jon noticed the sneer on his superior's face as he approached, and felt a mild irritation. In spite of his constant effort to earn the respect and liking of his superior, there was always an unacknowledged barrier between them, as impermeable as the barrier his superior erected with his more efficient mind-shield, that shut him off from the others at will. With a tight mouth, the youngster gave the routine report.

"All present, sir," he said with a nod in the direction of other members of the party.

Santa nodded without bothering to look at them, as aware as the rest of the group that there were no absentees. There was a faint ripple of something that may have been laughter from the others, and he grinned inwardly, wondering whether they were also savoring the humor of the situation.

It was a pity, he thought, that the humans' love for petty routine had not died with them when they waged their futile wars. He gestured to the lieutenant and walked away between the tottering girders as the order was given to spread out and search for anything worth taking back.

For a while, the two leaders walked silently together. Both listened for the occasional cries that meant something worth further investigation had been uncovered, and marked with a small white flag.

"Do you think that there was any improvement today, sir?" ventured the younger officer, in an effort to break into his senior's reserve.

"In experience perhaps." Santa looked at him thoughtfully.

"But that is to be expected. Otherwise I think we were just having a run of luck for a change."

"Luck!" Jon let the exclamation escape him with an irritation which he hardly bothered to conceal. "I'm no believer—"

"Well, contrasted with the usual run of constant skirmish and attack that we experience these days, whenever we leave the settlements, it was different enough to warrant that as an explanation."

Realizing that the captain had almost completely ignored his own remark, Jon felt an impulse to say something that he undoubtedly would have regretted later. For a few steps he found himself breathing more deeply than usual, and his face felt hot and feverish.

"There always is an element of luck about our survival." Santa glanced at the younger man as he casually dropped the remark. "In my own experience, there was only one person who really proved that she was capable of surviving against all the odds." For the first time there was a trace of emotion in his voice, and the younger android looked at him curiously.

In spite of the momentary lapse by his superior, Jon felt the surge of anger again, but with an effort he bit back the rejoinder that was on the verge of escaping him, and watched his superior with a mock air of subservience that came closer to insolence then he realized or cared.

Santa stopped suddenly and leaned over a shard of metal to examine it more closely, while at the same time he managed to gain a clearer idea of how Jon was feeling. What he discovered made him decide that the game had gone on as far as was desirable. He had no real wish to goad the youngster into making some stupid gesture that might harm his position in the scouting groups.

"Watch those two down beside the pillars."

Jon stepped a little higher on a mound of rubbish and watched for a moment. Then he looked questioningly at the captain.

Santa scanned the ruins. "They have learned the scavenging business quite quickly, haven't they?"

"Definitely so." Jon sensed that there was something he was expected to add to the conversation, but although he was thinking furiously, he was still unable to see anything particularly significant about the captain's remark.

"That's one reason why we are lucky—" Santa broke off suddenly as something caught his attention and his expression made Jon swing around to follow his gaze.

Just short of a small piece of open ground that might once have been a park, a small figure stood in an opening in the wall of one of the buildings. Obviously, it had once held a window, but neither of the two watchers was particularly concerned with that at the moment.

A shout of panic rose to Jon's lips as he realized that the little figure was clinging desperately to some unseen projection at the edge of the opening. Even as they stood there, helpless to intervene, the face of the ruin started to crumble, and the tiny figure lurched, scrambled wildly for a foothold and fell backwards into the street below.

For an endless moment they watched; then they started running as the small figure hit the ground with a dull thud.

All about them there was the sound of hurrying feet and muted voices, but they both knew, as did the others, that there was no hope for the victim of the accident. Instead, there was an abrupt feeling of loss as if a segment had been suddenly chopped out of their mutual bond of telepathic kinship.

"He was the first we've lost on this trip," Jon said heavily as they moved away from the shallow grave that had been scooped out of the hard soil near the scene of the accident.

"Luck doesn't solve all the problems." Santa spoke carefully, with a note of sorrow that took the sting out of his remark. "Did you ever notice how a cat falls?"

"That's more or less common knowledge," Jon answered. "They seem to fall invariably on all fours, no matter what position they were in to begin with."

"And him?" Santa gestured towards the level space they were leaving behind. "How did he fall?"

"In the same position all the way. On his back from start to finish." The youngster looked at his superior with a flush on his face as he realized that his lack of observation had obscured a vital fact, until it had been forced on his attention.

Santa nodded without expressing any emotion, and probed casually at a pile of rubbish with a piece of wood, as if expecting it to yield something valuable.

"That is why I keep on saying that luck cannot be depended on. We doll people learn fast and efficiently; there is no doubt about that. The trouble is that we just don't seem to have any natural instincts."

"We aren't animals. What can you expect?" Jon did not speak with anger this time, but with genuine curiosity.

"But even the humans, as far as we have been able to determine, had some remnants of instinct. Call it racial memory if you like, but it will give the animals an advantage in survival until we manage to develop some adequate substitute —like habit for example."

"Do you think then, that we are handicapped in coping with the wild life? The cats especially, because we have no substitute for experience?" Jon blurted out the notion, with relief at having caught up with his superior's thinking.

"We, that is the elders of the doll people, found out almost at the beginning that we depended on experience for far more things than seemed necessary. For a long time, we did not equate that with a lack of instinct, but we caught on as soon as things started to reach the point where there was no other likely explanation."

"So that, then, is the reason why we seem to spend every waking minute of our lives learning new skills, or trying to improve those we already have." Jon looked involuntarily over his shoulder as he spoke, and a shudder went through his small frame. "But learning to fall correctly is one of the first lessons they give us. And it didn't seem to have any effect at all just now." He looked questioningly at his somber-faced companion.

"That's an example of education being inferior to a pure survival instinct. It's all very well to demonstrate how easy it is to fall properly when all your faculties are concentrated on it. But anything can happen when the necessity arises unexpectedly and you are too shocked to remember, or don't react as spontaneously as an animal might do.

"And so we spend our time training, or, when we get older, helping the younger generation to develop our skills. Perhaps it does work after a fashion," he said thoughtfully, "but the trouble is that it takes the time that could be spent more usefully developing our own mental abilities."

"The humans did things differently," Jon said. "They seemed to find the time they needed to educate their young."

"It was probably because they developed slowly from the primitive stage, so that by the time they started to lose their wilder instincts, they were sufficiently advanced to be out of danger from the animals. Although it seems doubtful whether they ever encountered anything on a level with our own adversaries—except among themselves."

Trying desperately to prevent his fear of punishment from showing on his face, Will stared back defiantly at the semicircle of little men facing him. It seemed as though, in spite of himself, he was continually stirring up ill feeling. This time, the reaction seemed even worse than usual.

"But I tell you, it's the truth. At the beginning we were nothing but playthings for the humans." He realized, even as he spoke, that there was no chance of striking a chord of understanding among his compatriots.

"That is an exaggeration, Will. You constantly indulge in sly taunts at your own people, and lose no opportunity to remind us of our ancestry."

Will groaned inwardly as the stockiest of the little group shouted the rejoinder. Even those he had once considered as close friends seemed to have turned against him.

"But what harm can it do us if we admit the truth…" His voice faded away as he saw the captain and his companion come into view.

Still defiant, he watched the captain pause in his stride as he studied the group in front of him. Then, as he moved towards them, Will noticed, from the tense expression on his face, that trouble had been blowing up.

He watched curiously as Jon moved up to Santa and spoke a few words in an undertone. Then, as the captain looked in his direction, he realized that he had been the subject of the remark.

As the captain walked closer and then stopped a few feet in front of him, Will stiffened into attention, although his pride did not allow him to do anything more to acknowledge the presence of his superior.

"Been having trouble again, Will?" He felt the captain's eye studying him carefully and after a moment he raised his eyes and gazed steadily back at his questioner.

It would be a change, he thought to himself, if even one of the doll people would stop trying to build up illusions about their own ancestry. In spite of all indications to the contrary —their present surroundings, and Santa's own personal experience—they persisted in ignoring their obligations to the human race.

It was only when there was a concerted gasp from the others that Will realized his error. Blinded by his emotions, he had neglected to keep up his mind shield.

Santa gestured impatiently at the muttering and, as it died down, he turned and looked at Will, more carefully this time. The younger man waited mutely for the reprimand he knew he had earned.

"So you're setting yourself up as an oracle?" Santa smiled coldly at the youngster. "You seem to have the idea that you know more than we do, about our own people."

"Perhaps I do!" Will flung back the remark and then his fists unclenched slowly, as this first experience of self-doubt clouded his emotions like a sudden insidious fog. After all, he knew that there was no solid foundation for any of his ideas. Nothing but his own sense of conviction that even his daydreams carried an essence of reality about them stood between him and complete disbelief.

"Come, son!" Santa had a gruff note of kindliness in his voice as he beckoned the youngster to follow. At the same time he motioned to the lieutenant to stay behind with the others. A minute of brisk walking took them out of sight among a row of crumbling tenements, and Santa stopped and sat down on some steps, while Will followed suit as his superior pointed to the space beside him.

The boy was still young, but he did not give the impression of being a troublemaker and liar. Santa inspected him keenly and was pleased that the youth returned his own regard as steadily. Maybe that is all that is necessary, the captain thought. A frank, man-to-man discussion that would help remove the fellow's illusions.

"Care to tell me about it, Will?" He broke the silence suddenly. "Perhaps I should have known about it before, but that is one of the drawbacks in being leader. Smaller matters have a way of simmering for too long without my knowledge." He smiled encouragingly at his companion as he spoke.

"How do people get to know that they are different from the average?" Will plunged straight ahead, without trying to evade his senior's question. "I've thought about it time and again, and it all comes back to the fact that you don't really know yourself until your friends or companions point it out. As far as you're concerned, the way you see things is normal."

Santa nodded encouragingly and, after a pause, the youngster went on.

"At first I thought it was normal to see visions, to see things sort of happening at the back of my mind. But when people started to laugh at me, I found out that it was regarded as odd. So I learned to keep my mouth shut."

"But the pressures built up again?" the captain asked.

"In a way. I don't know exactly how long it took, but the visions went on and on and seemed to build up a recognizable picture. After a while, I began to feel it was a sort of flashback to our own forebears…" He stopped and glanced at Santa, who appeared to be looking casually out over the ruins.

"Tell me one," suggested the captain unexpectedly, turning his head and studying Will carefully again. "It might at least give me some sort of yardstick to judge whether we can get something useful out of it."

With a grateful look at his superior, Will half closed his eyes and began to talk…

The whole trouble with the visions was that you had to learn to judge for yourself what sort of sequence they fell into. In time, Will had worked out his own solution, based more on guesswork than anything else. This one was about as far back as he was able to see.

He remembered the first time he had seen the tall figure, and realized that it was a human—even though he knew that the humans had died, or left for the stars, a long time ago.

But he felt happy as he saw the huge figure silhouetted against the light from the windows, as if he had come home again and found a friend, or someone who had been sought but was missing for a long time.

This felt to him like a home where he belonged, and he opened his mouth with a warm greeting on his lips. Still the tall figure stood looking out of the window, without giving any indication that he had heard anything, and Will knew, with despair, that he had been unable to utter a sound.

With an effort, the boy looked down and saw that at least his body and limbs seemed to be intact. By the same analogy, he thought ruefully, he must have a head and a normal pair of eyes, since his perceptions did not seem to have suffered.

But… He drew in his breath with almost audible sharpness and looked down at himself again. The pattern of the clothes he was wearing had nothing in common with the drab and uniform grays he was used to. Which meant that some sort of transference must have taken place.

As the tall figure turned from his place by the window and moved slowly and almost clumsily in his direction, Will stared as hard as he could, trying to make out as much as possible in the darkness of the room. At the same time, he tried again to force his seemingly paralyzed vocal chords into making some sound, but again the effort failed.

Realizing its futility, the boy tried to relax, and watched as the man fumbled in a drawer. He flinched as lights flared, and the room slowly brightened.

In spite of himself, Will felt another wave of warmth and liking as he saw the man turn and look at him for the first time.

"And now, child," said the voice, booming a little in his sensitive ears, as the figure limped closer, "it is time you learned to make use of your tongue, is it not?"

The little figure cringed in spite of his friendly feelings, and a sensation of wonder came over him as he imagined that his thoughts had been read. But, as the wrinkled hands closed gently but firmly around his small body, he had the impression that the man was talking to himself rather than answering an unspoken appeal.

As he whirled through the air, his head turned back to the place where he had been standing. To his surprise, there were other little figures there, dressed in bright distinctive clothing and watching him with large, beaming eyes that followed every movement the human made, as he carried the little figure to the dim bench in the background…

Santa sat silent for some time as Will's voice died away, and the story ended. In spite of his strong disbelief in the tale, it carried something familiar about it which, however hard he tried, he was unable to place.

The younger doll was silent for other reasons—both because he saw that his companion had not been left unmoved by his story, and because of his own feeling of loss that he experienced anew whenever he thought about the human race.

With sudden decision, the captain came out of his reverie.

"Look, Will, I was one of the first of the dollmen myself, as you know, and your story obviously points closely enough to our own creation. But the facts should be known to everyone, even if they are unwilling to admit them. As far as that goes, your visions did not seem to carry anything new, and I am inclined to admit to the others that you have been making too much of them. Like your emphasis on their endowment of speech. Even that is doubtful, as in time we would have developed the ability in spite of them."

"Not only speech." Will knew that his opportunity was about to vanish again, and so he spoke quickly. "There have been so many visions, and every one remains as sharp and clear as if I were really seeing them happen.

"No!" he went on almost without a pause. "From the visions, it seems to me that every ability we have was planned by them. How, I can't say; I'm not a scientist. But the earlier scenes led me to believe that they planned a more mature race to follow them, and so they deliberately suppressed our aggressiveness with the idea that nature would compensate for it in some way."

"The doll in your dreams—did you ever find out what name he was given by the humans?" the captain asked.

Will dreaded answering that question because he felt that his reply was not likely to be accepted in good faith. For a moment he even considered telling a lie and substituting another name for the true one. But with sudden resolution, he stood up and stared defiantly at Santa.

"At the time of the first vision, or dream if you prefer, I had no inkling of the truth at all. That came later when his first owner christened him." He paused with dramatic emphasis and said, "It was Oberon!"

The captain started violently, obviously taken aback, and came suddenly to his feet, with anger clouding his face.

"So this is what it's all been leading up to. A cheap effort to gain some credence for your wild imaginings, by roping in Oberon, when you know how much he is already respected by his people. The least I can say is that, save for a few particulars that could have been manufactured by you, you have had nothing new to contribute."

Santa took a step towards him as if he fully intended to do what Will feared; then suddenly he turned and walked off without a backward glance, only his rigid back and expressionless face giving an indication of how powerfully he was striving to suppress his fury.

The boy sank back onto the step with a feeling of weakness at his narrow escape. The abrupt easing of tension was too much for him, and for a few moments he cradled his head on his arms, while his body racked with the sobs he was trying so hard to control.

Swinging in alongside the captain, as he strode past the scene of the recent argument with a set, grim look on his face, Jon knew that the interview could not have gone well.

"Lieutenant!" The captain turned a pair of steely blue eyes on the younger doll, so out of character with his usual appearance. "Up to a point I have always tried to understand every member of the troop." He paused, as if expecting some comment, but Jon merely grunted noncommitally.

"All the same, we must maintain respect for the few traditions we do have. The boy makes no effort at all to fall in with the rest of us. Something drastic will have to be done about him if we want to avoid continual friction between him and the others."

"It's those dreams of his, isn't it, sir?" Jon asked.

"You've heard them too, then?"

"Yes, sir. They make quite an impact whether you accept them as delusions or not. I felt very much the same as you do now, the first time I listened to him, but in spite of that I went back for more." He eyed the captain reflectively as he spoke.

"I admit that the story he told made a deep impression on me, but still… the tale about Oberon struck me as being a cheap fabrication. The trouble is, I was too young, when the final catastrophe struck the humans, to remember much about it. But dammit, sir"—he looked at Santa apologetically— "there is something in what the boy keeps saying that strikes a chord somewhere."

Santa looked at his normally self-contained officer with considerable surprise as he waited for him to continue.

"Every time Will tells me another chapter of his dream saga, I seem to be on the point of finding out something significant. You know how it is when you can't quite remember something and an idea hovers just short of consciousness."

"I had a glimmer of the same thing," said the captain. "But it disappeared with a rush as soon as he managed to hit a raw spot. You know, I had an idea that he was an asset to the troop before we arrived here, because his actions and response to danger were exemplary."

"That's one of the things that I had in mind. He is the most efficient member of the group, and I think that's what has saved him from more serious trouble with the others. So far anyway. They have considerable respect for him—particularly for his fighting abilities. I saw him take on a bully once," Jon said. "It could have ended in murder even though he was tremendously outweighed. But he stopped short of that, after cutting his opponent to pieces."

They both halted as there was a shout from a pair of searchers ahead of them. Involuntarily, they broke into a half run and then, with self-conscious glances at each other, they settled into a brisk walk that quickly took them to their objective.

"Well?" Santa asked the taller of the two, who had shouted to attract their attention.

"There seems to be an intact building here, sir." He gestured as he spoke and the captain and lieutenant gazed with excitement at his find.

The devastation in the cities had been so severe that there was seldom anything left other than a few tottering walls and charred skeletons of steel, protruding from crumbling concrete pillars.

In the narrow street where they were standing, the small brick building, surrounded by high, ragged walls of concrete, seemed an anachronism. Probably it had been protected frotn the full force of the blasts by its own ground-hugging mediocrity. But none of the dollmen looking at the plain, faded gray door had any fault to find with providence.

Soon there were a dozen of the little men, dwarfed even by the low gray door, hammering and probing at the brickwork surrounding the entrance. When at last the door squeaked rustily open, they hesitated fearfully on the pitted doorstep.

The captain walked ahead of the others, knowing that it was necessary to make the first move. Within, the room was shadowed in deep gloom, and a thick carpet of dust ballooned about his feet.

With an impatient gesture, Santa seized the rag that someone held out to him and wiped hard at the grimy windows that lined one end of the room. As the light filtered through the still dirty panes of—surprisingly—intact glass, he was able to see that the room was practically bare of furnishings.

Close to the window on one side of the room, there was a low, narrow bench, which Santa recognized as a work-table, still littered with rusting tools. Along another wall were rows of narrow shelves, which were covered with scraps of rubbish.

With a disappointed gesture, he half-turned as if to leave the room, to be investigated properly later, when a stifled exclamation from Jon took him quickly across the floor towards the shelves.

"Found something, lieutenant?" He looked at the bundle of meaningless rubbish that Jon was holding.

"Could be. It looks like the bones of something small. Definitely too small to be human. Unless it was a baby, of course." He probed at the pile of rubbish and Santa stretched forward to pick up a fragment of colored fabric that crumbled at his touch.

"If I were an expert, I would say that these are the bones of our own people."

There was a muffled exclamation from the doorway and they looked around tensely, as if anticipating an attack from some unexpected source.

"It is just the way I always saw it in my dreams." He moved toward the bench and stood there, holding an outsized hammer in his tiny hands. "That's exactly where the human stood when he worked at the bench. Remember?" He looked at Santa appealingly. "Surely this should strike something in your memories after the way I described it to you only a little while ago. And you, too!" He swung around and gestured at the lieutenant, who remained silent, watching him with reflective eyes.

"It's just one room; there are a million more like it." Santa shrugged impatiently. "The similarity to your fantasies is simply coincidence."

Just then the roof fell in. Literally. Weakened by bombardment and age, with the mortar in the brick walls supporting it slowly crumbling away, it was probably already tottering when they forced their way through the door. But without warning, the walls collapsed, and no member of the party had the opportunity to try to escape.

It was simple enough, the captain thought, wondering why the solution to such an easy problem had not occurred to him before. You could turn a headlong rout into a brilliant victory with just a slight alteration of tactics—plus the outflanking movement, of course. He felt a self-congratulatory glow at having reduced the complexity to such simply understood maneuvers.

But not alone! He realized with a shock that someone was standing next to him and talking. Telling him everything he had just been thinking and then carrying on to heights of experience that he had never contemplated.

The trouble was, thought Santa desperately, that the speaker seemed to have no definite aim. As far as he could make out, the subject of the conversation was liable to change from one moment to another, and continue until something distracted his attention. The next choice of subject appeared completely unpredictable.

It was quite frustrating, even though he seemed to be picking up ideas at a remarkable rate, if his normal time sense was still in operation. If only he could interrupt, and ask the speaker a few questions, so that the talk would not wander so rapidly.

And then it was on the subject of the humans. Santa groaned involuntarily and tried to move closer, but something held him like a vise, and after a moment he stopped trying as the effort seemed to send waves of blackness over his mind.

Like all small people, Santa had always imagined the humans as being overgrown lumps of conceit, with a strong urge for their own destruction.

What the talker was saying seemed to be the complete antithesis of this. At least as far as the honesty and temperament of all humans was concerned.

He listened skeptically, with a growing feeling that, in spite of his disbelief, there was a certain amount of truth in what the fellow was saying. Not just because he was saying it, but because all the logical facts seemed to point in that direction.

Even his own people's lack of instinct began to slide smoothly into position. If they really were an artificial race which started out as human-made androids, it would help to arrive at a solution. Because obviously, under the circumstances, they would not have a race-memory to fall back on. It took time for experience to become habit and then habit gradually to be transformed into racial memory…

The captain tried to shake his head, but the blinding pain that throbbed across his skull brought another wave of blackness in its wake.

"Sir? Are you all right?" He realized that someone else was talking to him. No, not talking—thinking!

He concentrated his attention and after a moment the thought clarified again.

"This is Jon, sir." He felt a wave of relief and smiled at the lieutenant.

"What has happened, Jon? Last I remember, we were talking in the ruined building."

"Most of the roof caved in. But if you think outwards, you'll know that a rescue party will soon get us out. As far as I can tell, everyone is showing signs of consciousness."

There was a silence while the captain wondered whether anyone had been badly injured. Then the lieutenant was back again.

"Have you been listening in to anyone, sir?" The captain felt a peculiar note of exhilaration in the thought, and he pondered awhile before he answered.

"Yes, but it seems that you know more about it than I do."

"We all got onto the same wavelength, I think." The lieutenant spoke cautiously, but the half-hidden note of excitement was back in his thoughts again.

"The speaker!" Santa grunted with satisfaction, as he realized that he had tracked down the reason for the familiarity that had been plaguing him for so long. It had been Will talking—or rather, thinking—all the time.

"Yes, it was Will, with a difference!" Jon picked up Santa's thought. "The accident put him completely under and, by some freak, opened his subconscious to our own minds. That's why we've all been thinking more or less alike.

"It seems as though you were right about the luck, and the instinct part as well," Jon went on, "but I think we have stumbled on the substitute we needed."

The captain then understood that his own return to consciousness must have been much later than the rest of them, and so he seemed to have missed the main point. With a gruff note to the thought he sent to Jon, he let his mind relax again, and found that things had changed considerably…

It was possible, of course, that they might never have realized the truth if the accident had not happened. All the same, with Will at least half aware of his own difference, it was inevitable that sooner or later he would have discovered his ability to probe deeply into his own subconscious.

The doll-people were stubborn enough, but usually they were willing to listen to anyone who came up with a new aspect of their mental abilities. After all, the fact that they possessed unknown qualities had been demonstrated before.

For a while the captain savored the memories that started to crowd in on him, with a growing sense of wonder and understanding of the excitement he had sensed in Jon, a short while before.

Now that the key to their subconscious had finally been discovered, it was probably true that they all possessed the same ability of total recall, which would mean a faster advance by the race as a whole.

After all, thought the captain a trifle mistily, as the emotion of the experience began to take effect, if we remember everything our ancestors experienced, that will be more than an adequate substitute for instinct—in time. It will be like building a pyramid, with its apex resting on the ground and increasing upwards in size and strength, as. the centuries pass.

"Oh, I know!" he said impatiently, as Jon seemed ready to interrupt. "This incident has not actually provided us with the ability Will possesses. For a while we were in complete rapport with him, and that stimulated what rudimentary faculties we do have in that direction. But the mere fact that they do exist, and that Will has them so well developed, promises well for the future."

Knowing as he did so that the others were doing the same, he listened to the sounds of the rescuers, who were drawing closer. There was a warm feeling of understanding regarding the humans who had started the whole thing. It was pleasant to imagine that they had planned even for this ability to develop.

IV

Although the trail had been downwards for some miles, the little figure looked comparatively fresh as he walked slowly toward the spreading forest, which he could now make out quite clearly.

Oberon limped slightly as he neared the trees, more because of the stony nature of the path than because of fatigue—or age. The years had dealt kindly with him, and there seemed little difference in his fresh, young skin and clear blue eyes that squinted against the hot sun beating down on the rocks at the edge of the forest.

He paused to glance toward the top of the pass, that was wreathed in vapor, before he turned, almost reluctantly, and walked into the shade of the huge trees that clustered against the foot of the mountains.

From here on, as he knew well, the land dropped for some miles before leveling off again into the midland plains. Beyond that there would be the undulating hills rolling on towards the sea some two hundred miles distant.

Once in the shade of the forest, he seemed to acquire more energy from some reservoir within himself, and his pace quickened as he moved on down the forest path into the deeper shades. But always he moved lightly and carefully, placing his feet with deliberate care, so that only a faint whisper of sound followed his path through the trees.

After a while, Oberon slowed down again, and started looking intently around as he walked. An exclamation of satisfaction escaped him as he noticed the tiny, inconspicuous white cross on the base of one of the trees. With a sigh of relief, he walked over and sat down, straddling the half-exposed roots with his short, sturdy legs.

For a long time he sat there waiting, while the noises of the forest went on around him. He appeared entirely oblivious to the stream of sound. But long before the birds in the lower branches chirped their warning, he had tensed into alertness again, as though his hearing had been keener than that of the animals.

He was still sitting there, when the first of the little people emerged from the dense undergrowth. Each came from a different point of the compass, but they arrived at such close intervals that it looked like a pre-arranged entrance into a circus ring.

As they came into the clearing, they moved silently into a semi-circle, until there were a round dozen of them before him.

A few minutes went by while they stirred and muttered almost inaudibly to each other. Finally, a slight rustle heralded the arrival of another of them, and this time there was a hush as the small figure advanced towards the semi-circle of waiting mannikins. With an involuntary turn of his head the newcomer could make out the look of impatience on every face but one.

Oberon sensed the waiting attitude in the other dolls, and knew they wanted to see how he would react. In this situation he was forced to be absolutely impartial, for he was to act as judge and, if circumstances dictated it, jury as well. He knew that he must assume these roles, reluctant as he was, because it was for the good of the whole community.

"You're late, Umbriel!" He looked questioningly at the younger one, and there was a stir and mutter from the little people in front of him. With an impatient wave of his hand, he curbed the whispering and looked at the latecomer again.

"A matter of not more than a minute at most. Not too bad on a hike of thirty-odd miles through the forests." There was no sign of apology in the youth's tone. In fact, the onlookers could sense the defiance expressed in his tight mouth and rigid body.

For long minutes Oberon sat silent, meditating on a suitable reply, but at the same time concentrating on shielding his thoughts against the probing of the other youngsters in the clearing.

"It is not only a matter of a minute or two." Oberon made his voice harsh; the youngster must be rebuked, if only to save face. "You know very well that we must learn to work and move in harmony with each other. That is the most important thing about your training. If you fail to adapt to the pace of the others in the troop, then you cannot expect to fit in with the people at home when you are older."

Umbriel stared back at him, without allowing the espression of his real feelings to show. As long as he could mask his features, the others were reduced to guessing his thoughts. Not that they wouldn't make a good guess at that, but as things were it was his only recourse against their constant gnawing away at his defenses.

"So you still think that you can make the grade as a hunter?" Oberon's voice broke into his consciousness again, and he started involuntarily. He restrained his desire to frown as he sensed the faint but derisive laughter from the others.

Oberon studied his son compassionately, knowing he was being unnecessarily harsh, and feeling the backlash like a tearing wound in his chest. At the bottom of everything there was the feeling of guilt he could not suppress—guilt at having sired the boy who stood so defiantly in front of him, with no trace at all of the extra abilities that the other dolls possessed. Umbriel was the only one in the community who seemed to have no psi faculties at all. Sadly, Oberon admitted to himself that there was no place in their group for failures. Unless the boy, by some miracle, found a niche for himself, eventually it might be necessary to expel him from the settlement.

"You know yourself that it takes a little longer to follow the trails and keep out of danger if you cannot smell your way along." The boy looked around at the watching dolls as he spoke. Even the eyes of those who had accepted him as a friend in his younger days now had an attitude of superiority that told him they had already washed their hands of him.

"Anyway, I at least managed to keep away from the big cats." He blurted it out, knowing how much it sounded like bluster. "Even though there are dozens of them in the deep forests we had to go through. Considering I can't feel them the way you do, that should at least be something worthwhile."

Oberon sighed audibly, and seemed to ignore him as he studied each member of the troop. Umbriel realized, with a feeling of rejection, that his father was receiving sensory reports from the others. Seeing with their eyes, admittedly in a rather limited manner, every important facet of their individual treks through the jungle.

Alone among them, Umbriel was unable to participate in the mutual giving of sight. It was improbable that they would ask him for a verbal report on his own trek, since they did not consider that he had anything worthwhile to contribute.

Inevitably, he knew, he would begin to fall behind the others. As things were now, by considerable ingenuity, which was admitted to even by his father, who appeared to be his severest critic, he was nearly able to hold his own. But as the lessons became more and more difficult and complicated his deficiencies would begin to stand out in sharp contrast to the developing efficiency of the troop.

There was a sudden relaxation in their listening attitudes as he watched them, and he guessed that the session was at an end. He started to move toward a secluded corner of the clearing, to rest for a while until the next part of their excursion began. But he was stopped by the beckoning finger of Oberon. He approached his father reluctantly.

"Hope dies hard, doesn't it, son?" Umbriel caught the sympathy in Oberon's voice and felt his own eyes moisten. He stiffened as the hand on his shoulder startled him for a moment, but blinked fiercely as he forced himself to look straight at the keen, searching blue eyes.

"I gave that up long ago, sir. One cannot keep on struggling for the unattainable forever. Even though I do feel at times that things come too easily to the rest of you, and you no longer understand anybody who is different."

"We're not all bigots, son. Some of us are quite capable of seeing the forest, in spite of the trees." Oberon looked out over the clearing, as though he wanted to avoid seeing the emotion on his son's face.

"I think we have done our best to encourage you to develop in competition with the others. We always hoped that one day the pressure of striving to prove yourself their equal might have brought some unexpected ability to light." He stopped speaking for a minute. When he began again, Umbriel heard the catch in his voice. "That it has not happened is not unexpected, but Mab and I have been praying for a miracle. It's unfortunate that we dolls are obligated to a rather primitive code of ethics, which has been forced on us by circumstances; otherwise there would not be so much reason for concern at their attitude."

"Until lately I thought I was managing all right." There was a distinct note of bitterness in the youth's voice. "But there doesn't seem to be much to hope for in the future. Look, Father… sir, can't you see that it won't be a matter of my being turned out of the settlement? Pride alone will force me to leave before that point. At least it will help you and Mother avoid the humiliation of an outright expulsion."

But even to himself Umbriel admitted that it was not a satisfactory solution, and, as he saw his father turn away, grief tore at his throat. Running away from your troubles never is the answer. And he knew quite well that once he was on his own and unable to rely on the help and encouragement of the community, it was unlikely that he would manage to survive for long in the wilderness.

Although he was too young to be admitted to the inner councils of the elders, and did not have the telepathic contact that would keep him abreast of events, Umbriel knew from hints dropped by some members of the troop that there was some uneasiness and depression in the community. The unrest was traceable perhaps to the forays of the big mutating cats that infested the jungle; even though, as long as he could remember, the animals had always been a minor danger to the doll communities.

Oberon coughed, and Umbriel looked at him apologetically, realizing that he might have missed something important while he was glooming over his own troubles.

Seeing that Umbriel was following him again, he went on. "It's not even that we can afford—or want—to dispense with any member of our group. The way things are, we need every person who can contribute something of value. Can you do that?" He darted the question at the boy with such sudden emphasis that it took Umbriel completely by surprise.

"Except that I have to rely on myself in emergencies, I don't think there's so much difference between us." Umbriel realized that the other members of the troop gradually had moved closer again and were listening intently to the discussion. "Even when I can't sense when one of the cats is in the vicinity, I usually manage to hear him move before I'm in any danger."

"Usually is the right word." The impatient note had returned, and Umbriel knew that his father was disappointed that he had failed to contribute something useful to the conversation—something that might have given Oberon a weapon to help him to convince the dolls that Umbriel should be given a chance to prove his worth.

"When things look as black as they have been lately," Oberon said with sudden emphasis, "we have a right, merciless as it might seem, to demand absolute efficiency from everyone."

There was a ripple of comment from those in the clearing as he finished speaking, and Umbriel suddenly knew that his father had been leading up to the seriousness of the situation all along. With a sudden impulse, Umbriel spoke to him again, with his distinct voice ringing sharply across the clearing.

"So it is true that we are having trouble with the cats. Don't you think we have a right to know just how serious the trouble is, and exactly what's going wrong?" He was aware that all heads had turned in Oberon's direction, and the group was still, awaiting a reply.

The boy had intelligence, Oberon thought with a pang. Otherwise he would not have been so quick to demand an explanation and so draw the attention from himself.

"It's not easy to admit that we have been wrong for a long time, but there seems to be no other possible explanation." He leaned back against the tree-trunk and gazed at the youths as they gathered closely around him again. "You know that we have always fancied that we had a big margin of superiority over the wild life." He looked directly at the sturdy, freckle-faced youngster who stood next to Umbriel.

"Because we are all telepathic to some extent or other. Except for Umbriel here," said the youth addressed, unable to resist the dig. But at Oberon's frown of impatience, he carried on hurriedly. "So we have always been able to sense when one of them is in the neighborhood, and that gives us an unbeatable advantage, because their own telepathic senses enable them to do little more than sense the presence of their own kind, unless some of us are careless and broadcast too openly. As long as we exercise normal caution, that's not likely to happen." He paused. "That is, up to now. Now we are not so sure." He looked at another member of the troop and directed his next remark to him:

"Suppose we assume that they have now developed to the point where our blanking of our own thoughts is not effective any more. How much of our advantage will be lost?"

"Just about all of it!" the youth blurted out and there was a gasp as the thought struck home simultaneously in everyone present. "Once they sense our own presence and position in the neighborhood, our superiority will virtually disappear."

Umbriel listened with a feeling of growing tension. All about him the group members were batting the matter back and forth, partly on the mental level. Umbriel stood alone, with his own ideas boiling in his head, quite unaware, for once, that he was excluded from joining in with the others.

There was a saying that had come down to them: "In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king," Umbriel thought of this as the dying embers of the campfire flickered faintly in the clearing.

But that was only because the one-eyed man possessed something that gave him an advantage over the others. In his own case, he seemed to have nothing valuable to contribute. All the same, he thought, even though the others had the ability, even when asleep, to sense the proximity of the big cats, it still seemed foolhardy to fail to keep some sort of sentry-guard during the night. Especially since their discovery of the new abilities of the cats.

Not that it would have done any good to say so. He knew from bitter experience that anything he had to suggest was likely to be received with an attitude just short of derision. It often seemed as though their superior abilities were blinding his people to their own egoism.

Once upon a time, Umbriel thought to himself, the big people, who had created his own race, had killed themselves off through selfishness and greed. Sometimes it seemed to him that the doll people were not doing very much better for themselves.

Umbriel lay down and tried to go to sleep. Even though he was physically exhausted by his long trek through the deep jungle, his mind refused to relax. In spite of his earlier boasting, he had a sense of wonder about the way he had managed to penetrate through the lairs of their most treacherous enemies without a scratch.

With a sigh of despair at his sleeplessness, Umbriel sat upright and then slipped like a shadow towards the nearest side of the clearing. He realized that in the circumstances the best thing he could do was to go for a short stroll along the forest paths, which he knew so well.

Although the air inside the clearing had seemed rather humid and oppressive, there was a cooler breeze on the path, and the youth was soon enjoying the bracing walk.

Even at this hour of the evening, the forest was not entirely still. The nocturnal animals were quieter, but there were occasional brief screams of agony from small animals overtaken by fiercer night prowlers. After these skirmishes, there would be brief flurries of sound, but the virtual silence soon returned.

For a while, as he walked, Umbriel looked at the pinpoints of light that flickered through the leafy roof of the jungle path. Perhaps, on some of those planets, there were still descendants of the big people who had left before the final catastrophe. Vaguely, he hoped that there were, and that one day they would return to find that their doll creations had reached maturity at last.

Umbriel froze suddenly into absolute immobility, and the huge cat that padded almost invisibly along the path towards him failed to notice the small figure that blended like a shadow with the overhanging trees and branches.

For one panic-stricken moment it had seemed as though the animal looked directly at him, its head swaying in his direction as it passed scant inches away from his tense little body. But there was not the slightest pause as it padded on down the forest path, leaving only the tangy, unmistakable smell of cat in the air behind it.

Perhaps it was the scent that pulled the little figure out of his paralysis of fear and sent him scuttling away from the path, to sink quietly to his knees behind one of the overleaning trees.

There was only a moment between the passing of the first animal and his own rapid scuttle for cover, but seconds later he watched breathlessly as two more of the monsters padded down the path and into the gloom of the jungle.

He crouched against the tree. Then, like a tiny shadow, he was racing at almost incredible speed after the animals,

"Only a half mile," he whispered frantically to himself, "and they will walk into the clearing where the others are." Even though he knew quite well that by now the troop should be awake, and aware that their enemies were approaching, Umbriel had always had an unconquerable fear that one day their psi abilities would vanish like the wind and leave them even more defenseless than he.

As he ran, he reached into his belt and took out the short blowgun that all the dolls carried on their forays through the Jungle. In spite of their confidence in their psi powers they still found it necessary on occasion to resort to the immediate and fatal effect of the poison darts.

The faint light from the still hidden moon gave him occasional glimpses of his enemies as he ran. And for one fleeting second he was able to take aim and puff a lethal dart as the last of the cats paused at a junction in the path, its huge head moving from side to side as if it had scented something.

Umbriel nearly overran the animal as it sank slowly and gracefully into its last sleep, but there were still two of the beasts left ahead, so without even a parting glance at the fallen cat, he ran on through the gloom.

Almost before he realized how close they had come, he slowed down as he saw the two tawny shapes, dappled by heavy shadows, peering out into the clearing. And he saw, with a feeling of despair, that there was no sign of movement within the circle of trees. As he inched closer, he could make out the mounds of shadow that represented his sleeping companions.

There was a prayer in his heart as he steadied the pipe and puffed strongly. At first he was afraid that he had missed the target, as both animals crouched together, muscles tensing as they prepared to charge into the clearing. Then one of the beasts was pawing frantically at its side and roaring with incredible force and power, as its agony started. By some freak, the poison had not been immediately effective, and he groaned as the other beast, only temporarily diverted, turned and bounded out of the cover of the trees.

Brief as the warning had been, it was enough to bring the troop to instant awareness. Umbriel watched, his admiration bordering on jealousy, as they marshaled against the cat, as if they had been preparing for it for days. Once awake, they moved with such perfect harmony that the animal was confused by the complexity of their actions. And a rain of darts struck it down before any damage could be done.

Umbriel walked forward, cautiously at first, and calling his name in a low voice, knowing that otherwise the same fate might overtake him.

For endless minutes, Umbriel stared at the dozen slender pipes pointing straight at him. It did not help to realize that only a tiny breath was needed to bring death winging his way. Even less pleasant was the knowledge that there were some among the party who might not hesitate to seize an opportunity like this—with the probability that they would never be blamed.

But as they lowered their weapons at the same time, Umbriel knew that their telepathic gifts had come to his aid. As Oberon shouldered his way through the group and moved towards him like a glowering thundercloud, he realized that his father must have signaled them to refrain.

As Oberon stopped a few feet in front of him, Umbriel waited, with a feeling of resignation, to hear what he would have to say. It seemed obvious that he was not to be allowed to present his own case.

"So you broke the rules again, Unabriel?" There was a touch of indecision in his voice as he addressed the youngster, as though he had doubts in his own mind about what had happened.

"I couldn't sleep… sir…" Umbriel broke off lamely and the others seemed to gain strength at his lack of conviction.

"You know the rules. Nobody must leave the troop without permission. Whether you like it or not, it is a necessary rule, and one that would have made all the difference if there had been more of the beasts."

The youngster stared back at him, determined not to reveal how close the troop had been to catastrophe. If he had not gone against orders in the first place… He shuddered slightly.

Oberon turned to face the others. "I've spoken to the boy, and that ends the matter—at least until we get back to the settlement." He surveyed them bleakly. "But regardless of the fact that we escaped without a scratch this time, by some miracle or other, the point is that nobody was aware of the approach of the beast."

Umbriel knew as well as the rest of them that an answer to the problem was urgent. Some stories had it that the animals had mutated from a domestic species and developed size and cunning as they evolved. But there was a strong school of thought that radioactivity had affected their intelligence.

Without haste, or any obvious sign to the troop, Oberon moved towards the edge of the clearing, where the pathway entered the jungle. With his mind distracted by what had just happened, Umbriel did not realize for a moment where his father was headed.

As the troop dropped into line behind him, Umbriel fell back a few feet and held his breath. There was an exclamation from the dim beginnings of the jungle, and he knew that the party had stumbled across the second of the great beasts he had killed a short while earlier.

Without allowing any emotion to show on his face, Umbriel followed the others, and looked down on the animal as if he had never seen it before. Oberon was surveying it with a peculiar expression on his face, and Umbriel could have sworn that for an instant the blue piercing eyes flickered in his direction.

"Another mystery!" Oberon's voice was hushed and faintly mocking in the gray flush of early dawn. "So the cat was not alone after all. It seems that we were a little hasty in thinking that all that thunder came from one animal only." Umbriel felt again that the words were being uttered solely for his own benefit, and he gritted his teeth hard, determined not to be taunted into answering until he was directly ordered to do so.

Without any further remarks, Oberon turned his back on the dead animal and loped down the path. The troop followed automatically, but Umbriel noticed with some surprise that he was no longer at the rear. By some unspoken agreement, he had been jockeyed into position just behind Oberon, who was running as though he had a definite goal in mind.

The last of the dead animals still lay at the juncture of the paths, and Oberon stood looking at it as they moved around him, with his face an impenetrable mask.

"So now we have three cats. Two of them dead within hearing range of our sleeping place. And nobody, of course, can explain why we failed to sense that they were coming in our direction." He looked keenly around at the other youths, again avoiding Umbriel with his direct gaze.

"But I think we know who was responsible for all this." Now he looked straight at Umbriel, and the youth felt a tremor of nervousness, as he saw that all the rest were doing the same.

"I suppose you couldn't be bothered to tell us what happened, Umbriel?" The older man smiled at him for a moment. Then his face relapsed into the slightly grim look that was becoming his hallmark.

"No, on second thought we can't really blame you for your silence, can we? Being too stiff-necked ourselves to listen to you when you try to tell us something."

He moved towards the youth with such suddenness that Umbriel gaped for a moment as he saw the hand extended in his direction. Then he grasped it hotly with his own hand, and felt a gush of wetness at the back of his eyes.

One by one, the other troop members stepped up to him silently, and offered their hands, while he gulped back his tears and felt the laughter rising in his heart.

After this, things would be better—for a time at any rate, until they forgot again. Gratitude had always been a poor substitute for comradeship, he knew, and he wished desperately that there were sornething else he could substitute for it, some way in which he could prove his worth to the community, so that it would learn to accept him as an equal.

"Umbriel!" Oberon had a tone of appeal in his voice as he spoke to the youngster. "This still has not done as much for you as you had hoped, has it?"

"Perhaps I did not hope for anything at all." The youngster looked away from the forests, towards the faint, stony path that wound up the mountain escarpment to the plateau far above them. If he had been a few years older, he might have been able to escape his feeling of depression with one of the young females of the settlement. As it was, he merely had a vague feeling of being lonely and frustrated.

"In spite of everything that happened last night, do you really have no clue at all as to why the cats were nearly able to take the camp by surprise?" Oberon asked.

Umbriel closed his eyes and shivered as he remembered the cats gliding past him, without even the twitch of a whisker to indicate that they were aware of his presence. For a brief moment, he could even sense the pungent smell of the huge speckled animals, as if they were only a few yards away from him. With a gasp he opened his eyes and looked keenly at Oberon.

"It has always been rather a sore point to you and the rest that I am as blank to your thoughts as you are to mine." His father stiffened as he sensed the challenge in the words.

"Perhaps you're right. If you had been open to our own minds, half the battle might have been solved, because we might have been able to help you resolve your own difficulties—and differences. All the same, I still think you have a theory about the cats. Whether you are right or not, it would be better if you told me your idea. Anything that will help us should ease your own difficulties. I am still your father, and I would give a great deal if I could help you more than you have allowed me to do in the past."

There was a sudden flurry of sound from among the shadowed trees, and they both fell silent until the sound died slowly away again.

"Well, there is no harm in trying, anyway. The notion dawned on me when I noticed how the cats seemed completely unaware of me, even when they passed a—"

With not so much as a warning cry, the older doll flung himself to the ground, at the same time jerking at his belt in an effort to bring his weapon into play. Even as he fell there was a roar of sound as the cat sprang from the undergrowth. All the members of the group were poised for action, with their blow-guns in position, while the huge animal crouched over Oberon's recumbent body, one paw ready to crush the life out of him.

The cat stared unwinkingly at the compact body of little people standing almost out of range. "Make a move and he dies!" it seemed to say, and Umbriel's grip on his weapon slowly relaxed as he realized how close to death Oberon already was.

Then he began to look more objectively at the problem. Being on the opposite side of the rest of the party, he was only a few yards behind the cat, and the animal seemed completely unaware of his presence. In fact, as he himself had been the closest to the trees when the cat had first pounced, it seemed quite fantastic that the monster had not made him the prey, rather than his father.

With sudden decision, he put the gun to his lips and puffed strongly, at the same time running towards the animal. As the dart struck home, the cat collapsed, but a final quiver sent one paw striking violently and Oberon crumpled inertly against the ground under the force of the blow.

As the party of little people moved slowly and painfully up the tortuous path, towards the top of the pass, Umbriel hovered anxiously over the rude stretcher holding Oberon.

Perhaps as a gesture of respect towards Umbriel, resulting from the initiative and daring he had displayed the previous night and morning, the doll people followed his instructions without demur. So, as a stunted clump of thorn trees canie into view, offering meager shade from the sun, Umbriel signaled a welcome halt.

The air seemed a little cooler here, and Umbriel was even more relieved than the others when Oberon came suddenly out of his coma. One moment he lay motionless, the next his eyes were open and his head turned to one side as he gazed at them.

"So you did it again, Umbriel!" He spoke quite clearly, although there was still a trace of tiredness in his voice.

Umbriel rose from his squatting position a few yards away from the stretcher and walked up to him.

"It does seem as though I'm making a habit of it." He smiled as he bent over his father. "In a way it tended to confirm what I had been thinking right along."

"I'm beginning to wonder whether the rest of us aren't a remarkably obtuse lot." He turned his head slowly on the rough pillow of the stretcher and looked questioningly at his son.

Umbriel had a strong feeling that he needed time to think it over carefully, time to develop his theory until it was foolproof and they would not be able to pick holes in it. Also, he knew that his father needed a rest, and so he shrugged with resignation as his father gestured to him to proceed.

"I think you live in rather a noisy environment, where there is so much going on on the thought level that you do not listen for real sounds, unless your attention is attracted by something unusual. And you are so used to picking up thoughts from a multitude of different sources that it tends to blank out some of your own thought processes. That is why I first became suspicious about your theory regarding the cats. You see, I just can't understand how any creature, supposedly inferior to us in ability, could suddenly develop something that gives it an advantage, or at least makes it considerably more dangerous."

"And yet that does seem to have happened," interjected one of the others, who had gathered around to hear what he had to say.

"Seems to, but hasn't. I really started to wonder what was going wrong when we took our training hike through cat country. You might call it a miracle in some cases, but as you know I managed to get through unscathed. Then last night the light started to dawn on me."

Oberon smiled contentedly, as he saw that the youngster they had derided and ridiculed all his life now seemed to have the upper hand.

"It was not just that the cats failed to see me," Umbriel continued. "After all, I've been trained in evasion tactics as thoroughly as any of you. It was just that they seemed to have an absolute unawareness of my presence. Any normal domestic cat could not come within a few feet of any of us without knowing that it was not alone."

"I'm beginning to understand something of what you mean." Oberon looked at him with dawning comprehension on his face. "If you are right it means that your own troubles are nearly over."

"Just cast your minds back to what happened when the cat crashed out of the jungle," Umbriel told the rapt crowd. "It charged in total silence, so that not even I was aware of its coming. The fantastic part was the way it ignored me completely. As far as the cats are concerned, I simply do not exist. You can call that my ability, if you like." He grinned faintly, but went on before anyone could interrupt. "I don't believe that this new type of cat is capable of blanking its thoughts at all. Any more than I am. I think they are just a throwback, with no telepathic ability at all, which is why you can't sense them coming. It seems to me that you will find that a return to the older methods of dealing with them will be the only possible course—that, or the breeding of more specimens like myself."

V

As the tiny hovercraft purred quietly above the water, the four androids on the almost unsheltered deck crouched under the lee of the almost unsheltered wheelhouse. Again and again as the driving wind whipped sprays of water across the vessel, they cringed involuntarily, even though they were already drenched to the skin, and had been for many hours, while they waited for the skies to lighten before they continued on their trip to the island.

The tallest of the little men, his gray tunic still giving him a vaguely military look even though the material clung damply to his body, moved restlessly at intervals until he stood against the rails, peering intently through the gloom as though the few extra paces were likely to make a difference to the visibility.

Robin watched his grandfather almost uncaring, his body too numb with cold and discomfort for him to take any interest in his reactions. A small part of his mind worried dismally about the prospects of the squall developing into a gale, or something worse, even though he knew that the hurricane season in these seas was still some months off.

It was curious, though, he thought, how the dollmen tended to retreat more into themselves at times like this, when one would have expected a greater desire for companionship. But perhaps it was explainable by their almost fanatical disinclination to pander to their weaknesses. Call it false pride if you like, but it seemed to have developed into a tradition among the little people.

With an almost perceptible rise in his pulse-beat, Robin noticed that the sky had lightened several shades since he had last looked. Dimly now, he could make out the shadow of the land against the sky. As he had been told, the mountains gathered their flanks close to the sea, seeming to rise to their greatest height near the landing place that had been selected for them.

The silhouetted heights reminded him strongly, in the dim early morning light, of another harbor on the south of the African continent, although he realized that the similarities would probably disappear once it was light enough to make out the details more clearly.

Oberon caught his glance and nodded. Robin smiled, knowing that a stray thought had leaked through his tight screen, but not feeling any regrets about it.

"Half an hour or so should see us on our way again," Oberon said, squinting against the driving spray towards the dimly seen island.

"It seems that we've been hanging around for weeks already." Robin realized that his tone was curt, but perhaps it was a reaction to the reverence shown by the other dolls to his seemingly ageless relative.

"You must have known that things would be difficult on this trip." Oberon did not look at the youngster as he spoke. "But there were good and solid reasons why the hovercraft were chosen, as you know. Anyway, be thankful that you did not have to attempt an expedition to the islands fifty years ago."

"The comfort could have been emphasized a bit more," said Robin with a note of sarcasm in his voice. "At least they could have given us more shelter."

"It all looks so easy when you're safe and sound on dry land." Oberon wiped his face with a soaking square of linen. "They were so obsessed with the idea that if anything went wrong the boats must be too small to provide transport for other, possibly hostile, beings, that they ignored the necessity to provide more shelter on a slightly bigger craft. In any case, it is supposed to be the calm season."

"Appearances to the contrary, I suppose," said Robin, "but I don't understand why they persist in assuming our enemies will be larger than we are. Intelligence doesn't necessarily imply sheer bulk."

"If the beings we are seeking are intelligent," remarked the other. "The cats were supposed to be so, up to a point, but their abilities turned out to be quite limited. By present standards, they would hardly have presented any hazard at all."

From their position it was just possible to make out the flickering light against the darkness of the mountain.

"Well, the fires are there all right," Oberon said with a note of triumph in his voice. "That proves that at least we're not on a wild goose chase. And as far as I'm concerned, it indicates the presence of something intelligent."

"But not telepathic, or we would have picked up something by now." Robin stared intently at the tiny fragment of red staining the blackness of the mountains. "Oh, I know!" he said, in a voice tinged with boredom. "It's just our own viewpoint which equates intelligence with psi. Still, the maker of the fire could be something decadent, say some descendents of our own kind, who have lost their special abilities and regressed to a stage where they still remember how to make use of fire."

But they all realized that the fires were something that carried unspoken menace for the doll people. Even now, when their technological skill was developing brilliantly, and their colonies were trading regularly with those in Europe, the balance could easily be disturbed. With larger numbers, their society would have been more stable, but as it was they still depended to some extent on scavenging for materials and metals in the ruined cities.

Short of a phenomenal population explosion, it was unlikely that they would attain self-sufficiency for some generations, which was why they were wary of any likely threat or competition from other species.

The reports of lights sighted on what had once been known as Mauritius had been followed up immediately by the present scanty expedition, but the dolls were prepared to launch a full invasion as soon as the presence of a threat had definitely been detected.

Robin knew that they were regarded as foolhardy, but none of the party regretted their position, for different reasons. He admitted ruefully that there was no unanimity about it. Even to himself he was not fully prepared to admit that there was nothing of the adventurer about him. Unless the spirit of curiosity could be called so.

He was so lost in thought that he failed to notice how the engine had changed. Slowly the hovercraft started to move forward towards the land, sliding smoothly above the ragged waters of the sea. Every now and then it staggered sideways like a drunk man, as a strong gust of wind caught the flimsy craft before the pilot could take corrective action.

Long and anxious minutes later, the boat lifted above the steeply shelving sands of the tiny inlet they had selected, and settled gently between two gray, water-worn boulders.

Without any command, Robin intensified his thought screen, knowing that the others must be doing the same. From here on, they had agreed earlier, it was essential that they should prevent any stray whispers of thought from betraying their presence to a possible enemy. There was still the possibility that telepaths inhabited the island, and their own failure to detect any while offshore did not rule out the existence of the unknown.

Silently, the small band of five picked their way over the rough, boulder-studded ground and entered the line of low bushes that marked the beginning of the island's vegetation.

They all walked carefully, moving on their feet as if they had been trained for jungle warfare. Robin knew that normally their thoughts would have passed back and forth without audible comment, and to him there was something ghostly and depressing about their lack of contact. It was easy enough to isolate yourself when it was done voluntarily, with only the deeper ranges of the mind closed to contact. But at least there was always the continual friendly touch of surface thought to make you aware that you were not quite cut off from others. This heavy screening was different and oppressive, he admitted, unwillingly, because he had argued to the contrary on numerous occasions.

Robin sat above the clearing, half-way up the slope of the small hill. From there, he could see and be seen without being too obtrusive.

In a way, he thought, it was remarkable how quickly they had recovered from their astonishment at finding a small number of humans still alive on the island. Perhaps Oberon's presence had been largely responsible for their quick adaptation.

Apart from the communication problem when it turned out that the humans spoke French, their difficulties were not insurmountable. In spite of their primitive living conditions, the humans were not stupid. As far as could be ascertained, their decline on the island had been a matter of circumstances they had been unable to control.

Nevertheless, even the few days they had been there had been enough for the dolls to realize that the humans were living on borrowed time. The island had apparently been denuded of nearly everything edible—bird, beast and flora. It seemed incredible that so few people could have been responsible for the devastation.

From his position on the slope, he could see three of the dolls sitting with the humans, evidently in earnest conversation. There was nothing actually abnormal about the scene, but he suddenly had the feeling that they might be making a mistake in their approach to the whole problem. "Almost as if we haven't been careful enough," he murmured to himself. He watched with a vague sense of distaste as one of the humans stretched out a casual hand and stroked one of the dolls on the head.

With a sharpened sense of foreboding, Robin saw that it was the pilot, Chatto, who was being submitted to the indignity. A brave and proud man, Chatto was the last person Robin would have expected to accept a caress from a human.

But with increasing bewilderment, Robin saw that the doll apparently accepted it without demur, as if he were a dog, submitting to the momentary attentions of his master.

Then the watching android sensed that someone had approached him silently from the rear. He rolled over and stared into the grim face of Oberon. For a moment neither spoke; but they knew that their impressions had been the same.

Oberon broke the silence first, with an anxious glance in the direction of the clearing before he turned to Robin again.

"I think it would be better if we refrained from lifting our screens to each other—even now. There might be snoopers around."

"They're not telepathic…" Robin began, and then stopped short as he realized what lay behind his grandfather's remark. "I see," he continued slowly.

"We don't need to beat around the bush, then. We may be wrong, but there is something definitely unpleasant about the way the others are reacting to the humans."

"They seem to have a dominant trait that makes our own people appear servile," Robin said thoughtfully. "Fortunately, though, we don't seem to be affected ourselves."

"There have been two distinct types of dollmen for many decades." Oberon walked restlessly a few paces away and then swung back to face his grandson. "The more cooperative-minded types who don't object to community get-togethers, and those like ourselves, who seem to hold aloof from the others."

"And you think the first type might be more susceptible to a dominant personality?" Robin asked. But he didn't wait for an answer. "I don't think we could say for certain that the humans actually planned for one trait or the other, but the fact that our earliest forebears were planted on individual families as dolls seems to imply that originally all the dolls must have had docile personalities. You should be able to comment from personal experience." Robin studied his relative curiously.

"I wouldn't put anything past the humans," said Oberon musingly. "There have been so many traits that turned up over the years, that I would guess they intended us to develop in more directions than one. It may just be that their planning was disrupted too soon, and so some traits remained in existence for too long. I would give a lot to know for certain whether they actually planned my longevity."

"Perhaps they reckoned that we needed more than one dominant characteristic." Robin rubbed his head thoughtfully. "I have my own ideas about our apparent advantages and deficiencies anyway. Like our technological achievements so far."

"We seem to be doing all right."

"Perhaps we are up to a point, but when we fail to develop anything startlingly new there's a tendency to blame it on lack of population rather than on our own lack of mechanical aptitude and inventiveness. We are excellent at adapting something left by the humans, but we seldom come up with anything original."

"If I didn't know you so well," Oberon said, "I might think you were in favor of taking the humans back to Africa again." He grinned and raised his hand as Robin tried to interrupt.

"All right, you don't have to tell me that the boat isn't capable of it. We've been over that already. But you know as well as I do that the people back home will be swayed by sentiment when they hear about our discovery. Unless we can provide good and cogent reasons why the humans should be left on this island, there is not much doubt what will be done."

The younger android relaxed comfortably on the grass after his companion had gone. In spite of the fact that the conversation had left him worried and perplexed, he kept his thoughts in the deeper layers of his consciousness, where they were not likely to be detected without his consent.

On the surface, he seemed as placid and contented as he was trying to appear. Perhaps he was helped by the vague flashes of thought he was able to pick up. At this range it was possible to do little more than sense the presence of others on the mainland, but it was a comforting thought that they were not completely isolated from their own kind.

It was not even necessary to know who you were contacting, he thought. The mere presence of some other mind was like a friendly hand in your own.

He smiled self-consciously at his own sentimentality and rose to his feet. A little walk around the island was not likely to bring a cure for his doubts, but it had a therapeutic value in providing some necessary distraction.

At times the beauty of the island was like a drug, forcing the mind to forget the more urgent problems of the moment in a tidal wave of color and enchantment. High on the mountain slopes the blue of the sea blended with the more distant peaks of the island, with the vivid green of the vegetation a fresh contrast to the eye.

After the brisk climb, Robin panted a little. Sitting near the edge of a steep slope, he noticed the approach of a large figure. The humans, he had noted, did not allow any of the doll people out of their sight for very long. No doubt they would deny that they were keeping an eye on him, but their tactics were fairly transparent.

Evidently they think I am of some importance, Robin thought, or they wouldn't have sent their own leader after me. He carefully veiled his surprise in a noncommittal gesture at the other to sit down on the grass next to him.

For a while the big man was silent, keeping his eyes away from the android. Robin had the distinct impression that the man was doing his best not to appear intrusive or inquisitive.

"You are not as friendly as your companions," the human said finally, darting a quick glance at him.

Robin flinched at the remark. This man, Pierre, was no fool, he thought, or he would not have long remained leader of a people who were so obviously at the end of their tether.

"I might say that it takes all types," Robin said carefully.

"It does take all types," Perrre agreed, turning his larger bulk so that he faced the android directly. "But I think we humans deal more in averages, and the others of your party, excepting one, seem to have less reservations than you or your leader."

Robin felt a flare of panic as he looked as steadily as possible back at the human. They had realized that he and Oberon did not have the same open-hearted liking for the humans, that neither of them enjoyed the good-natured tolerance—or contempt—of the big men. Perhaps it would prove dangerous to both of them. He cursed his lack of perception in not realizing how obvious their attitudes must have been. But was the contrast sharp enough to make the humans equate it with actual hostility?

"If you meet a strange animal," Robin said carefully, "it is not usually a good policy to put out a hand and pat it, until you are quite sure of its state of… well, civilization, if you like."

Robin felt the human's lack of telepathic ability oddly disconcerting. In talking to other telepaths, there were nuances of thought on either side that were difficult to screen out completely, and which gave a fair indication of how the other person was thinking. Here everything was a mental blank, and he felt that the human sensed, better than he, how things were going.

"We could at least be said to have passed the savage state," said the bronzed, dark-haired human. "The fact that our present circumstances are bad does not prove that we are not capable of better things, given the opportunity."

"But why?" said Robin, leaning forward eagerly. "In spite of everything we have been able to find out about your people on this island, it still isn't clear why your conditions are so bad. Why, for example, you seem to be on the verge of starvation. The island is big and fertile enough to support a population many times larger than your own group. But as far as we know, there are no others of your kind here—or anywhere else for that matter," he added under his breath.

"You are telepaths, aren't you?"

The unexpectedness of the question left Robin groping for a reply.

"How did you know?" He knew that he would have to play for time until he could think out a way of giving him just enough information to satisfy his curiosity.

"You people talk too little and answer questions as if someone else had told you the answer. And when we suspected the truth, it was easy enough to set a trap for one of you who should not have known the answer to something we had told to another." Pierre grinned broadly and Robin knew that they had been outsmarted again. More and more he was finding that they had underestimated the humans.

"You can't read our minds though," said the other coolly. "And it should be obvious enough how we worked that out once we knew that you were telepaths."

"We ask too many questions." Robin realized that a measure of truth was the only possible course. "If we knew all the whys and wherefores, it would not be necessary. Still, you haven't answered my question about your living standards."

For a moment the human sat quietly, and Robin had the impression that the man would refuse to answer the question. When he did break the silence, he spoke slowly, as if each sentence were being edited.

"The island was already approaching saturation when the war broke out. We imported a large percentage of our foodstuffs, so that when the ships stopped coming—in fact, a certain number reached here after the bombing and aggravated the shortages still further—we rapidly reached the starvation point.

"Even now, the stories of the privations the people went through are still remembered." He paused and looked around him. "Of course, it was more or less inevitable under such conditions, that disease would break out. From then on things steadily deteriorated. The trees, for example, were cut down for fuel, or for boats to send over to the mainland."

"We have no record of any expeditions reaching Africa," Robin said.

"I think they died because the land was still contaminated, or because they met up with storms. At any rate, no expedition ever returned here, so after a while the people gave up hope."

Robin felt a twinge of pity for the man. Perhaps he and Oberon were being too hasty in passing judgment. He seemed sincere enough, and there had been nd attempt to coerce or mistreat them.

"In theory there should be enough for the few who still survive to exist on, but I think that the facts speak for themselves." Pierre pinched the scanty flesh on his leg to illustrate the point. "Perhaps it was nature's way of compensating for the overpopulation, but apart from the birds there is very little that's edible on the island. What was left after the…" He stopped short, but continued as Robin eyed him inquiringly.

"What was left is largely inedible. Most of the fruits and vegetables are deadly poisonous. In bitter fact, you may be our last hope of surviving the next year or so."

Robin realized that his own attitude had been changing as the story unfolded; the humans, in his mind, no longer constituted a prospective menace. Perhaps because it was impossible to fear something that seemed so completely dependent on the good will of the dolls for survival.

Something of what he had been thinking must have been apparent to the human. Robin glanced away from him for a moment and then sat paralyzed with surprise as the huge hand stroked lightly across his head.

Without thinking, he shuddered violently and jerked away from the touch, fright flickering over his tiny face as he stared at Pierre. For a moment, the human dropped his impassive mask and Robin caught a fleeting glimpse of frustration and then puzzlement.

"I'm sorry!" The words came thickly from the tall bronzed man, as if he were having difficulty in speaking. "But the others do not seem to mind."

"I am sorry as well. It doesn't indicate dislike; it's just that I'm one of those who resents personal contact." Robin knew that he was lying badly and that the other suspected he was not telling the whole truth. Steeling himself, he gazed frankly back at the other, and breathed a sigh of relief as the human seemed inclined to accept his statement.

They separated as they approached the clearing, and Robin looked around eagerly for Oberon. Not noticing him at first, he dropped his screen and started to thought-probe.

"You fool!" came the guarded thought instantly. "At least keep your screen up until we have had a chance to talk things over." Robin felt the anger behind the thought like a slap in the face, and his own face reddened with the shock.

This time he looked more carefully and a short moment later stood in front of Oberon, feeling like a small boy who has just been reprimanded by his teacher. Robin gave a quick account of the talk he had had with the leader of the islanders.

"It may well be that we've misjudged them," he concluded. "There were moments when the humans seemed to be holding something back, but that can be explained by our different points of view. Their lack of psi, for one thing, makes it difficult for us to understand them."

"You should try taking a look at your own change of opinion. Yesterday you were practically advocating continued isolation. Today you seem ready to ask those at home to send over a ship for them."

"It's natural enough to change opinions if circumstances warrant it," Robin said curtly. "All we have against them is our personal dislike of being touched, which seems rather irrational, to put it mildly. They do it so spontaneously, even casually, that I'm beginning to feel that we've been making too much of it."

Oberon grunted and continued to eye him with an expression that was just short of hostility. Then he looked away and stared across the clearing.

Robin followed his gaze. Two human children were standing opposite each other, shouting incomprehensibly. Robin watched first with increasing incomprehension as they suddenly ran together and struck out at each other. And in a moment there was a mob, screaming and clawing in the middle of the clearing, as the other children joined in with gusto.

"You saw that, Robin? Doesn't that mean anything at all to you?" Oberon asked. "I know that our own youngsters settle their squabbles in other ways. Telepathy gives them more of an insight into the desires and frustrations of others. These children lack the ability, so I suppose we must expect something like this.

"The trouble is, they will not be likely to change their way of handling things once they contact our own children. In a quarrel, it's obvious enough who would come off second best."

"We cannot afford to make a judgment solely on what we know right now."

Oberon brooded with a bitter look on his face. "Tell me," he said suddenly, "did the human give you any details of the extermination of his people on the island?"

He grunted with obvious skepticism, as Robin told him as much as he could remember, chewing fiercely at a blade of grass as he listened.

"The humans never have changed their ways," he said obscurely, "and we can hardly expect them to do any better once they've left the island."

With sudden decision, he rose to his feet and gripped Robin by the arm.

"Be particularly careful now, and keep your feelings to yourself, no matter how surprised you feel at what I say. That Pierre fellow is watching like a hawk from the other side of the clearing, and he mustn't get the faintest idea of what I'm planning.

"Have you walked down to the beach lately, to take a look at the boat?" Oberon spoke quietly, deliberately refraining from watching Robin.

"As a matter of fact, I haven't bothered. Since it's too small to carry any of the humans—even if they knew how to run it—there can hardly be any danger from that quarter," Robin said.

"All the same, they have a couple of men guarding it night and day. In case we try to make a run for it, I suspect. Although what they expect to gain, I couldn't say."

"Unless they've persuaded some of the others to collaborate in a plan to summon a boat from the mainland," Robin suggested with a sudden qualm. "Yes, I know the range is too far for either of us individually, but it is possible to achieve greater range by mental linkage." As Oberon looked back at him grimly, he nodded his understanding.

"We both shudder at the idea of opening up our minds completely. But the humans seem to have the others so thoroughly under their thumbs that it's a possibility we will have to face. We've been keeping our screens so tight that we wouldn't even have been aware of what was happening."

"Possibly you're right," said Oberon, "and that makes our position even more difficult. I'm beginning to think that it would be worthwhile to investigate the possibilities of the group-mind properly, now that there's something to be gained from it."

The two of them crouched at the edge of the bushes. Dimly ahead of them in the darkness they could make out the outlines of two large rocks, between which they had left the hovercraft.

Robin saw that Oberon had been telling the truth, as the metal of the boat reflected the flickering of a small fire further down the beach towards the sea.

"You can't see it from here," Oberon whispered, "but they've constructed a low barricade of stones between the boat and the sea." He gave a dry chuckle. "You still haven't guessed how we can get the boat away from them, have you?"

"Short of getting rid of the guards and trying to break the barricade, I have to admit that I can't."

"Probably you have made the same error as the humans have, but without the same justification. As neoprimitives they would not be likely to visualize a boat as something that can cruise almost as well over level ground as over water…"

"Dammit, you're right!" said Robin. "As long as we can reach the boat and get it started before they can get to us, we can cruise up the beach and around the rocks on the other side."

"Sounds easy, but it has as many snags as a bramble bush. For one thing, it takes a while to warm the engines, and the guards are too close to allow us that much leeway. For another, they might have sabotaged the engines."

"There is one way," suggested Robin carefully. "The boat's landing wheels are down, and only the brakes keep the boat from running down the sands towards the sea. The incline is enough to give it momentum. If we can reach the boat undetected…" He outlined the plan, while his companion listened with mounting excitement.

As they reached the boat and crouched breathlessly for a moment on the shallow deck, both realized how desperate their idea really was. But as the moments passed without any sign that they had been detected, the plan was slowly put into operation.

The brakes were gently released and the boat began to move down the slope. At the same time Oberon started the motors with a sudden roar of sound. There were shouts from the barrier ahead as the guards belatedly realized what was happening.

The boat gathered speed rapidly, as the motors labored to lift the craft above the sands, and Robin could feel the engine gaining power.

But already there were shadows running towards them from the direction of the barricade. And there was a shout of alarm as one of the humans evaded the speeding vessel with a lurch to one side.

Almost groaning with despair, Robin saw the barrier looming closer and still the boat struggled to attain air buoyance. Drearily he realized that the guards were shouting in triumph as they waited for the boat to strike the row of docks.

Incredibly, almost at the last minute, the boat rose inches above the sand, and Robin scrambled for a foot-hold as Oberon threw the motors into reverse. For an endless moment, the craft seemed poised to crash against the rocks, and then it was gaining speed again up the incline.

Afterwards, and at intervals over the years, Oberon remembered seeing the lean figure of Pierre, the leader of the island humans, run shouting down the beach at the last moment, in a desperate attempt to stop them from leaving the island.

Even then, it was clearly an impossible task, and he saw the man stand helplessly at the edge of the water, watching them move steadily away. Oberon knew that he would never forget the expression on the man's face—the fury that changed so subtly into despair.

Oberon squinted at the blue mountains of the island, as the boat purred contentedly above the smooth waters of the sea.

"Now we only have to decide how we're going to conclude the whole matter." Robin stared ahead as if he were deliberately trying to ignore the receding island.

Oberon shrugged his shoulders impatiently. "There's only one thing we can do—abandon them on the island. It is a pity about the three of our people who helped them, but perhaps we can come to some sort of agreement about supplying a limited amount of food to the humans, if they will hand them over."

"But the humans will die unless they manage to get off the island."

"Maybe you're just as selfish as I am," said Oberon—"or less experienced. But I happen to believe that we must look after our own."

"They are so few…"

"And they breed like rabbits," Oberon said sourly. "Only two couples on the island of a reproductive age, but there are at least a dozen children, and more on the way. In ten generations or so, who knows how far they will have progressed."

"We're telepaths; surely that gives us an advantage."

"If you call it an advantage. Most of us are so damn used to being honest, because it's impossible to get away with anything else, that we just wouldn't manage to get along with them. Their talent for double-dealing is too well-developed for us to change it. And their physical strength gives them an advantage.

"Perhaps you think the influence they had on the others was overemphasized by us, but we just can't afford to take the chance that it might have worked on most of our own people as well and, if it did, we would probably end up as tolerated animals, if we were lucky. From birth these humans seem to indulge in one long competition, as if their very survival depended on going one better than the other fellow. Even their weak story about the depopulation of the island doesn't ring true to me. The signs pointed to a fratricidal struggle that must have been going on for generations, resulting in the scant numbers still alive.

"Once," he said, after a pause, "Mauritius had other inhabitants—big, helpless, ungainly birds which were too slow and stupid to adjust themselves to man and his importations. Perhaps it's poetic justice that man himself will end up in the same position—as dead as the dodo!"

VI

"I may be wrong," Oberon said thoughtfully, "but I've been around for quite a long time, even as our lives go. It seems to me that you're going out of your way to find possible dangers."

Robin admitted that his grandfather had a way of seeing things differently, but this time he was sure that he was wrong.

"You're even more of an individualist than most. That at least should set you against the hive-minds."

"I admit that I do not quite like the idea," Oberon said, "but our race has turned up with surprises so often that I would rather reserve judgment for the time being."

"By then it may be too late."

Oberon stared across the hills towards the light blue haze that indicated the sea some forty miles away. "You were still young when your father died, Robin," he said. "At the beginning, I was as willing as anybody to see only his drawbacks even though he was my youngest son. But he proved that his apparent lack of psi power was something we needed desperately. It's easy enough to belittle his contribution, but the cats were a potential danger at a time when we were still struggling to establish ourselves."

"Then for the time being," said Robin reluctantly, "I will do my best to find out as much as possible, without getting myself too deeply involved."

Robin guided the dwarfed horse carefully into the half-hidden entrance to the tiny yard of the house. A few minutes later, the animal safely stabled and contented as it munched the fresh hay in the stall, he let himself through the sturdy wooden door, into the house.

He was envoloped immediately by an atmosphere as welcome as it was rare. Like old wine seldom drunk, it even had a tang of the alien about it.

For a moment he stood still as he surveyed the room. Being among friends, real friends that could be trusted, because they thought the way you did, was like coming home again. His breathing quickened as he answered the smiles of welcome and moved towards the one vacant chair in the room.

After weeks of guarded thought, and cautious, continued shielding against prying minds, the atmosphere here seemed doubly welcome.

"Still deep-shielded, Robin?" One of the dollmen smiled grimly at him. "It's remarkable what a difference it makes when you have to keep such a tight grip on your thoughts."

"It drives me nearly frantic sometimes, Dan," he replied. "Still, how the others can stomach a constant intrusion of petty thoughts and interruptions to their own ideas completely escapes me."

"It seems to be getting worse." Robin watched keenly as the slim, tall doll walked over to the miniature fireplace and leaned against the mantle. "It seems to have become a soporific for the masses, who feel lost unless they're in a continual contact with at least one of their fellows. You should know how the constant undertone of droning triviality acts like a hypnotic after a while. If allowed to go on for too long, it seems to become a necessity to them, like a drug addiction."

There was silence in the room as the half-dozen dolls pondered the question. Robin felt that they were approaching a danger as crucial to the welfare of their people as the cat menace had once been. Perhaps more so, because it was considered not as a menace, but as a step forward, by the people who took part in it. Perhaps at some stage of their evolution the ants and the bees, if intelligent enough, might also have hesitated and wondered about the advantages of a group-mind.

"At the moment," said Robin, "it may be only a cult. The trouble is that it's caught on too rapidly. If we're unable to stop the trickle now, it may become an avalanche that will bury the lot of us."

"You are all fooling yourselves," Grayson interrupted, his full twenty-nine inches looming over the others. "You're not willing to admit to yourselves that things have gone too far already. Otherwise, why do we meet in secret like this, taking absurd precautions to ensure that nobody will find out what we are doing. It only needs one suspicious thought and everything we stand for will be blown sky high."

Robin remembered how he had come over the brow of the last rolling hill before the sea burst into view, sparkling in clear blue and white above the mile-long beach of clear sand.

Every time he visited town for the monthly stock-up, he felt the same rising flood of emotion, until he passed down the hill again to the hollow where the growing town lay against the sea. Hemmed in as it was, by the salting, ancient harbor of the dead humans and the lush vegetation along the coast, it still held promise of developing into a beautiful place, once the growing-pain stage was passed.

But this time it felt different, perhaps because of the serious views he had expressed to Oberon. In a way, he felt as though he was walking into a trap, all the more menacing because he had his eyes open.

In any case, he assured himself, he seemed to have less and less in common with the townsfolk, who "carried their thoughts on their shoulders," as Oberon would have put it. In a way, it was true that most country people had some hesitation about leaving their minds open even to their friends and families, whereas the townspeople seemed to be losing whatever inhibitions they might once have had.

He whistled cheerfully as the first of the little houses was reached and passed, and his morbid imaginings fell further into the background. He appreciated the contrast between the rude conveyance he was driving and the motor vehicles that were making increasing appearance on the roads. At the same time the horse served as a cloak for his activities.

With a cheery nod to some loungers on the street corner, he concentrated more on keeping the horse on the correct route. "They probably think I'm just a dull country-bumpkin!" He chuckled to himself a little ruefully, aware that his own ideas of what stood for sociability and friendliness evidently did not mesh with theirs. "Maybe there is something to be said for less talking and more thinking, but the trouble is that they can't seem to see how much genuine feeling and emotion is lost in the process."

With a cluck to the horse, and a faint grin as he picked up its momentary thought (one which would have shocked his female relatives), he turned into the narrow street close to the old harbor and stopped outside the store.

Even here, a place full of bustle and cheerful chatter, Robin found the atmosphere thin and chilly. As far as he was concerned, it lacked warmth of any kind, so that it was a relief when his business was finally concluded, with little cordiality from the young man who seemed to have taken over the place since his last visit.

Robin missed the cheerful teasing and bickering that had usually helped the transactions along, but the old man did not put in an appearance, and his successor did not appear to be in the mood for explanations. In fact, he thought with a feeling of exasperation, the man spoke seldom and reluctantly, although Robin could feel the occasional probe that made his own mind recoil and close up after each unwanted intrusion.

When the girl entered the store, Robin looked casually at her as he prepared to walk away from the counter. Then he stopped and waited until she was passing close to him before he stepped into her path.

"Bette-Ann!" There was more exuberance in his tone than he realized, and the girl stared at him.

"I don't…" she began and frowned at him with sudden embarrassment as she suddenly recognized him.

"I thought you had gone away north, to the new colony," he said. He could feel a sense of withdrawal in her that seemed close to panic.

"We decided not to go, Robin." She forced a smile in which there was little of the old warmth and liking that had once existed between them.

"But you didn't let me know, Bett." He caught the hint of pleading in his voice. Their encounter was on a plane he didn't understand.

In time, he had expected to follow her to her new home. Both of them had hoped that eventually they would be able to "set-up" together. But now, without any reason at all, everything had changed.

"Wait a minute, Robin." She turned and made a few casual purchases, while he stood silent, his mind in a ferment.

After a few minutes she gathered up her parcels and they left the store together, she with her head high, and her face pale and strained.

"I think you owe me an explanation." He knew that the anger in his thoughts was close to the surface, but he was unable to conceal it.

"I owe you nothing at all." She did not look at him as she walked quickly along the edge of the dusty little street. "Nothing I ever said could have given you a claim on me."

"That's not true…" Robin stopped speaking and clamped his teeth tightly, trying to calm his anger. "Look, Bett, you just can't let everything break up like this without telling me why."

The girl gave him a quick glance and he was tempted to open his mind to her. At the last minute, something made him tighten his shield instead.

"I'm sorry, Robin, but it really wouldn't be any good. Too much has happened since you last went home." She stopped and smiled uncertainly at him; then her face changed and he watched with bewilderment as she looked at him impersonally, as if he did not exist, and started to walk down the road. He took a couple of quick strides and grasped her firmly by the arm.

"Oh! Who—?" She looked at him with such obvious bafflement that his grasp instantly relaxed and he stepped back from her. Then the light seemed to come back into her eyes again, and the blankness he had noticed disappeared as if a curtain had been opened.

"Well, I'm right back where I was before—still waiting for your explanation."

"You never did like to open up completely, did you Robin?"

"Open up?" He looked at her in amazement. "You mean like the average townie? No, I can't say I did. Even with you, although that would be easier than with most."

"You 'closed-minds' are not exactly popular around town, Robin. Have you ever tried to do something about it?"

"Maybe I feel that I'm entitled to keep my opinions to myself."

Perhaps the mutual trading of thoughts was the best thing to do once you were married, he thought. But until then it seemed like a violation of something too intensely personal to be shared with anybody. Oh, there were young people who indulged in it, but they were in the minority, in the country areas at any rate.

"Damnit, Bette-Ann"—he clenched his fists as he spoke—"if I thought that you had been sharing with anyone else I'd…"

"Not just with anybody." She looked at him with a glazed expression, so that her eyes seemed dull and lusterless. But at the same time there was an exhilaration in her voice that startled him.

Then the momentary filming passed away, and she seemed as normal as usual.

"It's something I can't explain properly. Unless you try to meet me… us, halfway. There is a meeting tonight, if you would like to come along."

"I've been hearing something about those meetings," he said, feeling himself slipping into the mire. "And I think I would enjoy the experience…"

The dividing line between normal enthusiasm and fanaticism was so fine as to be virtually indistinguishable.

If Robin had not known beforehand that these people were leading the new extremist cult, he would have passed them by without a second glance. There was only one hint of their difference, and this was the absence of cheerful conversation which usually occurs when a group of people come together.

Even Bette-Ann sat quietly at his side. She allowed him to hold her hand, but with such passivity and lack of response that he was tempted to release his grasp, knowing that in all probability she would not even notice it.

At intervals he probed cautiously at his neighbors, but found with a shock that they invariably had a tight screen on their thoughts. That made him concentrate all the harder on keeping his own screen intact, instinct telling him that there might be danger in relaxing for a minute.

For some time, as the hall gradually filled with people, Robin kept his impatience in check. Apart from an occasional rustle of movement, he could sense nothing. Even though he usually welcomed the absence of intruding thoughts, there was not even the murmur that telepaths felt at the surface of their minds, like the low humming from a radio when it is warming up.

Eventually the doors of the hall were closed, as the people stopped entering and Robin felt his interest quicken again with a sense of anticipation that at last some of his questions would be answered. But again the minutes passed slowly and tediously, and he turned to Bette impatiently.

Even the increased pressure of his hand did not seem to divert her attention; completely oblivious to him, she continued to stare raptly in front of her, as though watching something out of his sight.

In spite of himself, he followed the direction of her gaze, and then quickly shifted his attention to the hall, realizing with a sickening sense of frustration that he was being left out of something. Even a quick mental probe at Bette, and then his neighbors, elicited no response.

Slowly, he relaxed his thought screen, feeling that there did not seem to be any reason why he should continue to maintain it.

In fact, Robin found himself thinking, it was a pity in a way that he had been brought up to consider any deep contact with others as a violation of his own privacy. The whole idea of one conglomeration of minds thinking in concert, with an undivided aim, was an infinitely better idea than countless individuals pulling selfishly in all directions.

With each member of the group fully aware of all the ideas of any other member, it was inevitable that each individual stood to gain from the contact.

He played with the idea further, feeling, with a sense of exhilaration, that he was making a big stride forward. The thought of his own country people, hidebound by their petty prejudices and distrust, filled him with pity at their weakness.

After all, the thought came even more strongly, unless they are encouraged to change their ideas and come out of their isolation to join us…

Robin felt the thought stop abruptly, as if a mistake had been made. Then it struck him like a shower of cold water.

The idea of us—how had that intruded into his thoughts?

With sudden fear, he tried to raise his thought screen again and found that he was unable to do so.

His thoughts plodded slowly and painstakingly along, as if they were dragging through a quagmire. There were undercurrents of images, nagging little details he imagined that he had long forgotten, and fragments of new ideas that did not seem to belong in his own mind at all.

Without being conscious of arriving at a conclusion, Robin realized that the full weight of everyone else in the hall was bearing down on him with suffocating force, so that gradually his own thoughts were grinding to a stop.

Somewhere, there was a vestige of reasoning still left to him. Something of which the group-consciousness did not seem aware was still in existence. With a sense of desperation, he clung to it, as if it were his only chance.

And as he relaxed his mind to the invasion, he still clung to the one small corner; he felt his whole being flood into it and cower there as though hiding from an unrelenting enemy. Gradually, the sense of overwhelming strength began to recede, and he received a last fleeting impression that the combined minds were satisfied that he was now suitable material for easy absorption.

Dazed as he was, Robin saw that Bette was rising to her feet and, feeling the earth reeling around him, he followed suit automatically, allowing her to take the lead as they walked out of the emptying hall.

For some moments, he followed her silently, feeling his strength slowly return as they walked, but with a growing conviction that it would be dangerous for him to try to put up his screen until he was well away from the other members of the group.

Including Bette! With a sidelong glance at her calm, pretty face, he suppressed the thought, feeling even that might be enough to reveal the truth to her, and so to her circle.

With an almost audible click, she suddenly seemed to become aware of his presence at her side and smiled at him. Robin felt a sense of repulsion that was clouded with pity.

"You know now, Robin, don't you?" She spoke so sweetly that he stared at her in astonishment. "Now that you have learned to keep your mind open, it will be like old times for both of us."

"You mean that things will be as they were before all this happened?" He knew that whether he liked it or not he would have to carry on with the deception.

"Not quite the same, of course. It will involve sharing with the others, to some extent. But that will make life more full and satisfying for both of us." He could feel her mind, fluttering against the surface of his own, which he kept open with an effort of his will. If only she did not try to delve any deeper, he thought desperately; but after a moment her mind withdrew, and he breathed more freely again.

"Perhaps now it's a bit too soon." She smiled at him impersonally and Robin knew a sense of loss. "The shock of first contact is too disturbing, anyway. It will be better for both of us when you've had a chance to adjust."

He only knew that he must get away from her and leave the town as quickly and unobtrusively as possible. Once beyond casual psi contact, it might be possible to evade the prying group-mind for a while, until he could alert his own people against the danger.

But Bette? In spite of his revulsion… No! She was as much the group mind as the others, whether she had joined it voluntarily or otherwise. But, in spite of the trap she had tried to lead him into, she seemed, outwardly at least, as much the woman he loved as she had been before.

As Robin finished his story, there was a sigh from the other people in the small room.

"They are having things nearly all their own way," Dan commented from his chair across the room. "If they don't try to get at us through emotional entanglements, there are dozens of variations on a theme that they can try. And we cannot say for certain that they won't succeed."

"With only our own group still free, plus a few scattered individuals here and there in the town, it looks as though they've won already," Robin said bitterly. "After all, we have to sleep sooner or later, and it only needs a casual thought probe for them to realize that someone is still independent."

Grayson looked at him from across the room, a frown wrinkling his forehead. "I suspect that the idea of giving up your girl friend for an ideal is proving more of a trial than you would like to admit."

Robin stared at him, his mind shying from the accuracy of his guess.

"Yes, perhaps I am tempted a little," he said after a momentary pause. "But there are other considerations besides my own immediate concerns. There are still the folks back home; anything may have happened to them since I've been gone, even though they were forewarned and at a seemingly safe range."

"I wonder if there is a safe range anymore," Dan said thoughtfully. "It's always been possible to span the globe — theoretically at least. Unless we can find a way to stop this thing now, we may find that the linkup has become worldwide, and that will be our finish.

"We could hope that, once we're gathered in by the monster, and cuddled up comfortably to all the other little minds, we might be able to have some effect on the way it thinks. Change its attitude, if it can be said to have one, to something more progressive."

"No, that definitely will not work." Grayson spoke with such confidence, and yet so tensely, that they all watched him with a brightening of interest. "We've talked this matter over often and risked our minds in fruitless probes, with no results. But from what we have managed to find out, through adventures like that of our young friend here"—he indicated Robin—"it's pretty certain that the thing has gone back a long way, towards the point where our differences started to set us apart from the animals."

For a long time the six androids remained silent, each concealed behind his private mind screen. Robin, for one, knew that they had reached a crucial point where even their present small numbers might begin to fall away under the stress of doubt and indecision.

"You've got a few minutes left to make a choice." The tall android walked to the center of the room. There was a note of desperation in his voice. "I've had my mind open for the last few minutes," Grayson announced calmly, and the remaining dolls in the room came to their feet and moved towards him with shock and anger on their faces.

"No!" he said firmly. "Just listen to me for a moment. It's too late to resort to violence." They stopped indecisively, and he went on, knowing that he had gained their attention. "It's too late to leave the house safely. By now, either the roads will be blocked or there will be other dangers out there.

"Forgive me if I have made a mistake," he said, "but I believe that my plan will give us our only chance to retain our identities. Our secret meetings have been a dead end; as you admit, we would all succumb sooner or later. And I think this is because we have taken only passive measures."

Grayson spoke rapidly now. "From now on we have got to hit back and hit back hard as soon as we sense any intrusion." He raised his hand to check them as a chorus of objections assailed him. "At the beginning you will have to feel your way. The important thing is that you forget any inhibitions you have about sharing your minds. For strength, we will have to link up as fast as possible, because the only possible chance for us is to fight fire with fire."

As Grayson fell silent, there was a hush in the room. Robin felt, from his own reactions to the android's remarks, that the majority might not be prepared, even now, to surrender their own individualities. In fact, as the silence deepened, he sensed that their resistance to the idea was becoming stronger.

Robin's throat suddenly felt dry and his hands were soft and clammy with fear and loathing, but he knew that it was up to him to break the deadlock.

With sudden decision, he dropped his mind shield and concentrated on Grayson. The contact was instantaneous, as he knew it would be, because the tall, lean android had been prepared from the beginning to form the link in the chain. The sudden surge of additional perception dazed him momentarily, and then he felt his own powers expanding and developing as their minds began to share.

This time there was none of the repulsion that he had fought against at the meeting, and he began to understand that there were levels and degrees of telepathic power that had not been fathomed. On the previous occasion he had been smothered by a sense of mediocrity. Now he was meeting a mind as far above the average as his own.

Almost at the same instant, there was a warning thought from Grayson, like a mental shout, and he felt both their minds tensing to meet the expected attack. And now the other men in the room, obviously aware of the insidious invasion of their own minds, linked up with Grayson and him so quickly and easily that Robin felt more a sense of completion than the shock he had experienced on his first contact with Grayson.

The mass mind moved on confidently. Robin knew that it was tapping only the surface of their linked thoughts, slowly probing deeper as it failed to encounter resistance.

There was something insidious about it, as there had been before—something hypnotic about its steady advance—but Robin felt a sudden belief in their own power to resist. Apparently the efforts of the group mind were too vague to make any impression, because there was no indication that they had been detected as a cohesive force.

Somewhere, Robin knew, there had to be an answer. Every being, every problem, had a point of weakness. As long as you could concentrate on that weakness, it might be possible to ignore the strength.

There was Robin's previous encounter with the entity. All their minds were thinking of that as well. If the thing had been invincible, or perfect, it would not have failed to detect his own retreat into the deepest reaches of his mind.

Suddenly, Robin felt inclined to shout. The shock of the idea that must have been simultaneous to them all did feel like a cry of triumph.

Listen, Robin thought, knowing that he was only putting into words what they all understood already, the entity is still incomplete. It must be composed of so many individual minds that its very diversity is a weakness. Perhaps, in time, the individuals would learn to function more closely with one another, but the whole thing is too young as yet—at least I hope so. So, if we strike rapidly, at each individual unit, it should be possible to cut them off from the main body.

As they whittled away at the invading mass mind, Robin seemed to stand away from himself and watch in astonishment as the entity shrank perceptibly under their attack. He could sense the same feeling of impending victory among the other members of his chain.

But slowly they began to realize that something was wrong. As more and more minds were separated from their parent body, it began to feel as though they—Grayson, Dan and the others—were being surrounded by a pall of drifting flypaper. Scraps of clinging stickiness that sifted off under their attack and then slowly fell back upon them again like a mountain of feathery mites.

As on the previous occasion when he had been in group contact, Robin felt that the full weight of thought from everyone in town was bearing down on his own mind, so that his mental activity seemed to be slowing under the relentless attack.

We're being beaten! Robin knew that Grayson was experiencing a horrible sense of panic, and almost at the same instant the attack stopped, and he was gulping at the air in great gasps, as if he had been running hard for a long time.

"So it was not quite as easy as you fancied?" They could feel the quiet confidence in the thought, and they waited numbly for the attack to begin again.

"Why not carry on with it, and get it over with?" Grayson snarled.

For a moment there was silence and then the thought was back again. Robin could not help noticing that there did not seem to be the same menace attached to it as before. If a thought can express emotion, then it was laughing at them.

"For mature minds, you have not done very well for yourselves."

"We simply didn't start soon enough," Robin heard himself answer.

"Robin!" The youth started at his name.

"Grandfather! You had better keep out of this mess…"

"I told you to be careful," came Oberon's thought, and Robin had a feeling of despair when he realized that his grandfather was also in touch with the group mind.

Looking around, he could see that the others in the room were watching him tensely, knowing that what was going on affected them all.

Then Oberon was back in touch with him and Robin stiffened at the note of near scorn in his mind.

"So you had to make premature judgments, Robin? Couldn't you at least see, from your own linkup with Grayson and the others, that the hive-mind carried more potential than you claimed for yourselves?"

"What do you mean?"

"That you were only too eager to assume that the intentions of you and your friends were perfectly altruistic, even while you endowed the other group mind with all the evil motives you were capable of imagining."

"But it felt different…"

"Your state of mind was different on each occasion. Because you believed it was trying to take you over, you endowed it with all the sins of hell. When you submitted voluntarily to your own linkup, you had the opposite impression."

Robin admitted, although reluctantly, that there was a great deal of truth in what his grandfather was saying.

"I was keeping in contact," Oberon admitted, a trifle smugly. "It's not difficult to keep in touch without being detected if you have had the opportunities for practice that I have had. If you hadn't been so absorbed by your own suspicions, you wouldn't have failed to realize how greatly your own range and depth of perception increased as each link was added."

"That's true enough," Robin admitted slowly. "I felt at one point as if I could pick up the dolls anywhere in the world." He probed cautiously and started with excitement. "Why, it still seems that much stronger than before!"

"Exactly." He could visualize Oberon smiling grimly at him. "The group mind was never what you imagined it to be. It's basically a refined method of improving thought, providing you are willing to cooperate. That is what you will have to learn to do from now on, if you don't want to find yourself stranded in a blind alley of your own making."

"So we have to learn not to be so fiercely individualistic." Dan joined in for the first time, and Robin willingly fell silent.

"And there is no loss of identity." The group thought came again, full of individual undertones which Robin recognized for the first time. "Nobody was ever coerced into joining or prevented from leaving. It was only your own resistance that fooled us into believing that you knew what we were aiming at. If you had cooperated from the start, you would have seen that there was nothing to cause anxiety."

Robin got to his feet, knowing that the group mind had withdrawn from contact with them for the time being.

"I think," he said, noting with surprise how cheerful and relaxed his own voice was, "that I would like to be their first recruit from the stand-off section." He could hear Oberon chuckling somewhere as he spoke.

"Maybe Bett will feel a little differently about things now, as well…"

VII

The pencil-slim starship orbited silently above the gleaming blue and white sphere that was Earth, tumbling endlessly, so that the ports of the ship presented a continually changing panorama for its sole occupant.

The doll stood at the large viewing port, watching with unwearying fascination as the ship tumbled through space. Even from a distance of eighty thousand miles, there was enough detail to hold his interest and, when the Earth was not in view, there was the sweep and majesty of the galaxy marching across the heavens.

Ariel smiled nervously as his fingers beat a light tattoo against the unbreakable plastic of the port. Self-consciously, the little android knew that many of the dolls on the planet beneath were seeing everything he saw as if with his own eyes. Which was why he had been chosen for the trip in the first place…

"It is not really any good trying to screen your mind against anyone, is it Ariel? If you had been different, we would have chosen someone else."

Ariel remembered smiling at the scientist almost apologetically.

"I know, and it's not necessary to keep telling me. After all, the trait has been part of my make-up for the thirty-odd years I've been alive. I suppose there must have been humans like me, who were too garrulous for their own good."

"Where you are going," said the slim, white-haired doll, "it's imperative that we keep in contact. Even the smallest of your thoughts and experiences must come back home, so that we will know exactly what problems we have to face in the long trips between the stars. If you were a tight-screener, we would get far less valuable information out of the trip."

Ariel grinned. "In other words I'm an open broadcasting system, working night and day without any rest. I suppose I should feel naked at times, but—"

"You have to remember that we have developed enough to know where to draw the line. If thoughts are intimate enough, you can be sure that the average person will switch his mind elsewhere. If there are any who pander to sensation and break the code, they don't go undetected for long."

Ariel turned away from the scientist to look across the desert towards the starship poised against the horizon.

"This idea of sending one person on the first trip to the stars," Ariel said slowly. "Isn't there still a possibility that you're making a mistake?"

"We had to make a choice of some kind, and what influenced us most was the necessity of keeping both the crew contented and ourselves supplied with all possible information. There are few of us who could tolerate long periods alone with the same person. I know that Julie would have volunteered to go along, but that would have meant not seeing your baby for nearly two years. No, we feel that a single person is the best possible choice, and planned the ship for complete automation on that basis."

"Which makes me little more than an observer," said Ariel. "Just going along for the ride."

"As will every person on Earth who is interested."

Ariel nodded grimly, and started to walk over the hard-packed sand towards the ship. "It's pretty certain that very few will keep listening in during the whole journey. Most of the time things are going to seem quite tedious."

"Just the scientists, your family and friends," the other android agreed. "And they are what you really need to keep you happy and contented. As long as you feel that they are with you, and know what they are doing every day, it will be almost as if you had never left home. You know for yourself how intimate and rewarding contacts can be between people who are close to one another. That is another of the factors that decided us on this method."

And I'm the type, thought Ariel, because I get my pleasures from others—experiencing things with their eyes and ears and thoughts, participating in every facet of their lives. It's peculiar how eager most of them are to open up to me, just because I'm that way myself.

"Julie?"

There was a short interval while Ariel probed for some atom of contact.

"It just isn't any use anymore, is it, Ariel? Anything I could say to try to change your mind has been said already."

"It shouldn't have happened like this," he said desperately, groping for some way to make an impression on her. "I've been off Earth before, and you seemed proud and contented."

"It wasn't the same then. You never seemed very far away from us. Even when you were way out on the asteroids, if I wanted to talk to you, you were always there."

"But you know that it won't be any different this time. There is never any fading of contact, no matter how far anyone is away from Earth. Once we learned to make full use of our powers by means of the linkups, it was inevitable that our range should be extended to infinity, so that mere distance no longer makes a difference to the strength of telepathy."

She was silent for a long time and he visualized her sitting quietly in the little house above the sea, hands clasped tightly together with all the tension of unshed tears.

"I can't help being a female, and seeing things with my emotions. You're my husband and I would miss you intolerably if you ever failed contact. I think that you put too much faith in your beloved scientists' infallibility. A long time ago even, electricity was a mystery to them and they couldn't explain how it worked, just that it did. I have a feeling that the same thing is happening now. They've taken over where the humans left off and claim that they understand it completely. But if they do understand it, why are they so hesitant to forecast a date when they will undertake the construction of a colony ship?" She paused only to take a breath. "I still do not think that you, or they, can tell me why the warp effect they expect to use to slip around relativity might not also affect your thought waves."

"Because the warp is a material effect," said Ariel, "and thought is never affected by anything material—at least not since the 'hives' broadened our potential so tremendously. No known substance can deflect their penetration or diminish their clarity."

He could sense her straining to prevent the tears from gushing out. As clearly as if he sat opposite her in the neat little room with the pale gray furniture, he could see her face puckered with anguish.

"You've told me yourself that they're working on devices to black out thoughts artificially. If we ourselves can put up screens to keep out the snoopers, why can't the same thing be done mechanically? And who is to say that the distortion, which is an integral part of the warp, might not have the same blanketing effect?"

"Look Julie," he said, "you know that the device has been tested with no unforeseen results. So much hangs on the ship being a success that, if they had even a suspicion of failure, they would have scrapped the whole project by now."

"You could be just a guinea pig," said Julie, and he knew she was standing at the window, staring blindly out over the sea. "If you failed, they would wait a while and someone else would be the scapegoat next time.

"It hasn't done any good, though, has it, Ariel?" She seemed to turn and look straight at him as he stood in the cabin, eighty thousand aching miles above her. "You are still determined to go, anyway."

"The trip starts tomorrow. I am sorry in more ways than I can tell you, but I still think your doubts will be over by this time tomorrow night. I love you too," he said desperately. "You know I would never have volunteered if I thought there was any possibility of failure. After all, nothing human"— he grinned at the idiom—"could keep me away from you and the children."

"Daddy! Mummy took me swimming in the big sea today."

The fair, curly hair and bright brown eyes of Tam stared back at his father, with all the fervor and enthusiasm a three year old is capable of.

"Mummy told me, son." Ariel could feel the spray and the sharp tingle of the cold sea water, even though he knew that only a frigid, frightening void lay outside the portals of the star ship.

"Daddy," came the thought again, "Mummy says you are going far away. What is far away, Daddy? You've never been away from us before."

Except when I was on Mars and Venus, and on the Moon, thought Ariel. But even then the child felt as though I were with him. Closer perhaps, because our telepathic contact has become so much more intimate than any verbal conversation could ever be.

"Tam"—he visualized the child, with a momentary pang that he was unlikely to see him in the flesh again for so long —"you know that your Mommy is not always in the same room with you?"

"Yes." The voice sounded a little doubtful. "But she always knows what I'm doing all the same." There was something rueful about the thought that made Ariel chuckle, even with a slight lump in his throat.

"Well, it will be like that with me for a long time. You will be able to hear me and know what I'm doing, but I won't be able to pick you up and play with you."

How did you explain such a simple concept to a tiny child, he wondered irritably, as the boy worried the idea around in his small head.

"But you will still be there, Daddy, won't you?" The thought relaxed as Ariel nodded assent. "Then it doesn't matter. Just so long as you can tell me stories sometimes and I can see what you are doing, it will be all right. Don't worry, Daddy…"

I suppose I must have been like Ariel once, thought the aging doll. Young and full of confidence and in love with life.

It is queer to think how much the youngster resembles me. Oberon hunched slightly in the canvas deck-chair on the cold veranda of his home. Even Julie, he thought regretfully, reminds me of Mab. It was so far away and clear in his mind. It looked as though his genes were still going strong after these many centuries. Otherwise why should there be such a strong likeness?

Great-great… How many greats would have to be added to give the right relationship, he wondered. It was just a matter of chance that Ariel had been the one chosen for the trip. Sometimes I wish that he would remember me before he leaves, so that we can arrange to 'talk' sometimes on the trip. It would be something to add interest to the days.

"Oberon!" He came to attention immediately as the thought impinged on his lightly-held screen.

The old android smiled with ill-concealed delight as he realized who was calling.

"Ariel! So you still think of the old ones?"

"You've been calling so loud and clear the last half hour," said Ariel, "that I would have had to be blind and non-psi to miss you. If you had lowered your screen earlier, you would have known that I was trying to talk back."

"It must have been my subconscious," replied Oberon. "I admit I was thinking of you, but I can't remember actually calling."

"You should have known that I wouldn't have gone without calling you, sir," said Ariel respectfully. "After all, you are my oldest relative."

"But things have been a little crowded lately, haven't they, son?" Oberon failed to keep the pride he felt out of his mind and he chuckled as he caught the embarrassment from Ariel.

"You're a queer one, Ariel. The most open character I have known in years, and the most agreeable, too. It's remarkable how many different types were sired by your ancestor, Umbriel, who was not even a telepath himself. But you seem to imagine that all space is your oyster, and I could hardly agree less.

"Son," he went on with increasing seriousness, "I think you blind yourself deliberately to your own shortcomings as a space pioneer. And your scientists, as usual, cannot see the wood for the trees. Too single-minded, like all of their kind."

"I haven't often met you in the flesh," said Ariel, "but that hasn't stopped our friendship from developing as normally as if we lived next door to each other. Surely that proves that I am as well qualified to make the voyage as anybody else."

Ariel could hear the winds whistling around the rafters of the little cottage as clearly as if they were just outside the ship. The same chill that Oberon was feeling made him hunch himself involuntarily in the cabin of the ship, where the temperature was pleasantly warm.

"You're the younger generation, Ariel. Maybe I was the same once, because we haven't changed all that much since I was made. But whether you admit it or not, there is just no substitute for personal contact. Think of me as a friend, Ariel, as you say you do, but there are emotions deeper than friendship, and those are the ones I think you will regret once you are far away in time and space."

"Goodbye, Oberon. Just for now." The older doll knew that the youngster was more worried than he cared to admit. "I'll be along to see you as soon as I get back. But keep thinking of me; I'm going to need it out there." He glanced out of the port, to where the wheeling majesty of the stars seemed framed against the golden curve of the moon.

His hand tensed as he poised over the controls of the star-ship. If he looked up, there would be the scene he was beginning to accept as commonplace, more beautiful than anything anyone on Earth would suspect.

"Julie!" Ariel thought harder than he had intended, and he felt her give an involuntary cry at the force of it. "The ship is all ready for the drive to be started up. I just wanted…"

"Goodbye, Ariel." Her thought was a little hazy and he knew that she was trying desperately to forget her own fears.

With a silent prayer, he jabbed at the one button on the control board that was still unlit.

There was no sign at all of any change. The Milky Way still spread tantalizingly just out of reach above the port, and Ariel stepped forward to look through the rear viewer as well.

The planet Earth filled most of the screen, faintly blue and green, with hazy masses of white, as it had always appeared from space. As he watched, he could see that it was already beginning to recede slowly, and this meant that the ship was accelerating at enormous speed.

"Ariel, you're still there! Didn't the drive work after all?" He could feel the worry slowly fade from her mind.

"I told you you were wrong. There's no damping down at all, Julie." Incredibly, he realized that all along the same fear had been haunting him—the fear that he might be cut off from her and the child.

"Mars orbit—receiving you loud and clear." The scientist turned and flashed a grin of triumph at his colleagues in the small room overlooking the spacedrome.

"You're relieved, I can see," Ariel said, as clearly as if he were in the room with them. "That means that Julie was at least half right."

"We had our doubts," one of the others said. "But it looks as though we were right in taking the chance…"

Eat, watch the stars, sleep. It fell into a routine. But always there was contact with those back on Earth to fall back on. Not that it was necessary to contact them consciously, because there was always someone on the edge of his mind, watching what he did and what was happening on the instrument panel.

And if he wanted conscious contact, there were friends and family, hanging onto his every word and sensation.

"Jupiter orbit—receiving you loud and clear." Ariel relaxed and leaned back in his seat. At first there had seemed so much to savor that even the hours set aside for sleep and relaxation were resented.

Now even the exercise units were a welcome diversion, and he found himself more and more in the recreation room of the ship.. But above all, he began to feel, even more intensely, the lack of human contact. At times he imagined that its absence was actually intensifying his powers of telepathy, so that he seemed to be seeing deeper into the minds of those he sought out than he had ever penetrated on Earth.

Saturn orbit… and the glories of the rings, left behind all too swiftly as the ship still accelerated.

"Uranus—receiving you loud and clear."

Pluto!

Ariel sought the tiny disc of the planet, with the miniature telescope provided on the ship, knowing that the body was too far for him to distinguish any details. It was just a welcome diversion. Every small incident was something to send back home, something to talk about with the loyal friends and relatives who helped, with their own everyday experiences, to keep him occupied and content.

"So you've reached the edge of the system, Ariel." The warm thought of his wife sounded clearly in his mind. "It's so wonderful to know that my fears were groundless and that you are always waiting to listen to our humdrum little affairs."

"They're not so humdrum, really." He looked around as he spoke, knowing that nothing was wrong, or likely to go wrong. "If we depended wholly on major incidents to keep us interested, life would be a series of long blanks, broken now and then by small blazes of light. No, it's better the way it is. There's far more happiness to be gotten out of life when it rolls calmly along."

"Daddy." Tarn's thought pecked away impatiently and Ariel felt Julie relinquish her hold on his attention, giving the child the opportunity to move closer to him. "I knew you'd never really go away, Daddy. But it's not the same as when you're really here."

He sounded a little puzzled, as if even now he could not quite understand the difference, and Ariel smiled ruefully. The child was expressing the same emotion he had begun to feel himself. As he had been warned, he felt the need of something a little closer and more intimate.

Ariel lay back on his bunk and smiled, listening to the familiar bustle of his family in the background. Outside, there were the myriads of stars, unearthly bright sparkles of light in blue velvet. He opened his eyes and took a quick look and then shut them again, wriggling closer into the comfort of his bed and the homely chatter back on Earth…

"I must make the dinner now," came Julie's thought. "Yes, you can laugh, Ariel, lying up there. Laughing and getting fat."

"Comfortably!" grinned Ariel.

"Ariel!" The thought came in powerfully and he tensed, knowing that something must be wrong.

"Yes, Julie?"

Silence. Ariel rose hurriedly to his feet, probing with all the power of his mind at the sudden pall that hung about him. He and Julie lived in such perfect harmony that she never failed to respond when he tried to contact her.

Silence. And he sat in the chair, realizing numbly that there was no reply from anyone. Not even the slightest murmur of thought nibbling against his mind. He shivered as he felt the full impact of absolute silence.

"It couldn't happen." He sat tensely on the edge of the chair, trying to calm his pounding heart. "It was proved beyond a doubt that thought can have no boundaries," he said, aware that he was talking to hear the sound of a voice, and that he was talking too loudly.

"But why now?" He stared out of the port and then looked out of the rear viewer in the direction of the receding solar system. Only a pinpoint of light among the stars indicated the presence of the sun.

Silence. It dominated the atmosphere inside the speeding vessel, as he stopped talking and crouched over the instrument-panel. And the dials lay beneath his gaze as inscrutably as ever, while the seconds were ticked off slowly on the chronometer above the desk.

How much time had passed before he raised his head again? Ariel never knew for sure, but already there was a gaunt, hunted look on his small brown face. Forcing himself to rise from the chair, he walked across the cabin, checking the instruments as he went, knowing that it was a purely mechanical gesture.

It had always seemed so easy to forget the thoughts of others and relax in the intimacy of his own mind, knowing that friendship and affection was only a finger's breadth away from him. Now it was different. There was something frightening and unnatural about the stillness in his thoughts, that probed futilely at the measureless void around the sh'ip.

With a gasp of despair, he realized that he had been on the verge of screaming. He was beginning to feel the change as keenly as though a knife were being twisted into his brain, and the feeling of almost physical agony it imparted was sharp enough to assume the cloak of reality.

And then there were endless hours of crouching in the control chair, or lying motionless on the little bunk, trying to reason logically.

A multitude of fantastic explanations occurred to him and were discarded as rapidly as they had been imagined. Perhaps the passing beyond some invisible barrier that lay around the solar system had caused the loss of contact. That alone might explain why the dolls had failed to detect the presence of other telepathic minds reaching across the galaxy.

Perhaps there had been a catastrophe on Earth that had obliterated his own people. With a shudder of horror, he forced his mind to consider other possibilities, even while the former idea gnawed away at him.

In time, the chronometer stopped giving him an adequate impression of the lapse of time within the ship. Less and less often was the tiny being tempted to consult the instrument, as he lapsed deeper and deeper into apathy.

He began to fear that even his memories were beginning to suffer. A picture of those he loved, something material that might have served to remind him of them, would have been useful. But although he had always imagined that their images were engraved indelibly on his mind, he was finding it increasingly difficult to visualize them.

There were fleeting moments when he remembered the vivid eyes of his wife and the sparkling sheen in her hair. But the moments grew rarer. It seemed as though his dependance on telepathic contact had blunted the sharpness of his visual apparatus, and his memory. In his desperation not to forget, he tried to picture the places he had seen through the eyes of his friends: the pounding waves on golden Australian beaches, the tropical palms and dense vegetation around the teeming African estuaries, and so many others.

Gradually his memories grew blunted and hazy, so that the characters and scenery lacked depth and seemed flat and uninspiring.

As the robot mechanism delivered food and drink to the small table in the cabin, he roused himself from his lethargy and ate without appetite. But increasingly his periods of lucidity became rarer and he spent most of his time on the bunk, staring blankly at the ceiling.

For a period, nothing moved in the cabin. At regular intervals there was the muted click of food being deposited and removed. The stars still blazed down through the magnificent port of the ship.

From the tiny heap that stared vacantly at nothing, there was a sudden sound:

"Julie!" Then it stopped and silence reigned in the ship.

Even after so long, with all the disappointments he could remember, Oberon felt the pain and discouragement bearing down on his ancient shoulders. Stiffly, he walked out of the door onto the veranda and stood for a long time with his face turned up to the heavens, where the stars twinkled in a broad band across the skies.

No matter how often it happened, the pain of sudden separation from a loved one was as sharp as it had always been. It did not even help to know that Ariel was being mourned all over Earth.

"Now we know," said Oberon softly, "that the sky is a lonely place. In time, we will slowly forget, until something like this happens again."

VIII

Oberon sat, apparently relaxed, yet concentrating carefully as he felt his way across the intricate framework of the thought-web. He sampled here and there, as the desire took him, while his own quota was automatically assimilated wherever possible, so that there was continual change both in himself and in the whole.

Yet there was no compulsion to remain within the confines of the web itself. In that sense it bore no resemblance at all to the weaving of the insects from which its name was taken. Each individual remained a free and independent unit, capable of using any information provided within his own capacities, and so benefiting immeasurably from it, because there was no limit to its potential.

Since any advance became available immediately to all sciences and was immediately integrated with them, continued progress was inevitable. Just as anything that was tried and found wanting was immediately discarded.

Oberon sighed as he started to withdraw his mind towards a period of peace and tranquility. Increasingly, he had been finding more solace within the community of minds than in his own semi-solitary existence. The knowledge that his own part as a pioneer had borne such near perfect fruit still gave him some stirrings of pride, but at the back of his mind was the fact that the average mentality was already beginning to pull ahead. The race to keep abreast did not bring the same satisfaction that it might have once, perhaps because he had lost much of the zest of youth.

Suddenly, Oberon came alive, as the whole immaterial weaving of the multitude of mental beams coalesced—a gigantic conglomeration aimed at one objective for perhaps the first time since the web had painstakingly been evolved.

High above the planet, Oberon could see the enormous shape of the ship that had materialized. He was almost certain, at the sight of the space vessel, that the long departed humans, his almost forgotten creators, had returned to Earth. All the information necessary to arrive at that conclusion was immediately available: the construction of the ship, its apparent path prior to emergence from the warp—all the facts had been analyzed and were provided him, as they were to all the other minds of the web.

"There is only one questionable point," Oberon said, phrasing his thoughts as carefully as if the entire communication were on the verbal level. "And that is the fact that the ship appears to be shielded against us."

"Total coverage, as complete as anything we are capable of ourselves," was the automatic response. "As complete as possible against anything mental or physical that we can use against it."

Then there was a brief pause, as his own expression of doubt began to percolate. Oberon had a momentary feeling of childish triumph which he suppressed with a faint chuckle. The strength of the web organization could be a weakness, too, at times, especially where its own infallibility was held in question.

After a moment of thrust and parry, the query came to him again, a little more subdued this time:

"Don't you think it is conclusive proof, considered along with all the other factors, that the ship must be manned by humans?"

"I think so myself," Oberon said, "but as far as we know the humans were never telepathic themselves. Nor, as far as I know, did they ever suspect the truth about us. Then why are they screening on the thought level?"

"They might have met another telepathic race somewhere among the stars. Their screening at least reflects their distrust and suspicion."

Oberon nodded. "It's barely possible that they are not hostile, but merely wary of enemies. Until they definitely declare their intentions, we must give them the benefit of the doubt—and it hardly seems likely that one ship will attempt anything foolhardy against an entire planet. Even the humans were not as irrational as that."

Without further comment, knowing that the web was fully capable of keeping matters under control without any interference on his part, Oberon looked once more at the immense ship.

He felt a pang of regret at his own people's apparent failure in that one field of endeavor. Although they were already far beyond the point where the first ship had been sent out, and failed, the dolls had lost the zest for physical expansion and discovery. To his way of thinking, that was the atrophy of what should have been the most important facet of the dolls' growth to maturity. But unless something unforeseen guided them in that direction again, he knew that their very satisfaction with their own mental advance was a potent weapon against it.

For as long as the ship had been out of warp and orbiting the planet, the captain and chief members of the crew had been examining it from every angle, as its face changed under the circling vessel.

The captain turned away from the magnifying port of the Star vessel and faced the other five members of the ship's executive, knowing that much hinged on what was decided in the next few minutes.

"Well," he said slowly, "at least the planet is where we expected to find it."

There were faint smiles at the incongruity of the remark, but they realized as fully as he did the gravity of their situation.

"Just as beautiful as legend has it, too!" Tom Pearson, second officer, glanced at the image on the port as he spoke.

"Probably it's just as full of unpleasant surprises as it's reputed to be."

"Perhaps it was a forlorn hope," the captain interrupted, "but when driven to desperation one tends to grasp at straws. Which is why I have little doubt that most of us will vote for contact with the inhabitants."

All of them were quite aware from their study of the planet that there were intelligent beings in possession. And they were just as aware that the period since their ancestors had left had not been long enough for an entirely new species to evolve.

The other point that worried them was that there did not seem to be any indication that their presence had been detected. No radar or laser beams had been identified, and this made them wonder whether the culture shown by the cities on the world below was as advanced as it seemed.

"You know as well as I do," the captain said after a long pause, "what condition our world was in when we left. In a way, I expected to find this one something like that—racked with death and blasted by radioactives. But legend might have exaggerated. At some period or other it might have been the same, but that must have been a long time ago, and time is a great healer."

"And so," said Ernest Voegler, the ship's doctor, "we stick our necks out again, I suppose. Offer to show them the error of their ways or something, even when we failed to do anything to stop the rot on our own planet."

"That is presuming that they haven't worked out a solution for their own problems," the captain suggested. "Until we are certain which way they're headed, it seems at least worth a try."

"It might also prove to be a quick road to hell," Tom interjected bitterly. "If my vote is worth anything, I'm for branching out on our own and looking for some other planet that may not be dominated by a bunch of pseudo-civilized savages."

"It's easy enough to criticize," said the captain, "when we like to imagine our own natures are entirely different, but the human race has always been bent on its own destruction, and I wouldn't say that we did everything possible to avert the explosion."

"Saving our own skins does seem a little shoddy, on reflection. But at least it means that something was salvaged from the wreckage."

"The people on Earth probably won't be ready to see it that way, although it's not strictly necessary to tell them the whole truth. We would earn more sympathy as refugees from disaster than if we gave them a literal account of hijacking the only completed starship on the planet."

It had been a long time since their own forebears had left, and it seemed unlikely that their existence among the stars remained as anything more than a legend on Earth. But they were a frightened group of interstellar voyagers, in spite of the bravery they pretended.

A scant three-score was a pitiful remnant to throw against any completely alien environment, which was why they had headed for Earth—hoping against hope that they might be accepted…

Oberon settled slowly into the privacy of his own thoughts, feeling the absence of the others with a touch of nostalgia.

As he grew older, it became clearer to him how much he needed close companionship and affection—things that seemed less and less available as his life meandered towards an increasingly welcome conclusion.

He was aware that few of the other dolls had the same problem. As far as they were concerned, the web was an interlude between periods of work and companionship, something that existed to broaden their outlook and give them the mental scope they were capable of developing. But it was something that had come to be accepted as a commonplace.

For himself, it had become a substitute for the things he should have prized most in life.

In a way, he had been a major architect in the shaping and directing of the web, perhaps more because of his immense experience than for any exceptional talent.

Almost subconsciously, Oberon began to remember the humans again, knowing as he did so that his own actions, on the various occasions when he had become involved with them, were hardly explainable. Although he had put the interests of his own people first, there had always followed a period of soul-seeking, when he was unable to explain to himself why he still regretted his incapacity to find some sort of compromise between logic and emotion. Even then, he remembered the Benekes with the same keen sense of sorrow that he had experienced so many centuries ago.

He shivered as the remembrance strode along the dusty corridors of his years, knowing that through the web the dolls would be able to understand and sympathize, if those were the things he sought.

This was one of the web's advantages: the capacity it gave, to those who participated in it, to comprehend and glory in the deeper emotions of their fellows.

"Perhaps," Oberon said to himself, "it should give us a deeper insight into the human race." But even with their sharpened senses, the dolls still failed to fully comprehend the philosophy of the big people.

It would be easy enough to put down their aggressive instincts to a lack of psi, with the parallel lack of understanding that it gave of their fellows, but he knew from his own experience that it was not the only explanation. Even as with the dolls, the humans had varied greatly in their individual make-up.

This was going to lead to further problems when they eventually contacted the star ship. It was certain that some standard of compatability was already being established through the web, both from what he had contributed and from what was interpolated from history. It seemed unlikely that the humans would be welcomed.

"I must see them, even if only for a short period." Oberon put all the emphasis that he was capable of into the thought.

"As soon as contact becomes possible, everyone on Earth will automatically be aware."

"That will not satisfy me," Oberon said. "I must request nothing short of personal contact."

The pause this time was almost imperceptible, but he felt that the dolls were reluctant to give their approval.

Oberon realized that this was no time to hold back. With a faint grimace, he put everything into the unspoken appeal to the great tribunal of the dolls—everything he felt and remembered about the human race, knowing that only if he were able to impress them sufficiently were they likely to agree to his request.

The captain looked around the cabin almost reluctantly, taking his time as he studied each of his officers. In spite of the fact that the final decision had been a communal one, he still knew that the relinquishment of what could prove to be their sole safeguard against the unknown was something not to be lightly done.

From each there was the same curt nod of approval and, with a shrug, because there did not seem to be any other way to solve their predicament, he moved the lever on the panel.

The screens fell away from the ship, and for the first time it lay open to attack. The captain had time for only a second of panic before the three dolls materialized inside the cabin.

Oberon, too, had time for only a brief feeling of loss, as the two parties found simultaneously that their fears had been groundless from the beginning.

Even so, though the web's capacity for adaptation was tremendous, the discovery that the beings within the ship were dolls like themselves came as a staggering shock.

There were, of course, lengthy explanations and welcome acceptance from both sides, slower perhaps from those within the vessel, because they were still only primary telepaths, with none of the freedom from contact inhibitions that had become part of the basic make-up of those from Earth.

Oberon felt the same gladness and acceptance as the rest, as the tale of the star-travelers unfolded, even though his emotions were tempered with regret at the fact that the humans were not present. In a way, he had occupied the center of the stage from the beginning, perhaps because something of the years that had piled up on his shoulders spoke from his eyes and personality.

Without any hesitation, Oberon joined minds with the new branch of dolls and led them down the long pathways of the web. Together they experienced the incredible complexities of technology which were resolved into their simplest elements under the combining minds of the dolls.

Oberon could feel their perceptions grow and expand as they learned how to use their own latent abilities more efficiently. And suddenly Oberon caught the hint of an idea that he grasped at instinctively, preventing it from escaping into the general complex.

Only later did he understand the action. For a while Oberon felt as though there were two separate entities within his own mind, arguing the case with each other:

"But it is a betrayal—taking something from the minds of the star-travelers and depriving the web of its benefits."

"That's one way of looking at it. But I don't have the same faith in the infallibility of the web as do most of the others."

"You're only one person. How can you set yourself against the combined knowledge of millions of mature minds?"

"The web represents an average opinion, and that average might not be the same a few months from now. An individual might see the result of a course of action better than a culture that has settled into a groove."

"This notion would lead the dolls to new heights. The fact that it's possible to penetrate the interstar barriers by telepathy alone means that there would be instantaneous communication across the galaxy… and perhaps further."

"I know! But are we ready for it at this moment? It might mean submergence for the dolls. There must be other races in the galaxy; the laws of probability alone favor that. But the dolls are still small in numbers, even though we believe our attainments are tremendous."

"Population alone is not everything…"

"No, but until we have spread physically over at least a portion of the galaxy, so that some cosmic accident may not cause our heritage to be lost, it might be better if we avoided mental contact with other worlds."

"Perhaps you are right. There is always the danger that once mental contact is established, the dolls would lose all desire to get out there themselves. But you are not young anymore. If you wait, it is probable that you will not live to see your people join in a tremendous web of mental growth across the worlds of space."

"It is a thing to stir the heart and imagination. But I want the dolls to be an important part of such an operation, not just a minor cog. As we are developing now, I think our own contribution should—and could—be something better."

It was a difficult decision to make. But in the meantime, the successful flight of the other doll people was something that was already making its impression on the web. It might prove to be something that would eventually nudge the dolls onto the outward path again.

Warily, he encouraged the first glimmerings of the notion, knowing that nothing would be forgotten by the web, and that in time the drive to adventure would take root in the doll people. And even though he would not be there to see the end of it, the random discovery he had blocked was certain to come to light again, once they understood more about the warp-drive itself.

Somewhere, Oberon thought wistfully, the humans might still exist. Vega was only one of their old colonies. In time he hoped that they would be located again and that the dolls would have the necessary knowledge to give them the maturity they lacked.

The End